Ok everybody, time to show you how I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! I have had business dealings with the families of a number of locals with members in the military, and I always give them a generous discount and sincerely wish them well. That's the most important thing: because they are good people, working people, and they are the ones who will suffer the most from bush's idiocy. They are not to be blamed for doing the job they signed on to do. But that doesn't oblige me to shut up while my leaders pursue a global empire predicated on unequivocal arrogance and unprovoked violence.

It is time to deal with a particular sort of soldier; the bitter, self-aggrandizing sort. The sort most likely to engage a peacenik in roadrage due to his bumper stickers.The kind most likely to get off on cool war stories, and refer to Filipino sex-workers as Little Brown Fuck Machines. That's kind of appalling, as is this: but just as you can't blame Mike Tyson for developing a violent streak in his line of work, I expect certain personalities do lend themselves better to the task of killing.

I understand that soldiers and their families commonly engage in a kind of rationalization to keep morale up; they did it in Vietnam, too. It goes: my (relative) is protecting our nation, doing good work, serving selflessly; they are good people fighting a good war, end of story, yellow ribbon, wave flag, feel a bit better. I don't argue with the general spirit of service, but if you can't bring yourself to question the leaders and the wars they send you off to fight, your notion of national service has just turned into facism. I might well shut up and wave the flag myself, if any of my family had been naive enough to trust their government after Vietnam and enlist. Luckily none of us have been that stupid. Or poor, the other reason half of them join, another example of those who have been fucked by the powers that be bending over one more time in the hopes of waking up to find themselves shitting gold. Or at least cubic zirconium.

So, I support our troops, but not their leaders; and some soldiers seem to be ungrateful for this, that my tax dollars pay for their salaries and equipment, and I don't even believe in what they are doing at the moment, but I refrain from marching on my local military base, I don't spit on them or disparage them. Some soldiers, really brainwashed, get super-pissed when peaceniks like me criticize their wars at the policy level; they take it personally because they had to invest psychologically in the mission in order to maintain through all the hell Uncle Sam asked them to go through....in defense of what? The Constitution they are sworn to protect? Hardly. In defense of "American interests", if you really read and listen to the policy wonks from the fancy universities who decide where and when our boys will kill and die...Funny how neither Bush, Cheyney or Wolfowitz ever served on a battlefield, huh? But hey, Bush owned a baseball team and never had much time at bat...though he was a cheerleader. But I stray.

"I remember the near unbearable heat... We were preparing ourselves for the invasion of Iraq...The order from our squad leader to come together and get cover in what little protection could be afforded in the desert — in what amounted to little more than a hole in the ground...As they rose to the sky, Patriot missile batteries gave the S.C.U.D.s chase with trios of green counter missiles deep into the night sky. Our only hope was that they would be knocked out of the sky before they rained down death and destruction on our position. Some marines prayed to God for protection, while others looked out to see what seemed like their inevitable end. The war had begun for us and within the first 30 minutes, we didn't know if we would see another day."

Wow. Well, no objection here, this guy's job really sucks. I mean, you couldn't pay me enough to go invade another country. Sure, what our boys did for Kuwait was nice, though it was really for the Kuwaiti royal family, not the citizens living under that authoritarian regime. What we did for Europe was nice, when Hitler was whipping their asses, and probably prevented an actual threat to our nation that never did really materialize, aside from some stray balloon experiments and Pearl Harbor.

But I stray. I was talking about bitter soldiers who believe it is their duty to flex American muscle overseas. If that's what you want to do, if that's your calling in life, then go do it and don't complain about it just because some Americans don't care for your handiwork. All those bombs do kill a few innocent people, as part and parcel of saving the other innocent people. And whether it is collateral damage or murder is just a choice of language. Oh, sure, collateral damage is accidental because you aren't aiming at the grandmothers. But if you drop bombs with full knowledge you are causing innocent deaths, it isn't exactly accidental, either. We don't fight any of these wars hand-to-hand; all of them involved massive, indiscriminate bombing. But if that's your thing, bombing and being shot at, and you feel like a hero, go for it. You have not risked your lives in vain, someone will be happy about it; your masters in Washington, oil shieks, and the stray Kurd. But these heroes always lose me when they try to bring their adventures abroad to bear here at home:

"To the man who hung our flag upside down — rest easy tonight, for tomorrow you still have the right to display your ignorance to the world. You're welcome."

