Why we're in Iraq: The Real Story

Pretend that you're responsible for, say, a jock strap manufacturing company in Ipswich Connecticut.

Your headquarters building along with several distribution outlets in Nebraska, Florida, New York and Mississippi, have been fire bombed and are out of operation. Your survival as the world's leading jock strap producer is at stake since a host of other producers are unscathed and are ready and more than willing to do business with the clients you're unable to serve.

You're confronted with a formidable dilemma. If you're to maintain your market share, it's essential that you prevent another such attack in order to gain the time you need to rebuild your manufacturing, sales and distribution network.

Since this circumstances is unique in the history of jock strap making, you have decided to call on your supervisory staff and key employes for their input.

Hiram?:

Sir, I think it's pretty obvious that the anti jock strap coalition-people like Al Keider, Madame Husane, Kim Jong Duck Doo and others are responsible. Everybody knows they hate our guts, if you'll pardon my French. I don't know why we don't just go ahead and pop em.!

Thank you, Hiram. It's hard to argue with that kind of reasoning. But you have to remember that,as the world's leading jock strap producer, we have a very heavy corporate responsibility, an extremely vocal union and an often hostile customer base to consider before we take any kind of action like that.

Charles?

Well, sir, I don't think there's any question that they need to be popped. But we ought to get some consensus and support from the rest of the industry before we go off half cocked and get everybody all upset with us.

Steve?

I don't see any sense at all in that. Why do we need these guys? We're the ones that got smacked and most of them are laughing up their sleeve about it. You expect them to help us out when they're the ones who are getting our business while we're down?

I mean companies like Jacque's Jocks are getting a lot of business from Madame Husane, Al Keider and the rest. Vlad's Pads and Schroeder's Snoods certainly couldn't care less about our problems since they've never liked us very much anyway.

It's a waste of time.

Shirley?

Well, I think we could count on Tony's Trusses for--support,shall we say?

All right, Shirley.....

So you and Charles think we ought to take our case to the association.

How about you Bruce?

Well, they ought to be popped for sure. But everybody's going to call us an arrogant bully, even our own union members- you can just count on it. Particularly if we pick on a sweet old lady like Madame Husane.

So I'm with Charles and Shirley-it's worth a shot. But if they don't approve, I think we should pop her anyway.

Wayne?

Well you keep stressing that Madame Husane poses a serious threat to the jock strap industry.But nobody has told me what that threat is.

At your press conference on July 30, for example, you used the word "threat" over and over, even as you acknowledged that no weapons of jock strap destruction have been found.

And in a speech on July 24, your assistant asked "How could any responsible leader ignore the Madame Husane threat?"

But, again, what threat? The vision of one that you and your minions have manufactured from grossly exaggerated, distorted or downright false intelligence reports?

So you guys want to go to war! Your problem, of course, is that not a word of it is true. There are no weapons of jock strap destruction. Even the program Madame Husane once had to develop jock strap destruction weapons is inactive.

She certainly had such weapons years ago and doubtless retained some capability -- the know-how, the laboratories etc. -- to manufacture them again. But a capability does not equate to having weapons ready to use.

O.K....

Hold your thought for a minute there Wayne.

Hiram?

Well, first of all, I think Wayne is forgetting that we lost 3,000 employes in those attacks. So this is about a lot more than jock strap destruction.

And he's trying real hard to make us the bad guys in all this.

But all I hear him saying is "well, she had the weapons but now she doesn't- she knows how but she's quit doing it-she's perfectly capable but wouldn't dream of it".

What kind of bullcrap is that?!!

Everybody knows she gassed more than 300,000 of her own people. What makes Wayne think she'd bat an eyelash over 3,000-or even 3 million-Americans?

And of course, Al Keider would like nothing better than to crawl in the sack with her.

I vote we pop her. And I see Bruce, Steve and Shirley nodding their heads.

All right, Hiram. Let's allow Wayne to finish his thoughts.....

Well, as I've tried to point out, "popping Madame Hussein", as you put it, would be a distraction from what should be our principal task, the war against Al Keider.

Would we be more secure is we pop her? Absolutely not!

Madame Husane is a bitch, a vampire and a wanton hussy, yes. But she poses no real threat to the security of our operations. Why would we waste time and money and risk irritating our partners in the industry, our union members and even our customers by taking her out?

It's just a ridiculous, extremely risky, mindless act of destruction. And you're going to be held accountable!!!

All right, Wayne, thanks so much for sharing that with us...

Why are you laughing, Shirley?

Well, if Madame Husane has friends like Wayne, she certainly doesn't need any enemies.

He makes her sound exactly like the kind of person that needs popping.

Really bad......

Agreed.

Charles?  Pop her      Steve?  Let's get it on      Hiram?  I think you know where I stand

Bruce?  If you're waiting for me, you're backing up.

Ok, guys, let's roll!

Wayne, please turn in the keys to your company camel on the way out.....

An incident at Valdosta

My brother in law is a retired english professor and about as ultra liberal as they come. Working in concert with my childhood friend , a retired television journalist, they dish out about as much liberal poowaddle as I can take sometimes.

My brother in law mainly enjoys: being liberal, growing vegetables, reading bad poetry and making mayhaw jelly, fig preserves and sugar cane syrup. And the cane syrup he makes is the best you're going to find anywhere.

