The DavidCyrus Blog of Wisdom

Bush-Lovers Seizing Their Opportunity
All manner of crazy Rightists proclaim how well their mission's been accomplished

They're coming out of their backwoods military compounds and survival shelters to coronate their cowboy king. His brilliant and righteous strategies have led them to victory, and along the way, planted the seeds of world peace now blossoming throughout the Mid-East. But true colors are shining through their celebratory amnesia; the emphasis isn't so much on how right they believe Bush is, but how wrong they've "proven" the Left to be.

Charles Krauthammer writes in the "Washington Post" that the entire international Left has suddenly been shamed into acknowledging that their view of Arabs was not only incorrect, but "...morally bankrupt".

What an article! In it, Krauthammer attempts to twist reality to argue that the Left: (1) supports the notion that Arabs love slavery, (2) supported Saddam Hussein's sovereignty and all manner of his dictatorial rule, and (3) uses their concern for human rights as, "...nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism."

The Left has never supported slavery, nor regimes that practice it, and most definitely would never argue that Arabs love it. We might argue that a majority of Arabs love Allah (a concept so befuddling to Rightists that it is often dismissed as paganism) but justifying slavery by implying that the slaves love it is a Rightist, Ku Klux Clan tactic, not a progressive Left principle.

Furthermore, the Left never supported Hussein's rule. That, too, was strictly a characteristic of Reagan-era Rightists, who generously supplied him with the weapons they swore he still had in 2003. It was the UN weapons inspectors and world-wide sanctions that disarmed Saddam, not Bush. He simply walked in when the job was complete.

How fervently the Rightists want to forget the facts of Bush's nation-building. We have now occupied Iraq for over two years, and neither Osama Bin-laden nor any weapons of mass destruction have been corralled. We have replaced Saddam's rule with an occupation that itself has killed over ten thousand Iraqi civilians. Allegations of torture, murder, and indiscriminate denial of civil liberties are drowning the notion that our forces represent freedom. Our 130,000 troops will not be withdrawn or even reduced in 2005, as planned earlier, and may remain in Iraq indefinitely, according to Bush.

Is this money well spent? How selective are we with our military machine? According to calculations based on the DOD's International Institute for Strategic Studies, we lead the world in military spending. This seems obvious, of course, but ponder this; we also spend more on our military than the rest of the top 20 spending countries do, combined.

Maybe it's time to lay our budget out on the table to critically review what we're really getting for all this money and effort, and stop praising false accomplishments as justifications for our nation-building. The true shame should be cast upon the war-mongering elitists who trumpet approval for the havoc we wreak, not upon those who question that myopic imperialist mindset.

Limbaugh Logic: Looting Proves Righteousness
translation: Looting at Iraqi weapons sites justifies Bush's invasion

In concert with our season of the bizarro, Rush Limbaugh makes an appearance. It seems that the New York Times reported that Iraqi weapon sites were looted just after the American invasion. Now, looting in Iraq is nothing new- if fact, it's hard to find a significant Iraqi location that wasn't looted. Stores, schools and universities, research labs, government offices, national museums, hospitals, and even weapons sites were all looted. There's very little mention of deterrence provided by coalition forces to stop any sort of looting in Iraq. It stood, and still stands, as one of the first great embarrassments from the war; that our invasion allowed looting to wipe out great chunks of Iraq's economy and culture. Seriously- how could anyone be pleased that Iraqi weapons sites were not secured, but were instead, looted? Wouldn't that just strengthen the terrorist forces that are killing our soldiers in Iraq right now?

Well, Rush is pleased. He's happy and feeling righteous. He's spun this bit of tragic news to an absurd conclusion; that the looters must have been collecting "Weapons of Mass Destruction", so their looting justifies the invasion!

First- let's all understand that the article in no way locates or identifies any WMD's. It simply points out that major pieces of dual-use industrial equipment and explosives were looted after the invasion, and some of the equipment that is now missing could be used to develop WMD's, or jet engines, or as the report stated, "...highly specialized parts." Certainly 9/11 has taught us how dangerous jet engines can be, but let's remember- those jets were American, not Iraqi.

