With all of the horrors inflicted upon us-as so well documented here at DD and elsewhere-it’s good to take a mind-break and go somewhere else.

This is a short story I wrote about 12 years ago. It was published in Bricolage, which has about 500 readers, in 2002. It used to be online but has since been taken down (along with everything else from 2001 and thereafter.)

I’ve been thinking about posting this here for quite a while and have finally decided to do so.

I recommend that you have a dictionary at hand or have another browser window opened to an online dictionary. (My brother laughed when I made this same recommendation to him, but later admitted that a “few” of the words were unfamiliar to him.)

I wrote the last sentence of this story first. Originally it had almost 500 words, but for the purposes of the story I edited it down to a mere 365 words. (Bonus points for anyone who can guess why it was originally just under 500 words.)

I hope y’all enjoy reading The Golden Peach as much as I enjoyed writing it.

In 1897, long before my father left the family estate near Cashmere, Washington, and moved us all to Seattle, his father uprooted a wife and four children from the soils of Georgia and transplanted them to the bountiful Pacific Northwest, where prosperity and health smiled upon Grandpa and granted him a long and happy life, a life truly to be envied, a life filled with activity and alertness right up until he passed into stardust, thirty years ago, at the ripe old age of one hundred and four.

In my youth, within the cool confines of a handsome library filled, shelf upon shelf, with thick volumes much beloved, Grandpa frequently spoke to me, in a manner peculiarly his own, about the abstract mental processes which, in accord with intrinsic inner impulses, he variously characterized either as the source of his greatest joy or as the bane of his existence. The duality of conscious and subconscious factors defining not only the content but also the form of his unique verbal style, all inherently and inextricably interwoven in the formation of an inexplicable mental landscape, contrarily resulted in a mode of expression representative of the essential unity, the oneness, which constituted Grandpa’s being-there; for him, all such dualisms (mind/body, subject/object, e.g.) were subsumed beneath a superstructure of logic which could not countenance the actuality of such antithetical contradictions as being anything more substantial than convenient (if confusing) constructions, useful only to the uninitiated (i.e. neophytes in the metaphysical arts).

Grandpa sometimes speculated that the distinctive qualities of his cognitive faculties resulted from neurological damage, an aberration caused by a severe concussion incurred at the age of two, leaving him not incapacitated, but hyper-aware of the slightest internal or external vibrations. His heightened sensitivity to emotional landscapes could also be attributed to the loss of his father at that same early age and to his precocious awareness of the devastation wrought upon his mother by the twin blows of widowhood and the utter destruction of her home, her life, and her city in the depredations of Sherman’s assault upon Atlanta.

A concrete example from Grandpa’s own life should suffice to explicate the intricate nature of both his intellectual apparatus and his highly expressive loquaciousness.

As Grandpa was so fond of recounting the story of how the ultimate decision to ask for the hand of the woman who would become my grandmother had come over him, with the passage of time and repetition it eventually assumed an epic quality marked by a sublime subtlety and an uncanny awareness of the intuitions and motivations which had ineluctably catapulted him into a life of surprisingly gratifying connubial bliss.

Though Grandpa was fully cognizant of the complex ramifications and momentous repercussions this one most consequential decision would have upon the remainder of his life, before he sank his teeth into the fresh plump tree-ripened peach, triggering a flood of oneiric divagations not unlike Marcel’s madeleine-induced hallucination, other considerations, closer to the core of dearly held conceptions of both identity and self-respect and also more related to a well-developed definition of personal integrity, a veritable code of honor, predominated. Born into an aristocratic family of the Old South, Grandpa dwelt in an old-fashioned world where such notions were by no means unusual; numerous protracted late-night philosophical discussions with divers fellow students at The University of Georgia had revolved around this very issue; each young gentleman tried to outdo the others in demonstrating an unswerving devotion to upholding the revered regional traditions for which their fathers and forebears had willingly perished.

