That was a great idea. Use a crisis to make positive change. They haven’t followed their own advice on Wall Street and the health care issue is still up for grabs, but the idea is sound. Change is hard in normal times, crises make it easier. It’s much simpler to build anew when you’re knee deep in rubble.

We are knee deep in Afghanistan already. In the next few weeks Obama will decide whether or not we wade in up to our necks. But we’ve been in that country for eight years and there’s no end in sight. The only thing that can save us from more of the same, and worse, is a crisis.

A crisis is brewing in Afghanistan. Actually, crises are always brewing in Afghanistan, but the one coming now is threatening to boil over, melt the kettle and blow up the stove.

That crisis is the Afghani presidential election runoff and the crisis of legitimacy that is sure to follow. Hamid Karzai will win, but it will be a messy, nasty business with messy, nasty consequences. Those events will precipitate a crisis that provides an opportunity, a fleeting opportunity, to get America out of that country. If we’re smart enough to take it.

The first thing we need is a reality check. What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What do we want for that torn patchwork quilt forever trying, and failing, to become a healthy nation? What’s our goal there, freedom and democracy? Well, people in heaven want orgies. We need to dial down the expectations.

Maybe we just want to build up the Afghan state until it’s ready to stand on its own two feet. But Afghanistan doesn’t have two feet, it has dozens. If it is to stand at all, it will be on the feet of clans, warlords, druglords, local despots, religious authorities and assorted tribesmen who have precious little in common, save this: they don’t respond well to outside force. Nor inside force, for that matter, which is why they’re always fighting.

That fight is going to get a lot hotter in the days and months ahead, after the runoff. There will be hurt feelings and wounded pride and a severely diminished belief in the ballot box’s power to make things right.

Obama will have a chance to make good use of that crisis. When Afghanistan devolves into chaos, on top of the already occurring civil war, Obama can begin to make the case that it’s beyond our power, any power, to heal that nation—not even with 500,000 boots on the ground, much less the 40,000 that General McChrystal wants.

We needn’t “cut and run,” nor will we. All Obama needs to do is “set down markers.” He can give the Afghan government some time to get their act together. He can save face by getting into a holding pattern, keep the already augmented troops in country for a while and “await events.” He can even add a few, saying it’s a down payment on our commitment to Afghanistan, the rest to be provided when conditions on the ground, in theater, allow. And when those conditions never arise, which they won’t, Obama can announce that it’s time to “change the mission” and begin to withdraw our troops.

What should our mission in Afghanistan be? To keep our real enemies there from taking over and to keep al Qaeda on the run. We can do that with special-ops and commando raids and Predator strikes on terror camps or anyplace else fanatics are holed up, dreaming of a second 9/11. Just like we’re doing in Pakistan.

With our army mostly gone, and hearts and minds, always out of reach anyway, no longer our core mission, our job will be much easier. Our footprint will be smaller, collateral damage can be minimized, and when it inevitably happens, regrettable though it is, it won’t hurt our troops engaged in pacification. Because they won’t be there. Pacification won’t be our mission. Defense will. And the people we’ll be defending is us.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. If we don’t want to be stuck in Afghanistan for longer than the American people, or the Afghani people, can tolerate, we have to follow that advice right now. The coming crisis will give us a precious chance to get out. It is too good to waste.

This was big news the past couple of days. TV was all over it, like white on whitey. They teased it mercilessly: “Sack of stank sacked by NFL! Film at eleven.”

Then there was the headline in Variety: “Karma Kicks Konservative Krazy in Keister!”

In a way it’s too bad. Rush had a good shot at winning the 2010 Marge Schott Memorial Award for Blowhard Bigotry in American Sports Franchising.

Rush got the old heave-ho when the other prospects in his ownership group realized he was contagious. There is no way the NFL owners would vote a guy that radioactive into their club. You can be as loopy as Al Davis or as degenerate as the Hunt brothers, no problem. But with labor relations decaying and a possible strike or lockout already on the near horizon, the NFL didn’t need this.

About 70% of NFL players are African American and they don’t like him, mostly. “I wouldn’t play for that fat duck if I sat on him till he quacked,” is almost what they said. It’s as close as I can get to their words on a family blog.

Rush is firing back now, saying he got race-baited by Obama’s cronies in the media and the cowards in the NFL.

He has a point. The league wasn’t crazy about his proposal to change the name of the team from the St. Louis Rams to the Missouri Vicodins or the St. Louis Thugs. They didn’t think that was appropriate for children.

