Dum Pendebat Filius

Wingnuts constantly frame the idea of US military withdrawal from Iraq as “surrender,” “retreat,” and/or “defeat.” They insist “we should win the war” instead.

But here’s the funny part: no wingnut has ever been able to describe what “winning the war” would actually look like. Not one of them has any idea what they actually want to see happen. They have a completely vague, albeit noble-sounding, idea — they want to see “victory.” That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Go ahead and ask a wingnut to list specific conditions for a US victory in Iraq, and he won’t be able to do it.

Try asking a wingnut to list specific conditions for a US victory in the “Global War on Terror,” and he won’t be able to do that, either.

Do wingnuts think every guerrilla and “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” terrorist wannabe in Iraq will one day put down their AK-47s and ask to sign a peace treaty? Do they imagine Osama bin Laden will emerge from his Pakistani cave and tell the world he’s had enough, that every terrorist in the world gives up? Or will American soldiers just wake up one morning and find that all the Iraqi insurgents just decided to quit overnight? Will a terrible avenging God swoop down from heaven on the back of a Bald Eagle and char each and every Muslim Terrorist to ashes one fine day?

Who knows?

Wingnuts know one thing for certain: they really want to “win.” It’s just a shame they don’t have the slightest idea what that would actually mean.

To the wingnut, it seems victory is like pornography — “Maybe I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

You might have been wondering, readers: How does Sen. McCain propose to reduce the size of the federal deficit? Well, the McCain campaign has answered the question for us: All we gotta do is WIN THE WAR(S)!

The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

Yes, readers, that’s an actual quote from Page 4 of Sen. McCain’s official economic plan.

What could be simpler? All we need to do is continue to hemorrhage money fighting useless wars overseas until the magical day arrives where we DEFEAT THE TERRORISTS, at which point we can put down both our M-16s and our checkbooks. Then we’ll be SAVING money, and we can use those savings to reduce the federal deficit. C’est simple comme bonjour, as those cowardly French surrender-monkeys say.

(via Dday at Hullabaloo)

From now on, readers, I want to be known on the Internet as “Dumpendebat Hussein.”

[S]he joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

The words of Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond (R. - Mo.):

“I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do,” Bond said.

That doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Give me liberty or give me death,” does it, readers?

Yes, the Nuremberg Defense (”We were just following orders”) is acceptable in America today.

I’m back, readers, with photos, as promised.

I’m still working on the pictures of Egypt, but what the hell, you can wait for those; you’ve all seen a million pictures of the Sphinx and the Pyramids anyways. Here are pictures of Ethiopia:

• Pictures of Addis Ababa, the capital city.
• Pictures of the Guassa afroalpine grassland (in the Menz Highlands), including my friends’ research camp, and gelada monkeys (Theropithecus gelada).
• Pictures of the remote mountain town of Mehal Meda in the Menz Highlands.

The long-awaited vacation is finally here, readers: the first leg of the journey starts tonight, with a flight to the Horn of Africa. I’ll be back, with pictures from Ethiopia and Egypt, during the first week of June.

I might as well make it official: this blog’s going on hiatus for a few weeks, readers. I plan on returning sometime during the first week of June. Stay tuned…

Who believes in personal responsibility, readers? Wingnuts do, that’s who.

Presidential candidate Sen. John Sidney McCain III (R - AZ) thinks Americans need to take personal responsibility for their chronic illnesses:

John McCain Believes in Personal Responsibility

* We must do more to take care of ourselves to prevent chronic diseases when possible, and do more to adhere to treatment after we are diagnosed with an illness.

Suck it up, sickies. It’s your own damn fault. That’s the American way.

And Mark Noonan at Blogs for Victory takes a stand against the evil “stars and media corporations” who enslaved his loved ones:

How many of us have friends and family members who went whole hog into sex and drugs because it was “cool” - and made “cool” because various pop culture heros [sic] did it (or, at least, seemed to do it) and it never appeared to cause them any problems, and is presented to the public as a heck of a lot of fun? Counting quicky [sic] among my friends and family over the past 30 years, I come up with seven who destroyed their lives at the urging of popular culture, and one of them is actually dead. True, we all have to be held responsible for our own choices in life - and these friends and family members are paying their price… in poverty, addiction and, in one case, in a coffin. And as we all have to be held responsible for our choices, shouldn’t stars and media corporations pay their price for their choices? No one was ever clamouring [sic] for gansta-rap [sic] - the music business put it out, and slickly marketed it for maximum impact on young people. They created the market for it, and then raked in the huge profits… isn’t it high time they paid a bit back? Made good some of the damage they’ve done?

Do you follow that, readers? Mark Noonan claims that “the urging of popular culture” caused seven of his “friends and family [members]” to “destroy[] their lives” with “sex and drugs.” He then claims that “stars and media corporations” should “pay the price” for it. His “friends and family” are apparently helpless robots, who have no choice but to obey “the urging of popular culture,” but the dictates of “personal responsibility” call for some unspecified price to be paid by the evil “stars and media corporations” who “put.. out” and “slickly marketed” something he calls “gansta-rap,” ostensibly as part of their evil plan to trick good Americans into going “whole hog into sex and drugs.”

That’s what Personal Responsibility is all about, readers.

(McCain link via Sadly, No!)

In the previous post, I linked to a TMZ.com item that said Barack Obama might be sneaking the occasional cigarette. Now I have seen Jake Tapper’s blog post (one of the sources for the TMZ post I linked to), and it just drips with holier-than-thou hokum. It’s not the smoking, readers — it’s the lies.

It’s not a big deal in the scheme of things — the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis — indeed, it’s miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.

Except that I don’t like feeling that I wasn’t being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect [sic] of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we’re confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)

Yes, readers, Jake Tapper thinks it’s a problem if Obama’s maybe not telling the truth about firing up a couple of Marlboro Lights every now and then, because Jake and his friends in the news media are very concerned about making sure that politicians are all being honest with the American people. If I were making this up, you wouldn’t believe it.

TMZ.com reports that Barack Obama might still be smoking cigarettes on the Q.T.

Forget about gender and skin color — is today’s America ready for a President who smokes? As we all know, it’s considered diabolically wicked to indulge in cigs these days. Anti-tobacco fanaticism has become so mainstream, and so fanatical, that smokers are thought of as, quite simply, bad people.

As a former cigarette smoker, I have to say I think it would be pretty surprising if Barack Obama was actually able to go through the pressure and stress of a political campaign without “falling off the wagon” and picking up a cigarette at least once in a while. I’ve been off the cigs for eighteen months now, and it’s still pretty much day-to-day — I still want to smoke almost all the fucking time. If I had known how hard it would be to quit, and that it would be hard for such a long time, I doubt I’d even have tried quitting. If the anti-tobacco fanatics had any idea how hard it is to stop smoking, I suspect many of them would tone it down a bit.

(Well, actually, no. No, they wouldn’t. Anti-tobacco fanatics are assholes, and if they didn’t have tobacco smoking to be assholes about, they’d find something else to be assholes about; but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, readers, if Barack Obama is indeed still smoking, he had better keep it to himself. A cigarette smoker cannot be elected President in today’s America.