Bill
04-21-2007, 05:13 PM
If you love war, weapons, strategy, and tactics like I do you gotta be reading war nerd.
"Now a lot of comedies have trouble finding the perfect ending, but this one nails it with the Bill Murray of gore comedy, the one man you can count on to make anything funny: George W. Bush. I can't improve on the man's work, so I won't try. I'll just quote in full our President's official reaction to somebody blowing up the most closely guarded square footage in the Middle East. Here's George, the day after the cafeteria bombing:
"There is a type of person that would walk in that building and kill innocent life and that is the same type of person that is willing to come and kill innocent Americans," Bush said after meeting with educational leaders. "And it is in our interest to help this young democracy be in a position so it can sustain itself and govern itself and defend itself against these extremists and radicals." Damn, that deserves a rewind it's so funny.
There was more truth in that 30-second bombing video than in the whole 200 or 300 hours of the PBS version of Iraq, "America at a Crossroads," that I've been watching out of a sense of duty this last week. Man, that thing is pathetic. I'll give you the highlights of "Crossroads" right here, condensed to a couple of lines:
1. Maybe, just maybe, the war was a bad idea...
2. And our boys feel real bad when they have to kill civvies...
3. So they write a poem about it... [I'm serious. They were reciting poetry - poetry!]
5. Then Robert Duvall wraps it up with a nice little voiceover about what a wonderful funeral they give this GI from a small town in Wyoming.
What's amazing to me is that there wasn't a minute of truth in all those hours of film. Not one lousy minute. Maybe some soldiers feel bad about killing people, but for a lot of them it's the best time they'll have in their lives. They just know they're not supposed to say so. We're all hams by now, we've all watched so many interviews we know what we're supposed to say: "Um...war is bad. And you can quote me!"
Yeah, right. Look, half these dudes are gonna get laid for the rest of their lives on the stories they take home from Iraq. And it sure beats working at WalMart. I'm not saying they don't feel bad after lighting up a jalopy full of civvies who were slow hitting the brakes. I'm just saying I don't trust a word that gets said into a PBS video camera.
Hell, we're all so camera-trained by now these guys are probably adjusting their sound-bites by network: "You guys PBS? OK, ahem! 'War, whut iz it good for?'" Then CNN comes sleazing around for a clip and the same guy switches into two-sides-to-every-story mode: "Well, I believe in the mission, but golly it's rough sometimes..." When Fox shows up he can finally relax and shout out a few verses of "Hajji Girl," best song to come out of this mess.
This whole hamming-it-up deal, that's what keeps hitting me about video footage from Iraq. I've talked about how the soldiers in Gunner Palace were all distracted hams."
http://www.exile.ru/2007-April-20/war_nerd.html
"Now a lot of comedies have trouble finding the perfect ending, but this one nails it with the Bill Murray of gore comedy, the one man you can count on to make anything funny: George W. Bush. I can't improve on the man's work, so I won't try. I'll just quote in full our President's official reaction to somebody blowing up the most closely guarded square footage in the Middle East. Here's George, the day after the cafeteria bombing:
"There is a type of person that would walk in that building and kill innocent life and that is the same type of person that is willing to come and kill innocent Americans," Bush said after meeting with educational leaders. "And it is in our interest to help this young democracy be in a position so it can sustain itself and govern itself and defend itself against these extremists and radicals." Damn, that deserves a rewind it's so funny.
There was more truth in that 30-second bombing video than in the whole 200 or 300 hours of the PBS version of Iraq, "America at a Crossroads," that I've been watching out of a sense of duty this last week. Man, that thing is pathetic. I'll give you the highlights of "Crossroads" right here, condensed to a couple of lines:
1. Maybe, just maybe, the war was a bad idea...
2. And our boys feel real bad when they have to kill civvies...
3. So they write a poem about it... [I'm serious. They were reciting poetry - poetry!]
5. Then Robert Duvall wraps it up with a nice little voiceover about what a wonderful funeral they give this GI from a small town in Wyoming.
What's amazing to me is that there wasn't a minute of truth in all those hours of film. Not one lousy minute. Maybe some soldiers feel bad about killing people, but for a lot of them it's the best time they'll have in their lives. They just know they're not supposed to say so. We're all hams by now, we've all watched so many interviews we know what we're supposed to say: "Um...war is bad. And you can quote me!"
Yeah, right. Look, half these dudes are gonna get laid for the rest of their lives on the stories they take home from Iraq. And it sure beats working at WalMart. I'm not saying they don't feel bad after lighting up a jalopy full of civvies who were slow hitting the brakes. I'm just saying I don't trust a word that gets said into a PBS video camera.
Hell, we're all so camera-trained by now these guys are probably adjusting their sound-bites by network: "You guys PBS? OK, ahem! 'War, whut iz it good for?'" Then CNN comes sleazing around for a clip and the same guy switches into two-sides-to-every-story mode: "Well, I believe in the mission, but golly it's rough sometimes..." When Fox shows up he can finally relax and shout out a few verses of "Hajji Girl," best song to come out of this mess.
This whole hamming-it-up deal, that's what keeps hitting me about video footage from Iraq. I've talked about how the soldiers in Gunner Palace were all distracted hams."
http://www.exile.ru/2007-April-20/war_nerd.html