Saddam Hussein isn’t the only brutal dictator who oppresses his
people, has weapons, and poses a threat, real or potential, to his
neighbors and if you stretch the evidence far enough, perhaps to
us.
Saddam Hussein isn’t the only brutal dictator who oppresses his people, has weapons, and poses a threat, real or potential, to his neighbors and if you stretch the evidence far enough, perhaps to us. He’s just the only one our President is obsessed with.
Make no mistake: this is all about one guy. The administration has bent over backwards, because depending on which compelling reason they’re going with this week they sometimes need to make the argument, to assert that the Iraqi people are not the enemy; in fact, they have even gone so far as to portray most of the Iraqi military itself as innocent victims looking for any way to turn their coats and help us whack their boss. Three-hundred-thousand troops, tens of billions of dollars, probably thousands of casualties, all to get one guy. Boy, when the conservatives argue that you shouldn’t trust government with power and money because it’s so inefficient, I gotta go along with them on this one.
And for Dubya to get this one pelt his daddy failed to bag, he has shamelessly sucked up to other, objectively more threatening countries, shredded the United Nations, gratuitously insulted a major portion of Europe, fractured NATO, and created a whole new and unprecedented worldwide phenomenon: a pre-war anti-war movement. But he’s also done worse, and for this I can never ever forgive him.
He’s destroyed my faith in duct tape.
It was just a week or so ago that Tom Ridge’s Office of Periodic Panic told us all that it might be a good idea if we sidled over to Orchard Supply and maybe laid in a goodly stock of plastic sheeting and duct tape, you know, just in case we should find that our heretofore good old American air is full of deadly gas not attributable to SUVs. But that’s not the bad part: then some official from 3M Corp. announces that this bright idea is full of holes – literally, as duct tape is NOT gas-impermeable.
I didn’t need to hear that, nossir. Now I am aware of the terrible truth that there is something in this world of a grab-it-fix-it-and-who-cares-what-it-looks-like nature for which duct tape is not the answer; is nothing sacred anymore? In an increasingly uncertain world duct tape has been one of the few things a guy can count on time after time. Duct tape is a substitute for glue, for paint, for Spackle, for rope, for car windows – hell, it’s a substitute for gravity. Without duct tape half the refrigerator doors in student apartments would be open all the time; for that alone duct tape has saved this country more energy than the Amish. Personally, I would rather run out of coffee, aspirin, or gas on a lonely road than run out of duct tape; the very thought gives me the creeps.
And yet, thanks to that monomaniacal bullheaded tunnel-visioned president of ours I have to spend the rest of my life with the vague uneasy suspicion of what other problems duct tape might not solve. When something cracks, breaks, or comes loose around the house and I automatically head for the garage and the big fat silver roll of duct tape, there will be a nagging doubt in my head that maybe, just maybe I should be reaching for some other tool – jeez, wasn’t lumbering through life as a guy hard enough already? Now I have to entertain options?
If this is the new world order, it bites.
Robert Mitchell practices law in Morgan Hill. His column has appeared in The Dispatch for more than 20 years. It’s published every Tuesday.
