"Ode to a Wahabbi Jihadist"

Winds of Change was kind enough to publish a ditty of mine as a diary post. I confided to J.K. that I had originally posted this over at The Command Post back in April when the Fallujah insurgency heated up. I had called it Ode to the Violent Shia. It then grew legs and walked over to LGF, posted by someone other than me, which is always sincere flattery.

O to the pitiless, violent Salafist
your leaders betray you
rivers of blood will course through
your poorly maintained thoroughfares
A battle with no end is upon you
The Coalition, may peace be upon Her...
will restore Arab magnificence
the crushed bodies of your martyrs sully your soil
there is an offensive stink to your dead
Democracy will liberate your women
they shall bare their heads and their breasts
in jubilation
you are powerless and pitiless and will get devilish scourges
Lay down your insignificant weapons
bury your dead so the odious stench does not blight
the new land of the free
get a small business loan at a low interest APR
endeavour to submit to your occupiers
get a convertible with your profits
live a little

Now, it was initially meant to be a satire on the fevered poetics that Islamists use (who can forget the poem that included the line "the Mother of All Battles has begun"). I was trying to provide an American counterpoint, I suppose. Anyway, W.O.C. provided me with a comparison to The Bard, which is unwarranted flattery. OT, my wife is appearing as Lady MacBeth this weekend along with my daughter who plays the Boy MacDuff in The Bard's own "MacBeth". I will play a marching bass drum and attempt to simulate "thunder". It should not be missed.

Then Kris Nichols and I are off to the Red Eye Coffee House to stoke the get-out-the-vote revelry with our songs of agitprop and anti-fascism. It is our contention that Kris' song "Criminals From Texas" has a short shelf life and we need to play it at every opportunity in the next few days. Similarly, I wrote a song about the war called "No Different", a Toby Keith-like song called "Ready For a Reckoning", and a tune called "I'm Free" that will not fit within the context of a Kerry Presidency. We have high hopes of retiring the tunes tomorrow night.

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It Is The Troops Fault

The Armed Forces show a loyalty to the President that is astounding considering:

• When the USS Greeville sunk a Japanese fishing vessel with oil executive donors sitting at the controls, it was the commander who sacrificed his career on bended knee to the president.


• When it was first asked why planes hadn't scrambled on 9/11, the administration answered that there were not enough planes in the area (signifying the Air Force lacked readiness) despite there being an exercise scheduled by the Secretary of Defense placing nearly all planes in the sector on alert.


• When the president landed aboard the Abe Lincoln and spoke in front of a banner saying "Mission Accomplished!", it was noted that the banner was the sailors idea.


• When the nauseating facts emerged about Abu Ghraib, it was clear only enlisted reservists would do time.


• When in the thick of congressional hearings about ugly abuses of taxpayer funds by Halliburton and it's KBR subsidiary, the administration offered that the armed forces would not be able to do the tasks any cheaper.


• When orders are questioned by a military supply company about transporting contaminated, useless gasoline in unarmored convoys with no air support through hostile territory, the word mutiny is allowed to hang in the air like a dark trial balloon.


• When a story about ammo dumps potentially damaging to the president during a close election bursts forth, the presidential debating society of Rice, Guiliani, Cheney et. al suit up and rush forth into the maw of TV cameras to deflect blame anyway they can. It is usually the previous president, the CIA, the enlisted men, or the vacuous, mush-brained democrats who get blamed. Someone other than the president must pay.

Would that we should blame Ceasar for what is the fault of his dominion?

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Bush...Kerry...Can't Decide?

So perhaps you are an undecided voter. You aren't thrilled with George Bush's domestic policy, but you find his defiance to the terrorists invigorating. Maybe you find Kerry's core values are suspect? Well, Bush is the only president I can think of with a criminal record. His DUI arrest (a Class D Misdemeanor) occurred at a time when George did not know what to do with his 30 year-old self. He was sorta buying and selling oil leases, but it wasn't a business. He was a year out of grad school and it was a year before he would get a hold of some of his father's friends disposable capital to found the ill-fated Arbusto Company. He was hanging out with a tennis star and driving drunk in Sept. of 1976.

Contrast that with John Kerry who passed the bar and went to work as a prosecutor during the same time.

Bush didn't stop drinking after his conviction for ten more years. Prior to his conviction, rumors had dogged him for years about possible cocaine use but, interestingly enough, there is no record of such a thing. Just a lot of unanswered questions. He cleaned up his act when he was 40 years old.

By the time George Bush cleaned up his act, John Kerry had been elected to the Senate and was presiding over an investigation that led to the Iran-Contra hearings.

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The Decembrist: The Bad CEO Gets Religion

I am from the Midwest. I live now in Chicago, but I grew up on a farm in Indiana. I grew up among small churches, the kind with one oil heater and an aging rural congregation that believed in the 2nd Coming and The Rapture.

