My roommate and I pondered which of the following two would actually happen during last night’s vice presidential debate:
1.) Halfway through, The Penguin would send a signal, maybe a slight nod, to one of his lackeys who would then pull a giant red level, releasing the trapdoor underneath Penguin’s chair.
Or
2.) The Penguin would hold up an umbrella that would turn into a helicopter and he’d fly off flipping Robin Underoos the bird.
In a former life Robin Underoos was a trial lawyer, you see, a trial lawyer who took on big business. The Penguin is big business. Robin Underoos loves to tell human stories, anecdotes that lull us into a shallow, dreamy sleep. Penguin tells those same stories, except they’re about corporations, not people. One way or the other, we expected Robin Underoos to tear Penguin apart. This was an unrealistic expectation, like expecting Toto to tear apart The Tin Man. No heart…tough exterior…swings an ax. Not gonna happen. Still, though, we dreamed a little dream, fantasizing The Penguin’s escape routes.
But the sad fact of the matter is that even if everything out of The Penguin’s mouth was a lie, Boy Wonder Undies had to repeat one lie he and Frankenstein concocted in the lab. This lie got in the way of him unleashing his full, biting dog furry on his heartless opponent. The lie is that he and Frankenstein would have gone into Iraq because Saddam was a threat—they just would have done it better.
No they wouldn’t because no he wasn’t.
The fact of the matter is, Monkey went before the public and said, “You’re either with us or against us.” He didn’t want to wait for U.N. inspectors; he didn’t want to give the U.S. Congress or the U.N. a vote. He wanted to go in guns ablazin’ as outlined in various proposals penned by most of the high-ranking officials in his administration, along with his own brother, Jeb. These proposals were sent forth through a fascist think tank called Project For The New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990’s and in 2000.
Fearing that the illusion of American democracy was going to be blown again (hey! Remember the election?), thin skinned democrats like Frankenstein and Robin Underoos begged the president to give them a vote to save face. Let there be a vote and we’ll vote you a war, they said. Anything to not become a blatant dictatorship. Because this is what happened and not the lie they keep repeating to look “tough on terror,” which means nothing to a sane person, neither Frankenstein nor his trusty sidekick can afford to mention PNAC.
How easy would it be to say to The Penguin, “Oh, you didn’t have this war planned prior to 9/11? What about PNAC?” or, “Oh, you didn’t plan on spying on our citizens before 9/11? What about PNAC?” or even, “Oh, you didn’t plan on a Pearl Harbor style attack on America to get the ball rolling on all your evil plans before the coincidental 9/11? What about PNAC?”
Yeah, it all goes back to PNAC and Frankenstein knows it and Robin Underoos knows and now you know it. But America at large have not a clue what PNAC is. We are a country in the dark. I’m beginning to think far too many of us enjoy that. I spoke to a Canadian acquaintance last night. In a conversation unrelated to any of this I made an offhanded comment about hell. He said he didn’t believe in hell. I said yeah, how can hell be worse than, say, Iraq? I was thinking how horrible it would be to be a child whose family has been killed in an attack, who is missing limbs from an errant bomb, and who lives in a city with no electricity. This happens there and what in hell could be worse?
My friend said, “Well I think America is hell. You guys are always living in fear.”
I thought that was an odd statement in the face of the enormous torment other countries are in. A proclamation like that only makes sense if our perpetual fear is also never ending, while other countries may alleviate their burdens at some future date. We know they do: civil wars and revolutions are happening as I write this. None in America. I hope I can add yet but I think my friend might be right. I think we’re too mired in our own shit to slaughter the pigs that consume us.
So who won the debate? Well like I said, it’s hard to take down The Penguin because he doesn’t flinch, certainly not for the like of Robin Underoos. And a vast majority of us are impressed with that. Our being impressed with that means we’ll call it a draw, even though The Penguin is a lying, conniving criminal. We’ll call it a draw because Robin couldn’t really say what he should have said about Iraq and about everything. We’ll call it a draw because we care more for style than substance. All politicians are substance abusers and we, the people, are enablers.
Hell or recovery. This, not the slight political nuances of a middle-to-far-right two-party political system, is our choice. It starts with regime change at home, certainly, but if it ends there it will have been no change at all.
