When it comes to the War on Terror (and Bush and Condi and Rumsfeld...) oh-so-many people are experts, and everyone's a critic. Oh, of course it's usually couched as concern-with-furrowed-brows, but the upshot is the same and you'd have to be a fool today to see anything more benign than a spite-filled desire for America's demise.
Jay Leno, a week or so back, while on the topic of the capture of suicide-liquibombs-on-planes planners, quipped in his opening monologue: "British authorities said they were able to detect the terrorist plot using a surveillance program that the "New York Times” hadn’t got around to exposing yet."
Chortle.
"Oh," an acquaintance of mine pooh-poohed me after I'd quoted it through giggles, "you just believe that's true because you're pro-war." No, frankly I'm simply pro-victory, and only sometimes but not always are they the same thing.
I saw a picture of Cindy "Peace Mom" Sheehan the other day embracing some poor AWOL sucker who was on his way to turn himself in and meet his comeuppance. Isn't there somewhere she can turn herself into? She was wearing an American flag hat and, yet again, a black t-shirt with Arabic writing on it. A young Iraqi was allegedly denied boarding a flight a little while back for wearing the same shirt, yet somehow Jihad Cindy can move about the globe and country in it unimpeded. She wears it often, and I shouldn't know that, but since I do can't we at least get her on some kind of photo-op fashion violation? It makes me think of a bumper sticker I saw last week -- What Would Jackie Wear? Certainly not the same lousy t-shirt over and over again.
Fortunately, however, the act, like the outfit, is getting old. Yes, certainly, Cindy, we got the message... you "will not be silent", and apparently neither will your Islamic brethren whom you not-so-subtly endorse. Doesn't matter though. Less people are listening.
A couple of weeks back, again in reference to the British would-be-bombers, a witty FReeper wrote: "As the Prophet used to say, 'If the shoe fits, there probably aren't enough explosives in it.'" It doesn't matter who I quote that to, it gets a laugh, without qualifying it or explaining it, without preamble. I wonder why that is? Perhaps it's because these things do not happen in a vacuum.
Folks can stutter all they want about peace and protest being patriotic, but when Jay Leno has your number, the punchline is the zeitgeist is you. (Don't go hunting with Dick Cheney and the New York Times aids and abets terrorists.)
The media keeps telling us that a decent percentage of Americans are buying the Bush-brought-down-the-towers conspiracy (talk about vacuum-dwelling... did none of these folks own TVs in September of 2001?) but eventually those numbers will dwindle as well, except for the "true believers", of course. Let's face it, there's only so much greedy oil barons can do while still having enough time left over to count all their by-product of gouging whilst still managing to take over Somalia and gang-rape in Australia and disembowel in Nigeria and stone in Iran and behead in Indonesia and burn in France and intimidate in Belgium and murder in Holland and plan commuter carnage in England and Germany and Spain. What stamina.
I'm no expert, but I'm at least smart enough not to criticize that which I know little of and so the best I can contribute is hope and prayer that those in charge can bring about peace through unequivocal victory. Besides, I hate vacuuming.
This morning I was cleaning up in my boys' room after an action-packed long weekend. One whole side was taken up by what appeared to be nothing more than a jumble of stacked books covered with my six-year-old's army toys -- tanks, helicopters, soldiers large, small and Risk-sized, with a few cowboys and Vikings thrown in for good measure. To me, a nonsensical disaster.
I began separating them all into their requisite bins and boxes, clearly, it "felt" to me, the right thing to do. I spotted a scrap of paper next to it all and was already crumpling it and heading towards the trash can when I noticed, on the back of it, some writing. Smoothing it out I read, in all-capital-letters that virtually screamed at me:
Sometimes, in all our earnestness, we just might not have a clue.
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