I went to a family reunion about ten years ago and a discussion sparked up around the fire about the need for home schooling so that children could be taught about Creationism and not evolution as it was apostasy. I was curious and amused by the passions involved in the discussion, but too detached to comment.

I went back a couple of years ago to sing at a church service. A lay minister gave a sermon that he had built a small reputation around, having given it in seven states to dozens of congregations. It involved the usual suspects of gays, abortion, evil elitists out to crush the old ways. And it ended with a vivid portrayal of the nature of the conflict being played out in the stark light of prophecy. The President was portrayed as using devine power that God has bestowed on our country in this hour to defeat forces of Satan to bring about the end times.

My ears were hot, my legs twitched. I was incredulous. Afterwards the lay minister came and shook my hand, since I had warmed up the crowd with a tune or two. I was too stunned to speak. And to think that people left this intellectual crime scene somehow edified was mystifying to me. I grew up with these people; I have known them all my life. My elementary school has literally been turned into a jail. The small churches are gone now, replaced by "Wal-Mart" churches. Aluminum clad industrial buildings with massive PA systems and huge lighting rigs. What happened here? Why did I not notice this event sweeping the land over the last twenty years? Where do I call home?

In my opinion, this is bigger than George Bush's unsteady reach for greatness. The forces that swept away some of what was familiar to me in Central Indiana tapped George Bush on the shoulder and told him he has an obligation; told the National Guard man who had a wife pregnant with quintuplets he had an obligation, so that when the babies were born he was laying critically injured on a battlefield.

The forces are not Satanic. They are just cruelly manipulative and breathtakingly singleminded. They seek world dominion as an historical birthright. The Global Village somehow called for a Global Village Chieftan to honor with tribute. Supply-side economics would ensure that the tribute flowed down to every capillary of the populace and they would be grateful.

Oh, but it is messy...and fascist.

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Don't Move...There Is WMD Behind You

As the Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom call into question the notion of Freedom around the world, the whip cracked above our heads by the ideologues we are permitting to hold the reins is the whip called WMD's. This is the call to arms that thrust us into war with the Iraqi people even though the Iraqi people were not necessarily at war with us. This is the grim scenario that haunts us. We will have a major city fall by means of a hissing black box of toxic vapors.

Not that it is altogether unheard of. The Jordanian Plot from back in April could be considered a heinous prelude to what kind of an attack violent Islamists wish to make on the U.S. Sulfuric acid, various nerve gases, and just enough conventional explosives to widely scatter the agents without incinerating them exploding in a densely packed urban area. The theoretical casualty metrics were thought to be around 80,000. In the conflicting reports that try to access damage estimates, the high tallies are usually suspect. There have never been any actual cases of such high yields. And CB weapons have been around a long, long time. One of the most notorious attacks, one that now compels so much attention, was largely excused by the U.S. at the time it happened.

Halabja is the attack that is pointed to most often to convince the general public of the dangers that a madman like Saddam Hussein represented. It is significant that this attack happened 16 years ago. At the time, according to The State Department Iran was implicated in the attacks. Weeks would follow before any condemnation officially issued forth from the U.S. towards Iraq. We protected Hussein from adverse world opinion. Where was our outrage?

But also significant is the nature of the attack itself. According to Super Terrorism: Biological, Chemical, and Nuclear, by Yonah Alexander and Milton Hoenig, possibly 112 sorties were flown in the air raids that killed the 5,000 or so civilians at Halabja. It took all night and part of the following day. Some experts believe that, depending on weather factors, it may take a ton of concentrated gas not blowing away to effect a single casualty. Iran, implicated by the U.S. quickly arranged for international journalists to view the immediate aftermath. If they hadn’t, little would be known about the incident whatsoever.

A recent report by terrorist expert Brendan O’Neill in Spiked Politics suggests that our conventional knowledge of WMDs is badly skewed. He quotes David C Rapoport, professor of political science at University of California as saying, “Such weapons do not cause mass destruction”. As shocking as that may sound, it may also be an indicator of why our military abandoned research into using CW and BW in battlefield scenarios. They simply were not as useful as conventional weapons.

So, an attack such as what Hussein unleashed in Northern Iraq took hours and hours of bombardment. The U.S., knowing Iraq was responsible, took immediate steps to implicate Iran. Iran, having been the recipient of dozens of Iraqi CW attacks that utilized U.S. targeting aid, was having none of it. They squealed to the press. Since this incident back in 1998, 15 people have died in a hostile terrorist attack using CWs. The President successfully launched us into all out war based on the justification that Iraq was a serious threat, although they had never had a missile that could go over 200km. Why, because no one at the time wanted to think about “the threat”. No newsgathering organization could be bothered into taking the 30 minutes necessary to uncover straightforward information regarding these weapons.

The “threat” of WMDs is largely myth.

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