Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The enemy of my enemy

is a bad shot.

I'm sure you've all heard about the bomb that went boom near Shooter in Afghanistan. Frankly, I don't know why the Taliban would try to kill him - after all, they both hate freedom and are slaves to fundamentalist idealogies. Not to mention, this will only piss off people (ie, Shooter and McFlightsuit) who are known to have invaded Iraq partly because Saddam tried to kill McFlightsuit's dad, who have access to the world's largest supply of nuclear weapons, and who believe that they are subject to no laws. I'm sure that somewhere, there's a wingnut arguing that this means that we should nuke Tehran, just to prove a point. (The point being, of course, that America is run by psychopaths.)

Now, one could say (and I'm going way out on a limb here) that if we had finished the job in Afghanistan, the Taliban would have been weakened, Al Qaeda would have lost a huge revenue source (the larger-than-ever opium fields), and we'd have a military capable of responding to threats. Don't expect to hear that from anyone associated with the administration or the media, though - it requires actual thought.

It also provides us a lesson as to why growing the national debt at a rate so fast that mathematicians have had to invent new ways of counting to deal with it is a bad idea. Lead story on CNN.com - "Dow tumbles after China selloff: U.S. stocks plunged today after stocks in China and Europe slumped and investors digested the news that Vice President Dick Cheney was the target of a Taliban suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan. Cheney wasn't hurt. The Dow was down more than 133 at one point. China's stocks fell 9 percent, the worst one-day selloff in a decade."

There's an assassination attempt against the US VP, China goes nuts, and our stocks tumble.

And hey - if Americans want a personal reason (other than the dead people, of course, since they're depressing) to oppose the war in Iraq - the failure to finish the job in Afghanistan just made retirement portfolios all over the country tumble.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll infer that stocks tumbled because Cheney survived.

Unless you're a criminally minded CEO the neocons are the worst thing that could happen to retirement. Spend money you don't have and destablize as much of the world as possible. Great idea, especially if you're heavily invested in defense contractors.

Eagles Nest said...

Many good liberal talking points in this well written article that ceased to be valid long ago. You perhaps don't know the Afghanistan has a government that we have to deal with in order to get at terrorists there but then that would be an inconvenient truth. It has always been source of interest to me how the left can be comfortable with slinging insults in all directions but should someone put out a derogatory comment concerning one of their icons the wagons are quickly circled and the attack is on. True icons of liberal beliefs would be horrified at what has become of the liberal movement in this country. There remain few real liberals; most of those who label themselves as such are actually leftists.

schmidlap said...

Eagles Nest...Eagles Nest...where do I know that name from...

Your argument that we must defer to the Afghan government is absurd on its face. If Shrub tells them to jump, they ask how high, and how long to stay up.

The rest of your insult isn't coherent enough, or on point enough, to worry about further.