Five Before Chaos

They sure did a job on that one, huh? The irony of Muslims blowing up a shrine of those other Muslims is lost on me. Admittedly not knowing much about the differences between the Sunnis and Shiites, I still found it odd. I figured they would just stick with blowing up each other and would leave the holy sites alone. I guess not. The real sad thing here is I suspect that the people running our little war here and liberating Iraqis from their earthly bodies don’t really know much more than I do about this kind of stuff. Some chilling stats from the BBC about the impending civil war…(full article here)

2004
Total attacks: 26,496
Improvised bombs: 5,607
Car bombings: 420
Suicide car bombings: 133
Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests: 7

2005
Total attacks: 34,131
Improvised bombs: 10,593
Car bombings: 873
Suicide car bombings: 411
Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests: 67

That whole ‘destablizing the Middle East’ thing…could it be right around the corner? We (or Israel) lob a few missles into Iran, then what?

The unease has been mounting with me… not so much the Iraq thing, just all of it, mostly the idea that we really have a madman or two in charge of our country right now, and a spineless opposition party. I know it sounds like typical liberal chicken-little stuff, but the freshness of William Shirer’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ that I read over the summer is still on my mind. Some of what we’re seeing now (spineless opposition, xenophobia, control of the media) was going on in Germany in the early ’30’s. I am for once fearful of what this country may be like in five years, and the sad part is I don’t have enough faith in my fellow countrymen to turn it around. 9/11 did more than take down the towers.. it knocked the critical thinking skills right out of the heads of many Americans, something in short supply to begin with.

But that begs the question for me… how unpopular are Bush and the Repugnicans right now? 39% is the number of the day. You figure maybe 20-25% is the Rapture crowd, but what about the rest? How do we find out, other than the typical horseshit polls we are saturated with every day? Do we even trust any of them, when often they are done by the same media outlets that have enabled Bush and Corp. to get away with as much as they have already? It’s even tougher when you live in a true-blue place like Vermont, where most of the people you know hate Bush to begin with. You forget how it is in, say, South Dakota, where the legislature just passed an abortion ban with no exeptions for rape, incest. You forget that there are still a lot of crazy people out there.

Is the tide turning? How much more will even the Repugs in Congress put up with being marginalized by the White House? One theory as to why congressional Repubs are getting nervous centers around all those electronic voting machines. Earnest Partridge of The Crisis Papers expands on it a bit here, in a fine article called “Perception is Reality”. Basically, he says that as the voting public gets ever more weary of our government’s actions, they are going to be more open to listening to stories of voter fraud, an issue which the MSM has done a great job of marginalizing as a liberal conspiracy kind of thing. And when people vote in droves against the GOP, and somehow the tallies still come back as GOP victories, it won’t smell right and people won’t swallow it so easy as they have in the past. And that means less Republican victories. 40-50% is easy to fudge, as we’ve seen in the last few elections. 30% ain’t so easy.

My apologies for the lack of focus in this post. I intended to originally just comment on the shrine bombing, but thoughts start drifting, and there you have it. Time for more sausage.

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