Uh...First off, I didn't thank you for anything, because you did nothing for me. Saddam never threatened my free speech rights. Neither did the Vietnamese. Revisionist history, here we go, now I hear Republicans saying that it was a good war, but we just fought it wrong. Have you seen the photos? Soldiers threatening ricefarming grandmothers with rifles to their heads? Summary executions? Village burnings? A good war. There has never been a good war or a bad peace. It was a wrong war, and we fought it wrong to top it off. Tell me, how would stopping Communists in Vietnam have made America safer? History answers you, because we lost, and Vietnam has been Communist for the past 30 years. Did I miss something? Has Vietnam flown some planes over here and attacked us since? Did they sell secret rice farming technology to the Ruskis? Did they threaten our Constitution, by, uh, hijacking our planes and demanding we uh...abandon our Constitution? How does one threaten the Constitution anyway, aside from attempts to amend it with bigotry? The Vietnamese haven't sailed over at night and dug tiger traps in our backyards yet, have they? They are still Communist today, and- we are trading with them! And let's not forget about China, which props up our economy as much as Mexican labor. First it was the "evil empire" and now it is the "axis of evil"...whatever. Evil lives within all nations as it does within all people. I see evil in the White House. Moral clarity my ass...

But back to our soldier boys. You didn't defend me. I never asked you to go there, and neither did the majority of Iraqis. Shit. Even the Shiites Saddam persecuted for ages want us out ASAP. Waving the flag, are they? When they're not kicking our corpses. Those ungrateful Muslim bastards! They don't appreciate being bombed, having their power out for months, water supply destroyed, and cities turned into a murderous anarchy with no rule of law, and Americans running the show. Nothing like bombing major cities to garner support. Death sucks, but a few dead soldiers doesn't bother me nearly as much as dead women and children, because the soldiers volunteered go home in a bag when they signed up.

So it's hot in the desert, and you don't like the flag upside down? Hey, we all make bad career choices; if you don't feel appreciated in the military, consider serving your country at home, like maybe in social work, or as a firefighter, or helping the homeless. Or be a cop, if you really, really like guns. Or a lawyer, defending the Constitution. Or a teacher. What about those folks who teach your ungrateful, spolied offspring, with eternal optimism? They are fulfilling a duty to country; and if they work in the suburbs (Columbine), they could be risking their lives as well. And then there are the protestors, willing to go to jail or be beaten to send the message that enough is enough. These are soldiers for peace. And whether you recognize it or not, they are protecting you and your future by trying to stop a for-profit industry based on global military domination that siphons money and blood from our working classes to enrich and empower a select few. Most of us protest without pay, trying to keep our government from shipping your ass off to some jungle or desert without a damn good reason, you ungrateful grunts.

You're welcome, yourself.

Uh, I agree, Hummers suck. The author in that last link sed if he saw a Hummer burning, "in my heart I'll be dancing in the street" Well, he didn't have to wait long! Fat Lazy Americans indeed. That's the America I love to hate! Now excuse me while I do a little dance myself. What miracle is next; a Burning Bush?

About scary Muslims; I'll relate that I watched the Paul Ankerberg show one morning and after I got over my usual shock, you know, the fake hair and over-earnest posturing and all, and listened to the content, well I found a few grains of truth. His show was pushing his current hot product, books and tapes and DVDs proving that Islam is a bunch of warmongering bullshit and that Christianity is superior. And how could you not trust a guy like Paul? Just look at him. Anyway, he brought out two brothers, former Muslims, who went on and on about the book Paul called the "Core Ann", and the God Paul called "Ala" (as in, pie ala mode), and such. Paul's little Jesus-fest of repenting former Muslims was mostly fearmongering, drawing on the war language of the Qur'an to paint Muslims as a violent people bent on world domination. That in itself is misleading. Why does Islam have so much more to say about war? Here's the long and short of that: Christianity, coming into being at the fringe of a powerful empire, never sought to build a nation, but merely the right to exist. Islam, arising in a chaos of tribal warfare, sought from the outset to unite groups, nation-build, and then resist efforts by competing tribes to crush it.

