The Democrats’ Lot: Iraq and a Hard Place

Even though the Democrat party pretends to be mildly leftist, it isn’t. It isn’t as far to the right as the Republican party, but it’s still too right-wing for a reasonable person. Still, they can sometimes help. This is the case with the war in Iraq.

Democrats know that in order to position themselves as an alternative to the Bushes and McCains and Grahams who want to “win” against the jihadists and secure an oppressive regime of democracy, they need to be the party of exit strategies. So it is their political lot right now to have to call for a withdrawal of troops.

The spin of it is that it’s up to Iraqis to step up and take full control, because the Iraqi government will be better able to defend itself from the chaos without 150,000 American troops getting in the way. But behind this façade is the truth: They want to leave Iraq to its rightful heirs — those who understand what would be lost if Iraq were to permanently fall victim to a modern representative government.

It’s about time. As I’ve written before, the best way to get back at the Bush Administration is to force him to bring the troops home. As we watch the horrors unfold, we can all turn to Bush and blame him. It will make everyone hate him more than they already do, and that’s the goal, no matter who has to die.

We need to support the Dems as much as we can. We need to help them win the presidency in ‘08. Then and only then can we be 100% sure that the alliance of America and traitor Iraqis will lose the war.

How Low Can He Go?: 21,500 More Reasons To Hate Bush

As I’ve written before, the only stance more immoral than Bush’s “stay the course” strategy of not letting Iraq’s fledgling democracy crumble was McCain’s desire for more troops in Iraq. McCain is the very definition of a fascist, which is why he fought in Vietnam, why he never said a word to sell out America while under torture, and why he’s such a media darling in the U.S.: The media is as anti-Left as Hollywood.

So under pressure to make some kind of change in Iraq, Bush decides to send in more troops. He has ignored the people, most Democrats, and even some Republicans. He has descended one huge rung on the ladder of morality. More troops in Iraq means more dead freedom fighters and a greater likelihood that Iraqis will remain enslaved by the ideals of Western democracy. If these extra troops manage to secure Baghdad and Anbar, it might seem as though America is winning this war. Worse, it might actually be that America is winning this war.

Let’s just hope that 20,000 troops isn’t enough to snuff out the freedom fighters who are sacrificing themselves every day to ensure they do not become repressed by human rights and democracy.

Double Standards: The Price of Being “Great”

In theory, Saddam Hussein should be punished for the murder of 148 Shiite Muslims in the city of Dujail. But not in practice, because the practice is immoral.

First, Saddam should go free on technicalities. Consider what would happen to a criminal in America if he were caught and brought to trial by illegal means. Even if the criminal had raped every little girl in the country, the case would be thrown out of court. And even if it weren’t, all the evidence would be inadmissible. Given that the war to depose Saddam was strictly immoral and illegal, he should not have to face a trial, let alone be punished. Making him take responsibility for his oppression and mass murders is unfair from a legal standpoint.

Second, Saddam should go free on moral grounds. We seem to be forgetting something that should be glaringly obvious. Even a child should be able to recognize that the massacre was justified. After all, the Dujail villagers tried to assassinate Saddam to end his tyranny. Hello? Saddam was a dictator! We have to put ourselves in his shoes! What do we expect him to do when faced with a group who wants to end his reign? He had no choice but to massacre everyone he suspected to be associated with the plot, including a few others for effect. If he’d simply killed only those few who were actually involved, he would have looked weak in front of other dictators who might doubt his psychopathy.

Some conservatives might want to argue that, because Saddam tried to assassinate the Elder Bush, by my logic he deserved to be reprimanded like the Dujail villagers. I’d like to remind them that the situations are completely different. Younger Bush, like his father did, pretends he’s not a dictator. And if you’re “not a dictator”, you can’t use force.

If Bush were open about being a dictator, maybe he would have been justified in retaliating against Saddam by invading Iraq and building an elected representative government. But you can’t have it both ways. As long as you pretend to be the “elected” head of a free society, diplomacy is the only acceptable course of action. This is just another reason why the invasion of Iraq and Saddam’s trial were immoral — they were carried out by a democracy and not a despotic regime. The only thing that should ever be killed by a responsible, moral society is an unwanted unborn child.

