House of Eratosthenes

Now that Carlos “Winning” Estevez has peaked, and I’ve finally managed to properly learn the first name of one of my oldest blogger friends, let’s go for something that is solidly put together & makes some sense.

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein’s evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi’s. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic. Gaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a “Republic of Fear.”

Moreover, that systemized brutality made Hussein immovable in a way that Gaddafi is not. Barely armed Libyans have already seized half the country on their own. Yet in Iraq, there was no chance of putting an end to the regime without the terrible swift sword (it took all of three weeks) of the United States.

Well, better put together & making more sense than that which it seeks to analyze, anyway. How do you explain fashion? It is, by nature, inexplicable, and it remains so in spite of generations of people who’ve made the attempt to xplick. Just the bell bottom trousers by themselves are an unworkable conundrum. We haven’t even gotten to the polyester suits, the muttonchop sideburns, the butt crack pants from the nineties…voting for Barack Obama…

I see all the talk about “blood for oil, how dare they, war criminals, blah blah blah” as on exactly the same level. Pet rocks, lava lamps, face tattoos, Good Lord how did we ever survive.

Thus it is with all the wailing, all the railing, against the invasion of Iraq for the last eight years or so. It still seems “hip”…kinda…to some. So the fad is staggering along. Well big deal, the droopy butt crack pants lasted fifteen years or so.

That hot new trend of leftist chanting against our move into Iraq, is ultimately going to take its place somewhere between the Whig party and Jim Crow laws. Solid, durable logic is not a requirement for an idea’s longevity across a decade or so; but for it to last throughout the generations, it starts to come into play. “Saddam was a harmless kitten” doesn’t meet the standard.

Solid, durable logic is not a requirement for an idea’s longevity across a decade or so;…

In My Humble Opinion, the growth market of processing minions, durably DENIED the mechanics of solid logic, allows for it.
Kinda like poultry to slaughter, or something.
Oooo!…free food, free shelter, no apparent preditors, magically self-cleaning environment…
What? Now everyone’s standing in THIS line? Oooo….what NEW free “comfort” stuff are we gonna’ get NOW? I can’t see that far ahead. That
cloud of flying feathers is blinding me.

Wasn’t there an old (thinly veiled as) Sci-Fi, or fable, or allegory, story- or two- like that?
- CaptDMO | 03/04/2011 @ 09:53
The one that springs to mind is a maxim about “only the lead dog can see anything apart from a dog’s ass.”
- mkfreeberg | 03/04/2011 @ 09:56
Was it ever anything but a fad?

Wars (with a Republican president in charge) are to leftists what a camera is to Charlie Sheen — an opportunity to preen and posture and look like a jackass while thinking he’s very smart and clever and cool. Nothing more, nothing less.

Wars with a Democratic president in charge are…. oooh, look! A shiny!!!!

One of the great benefits of living in a college town is that I get to see the vanguard of leftist “thought” firsthand. And lemme tell ya, it was simply amazing how fast all those “support the troops — end the war” signs came down right around November 5, 2008. Used to be you couldn’t drive more than a block without seeing fifteen of those things, but all of a sudden it looked like the whole city had been infested with gophers, there were so many mysterious holes on peoples’ lawns.

Heh. But I think it was Shakespeare — or perhaps the Notorious B.I.G. — who said, “if liberals had any principles they’d be conservatives.”
- Severian | 03/04/2011 @ 14:14
And lemme tell ya, it was simply amazing how fast all those “support the troops — end the war” signs came down right around November 5, 2008.

It works the other way around, too. When Bush was still in office and waging war in Iraq, and uninformed, ignorant people were assembling by the tens of thousands on the National Mall in DC every weekend to denounce the war…

…I wondered, “Where the hell were all these people back in the 90s, when their man Clinton was bombing Serbia to smithereens? You know…the United States operating under NATO auspices (in violation of its charter which forbids pre-emptive strikes, no less), without UN authorization, on a sovereign country that hadn’t attacked us, which was in the process of dealing with its own internal problems, in territory that appeared to have no bearing whatsoever on American national interests. And what of all the collateral damage and civilian casualties that come with waging war from 30,000 feet?

Where were all those wonderful, peace-loving protestors when the Clinton White House was playing “wag the dog” by firing cruise missiles at Sudan…and arrogantly imposing its will on a sovereign country by enforcing an artificial state (Kosovo) in the Balkans?

The hypocrisy and double-standards are just staggering. It was OK to send American forces willy-nilly around the world on all kinds of foreign-policy misadventures – few of which were explained or justified even to the American public, much less the U.N. But let Bush take out a truly threatening character, leading a coalition of 27 countries, with full authorization both from Congress and the United Nations – and suddenly he was a war criminal waging an illegal, unjust, immoral, prohibitively-expensive conflict in the MidEast, trading the lives of our troops for a few barrels of Iraqi crude oil and up to his ears in skulduggery with Blackwater and Halliburton.

Suddenly, waging war arbitrarily wasn’t cool any more.

It boggles the mind. But you know what they say – were it not for double standards, the Left would have no standards at all.
- cylarz | 03/06/2011 @ 00:09

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A More Sensible CharlieFriday, March 4th, 2011

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Friday, March 4th, 2011