I can't tell you the name of it because it incorporates his last name. But "Professor's Gold"is a good substitute.

I sent him this a while back-when he declared, after too many glasses of Blackberry wine- that he was thinking about going to Iraq.

As a human shield..........

An Incident at Valdosta

The shattered remnants of the Valdosta Greyhound station were still smouldering in the steamy August dusk, hours after the explosion. Splintered benches, crushed storage lockers, one way tickets to Waycross were strewn like confetti over the heat warped vinyl floor.

Here and there a twisted Budweiser can, a baggage tag reading "Jacksonville or Bust", an imploded Heinz catsup cannister, a half eaten Payday, a shredded Cheetos wrapper.

"I just can't understand it", mused Theron Cromwiddle, Valdosta's fire chief.

"Of all the places in the world for a suicide bomber to try and set up his eternal meeting with 70 virgins. Hell, we hardly ever get 7 people in here at one time-let alone 70 virgins!

Just doesn't figure."

Who do I think did it? Well, we're not sure because what few body parts we could locate were covered in fig preserve residue and the only DNA we could identify traced back to a mayhaw tree on the Flint river.

But everything we see right now points to a local retired Valdosta State history professor.

Neighbors are telling us that this gentleman usually dressed in a croaker sack and covered his face with a Handi-Wipe, even when he was pulling crab grass in his back yard.

We also found several Yasser Arafat commemorative glasses in his wine cabinet and an autographed picture of Sean Penn hanging on his tractor windshield.

I'm not saying there's anything conclusive in that, of course. But his friends tell us he didn't show up for yesterday's blueberry mulching and we found several poems by WB Yeats that he apparently hadn't had time to read since they lacked his usual " You tell 'em WB!" scribbles on the margins.

Sad, really. Here's a man who spent his younger years in normal endeavors-grappling for catfish on the Chattahooche River, squirming through the Sunday sermon at Liberty Baptist Church , walking barefoot to the Royal Theater to see Tex Ritter, saving Capitola tokens for popcorn at The Bradley, bugging his grandma for extra helpings of collards and butter beans.

His relatives say he made good grades in school, never had a problem with things like saying the Pledge of Allegience with the words "under God" in it or singing "God Bless America", enlisted in the Marine Corps when the Korean War broke out and just all around made his folks real proud.

The local speculation is that he went and got himself all "educated".

Yep, most folks think he just decided that all the values he grew up with were the product of ignorant, old fashioned thinking by his parents, his grandparents, his teachers and classmates.

So the poor soul figured that the years he spent with all them books would be totally wasted if he didn't come out thinking a whole lot different than he went in.

And he sure as Ned managed that.

Anyhow, the old guy made a helluva cane syrup.

If you act right, I'll split this bottle I found in his car with you.....

Pascal's Wager...

Our blogger friend jack* has a post titled "Pascal's wager" in which he sets up an argument that is just too damned complicated for my limited mental faculties to grasp in it's entirety.

It concerns the theories of a 17th Century French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, and the ways in which they relate to the Bush administration's rationales for such matters as waging war and ignoring global warming warnings are rooted in those theories and essentially pose the question "which is the greater danger"?

I urge you to go to jack*'s post if you want to dig further into the subject; it really is an interesting one. But be warned that it's going to require a large ration of your remaining time- for the day at least-and a reliable supply stream of mental stimulants if you expect to survive the exercise with your mental acuity in tact. 3 or 4 White Horses might do it. (*http://jackasterisk.typepad.com/j_a_c_k_/)

"Pascal's wager....."

Pascal argues that since reason cannot decide the matter we should look at the trade offs.  Christianity (specifically Catholicism) offers eternal happiness for believers and eternal misery for non-believers, while atheism offers only the satisfaction of being rational and free time on Sunday mornings.  Since Christ promises a better payout, we should play His game.  "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is," Pascal instructs us. "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is...."

jack*'s post brought to mind my encounter with a person who had essentially based his entire life on Pascal's wager although I didn't know what to call it at the time.

It's really not very pleasant to recall the incident since I was definitely committed to my questioning, probing, challenging "smartass" position concerning religion at the time.

One of the people I admired and respected greatly in my home town was a gentleman named Bob Herlong, a highly successful businessman and, as I learned that day, a committed Christian.

Everyone in our little luncheon group knew that Bob was dying of leukemia and only had a year or so to live. Everyone, that is, but me.

I'd never thought of Bob as sickly. He was energetic, almost effervescent, with a permanent smile and a quick grin. He was also highly intelligent and I guess this fact this had something to do with my little smart assed statement to him that day as he spoke quietly to me of his commitment to Christ.

I said something like, "Bob, you're an intelligent man, a lot smarter than me-how can you possibly believe some of the things you read in the Bible"? I had no idea that I might be undermining the faith of a dying man and it bothers me every time I think about it.

But I needn't have worried. Bob smiled and said "John we all have choices to make in life. And one of them is whether or not to believe in God and the personal redemption of Christ.

Whether I'm right or wrong, my belief has given me peace of mind and my life and my family's life have been the better for it.

It's going to be leukemia that kills me, John-not ulcers."

Were those the words the result of some kind of battlefield conversion in the face of death?

I found out later that Bob's father had been a Methodist minister and that Bob himself had been a leader in his own church for many years.

Almost as long as I'd been a smart ass...............