These kinds of double standards are essential. They effectively ensure that America is judged by a separate set of rules from most of the world. They guarantee that when a jihadist saws off an innocent civilian’s head on the internet, we apathetically wonder how someone could do that, but when an American soldier flushes a Koran down the toilet, there is violent worldwide outrage.

America made its bed. Now it’s gotta lie in it (yes, pun intended). That’s the price of being “great”.

War is Bad (But Tony Blair Has Confused the Issue)

Conventional political wisdom considers the war on terror to be an issue mostly characterized by the Left vs. the Right. The Right is fascist, so they want to capture or kill terrorists, while we on the Left know that if we’re nice to jihadists they’ll drop their jihad faster than they can say “allahu akbar”.

And yet Tony Blair, supposedly a good-hearted Lefty, is the number-two gangster — Vader to Bush’s Emperor, Starscream to Bush’s Megatron, Destro to Bush’s Cobra Commander — in this atrocity of a war. Obviously, those to the left of Blair support the freedom fighters and know the war is immoral. This goes without saying. What’s confusing is that Blair’s war critics also include the opposition Conservative Party.

Granted, politics in Britain is different from here. But not that different. And yet in Britain we have an immoral global war on terror being waged by a sitting pro-war Leftist government (in name only, mind you) that’s being resisted and criticized by a right-wing anti-war opposition. It seems that, at least from an American perspective, Britain is bizarro world.

What does this mean? Does it mean that the war’s not about Left vs. Right? Is the war more about simple right vs. wrong? Alone, each of these analyses is overly simplistic. I hate simplistic explanations for things. There is truth in both. Yes, of course the debate over the war is very clearly right vs. wrong. But it’s also Left vs. Right, because the Left is always right. Only in Blair’s messed-up Britain, and only on this issue, is it the other way around.

By supporting Bush’s war, Tony Blair has confused the issue into something more complicated than simply “war is bad”. This is unforgivable. We need “war is bad”. The beauty of “war is bad” is that it absolves you from thinking too hard. It shelters you from getting confused enough to think that it’s wrong to abandon those who want democracy.

If it weren’t for Tony Blair, his party would be against the war, and the conservatives would be for it. For conclusive evidence of this, we need only look at the way Britain’s conservatives oppose the war. They don’t argue that the war’s immoral, as they should — as we all should. They simply point out that the reasons for invading Iraq weren’t truthful enough. (Duh! Even a moron knows that the WMD materials we have recovered in Iraq don’t prove that Iraq ever had any WMDs.)

In other words, British conservatives’ opposition to the war is purely half-hearted. They know they need to distance themselves from Blair if they’re going to have any chance of being elected, so they opportunistically oppose the war. You’re a fool if you were duped into thinking British conservatives are any less immoral than conservatives here and everywhere else.

At this point, it seems Blair’s with Bush until the bitter end. All we can hope for is that he goes one step further in being like Vader, Starscream, and Destro: Hopefully, for whatever reason — selfishness, jealousy, or to save his son from destruction by the blue lightning Bush is firing from his fingertips — Blair eventually decides to sell out the number-one gangster, just like he sold out the British Left by confusing the war issue.

John Kerry, Reporting for Fatuity

Let me just point out that I don’t like John Kerry, because his politics are way too right-wing for me, and because he volunteered to be a fascist in Vietnam. That said, contrary to everyone else, what bothers me about this fiasco isn’t what Kerry actually said. Everyone makes mistakes like that. President Bush has made about 4,566,765,346,899,996,898 since taking office. (Have we forgotten the “fool me once” delight?)

