He who kills the head guy becomes the new head guy. Brutal, unpleasant, but true. So? The USA does not have legitimacy in the eyes of the Shia rebellion because it hasn’t killed Muqtada al Sadr outright. Because he is still around they believe he must be more powerful. So they follow him. Put a cruise missile through his window and he becomes instantly less popular.

See, it’s simple. If George W. Bush kills Muqtada al-Sadr, Sadr’s followers will immediately pledge their loyalty to Bush. Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?

Indeed. Everyone will be dead.

I’m pretty sure that’s the general idea. When all the Muslims are dead, then we will have peace! It’s brilliant in its feral simplicity.

This guy is brilliant! He should sign up for military service and single-handedly win the war!!

Wow! What a man!!

http://www.goarmy.com

The nation needs 28% more probably-gay action heroes who never actually served in combat?

Good, shoelimpy, you found the army site! Now you can enlist instead of bothering us.

I love the smell of Cheetos in the morning.

Saddam Hussein is still allowed to rave on TV like a wino driven by drugs manufactured in a genetically modified Babylonian goat.
You have to admit, as well as the vividness of that simile, it has the advantage of begin grounded in reality. Every channel seems to be broadcasting drug-driven wino-ranting these days [obligatory joke about Fox goes here].
His idea that genetically-modified Babylonian goats are the state-of-the art technology for drug production is slightly more enigmatic.

How did you stumble on this gem — from Kevin’s website?

By his logic, when we killed that last guy in Iraq with a cruise missle (you know the one), the insurgency should have ended.

Moving livestock by plane is a bad plan. Seriously. Like, any sane crew would look at you like you had three heads, then punch you in the face for suggesting it.
Unless he’s suggesting that we load up C-130s with dead pigs, and drop their carcasses out the backdoor onto the ground. Which would be retarded and ineffective.
And would instill more violence among muslims worldwide.
Which, as we’ve seen, is the only thing the 101st is capable of.

The reason the Sunni insurgency is still around is because Saddam Hussein is still allowed to rave on TV…

Sweet fancy Moses, reading this is like having someone vomit luke-warm stupid directly into my eyesockets.

Unless he’s suggesting that we load up C-130s with dead pigs, and drop their carcasses out the backdoor onto the ground. Which would be retarded and ineffective.
It’s pretty clear that your man Longman has not tried to think through his proposals to the point where he’d notice their internal dissonance.

I’m not sure if ‘logic’ is the right word for what’s going on inside his mind. It seems to be a howling pandemonium — an aviary of metaphors (retreads, cookie-cutters), memes (muslims vs. pigs) and mis-remembered scraps of history, all ricocheting around in darkness like frightened pigeons, and bumping into each other until a couple of them adhere into some sort of semi-stable configuration, which he snatches out of the aviary with a butterfly net and arranges any which-way on the page, with no time to waste in checking whether the mental images are plausible. This is surrealism, baby! If Andre Breton were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave. As well as beating himself over the head with brightly-painted machine tools. Foxgloves, yelp! Filthy great blood-bags!

But I did like Longman’s idea of retreading errors as if they were tyres, because you certainly don’t want to drive around on errors when all the tread has worn away; they wouldn’t be safe in wet conditions.

One last thought… the final word on drug-manufacturing Babylonian goats comes from Snakefinger, naturally. I give you —

Golden Goat

No way up and no way down
No room in the middle
And there’s no way around
Well, I can’t go and I can’t stay
My lungs are black
My brain is gray

I have seen the Golden Goat
And he would like to lick my throat
I know his mane, I know his spoor
I know he waits outside my door

That goat’s too weak to do me harm
But he has got a big long arm
It fills my dreams, it’s in my head
It makes me shake
and wet my bed

It really must be a mental illness that’s affecting people like Longman.

Because how can they hold simulatenously in their heads the two ideas 1) things are going swimmingly in Iraq it’s just the media that’s showing the wrong things and 2) Bomb the fucking place into glass.

And – dropping pigs caracasses from cargo planes? Is he high?

