Frost and Fire

The season winds down. Yesterday morning I picked lettuce as yet undamaged by frosty nights alongside staked tomatoes not-so-fortunate. This is the shoulder season when life still clings to some crops while others surrender to bitter cold reality.

So too in the political season, where the frosty (though minor) squabbles over “policy” between members of the Bi-Party punctuate the drift into a looming hard winter for humanity. The tedious pseudo-tussle dominates what passes for “news” around here. Personally, I haven’t watched a network “news show” since February 13, 1991. Fans of military adventurism may remember that as the date G.H.W. Bush & The Bipartisans conducted “an aerial bombing attack killing at least  408 (Iraqi) civilians…. when an air-raid shelter (‘Public Shelter No. 25’) in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq was destroyed …. with two GBU Paveway III laser-guided ‘smart bombs.’ Human Rights Watch characterized the bombing as a war crime.” (See Wikipedia)

Similar bunker-busters (some apparently built across the river from our homestead) are still being used today in that region to similar effect: Lots of dead, splattered women, kids, and oldsters.

And on that night, I watched a PBS “News Hour” panel discussion where a roundtable of the usual state department war geeks and military brass made a united front agreeing that (if somewhat unfortunate) the carnage was all the fault of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

So there. Case closed. Page turned.

Similar barbarity has followed over the decades, today, (and tomorrow).  Mainstream Media continue their obedient stenographic role, “listening for the new-told lie” and dispersing it across the land as I used to distribute fragrant hen “dressing” from the back of my PTO-driven International 530 manure spreader.

Back to Wikipedia’s Amiriyah entry: “At 04:30 on the morning of 13 February, two F-117 stealth bombers dropped a 910 kilogram (2,000 lb) GBU-27 laser-guided bomb on the shelter. The first bomb cut through 3 meters (10 ft) of reinforced concrete before a time-delayed fuse exploded. Minutes later, the second bomb followed the path cut by the first bomb. Neighborhood residents heard screams as people tried to get out of the shelter. They screamed for four minutes. After the second bomb hit the screaming ceased.”

“At the time of the bombing, hundreds of Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children were sheltering in the building; many were sleeping. More than 408 people were killed; reports on precise numbers vary, and the registration book was incinerated in the blast. People staying on the upper level were incinerated by heat while boiling water from the shelter’s water tank was responsible for the rest of the fatalities. Not all killed died immediately; black, incinerated handprints of some victims remained fused to the concrete ceiling of the shelter. Journalist John Simpson reported on the horrific sight of ‘bodies fused together so that they formed entire blocks of flesh’ along with ‘a layer of melted human fat an inch deep lying on the surface of the water pumped in by the firemen.’ “

Lawsuits were later filed against Bush, Colin Powell, General Norman “The Bear” Schwarzkopf, and (current Harris fan-boy) Dick Cheney.

In addition to the millions of dead and displaced resulting from US wars-of-opportunity in the region since 1991, Biden & The Bipartisans have more recently been sluicing money, bunker busters, and other weapons to our favorite regional Zionist garrison-state ($22.76 billion and counting) over the last year.

The rest of the world sees the destruction and mass death the funding leads to, even if legacy media here continues its Amiriyah-style spin-job for the distracted domestics. Polling indicates that despite the spin, the rascal American public-that-pays isn’t all that keen on the continuing slaughter.

But so what? These are the same folks who poll as preferring universal healthcare and taxing the rich. Fat chance. Let ‘em eat GBU bunker busters.

Such failed/  fond wishes in “our democracy” must wither like staked tomatoes after the frost.

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