The news is all over the, uh, news. Mary Cheney, daughter of the Vice President and in a loving comitted relationship for the last fifteen years is pregnant.
Why is this news worthy?
Because Mary Cheney’s a lesbian, and her dad is VP of a Presidential Administration that caters to the Religious Right, and as we all know, the Religious Right is perfectly happy to have War on Earth, and poor in the streets, and fuck the meek, just so long as homosexuals are eliminated from the face of the planet.
“It’s very disappointing that a celebrity couple like this would deliberately bring into the world a child that will never have a father,” said Crouse, a senior fellow at the group’s think tank. “They are encouraging people who don’t have the advantages they have.”
Advantages … like the legal protections offered by marriage? Actually, Mary Cheney and her partner Heather Poe don’t have those legal protection because they live in the fine state (or commonwealth or whatever the fuck it is) of Virginia which has a state constitution ammendment banning homosexual marriage.
Maybe I’m just bitter because my rapidly-turning-libertarian-or-Goldwater-conservative political leanings make me think that allowing a person or couple the widest variety of choices and options possible is the best political system, and the clearly freedom-hating Religious Right hates allowing people the freedom to make choices for themselves (bastards).
So. Anyway. The post title. Man. Can you imagine how furious the Religious Right would be? It would be “teh funny.”
(Not, mind you, that there’s anything funny about abortion. The funny would be in watching the Religious Right with foam gushing from their never-used-for-oral-sex mouths.)
(Pandagon has a list of extreme-right-wing reaction to Cheney’s pregnancy. Dayum people do some hatin’.)
What was the Colin Powell “Pottery Barn Rule” about Iraq? “If we break it, we’ve bought it.”
Well, here’s a big surprise: we broke it.
Today, the Iraq Study Group released some of its findings and conclusions:
America should aim to withdraw the majority of its forces from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008 and must engage with Iran and Syria to avoid “a slide toward chaos”, a high level committee of inquiry has concluded.
Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which has today published a 142-page report on America’s options in Iraq, said the situation in the country is “grave and deteriorating”.
He added that the cost of the war could rise to more than $1 trillion and said America’s ability “to influence events within Iraq is diminishing”.
The report recommends that George W Bush set a deadline for a large scale drawdown of troops.
There has been so much written about the bungling of Iraq by the Adminstration, and I don’t feel qualified to critique them, except to say that if you don’t have the balls to fire non-performing people until after your party gets its ass kicked in an election, you probably shouldn’t have run for President.
Anyway, here’s my thoughts: the Iraqi people seem unwilling or unable to secure the country. The Iraqi Army and police forces appear to be particpating in the religious strife as opposed to taking a neutral role and trying to install security. A withdrawal of American and British and other coalition forces will simply allow this Civil War — or, more simply, “bloodbath” — to accelerate until Iraq fractures and finds itself either under the control of a strong, central, fundamentalist Islamic government similar to the Taliban, or under the control of warlords, each with their own little sections. I think Kurdistan — barring an invasion by Turkey which I think unlikely* — will do just fine, and the Kurds will be the better for all of this.
I think the United States has an obligation when it invades a country and overthrows its government, and that obligation is, in order, to provide security for the population, and to establish a democratic government. We’ve done the second, failed at the first, and the second seems to be in name only as the Iraqi government doesn’t seem very effective.
A coworker remarked that he’d heard a poll that said most Iraqis would’ve welcomed the return of Saddam Hussein. Well, maybe they are (which is a sad condemnation of our efforts), but reinstalling Saddam as President of Iraq and withdrawing our troops wouldn’t be very effective for a number of reasons. I mean, first, Saddam is a bad guy — it can be argued that Iraq is a worse place for not having him around, but that argument only works because of the incompotent planning and execution at the adminstrative level of the post-invasion efforts for Iraq. Second, all his support structure was removed or rearranged by the invasion. Saddam’s power was because of his internal security forces and his army, neither of which are around anymore. It’s like this: when you pick up a plate and smash it on concrete, you can use as much glue as you want to try to put it back together again, but things don’t work like that. We smashed Iraq, and even with all the glue in the world, we can’t put it back the way it was before. Saddam has no place in Iraq’s future, and wouldn’t perform very well if he was.
I have no idea what should be done, but I do know Iraq is shattered on the concrete, and the Baker Report doesn’t seem, from what I’ve read of it (haven’t found a link to the actual Report yet), to actually provide any solid foundations to “fix” Iraq that don’t rest on what appears, to me, to rest largely on an Iraqi military and police presence which seem less interested in preventing violence, and more interested in joining in.
Look, here’s the thing: “stay the course” has done nothing but fuck Iraq, and I think without a doubt we need to “change the course.” I don’t know if this report outlines how we should change the course in a way we want, but I do know any course change, at this point, can only be a good change.
* But would Turkey want anything to do with any part of Iraq? Even age-old animosity would, I think, dribble away at the prospect of being blamed for Iraq.
So what happened in Tuesday’s riddle? I don’t know if anyone got this right because I actually am writing these series of posts last Thursday and time delaying them. Anyway,
“man sitting on three legged stool milking cow that hit him, and he hit her with stool.”
Right, so, today?
The beginning of every end
The end of every place
The beginning of eternity
The end of time and space.
Easy. But still a favorite, ‘specially for an english major. That’s a hint, by the way. Don’t cheat.
