The Iraqi government seems to be in a big hurry to get Saddam hanged. I keep wondering why. Do they really think his death would in any way quell the sectarian violence? Surely not. Saddam has been pretty much irrelevant to events in Iraq since he crawled into that spider hole after the invasion.

I guess I'm just a cynical Bush hater, but I can't help but notice that his execution will be timed perfectly for dubya to use as a centerpiece in the State of the Union address. Is it just me or does every event that this administration has a hand in feel somehow managed? He'll get to call the execution "progress" and use it to further justify his escalation of the war. Come on, we all know that's what he's going to do, just like we all knew he was going into Iraq a year before he actually did it. And I bet we all get to see that scary little flash of insanity in his eyes when he says the word "evildoers."

I also can't help noticing that they tried Saddam, found him guilty and sentenced him to death for something he did in 1982. Why aren't they going to try him for any of his other crimes? He committed some atrocities during the Iran-Iraq War using chemical weapons. Given that our reason for the invasion was WMDs, you would think that the US would be pushing for very public trials for these crimes, but they aren't. Why? Could it have something to do with the fact that a large part of dubya's crew were with the Reagan administration when St. Ronnie was supplying arms to both sides during that war? These people are just too damn good at keeping secrets.

Look, look! Santa brought a new look for the site. Okay, not really. I did get a sweet pair of Harley-Davidson Gore-Tex winter riding gloves though. I merely switched the site to another Rapid Weaver theme. This one is called Smart Business. I'm still working on building my own theme. From what I've learned so far, it doesn't look like it's gonna be all that hard to do, but it's mind-numbingly boring. I'm sure it will be spectacular if I ever finish it, but today I'd rather spend my time bitching about right-wingers.

Speaking of Themes. I took Faux News off my viewing list on the sat-feed into the bunker, so I don't even accidentally watch it any more, but I know from surfing the inter-tubes that Bill O'Reilly is still beating his annual dead horse. It's the clerks-at-(insert offending retail outlet here)-are-saying-Happy-Holidays-instead-of-Merry-Christmas! War-on-Christmas! bullshit again. How many years in a row can he get away with selling this fiction? I guess the rubes are still buying though. I do realize that a large percentage of Faux viewers believe we found WMDs in Iraq too, but it just seems ludicrous that the same people can work themselves into a tizzy every year over someone having the audacity to wish them well using words other than the ones they wanted to be wished well in. People like this asshole. The whole thing is so phony anyway. Christmas was overlaid onto a winter solstice celebration that pre-dates the birth of Jeebus by thousands of years. These poor, persecuted, angry Christians need to actually read their bible. It says Jesus was born during lambing season. That could mean spring or fall. Either way it's not in December.

Somewhere in the human brain there must exist some quirk process for alleviating fear via the cultivation of hate. I imagine it to be similar to the primitive brain-stem fight-or-flight response all animals have to a threat, but residing in the more advanced human fore-brain where it's triggered not by any actual threat, but by some perceived possible future threat. It's the brain's way of coping with consciousness of death. Mankind is in a constant struggle with that portion of the brain that determines his ability to control his level of fear and continue to function past the immediate knowledge that death is literally everywhere. Religion and hate (and the practitioners of both) arise from an inability to simply accept some level of fear and put it aside. It's far easier for most of us to construct a barrier of myths between ourselves and death and let the enzymes of hate overwhelm that scared-rabbit fear.

Separation of church and state is the one seemingly odd thing about our constitution. A bunch of (mostly) religious men sat down in 1789 and wrote a document that established a government in which religion did not play a role. The mythologists have been denying it ever since, but it's true. Read it. Religion isn't even mentioned until the First Amendment and only then to state flatly that the Congress shall not establish one. I don't know why they did it, but it seems obvious that they did it on purpose. Maybe they looked to history and saw that nations proclaiming a single religion exist in a never-ending state of conflict. Or maybe they just saw an opportunity to establish true freedom as the law of the land and took it.

Read this CNN story and you'll see why separation of church and state is such a great idea. The shiny new democracy in Iraq has been completely subverted by 2 religious clerics. Neither of them is actually a part of the government, but both can shut it down simply by withdrawing their support of it. It looks like the US is attempting to get al-Sistani to turn against al Sadr. (It's like bad reality television over there - - Survivor: Iraq). That much power in the hands of single individuals shows why democracy and religion are antithetical. Democracy is about majority rules and open-minded compromise. Religion is first and foremost about power and control. Nietzsche said man created god so that he may better worship himself. I think man created gods in order to wield them as weapons.

