Four Little Words

Talladega

Great race spoiled by a lousy finish. After driving through the big one, the race wound down to a long single file of cars winding the last laps down led by Dale Jr. with Jimmie Johnson either glued to his bumper or trying to lay back a bit to get a run on him. This is the kind of stuff people pay to go to races to see, especially with two guys in contention for the championship. In the final lap Jimmie stepped out to challenge Dale for the lead and his little teammate Brian Vickers (#25, also owned by Hendrick Motorsports), who had been pushing him tried to follow but hooked Jimmie’s rear bumper sending him into Earnhardt, wrecking them both while he sailed on to win the race.

The resultant "You little Prick!" was probably heard throughout my complex.

But. For a short time Brian Vickers achieved the impossible: He became the one driver even more hated than Kurt Busch. The “Boos” from the stands were very audible during his Victory Lane interviews.

I try at least to have some objectivity and say, “It was just a racin’ deal…” but that was just bogus. At the very least it's rookie-level incompetence.

But all the Chasers had bad days today and at least that doesn’t put Dale too far down to still try for the Championship. Jimmie, I think Jimmie is out. This is like his third “mulligan” in the Chase. I don’t think he is coming back from that.

Elliott days started out very well, moving from the middle of the pack to the top five by a ¼ of the way through, but then he vanished into the 30’s never to be heard from again. We don’t know why, he just disappeared.

What is with him and the guys in the booth? Does he have some sort of natural camouflage announcers cannot penetrate? Do his cars come with a cloaking device?

Prose

I have been gently reprimanded for my moments of more…embellished rhetoric lately. Granted, there have been some over-the-top moments, I’ll admit that, but then there has been a heck of a lot to be angry about and I get really, really sick of people waving the American flag in my face who so obviously don’t know anything about their own country.

Besides, I have professors telling me to break my writing down into short simple sentences all the time, here I can be as flowery as I wanna be. :)

But I will try to refrain from the more melodramatic verbage....

Romans

I think everyone has had a chance to get the riveting and revealing letter by the Marine in Iraq printed in Time.

Touching in it’s simple honesty, one detail leapt out at me…

“Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate — Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here — all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a band of brothers who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps.”

Now, I do not belittle these men and women’s reasons for reenlistment in any way. It is honorable, but I can’t help but think of Roman Legions.

Way, way back in the day, Roman legions were not reassigned as today’s military units are. A legion went out to the borders of the provinces and stayed there, twenty years or more sometimes. As men were killed or retired, they recruited from the local population of Romans and even native people’s. The glue that held these units together was the loyalty they felt for each other and their commanding general.

The problem? They were more loyal to their generals than they were to Rome. So whenever a general got it into their head that he could do a better job than the Emperor, he would pull the legion off the border and march on Rome, his troops behind him all the way. What did they know of Rome beyond the fact they weren’t getting paid on time?

“Screw the Emperor, our General takes care of us and we think he could do a great job taking are of the Empire!”

It destabilized the border, it destabilized the government. Granted, Rome withstood dozens of attacks/take-overs by such generals before she finally went kablooey. But in the end, it was one of the factors that wore Rome down.

What the Marine describes is possibly a similar dynamic: Troops long separated from home, with no one to rely on but themselves, being screwed over by their own government. Not to the same extent by any means, but we could end up with troops more loyal to themselves then the President.

Of course, at this point I think there are some people who would favor a military coup but I would rather not…and I doubt it will happen. Like I said, not nearly the same level of isolation the Romans had.

Just a thought.

“Biggest Outrage — Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest Offender: Bill O'Reilly.”

I wonder what Billy Boy is going to say about that?

In the end, I read letters like this and the exchange in the "Dispatches" area of Henry Rollin's website I posted last week and it really shocks and sadddens me. No one should have to live like this, ever. I realize sometimes it is neccessary for these guys to go through these tremandous privations, but if they must I would far rather it be from something that was just and valued. World War II, a world-wide conflict in which we knew we were in the right, lasted less than four years for the U.S. We're just passed the 3.5 year mark in Iraq.

Isn't it time we gave some serious thought to getting our people home?

Lott

Is he a racist, or just one of the biggest fucking idiots you have ever seen?

"No, none of that," Lott told reporters after the session when asked if the Iraq war was discussed. "You're the only ones who obsess on that. We don't and the real people out in the real world don't for the most part."

Lott went on to say he has difficulty understanding the motivations behind the violence in Iraq.

"It's hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what's wrong with these people," he said. "Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me."

First of all…Given the fact that thousands of Americans have died, tens of thousand Iraqis have died and the war is putting us trillions of dollars in debt, why aren’t the Republicans discussing it?

Or are they busy discussing how to get themselves re-elected again…

Two: Dear Mr. Lott, Civil Wars are kind of like that dipshit, put Union and Confederate soldiers in plain clothes and you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart either. Catholics and Protestants massacred each other like nobody's business during the Reformation, they were all white Europeans that were pretty much wearing the same thing.

What-a-maroon.

The Sunnis and Shiites have been at odds with each other for literally hundreds of years when the two groups split from one another over a question of succession a couple generations after Mohammed’s death. Eventually, they developed into their own versions of Islam. This article explains some of the details of how to they identify each other. (And if you think Muslims have a monopoly on grudges, just go talk to someone in Belfast about the British, or the Serbs and Croats about how much they love each other….hell, just go down to Georgia and say “Sherman”.)

The situation in Iraq is a particularly nasty one because the Ottoman Empire was Sunni as were many of the military personnel under Saddam later. Under the secular Ba’athist regime, they used their power to repress religion selectively, coming down much harder on the Shiites in the population than the Sunni's. So the Shiites have literally hundreds of years of violent repression they are lashing out against and are in "Never Again" mode while the Sunni's are terrified of reprisal and want their power back to protect themselves.

Arab Nations hate Israel because in 1948, Israel was carved forcibly out of the Nation of Palestine. Since then, Israel has reneged on almost every promise they made to rehouse the Palestinian people and been almost as antagonistic toward the Muslims (such as electing a man to be their Prime Minster wanted for war crimes by the Hague for massacring Muslims in Lebanon), as the Muslims have been toward them (such as the Six Day War).

Now was that so hard?

This is why wanting your elected leaders to be “simple folks, just like yourself”, as so many Americans did in 2000 and 2004, is a very, very stupid idea. Politicians control a lot more than a riding lawnmower and should be pretty smart, well-read and astute people. Anyone should want their leaders to be very intelligent, educated men and women who actually know and understand things because unlike you or I, their stupidity and ignorance gets people killed. Just like in Iraq.

The Bush administration runs around now saying, "Who could have known there would be a Civil War?"

Anyone with the slightest clue of Iraq's history, that's who.