Wingnuts haven’t had enough of their Iraqi-blood lattes yet. Now they want Iraqi-blood egg-nog for the holidays. Do they realize that they’re more blood-thirsty than leeches and vampires?

Pelosi 2007 – Freedom can’t wait ’til 2008!

Mark S. said, December 4, 2006 at 7:38, I love the smell of Cheetos in the morning.

Thank you, Mark S! That’s the best summation of wingnut arguments EVER!

Guy likes to pull triggers he never has to touch don’t he?

After reading this, I have 2 conflicting opinions of the author.

1) He is either a consummate and cutting edge RW military analyst who will soon be making his debut on the Sunday AM Bigs….or

2) Longman is actually a consortium of 100 not-so-bright monkeys who have been typing random ideas on their Commodore 64s. And they are running proprietary PajamaMedia 1.0.3.4 software to synthesize their thoughts into a single post.

I’m not sure which.

This is surrealism, baby! If Andre Breton were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave.

That reminds me of something hilarious my best friend said one time. Somehow we found ourselves in this insanely seedy after-hours bar in Los Angeles. It was like a South Central version of the Star Wars cantina scene– you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. The surreality factor was off the charts. He turns to me and says, “Breton’s got nothing on this.”

allowed to rave on TV like a wino driven by drugs manufactured in a genetically modified Babylonian goat

Replace TV with worldnetdaily and he’s got the opening for his one-page autobiography.

The U.S. should not show favoritism when coming across insurgent groups fighting each other – the U.S. should kill them all.

This is funny for soooooo many reasons.

Ah, the wingnuts become more genocidal as the truth of the Iraqi debacle begins to intrude on their masturbatory fantasies.

I think Andrew’s also been writing for the Boston Globe under the nom-de-wingnut Jeff Jacoby
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/12/03/fighting_to_win_in_iraq/

It always amuses me the way the Israeli Defence Force PROs talk about “terrorist infrastructure” – I mean, what infrastructure? Terrorists don’t have infrastructure by definition. If they had it they would be an army. I suppose these “insurgent headquarters” bombs are meant to fall often on have big signs outside with INSURGENT HQ on, for easy identification.

Also, the pig-munition meme. Some wingnuts go so far as to claim that the British did this in Iraq in the 1920s, but there is absolutely no historical evidence of it. And anyway, we wouldn’t have done something that incredibly stupid. In 1857, a rumour that the new cartridges being introduced in the British-Indian army were greased with pork fat was the proximate cause for the Indian Mutiny..

Can we please just get Patai’s “The Arab Mind” off the “required reading” lists?

Some Guy: Moving livestock by plane is a bad plan. Seriously. Like, any sane crew would look at you like you had three heads, then punch you in the face for suggesting it.

Some Guy – thank you for your comments, but, really, there are more serious things wrong with this man and his arguments than a lack of understanding of the air freight business. This is as though he had written: “We should root out homegrown terrorists by FLATTENING DEARBORN with 15-inch shells from the USS New Jersey!”; there are other problems with this proposal as well as the fact that the New Jersey actually fires 16-inch shells.

Rumor has it Andrew Longman is Bush’s second choice for SecDef after Robert Gates.

And I love World News Daily. It’s like the Weekly World News or National Enquirer of online ‘political’ coverage.

Especially good (as in really bad) is Michael Farah’s intelligence coverage, which reads like rejected treatments for the next James Bond film. If they could team that guy with the Washington Times’ Bill Gertz, I could cut back my monthly comic-book reading by at least 10 percent.

I mean, nobody believes any of the crap they post there. Do they? Do they?

Oh…

That’s kind of scary.

“…a wino driven by drugs manufactured in a genetically modified Babylonian goat.”

And all this time I thought it was the wine that drove winos…

I’m totally making a t-shirt with the gen-mod Babylonian goat thing on it. You can’t invent shit like that.

Goat meth labs, bombing for peace, pork rind kryptonite, alpha male assassinations…we have a true winner here. I could hear the fapping when he wrote that 5% gdp growth line.