At the crux of the matter for Grandpa lay a tragedy and an oath, the latter perhaps given in an excess of youthful grief though none the less inviolable for that. Prior to proposing marriage to Henrietta, he had first to resolve in his heart this perplexing promise made two years earlier to another exceptional young woman, his betrothed, as she lay on her deathbed, caught in the final gasping throes of tuberculosis. “I will never marry,” he had solemnly pledged, filled with an excruciating emotion, certain that no woman could ever supplant the one who suffered so terribly before his eyes, certain also that even to consider such an eventuality would constitute an ignoble betrayal of the one who had come to represent the apotheosis of love and devotion. The tears streaming down his face as he watched the carriage roll from town, carrying away the lifeless remains of his beloved Sarah, seared into his memory a powerfully etched visual montage, which was augmented by an unusual auditory phenomenon that culminated in the formation of a firmly embedded array of neural synapses and permanently fixed in his brain a poignant disquieting reminder of all that he had lost.

To simply repudiate his given word was unthinkable, contrary to his nature, yet the return of Henrietta to Fort Valley Georgia after a three year stay in Paris presented Grandpa with a seemingly insoluble problem. Hattie (as she was affectionately known within the family circle), a gawky eighteen year old girl at the time of her departure for Europe, returned a much transformed young lady, one who displayed a natural grace and a sophisticated charm that captivated every young man fortunate enough to witness even such an ordinary thing as a stroll through town. Due to close familial connections and an enduring history of childhood camaraderie, Grandpa was thrown into a situation offering more intimate contact with Hattie than that afforded to the casual observer. Smitten as much by her wit, intelligence, and forthright character as by her physical beauty, Grandpa could neither fail to acknowledge to himself his precarious position on the horns of a dilemma which admitted no simple solution, nor could he evade the issue by resorting to benign neglect or, worse yet, avoid the decision altogether by fleeing town, either of which option would expose him as an unworthy coward. Appropriate respect and consideration for Hattie’s feelings had become necessary; she herself had not remained indifferent towards Grandpa, a fact made eminently clear by a certain smile bestowed upon him one afternoon in the park, a special smile directed at him alone, a smile that bespoke a desire and revealed an emotion which she undoubtedly had been concealing (perhaps even from herself) and which burst forth unbidden, unchecked by the usual restraints of feminine caution or prudent decorum.

Such were the circumstances confronting Grandpa that morning in 1888 when he plucked the sweet peach and sat leaning against the trunk of the tree, determined to reach a decision as to whether or not he would (or could) go down on bended knee before this gorgeous and desirable woman.

Prunus persica is an ordinary fruit not normally associated with the fate of a family; for us however, the common peach is paramount, and has been so since 1866, just after the Civil War, when Grandpa’s mother bought an orchard in Peach County, Georgia. Fleeing the fires that consumed Atlanta in ’64, leading five fatherless children while carrying the sixth, a shell-shocked two year old (Grandpa), and also secretly transporting fourteen pounds of solid gold, she’d sought refuge with an old aunt who resided in Fort Valley, the county seat. Two years later, using the final remnants of the fortune which initially had been acquired by her father during the Dahlonega gold rush of 1828 in northern Georgia, the southernmost reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, she invested in peaches, and thereby bequeathed to her descendants sustenance and a livelihood that persists to this day, despite Grandpa’s short-lived rebellion in 1897. That was when he, under the influence of family lore and tradition, had come to Seattle on his way to the Klondike to try his luck just as his maternal grandfather had done so successfully in the first American gold rush; but the power of the peach unexpectedly intervened and sidetracked him from these impetuous intentions; unbeknownst to him, newly developed irrigation in the lands east of the Cascade Mountains in the years just preceding his arrival in the Pacific Northwest had brought on a boom in orchards and, succumbing to the gentle persuasions of Grandma, he abandoned his foolhardy dreams of finding instant wealth in the Yukon and instead invested his grubstake in the more familiar yellowy-orange fruit she called “sweet gold”.

