Intravenous Caffeine

Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

Afghanistan: As Obama will say, the Surge is Working … Hmmmmmmm

The last two al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Bilal and Yussuf, discuss Obama's Afghan strategy and how they'd be happy to leave for $10 billion dollars and we wouldn't even have to send in 30000 troops.

Afghanistan-Pakistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan--it's getting so they're not even unpacking anymore

Well, the root canal is still a bit sore but the stomach virus has, shall we say, eliminated itself, so we are back here a day late. Obama’s speech to West Point–which Mr. Matthews stupidly characterized as “the enemy”–has already passed out of the news to give way to more important rumors about Tiger Woods and his many woods…which appear to be quite a few more than he carries in his sack. President Obama has, as was expected, elected to escalate whatever it is we’re doing in Afghanistan. I mean, what ARE we doing there? Is it a war? I thought that was over eight years ago. Is it a mission? If it is, I’d like to know what the mission is. Or was.Or will be. Because the only way you can end a mission is by accomplishing something and after 8 years of being in charge, we haven’t seemed to have accomplished much. Was it to catch Osama bin Laden? That’s what the advertising was back after 9/11. Well, hell, we let him escape to Pakistan. That’s one mission UNaccomplished. Was it to eliminate the drug trade? Hell, there are only two industries IN Afghanistan, rugmaking and opium poppies, and opium poppies is the one that brings the most cash into the country. Besides, if that was our goal, we should have just left the Taliban in charge–they’d brought opium production down to a minute fraction of what it had been. What’s 18 months gonna do that the last 8 years hasn’t?
To be fair, back during the election, Obama kept saying that Afghanistan was the GOOD war and Iraq was the BAD one and he was going to do something about it. But lots of us must have figured that was just to impress Fox News. And as it turns out, this is one of the few things he wasn’t blowing smoke about. Gays? Wait around. Patriot Act? You know, there are some awfully good things in there. Secrecy in government? Shhhhhhhh, let’s not talk too much about that one. Single Payer? Why, that would destroy our health insurance industry! So I can’t blame progressives for being surprised that he IS keeping his promise about this one. But, if we haven’t accomplished our mission yet, just WTF is it?
FOX NEWS knows what our mission is–since they seem to have become the fourth branch of government since Dick Cheney abdicated–it’s to “WIN”. That’s one word we didn’t hear in Obama’s speech, Fox newsies said with stuck record regularity, WIN! Well, Fox–and its subsidiary, the Republican Party–has always had a football game mentality to both war and politics, which I suspect are the same thing to them. No such thing as a draw, only winners and losers in their books, so if you didn’t win, you’re a loser. But — we won. We did that eight years ago. What we’ve been trying to do for the last eight years is figure out what the hell it was we DID win. True, we got rid of the oppressive Taliban government, but what did the Afghani get in return? Karzai–and his brother, Mr. Opium King? Who managed to hold an election in which hundreds of thousands of votes were cast in non-existent polling stations? I’m no fan of the Taliban but Cheeses and Crackers, couldn’t we have done a little better than Hamid Soprano?
Winning, as far as I can see, consists simply of keeping al-Qaeda and the Taliban out. Well, the Taliban, there’s only about 100 al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan at the most generous estimate, see Bilal and Yussuf in the illustration, but we always have to say “al-Qaeda and the Taliban” so that our “mission” looks like it still has something to do with 9/11. Where did al-Qaeda go? To the hills of our “ally” Pakistan. So why are we in Afghanistan? To keep them from coming back in. WTF would they go back to Afghanistan when they have a safe haven in Pakistan? I mean, it’s not like it’s their ancestral homeland. They have just as miserable conditions in Pakistan as they had in Afghanistan. Well, we have to stay to keep the Taliban out. What for? To keep up the opium trade? To prop up a government that is so corrupt it even makes the Bush administration look beige? We’ve had eight years to Kabul together a government in our own image and likeness and all we did was screw around. We ain’t gonna do it by getting serious for another 18 months.
But I think Fox News has a point, one that they don’t even understand–which isn’t saying a lot, since understanding things is less important to them than having an opinion. We have to have a surge to make it look like we’re taking some kind of action. Then we’ve got 18 months to figure out what we can say we accomplished so we can declare our mission “WON”. Then we can “draw down” before the ‘012 election. Mostly. Like Iraq, we’ll be keeping a significant garrison in place because the only way to keep the Taliban out is to stay fighting them. And, like Iraq, where we still have 50,000 troops, we’ll be there for some time to come. At a million dollars a year per man because that’s what it costs to keep troops occupying another country. Just think what we could do HERE with a million bucks! Never mind we, think of what I could do with a million bucks. Hey, doesn’t the USA qualify for “too big to fail?”
Which brings me to my final point. The Soviet Union was only in Afghanistan for 10 years and that little adventure is credited with its downfall. We’ll be hitting OUR tenth anniversary in 2011 and remember, the tenth anniversary is TIN!

