July 29th, 2004

July 29, 2004

Posted at 7:06 PM by Jack Chalker

Now you see why I don’t do a blog. They’d throw me out for inactivity. I’m spending from now through the end of August finishing a book that’s long overdue so I can go to the World SF Convention in Boston with a relatively clear conscience. Health wire, I’ve been better but I’m getting older, and I really think I don’t have a lot of problems that winning the lottery and losing 90 pounds wouldn’t go a lot to curing.

     Those who know me and those who have followed my comments here and elsewhere probably know that I’d love to spend some time here commenting on politics, but until I get ahead on my other writing there’s only a little that I can spare the time to cover. I do note that I was pretty well right on Iraq, and I have no idea how the heck the folks in Washington are going to get us out now that they’ve gotten us in and used up the entire army (I sure hope we don’t need them elsewhere), blown up the flower delivery Kitchener, caused over 900 casualties of some of our best and brightest young people and permanently crippled over 3000 more with no end in sight (and let’s not even discuss how many “liberated” Iraqis are going) while making us hated and reviled even in countries that are our theoretical friends. I can understand attacking those who attack you, but we get created by folks in Afghanistan and we respond by declaring war on Iraq? Sure, Saddam was a Hitler-like scuzzball, but I’m afraid he wasn’t alone in this and in fact he was a good buddy of Bush Sr. and Dick Cheney until he misunderstood some signals and attacked oil supplies in Kuwait. And Osama was a good guy to the Reaganites so long as our mutual enemy was the USSR. So while Iraq is a crippled hole, Iran is building nuclear bombs, North Korea has both the bombs and the missles, and we’re slammed by the Wassabis in exile in Afghanistan and so we attack Iraq? Uh huh. All because the neocons in Washington have this weird theory of how to make the world in our image in a view as rigid and as wrong as the old communists. In fact, they remind me of that mind-set; every time the world view is proven wrong, you just come up with an alternate universe that says it’s not really wrong. In the meantime, it’s not their kids who die. Like Cheney in the Vietnam era, they have “better things to do.” Those who have followed me all these years know I can respect conservatives, liberals, you name it, but I can’t abide hypocrites.

     So, see why I haven’t done much here with this? Remember, I had a heart attack last year. I need to keep things from blowing up inside.

     But I have a prediction. We are not only not safer than we were before this war, we’re in a much more dangerous position. We are already giving up our liberties in the name of security, and we’ll have neither. And, at this point, it won’t matter who wins in November….

      And the worst part is, I haven’t been wrong on this stuff yet.

      See you in Boston, or here when something awful happens or the book is done.


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