Thus, back in 1888, with a golden peach in his hand, Grandpa leaned back beneath the radiant sun against that tree in his mother’s orchard, and sat, torn and tormented by conflicting self-imposed demands, resolutely contemplating his life, his oath, his future, and his desire to bring to an end this ceaseless quibbling debate between will I and nill I.

Lost in ambivalent reverie, he hesitated; and when he at last bit into the fruit, he tasted not the sweet refulgence of the flowing juiciness but rather the bitter seed of long forgotten memories, memories buried like the long forgotten dead, those men who, unrepentant as Adam, had also tasted of the fruit before their final consignment to the burial grounds now covered with wild tangled weeds and dotted with broken obliterated headstones hidden in these obscure thickets guarded by prickly dewberry; memories that induced dreamy disjointed fragments, figments woven by Clotho into fantastic raiments, phantasmagoric yet elemental images forming a transubstantial exploration of fundamental mundaneness betokening ontological imponderables; memories arising out of the protean protoplasmic substrate perpetually relegated to tenebral unawareness; memories antithetically suffused with redolent wisteria, contrarily tinged by the emotive anodyne of mulberry pie and sassafras tea, sweetly imbued with the wonderment of a child enraptured by vernal eclosions, and exquisitely permeated by the luxuriant languor of contemplative sojourns in the realms of Beauty and Art; memories triggered by a fleeting mental glimpse of the scene that fateful afternoon as the carriage rolled away, leaving the town square and disappearing from view, leaving Fort Valley never to return, carrying his beloved Sarah and leaving behind a cloud of bone-dry dust hanging in the lambent light of early afternoon, and triggering the recussive reverberation of the town clock in the tower, tolling repeatedly, tolling over and over though the hands on the clock showed one, tolling concussively throughout the town, tolling echoless over the surrounding fields and orchards, sweeping up the South and tolling all over America, across the oceans and around the world; memories that roiled over the banks, rolling rivers of words, inchoate in the symbology of pre-verbal utterance, suggesting, not unequivocally asseverating, an atavistic relatedness to the primordial being-there which spawned all consciousness until, with the swiftness and finality of a dropped guillotine, the flood of memories, satiated by the inner flux of timeless transport, ceased to whelm and overwhelm and he saw the bitten fruit in his hand, the fluid motionless drips covering his immobile fingers, so that, in an epiphany of self-revelation, he thought: I will, I will.

Right-wing reactionaries thought manna had fallen from heaven along with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s denunciation of the crimes of America. That’s because Rev. Wright is Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama’s personal preacher. But while the demagogues falsely label Wright’s sermons as racist and anti-white, his remarks express truths that resonate with the experience of black Americans and cannot be forever hidden.

Anyone can go and watch excerpts from Rev. Wright’s sermons, edited for maximum incendiarism by arch-conservative, Fox Network Hyas muckamuck, Bill O’Reilly. Yet, all the editing tricks in the world cannot paint Wright’s sermons racist. But then that’s the cry raised when African-Americans say anything on the mark about the experience of racism in America, an experience that has made them sensitive to the crimes and injustices of this country perpetrated abroad, as well.

As if four hundred years of slavery, and one hundred years of Jim Crow state segregationism were not enough to prove the racist legacy of this country, African Americans are still subject to discrimination across the entire society, with inferior schools, inferior health care, wage discrepancies, housing discrimination, racist assaults, unfair drug laws and a still racially insensitive judicial system. CalexanderJ over at Daily Kos hit the mark with this quote from the comedian Chris Rock:

I think Chris Rock said it best when he said, “to blacks, America is like an uncle who paid your way through college, but molested you.” This quip reflects our (African American’s) recognition of the vast benefits living in America has provided us which we are truly grateful for, but it also acknowledges that we haven’t forgotten, the travesties that America inflicted on our race.

