Iran recently threatened to kidnap American soldiers and feed them to roosters.
Roosters? Feed American soldiers to the roosters?
These days I am often led to think of Senator Foghorn Leghorn.
But thinking of Senator Foghorn Leghorn is not a result only of the Iranians threatening to throw our soldiers to those roosters. No, there are other reasons for such a thought.
Look at Congress.
On the one side, those Bush loyalists, who repeat all the same idiotic phrases instead of showing they have minds of their own. What are those phrases? Oh, that "we can't cut and run." That "failure in Iraq is not an option." That "we can't leave until the mission is accomplished." That "we need to achieve victory in Iraq." That "if we don't deal with them over there, they will follow us home and we'll have to deal with them over here."
Every single one of these phrases does not stand up to ten seconds of intelligent scrutiny. What is the "mission," and why would it, as Bush defines or tries to define it, be helpful to the effort too weaken the Camp of Islam? What is that "victory" that he prates about? What does it mean to say "they will follow us home" and then "we'll have to deal with them over here"? Aren't there millions of Muslims already here? Aren’t all of them inculcated with the idea of the duty of Jihad to spread Islam, and aren’t at least quite a few of them taking that duty seriously indeed, even if they are inclined at times to lie low, or to conduct Jihad using the "money weapon" and Daw'a and demographic conquest, rather than bombs in subways? Meanwhile, all Bush can talk about, while Western Europe is slowly islamized, is this goddam "war on terror."
And then there are the Democrats, who oppose the war but have yet to offer the kind of criticism offered here, the unanswerable and deadly kind, the kind that frightens the Bush administration because it shows up the folly of that Iraq War: that it makes no sense if one has correctly identified the war not as "war on terror" but as a worldwide campaign between the Camp of Islam on the one hand, with its many and varied instruments of Jihad, and the Infidels. The Camp of Islam and Jihad commands vast sums -- trillions -- of unmerited oil money, and tens of millions of Muslims have been carelessly allowed to enter and settle deep within the Lands of the Infidels, where they conduct campaigns of Da'wa that are unhindered, and procreate at rates much higher than the indigenous non-Muslims. They keep up steady pressure everywhere, never giving up, for changes in the social arrangements and legal and political institutions of the Infidel nations, to which they cannot, as Muslims, possibly feel any real loyalty. For their loyalty must be, they are taught, only to the umma al-islamiyya and the need to spread Islam, so that "Islam dominates and is not to be dominated."
No, instead we get Democratic blowhards who appear incapable of explaining to the public that the best reason for leaving Iraq is that it ties us down, it squanders enormous resources, it does terrible damage to our military, it preoccupies us and weakens us in the very place where the most important fissures within the Camp of Islam -- sectarian and ethnic -- are there for the exploiting, if only we got out of the way.
What, ladies and gentlemen, would you think of people who cannot stand the American presence in Iraq but apparently cannot bring themselves to recognize, much less articulate, the most convincing and unanswerable of reasons why such a withdrawal -- an immediate withdrawal -- makes sense? Why?
Perhaps you can understand, then, why the mention of feeding American soldiers to roosters made me think again -- not for the first time these last few months and years -- of Senator Foghorn Leghorn. In a certain sense, American soldiers have been fed, for quite some time, to roosters -- to all those Senator-Foghorn-Leghorns who simply will not take the time to study the clear doctrines of Islam, or the history of Islamic conquest, or the psychology of Islam, or the history of the mistreatment of non-Muslims under Islam, or all the other things that would inexorably lead them to exactly my conclusions, put up here hundreds of times.
Yes, the Executive and Legislative branches, both of them, with their foghorn-leghorn braggart soldiers and why-can't-we-all-get-alongers, offer on both sides of the aisle a spectacle that leaves many Americans confused, and not quite knowing what to support, and expecting to have leaders -- or those "taking a leadership role" -- who will both know how to instruct and to protect them.