But Leonel, I hear my leftie allies crowing, the Bible also has examples of war and killing. To rationalize these bloody passages of the Bible, the Brothers Kufr hit a point that rang true:

1. Because the voice of the Qur'an is the voice of God, rather than the third-person second or thirdhand reports compiled in the Bible, Muslims often do not make distinction between messages directed toward contemporaries of Mohammed, and historical passages, and guidance given for all people in all times. The Taliban was a prime example, exacting Scriptural punishments. Christians have their counterparts- Seventh Day Adventists, the Amish, all sorts of freaks who read a book and decided that some customs of a faraway people a thousand years ago, are to be replcated for eternity, to please God, or gain entry to heaven, as if God was obsessed with us and whether or not we eat frog or cover our hair. Muslims do indeed run around with some amount of worry about which side they sleep on (prophet-approved, doctor recommended, on the Right side, of course) and even with imported chunks of Miswak tree protruding from their teeth as thick as their fingers, due to some Hadith about clean teeth... any time folks take these books by the letter and not the spirit, they miss the point. Islam is at a crisis point in the sense that there has not been, to date, a serious push for reformation in the sense that Chirstianity and American Judaism have both seen (in both cases involving a secularization that drives the book-bangers to madness). To their credit, American Christians and Jews have stopped stoning people in the public square and chopping off body parts and such. Muslim scholars are capable of a historical perspective; the prime example being their apologist explanations for Allah's apparent sanctioning of the beating of women. There is a serious need for a modern rationality in Islam which recognizes the historical aspects of the Qur'an as literature and separates them from the spiritual truths of the book.

2. Given the estimated world population of Muslims at 1.2 billion, even if only .1 percent are on a holy war against America, that means an army of 1 million. The lesson which Paul and his holy-rollers failed to conclude from this sobering statistic, goes beyond 'fear the scary Muslim hordes'... let's get past the Crusades here. The point is that to 'win' the 'War on Terror', we don't need any more Operation Enduring Problem; what we need is to eliminate the cause of their hatred- i.e. our fickle and oft imperialist foreign policy, starting with Palestine and then moving to oil. I just heard a long PR spot on the radio from the Saudi government, about how they have killed more terrorists than anybody and how terrible 9/11 was and how they are our ally and friend. Whatever. I have met some very nice Saudis, but it's hypocrisy to Free Iraq and invite the Saud Prince to the ranch...Free Iraq and ignore Mugabe (though it is satisfying to hear him say, ''Where is black man's land in Europe?'') Seriously. We CAN'T eliminate the terrorists, short of genocide of a fifth of the world population. Israel has been trying the military solution to terror for ages, and no matter how many helicopters we sell them, their citizens still can't go the mall without fear of getting bombed. And isn't that what we all want? To just go to the fucking mall without being bombed? The man who doesn't negotiate with terrorists is a fool. They are an enemy that does not fear death; not like a Marine not fearing death, but insane actually wanting and planning on death. No gun will protect you from that. Hear the cries of 9/11; you will also hear the voices of invisible, dead Muslims echoing across continents and time. And if you refuse to listen this time, you can count on hearing those voices again somewhere else. War on Terror. Makes as much sense as a War on Fat-Ass-Americans. You can discourage them, you can punish them and starve them, you can even try to kil them all. But you kill one, two more pop up. In the end, you realize it's a lot less painful to just feed them.

Hey, good news, the Dept. of Fatherland Security has decided to eliminate their program of registering all men of middle-Eastern origin! Now, some of you right-wingers and Jesus-lovers are out there saying, that's not good news, how will we track these America-hating bastards? Well, don't worry, the program was not ended out of any sensitivity to the American Muslim community. No, Muslims are still as feared as you like them to be. It's just that the program was an ineffective waste of resources. Something the scary Muslim community, along with immigrant rights groups, was telling them all along.