Travesties like slavery, lynching, and segregation, laws against miscegenation, Nazi-like experimentation (Tuskegee) mandatory sterilization laws. And most of this, slavery aside, within the lifetimes of many Americans. It was only thirty or more years ago that the government’s FBI targeted Black leaders with its COINTELPRO program, which included blackmail, the use of agents provocateur, and assassination.

Let’s look at what Wright actually said

He said the U.S. is “a country and a culture controlled by rich white people.” He dissed liberal saint Bill Clinton, whose wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is running near neck and neck with Obama for the nomination. “Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky.” Suddenly, Jeremiah Wright is the only man in America that can’t make a Monica Lewinsky joke.

But Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” was no joke to African Americans. Clinton lined up with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” Republicans to pass a draconian welfare “reform” bill, which severely limited aid payments to poor families and many single mothers, who were disproportionately African-American. Millions were thrown off the welfare rolls, while the poverty rate continued to rise. Children were forced to fend for themselves as latch-key kids or join up with gangs, as single mothers worked part-time or low-paying jobs that barely made the bills, much less have the hundreds of dollars left over each month for decent childcare.

Reverend Wright denounced the government trafficking in drugs to support their right-wing insurgencies abroad, while building bigger prisons and passing onerous sentencing and drug laws at home, whose impact fell hardest upon black Americans.

Wright excoriated the U.S. government for its lies making false connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida (something the Pentagon owned up to, very reluctantly only last week), its lies about Iraqi WMD, and even more lies tying 9/11 to a rationale for the aggressive invasion of Iraq. Nor did Wright stop there in challenging the U.S. government for its history of support to the former apartheid of South Africa, and to the Israeli apartheid-like treatment of the Palestinians.

And nothing he said was wrong… unless it is his assertion, supported by many in the black community, that AIDS was some kind of plot by the government against black people. But after everything else, can you blame them? And, by the way, it’s not like the United States and other countries haven’t thought about aiming biological warfare against specific races and nationalities. New genetic engineering techniques and DNA mapping has brought the possibility of making “ethnic” weapons from fantasy to dangerous near-future threat. (See the discussion of this by the well-respected watchdog group, the Sunshine Project.)

But if Wright was off on AIDS, he nailed this country on its shameful indifference to its history of mass murder. “We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Wright thundered, killing far more than the thousands who died on 9/11, “and we never batted an eye.” If the preacher really wanted to nail the point home, he could have mentioned the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children killed by the U.S. in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Or, for an earlier generation, there were the one million Vietnamese killed by the U.S. in the 1960s-1970s.

Finally, perhaps, it was Wright’s Malcolm X-like pronouncement that drove the racists into a frenzy. After John Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm famously intoned that America’s chickens had come home to roost. Knowing what we do now about CIA assassinations and assassination attempts during the Kennedy years against Castro, Lumumba, Diem, and others, Malcolm X’s comment seems more prescient than any of the establishment pundits of his time.

Rev. Wright reminded his African-American congregation that 9/11 happened, in part, because the “stuff we did overseas is brought back into our backyards.” In fact, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism was fueled by U.S. and Western backing of corrupt and torturing governments, compliant with the needs of American business and foreign policy. Even further, Islamic obscurantists were funded by the CIA to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and used as soldiers in the U.S. battle against the Soviet Union in the Cold proxy war that was Afghanistan.

Racism and the American Presidency

Barack Obama is a mainstream Democratic Party politician. But he wants to be President of the United States. He may be what he says he is, an idealistic man. He may be nothing but another phony false hope for the poor and downtrodden, and especially for African-Americans. Neither of those possibilities matter at the moment, because he is black. (His mixed parentage also is irrelevant in the light of American politics.)

