WEEKEND FEVER DREAMS

As what seems like another too-early heatwave hits LA, the sense inhabiting a very nasty, but highly realistic science fiction movie closes in on me, and the sense that I may be writing for my life, and but with knowledge that it is probably already too late. Global weather systems lurch out of whack. The planet is now so crowded that my favorite cities have grown, just in the last few years, to the point of standing-room only. An enlightened species would be galvanized by a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Population and environmental disaster loom, but instead of uniting in a common awareness of the threat, those in power, both secular and spiritual, allow the contagion of war to run lose yet again. The USA has been stumbling down the slippery slope of counter-insurgency for a year, and has now fallen into a dead run. The last time this benighted and evil game was played, it ran for twelve years, cost lives of 50,000 young Americans, a million Vietnamese, and don’t even mention the Kennedy Brothers. It split the country, polarized the world, and took a bite out of my youth, although I will freely admit that we had a lot of fun fighting the good fight to stop that wat. Who the hell knows where the mess in Iraq is going to take us, or how long it will be in the taking? But right now it causes menacing images to spin out at random from my memory.

Like who recalls the neutron bomb? The neutron bomb was a piece of nastiness from the Carter era. Small, low yield nuke that was designed to vaporize the Soviet tanks as they rolled across the West German Border without doing to much permanent damage to the friendly real estate and infrastructure. The fear at the time was of the Red tank superiority over NATO, and the joke was that the neutron bomb killed people, but left the buildings intact. The thought can only lurk in the back of my mind that at least someone in the Bush is wondering where we left them and how hard it would be to dust them off. Kill the insurgents but don’t irradiate the crude?

And then there’s John Kerry. He is now the repository of the world’s hope to oust Bush and restore some semblance of civilization to this country. We all knew he’d run into a barrage of flack, but he hardly seems to be coping with it. While the Republican’s drag out to old fabricated snitch-files of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO that absurdly claim the VVAW was seeking to overthrow the government, Kerry is still fumbling the smear about how he voted on the invasion of Iraq.

On this last topic, Andrew Christie, wrote the following and more for CommonDreams.org (sent by some girl)

There was Dick Cheney speaking to an NRA crowd last week, firming up the base, getting in the administration's favorite Kerry dig: Kerry could try to "explain or explain away all he wants" his vote to authorize the Iraq war, but such vacillation, was, to Mr. Cheney's way of thinking, unbecoming in a man who would be Commander in Chief. Incredibly, Kerry has allowed this issue to remain an issue, via his thread-the-needle, what-I-really-meant parsings ever since his former primary opponents started lobbing his war vote at him, now continuing to allow it after the GOP has taken it up, using it as the polishing cloth to burnish up their frame around Kerry's flip-flop image. Incredible because this was, and is, an issue easily dealt with. When Cheney demands to know how Kerry can justify his shameful, unmanly, indecisive, poll-driven equivocation on the war -- how it is that he now opposes what he once obviously supported -- he need only reply as
follows: "Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports -- that legendary 'bad intelligence.' It was on that basis and that basis alone -- the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction -- that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade.

COMMENTS

After all last weeks discussion of the comments board, the bloody thing seems to be falling apart and I don’t really know enough html to either fix it or replace. Of course, once you declare a piece of web of software to have failed, it frequently reasserts itself. If anyone finds that it’s working perfectly for them, please email me. If anyone has a link to an alternate server, let me know about that too. (Byron4d@aol.com)

CRYPTIQUE – I can’t do that, Dave.