That’s what’s so remarkable about the situation we’re in right now; pretty much all of our problems that we face as a country stem from the simple fact that we spend HALF of our money each year trying to (often successfully) kill people we don’t know, in case they might try to kill us, and getting a lot of our own people killed in the process.  Is that smart?  Is this a country, or a mink farm?  As usual, in both wars, arms we sold to our last best friend got turned against us, so we showed them what’s what by buying a whole lot more.  Children conduct snowball fights with a more sophisticated strategy, and snow is, unlike the weapons we employ, free, and nobody dies.

Murtha, unlike his many Republican critics that suddenly emerged when he “prematurely” called out the Iraq War as a fraud and a disaster with no conceivable goal in sight in 2005, was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam, and although defense contractor dough had long since gummed up his spending priorities, he still could spot a deadly, pointless meat-grinder when he saw one, and then by defending himself against their cowardly attacks repeatedly revealed the neocons as the chickenhawk pussies they were and are.  And he did.  Sadly, the Democrats, who owe their 2006 and 2008 victories in part to outspoken antiwar Democrats like Murtha, clearly didn’t listen to him, or to the rest of the people who are quite aware that war costs a whole lot of money that might be better spent elsewhere, no matter what nonsense you read in the Washington Post or hear from David Gregory.

As a country, we’ve simply been sold a pig in a poke so obvious that we have to either admit our error now or literally go down the tubes trying to apply lipstick.  Sarah Palin has some experience in that area, and look… here she is.  She says Iran ought to be next, and didn’t even have to write that one on her hand, which I find rather disturbing.  Evidently, the current wars haven’t bankrupted us quite enough for the evergreen Republican Utopia to look good by comparison, so Sarah has spit out the teabaggers and reached for the Kristol Pistol and the Cheney Dick.  For Sarah, this is pretty much a lateral move, but for the teabaggers, not to mention normal Americans, it sucks.  (I hereby promise not to carry that metaphor any further…  CHNN has had a run on barf bags lately…)

Wars are now bipartisan again, just as they were when Murtha opened his jowly mouth, and worse, the right has decided that even two couldn’t possibly be enough, and no Democrat has yet called them insane.  If you ask me,  Murtha picked a good time to die.

Iran, of course, is the current target, but does it even matter?  Wars no longer function in the traditional sense; to be fought and won or lost, then ended.  Wars today are media events designed to gin up false patriotism and media acquiescence, while enriching those who’ve invested in them.  As Orwell predicted so presciently, they aren’t intended to be won, only to be permanent.  Old wars, never to be won, but merely not ignominiously lost, must be out of necessity periodically rebranded, and when they finally get too shopworn for even that, the cheerleaders roll out the new season, with its same cast of suspiciously familiar villains, just like on Dragnet.  What happens on the battlefield is immaterial; wars have become our televised bread and circuses, and the elites who plan and profit from them care little about such minutia, in the deliciously “heads we win, tails you lose” game they have going.

Dick Cheney is perhaps the apotheosis of this genocidal bet-hedging; the oil would be nice, but even if he doesn’t get it, it can’t hurt to get rich trying.  Huge military contractors like GE “diversifying” into owning television networks is almost as transparent an outrage, but equally uncommented upon, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.  Though the Selling of the Pentagon is a practice, consuming an ever-escalating budget and ever more elaborate deceptions, that is as old as I am, it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that it is so, well, out of the closet these days.  The sell job has obviously worked entirely too well.

Today, Gen. McChrystal essentially defied the current and even prospective decisions of his ostensible Commander-in-Chief, and said that he would neither reduce troops or redefine the latest hothouse-cultivated “objective” in Afghanistan, because he quite evidently assumes that this is “his” war, Obama and the American people be damned.  And the media gasbags, so overcome at the effrontery of Rep. Grayson’s impermissible truth-telling yesterday that they were still noticeably under the influence of smelling salts when a military coup like that just passed them by, are undoubtedly clucking in eager assent.  Wars, you see, which will henceforth start when somebody says so and last until we’re told they’re over, are clearly no longer our business as Americans, who know what our pay grades, and theirs, mean.

This reality was disturbing enough when it could plausibly be attributed to a rogue administration that would inevitably be checked by our vaunted constitutional “system,” which would surely turn out the miscreants electorally, and prosecute them criminally in the fullness of time.  (Like in Iran/Contra, right?)  Now that we have found, with dumbfounding swiftness and finality, that it is no longer possible through mere elections not only to stop the current wars, but even attempt to prevent additional ones, you have to wonder whether it was worth the bother  to participate at all.  No majority is large enough to stop the wars, but no amount of PR hogwash will ever win them, either, so the only answer is to keep starting them, forever.  And here we are.  You’re next, Iran, but please don’t take it personally;  we need you more than you need us.

