Tings Bruk Down

In an utterly shocking, completely-unforeseeable development, the shambolic "government" that United States animated in Iraq, its rent-a-goon Army, and its paramiliary police force are washing away like sand before the incoming tide of angry Sunnis.

What the hell is there to say, really? Other than what I've said over and over again?

"...that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.

It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations."

One thing that the usual idiots and the reliable-liars-of-the-Right are saying that makes my jaw drop is that it's time to get our war back on to go shovel this water, again, like somehow it's going to work out any better than it did the last time.

To which I have no better reply than to quote the section of Zee Edgell's work Beka Lamb that pretty much sums up in 131 words what happens to those who have tried to hustle the Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates since the Fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258:

"I know. But nothin' lasts here, Beka. Tings bruk down."

Her Gran leaned the fork carefully against the frying pan, pushed the window over the back stairs and propped it open with a long pole. Then she said:

"I don't know why, Beka. But one time, when I was a young girl like you, a circus come to town. I can't remember where it was from and don't ask me what happened to it afta. The circus had a fluffy polar bear - a ting Belize people never see befo'. It died up at Barracks Green, Beka. The ice factory broke down the second day the circus was here."

Beka's Granny Ivy was crying. Her apron tail was over her face, and she said again and again,

"It died, Beka. It died."

Monster Raving Loony

I wish I'd said this, but Ed at Gin n' Tacos said it first, and better:

"Just the hint of any cuts to – or anything but continued growth of, for that matter – the Pentagon budget tells you everything you need to know about who runs that town. Think the NRA is a powerful lobby? There are dozens members of Congress who will tell Wayne LaPierre to his face to go fuck himself. None but a handful will even mention reduced defense spending…despite the fact that polling shows many Americans believing that we spend too much."

The post is a polemic, so he doesn't mention the handful of genuine Defense cutbacks under the first Bush and Clinton (I'm not counting the post-Vietnam RIF drawdown - that was inevitable after the end of that misadventure).

But the ironclad fact of the last half of my adult life is that in a world dominated by the United States' military power, dominated in a way not seen since the heyday of the British Empire and perhaps not even then in which the closest thing to a "peer foe" are a pack of raggedy-assed martyr-wannabes sitting in the dusty villages of the FATA, my country spends an unencompassable quantity of public monies on its weapons.

The fiscal reality is that as of 2012 the United States is an insurance company with a military.

Outside the Defense budget, Social Security and the medical insurance programs there is fuck-all left for anything else.

And while there is a completely rabid, drooling, tinfoil-hat-grade coterie of raving bugnuts loonies (you'd probably know them if I used their public name, the "Republican Party") that would kill those insurance programs deader than the passenger pigeon in a heartbeat, there is no such commitment from anyone anywhere to question the depth of the vast bucket of cash we throw at our military.

And there ARE questions that should be asked. Whenever tax money is spent on weapons and soldiers we as citizens are fools if we don't question how that's spent, for the simple reasons that there is no measure there.

You can see a road, a bridge, a dam built with public monies. You can see the children fed, and the sick people cared for by tax-funded programs.

Weapons? Soldiers? What you pay for there is a LOT harder to assess.

And the notion that "More $$$ = more safer" is, simply and plainly, bullshit.

You don't even have to look at the clearly ridiculous and excessive amount of lolly we've tossed at the so-called "War on Terror".

Just the ordinary and everyday operations of any military involves a massive fire-hose-effusion waste of cash.

For example, when I was in the RA every September we used to send a detail to the ranges to shoot up ammunition. Not use it for marksmanship training. Not for tactical purposes. Just to fire it up. Because every round we turned in meant one less round we got the next fiscal year. So we camped out and did goofy shit like try and cut down pine trees with 7.62mm rounds.

Or during my time in the Army Guard, every one of our units had anywhere between a handful and several dozen "ghost troopers"; people who were officially on the manning roster but were actually in jail, or working in another unit, or simply missing from drill every month. We had people who were unfit for duty, people on profiles for everything but breathing, people whose restraining orders prevented them from going within sight of the arms room, people who had been unable to pass the PT test for years.

But they were still Guardsmen, by God, because every one of them represented a delicious chunk of Federal cash paid to the State of Oregon in one of the fed's least publicized jobs programs. Fewer Guardsmen meant less money, and nobody wanted less money.

That has changed now, I understand, with the repeated and brutal deployment schedules. Instead of trying to fill already-understrength units the ORARNG has simple disbanded units. My old battery, C/2/218FA no longer exists, even as cadre. My old brigade, 41SIB, is now reduced to two maneuver battalions from the three it had in my time.

But, for all the reasons Ed details, nobody in Congress, not even my usually-reliably-sensible Senator Merkely, wants to derail the Defense gravy train.

Because more gravy means more safer.

And anyone who questions that isn't a Republican or a Democrat but a Monster Raving Loony.

BASE Jump

I'm trying to give a shit about the "fiscal cliff" but the best I can come up with is a sort of vague irritation that my fellow lefties in D.C. are even considering "compromising" with the GOP on anything about this.

Because "compromise" for the wingtards (which is, functionally, what the modern GOP has become; a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right) means "What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger.

I am pondering a New Year's Message post about the State of the Nation as I see it, but I wanted to take a moment at this point and just marvel that here we are, still mired in the Great Recession, and the Usual Idiots are fulminating and bloviating about deficits and all butt-hurt about raising taxes on the Uberrich.

Yeah, THOSE fuckers;

"That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

He recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere. A woman to Kay’s right wrinkled her nose: How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”

The unchanged and unchanging reality is that while there are probably several truly wealthy Americans who are deeply committed to this nation and its democracy that the vast majority have no structural reason to be so.

The Rich have always been able to afford their own Nation.

The rest of us need some semblance of a functional polity to have a decent, non-Hobbsean existence. We need police and firefighters and we need to know that they are relatively honest and devoted to our community as a whole and not to its oligarchs. We need a relatively square deal from the legal system and its arbiters; we need to believe that when we come before a judge that what will weigh will be the matters of our case and not our origins or the contents of our purse (although this is already well in doubt - you needn't look hard at the U.S. judicial system to recognize that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor).

We need a government that cares whether we eat clean food, drink clean water, and breathe clean air because we have neither the breadth of information nor the depth of wealth to fight back those who would befoul all three.

For the wealthy all this is a frippery. They don't need this "government"; they can purchase access to safety, to health, to cleanliness. They are free to roam the wide Earth in search of places to make their monies; we are, most of us, tied to where we live now. If that place goes to hell we are trapped in Hell; our plutocratic Lords can flit away as easily as a camel may leap through the eye of a needle.

So I gaze with scorn and loathing upon the gyrations of the Powers that Be along the Potomac now so fretfully aquiver over the notion that our domestic satrapy might be forced to wring another penny or three from their bulging moneybags.

Whilst in the streets the jobless stand in endless lines and below the overhangs and beneath the bridges the women and children stare with empty eyes at the pitiless rain that washes their future away before it.

Go over the "cliff", then, goddamn it.

Let us leap out into the unknown before we "compromise" so much as one more wretched cent to the grasping Midases we have already so wrenchingly enriched.