America is a deeply racist country. It was founded on slavery. It kept millions in legal second-class status for over a hundred years. Outside of sports heroes, black children have few role models in the mass media. Their job prospects and their social mobility is terrible restricted compared to other groups in America. Blacks are vilified as having low IQ, being naturally criminal, or naturally ADD. They fill U.S. prisons in vastly disproportionate numbers.

There are many who hope that an Obama election can help change all that, and heal past wounds. The reality that is white racism in the United States is just beginning to raise its terrifying face in this election, having hunted around the borders of Clinton-Obama electioneering. The Wright story may or not be a calculated plant, but I suspect it’s worse than that. The vilification of Wright by a vast majority of the media — even Obama has (sadly) condemned Wright’s statements — is an offshoot of the racist culture of this country, fertilized by decades of backpedalling by the civil rights movement.

I’ll say this, Obama is a brave man, as he is facing a behemoth in American racism. And he is an intelligent man, but the pressures he is and will be facing are immense. I wish him well, and I hope he does not cave in and throw his truth-telling friend and pastor under the wheels of a vindictive, blinded monster fearful of losing its phony race privilege. Because in America, it really is a small group of mainly white people that control this country. And they will not give up their power gently. They are readying this country for an outbreak of terrible racist propaganda.

Now we’ll learn how much “progress” this country has really made in the last forty years, since the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the end of black hopes (for that time) in the smoldering ruins of the nation’s ghettos.

Also posted at Invictus

Nebraska has 3 representatives: All Republican

Filing deadline was March 3, primary is May 13

Nevada has 3 representatives: 2 Republican, 1 Democrat

Filing deadline is May 16, primary is Aug 12

New Hampshire has 2 representatives: Both Democrats

Filing deadline is June 13, primary is Sept 9

District: NE-01

Location Eastern NE, except for Omaha.  Borders MO and IA

Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R)

First elected  2004

2006 margin 58-42

2004 margin 54-43

Bush margin 2004 63-36

Notes on opponents In 2004, this was an open seat and Fortenberry beat Matt Connealy, while raising $1.2 million to Connealy’s $1 million.  In 2006, Maxine Moul and Fortenberry each raised about $1 million

Current opponents Max Yashirin (site in development)

Demographics 51st fewest Blacks (1.4%)

Assessment Long shot

District: NE-02

Location Omaha and suburbs

Representative  Lee Terry (R)

First elected  1998

2006 margin 55-45

2004 margin 61-36

Bush margin 2004 60-38

Notes on opponents In 2004, Nancy Thompson raised $900K to Terry’s $1.4 million.  In 2006, Jim Esch raised $400K to Terry’s $1 million

Current opponents Jim Esch ,

Richard Carter (who blogs at Daily Kos: list of Richard Carter diaries

Demographics Not unusual on what I track

Assessment One can’t say we’re the favorites, here, but I think we have some chance

District: NE-03

Location The western 3/4 of the state, bordering SD, WY, CO and KS

Representative Adrian Smith (R)

First elected  2006

2006 margin 55-45

2004 margin NA

Bush margin 2004 75-24

Notes on opponents In 2006, Scott Kleeb made this a close race, raising $1 million to Smith’s $1.2 million

Current opponents Jay Stoddard and Paul Spatz

Demographics 33rd most rural (53.9%), tied for fewest Blacks (0.3%), 6th most Republican

Assessment Long shot.  Kleeb is running for Senate, which is probably an easier race to win

District: NV-01

Location Las Vegas

Representative Shelley Berkley (D)

First elected  1998

2006 margin 65-31

2004 margin 66-31

Bush margin 2004 41-57

Notes on opponents Neither raised money

Current opponents None declared

Demographics 55th most Latinos (28.2%)

Assessment Safe

District: NV-02

Location Almost the whole state, except for Las Vegas and suburbs, bordering CA, OR, ID, UT, and AZ

Representative Dean Heller (R)

