The part where we are fucked

 The beginning of this pirate raid is going to plan, with Democrats assuming the Daschle position – a sort of pro-Israel whiffle bound to please their owners, the donors, while so irritating their voters that they will stay at home – and the media doing its best to present a united front of American patriots who have been itching and moaning to bring their opinions about the proper governance of Shiraz to fruition – and who among us has not noticed that Americans drop everything when they can dream, aloud, about the best qualified undersecretary of culture in an Iranian government of our choice! Why, it makes discussions of the price of gas positively petty!

That 58 percent of said Americans in the latest poll are opposed to the war will make no nevermind to the American press, which from the Free Press to the NYT, including the Elllison networks and beyond, will select only those Americans properly appreciative of Iranians dancing in the street in the joy unleashed in the fact that, at last, a foreign power is willing to drop bombs on their girls schools.

In the circs, it is good to look back at the golden year for freedom lovers everywhere, 2001. We all remember how it rolled out: a president who stripped away the awful Clintonites, forever going on about terrorist attacks, in the period after Bush’s inauguration; the man himself poo-poohing the CIA warning he received in August, knowing many Saudis, all of them rich and generous, himself and willing to trust those guys; the attack; the media and Daschle-ist response, which was not that we had the stupidest puppy ever for Prez, but instead, that we were ruled by a superhero!; the warning to the Taliban (and a policy happily summed up as a very glorious thing indeed, by the poet laureate of American foreign policy, Tom Friedman, as “breaking things” – the tantrum as an endall in itself!) to hand over Osama bin; The Taliban’s response that they’d give him up to a third Islamic power, like Morocco (which was the closest the U.S. ever got under Bush to actually laying hands on Osama bin, not something that the American establishment, with all that Saudi money at stake, wanted to happen); the farcical invasion, employing a comically small U.S. force, allied to a rapehappy congery of warlords, presided over by a General surveying the whole thing from a base in Florida; the happy battle of Tora Bora, in which the U.S. sent a message by bombing the entrance of the cave system not the rear (it would have been unseemly to have just said, escape by the rear you dingbat, we need you around to be a threat on tap!); Osama bins flight on a magic pony, to who know where, just so hard to find that guy!; and finally, the assembly of much of the Taliban high command at Kunduz, with U.S. troops surrounding them, who were evacuated by plane by Pakistan with the tacit consent of the Bushies; all in all a glory that we need to revisit in a speeded up version!

We remember, fondly, that the media during this point in time was careful not to report news that they accidentally found out about, like that Kunduz matter – this would depress your average taxpayer, who would not see the Rumsfeldian cleverness of it all! Far better to report the news on things two to three years after you find them out, so that nothing could be done and we could forget what happened.

We can speed through the rest – the U.S. war against the tally high command that our U.S. ally, Pakistan, to whom we were giving billions a year, had airlifted out, as per above; - the jailing of random Afghanis, and the delicacy with which we let our Afghan warlord allies rape and steal; the famine which we all just forgot; and one of my fave memories, the way the Bush administration promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and then (oopsy!) put $0.00 down on the plan in their 2002 budget. Because words, as we know, are much more important than acts. After all, in the beginning was the word, and the rest you can pocket in bursts of money as a subcontractor, privatizing the whole deal!

Down this road we hop again. That is, our power elite. Out here in the countryside, though, where upper middle class libs and their AI invested friends assure us it is all redneck racism, we are not so sure. In fact, we are sure the war with Iran is the worst kind of shitstorm available, ignorant peasants that we are. But the political people saying this are surely extremist. What we want to do is listen to podcasts from the Third Way, torture transpeople, and guarantee the safety of Israel all the way to Valhalla!

I title this part of American history: how we became so fucked.