Apologies are in order right up front to the famous Australian Lighthorse Brigade that distinguished itself in WWI, but I just couldn't fight off the temptation to parody the famous phrase into something far less heroic.  What I'm talking about here is the band of bamboozlers at the White House who worked so hard at selling the war to the American public when they attacked Iraq.  And they did find a lot of people willing to swallow the swill they threw out at that time . . . bullshit, mostly.  Actually, what they dumped on the public in terms of propaganda went past being just bullshit because it was actually just a load of lies.  This blog is about the liars, the propagandists, who did the job on all you dumbasses who supported the war.  

I bring this up mostly because of some recent talk about McCain possibly choosing Colin Powell as a running mate.   Whoopie!  That's just what the country needs - a couple of former military men in the White House . . . and more war in Iraq.  But wait?  Hasn't Powell changed his mind about all that?  Hasn't he publically stated that he thinks his support of the war was a mistake and a blot on his record of public service?  Nope, not really.  Mostly what Powell has done is clam up, retreat into retirement . . . or running around giving motivational speeches for outrageous sums of money.  In other words, he's still a whore, still sucking the tit of public service and all the while looking more pathetic.  Powell, you see, was a major officer in the Lightwhores Brigade at the White House.  You remember, right?  The dude who got up before the Security Council of the U.N. and lied his ass off . . . yeah, the one who went around the country making speeches about what a danger Iraq was to the free world.

Last fall there was lots of chatter about Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight documentary about the war and what all went on.  Word had it that advisors at the White House were in a stew about it.  Big hitters, former members of the Lightwhores Brigade, like Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, and Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, and ambassador Barbara Bodine have all turned critics of the war . . . and of the strategy that set it in motion.  Powell has been absentee in all this criticism.  Oh, he's made a few little remarks, like his prediction the surge wouldn't work.  Looks like Wilkerson, Armitage, and Bodine got tired of being whores for the Bush Bandits and are trying to reform, or at least rid themselves of the smell of a war gone rotten.

And then there's Condoleezza Rice, the gal who replaced Powell and continues to be a lap dog for the Bush war machine.  Lap dog, yeah, but she's worse than a lacky . . . she's still dangling her feet in the air for the vested interest, the greedy sonsabitches who so badly wanted this war.  I don't get it.  Even Time magazine excuses Rice for all she's done to aid this war.  So she's smart - so what?  She's still an architect of a war that's killed four thousand young men and women, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens.  I don't give a shit what's she's been in the past; she's corrupt to the core now.

A few years back I ran into a fellow left winger, and he was telling me about this dream he'd had.  He said that in the dream he suddenly found himself in a dark wooded area, but in the distance he could see city lights.  He's suddenly aware that the city is Washington, that he's in the woods somewhere along the Potomac River - and there's all sorts of movement around him.  There's this enormous caldron, so large that it's probably ten feet high and a good ten feet in diameter.  Condoleezza Rice is standing on a step ladder stirring the boiling mess with a large boat paddle.  Donald Rumsfeld takes care of the fire, piling on more wood and simpering like a wicked gnome.  At about this point in the story, I start laughing, but it gets better, or worse, depending on how you see it.

Swift boats, manned by men wearing t-shirts inscribed "Kerry: Unfit for Command" are pulling bodies from their boats and hauling them to the caldron, where they dump them in.  Rice cackles like a witch each time a body is dumped into the war stew she's brewing.  The Prez, Bush himself, is nearby, pacing back and forth and looking . . . well, looking stupid like he always looks.  Over by a tree, half concealed, is Cheney, whacking off while looking at pictures of destruction in Iraq.  And on the other side of the tree, Powell has a noose around his neck and is trying to throw the other end of the rope over a limb so he can hang himself.  At that point in the story, I'm on the ground, rolling around and almost too spent to laugh out loud.

But . . . I suddenly realize that my friend is not laughing, that he is actually weeping.  I sit up and look around.  I'm in the parking lot near a food market, and people are starting to stare at us.  So, I get up and start to console my distraught friend, telling him that it's just a dream.  Forget it, I tell him - it's not real.  That night when I went to bed, dog tired and needing a good night's rest, the story about the dream came back to me . . . and I had to get up and watch re-runs on television until I fell asleep in my recliner.  And wouldn't you know, I dreamed of snakes.

I hate it when that happens.

D. Paz, 3/23/08