Bombs should fall on insurgent headquarters often.

Is it just me, or does that sound like a mnemonic device?

The dropping pigs thing, I dunno, reminds me of the flying turkeys episode of WKRP….

In 1857, a rumour that the new cartridges being introduced in the British-Indian army were greased with pork fat was the proximate cause for the Indian Mutiny.

And beef fat for the Hindu troops, I believe.

Have you guys considered that maybe Longman is being very subtle and nuanced in his use of metaphor? After all, isn’t he really just saying that the insurgency in Iraq will end when pigs fly?

It really must be a mental illness that’s affecting people like Longman.

Oh, it is. What else can you call this pathological level of racial hatred? While bumping 97% on the stupid scale, it hits 100% on the offensive meter. I swear, these people are GRATEFUL for 9/11. They may not have even known prior to late 2001 that they hated muslims, but they knew there were people out there they hated and they merely need a single catalyzing event to identify them. The joy is twofold. There is the tribal us v. them played out for fatal keepsies with all the attendant shock and awe, modern military hardware and the wingnut’s favorite sound, the steady clockwork BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH of a 25mm Bushmaster chain gun demolishing an apartement building, er, sorry, insurgent HQ in the heart of a big city.

Imagine the frustration, martial fantasies played out on football fields, african-americans are off limits for outspoken hate, you can SORTA hate mexicans but only in the context of illegal immigration, you can hate gays but if you hurt them you get tossed in prison, what’s THAT about? Ahh, but muslims. THEY attacked us, did they not? We can advocate genocide, ethnic cleansing and wholesale murder and the best part? It might even happen! Hell, we’re responsible for half a million dead muslims already (doesn’t even BEGIN to balance the scales for our three thousand dead in NY and Washington), and we’ve got two more years of bush and then hell, mccain or hillary, more muslim killin coming up.

Val Kilmer, in a memorable take on doc holiday, described these animals well: A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of himself. And he can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it. These sub humans cannot be satisfied by bloodshed. They will want more, more death, smoldering cities and mass graves, war without end, amen. And it is an open question if there are enough true american patriots to stop them…

mikey

‘Can we please just get Patai’s “The Arab Mindâ€? off the “required readingâ€? lists? ‘

…and take away Longman’s GI Joes and Batman comics while we’re at it.

A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of himself. And he can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.

Sweet fancy Moses, reading this is like having someone vomit luke-warm stupid directly into my eyesockets.

See, this is my problem this morning. Can’t decide which reaction I wanna go with . . .

Kitchener of Khartoum crushed the Sudanese insurgency and brought relative calm to that country for 50 years by opening up with the British naval guns on the tomb of the revered Mahdi, utterly leveling it. Any sight revered by a terrorist insurgent should be pulverized with a very American bomb and…

1. The Sudanese “insurgancy” had held the country for decades.
2. Kitchener didn’t purposfully destroy any other monuments. In fact, he rebuilt all the mosques damaged in the war and forbade Christian missionaries from entering the Sudan.
3. Kitchener realized that followers of the Mahdi and followers of Islam were not necessarilly one in the same.

Gods above, I can’t believe I’m defending Kitchener. He was a racist war-mongering imperialist shit. That said, he was a better man than anyone in the modern Republican party.

What I like about Longman’s idea is that it’s based on a proven model. Ruthless force against civilian populations of occupied countries worked so well for the Third Reich! They completely vanquished their enemies and saved Western civilization in Europe to this day!

Shorter Andrew Longman:

“If we simply killed everyone in Iraq, we would win.”

Any sight revered by a terrorist insurgent should be pulverized with a very American bomb and, preferably, a C-130 full of pigs dumped on it from a few thousand, splat, feet.

so that whole “we are there for the brave Iraqis yearing for freedom, hearts and minds” stuff is out teh window again? Good to know. Good to know.

Needed in Iraq: 28% more John Wayne

Aside from all the other batshit-insane ravings in Longman’s piece, I am really curious as to how he came up with 28% more John Wayne. I mean, why not 27% or 29%? Is there a margin of error involved?

