Fuck the Middle East. Let's take Ron Paul's advice and go home. I'll get to Ron Paul soon enough, but first I want to mention something else.
As many of you have probably read, heard or seen, Oscar-nominated British film-maker, battlefield photographer and journalist, Tim Hetherington, and American photo-journalist, Chris Hondros, died in the western Libya city of Misrata from mortar attacks. Their deaths come with injuries to other journalists and the deaths of many Gaddafi-opposed Libyans.
Men and women die in this line of service somewhat frequently so that people around the world will know what evils persist in places of conflict. They bring us images and words with the weight of first-hand experience that tear at our hearts and cut through political rhetoric and the bullshit foreign policy our government forces on us, despite its unpopularity among many of its people. Though we have this information, and the answers seem so clear, people still don't expect to have sensible decisions made in Washington, and we're used to it.
It has been estimated that every Al-Quaida militant in Afghanistan costs $3 billion per year to pursue, and there is said to be about 50 of these guys left there. That's a cost of $150 billion a year to chase 50 guys hiding in rock piles in a place so backward that few homes have plumbing or electricity. Most agree that it will take no more than a couple of years for Afghanistan to revert to its original state, regardless of our level of success there--and all this while most in the media, military and intelligence services concede that the real problem lies in Pakistan.
A March 13 Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 73 percent of Americans want out of Afghanistan immediately. Of the remaining 27 percent who opted to stay, half are tax-dodging republicans who no doubt want to stay and prove a point on behalf of Jesus, probably for the same reason they ignore unemployment and the destruction of the middle class in favor of attacking wages, abortion and healthcare to poor men, women (especially women) and children.
Their fucked up, Jesus-based social agenda tells me Jesus must have hated poor people and wished they would all die like dirty maggot shit, and that he hated clean air and water too. The rest are split between hopelessly misguided democrats and independents who probably suffer from clinical depression, paranoia and the gripping, schizophrenic fear that some mad Muslim will blow himself up next to them on the city bus. I'm not saying that can't happen, because those Islamic militant bastards are completely nuts, but holy shit, is it worth sending all these boys and girls to the other side of the world to get blown up for 10 years at a cost of a trillion dollars? The same shit can still happen to us here, but imagine how much better we'd be protected if we brought everyone home.
These journalists who died, and many like them, have given their lives so that people like me can sit here in solid comfort and bitch about all the things that piss us off about the current state of things. So, you see how integral a part of free speech they are. If not for them, we'd be guessing, and if you can imagine such a thing being possible, we'd be taken advantage of even more egregiously by the criminals in government.
And numbering much higher are the thousands of servicemen and women who have died, and the tens of thousands injured in these conflicts that began with the ridiculous bullshit lie perpetrated on America by the Dick Cheney administration. You know the one--it was where we unilaterally invaded Iraq based on false CIA "intelligence reports," because they were such a big bad nemesis with nuclear bombs and VX nerve gas, among other terrible things we never found. They were so damned dangerous with their 12 crop dusters and a few Russian tanks made in the 1950s.
What a ridiculous joke, and we fell for it under the guise of revenge for an attack on us that we still don't fully understand, which a large group claim has never been properly investigated, and I am inclined to agree with some of their points. "They're helping the terrorists! Let's get em!" The war was a scam. It cannot logically be denied, and people are still dying every day because of our government's unwillingness to leave it behind.
Ron Paul has been ostracized from media coverage, though he is a fan-favorite across the country among a broad group of republicans, democrats and independents, especially young people. The reason for his exclusion is his foreign policy stance that we have brought some of this on ourselves by doing ridiculous, short-sighted, irresponsible things in the Middle East. He believes some of what has happened has been blowback from these foreign policy mistakes. Paul believes 9/11 happened partially because of our policing in the world, namely in 1991 when we placed our military in Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in Islam, as it contains the cities of Mecca and Medina, Mohammad's old stomping grounds. Bush Sr. wanted to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait so we'd keep getting Kuwait's cheap oil, and to stabilize the region.
This dysfunctional relationship we have with Saudi Arabia, who we laughingly call allies, is also at the heart of our foreign policy idiocy. More terrorists are trained and sponsored by the Saudis than any other county, yet we pour billions of dollars into their economy buying oil, thereby enabling the destabilization of the region, and adding to terrorists' ability to strike us here at home. Osama Bin Laden is Saudi, along with many of his top people. Ron Paul is aware of all this, he sees how wrong it is, and he wants to stop it. That would keep a few ultra-rich billionaires from continuing us on a path to global slavery, so he is kept out of the conversation. Donald Trump and Sarah Palin's illegitimate monkey baby has a better chance of being nominated on the republican ticket.
While being interviewed (verbally assaulted) by Bill O'Reilly, one of the biggest douchebag charlatan conservative demagogues in the history of the world, Ron Paul was asked if he saw Iran as a danger to the United States. He said no. He went on to say Iran couldn't put together a nuclear weapon for 10 years, and a lot can be done between now and then. That was when O'Reilly shat his pants as tears welled up in his Irish eyes, the screams of riot-inciting panic spewing forth. And Ron Paul asked him a question. He asked how we would have felt, during the Cold War, if the USSR had invaded Mexico. Fucking brilliant! O'Reilly just spewed ignorance, having nothing credible or sensible to add to the conversation.
These are all things to think about as another two years of hard campaigning for your hearts and minds ensues. For crying out loud, whatever you do, don't vote for any of these limp-dick republicans other than Ron Paul. They will land the final blows to the middle class, create more poverty and let the poor die in the streets while cutting another trillion dollars from the taxes of the rich. That's not the country I want to live in, and no one with a soul would admit differently.
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