War Is Not a Video Game

Yeah, so-called "first person shooter" video games on a slick X-Box can be kind of fun to play, but they are not "war". War -- real war -- is NOT a video game.

You wouldn't know it from the praise heaped on American Sniper by Fox News, who is creaming its jeans over it, while at the same time denigrating "Hollywood" for being a bunch of leftist Islamist-jihad-enabling brie-eating wine-snarfling elitists. You know, the same Hollywood that made this movie, the same Hollywood that hated America so much that they nominated this picture for about five hundred Oscars, including Best Picture.

The same Hollywood that provided a pathetically doddering old man to argue with a chair at the Republican national convention. The same pathetic old man who went on to make this movie. The same pathetic old man that must need money really really bad, so bad that he obviously can't afford to retire.

Yeah, I'm looking at you, Clint Eastwood. Jesus man, give it a break. Go back to arguing with that chair. It suits you.

Killing another human being is the absolutely worst thing that a human being can do. I don't give a flying fuck about how much the now-sainted-by-Fox Chris Kyle claimed that he enjoyed sending hajjis to their seventy-odd virgins, killing another human being, no matter who you are, takes a terrible toll on your very soul. I don't know anyone who killed someone in war (I was in Vietnam myself, and I know a lot of veterans who have) who wasn't fucked up by that to some degree. Anyone. If anyone isn't affected by it, they are a sociopath. We should not, as a society, exalt our sociopaths.

Going to war. It's not fun, it's not a video game, it's not "noble". It is, in fact, the veryworst thing that a country can do to its young men, and yet we still do it.  By "We" I mean the dickwad chickenhawks like George "Baby Doc" Bush and Dickhead "Darth" Cheney, to whom military service was something to avoid, and avoid talking about, because they (Cheney) had "other priorities", instead of answering their country's call when an actual war was going on, thereby letting one of 16 men from Midland Texas and one of 12 men from Casper Wyoming die in their place in Vietnam .

I've asked this question before and it is still valid: "Who Died in Your Place in Vietnam"?

I haven't seen American Sniper and I have no plans to see it. I don't have a problem watching most war movies, even those of the John Wayne variety, wherein every enemy soldier ("Japs" for the most part) gets what is seen as coming to him. But it seems to me that this particular movie glorifies the killing just a little too much, celebrates the death of another human being a little too eagerly, another human being whose only "crime" was being born an Iraqi and then exacerbating that misfortune by being in the way of a bullet screaming towards him from some hidden murder gun on a rooftop so far away that the sound won't even carry that far.

I don't need it. I don't want it. And I won't support it by spending my money on it. Fuck that shit.

Oh, and "fu_k you Sarah Palin". Just thought I'd toss that in there...

Even More Ted Nugent

No, I'm not being obsessive over this fucker, but some things are just over the top:

Now I am not anti-draft dodger per se. A good friend of mine chose to do his two years of government service as an inmate of a federal correctional institution rather than submit to the draft. And other friends went to great lengths to avoid being drafted, including moving to Canada and renouncing their US citizenship. They all had one thing in common: They were opposed to the Vietnam War and were objectors, conscientious or otherwise, to it. I admire them for sticking up for what they believed regardless of the consequences to themselves.

But someone like this asshole, who prides himself on his prowess with a machine gun, who is a hard core Republican, who is an NRA spokesman/officer, who actually supported the war in Vietnam (I don't know that for a fact, but what are the odds that he didn't?) and yet chose to let someone else serve in his place (are you listening, Dick Cheney?) is beneath contempt.

In other words, he is a Chickenhawk.

Romney: Another Chickenhawk

I've always found it kind of odd that Mitt Romney never quite managed to find the time to serve his country in the US Armed forces. After all, Mitt is of an age (born in 1947) that, when the 1960s were in full flower and the flower of American youth was called to serve and die, that he really should have been called to serve.

Of course he was on a mission for the Moron Mormon church for two years in, of all places, France! How many Frenchmen can be wrong? All of them who fall for the cheese-pie-in-the-sky fantasies of the Mormons...

Okay, cheap shot -- everyone knows that I don't hate the French. But I do hate most Mormons and I hate most Mormon missionaries (okay, hate is a strong word for what is really a kind of special pity for a naive bunch of brainwashed children) and I especially hate chickenhawks.

So why is it that Mitt, even though he was pretty public in demonstrating in support of the draft at Stanford(!) in 1966, was never sent that infamous "greeting" that a lot of us got when we were afforded that "opportunity" to serve our Uncle Sam?

The article linked above seems to conclude that his status as a "missionary of god" got him a permanent exemption, but I know that this is a faulty conclusion. It got him a deferment only for the 24 months that he was "laboring" in the mission field, but after that he was -- or should have been -- 1A with his local draft board again.

When I was an unwilling employee of Uncle Sam myself, I was in training with this creepy crewcut geekezoid -- he looked a lot like that Gary Larson kid with the black glasses and flattop haircut -- from Idaho who was a "returned missionary", having served his two years in Germany. He was, like me, a draftee, but he was also a scion of Mormon Royalty from several Utah generations (you'd recognize the name immediately if you knew anything about Mormon Royalty). Back then, I thought that most Mormons were a patriotic lot and wouldn't consider avoiding the draft.

Still, when something over 80% of my basic training company -- all draftees, of course -- got sent to advanced infantry training at Fort Polk Louisiana (prep school for Vietnam) Mister Mormon Royalty managed to snag himself a plum quasi-diplomatic liaison assignment to ... Germany. All because he spoke (sort of) German.

Which brings us full circle back to Chickenhawk Romney. If he didn't get that deferment because he was on a mission, then why didn't he get drafted?

Could it be that it was because his father, George Romney, who himself had avoided the WWII draft himself by making cars in Detroit, was the governor of Michigan?

And even though our Mittsy was in favor of the war, he just didn't want to dirty his own hands with it; his father, when he tried to run for president (yes, it's true) in 1968, came out against the war and said that, when he was for it before he was against it, he'd been "brainwashed" by the generals. Which history shows was his knell of doom...

Politics is a dirty business, but it ought to be at least a public dirty business. Mitt Romney needs to clear the air, straighten out the record, and come clean as to why, if he really supported the war, he didn't do anything personally to help win it. Like enlist. Or like allow himself to get drafted.

But I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for it. The fucker won't even make public his goddam tax returns. He's not going to address a half-century old question as to why he, despite having every opportunity to do so, did not serve his country in the Vietnam War.

Return of the Chickenhawks

I see that the neocons lost no time in calling for yet another war, this time against Iran.

As you might surmise, it's the usual suspects: Sean Hannity, William Kristol, John Bolton, et al., none of whom have actually worn the uniform of the US armed services, even though they all had a significant opportunity to do so.

In short, chickenhawks, whose motto is "let's you and him fight -- I'll hold your coat". I haven't done my due diligence on all of the names mentioned in the Common Dreams article, but I'm willing to bet good money that not a single one of them has served in the military.

But that inconvenient fact has never stopped them before.