But that’s not why he got sacked. The liberals didn’t do it. The capitalists did.

That’s the beauty part. Rush got done in by capitalism! He got the full leper treatment because he was bad for business. Nobody censored him and no liberal threw him under the bus (where is that bus, anyway, the one that keeps driving over people? I think the driver may be impaired, by, like, Oxycontin or something.)

The NFL didn’t even have to vote on the guy. I heard one of Rush’s supporters (excuse me a second, that word gave me a visual and I have to puke…. Ok, I’m back.) say what happened to him amounted to a “high tech lynching.” Well, if so, the NFL didn’t get their hands dirty. His “partners” did the hit for them. That’s one thing you gotta love about capitalists, no sentiment.

“Hey Rush, you’re getting in the way of our bid. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya! Peace, out.”

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that having Rush in the league would have been a risky proposition. He would have cost the networks too much advertising. All those booze ads with P. Diddy? Gone. That Miller High Life guy who repossess the beer from yuppies? History. Dennis Haysbert pitching for Allstate? Policy cancelled.

But they could have made some of those losses up. The American Association of Teabaggers was ready to pony up for a spot, and I understand the Alabama Robe and Noose Company was interested as well.

But you know businessmen. No courage. They said what all Americans say when the gods of commerce are faced with controversy. “I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

Bless their covetous little hearts.

But a part of me regrets their decision. Rush with an even higher profile might have been fun to see. The man already has an ego bigger than his ass, and his ass is so big I was sure that Balloon Boy was trapped in the crack. Thank God Rush made a soft landing and that kid was safely tucked into a box in his father’s hoax, uh, I mean house.

Alas, it was not to be, and it’s all Rush’s fault. He brought this upon himself.

Forget the politically incorrect statements being blamed for Rush’s defenestration. A few tasteless remarks about Crips and Bloods and Donovan McNabb aren’t the problem here.

Rush’s problem is that he hates everybody who isn’t a sycophantic fan of Rush Limbaugh. He hates our duly elected president like Obama wanted to date his daughter or steal his wakeup or both. He’s sitting on top of a pile of money almost as big as his self-opinion yet he cries hippopotamus tears of woe about how the liberal conspiracy is out to destroy him.

Well, we’re trying. But it hasn’t been going so well. Until some of his fellow capitalists took a quick sniff and decided to distance themselves from the skunk.

Take a bow, irony. You earned it.

]]> http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/10/16/roughing-the-rusher/feed/ http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/10/09/who-roots-for-america/ http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/10/09/who-roots-for-america/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:39:57 +0000 Snark Twain http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/?p=374 Who is so bold as to root for America anymore? Once it was a given, now rooting for America is passé on both sides of the political divide. These days you can get more applause, American applause, by rooting for America to…

Our new president came into office with a vision of the future and a long to-do list that the previous administration had either badly botched or sorely neglected. He knew what he wanted to spend his political capital on, he knew the approximate direction he wanted to take the country, he thought he had an idea of the history he was going to make.

He is about to be overtaken by events. The anvil that will forge or crush his presidency isn’t going to be the town halls or the blogosphere, it won’t be in congress or the Supreme Court. It will be, once again, thousands of miles away, where reckless men are making desperate bets with the lives of millions. It will be, once again, a dozen little fires, threatening to burst into a firestorm, that test his steel and define his legacy, as it did to FDR and JFK and LBJ before him.

Iran wants a bomb, Israel wants to bomb Iran, Bin Laden wants his audiotaped fantasies to become fatal realities, homegrown Jihadists with homebrew explosives want to kill, kill, kill.

Will Afghanistan become a playground for Al Qaeda again, is it a war to win or a quagmire to avoid? What do we do if Iran goes critical, if Pakistan explodes into civil war, if Moscow sends the tanks into Georgia, if a ship full of North Korean missile parts sails for Yemen?

Those are the stark choices that are rushing to confront our president right now, at an ever-accelerating speed. He is the man who must decide, do we go all in, is it just a bluff, can we let things happen and live with the consequences? Will Iran get the bomb, will they use it, will Israel wait quietly to find out, will Russia and China help with sanctions or pick up the pieces after we break ourselves in a war that costs them nothing?

We have a most reasonable president who now has to deal with a scarily unreasonable world. This is his test and it’s not the one he was looking for. The 3 AM telephone is ringing off the hook. What does he say when he picks it up?