What is embarrassing about this incident is what Kerry meant to say — that if you don’t study hard and do well in school, you’ll get the country stuck in Iraq like Bush has. Apparently Kerry's advisors don’t realize that all it takes is about a minute on a search engine to find out that at Yale, the university that Kerry and Bush attended, our president (the first with an MBA, no less) had a higher grade point average than Kerry. In the interest of keeping alive the notion that he’s smarter than Bush, maybe it was for the best that Kerry made the gaffe and kept everyone's attention away from his academic ineptness…

So John Kerry embarrasses us liberals yet again. Can’t Howard Dean put a leash on him already?

I Hate Bush (the President, Not the ... Y'know)

Can I just tell you that I hate President Bush? I really, deeply hate the man. We need to curb his power as soon as possible. Luckily, the mid-term elections are coming up. This is big. If enough good guys get into Congress we might actually be able to bully the Bush Administration into pulling out of Iraq, which is long overdue.

Some say that it’s the wrong move, because it would show us to be soft on the War on Terror and because it would cause Iraq to crumble into chaos. … Exactly!

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We are soft on the War on Terror! Most of us oppose this war because it’s immoral to kill terrorists. We are no better than they are. Terrorism is the only way these people can fight back. Maybe Native Americans, African-Americans, and Mexican-Americans would be sitting pretty these days if they’d considered flying planes into buildings. But they didn’t. They were “too good” for that. Well, jihadists aren’t. And who are we to judge? After all, who’s to say their culture is any worse than ours, which includes similar horrors such as intelligent design and Ashley Simpson? If we murder those who murder, we’re no better than the murderers.

In fact, we might even be worse than our enemies. Why? Because we created them. How many peace-loving people have turned to terrorism because of the Iraq occupation? Sadly, we’ll never know, because coalition troops are trying to kill them all. But think about it: If an alien race invaded America and there were no way for Americans to win the war, other than to wait until the aliens’ media spouted enough doom and gloom to make them lose heart, the best way to defeat the aliens would be to strap a bomb to yourself, go to the mall or the movieplex or the subway, and blow up fifty or sixty people. You might even blow up one or two of the aliens, if you’re lucky.

Look, as much as it might offend, we need to accept that our enemies are freedom fighters. They’re fighting for freedom from democracy. They’re fighting for freedom of oppression, for freedom of tyranny. Our enemies have every right to overthrow the elected representative government and keep the area firmly nestled in the seventh century. We need to respect that right.

Besides, we should want Iraq to descend into chaos. We should want a civil war. What better way to prove to Bush that he was wrong? Too many people die every day in Iraq, and it’s Bush’s fault. If we reverse Bush’s Iraq policy and leave now, even more people will die every day. That will be Bush’s fault too. All potential for Iraqi human rights will vanish — Bush’s fault. Most importantly, much of the potential for dealing with this ideology through diplomacy will disappear with the emergence of a hard-line Islamic theocracy that’s bitter about having had to kill so many people on roadsides and in markets just to restore their ability to kill from the pulpit with impunity. That’s not just Bush’s fault, it’s also a blessing in disguise, because we shouldn’t be acknowledging, much less pursuing diplomacy with, an immoral regime.

If the Dems win control of Congress, maybe we’ll even get the chance to impeach Bush. Then Cheney will become president. And he’s arguably worse than Bush, so we’ll have to then impeach Cheney too. Hopefully this will all take just under two years, so that we will have wasted everyone’s time and money distracting the world from what’s important in order to remove from power an administration that was about to leave anyway. The beautiful absurdity here would be a parting slap in the face to the Bush Administration — look what you made us do, guys! Hope you’re proud!

So vote in November. Vote Democrat. If you’re particularly devoted to the Democrats — the real party of democracy and freedom — vote more than once, in multiple states. Try to convince your Republican friends (which I hope you don’t have) to stay home. Consider strapping a bunch of hotdogs to your body and showing up in heavily Republican areas. Threaten to blow everyone up unless they don’t vote. Hell, even consider using real dynamite to threaten them. In fact, even consider going all the way and blowing everyone up. You never know, there could be 72 virgins waiting for you (even though there’s exactly no reason to believe there are).

The bottom line is that we need to get as many Nazis out of Congress as we can, no matter what it takes or who has to die.