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Yes, Virginia, There IS A Sanity Clause

Suddenly, Dick Cheney says there was no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq and that he is in favor of gay marriage. Santa Claus come early this year!

I Do Believe in Cheney Claus

Ahh, Dickie Boy. I guess it hasn’t occurred to you yet that nobody frickin’ believes you anymore. On the other hand, I guess you can’t be held to blame because the National Press Club obviously still DOES. Who else but the coprophagic reporters and editors who swallowed your BS for eight years would still pay attention when you offloaded the logs that you delivered the other day? Weren’t you the one who said that there wasn’t any doubt that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda? And said it over and over not just during the rush to a war that, oh, gee, you just admitted wasn’t really all that necessary, but for the five remaining years of your, oops, I mean, George Bush’s administration? Just who was it then who got us into this war? Congress? The other group who got diddled with edited intelligence, all disclaimers being buried in the footnotes? There IS such a thing as videotape, you know, and people can actually re-watch all those interviews. But not “the base”, I guess.
I guess Mary must be pretty happy right now also, now that Dad has realized he’s not against gay marriage. It must make her feel proud to know that he can acknowledge her sexual orientation without attacking anyone else–like John Edwards did during the 2004 election–for revealing a deep dark stain on his character. Too bad so many states have followed his earlier lead and started passing “Defense of Marriage” bills that define marriage as being between one man and one woman, but they obviously misinterpreted your unspoken thoughts.
Now, most of the news articles I read treated these statements of yours as two separate incidents, not wishing to reveal that you said both of these whoppers at the same event. But most of them completely ignored your dumping the blame for 9/11 on Dick Clark, suggesting that he was asleep at the switch and was caught with his pants down like the rest of you. Jon Stewart’s writers at the Daily Show (who have GOT to be watching every freakin’ news channel and C-Span 25/8!–as well as Arianna Huffington) After all, you hadn’t “read his book.” I guess you hadn’t read his memos, requests for meetings, briefing statements, either.
So what I want to know is, why does anyone pay you any attention anymore Dick? We already found you stealing the presents from under the tree. Isn’t it time we all grew up and admitted that far from being the Santa Claus we believed gave us peace and security, you were the Grinch who was stealing it away? Unfortunately, you’re out of office. It’s too late to invoke the Sanity Clause.

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Recommends Hotmail for your Terrorist Needs!

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of Al Qaida/Al-Qaeda used hotmail for communications. Here he receives an urgent message concerning his penis size.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed found that spam often slowed his communications

Back in the 90s, the Navy held an exercise to test its defensive capabilities. Officers were given instructions to develop and implement offensive strategies that would be tested in live wargames. Well, one commander, realizing how futile it was to attack with a comparable force, selected a different course of action. Using small boats, he boarded the target vessel with light-armed sailors, kind of like the Somali pirates, and was able to effect a takeover. Naturally, this result was scratched and he was given a failing grade for the exercise. It wasn’t the result that had been wanted.
It seems al-Qaida, or al-Qaeda, whichever the preferred spelling of the week is, also used such really stupid like a fox methods for communicating. Hotmail, prepaid phone cards, public phones, search engines. The code they used for exchanging phone numbers was devastatingly–bush league–A “10-code”…subtract the real digits from 10 and pass that along. Amazingly enough, such lame-brained tactics skirted by our best intelligence efforts, which were all geared towards navigating the Byzantine and high tech methods of the former Soviet Union. Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri described the operations in his guilty plea agreement filed recently in federal court, see Al-Qaida Used Hotmail, Public Phones In Planning also in the Washington Post. What’s our solution? To turn our entire monitoring security apparatus to listening to every phone call made to or from overseas, wasting valuable resources since we have no idea how to cull innocent from suspicious communications (since of course, terrorists never actually SAY what they’re talking about–Yo, Khalid, I have those pomegranates).
In other news, the alleged “father” of the Malawian child Madonna wishes to adopt, who’d never visited the orphanage and is totally unknown to the deceased mother’s relatives, has brought suit against Madonna to keep the child in his care so she can be brought up in poverty. Madonna adoption case heard amid paternity dispute Sounds like a shakedown to me. Here’s a link to an earlier cartoon I drew on the subject Madonna and Child–Malawi Edition

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