Every night I try to watch the news, and the only news channel I get at this point is MSNBC. Normally this isn’t so bad, but Chris Matthews is in his own freaking world at this point, spending hour after hour after hour saying things like “what did the president know, and when did he know it?” about the goddamn Nigerian uranium story. I know many people have said what I’m about to say many times in ways far more eloquent and persuasive than I’m about to, but for the love of fucking Mike, Democrats, give the goddamn uranium story a rest. Nobody else cares. Nobody. You may think this is the worst thing that any government has ever done ever, but you are in the goddamn minority, and the more you shreik about it, the more you start to look like the Republicans who kept the equally idiotic Lewinsky blood-feud going long past its sell-by date. I know, I know, war is more serious than blowjobs, blah blah blah, but Clinton lied under oath, and Bush read a line that had been vetted by several dozen other people and is still supported by the British intelligence to whom he attributed the claim right there in the speech. I know you hate Bush. I know the sound of his voice and the sight of his face makes you want to vomit. But Democrats, here’s a news flash: most people don’t feel this way. Most people don’t believe he’s lying to them every time he opens his mouth, most people didn’t make up their mind on the war over the Nigerian uranium claim and therefore feel bamboozled, and most people are not going to all of a sudden reverse their support for a popular war that we already won. And win it we did, despite all the “quagmire” and “the Iraqi people want us out” nonsense that anyone who’s honestly paying attention and has ever done some research into military history can see right through. You may want all the above to be true, but most people don’t. Whether or not you’re in the right, change your goddamn tactics and change them now, because they’re appealing only to people who enjoy saying things like “Bush stole the election” and “it’s all about oil,” or to German kids who think the CIA flew the planes into the World Trade Center, or to British leftists who think that Tony and Me by Georg Bush book is funny, and that’s not enough to get you into the White House. So please, please, please, please, please, shut up about the stupid Nigerian uranium story. Even if you’re 100% in the right about it, shutting up about it will actually give you much more of a chance to fix the underlying problems of which it is symptomatic than continuously screeching about it night after night will. Consider dropping the story to be, as you believe Saddam Hussein was compared to Dubya, the lesser of two evils.
Another glimpse into Matthews’s psyche was afforded by a comment he made in an earlier segment of the show about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. As you might now, in a move roughly tantamount to tipping over the coffins of 9/11 victims (the ones of whom enough pieces were found to put in coffins, of course) and giving the bodies the finger, the government has kept sealed 27 pages of the 9/11 report, and it’s believed those 27 pages are a damning indictment of the Saudi government’s role in failing to thwart, if not tacitly or not-so-tacitly encouraging or even directly funding, the attacks. Matthews’s guests, including relentless terrorism expert Stephen Emerson, denounced the Saudi government over and over again, and denounced the administration for seemingly bending over backward to avoid any unpleasantness with these murderous douchebags, who use their fluke-of-geography oil money to spread their poisonous death-cult ideology, Wahabbism, into mosques and schools all over the world. Matthews, who agreed with the guests, closed the segment by saying “This is something we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives.”
Not if the hawks can help it.
If you actually read what the policymakers behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are on record as saying, the wars are more than just an effort at direct punitive retaliation for 9/11, or to enforce scads of UN resolutions and regulations on Iraq, or (heaven help us) to acquire more oil. It’s an ideological campaign against the sexist nationalist luddite homophobic Jew-hating war-crime-committing murder-suicide pact known as radical Islam, which as practiced by thousands and supported by millions is the root cause of this war just as the radical Christianity embraced by millions in medieval Europe was the root cause of that society’s ills. Among the many purposes for the Iraq War was the fact that it’d enable us to pull our troops out of Saudi bases and put them into Iraqi ones (at least for the time being), to modernize and open up an enormous amount of oil fields that would be operated by a friendly democratic government and whose revenue would go to the country’s people, not some UN-sanctioned grift that fed Baathist apparatchiks and their miserable genocidal writing-Korans-in-his-own-blood boss. In other words, as many hawk policymakers and thinkers would gladly tell you, it was a war to divorce ourselves from our odious gender-apartheid suicide-murder-exporting client regime, the House of Saud. The antiwar people yelling “What about the Saudis?” seem to have failed en masse to do any research on the subject, as the road to Riyadh runs through Baghdad.
And if this policy continues, which I sincerely hope it will, by the time I get old I won’t have to talk about Saudi support of terrorism, except in the past tense.