First elected  2006

2006 margin 50-45

2004 margin NA

Bush margin 2004 57-41

Notes on opponents In 2006, this was an open seat. Heller and his opponent, Jill Derby, each raised about $1.6 million

Current opponents Jill Derby is running again

Demographics 21st most veterans (17.1%),

Assessment Somewhat vulnerable. superribbie ranks this the 38th most vulnerable Republican seat.  This may depend on how fed up the military gets with the Republicans and Iraq

District: NV-03

Location A Y shaped district of Las Vegas suburbs

Representative Jon Porter (R)

First elected  2002

2006 margin 48-47

2004 margin 54-40

Bush margin 2004 50-49

Notes on opponents In 2006, Tessa Hafen raised $1.5 million to Porter’s $3 million.  In 2004, Tom Gallagher and Porter each raised around $2.5 million

Current opponents Andrew Martin and Barry Michaels and Robert Daskas

Demographics Not unusual on what I track

Assessment Vulnerable.  superrribie (link above) ranks this the 21st most vulnerable Republican seat

District: NH-01

Location The eastern part of NH, bordering ME

Representative Carol Shea-Porter (D)

First elected  2006

2006 margin 51-49

2004 margin NA

Bush margin 2004 51-48

Notes on opponents In 2006, Shea-Porter did something very unusual: She ousted an incumbent while spending much less than the incumbent ($300K to $1 million).  A people-powered progressive, she has turned down opportunities from the DCCC.

Current opponents Jeb Bradley wants a rematch. John Stephen doesn’t want him to have one.

Demographics 55th fewest in poverty (6.7%), 14th most Whites (95.1%), 24th fewest Blacks (0.7%)

Assessment  Although superribbie ranks this the 10th most vulnerable Democratic seat, I think this is one where models fail.

District: NH-02

Location The western part of NH, bordering Canada, VT, and MA

Representative Paul Hodes(D)

First elected  2006

2006 margin 53-46

2004 margin NA

Bush margin 2004 47-52

Notes on opponents In 2006, Hodes ousted Charles Bass, raising $1.6 million to Bass’ $1.2 million.

Current opponents Jim Steiner.

Demographics 57th most rural (48.3%), 50th fewest in poverty (6.4%), 14th most Whites (95.1%), 18th fewest Blacks (0.6%).

Assessment  Somewhat vulnerable, superribbie ranks this the 24th most vulnerable Democratic seat

(Just a reminder! – promoted by buhdydharma )

(Cross-posted at EENR blog and Daily Kos.)

We’ve started something new on this blog.  We’re calling it Feedback.  It’s a newsletter, but we aren’t doing it the traditional way.  You can see the evolution of this project here.

Here’s the short explanation which will be found in every issue we publish:

(what is this?) The internet, primarily through blogs, has brought about a communications revolution. Yet the traditional media has maintained their position as information gatekeepers, and they won’t let you hear us.

We can’t bring about change when the media ignores us. We can’t rely on politicians to fix things for us. So we’re through playing nice. We’re done begging for attention. We’re bypassing the media and coming direct to you.

We can solve our problems if we work together. We can make things better when all of us try. All we’re asking for is your help. So we can generate a little Feedback.

While this will normally be a weekly publication, due to our various schedules, we realized we had to delay our official launch for a couple weeks.  Despite that, we were determined to have something ready for this week, and somehow, we’ve managed just that.

Now we need your help.

We’re publishing a special 2 page issue focusing on war and specifically the war in Iraq.  But in order to get this out to people, we need you to print it and distribute it.  With your help, we can get this out in every city across the nation.

For those who don’t want to follow the link above, I’ll sumarize what specifically we’d like you to do.  Send an email to feedback.news.report{at}gmail.com¹ with “subscribe” in the subject line.²  Late tonight, we’ll start sending out the the pdf file.  (Warning: it will be approximately 1.2MB.)  Print it and make as many copies as you like.  Pass them out wherever you can.  Be subtle or overt.  It’s up to you.  You know your area best.