“Yes, we can.” There is still power in those words. The honeymoon is over, but the dream is alive, and Obama has more people believing than not. It will take time, but we’re only ten months into an eight year presidency, he has time. I have no doubt that Obama means it when he says, “Yes, we can.”

But there are forces afoot in the world that can turn it all to dust, if left unchecked. From Tehran to Times Square, nihilists, dictators, fundamentalists, crazies and crazies like a fox are weaving nightmares and hatching plans that would shatter our beautiful hopes for a better, more compassionate world and paint it red with blood.

Obama came into power with grand ideas and many plans, as only the best leaders do. He was going to bend the future to his will, as only the strongest leaders can. He is trying mightily to rouse us from our gridlocked doldrums and get us moving forward again. Obama is a moderate by temperament and a progressive by aim, but a realist above all. He knows that progress is a ratchet, you make history by moving forward, click by click. Little victories adding up to big changes, that’s how history is made. Obama knows that and he’s doing it, through all the noise and turmoil and resistance he’s pushing forward, pressing the agenda. When the dust clears and the naysayers have screamed themselves mute, we’ll be further along than we are today. Obama will have made history.

But it’s not just about the history you make. Sometimes it’s about the history you prevent. Sometimes the measure of the man is to stand athwart history and shout “halt!”

The horizon is growing dark, you’d have to be blind not to see that. Obama is not blind. And now we’re going to find out if he knows how to say the words that are not in his nature, and make them stick. “No, you can’t.”

When we’re children and someone tells us that “life isn’t fair,” we cry. When we’re adults and we hear those words we nod knowingly. It’s called maturity and it’s supposed to be an improvement.

Life is loaded dice and sweetheart deals, fair play is for suckers, and if you’re naïve enough to expect an even break you deserve the fleecing you’ll get. That’s pretty much what everyone believes about pretty much all of life.

But not about sports. Sports is magic.

Sports is about the last place left where we expect fairness and are disappointed when we don’t get it. Even the power of the almighty dollar is diminished on our sporting grounds. The Yankees have all the money in the world and every year they try to buy the World Series. They’ve won a lot, but it’s been nine years and a billion dollars since their last crown. And only Yankee fans think that’s not fair.

We do sports great in America. This is the nation where you’re most likely to get gunned down because you’re in the wrong store at the wrong time when some spurned loser decides to end it all and take a room full of total innocents with him, yet you don’t have to think twice about taking your five-year-old to a Giants game wearing a Dodgers hat.

Why are our streets among the developed world’s most violent and our stadia the most peaceful? Why don’t we have soccer thugs here?

I don’t know. It must be magic.

Something about sports kills cynicism. I don’t need to tell you—but I will anyway—that one bad year can bankrupt an auto company and one lost election can drive a party to the bitterest depths of despair; the memories of both are fresh enough.

But hope in sports is harder to kill, every year it rises from the ashes like a Phoenix—even in Phoenix.

Or Chicago….

The year is 1908, Teddy Roosevelt is president, Henry Ford produces the first Model T, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—are killed in Bolivia, and the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

They haven’t won it since, not in 101 years, but are Cub fans cynics? Not really, they grumble a lot, but every year they pile into Wrigley Field and almost every game is a sellout. That’s three million fans, not one of whom was alive the last time the Cubbies won it all, stuffed into Wrigley, shouting themselves hoarse for a victory that may never come.

When the world cries tears of sorrow and the prophets preach that the end is near, the sports fan sings a sweeter song.

“Wait till next year.” That triumph of the human spirit over insurmountable odds is on breathtaking display at every game played by the Los Angeles Clippers, the Cincinnati Bengals, the Texas Rangers and so many other deserts of defeat in America.

Sports are little temples to idealism, a place to practice what we preach about fair play, where the rules are agreed on by all and everybody hates a cheater. All is not perfect on our fields and courts, perfection is beyond human achievement in any endeavor, sports included. But we expect it, sports comes close enough that we are outraged by every juiced player, corked bat and paid-off referee.

When was the last time you were shocked at the news of a businessman stealing or a politician being on the take? How old were you then, twelve?

Corruption in the real world is so common and expected it fades from memory, even when the consequences are catastrophic. Take the Great Boston Molasses Disaster, for example. A large tank burst at the Purity Distilling Company, sending a wave of molasses rushing down the streets of Boston at 35 mph. It killed 21 people and injured 150. Arthur Jell, who oversaw construction of the tank, was so lax he painted it brown to hide the leaks.

Have you ever heard of him? Have you heard about that calamity at all?

Of course not. How could you, it happened so long ago, all the way back in 1919.