I have been exchanging e-mails with my cousin, who is currently stationed in or around Baghdad. He recently asked if he could send me a souvenir from Iraq. I wanted something distinctly Iraqi, but cheap (my cousin is junior enlisted with a wife and babies to support), so after thinking about it a little while, I asked him to pick me up an Iraqi newspaper or magazine. Here is his reply:

As for magazines or newspapers I aint seen any. They do have souvenir stands but all they got is like fake rolexs and iraqi bongs. They got all kinds of shit that says Iraq on it but that is about it. All I can get is what we have on the base cuz when we go out we dont get out of the truck except to piss. Don't know why. I want to get out and mingle but they wont let me.

My cousin is being a little tongue-in-cheek there. He's been in Iraq for a few months now. He knows exactly why he's not allowed to walk the streets of Baghdad. He's got a red, white and blue target on his back.
We don't even pretend to own the streets of a city of around 6 million people. How can a temporary surge of 20 or 30 thousand additional troops make any difference whatsoever? The only way we can stop the sectarian violence in Baghdad is to take back the streets from the militias, and the only way to do that is through superior force. Superior force means air support, and air support in urban areas means a big fucking mess with lots of civilian casualties. About all we would accomplish is getting them to stop fighting each other long enough to focus on blowing up our troops. No matter how I look at it, this just doesn't appear to be a problem that can be solved with more violence. We could wind up owning the streets with no way to give them back.

I watched most of the the press conference. It was mind-numbing as usual. The preznit stated that he has not yet made up his mind about increasing troop levels in Iraq. He said it just like he said he hadn't made up his mind about invading Iraq 4 years ago, when the whole fucking world knew he was lying. And just like back then when the news coverage was all about The March to War, today it's all about The Surge. The increase in troops is a done deal and the press knows it. They are all just playing word games with the administration to try to get someone to say it on the record.

The Joint Chiefs and the commanders on the ground are all already on record saying we don't need more US troops in Iraq. Now they are backing off a little on that by saying that they would only support more troops if those troops had a clearly defined mission. I can only hope they are telling dubya in private that peace is not a clearly defined mission, it's wishful thinking.

I doubt if it makes any difference though. At one point during the press conference, when speaking about "the enemy", the preznit said "They can't run us out of the Middle East" and at least twice he stated that we are engaged in an "ideological" war. Talk about mission creep! We've gone from preventing the eeeevil dictator Saddam from destroying the world with his imaginary nukes to changing the ideology of a people. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Crusades 2.0, now with more power.

This guy is just not capable of considering the possibility that he screwed the pooch. The only peace America can bring to Baghdad now is the kind of peace we brought to Fallujah. The peace that emanates from a pile of rubble.

I'm watching CNN in the gym this morning. They are all a-twitter over the fact that the preznit finally admitted that we are not winning in Iraq. He also said we're not losing. Coming up on four years in country with him assuring the American people that everything is just peachy, the commander-in-chief now says we are just holding our own. The emperor himself will speak a little later. I'm literally breathless with anticipation. Okay, maybe it's the crunches. I'm thinking this is the beginning of his selling the escalation of the war. It'll go like this: We're not winning, but we're not losing, see, so all we need is a few more troops and a little more time (2 years should do it) and we'll wrap up this war on Terra with a victory for Amurka. Hell, we'd have won a long time ago if it hadn't been for Donald Rumsfeld not sending enough troops to begin with. Boy was that guy incompetent. I guess I was just blinded by my loyalty to him. It's troubling.

My father would often say, "It's hell getting old." To someone in pretty much their physical prime, as I was at the time, those words didn't really have much meaning. I remember thinking that he should maybe work on staying in better shape. Smoke and drink less, exercise more. Now, from the vantage point of middle age, I've come to realize how true that simple phrase is. The hell is in the knowledge that you've passed some unseen point in life where you will never be completely healthy again. You don't know you've hit your peak until your body lets you know you are past it. The evidence accumulates slowly, but the realization has a suddenness and an air of finality about it. When I get up in the morning, my first few steps across the floor sound like my bedroom carpeting is made of bubble wrap. I have 5 places on my body which never stop hurting and only one of them is actually from an injury. The other four just kinda came on me gradually. Exercise has become less about getting or staying healthy and more about slowing the continuous erosion of aging. It makes me wonder if what I have in store is a maddeningly gradual descent into that withered old guy who launches into a long, boring recitation of all his aches and pains whenever you ask him how he's doing. I don't want to be that guy.

