From the desk of the bastard editor
For all three of you who missed a new installment of the bastard editor last week because, through technical foul-ups, I printed the same page two weeks in a row, I apologize.
I also apologize to all those volunteers who didn’t see their names in the masthead; so to make it up I have printed last week’s volunteers at the bottom of the page.
And now, the belated commentary on the new war in Afghanistan.
So we’re at war! Weehaw, break out the K-rations and the pocket bread mama, I’m goin’ Taliban huntin’! I don’t exactly understand how Canada has managed to rope itself into the war. Pledging troops and aircraft just seems so awfully stupid for a nation with a military of 60,000 or so. How do we find ourselves partying with those pigfuckers every time they throw a strategic air-strike kegger?
I suspect it’s just part of the awful drift into total unity with our cousins, to paraphrase Porfirio Diaz: Poor Canada! So far from God, and so close to the United States.
Can we get a grip on our fervour to do violence to the Afghan countryside for a minute and consider the consequences of these attacks? The U.S. has already spent the equivalent of Afghanistan’s annual GDP on the cruise missiles it has lobbed at the “air defense systems.” Right. Note to self America: the next time you covertly funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in sophisticated munitions into a civil war, you might want to include some cheat codes that can shut the shit down from afar afterwards.
The U.S. is trying to take out Osama and the Taliban leadership by bombing the whole country into the Stone Age, leaving no airport, road, supply dump, bank, or communications infrastructure intact and rendering Afghanistan unusable as a base for terrorism. This stradegy’s flaws are obvious when the Senate Magority Leader’s office is the victim of a mail-in anthrax attack, along with media and government offices across the world. The ground is shifting beneath our feet here and, while it’s not being mentioned too often, the U.S. doctrine on weapons of mass destruction (which biological attacks are categorized as) calls for a proportionate response. So if these anthrax letter bombs take out a bunch of people then we might have to see the U.S. cry havoc and let slip the nuclear dogs of war.
There is no exit strategy, so what is the long-term solution? Keep bashing them flat like they still do with Iraq? Reducing a country to rubble is one way to end their threat to you, but it has awfully Roman implications.
Military planners love to refer to Hannibal, the greatest general of Carthage, because of his innovative victories over Rome in the field. Can you find Carthage on a map today? Nope, because the Romans took the long view and decided that even though Hannibal was laying siege the Imperial City, one of their chaps, Scipio Africanus, should take apart Carthage (which was in the part of North Africa now known as Tunisia) brick by brick. The famous line, “they made a desert and called it peace” refers to the total destruction of Hannibal’s nation. Carthage never came back, eternal Rome eventually fell apart; America bestrides the Earth and soon Afghanistan, a country slightly larger than France, will be obliterated.
I had more to say about this last week, but, well, you know.
In news closer to home, Mike Harris is leaving office at last. I heave a vast sigh of relief, and so do the Liberals and the NDP, because even though he has been brought low in recent months, the Knife is scarily good on the campaign trail.
I’m not sure how the radical left is going to deal with this. Their smug smiling über-evil bogeyman is departing, and some feckless freak like Ecker or Clement will be bellying up to the bar to rebuild the party. Good luck, now that Harris is out the forces that opposed him will be riding on a wave of confidence, a wave that’s going to let the “kinder gentler” fools of Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals surf to power. I’d bet money that rabid animal Chris Stockwell will go even crazier if he doesn’t get the job. And if that colourless tool Jumpin’ Jim Flaherty takes over, expect a Liberal sweep in the next election.
I gotta say, I’ll miss the bastard. But what retirement present do you give to the man most responsible for the dismantling of our civil society? To the man whose PR machine so effectively rewrote the rules of the game that we will think of his profligate Tories as the business-y party when we didn’t manage a surplus during the greatest boom economy of the 20th century? For the man who had so many normally good and smart people acting like club-wielding cavemen when they went to the polls to vote for an agenda which included going hammer and tong after health care, our social safety net, and our children’s education? For the man who rode to power on a wave of common sense, but whose folksy wisdom didn’t include properly funding local utilities or adequately funding the environment ministry to make sure our water was safe. Not to mention the man who, at the least, seems to have sanctioned violent police action in Ipperwash.
Now, my lawyers say that a public lynching would be considered “murder” and that advocating for such a thing would be “uttering death threats.” Fagh, damn their oily hides anyway.
You know guys like Feldweibal Harris are just pigs with thumbs, so maybe we should remove his thumbs for his retirement. That way, whatever boards of directors consider paying him to lend some prestige go their goofball ventures will know him for the rutting squealer that he truly is.
Goodbye Mike, and as much as I hope your infamy will last as a cautionary tale, I pray that your cruel legacy will fade from memory as a sick joke we’d best ignore.
– S.D.
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