The same year as the Black Sox scandal.

The victims of the Great Boston Molasses Disaster are not entirely forgotten. The city installed a plaque on the site. It’s called Langdone Park now. They play Little League Baseball there.

I knew this was going to happen. It crossed my mind twenty years ago, on that glorious day when the wall came down and communism collapsed.

I cheered along with the world, as the iron curtain burst from within and a million voices celebrated a new era of freedom, but one voice in the back of my head struck a sour note.

“Uh oh,” it said. “The bastards have absolutely nothing to fear now! What will keep their greed in check, now that communism is gone?”

Twenty years later I can give the answer. Nothing. Capitalist greed and market fundamentalism went on a two-decade bender, the rich got filthy rich and the poor got dirt poor and the marginalized of the world came up with even worse ideas than communism to deal with the pain. Like Jihadism, narco-states, and anarchy.

For all its sins, and they are legion, communism and its kid brother, socialism played a vital role in keeping capitalist societies healthy.

Communism and socialism are very potent medicines. A little bit will cure what ails you, too much will kill you.

Take a few drams of communism and you get Social Security, Medicare, the FDIC, antitrust laws and even civil rights. The far left in America was ridden with Soviet operatives in the thirties, but they were also the vanguard of the drive for racial equality.

Don’t take enough and you get the kind of coal-smoke choked, child labor-abusing, Dickensian industrial nightmare that brought forth Marx and Engels in the first place.

Overdose and you die by the hand of Stalin in the Gulag or starve by the polluted banks of the Yangtze, so brainwashed you expire with the words of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book on your shriveled lips. You don’t want to take too much communism, ever. At best you wind up like Cuba under Castro, at worst, Cambodia under Pol Pot.

We could use a few vials of communism in our political medicine chest today. If only to remind the establishment what real trouble looks like. They’ve gotten so complacent a moderately liberal president, pushing a mildly reformist agenda, is enough to trigger their fight-or-flight reflex. And the conservatives grab their Winchesters and head straight for the barricades.

It’s an astonishing spectacle of delusion. Right now, the hysterical right wingers are scared shitless of absolutely nothing. You’ve got wackos from Texas threatening to secede (if only) and bulging-eyed, bulging waistline, dimwits who make you wonder how the White race ever supremacized anyone, baying at the moon, screaming for our president’s scalp. A president who is so moderate he’s driving the left almost as buggy as the right.

Almost nothing of substance has changed in American governance in the past seven months; the economy’s still in the shitter but no deeper than last November and Goldman is posting record profits again. The gun freaks still have their guns, abortionists still live in fear for their lives, we’ve got enough wars to keep the Pentagon and the prosthetic limb industry happy, the homosexual agenda still hasn’t seized control of America’s preschools and Aetna’s execs can still send out their “sorry, it was a pre-existing condition, you’re not covered” letters without worrying about getting two in the chest and one in the head.

There is literally nothing happening, but the lunatic right is screaming “apocalypse!” and middle America is starting to believe them.

I say let’s give them something to be scared about. It’s time, comrades.

Let’s all get together and sing the Internationale and wave the red banner of revolution. Get enough people to do that and believe me, we’ll get universal health care in a Stalingrad minute. Who knows, we might get lucky and the minimum wage will go up a few cents. If you want the power elite to throw you a bone you’ve got to show ‘em some canines.

We need to put the fear of godless communism in the capitalist class—and I don’t mean the guy who owns the local Kinkos franchise who thinks he’s a red hot entrepreneur so he votes Republican—I mean the nine corporations left standing after we bailed them out of their latest collapse who now have all the money. Scare them straight, make them pretend to play fair, lighten their purses enough to fund some humane social programs, health care for everyone for starters, and then go home.

Because if there’s one thing worse than a world without communists, it’s a world where they win.

]]> http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/09/03/calling-all-commies-we-need-you/feed/ http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/08/26/ted-kennedy-the-last-of-his-kind/ http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/08/26/ted-kennedy-the-last-of-his-kind/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:55:45 +0000 Snark Twain http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/?p=361 The news came out of the Kennedy compound Tuesday night. Teddy was dead.

You don’t hear much about “compounds” anymore, they seem like a relic of a bygone era, like the “trusts” and “robber barons’ that generated the loot that built them.

People…

Greetings, Master:

As the attached documentation will show, we’ve had a very productive year. I’ve taken the liberty of outlining some of our achievements in this letter, for your eyes only, Dark One.