It looks like dubya has postponed debuting his New Way Forward in Iraq until January so he can put a little more distance between his big announcement and the Iraq Study Group Report that his announcement is going to ignore. This will allow time for the right-wing talking heads to both trash the ISG Report and create the perception that it is just one of many, many such reports that the preznit is giving careful consideration. Before deciding to follow the advice of the same neo-cons who got us into Iraq in the first place. The hard-core right-wingers who tell him what he wants to hear, that he can still win. He's going all in on Iraq with a pair of deuces.

The last two years of dubya's presidency are going to be one long, slow-motion train wreck. As soon as he rejects the ISG recommendations, old-school conservatives are going to start coming out of the woodwork to denounce him. Even Colin Powell has found his balls. He's another conservative that I once respected, but he sold his soul to the neo-cons with that WMD dog-and-pony show before the United Nations. The rest of the world didn't buy it, but I think it really cemented American support for the invasion. Now he's on Face The Nation saying we're losing in Iraq. Too little, too late Colin. The time for you to speak up was when you were in a position to actually influence the president. Instead you let a bunch of chicken-hawks with dreams of empire invade a sovereign nation in a vain attempt to establish a client state in the heart of the middle east. A 35-year Army veteran had to know this wouldn't end well from the very beginning.

Over at Josh's place, David Kurtz is torpedoing myths about the preznit. It's good stuff. A snippet:

There are some indications that the reason for delaying the President's announcement of "The New Way Forward" is so that he can announce a fait accompli.…I wouldn't be surprised to see new deployment orders already issued by the time Democrats officially take over Congress in the first week of January, the President's way of grabbing his crotch and saying, Debate this.

That sounds exactly right, dubya is gonna send a message to Congress that he's still in charge of the military. They only provide the funding. He's just daring them to try to restrain him by cutting that funding. It would give him the out he needs. He could immediately start blaming every bad thing that happened in Iraq on the Dems for not supporting the troops. None of it would be his fault any more. He could withdraw our troops under protest and chant "cut and run Democrats" all the way back to Crawford. I doubt the Dems will rise to the bait though. It seems much easier for them to just sit back and let dubya stew in his own juices. They can let him demonstrate his own incompetence. Even if he sends in more troops and the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, he will still keep the world's most powerful military chasing an imaginary victory until he leaves office. And the American public will be calling for his scalp by then. He refuses to comprehend that what is broken in Iraq can't be fixed by force. Peace is not a military objective. It just isn't.

Way back before dubya won the Republican nomination and went on to Florida recount glory and this abortion of a presidency, I was something of a John McCain fan. I don't often vote Republican any more because the party has gotten way too chummy with the far-right religious kooks, but I was prepared to make an exception in his case. I had a lot of respect for him then. All that respect has been eroding over the last few years of watching him become one of dubya's boot-lickers, but it wasn't until he sacrificed his principles and let them do an end run around his torture bill with a bullshit presidential signing statement that I gave up on him for good.

He's only gotten more pathetic since then. Now he's trashing the Iraq Study Group Report and calling for more troops in Iraq. How can a Vietnam veteran and former POW condone the expansion of yet another stupid, mis-begotten war? It blows my mind. It looks like he's rolling the dice and putting all his own presidential hopes behind a wartime candidacy. I'm thinking he really shot himself in the foot on this one. Public opinion is now 71% against our current strategy in Iraq. I'm betting that both the Democrat and Republican primary campaigns will be about who can most effectively manage the re-deployment and ultimate withdrawal of our forces (I've already accepted that dubya is not going to do it). McCain is positioning himself to campaign around the issue of leading us in a war we've already lost.

It looks like those neo-con assholes are not going quietly. They are going after the Iraq Study Group Report and it's authors with a vengeance. It's typical right-wing smear tactics, all derision and scorn and insinuations of cowardice while avoiding any rational discussion or debate. It's something to behold. Attacking those who disagree with their fascist ideologies is an area in which they excel. It's not going to work this time though. The notion of some great victory still to be had in Iraq is not going to sell well this shopping season.

