Couldn't Sleep Again - Can't Trust the Watch

Everyone who visits here and reads, everyone who knows me well, friend and foe alike, knows that I not only said months before it happened that Operation Iraqi Freedom would prove to be a catastrophic blunder. They also know that I said with detailed accuracy what would happen. In fact, when our Commander-in-Chief strutted and preened like the adolescent schoolboy he is under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, I said “Yeah, you REMF S.O.B. you’ve got your tit in the wringer now; too bad it won’t be you that pays the big price for error in combat.”

I was damned near – and as far as I know totally - alone in that. “Expert” and “analyst” after “expert” and “analyst” did the Talking Head routine on television, all supporting our REMF in Chief. Not one apparently knew what was about to happen. That’s with the one possible exception of U.S. Army Special Forces Major Bob Bevelacqua, who did say that our Army Special Forces “were a good fit” in Afghanistan, seemingly expecting the guerrilla warfare that would occur there – perhaps result after invasion. He didn’t predict, however, Taliban resurgence and he didn’t predict what is happening and has been happening in Iraq.

Now, before continuing, let me say two things up front. I’m not particularly proud of about having been right. Anyone with even a modicum of training in military tactics knew damned well what was going to happen.

Secondly, one of the guys I’ll be talking about here, the guy with the Heritage Foundation, apparently served his country honorably and well for twenty-five years. I respect that, having done twenty-three myself. That I say “apparently” is due the fact – also known by everyone who visits here and read, and all my friends – that nothing about this benighted country is as uncertain as its records. When, for instance, I applied for Social Security “benefits” some little while ago, the Department of Defense had to be dragged kicking and screaming (as it were) to admit that I so much as served in our military.

“For purposes of Social Security and Veterans Benefits,” they would “concede” that I “had service (well f-u-u-u-u-ck you, too!).

One of the guys of whom I will speak is offended because I referred to him as a “so-called analyst.” Well, to paraphrase Steve Martin, “Exc-u-u-u-u-se me!” Where the hell were all of you "experts" and "authorities" when Bush was lying through his teeth about his reasons for going into Iraq? While several of the arms inspectors came back from Iraq to say there were no WMDs there, not one of FoxNews or the rests' “analysts” agreed. Not one.

Oh, one more of those “before I starts.” Sherry says – as though it were some kind of monster faux pas – that I always sound “bitter and angry.” Yeah, baby, you’re damned right I am. And only when the scum-sucking populace of this country finally gets fed up enough with the crowd in power here to tie a can to their tails and run them out of town, or throw their sorry asses in the Potomac, will our young men and women stop being wasted on this new Vietnam. Yes ma’am, I’m mad. In fact, I’m so damned mad I’m writing this at two in the morning, unable to sleep.

Whatever. And now another of these talking heads, a guy who prefers to remain “anonymous” – that's the way he signed his comment on my last “blog” – protests that he IS an analyst. Okay, I concede. A guy who drives a truck – including those who roar past me at ninety miles an hour, flatten signs and light poles by running over them at corners in cities, and the rest - is a truck driver. You do “analyze,” so you’re an analyst. Mea Culpa. Mea f------ culpa. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, I’m searching the record for any record that you said anything in any of your appearances concerning what has happened and is happening in Iraq. That you’re not alone in what I find – there is general after general and colonel after colonel on the list here – doesn’t expiate much. Anybody who didn’t expect this doesn’t know diddly about the history of Iraq and the Arab, the history and character of Islam, the Arab mind; or, even, how to find Baghdad – on a map or otherwise.

There’s more. Where the hell were all you experts on the military when the DOD was poking guys who return from Iraq in every imaginable state of disrepair into Building Eighteen at Walter Reed? Where have you been for the last thirty years? WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU ALL THE WHILE TWENTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS ALL BUT BEGGING CONGRESSMEN AND SENATORS, NEWSPAPER, TELEVISION NETWORK, COURTS AND THE REST – EVEN SOLDIER OF FORTUNE MAGAZINE - TO LOOK INTO THE VETERANS ADMINISTRATION? Huh? Huh? Huh?

"Maggots on their bed sores." A decoration to go with their Purple Hearts - huh?

"Analyze," your ass.* The people who come on FoxNews and the rest analyze nothing. They act in a play, read a prepared, Operation Mockingbird script - the better to make suckers of the people of my country, and they’ve really pissed me off. I’ll tell you all one thing that one of you has gotten right. Colonel David Hunt, sometime after the World Trade Center (where were all you “analysts” on that one? – I wrote about it almost twenty years before it happened; odd, isn’t it, that I’M not an “analyst?”), answered a “why” question by saying, “because nobody gets fired.”

