Sunday, October 24, 2004

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

FAR BE IT FOR ME TO BE POSITIVE . . .

But It's Not So Bad, Everything, Right Now

If you get too far stuck in all this political bullshit, you might forget how good life is, for most of us. Even in hard times, we have our friends, our families, our dozens of slavish lovers. Well, I do, anyway. You may need to work on that.

There's also cake, and champagne, and foot massages, and bicycle rides on brisk autumn days, and kewl shit like that. As long as you have somebody to care about, and somebody to care about you, you're not doing so bad. (If not, get the hell off the Internets and hook up, Baby!)

Yeah, OK, Bush is the anti-Christ, and Armegeddon is fast approaching, but so is le beaujolais nouveau! And things have actually been worse in the past: Ask any Holocaust survivor. (But, like, at a bus stop; not when you're trapped in their house or something. You really don't want to hear the whole schpiel. They have a tendency to just go on and on, and then they start crying, and OY VEY ALREADY!)

It really helps to have some historical perspective. In the Forties you had this awful war thing, but still, some good music, and clothes. In the Fifties you had the Red Scare and Jerry Lewis, but TV and Rock'N'Roll were born then, too. In the Sixties, the seething racial tensions and an undeclared war fought mostly by the underclass made it really hard to have sex with poor people. But drugs were becoming readily available, and you could get each other high and then screw. Then, in the Seventies, you had that asshole Nixon, and Disco. But everybody could screw anybody, and there was Cable, and VCRs, and Pong, for the unscrewable.

In the Eighties, a nice old man from Hollywood almost destroyed the Republic, and started World War III; but then he got Alzheimers, and started babbling about Star Wars (not the movie) and The Evil Empire (again, not the George Lucas one) and let the Soviet Union collapse all by itself. Which was decent. And porn became available EVERYWHERE, so you could always screw yourself, and with a bitchin' soundtrack. In the Nineties, this bunch of assholes in Congress just kept trying to fuck up everybody's wet dream, to no avail: Even a President from Arkansas could get a blow job from a nice Jewish girl. This was ground-breaking. We take it for granted today. You wouldn't BELIEVE how hard that used to be!

So, now here we are in the... Wait, what the fuck did we decide to call this decade? Well, it can't be all that bad, if it doesn't even have a name. Hm. Well, anyway, have a nice day. And remember, IT COULD BE WORSE! And, someday, it will be. Now, go on out and hook up at some political rally and GET YER COOKIES!!! Just remember, in the morning, you might find yourself waking up next to somebody you actually like. Exercise caution. And use protection, you dweeb. (Jeez, NOBODYS unfuckable, these days! Have you seen that show with Ozzy Osborne's daughter? OY VEY!)

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MORE SWIFT BOAT LIES

"JOHN KERRY TREATED WITH THE ENEMY"(?)

But, Unfortunately For The U.S.A.,
It Didn't Work

I was talking to some dumb guy the other day about the election. Like most dumb guys, he's for Bush. He assured me that this was true: John Kerry had met with the North Vietnamese in Paris (FRANCE!!!) while he was still in the Navy, back in the Sixties. I've heard this rumour before, but I couldn't recall where. On it's face, it's absurd. While he was in the Navy, Kerry was nowhere near Paris, While on active duty, he was in combat, in Vietnam. Then, after getting shot, and getting medals for it, he came home, and was released from active duty. Whatever he did after that, he did as a civilian. (Paris, {FRANCE!!!}, by the way, now stands in for Moscow, {RUSSIA!!!}, in crypto-fascist iconography.)

Also ridiculous on its' face: WHY would a foreign government negotiate anywhere with some schlub civilian with no political position in the U.S.? And, what could possibly happen? Kerry had no authority or connections to the Nixon government. What would be the point of negotiating with him?

So, I looked it up. Good old Internet. This bit of flummery had completely passed me by, back in September. It seems Kerry, and lots of other people, did meet with Vietnamese officials in Paris (FRANCE!!!). That's where the so-called "peace talks" were being held, for FIVE years, starting in 1968. Tricky Dick Nixon, of Watergate fame, had just gotten himself elected on a Bushian lie claiming he had a "secret plan for peace" in Vietnam.

If he had a peace plan, why not share it with the then-President, LBJ, and save some American lives? Wasn't Nixon, in effect, treating with the enemy, before his election, a la Reagan's arms-for-hostages election-eve deal with the Iranians in 1980, the "October Surprise"? And Nixon, like Reagan later on, was a credible national candidate of the second-largest party in the US, then running for President of the United States. But, just a candidate, not yet the President. Did he negotiate with the Vietnamese, behind Johnson's back? Hell no, he did it on national TV, every night, in campaign ads and speeches, with that phony promise of a secret peace plan! Did that prolong the war, and the suffering of those captured, wounded, killed and bereaved? Hell yes!

Especially since, as it turned out, Nixon's plan was to drag out peace negotiations for years, giving him time to win a military victory in 'Nam, while pacifying us on the home front, by any means necessary, such as COINTELPRO and Watergate. Nixon took a small, three-year-old conflict in an obscure and unimportant (to us) faraway foreign land, and turned it into a major 9-year debacle costing 50,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives. After dragging half a million men over to Vietnam, many of them kicking and screaming, and dropping more bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos than we dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy in WWII, Nixon lost the war, and had to run home with his tail between his legs.

The US has never really recovered from Nixon's acts of treachery on this massive scale. Our image in the world as defenders of freedom and fairness, liberty and human dignity, was forever tarnished. Our military might and honor were called into question, and our ability and willingness to act have been seriously damaged, to this very day. The traitors on the Right, Democratic and Republican "Hawks" alike (who got us into the Vietnam mess against all expert advice, and then blew it through piss-poor planning and execution) are still trying to blame somebody, anybody else for their shameful acts, and ultimate failure.

Sound familiar? Here we are in 2004, almost forty years after we sent that first big bunch of troops into Vietnam, doing the same damned thing in Iraq. Then, as now, it was all based on lies, miscalculations, and unrealistic ideology. If only there had been a young John Kerry, travelling to Iraq three years ago: Maybe nobody would have died. Hey, if we can celebrate our "citizen-soldiers," why not our citizen-diplomats? It's too bad young Kerry didn't have any authority or connections. He could have saved a lot of heartbreak and humiliation, for both sides, who are, by the way, no longer enemies. And, for most of us, on both sides, we never really were...

Swift Boat Veterans rip visits with N. Vietnamese, Viet Cong

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TO POST A COMMENT: CLICK ON "COMMENTS," "Post a Comment" or "# of COMMENTS" just below the SOCIAL BOOKMARKING LINKS (Digg, Delicious, etc), about three inches down from here. Please do comment. Thank you.

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Suggestion Box & Tip Jar We would like to make over this blog to make it easier to access, to read and to comment on. We would also like to serve our readers better by providing more of what you need and want to see. All serious suggestions will be considered. We hope to move to our own domain in the near future, and we would like to ask for your financial assistance in doing that, and in upgrading our hardware & software. Small one-time donations and larger long-term subscriptions are welcome. Exclusive advertising is also available. If you think we are wasting our time in doing all this, please let us know. If you wish to help us, now is the time. As always, negative bullsh*t from right-wing trolls will be sh*tcanned. Thank you to everyone else. Please send feedback & PayPal contributions to cosanostradamusATexciteDOTcom. Thanks.