Soapbox

This week I’ve been going to work, doing the laundry and weeding the garden and trying to act like I”m not wondering if we haven’t really, finally, f**ked the world up beyond all repair this time, and it is sort of surreal. I wonder if anyone else is feeling the same.

The middle east seems about to explode. It’s always a tinderbox, but for the past week, it has seemed like someoone has a death wish for the planet. The escalation started when Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli solderis. For the past few days, Israel has been bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, and Hezbollah has responeded with missles of their own. Israel now claims Iran has helped the terrorists, and the conflict seems about to spread, because everyone wants an excuse to smack Iran these days.

Meanwhile Lebanon has been bombed back to the stone age, their leader pleading in tears for Israel to stop and look for another solution, while some reports say that Israel is using banned incendiary bombs. Over 100 Lebanses civilians have been killed already. I wake up every morning now, flip on the computer and check real quick to see if the end of the world started while I was asleep. And every morning it is clear that the fuse is burning. It just remains to be seen if someone will step forward and try to put it out.

But who is out there who can do that, or will even try? So far, everyone is either watching it burn or famming the flame.It’s like waking up and finding that your town is on fire, but instead of putting it out, everyone is buying moe gasoline. It terrifies me to think that the fate if the region- and the world may be in the hands of people who think that things like standing up to opression and a nation’s right to exist are more important than the right of people to exist! And in the middle of it all, of course, is George Bush, Mr “Cowboy Diplomacy” himself. What a guy to have at the helm in a time of great crisis: the freakin captain of the Exxon Valdez!

Kidnapping those soldiers was more than wrong. But how is the life of one young man worth the Lebanese children that have been killed and maimed? Do you think, if you could ask them, “Would you want your country to kill these children and potentially thousands more to avenge you?” that the Israeli soldiers would say “yes?”

I bet not. I know most American soldiers would say “We’re soldiers. We die to protect kids like that, not the other way around.” But the cowboy diplomats around the world are puffing out their chests and spouting crap about how important it is that we not let the terrorists win…like anyone wins if they start a world war.

Oh, but they’ve proven their point, I suppose, and apparently that is more important. I don’t care if we all end up dead as long as, with your last breath, you acknowledge that I was right! Meanwhile the civilian population of Lebanon is held hostage to two factions, neither of which is willing to see beyond their own playground bully image to notice the dead scattered around them. “An eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind, and in this case, alot of them dead.

Beam me up Scotty: there is no intellignet life on this planet.

I wonder if this is how my parents felt during the cuban Missle crisis and all the “duck and cover” nonsense. I do not want my children to wake up in World War 3 just because israeli Prime Minister Olmert, bush, Cheney, gingrich, Kin Jong Il, a couple of freako ayatollahs and a bunch of sick terrorists with more plastique than brains want to make their little tiny dicks look big. Excuse my French, but that’s what’s going on. There is something they want, someone they’re trying to prove or a base they’re trying to shore up, and they think waving guns around and showing what tough guys they are will do it.

It’ll do something alright….
War is only the answer if the question is “How do we get rid of these extra people and their prosperity?”

Any time the President of the United States speaks, it is important to have a grain of salt or two standing by to take with whatever he says. All presidents spin, but this guy is a whirling dervish.

Today the White house will dress George Bush up in his Sunday best and send him out to tell us all about how GREAT the economy in America is thanks to his tax cuts! Ok sure, more people than ever (including children) have no health insurance, more Americans are living in poverty every year and the cost of higher education has gone up 40% in the last 5 years, but the Bush administration will pat themselves on the back because the deficit is slightly smaller than they thought it would be earlier this year! Yahoo! What a great fiscal conservative that man is!

What you need to remember, and what the White House very much hopes you won’t, is that the fabulously small $300 billion deficit was predicted by President Bush to be a $305 billion surplus just a few years ago! And of course there was that pesky $5.6 trillion surplus that Bush started his presidency with, which is long, long gone.

Bush will remind us that after all, he has been paying for a war, which is why being $300 billion in the red is supposed to be such a good deal. Strangely, some of us don’t think that the war is a good excuse for the loss of $5.9 trillion dollars from the American economy. Not only should this war have cost us a hell of a lot less ( the president never asked the Provisional Authority to even begin to look for the $8.8 billion that they misplaced- ditto for the millions that Halliburton lost track of or wasted…and why are we paying $450 million for a tank that we aren’t even getting?) it was also completely unnecessary. And since terrorism has increased rather than decreased, even if every penny was spent properly, it was a still rip-off!

It is important to remember when the president and FOX news pundits wax eloquent on how great the economic numbers are, where we used to be 6 years ago. It wasn’t all roses, but it was NOT staring down the barrel of 4 potential North Korean nuclear warheads. It was NOT watching our children come home in boxes from a sad and scary debacle in the desert that has made terrorism worse, not better. And it was not $300 billion in the hole and claiming we were on top of the world!