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...