IRAQ! Brought to you tonight by....

At last someone has grown balls enough to parody what's REALLY going on here in America -- the commercialization of death, war and patriotism.

The Onion (which apparently has enormous resources) has done a bang-up job of visciously satirizing the totally commercial nature of our current wars; wars of Big Business, unlike World War II, in which there were clearly good guys (us) and bad guys (our now and forever eternal enemies, the Japs and Krauts).

These days, what passes for a "just war" is more like "Iraq - Sponsored by KKR, Halliburton and those wonderful folks who brought you five buck a gallon gasoline, ExxonMobilChevronSunocoGettyBPCitGo!"

Here's one dead soldier's life being honored by Home Depot. Remember, this is totally satire. The dead soldier is a fictional character and the people in this spot are all actors.


Home Depot Honors Fallen Soldiers With Great Prices On Tools

No. Not Yet.

Look, I promise I'll finish it tonight. I did read an entire chapter last night. Honest to Godric Gryffindor!

Here's what I think is happening. I go to bed and read a chapter. Then I fall asleep. Sometime, in the middle of the night, Jo Rowling (that enchantress), sneaks into my bedroom and whisks my copy of HP&TDH away to a secret bindery, not far away. There they carefully break the binding on my book, install another sheath of papers representing another 3-4 chapters, rebind it and she sneaks it back under my bed, just seconds before the alarm goes off.

It's obviously a plot to make me look like I'm a slow reader, which I'm not. What were we talking about?

Oh, yes, they convicted Padilla of something, probably of thinking or saying evil things about Vice President Darth Voldemort or President Fake Southern Drunken Fratboy Who's Really a Spoiled-Rotten Ivy-League New England Preppie and Guard Deserting Drunken Fratboy -- and don't laugh, we're all next!

And I have one question. A half a trillion dollars, over 3,000 American military casualties and 4 years of war in two foreign nations have gotten us exactly what?

WHERE IS OSAMA MR. PRESIDENT?

Here's what I think. Every night we get close to ending the war. Then Fratboy falls asleep, and that bitch, the Veep, sneaks into his room and adds another six months of war to his presidency.

I can totally relate. I'll never finish the book. And you can

BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR THAT GEORGE W. BUSH WILL NEVER FINISH THE WAR IN IRAQ.

Note to the NSA data miners. This concludes our broadcast for today. We hope you have enjoyed our program and will join us again tomorrow. Have a pleasant evening everyone.

Sleeping Like a Baby

"Thank You, God..." Copyright © Austin Cline.

Somebody, I forget who, made a good point today about Dubya's refusal to "be funny" at the White House Correspondent's Dinner last Saturday night "out of respect for the dead at VT" ... that respect for the dead never stopped him before. I thought that was definitely worth noting.

And speaking of dead heroes, David Halberstam died yesterday. That's a real blow to the nation and to democracy. There was somebody who wasn't afraid to speak truth to power.

My friend Bev asked me recently what we old radicals should do now that we're finally getting pissed off enough to actually do something other than whine. I've given it a lot of thought.

Bitch. Loudly. Often. To anybody who'll listen and even to those who won't. One person DOES matter. One person can become thousands. I'm not that old that I don't remember how the "May Day" demonstrations grew in the early 70's until, by 1972, there were millions of people participating in mass demonstrations against the war in Viet Nam.

And bitch to the Supreme Court, too. Fat lot of good it'll do, but bitch anyway.

And get on the horn to your CongressCritter, too. There's a big vote coming up, maybe as soon as next Monday, on legislation to add the LGBT and Disabled communities to existing Hate Crimes legislation. Get on the horn now and nag the hell out of your representative to do the right thing and vote for passage. This is not the "Anti-Christian Act" that so many hatemongers are purporting it to be, unless the average Christian you know is a God-Fearing Fag Basher.

It's the little things that matter. Find some little thing to do. Change one incadescent light bulb in the house to one of those new-fangled mini-fluorescent bulbs. Anything.

And maybe, if you do just one little thing, when you go to bed tonight you'll wind up...

Sleeping like a baby.