Well, as a wise man once said, you fight your wars with the John Wayne you have, not the John Wayne you wish you had.

Catapoultry, people:
“The Chicken Gun is designed to simulate high speed bird impacts. It is named after its usual projectile: a whole dead standard sized chicken, as would be used for cooking. This has been found to accurately simulate a fairly large bird. The test target is fixed in place on a test stand, and the cannon is used to fire the chicken into the engine, windshield, or other test structure.”
Perhaps the technology does not scale up to pig-carcass size.

At any rate, when I finish future civil-war fantasy, several important plot twists will involve chicken guns. Don’t worry, war-porn readers, I will throw in no end of detail about calibres and exit velocities. Not to mention ‘fish tanks’, which fire actual fish. Why, yes, it is a surrealist novel. How did you guess?

Herr Doktor, if you need someone to read early drafts, you know, someone to give you that invaluable feedback that’s described so movingly on the acknowledgments page . . . well, you know where to find me.

The service logs about 3,000 bird strikes annually. Topping the Air Force’s hit list is the turkey vulture, which–although only responsible for about 1 percent of incidents–causes 40 percent of the damage.

“They’re very big, ugly and nasty birds with bad personal habits,” said Kelley.

I found the good Herr Doktor’s chicken gun on wiki, then followed to find that money quote at FODnews.com. Awesome.

Obviously, turkey vultures hate America and should all be wiped out. This whole idea of building stronger aircraft canopies is just Democrat defeatism. It is a weak approach, putting the USAF on a permanent defensive footing.

What’s needed is total war, an aggresive advance to take the fight to the enemy. We need to wipe out all the turkey vultures with overwhelming force and leave none alive.

It’s the only thing they understand, for they are all bloodthirsty animals.

How about a Phish tank that fires hippies from its main gun?

Shorter Andrew Longman:

“Have you ever… been… with a woman, Mandrake?”

We need to wipe out all the turkey vultures with overwhelming force and leave none alive.
Now you’re losing sight of the real enemy — the pelican. One of those jihadi suicide-bomb pelicanazis took out a B-1 in 1986, costing approximately two magoogal* dollars to replace.

* magoogal (noun). Enormous but poorly defined sum of money, with many zeros it, the number of zeros tending to increase as one looks at it more closely. Usually encountered in the context of airforce procurement budgets.

Is that more or less than a gogzillion?

Kitchener of Khartoum

Gordon of Khartoum seems the far, far more appropriate example at this point.

How bout “mikey of Cartoon”?

mikey

Now you’re losing sight of the real enemy — the pelican. One of those jihadi suicide-bomb pelicanazis took out a B-1 in 1986, costing approximately two magoogal* dollars to replace.

Well, you’ve really gone right to the heart of the matter. I was trying to be politic and only target the turkey buzzards, but you and I know that the distinction among them is meaningless. They all want to destroy America and are intensely jealous of our freedom, not to mention our supersonic flying capability.

It’s time to just eliminate the avio-fascists once and for all. That’ll teach ’em.

I’ve read that first sentence five times. I still can’t make any sense of it. I just get dizzy…

May I just point out how much I love being diggity-diggity-dared?

The dropping pigs thing, I dunno, reminds me of the flying turkeys episode of WKRP….

‘As god is my witness, I thought pigs could fly.’

Herr Doktor:

I vaguely recall something from my automotive days where someone used a frozen chicken in the gun. This was a bad idea.

Longman’s a genius. A real spaghetti-puller, in fact. I can imagine that whenever Iraqis are being fired upon and bombed, the first thing that occurs to them is potentially participating in 5% annual GDP growth. Because, you know, the soldiers firing on them while trotting gruntingly to their destinations would gladly lay down their arms to recruit new participants for the U.S. economy.

That whole post was a big bag of Huh?

someone used a frozen chicken in the gun. This was a bad idea.
See, [names of worried family members go here], all this time spent reading S,N! is not wasted at all. I’m learning important lessons about life.