Baffling

[David Morris]

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/10/ayn-rand.html


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  Those Cold Equations<http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/10/those-cold-equations.html>

*What this Liberal Sees… *



..when he looks at Iraq.

{...]

So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective
unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with
two choices too terrible to contemplate -- leap into oblivion or be roasted
alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this
poor bastard might have had became irrelevant.
Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the
air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a
downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so
very much.

That is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his
minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a
conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger
from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn't
act *right now* we were fucked.

*Mushroom-cloud fucked.*

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of
the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of
the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was
warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the
Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land
where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The
gains would be high. Virtually painless.

But MOST of all, that the fire was nipping at our heels. It was so urgent,
so imperative. that if we didn’t want to see our children perish, we had to
*jump right now*.

So we did.

Convinced by Bush that it was the *only option left to us* -- and that he
had planned carefully for the consequences -- we leaped out of window and
into the sky.

We jumped, because *we were told we had to*.

And in jumping, we committed our troops, our nation and our good name to
the brutal calculus of war; to factors beyond our control, and now we are
plunging down and down and down into tragedy.

And as we fall we find that the building *was not on fire at all*.

That the people that pushed us into space had *lied to us*.

That the parachute of carefully planning that they were supposed to have
prepared to save us from ruin had been packed with nothing but empty
slogans and ideology-drunk fantasies.

Now we are falling, out of control.

And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of
the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush
team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country
we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we
warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right? Any
pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic


On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> so wait, you, alice, are in nyc - hope things aren't too bad
>
> other crops of best & brightest that also turned out to not be very
> helpful to the rest of us include the dudes who sold vietnam, the
> dudes who sold invading and occupying iraq (think ows sucked, consider
> occupy iraq), the dudes who sold patriot act and homeland security
>
> ie perhaps let us not go overboard thinking well of these people -
> who, as far as i know, have access to the same government guarantees,
> student loans, social security, medicare, as the rest of us
>
> they really didn't build it alone...
> or, more to the point - they didn't get into position to tear it down
> the way they did without a lot of state subsidies
>
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