But this is all music to Rush's ears (selective and tinny as they may be). To him, this trips up the liberals in their anti-war protests. All along, they've been pushing an anti-war agenda, but, Rush states, "...in the process, they end up admitting that the weapons were there all along". In addition, mentioned simply because it is so bizarre, Rush contends that the missing WMD's will be found in Syria, and have been "miniaturized." (read his rant- I'm not making this up!)

Good God, the warmongering sadists such as Rush will stop at nothing to justify their idiotic agenda. I'm sure that they literally drool with anticipation, fingers clenched like worshipping fanatics, hoping beyond all hope, praying, dreaming for the day that a dirty radiation bomb, a cloud of anthrax, maybe just a dispersal of small pox- something, anything kills some of our service men, so they can finally shout, "Hurray! We finally found those missing weapons of mass destruction!"

Talk about an anti-patriotic war chant:

"Once our boys get gassed and bombed -
- we'll show them Lib'ruls they were wrong"

Life In our Bizarro World
War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, Bush was Right

Remember the joke about asking a man why he was hitting himself on the head with a hammer? He replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop!" Well, friends, Americans have reached that point with the Bush administration. After five full years of anti-American, unconstitutional, underhanded elitist dealings in the Executive branch, suddenly newspapers have stopped arguing, discontinued the debate, and wearily confessed, "Bush was right all along!" Peace and free elections are busting out all over the Middle East, just like Bush planned it. The New York Times, no less, that rag of such loathing from Rightists everywhere, is suddenly trumpeting the praises of the Bush Doctrine.

In the face of this nationwide Orwellian trance, Robert Kuttner from the Boston Globe has got it right, by questioning the causality of world happiness as a result Bush wisdom.

In short, saying Bush caused peace in Palestine is like saying Reagan beat communism. Sure, plenty of people have said those things, but anybody who understands international politics knows that neither President really caused the events that simply happened under their watch. Let's recall how fervently the Bush administration has denied their own responsibilities in the 9/11 attacks (which is understandable, since by some counts, it actually happened under President Gore's watch).

Another smart rebuttal to the idea of a calculated fostering of true democracy is presented by Seumas Milne at "The Guardian". To quote the article,

"What the US campaign is clearly not about is the promotion of democracy in either Lebanon or Syria, where the most plausible alternative to the Assad regime are radical Islamists. In a pronouncement which defies satire, Bush insisted on Tuesday that Syria must withdraw from Lebanon before elections due in May "for those elections to be free and fair". Why the same point does not apply to elections held in occupied Iraq - where the US has 140,000 troops patrolling the streets, compared with 14,000 Syrian soldiers in the Lebanon mountains - or in occupied Palestine, for that matter, is unexplained."

But let's take another look at the death toll. That has a pretty clear link to Bush decisions, right? Certainly, we aren't going to pretend that someone else ordered the attacks on Iraq. At least 16,000 civilians have been killed during this war, over 1500 American soldiers are dead, over 11,000 are wounded, and darn it all if gas prices aren't still going through the roof.

"It never was about gas prices", you might say. Well, wasn't it? Didn't we all sorta understand, without really mentioning it, that the real reason our army was in Iraq instead of Sudan was to secure Iraq's strategic oil reserves? I mean, it's been proven that it wasn't because of Saddam's 9/11 involvement, or Weapons of Mass Destruction, since none of that was true. But we knew about the oil- if everything else went bad, at least gas prices were going down, right? Wrong.

Other Bush dividends: Nobody wants to join the Army anymore. The Iraqi war is so screwed up that we've transformed a flood of military recruits post-9/11 to a trickle of volunteers that are missing recruitment goals in 2005.

Meanwhile, we still have hundreds of people locked up in Cuba, since early 2002, and we are still being told that this is a completely acceptable human-rights situation.