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 in the cartoon, a family is sitting around the radio listening to the voice of the “liberators,” assuring them that the allies “are coming soon.” Switch to the studio - the announcer is a leering big-nose Jew. Cut to the Allied bombers: Mickey Mouse, Donald, Goofy, and . . . Popeye. They drop their bombs with disregard, and one of them lands on the house of the family listening to enemy radio. The Grim Reaper floats over the scene.
It’s all in French.
This was one of the jarring entries in the “Eye of Vichy” DVD I recently watched, and it reminds you that nothing seems to have changed in 60 years - once again the Jew-tools are coming to kill civilians with indiscriminate bombing. Well, look at these images from Space Imaging (link courtesy of Instapundit) and you’ll see how ruthlessly we’ve demolished Baghdad. Oh, it’s possible that the Zionist forces erected a giant painted tarp over Baghdad to fool the satellites; it’s possible these images are downloaded directly into Ariel Sharon’s computer, and he gets to work Photoshopping out the damage, using the clone tool to rebuild neighborhoods. I put nothing past the power of International Jewry!
These pictures are fascinating - it’s a capital in wartime, and it looks like it’s had a few bad gas main leaks, nothing more. The giant black plumes of fire come from oil trenches set alight by the Iraqis, and looking at them from above you realize they make excellent visual markers for incoming bombers. (If they needed such a thing, which they don’t.) The first picture shows a Presidential Palace - two words that ought not cohabitate, really - and it’s had the crap blown out of it. Across the street is a gigantic assembly building of some kind, perhaps the National House of Enthusiastic Rubber Stamping. It’s untouched. I’d wager a five-spot that they left it for whatever legislative body comes next. There’s no sign of bombing anywhere else, except for a small building down at the bottom of the picture; perhaps that was the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, or the State Bureau for Interrogative Dentistry. Something naughty happened there, in any case. I’d thought that the first phase of the air war would see the atomization of all the palaces, but perhaps that’s not so; good. Turn them into bed & breakfasts. Give every iraqi citizen a coupon good for one free night in a room in the palace. Thin Mints on the pillow, courtesy the US Military.
I wrote here somewhere that I felt bad for the conscripts, and I still do. Not the Republican Guard. Send ‘em to hell, as a famous soldier actor once said. I have the same reaction to the RG as Indiana Jones had to the strutting sadists in the first Indy movie: Nazis. I hate Nazis.
What was the nationality of that collaborator / art dealer in the first movie, again? Slipped my mind.
Somewhere on the net - I think it was an Aint-it-cool forum, which is really a hotbed of ill-informed fumbuckery - someone posted 84 reasons why Bush is like Hitler. Bush helped paint a shelf in the garage as a child, Hitler wanted to be a landscape artist, that sort of thing. The one that jumped out was HITLER WAS A DEVOUT CHRISTIAN. (Or, more likely, HITL3R WAS A DIVOTE CHRITSIAN.) I’ve heard a variant on this theme for years, that Nazism had some essential Christian component. Sorry - there was no God but Hitler, and Hitler was his messenger. (I’m snipping out the whole issue of that German pagan comic-book mythology that besotted some, and in general I'm simplifying the entire matter as well. This isn’t a thesis; it’s one guy trying to type quietly while getting up every seven minutes to put his daughter back to bed.)
Anyway - I thought of this today while reading another one of Saddam’s dispatches from beyond the grave. It contained the usual BS (how do you know a Ba’athist is lying? His mustache is moving. And we curse it!) and it contained what we now have come to expect from this noted secular despot: explicit religiosity. (Reuters link via the indispensable Command Post.)
“Damn them, and by God, there will be thousands of soldiers fighting for what is right, virtue and faith in defense of the land of prophets and holy places, of belief and devotion," it quoted Saddam as writing in a letter to his niece on April 1 . “This war is not like previous wars. It is truly a jihad (holy war) for the sake of God and the nation. It is a war between Muslims and infidels.”
We all know he doesn’t mean it; this is a fellow who probably installed drainage channels in the mosque floors in case he needed to use them as torture depots. But it’s a reminder that this campaign is not disconnected from 9/11 - it’s an integral part of the war. Whoever chose to speak for Saddam did not appeal to pan-Arab solidarity, to socialist duty, to the struggle against globalization, to the need to contain the American hegemony, or the primacy of the rule of international law, the campaign to release “Freaks and Geeks” on DVD, or whatever cause is floating out in the great maelstrom of international contention. Prophets, holy places, belief, devotion, jihad, God, war between Muslims and nonbelievers. Those are the terms.
By using them, the dying regime helps discredit them - those who see the war in those terms will learn again that Allah has declined to intervene, and they’ll have to wonder what that bodes. (It's interesting that Christianity's founding moments incorporate the concept of divine indifference - Jesus himself asks God has forsaken him, thereby introducing from the start the idea that God's plan may not necessarily conform to the immediate needs of man.) Unbelievers might be likewise unnerved; those who don’t take the ravings of a cornered rat to heart can’t help but notice how these words are no longer spears to toss at the West, but symptoms of cultural disease that spikes in the Arab world whenever it runs smack into the modern world.
When Syria gets religion - literally - it might be a signal that it's their turn to stand on the precipice, arms windmilling to keep their balance. And then the entire Middle East will change! They’ll get it! Right?
No. When the US leaves Iraq, it will have freed the Shiites, left the mosques intact, and built not one Christian church. We will import no missionaries, distribute no Bibles. The most important accomplishment of the Latter-Day Crusaders will be the destruction of a reign based on secular idolatry.
Sometimes I think the reason America is so despised in some quarters is that we fail to live up to other peoples’ worst expectations.
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I was en route to making some point I’ve completely forgotten; apologies. Gnat has been getting up every ten minutes. She’s having a problem with the big bed. She just came into my room and crawled into my lap for reassurance. What’s the problem? Monsters, she said halfheartedly. I told her there were none, and volunteered to prove it. She declined, and said she just wanted to snuggle. I asked if her Zoe doll liked the new big bed, and she said that she did. That’s a good sign.
So we went back to her room, made sure the light was on, cued up some music, and I tucked her in with the promise we would make cupcakes tomorrow after we went to Target. Then I told her I would sprinkle Magic Sleep Dust on her, and it would send her off to slumber - but only if she believed that it worked. “Trust the dust,” I said.
“Okay, Daddee.” She grinned and tucked her hands under her cheek and smiled. She closed her eyes and I sprinkled the dust. Kissed her goodnight and left the room. Not a peep since. She truly did want to sleep; I just came up with the right words that let her do what she wanted to do, and once I left the room she shut out the dark and turned her mind to cupcakes.
Where was I? Never mind. I’m off to bed, myself.
(New 'Fence; go read that, if you're still interested.)
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