A(nother) Time To Worry, Yet

So I just turned on one of the news nets, expecting to bask in some empty-headed blowback about Barack Obama’s having just made it official. I’m in the middle of my work-week; I can use a little feel-good newsiness right about now.

Instead, the headline was another one in a slowly swelling chorus of ones along the lines of “Is Iran Supplying Iraqi Insurgents!” or some such nonsense. It doesn’t just have a familiar ring to it, it has a familiar mushroom cloud to it. Validating what all the left-wing “crazies” have been predicting for years, the talking points coming from the White House increasingly are of alleged imminent dangers from Iran. The drumbeat is building once again, ominously, familiarly. It really is like watching a giant wave grow off in the far distance, in slow motion, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

I would have never given them credit for having the stones to move on to Iran after Iraq had gone so badly for them. It’s like they don’t care. Like it’s a mathematical calculation to them, upon the outcome of which rides their pride (and the inevitable private gentleman's wager or two), but precious little else.

Again, just like the build-up to Iraq, the administration is saying one true thing, and conflating it into a completely different, unrelated thing for sale to the rubes. Yes, Saddam was a bad guy but the USA is not better off with him gone; yes, Iran is almost certainly funneling resources to the insurgency in Iraq, but so is every other fundamentalist government and goat-herder in the region – why are we singling out Iran, unless they’re already on our to-do list, just like Iraq was.

I know that it’s the government’s job to look at the big picture, and the Bush administration is nothing if not imaginative about some things (mission accomplished, few dead-enders, death throes of the insurgeny); the problem is they’re deliberately deaf to any evidence that is contradictory to or exculpatory of their predetermined outcome.

When you’re using that method to make war decisions, that’s not just unscientific. That’s criminal.

[next morning]

Some idiot (GOP bigwig Johnny Boehner on “Meet The Press”) just compared W to Lincoln, and then in the same breath, FDR. It was a breathtaking example of partisan rat-going-down-with-the-shippery. According to press reports, lately W has been fancying himself more of a Truman – wildly unpopular at the time he left office, but eventually (depending upon whom you ask) exonerated by history.

Plus, Truman had balls, just like W imagines he does. He did nuke the Japs. Twice. That’s probably the part that captures Bush’s imagination the most.

Pretty, pretty mushroom clouds in the sky. He’s been seeing them in his head since 2001.

Too many Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq now. Wouldn’t be prudent.

…

Hhhhmmmmm. Not very many Americans in Tehran…