In those two pages, we have reprinted with permission diaries by Turkana, Meteor Blades, and buhdydharma, and a short poem on war by Robyn (aka rserven).  While it’s likely that you have already read these works, we can be certain that there are millions of people who have not.  We’re asking you to get these authors’ words out to as many people as possible.

And starting next week, we’ll begin asking for more help as we start searching for stories for our official launch issue.  Stay tuned to find out what more you can do to inform people and help inspire them to act.

We can solve our problems if we work together. We can make things better when all of us try. All we’re asking for is your help. So we can generate a little Feedback.

________

Update:  And it’s official!  The special issue is sent.  If you signed up and haven’t received an email, my apologies and please try resending your subscription request.  I made sure to send out to everyone from whom we received a request.

________

¹ I apologize for the long email address.  I tried to find a shorter one to use, but they were already taken.

² You can unsubscribe at any time by sending an email to the same address with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

“It’s good to be back in Iraq,” Cheney said…

Just a quick recap of the history of the 21st Century, for any of you who may have made the incredibly wise decision to spend this century under a rock.

An American President gets a blowjob, $40 million is spent to investigate said blowjob, said President impeached.

Americans, shocked!, jerk their knees at this sexual horror and vote for an incompetent, corrupt, lying idiot in great enough numbers to allow the Republican dirty tricks machine and old boy network to steal the election. Whom, it also turns out….shockingly enough given the Republicans record on this sort of thing…is a War Monger and ultimately, a War Criminal.

A bunch of Saudis based in Afghanistan kill 3000 Americans, AND destroy valuable private property! Americans, under a War Mongering Republican President and a batshit insane paranoiac, Machiavellian, Vice President who had obviously closely studied the history of Fascism and taken it to heart…..respond to the Saudi/Afghan attack by ……..invading Iraq. It is PURE coincidence that these two oil men happen to preemptively invade a sovereign nation that had nothing to do with the attacks on Americans but that just happens to be the weakest nation that has the largest oil reserves. Pure coincidence, really. The fact that they manufactured and twisted every shred of evidence they used to justify this blatant War of Aggression (War Crime) has nothing to do with it. Pay no attention to the elephant behind the curtain.

(The fact that George’s Daddy couldn’t kill Sadaam, and that Sadaam tried to kill George’s Daddy, and that now George keeps Sadaam’s penis pistol in his office after having him hung is, we hope, just the pathological icing on the cake of twisted psyches involved in this sordid tragedy)

Unfortunately, those investors who bought into candy and flower futures in anticipation of a run on the market by Iraqis welcoming their liberators….didn’t do so well. Nor did the occupiers. Though the man in charge of clusterfucking the Occupation beyond even the lowest of expectations, L. Paul Bremer….says he wouldn’t do anything differently

BLITZER: You still think it was the right decision?

BREMER: Yes, I do.

BLITZER: Despite everything we now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that any connection between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein was very minimal if there was anything serious there. You still think it was the right thing to do?

BREMER: I do. I think it was the right thing to do, and I think Iraq is on the road now to becoming – it will take time – a democratic government in the middle of the Middle East, which is, in itself, quite an accomplishment.

So, I respectfully disagree with the senator. And I think it’s not clear – he makes the argument – I don’t think it’s true – that we are less safe than we were before. I don’t think that’s true. We have lost almost 4,000 Americans’ lives there, and that’s a tragic cost that we have had to pay.

Yes a tragic cost…..remind me why we had to pay it again, though? Oh, never mind, you will just recycle the same CYA bullshit you War Criminals have been spouting for half a decade now.

