Dodging the slings and arrows hurled at your convictions.

Thanks to The IWR Year in Satire

I chose today's illustration as a result of an incident which occurred in front of the federal courthouse building downtown during a local peace group's vigil that takes place there every Friday at noon. I had been going to these with my wife and her mother the past month. They've been supporting these demonstrations far longer and more faithfully than I.

But I stayed home this Friday to get our replacement garage door opener working smoothly. Without it, I can't get the car out of the garage. And with no car to drive around, U.S. oil consumption would decline, leaving Bush without his real, true reason for wreaking anarchy and terrorism on millions of Iraqis and killing tens of thousands of 'em in the process.

(Note to Bush--Calling Bush! There were no WMDs! [but you knew that beforehand, didn't you?] You got Saddam--your back-up "justification" for your Iraq misadventurism. Why not just get the fuck out? Why not, because those weren't your real reasons for going in. Right?)

What's now taking place in Iraq is *real* terrorism. It's Bush's demented form of nation building in the name of freedom and "democracy" with any innocent bystander its next potential victim. That's terrorism.

For every American who died on 9/11, how many Iraqis must die before justice is served? Estimates now stand at more than 33 Iraqis for every American victim on that day. But the real answer is none. That's because Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. It's not justice being served here. But--as I'm so proned to do--I digress.

So what does today's illustration have to do with what went on at the weekly peace vigil Friday at the courthouse? Well, my 80 year old mother-in-law was standing curbside. She was holding a sign that read, "DROP BUSH, NOT BOMBS" when a young angry motorist slowed down and said threateningly to her, "How about I come to your house tonight and bomb it?!"

I never fail to be amazed by these "patriots" who defend their president as he dismantles the nation and its constitution, his admission of illegally spying on Americans being his latest in a string of impeachable offenses. Those who blindly, or out of some deep seated tendencies toward ignorance, fear, or a subconscious love of despotism, support what's happening here are some very scary people. Not just because they can issue threats to blow someone up, but because they're enablers of behaviors by a president who's playing craps with the future of this nation as well as the world's. This man's president is an illegitimate child of power run amok. And yet, Bush's pathologies are being validated by people like this.

It's probably good I didn't go downtown Friday. It's not uncommon to get an occasional ominous reaction from a young chickenshithawk defending his president. But by threatening my 80 year old woman standing up for peace?!

I realize that fellow is like a mirror image of myself in that viewpoints opposite mine are very infuriating. But I temper my response to 80 year old grandmothers, i.e., I don't threaten to go over to their house and blow the shit out of it with them in it.

But maybe the action of that young upstart against a vulnerable elderly woman is the kind of bravado employed by the world's greatest military might against a millenia's old, defenseless civilization that didn't do anything to us. I guess my peace activist mother-in-law and the angry reaction of her antagonist is illustrative of the state of the nation under the great "uniter, not divider" who seized the government in 2000.