Vic and Old Jim at the Amen Corner discussing Predator drone strikes and Willow's latest triumph in pommel frites. Liz-with-an-S in rear. Photo by Jasper.
It is New Year’s Eve here in Baghdad-on-the-Potomac, and I am gearing up, as I am sure you are at your place. The champagne is chilled. The Happy Hour White is selected and on ice. Let the games begin!
The government fiscal year ends tonight at Midnight, and we great FY-2012 the second after the clock strikes. That is not as big a deal as it used to be; there was a time when we actually had budgets and didn’t make things up on the fly, but this is the post-season for democracy in the Republic.
I am pleased with the news this morning that we greased that asshole Anwar al Alawki. That is a major event, since the dickhead was a US citizen, born to Yemeni parents in New Mexico. That was first on the morning menu, and a note from a former close associate who recalled the development of the Predator UAV, and the happy marriage of a surveillance platform that eventually was equipped with Hellfire missiles, completing the perfect self-licking ice-cream cone of sensor and operational weapon.
New Mexico native and Colorado State Graduate Anwar al-Alawki. RIP, jerk. Photo AP.
Those were the days, I thought.
Then I got a note from the Socotra House Legal Department in the morning inter-office mail. Someone had been up in the middle of the night, monitoring the Beeb for morning discussion. There is a significant component of the electorate who have become unhinged.
Or maybe I should put it in a more linear manner: we all appear unhinged.
Whether it is me and LBJ, or the Birthers with the President’s interesting nativity, or those who somehow believe that the Bush Administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks in order to seize the country and overturn the Constitution.
I was astonished at the source of the latest furor over 9/11: the speech by Iran’s whacky President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN. The note urged me to look it up, and the supporting commentary by activist and loon Franklin Lamb.
It is a sad commentary on contemporary discourse that I discovered myself in compete agreement with al-Qaida’s propaganda magazine “Inspired” on the matter. The magazine calls the Iranian President’s remarks “ridiculous,”
In sum, the pesky Iranian leader said he believed the World Trade Center towers could not have been brought down by aircraft, and that “as an engineer,” he was convinced that explosive charges were planted before the airplanes hit the towers. “Airspace was cleared,” he declared, as Mossad ushered co-religionists out of the Towers.
The al-Qaida article said such a belief “stands in the face of all logic and evidence,” and I have to agree. The article went on to state that “Iran uses the theory “as a rallying call for the millions of Muslims around the world who despise America.” The note from the legal department notes that Ahmadinejad also dissed the Holocaust in his remarks, among other impossibilities.
Dwight Eisenhower wanted the atrocities well-documented for exactly that reason, yet the lies continue.
Iran “is a collaborator with the US when it suits it,” according to al Qaida, but of course this actually reflects the Shia-Sunni theological divide. They hate one another, though they both hate us as well.
Cookie Pushers from more than 30 countries walked out on the speech by the deranged and discredited Iranian leader. If Franklin Lamb wants to promote the bogus idea that this was a co-conspiracy between an multiple incompetent bureaucracies (US) in partnership with a maniacal and suicidal (Saudi) assault team, so be it.
According to the recorded testimony of hijacked passengers, the assholes actually did precisely what happened.
I have to shrug and not waste any more time with this. It isn’t healthy.
The whole notion starts with a belief system that demonizes the Bushies and postulates crimes against humanity- with premeditation- you have to accept that they are worse than the Nazis.
I have worked for and with them in wartime, under stress an in long hours. You may not like them, but that does not make them war criminals, and the conspiracy theories in this case are simply and finally not how things work.
Only the seriously disturbed- like Ahmadinejad- could believe it.
I don’t know about you, but I think in honor of the New Year, I might try the Willow Pommes Frites this evening.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.comRenee Lasche Colorado springs