But they mostly don't because they mostly can't because they mostly won't stop to learn what they have a solemn duty, at this point, to learn.
Foghorn Leghorns. Roosters. And other obvious words that come swimmingly to mind.
Iran recently threatened to kidnap American soldiers and feed them to roosters.
Seeing whats going down with he kidnapping of the british marines just now,I would not take this threat so lightly.
If the coalition cannt do what it is supposed to do,then it is time to come home.
This war is serious and their is no room for "Jennifer Lynch/Hollywood" style tactics.
Foghorn Leghorns. Roosters does come to mind when readng this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,956255,00.html
"The Camp of Islam and Jihad commands vast sums -- trillions -- of unmerited oil money"
The word "unmerited" unfortunately has resonance only with those who have a very limited say in matters: the vast majority of the world.
The Saudis of course dismiss this evaluation out of hand. Of course in their own minds it's abundantly clear that they deserve this money: They are the best of people. It is written, donch y' know. But beyond the Saudis, it is my suspicion and fear that there are all too many in the halls of Western power who have made some kind of accommodation with this wealth.
For instance, Saudi wealth is behind the construction of large, unnecessary and largely unwelcome Islamic information centers throughout the West. Yet no voice is to be heard in Western legislatures questioning the legitimacy of such prosyletizing when religious freedom in Saudi Arabia is itself found to be exactly zero. How come? Mass ADD?
In some fantasy world, I see a hero arising, with the sun behind his or her back, maybe wearing a body stocking and cape, but certainly carrying a briefcase. The hero is an accountant. They know where the money is going. And they're going to sing loud and long, jihad or no jihad, threats or no threats. But will we have time to act?
Time, I've been told, is money. But when this much money is involved, I'm afraid that our time could be limited. And I think any such time limit imposed upon Western civilization is truly unmerited.
Ah say, Ah say, Ah resemble that remark!!
When thinking of the leadership of the West in general, and the U.S. -- both administration and Congress -- I'm more inclined to think of capons than roosters.
You are certainly entitled to blame your leaders for our national decline, but I think that American poet Edwin Markham is "closer to the mark":
I fear the vermin that shall undermine
Senate and citadel and school and shrine;
The Worm of Greed, the fatted Worm of Ease,
And all the crawling progeny of these;
The vermin that shall honeycomb the towers
And walls of State in unsuspecting hours.
Let us not forget, however, that a nation's ascendancy to the heights of power carries with it no assurance that fortune's smile will never turn away from us. The pages of history are replete with the instructive accounts of great civilizations that, in their prime, strode like colossuses upon the sands of time, then declined and fell--some without a trace. A hundred generations have long since dropped, like the leaves of autumn, into the silence of the grave, leaving only a few decaying monuments, or fragments thereof, to testify to their bygone greatness.
Ours is becoming a nation of hardened cynics. We ought to return to our beginnings, go back into the hills, look up at the treetops and the open sky, and gain a renewed sense of God's presence in our personal lives and in the life of the nation. The real missing link in our national life is God.
What I love about JW/DW is the pearls of wisdom which drop onto the screen when one reads the contributions of more educated, more expressive, more intense posters.
I shall be eternally grateful to Senator R.C.Bird [above] for introducing me to Edwin Markham, whose works I shall eagerly consume and treasure for aeons to come.
Unfortunately, I shall remain a cynic.
Thank you, meekee. The entirety of my post past the first sentence was lifted from my namesake's autographed autobiography:
Robert C Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields
That book is over 800 pages. Including over 700 pages of self-congratulatory pork barrel victories. But the remainder of the book is comprised of ennobling passages such as those I've quoted.
A 1-7 wheat to chaff ratio might as well be 1000 to 1 when it comes to contemporary politicians.
As for Hugh and his stiff member for "Foghorn Leghorn", well, that's fine but I can think of about 99 senators ahead of Byrd who deserve a good ribbing as well.