Well now. How about that? See, I come from a time before humanist, feminist, and lunatic liberal metrosexuality, a time when guys who fucked up as badly as George W. and the White House Bush League got fired. Not analyzed. So did commanders who led their troops into ambushes after their point man radioed back warning – like Iraq. Bodyguards who went to sleep on duty like our FBI, CIA, and Military Intelligence did before 9-11 got canned. Watchdogs who didn’t bark went to the dog pound.

Limp dicks didn’t go to bed with the same woman twice.

Pissed off? “Angry and bitter?” DAMNED RIGHT. Damned near a trillion dollars a year (yeah, I know what you “analysts” say – I know better because I include all the numbers) on military spending, and we can’t beat guys armed with RPGs, AK’s, and “I.E.D.s.” I haven’t forgotten Vietnam, in that regard (or otherwise), either. Two hundred billion a year on FBI, police, and law enforcement generally, and we get 9-11. Posturing and pontificating pricks like you guys all over the place, and we get Iraq and Afghanistan – to say nothing of Vietnam. Billions on FEMA and we get New Orleans after Katrina.

And we get the VA mess. I haven’t had tears in my eyes in a long, long time (my website probably explains that, too), but last night, watching the guys on the Paula Zahn show (I think – I was so damned mad, I literally couldn’t see straight) and knowing damned well from personal experience how they’re being treated, I damned near “lost it.”

In the vernacular of the "Steve Canyon" "grunt," “Downtowners, if you fuckers want to analyze, analyze THIS” (and if any of you really were in the military - the real one - you know the gesture I'm making).


* There perhaps couldn't be a better example of the conniving dissimulation of the media and the "analysts" I speak of here than what is told the public about "Defense Spending." Often, I do a little "CIA Reading" (look it up) of magazines like Aviation Week, wherein insouciant members of the military industrial complex make clear their confidence that nothing will ever stand in their way to the trough provided them by the Pentagon and filled constantly by the taxpayer.

Whereas television "analysts" routinely - and frequently, I might add pointedly - repeat the fiction that defense spending is around four percent of the nation's GDP - "Gross Domestic Product" - the truth is that it is much more, at least ten percent more. One of the guys I'm talking about here - the Heritage guy, I think - is among these "experts."

The last of these "cooked books" figures I've seen had it that the Pentagon's budget - and that included Homeland Security - was $434 billion. That "expert" "analyst" didn't mention veterans' benefits (those being stolen or otherwise), military retirement, foreign military sales, military space programs, or interest on the national debt attributable to military spending.

Oops! How could we leave that out? It's at least half of our interest on the debt. Then there's the Social Security SCAM. Hidden in the nearly $500 billion budget for Social Security expenditures are something like $100 billion actually going to the military industrial complex. More, and in order to further camouflage the debt having to do with military expenditures, Social Security - still paying its own way out of payroll deductions, by the way - is routinely and regularly raided. That's hundred of billions of dollars, "borrowed" in order to obviate the need to issue bonds and perform other feats of federal "creative finance."

The fiscal prestidigitation, by the way, also serves to shift the tax burden to the working class and poor, not the rich who support the military industrial corporations. SURPRISE!

Think we're finished? Yeah, sure. Hidden away by "creative finance" and Pentagon funding books-cooking are things like the School of the Americas, budget something like (secrecy like that having to do with all that "national security" we seem to have so damned little of these days is a mighty handy tool for any thief, huh?) $40 billion.

Finished? Nope - not yet. The small change from it all is things like six or seven billion to provide for all the secrecy, protection of what at last count was 15.6 million.

It goes on, but now I'm boring you. I haven't mentioned all the waste, the embezzlement and outright theft, you'll notice. Remember the $225 dollar screwdrivers, $13 dollar apiece screws, the $1,150 wrenches, $750 coffee pots, and the like? What do you think happened after Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley caught the MIC boys with their hands in the cookie jar? They just stopped? Sure.

You do eat hay, don't you? Well you ought to - you're a jackass.

Bet your life - you've already lost your ass (and your country) to them - they've hidden their "pork" somewhere in the non-military budget. That's how it's done.

My point here is why haven't all these "analysts" told you all of this? Why do guys like the Heritage wonk continue to recite nonsense like the "four percent of the GDP" figure? One guess, and George Orwell called it "Newspeak" in his 1948 (what a co-incidence - the year the CIA was chartered) novel, "1984." It's the language foisted upon the nation and its media by CIA Operation Mockingbird, birthed at about the same time (another co-incidence).

Put it with the coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan you can't be shown, smoke and mirrors screens like the Anna Nicole Smith Tactic, and the latest on the U.S. Attorney firings. And have some more hay.