Cliff''s Corner

The Week That Was 4/14/06

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

Well if it’s an election cycle, it’s time to play bombardier for the little prince. Certainly if we’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that when faced with an election where the powers-that-aren’t will have to present a record of domestic achievement rivaling Andrew Johnson and a foreign policy that looks like it spent a night with Robert Blake — it’s time to talk about imminent attack again!

Did you know that Iran just had some inner tubes imported and we’re not sure they’re using all of them for bicycle tires? How about the fact that perhaps the only one of the 207 #3s in the Al Qaeda chain of command we have yet to capture/kill once spent a night in the Iranian city of Bam. Try pronouncing that and telling me there isn’t a full blown Al Qaeda/Iran coordinated plan to destroy us immediately? And equal to these in reality, they might have a nuke in 16 days.

I know that 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, as did bin Laden, whose family had intimate connections with the House of Saud, and they are Wahabbists who supported the Taliban, and there is credible information they are trying to go nuclear too. But their leaders like to hold hands with President Bush while making the family oil money and French kissing his jowls. So they’re obviously okey-dokey.

Except when that jealous Ken Mehlman is watching (and not taking phone calls from felons to coordinate phone jamming… I mean discuss the balmy weather in Manchester, New Hampshire).

I know what you’re thinking. It may be that the best intelligence estimates of US INTELLIGENCE say Iran won’t become a nuclear power for TEN YEARS. And it seems suspicious that we are talking about this during an election year again, when there must have been the same threat last year. But what if the Iranians decide in the meantime to open a new front in the War on Easter? Can we really take that chance?

Seriously, this would be pathetic if it weren’t so dangerous. Karl Rove, who is most likely orchestrating much of this, is in President George Herbert Walker Bush’s words “the most insidious of traitors.” He likes to out CIA agents and damage U.S. intelligence for kicks, when not busy washing dollar signs off his giant sebum-stained forehead. Dick Cheney, whose approval ratings and personality resemble that of a rabid gutter rat, is in on the con too. Because hey, even though Iran is just another country he happily did business with while at Haliburton, now they’re just unconscionable. And how else will he prove his manhood to Sean Hannity so that he might land more interviews where salt-of-the-Earth-Sean can continue to lick-shine his taint?

And then there’s boy wonder, who you really want to see running another war after the bang up job he did providing freedom and opportunity—to the poppy plant—in Afghanistan, turning Iraq into the Neocon Bahamas and pretty much fucking up everything else he has touched. He is like the anti-Midas, Leonid Brezhnev and that chick in The Ring movies all rolled into one.

I like how Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks put it in a blog. “Bush is the amalgamation of all the hideous and sad parts of the Republican Party. He is a Republican Frankenstein. He has the temperament of Barry Goldwater, the integrity of Richard Nixon, and the brains of Dan Quayle.” I would add the faux bravado of Arnold Schwarzenegger, compassion of Tom Tancredo and phallus of Lynn Cheney, but his list makes the point.

Which is that a threat that’s a decade off, like Iran, need not be handled by a man who thought Harriet Myers should sit on the Supreme Court. An efficient right-wing machine run by a corporate-owned Neocon elite and a catastrophe on our soil, has given us a man in the White House for two terms who should never have been allowed to sell bobble-head dolls in Lafayette Park.

Yes, Iran must be dealt with. In the future, by a competent, honest and learned president, who will know better than to take his marching orders from a group of self-appointed war czars who have only seen the battlefield on closed circuit TV and during late night Dungeons & Dragons sessions at sleepover camp. Let’s all stand up to the lies this time. The price will be infinitely higher if we don’t.