It’s days like these that I wish I believed in the Rapture.*

*Somewhat differently configured…

It started off in the usual way, her “quarry,” Reza Pahlavi, a less handsome ringer for his dictator papa, the Shah, was just the sort of vermin you’d find scurrying around the mop boards when things are “in play” in Iran, and he looked more than ready to play Bugs Bunny to Solomon’s Elmer Fudd.  But then, things went off the rails.  Solomon asked actual questions.  Even some rather rude ones, by which I mean relevant.  I could hardly believe my eyes when her first question, which pretty much pegged him as the Ahmed Chalabi of of the “real men go to Tehran” set, finished with, “What do you do on a day-to-day basis, exactly?”

Of course,  ol’ Reza then coughs up some laughable drivel about democracy and separation of church and state, things the heir to the Peacock Throne obviously takes about as seriously as Dick Cheney takes a subpeona, but never mind.  Reeling, because everybody told him all she’d ask about was his dog, or maybe his shoes, Pahlavi must have just about tipped over when the next three questions basically nailed the glaringly obvious fact that he was, of course, continuing a decades-long, CIA assisted, intermittently US government supported, campaign for somebody, anybody, to get him his damned throne back.  He lied of course, and rudely, but danged if Solomon, in what must be a career first, called him on it.  ”Why would you call your decades of living near Washington ‘temporary’?”  This time he told the truth, he was so gobsmacked.  ”Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.”  And Washington is the only place on earth so kooky and corrupt as to actually make that happen.  Though on a roll, Solomon does not point that out, but she doesn’t have to.

At this point Pahlavi was probably already on his cell phone calling out the remnants of dad’s secret police to haul this impertinent bimbo off to Cheney’s now-vacant undisclosed location and teach her a thing or two, and Solomon clearly senses this, so she goes back into Solomon mode.  Since Pahlavi evidently doesn’t have a dog, she asks about a nice subject on which they agree, that bad, bad, Ahmadinejad, religion, and blah, blah, blah.  His cheesy, rehearsed answers for this crap are what he had on his note cards, so he can hang up the phone.  Things seem back on track.

But then Solomon asks about the secret police.  Really.  Like Obama, Pahlavi wants to focus on the future and not that icky past, but incredibly, Solomon persists, quite unlike her White House counterparts. “You don’t feel obligated to acknowledge your father’s misdeeds?”  (admittedly, “misdeeds” is a mild term for it, but this is Deborah Solomon….)  Pahlavi says his dad did the right thing by going into exile, and if only Ahmadinejad would do the same, everything would be great.

But just when I was absolutely convinced that Solomon had been taken over by a pod person who was an actual journalist, she went one better, making for TWO followup questions, on the same day.  Get this… “When your father fled Tehran and went into exile, he reportedly took a lot of money with him.  Would you describe yourself today as a billionaire?”  Of course Pahlavi lies, evades, and misdirects, but it’s obvious he’s as surprised at the question as I am.

Solomon wraps up thusly:  ”Do you feel bitter about not getting to be Shah?”   Granted, the question is worded in the curious, touchy-feely sort of daytime TV-speak for which Solomon is famous, but it’s a damned good one, and you can tell he doesn’t like it one bit.  He lies, of course, but pathetically, “This is not a personal matter.  This is not about me.”  Right.

Today, Charlie Brown finally, and rather unexpectedly, kicked the football straight through the goalposts.  That’s news that’s fit to print.

I’m trying to think of a place where American bombs have resulted in anything but an embarrassing disaster for those who financed it, usually on credit, and I can’t.  When the bill comes, it’s nicer to have at least the unaffordable purchase to comfort the unwise spender.  ”I can’t afford heat, so it’s a good thing I got this mink coat.”  ”I just lost my health insurance, but at least I have a TV so big that Bill O’Reilly’s mouth looks like Lake Erie.”  Instead, we have wingnuts previously and subsequently utterly hostile to such ideas suddenly turning into feminists for Afghani women, ACT UP activists for Iranian gays, and “Fair Election” zealots who nonetheless helped Bush steal two elections and govern as though he’d won a landslide.  Bombing is good for this bunch, since it minimizes American casualties, which are the only ones that even slightly matter, looks good on TV, and makes a lot of defense contractors generous come election time.  Still, its popularity with the public remains a mystery.

Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Mogadishu, Iraq, Afghanistan…..  the list is long of pointless bombing campaigns that cost us dearly in terms of both money and moral standing, and delivered the precise opposite of their many shifting “goals.”  The last two are still costing us billions, slaughtering (albeit unimportant) things a sane person might call “people,” and doing exactly jack shit to help us, even if our only goals are grabbing power and money, which of course they are.

What’s the answer to this dilemma?  Bomb Iran.  The neocons are bored with their old war porn and need something else; we all know the feeling, but is Bill Kristol’s boner really enough to start a war for?  Sadly, a lot of dimwitted and dehumanized people seem to think so, and maybe they have a point.

By spending all our money bombing things, we won’t have any money for schools, roads, clean water and air, healthcare, or prosperity, and that immigrant problem will be solved in a big hurry.  Hell, some of the places we bombed might start to look good.  Mission Accomplished.

That’s the best I can come up with.