Returning to our history………who could have anticipated that the citizens of a sovereign nation would resist it’s Imperialist Occupiers? Well….just about everyone but said occupiers. More proof that having your head firmly up your ass tends to disrupt the old cognitive powers. And of course the fact that Iraq as we know it was invented as a country by previous Imperialists and has always been a hotbed of ethnic and sectarian rivalry that would erupt as soon as it had the chance seems to have gotten lost in the Republican Rectum as well. Sure…tons of people told them it would be the biggest blunder and tragedy in the history of American Foreign Policy….but what do those guys know?

A Government was formed and peoples fingers got colorfully and photogenically purpleized, those elected promptly stuck their purpled fingers up their rosy red rectums and have been sitting on them ever since. The one thing I have to give the Iraqi “Government” credit for is not selling off their oil to the first schmuck to come along with some magic beans.

Years and years of sectarian violence and insurgency against the Occupiers and rivals for power ensue. Again, who could have anticipated this? It’s not like there have ever been other instances of Imperial Occupation that have turned out badly…are there?

Little Donny Rumsfeld, whose delusions of mental grandeur apparently trumped all military wisdom, history, advice and common sense and is directly responsible for not just his part of the invasion, but the implementation of torture and the prolongation of disaster based on his THEORY of how wars work, by not sending enough occupiers….is finally fired. Four years after the invasion, four years into an occupation that caused 4 million refugees to flee their homes, the clowns in charge finally hearkened to the fact that you need a massive amount of boots on the ground to oppress a country of proud freedom fighters, (walk a mile in their shoes) escalated the number of brave American soldiers who have been required to risk…and pay with….their lives for these asshats stunning hubris and its accompanying jaw dropping incompetence. In combination with Blackwater, a huge mercenary army paid for by the American taxpayers and headed by semi-admitted Christian Crusaders, they have manged to quash the violence down to a level that the asshats in the MEDIA have been able to successfully spin into “success.” After which, they promptly stopped reporting any evidence that they too have their hatrack worthy heads up their Hershey Highways. (Are we sensing a theme?) And are thus facilitating  the occupation, which THEY were so instrumental in abetting and mythologizing, to continue unchallenged….instead of leading each hour of “news” with a giant WTF??? banner superimposed over the Mission Accomplished banner of Commander Codpiece.

And what, the intelligent student of history might ask at this point, of the Democrats, the putative opposition Party? Surely they were fighting tooth and nail and doing all they could to oppose, counter, and legislate the war out of existence or at least defund it, cutting off George and Dick’s allowance so that the could no longer play Armymen with the lives of real people? Sadly, tragically, heartbreakingly…even after the American People elected them in truly stunning numbers in 2006 …specifically as a reaction to the now unpopular war, counting on them to stop the insanity with this clear mandate…the fearless feckless Democratic ‘Leadership,’ spent their time cowering in fear of being called bad names by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity….at the cost of nearly a thousand more American lives since the were elected…to stop the loss of American lives.

And here we stand today, the stopgap surge about to fail, at the cost of a now indisputably broken military and National guard. The summer heat about to raise the levels of violence, in the wake of a now broken internal coalition between the warlord Al Sadr and his enemies….and STILL….with no solution or resolution anywhere NEAR a horizon visible to the human eye.

MAYBE….after eight more months of Stupid Campaign Tricks….someone other than this older, more senile version of the madman George “the Torturer” Bush and his Zombiemaster Dick “Plame Treason” Cheney will be elected

Elected to sit in the White House to preside over and attempt to repair the incomprehensible damage that George Bush….who unlike the President at the beginning of this little jaunt through history has NOT been impeached….has inflicted upon the world…and America.

An America that has become a systematic torturer and imprisoner of innocents without trial. An America that has killed perhaps hundreds of thousands Of Iraqis who had been minding their own business. An America that has given up or been stripped of its most precious and fundamental Constitutional Rights for the sake of “security.” An American teetering on the edge of Depression thanks not only to a TWO TRILLION dollar folly of titanic dimensions….but also to massive tax cuts for the rich and superrich…..in a time of war…when ordinary people are sacrificing their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters….

All for……all for…….all for….