The report says pretty much what any rational person can already see. Iraq is FUBAR and there really is no good way to extricate ourselves, but we absolutely must start doing so. We're spending lives and treasure trying to support a government that is non-existent outside the green zone. The people engaged in this "civil" war aren't interested in taking over the government (for now) so they are mostly ignoring it. This is the worst kind of war. The kind where both sides think they have approval from the invisible cloud-daddy to exterminate the other side. Our presence in the middle of it just throws in another cloud-daddy that the other two despise. The elder/smarter Bush knew this back in 1991 when he decided not to overthrow Saddam. Here are a couple of snippets I cherry-picked from his book A World Transformed, written with Brent Scowcroft.

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state.

Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

Junior has had his chance to prove dad wrong. Now it's time to clean up the mess. He's going to drag his feet and kick and scream, but I don't think the American public is going to let him have his way this time.

It looks like US lawmakers are going to spend billions to build a 700 mile fence along our border with Mexico. The whole idea just seems stupid in so many ways, not least of which is the fact that our border with mexico is 2100 miles long. That's right, this is so obviously a political gimmick that they're only going to fence 1/3 of the border. They want to appear to be doing something to stem the tide of illegal immigrants flowing North, but they absolutely do not want to be successful in doing so. Anyone who pays any attention at all to our agriculture industry can see that the whole system relies on cheap immigrant labor. The loss of that labor would be an economic disaster. Produce farmers would have to start paying American wages to American workers to harvest crops. Prices would skyrocket. Our legislators know that even though a lot of Americans are raising hell right now about securing our borders, it is nothing compared to what would happen if every grocery bill in the country tripled overnight. There would be blood shed.

I'm not a big fan of borders to begin with. As a physical manifestation of racial or cultural or religious differences between societies, they seem to be an arbitrary (usually temporary) solution to those differences. To me, borders embody a basic flaw of the human animal. We can't get along with each other. As a species, our intelligence is only excelled by our aggression. The combination leaves us fiercely determined and oh so proud. It is in our nature to always want more, to constantly strive for a better life--especially if your current life really sucks. That's why border security is ultimately a fantasy. To someone engaged in a lifelong struggle against poverty and hunger, a shiny new fence really isn't much of an obstacle.

Back when I was a kid, I stumbled on a small stack of men's magazines that my father had carelessly left lying around. In a box. Way up in the top of a closet. Underneath a bunch of other stuff. Of course I read every one of them cover-to-cover. One of them (I think it was a Playboy) contained an interview with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Her work, along with that of others like her, in the study of impending death changed the way medical care is conducted for the terminally ill and helped spawn the hospice movement. I later read her book On Death and Dying, but it was there between photo spreads of gloriously naked women that I first learned about the 5 stages of grief that terminal patients pass through. In order, those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It's the final stage, acceptance, that is most important, because it brings with it the inner peace that we all want for ourselves and our loved ones in the end.

I submit to you today that this peaceful acceptance of one's own death is the very meaning of atheism. It is simply an awakening to the facts in front of you your whole life. The realization that life is terminal, that every living thing ultimately passes out of existence. The acceptance of the randomness and inevitability of death is so freeing that it is almost spiritual in nature. The acceptance of your own death as natural renders the supernatural ideals of churches and religions unnecessary and irrelevant. Viewed from this perspective, religious dogma is really all about not getting to that final stage. There can be no acceptance. It's all denial, anger and bargaining with the invisible cloud-daddy.

It's December 2nd and cold here in Misery. A nasty ice storm downed a lot of trees and power lines displacing many thousands of people from their homes, some probably for days. When the power does come back, I'm sure many of them will be dealing with frozen water pipes.

I'm a day late in switching to a new theme for the site. I've decided to try out several of them while I work my way through this huge HTML book I purchased. When I feel confident enough, I'll either choose one theme and modify it or create my own. When I started this site I didn't intend to do much actual site building, but it seems the more I learn, the more I want to learn. I'm like a kid with a new toy right now. I suppose eventually I'll lose interest and quit doinking around with the looks of the page and concentrate on creating some more interesting content. Anyway, this particular theme is called Sharp. It's the first theme I've tried with a light background and dark text. It seems a little plain, but I'll give it a chance to grow on me.

I just realized I'm also a day late flipping the page on my Bob's Transmission and Automotive Service calendar down here in the bunker. Miss December didn't need any time at all to grow on me. Carmella Decasare. Oh. My. Goodness.