What He Said

I will now happily engage in the lowest form of blogging, the word-for-word re-post. Because there is no way in hell I can do any better. Original here.

by John Cole

Imagine it is 6 o’clock in the morning. You just woke up, brewed yourself a cup of coffee, and are sitting on the porch having a smoke, enjoying the morning air, thinking about what you have to accomplish today. Maybe your dog is with you, maybe you are chatting with your next door neighbor, who is also going through his morning ritual. You don’t live in the best neighborhood, in fact, there are some downright awful people living around you. But this is your house, you have mouths to feed and this is where you grew up, this is where your friends and family and job are, and this is what you call home. Sure, you’d like to move to some beautiful suburb where everyone is an upstanding citizen, but this is what you have, and you are making the best of it. And so you sit there, thinking about the day ahead of you, sipping your coffee, scratching the parts that always need the most attention in the morning after a good sleep, and…
WHAMMO. Out of nowhere, a crushing explosion vaporizes the house next to you, your house, and all the houses around you. The explosion throws you to the ground and pins you there, and the compression knocks the wind out of you and bursts your eardrums. All you hear is a loud buzzing. Debris is falling all over you, and you feel pain in multiple places on your body, but you can’t see through the dust and smoke to know if you are seriously injured. You smell smoke, burning flesh, and a mixture of toxic burning fumes from the smoldering wreckage of your former neighborhood. You hear your neighbor scream in pain. You gag on the cordite, and as you slowly start to regain your senses, a chill goes down your spine- “MY WIFE AND KIDS ARE IN THE HOUSE.”
Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? But this is the face of American policy in the Middle East. I know, I know, I’m an asshole and I hate Obama for pointing this out. This “hypothetical” and stories like it are happening every single day all over the Middle East in our forever war on terror. Maybe it wasn’t some poor sap on his porch having coffee. Maybe it was a wedding party. Maybe it was people on a convoy to a city. Maybe it was just some poor bastard “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” That statement always pisses me off- if someone drops a fucking bomb on me while I am in my house, how dare you tell me I am in the “wrong place?” Fuck you.
Maybe it was a 500lb bomb that went off the mark. Maybe it was a “precision” weapon that was a couple hundred yards off. Maybe the clowns at the CIA translated the address wrong or didn’t understand subtle nuances in the language (and we are short on translators because we hate gays as much as terrorists) and this was supposed to hit another side of town. Maybe someone was fed bad intel from a “trusted” source. Or maybe someone did something to the US somewhere and we just had to tell people to “SUCK ON THIS.”
And instead of being outraged by this, instead of being infuriated that the military was caught once again lying to us, we continue on. I’m sure very serious commenters will explain to me the necessity of our actions, and how there are bad people out there, and we do the best we can because WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS and PEOPLE HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOM and because HITLER/SADDAM/GADDAFI IS EVIL. We have to win the War on Terror!
This insanity has to stop.