I loved Lindsay’s description of the neocons as compulsive gamblers and nuking Iran as essentially them betting double or nothing, so I’m stealing it for this title post. I had to add an “Iran” category today, so that’s basically a weird little admission of defeat to the forces of the media and BushCo gunning for another war. Just when you have that knee jerk reaction to say, “He’s not crazy enough to do it,” please remember all the people saying, “He’s not crazy enough to lie about WMD in Iraq.”
Anyway, Ezra has a really good post up today I recommend highly where he argues against saber rattling (if that is indeed all BushCo is doing). Like I’ve said earlier, it’s asinine for a nation that came together to lose its mind after 9/11 to think that threatening people with utter destruction is a good way to break them apart instead of pull them together under their leaders, no matter how crazy those leaders are.
Not to misuse the holidays here, but think of the Exodus tale: The decidedly public, impressive plagues are repeatedly visited on the Egyptians, but each time Moses returns to the Pharaoh’s antechamber, the wannabe demigod’s heart is hardened (depending on how you interpret the passages, by God or by pride) and he ignores the latest plague, preferring to pit his society against divine wrath yet again. The end result, of course, is massive slaughter.
Ezra handles the rational dismantling of the right’s delusionary justifications and I point out what I would hope is obvious–the neocons probably are quite aware that people get defensive when you threaten them, and odds are they just don’t care. “Avoiding war” is just a sales tactic to escalate tensions so they get to have another war and this time maybe, just maybe, they’re actually not going to screw it up horribly. Well, in their fevered dreams.
I think about BushCo contemplating nuking Iran in an effort to get back the glory days when they were treated like saviors by America because they strutted the hardest, back before incompetence exposed them for the fools they are and I think of this.
Without skiing or bike racing as an outlet, he took to exposing himself in public. He is very matter-of-fact about it. “It’s the possibility of being caught or discovered, the thrill of doing something crazy,� Hoyt says, comparing the feeling to one he had many years ago, when he was skiing Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon and abruptly veered from the trail, flying off a 40-foot cliff for no reason. “I’ve raced motorcycles, raced bicycles, skied competitively. I’ve hit trees at 60 miles an hour. Been run over by a motorcycle. I’ve broken arms, broken my leg, tore cartilage in my knee.�
That’s right–in BushCo’s mind, The Bomb is the ideal way to regain that long-lost sense of Hollywood-esque masculinity, but to the rest of us, they’re pulling out their weiners and showing them to schoolgirls.
8 Responses to “Double or nothing?”
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Independence Day is the ultimate parody of hte bush administration.
No, seriously, ID4 is, I was watching it last night in a sort of “how bad was this movie again?” way, and it didn’t strike how much of a “bush admin through a mirror darkly” it was until the president guy grabbed his secretary of defense and yelled at him “Maybe my mistake was hiring a weasely little toady for a secretary of defense!”
An ex-pilot president, who’s manly and calm in a crisis (unlike bush who simply goes clam in a crisis), who agonizes over dropping a nuke on the aliens, and when the first nuke doesn’t work, stops the attack out of a sense that it’d just make things worse for the earth as a whole.
A president who can ad lib a morale boosting war speech before the final battle and is actually upset as the fighters get shot down in the initial attack. Made me shiver and want to cry watching it, it cut too close.
Of course, the planners know that NK will get defensive, as will Iran, and will all the other countries, defensiveness leads to nationalism, leads to hatred, leads to violence.
It’s the equivalent to someone cussing out some drunk’s mother at a bar so that they’ll swing at the cusser, who’s sober and can then look all good beating the living shit out of this “violent drunk”.
It’s the same thing that happens in northern ireland, orangemen decide to march through an area full of catholics, it’s a peaceful march so these macro scale carcer trolls cans say “what did we do? we was just marching peacefully, nothing wrong with that is there?” after the catholic hotheads lose their cool and start a physical fight.
That way, if the orange men just so happen to win the initial fight, killing and injuring a few catholics in the process, they win, and if the catholics win, well the catholics look bad, and the orange men’s recruiting increases, or it gives them an excuse to launch a full on “counter” attack agaisnt catholics like when protestants chucked a nail bomb into a catholic school a few years back, or like krystal nacht.
They want an excuse, and they’ll posture and threaten and fuck with until the iranians lose their temper and give it to them. The first nuclear test by iran will be the final excuse ireckon, to nuke and/or drop some B/C crap on major population centers, forcing the iranian civilian and military forces to be too reliant on outside (i.e. american) medical aid to fight back as iran finally gets raped by american business.
I had been wondering why the general chorus against Rumsfeld? Why now?
After reading your post, I finally figured out that all those generals coming out against Rumsfeld must have lost their taste for gambling too and think if Rumsfeld is pushed out, that will at least slow BushCo from moving forward with the double or nothing option. (And if the 2006 elections don’t go the GOP’s way, that may be all that is needed to stop it) In other words, the people who, unlike me and most of us dems/libs/sane folks, actually may have had face time with Bush and Rummy agree with our darkest suspicions that this is no mere saber-rattling either.
The more the lefty blogosphere talks about Iran the less willing I am to listen to their shit.
If they insist on acting like PNAC has nothing to do with any of this then I’ll probably just refer to them as being a bunch of pussies unwilling or incapable of making the right comments about why it’s happening.
PNAC.
MYOB’
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“No, seriously, ID4 is, I was watching it last night in a sort of “how bad was this movie again?â€?”
Yeah, the manly men go out and save the world while the females were just sitting in a safe place and waiting for their heros to come back. “Patriarchy Day” would have been a more adequate film title.
Well sorry for killing the thread amanda, anyway, you know how all the wingnuts are alwasy going on about iran funding terrorist insurgents in iran… well according to lindsay that was… can you guess?
Projection, duh.
So the american-iran war has basically begun in that same non-starty way that the iraqi civil war has begun.
Go Patriarchy! Woo!
I hope if it comes to it, the Pentagon will say, “We cannot follow illegal orders.” But I’m not banking on it.
It’s irresponsible posts like these that give flashers on schoolgrounds a bad name.
I keep waiting for the military to crack and say “enough is enough already!”
What I hope and what I expect are different things.