A soldier aims his gun in Diyarah, Iraq, on March 18, 2006. Today, the US fights proxy wars between various departments of our own federal government, using your tax dollars to buy the bullets and the bombs. (Photo: US Army)
Not so very long ago, Dick Cheney announced with his bare face hanging out that the vice president’s office was not part of the executive branch of the federal government. He coughed up this preposterous hairball because he didn’t want to give his official papers to the National Archive, as is required by several federal laws.
On that blissfully innocent June day in 2007, I believed that we as a nation had summited the Mount Everest of assholery, planted Cheney’s flag in a gritty crust of snow and watched as that bloody banner fluttered in the air-starved breeze.
This was the nadir, the final insult, the single silliest bark I’ve heard from a high public official since “If the president does it, it’s not illegal” and “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” It had to be, right? The vice president, who sits one missed heartbeat away from the big round room, isn’t part of the executive branch? Also, clouds aren’t part of the sky, water isn’t wet and bears don’t poop in the piney woods.
Such was my age of innocence. I believed with my whole heart that the arc of ridiculous had kissed the very ceiling of the sky. I was comprehensively wrong.
You may want to sit down for this one. Here be some foolishness of such raw and ponderous weight that it might cave in the solar system entirely. Ready? Here goes: There are currently two militias duking it out in Syria, in the shaved and shattered death zone between Aleppo, Marea and the Turkish border, and the US government is funding them both simultaneously.
The Knights of Righteousness (yeah, seriously, that’s their name) recently got their asses…