To get the bad news out of the way, our Twitter crash was a bust. The word that the government was behind it spread so fast we had to end the project in six hours. I sent the hackers responsible for the debacle to New York for a little R&R. Needless to say, they never made it past the Hudson. So we shouldn’t have that problem again. Please forward my sincerest apologies to POTUS.

The 40^th anniversary of “Apollo 11” was quite a challenge. I think you have to agree, we passed it with flying colors. We’ve scattered all the props to various carnivals and theme parks and got good money for them. All the cameramen and stagehands were eliminated in the 30^th anniversary purge, so no worries there. And with the closing of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site, we no longer have any concerns about the real source of the “ moon rocks” coming to light. Please send Harry Reid a box of Havanas for me by diplomatic pouch. I want him to know we appreciate his work on our behalf.

I agree with your recommendation that we continue the “noise” strategy re: 9/11. We all knew it was too big a story not to leak, so we opened the taps and drowned them with “information,” just as you suggested. Let’s see them drink from that firehose, I believe your words were, and truer ones have never been spoken. At least by this office—if you’ll forgive the levity. I understand that Mr. Cheney gave the key to POTUS on inauguration day—but please make sure that “Renegade” knows it only works on the Nafi version of the Koran. The ninth letter of the eleventh word in every other paragraph on the Mecca facing page. If he tries it with the Bible, he’ll just get gibberish.

Our core secrets have held up well this year. While the Masons have had more than their share of television shows and exposés recently, I haven’t seen one yet that links them to The Elders of Zion. Nor has it gotten out that Ronald Reagan was an animatronic doll.

The Kennedy assassination cover up has now reached the stage where all we need to do is wait and run out the clock. The Old Man is very ill. As soon as Castro dies, we’re home free.

On the Flab front, no news is good news. So far, we barely rate a mention on the blogs. The trans-fat diversion was a huge success, and I do mean huge. We got the public so panicked about trans-fat they banned the stuff and never noticed all the regular fat we were pumping into their food. So far, not a peep about the carb conspiracy has hit the web, and that’s where the real action is. Current projections say we’ll reach the critical 50% total immobilization mark by 2015. Complete docility of the non-elite American public should be achievable by the end of that decade.

Our colleagues in the Center For Disease Control have been working under deep cover in Africa, using the cloak of Malaria containment to smuggle researchers into the Sahel. The goal is to create an analogue of HIV-AIDS that can spread, by camel, to a predominantly Muslim population. If successful, this Priority One project could tip the balance in the War of Civilizations. We’ll keep the Pentagon and the White House apprised of any significant developments.

Challenges for fiscal year 2010:

Fear maintenance is our greatest challenge going forward. While we have managed to keep the American public in the dark about the true causes of the crash—Mr. Spielberg is maintaining his low profile—their panic has been abated somewhat by these untimely, and unwelcome, “green shoots” of recovery. We believe we have ridden the economic horse about as far as it can go. Our efforts in fear creation are now focused on health issues. We got a good start with the Swine Flu, and the labs are cooking up some delicious diseases for the fall season. Stay tuned.

After a long, successful run, we have had to admit that crack cocaine is losing cachet in the African American community. Luckily, the destruction that project caused to Black America was so close to complete as to be nearly irreversible. But the R&D department is taking nothing for granted. They are working on a replacement intoxicant as we speak.

In any event, African Americans are no longer our highest priority among minorities. The Latinos have taken their place by sheer weight of numbers. And they are a hard group to reach, being so scattered and coming from so many diverse places of origin. I know I’m getting older, and I hate to surrender to nostalgia when such an important issue is at stake, but it is a terrible shame their migration happened after we lost the tool of slavery. That institution made our jobs so much easier.

But we shall soldier on. I have every confidence our efforts shall not go unrewarded, and shall, outside of the odd conspiracy blog, go undetected.

Sincerely,

Damien Enigma

Chief of Operations: Government Conspiracy Agency

United States Smiley Face Commission

Catacomb 40, Bower 13, Crypt 7, Black Door One.

Langley VA.

]]> http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/08/13/the-government-conspiracy-agency-annual-report/feed/ http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/08/05/republican-autoerotic-asphyxiation/ http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/2009/08/05/republican-autoerotic-asphyxiation/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:36:25 +0000 Snark Twain http://snarktwain.hypocrisy.com/?p=346

One glance at the birthers and the town hall screamers tells you all you need to know. You don’t even need to see it, you can hear it in their strangled cries. The Republican party is a junkie, addicted to hate.

“The base…