So, let’s bring back conscription and solve all the problems the current army faces. Right?

Wrong. Re-instating the draft won’t work and here’s why.

First off, the Pentagon doesn’t want it. During the Viet Nam era, one of the main gripes the Brass Hats had concerning consription was that the people they were getting weren’t worth the trouble. They were undisciplined, they didn’t want to be in the army or sent to fight a war they didn’t believe in, and mostly, even the good ones weren’t around long enough to get any bang for the buck. When Nixon cancelled the draft, he was trying to score political points but mostly, he was doing what the Pentagon wonks wanted. The army wants a committed, full time professional force.

Secondly, it ain’t in the budget. The current price tag for the Pentagon’s troops and toys is roughly $700 billion a year. Adding even 92,000, the current figure proposed by the US army, will add $108 billion to that. Tripling or even doubling the size of the armed forces through conscription to, say 1% of the total US population, would incur a defense bill of well over one trillion dollars. It isn’t in the budget.

Besides, this idea of “civic virtue” through compulsary military service is, as Andrew J. Bachevich put it, somewhat akin to the notion that putting Chirst back into Christmas will reqwaken American spirituality. It overlooks the forces that changed a religious holiday into a competition of consumption.

So I wouldn’t worry about the draft any time soon. (or at least not for the next four years) Americans will still want all their energy-gobbling toys and big cars, and the electorate will still occasionally vote for people who’ll cobble together enough lies to send them overseas to ensure they can still have it all without responsibility.

PTSD (n): Not Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental affliction suffered by many who have been in combat, but rather PostTruth Stress Disorder. This condition causes former loyal Bush Republicans such as Scott McKellan and Colin Powell to write insider tell-all books repudiating their ex-bosses soon after they became unemployed. Sometimes referred to as Retroactive Morality.

In ancient Greece, only citizens who owned land or had served in the army were allowed to vote. It was thought that only this group would have a vested self-interest in defending the state. Nowadays, we have an all-volunteer force augmented by mercenaries. And what is the result? Troops doing their second and third consecutive rotation in the Phony War in Iraq. Tours extended to 15 months. Troops so burnt out and dysfunctional that they may never be able to function 100% in the real world. PTSD City.

So here’s an answer. Either get the hell out of Iraq (the President’s plan, which will simply have many re-deployed to Afghanistan) or re-instate the draft.

There are many persuasive arguments for this. First, the average American citizen has become divorced from the conduct and consequence of war. All those redneck yahoos screaming for us to invade Iran have never served a day in uniform in their miserable lives. The American people have also never been asked (at least under Bush) to sacrifice. They were adjoined to “go shopping” while the average grunt got to get shot at and eat dirt in Crapistan for 12 grand a year.

Re-booting the draft would make the workload more equitable - there would be a return to the concept of civic duty and sharing the responsibility of decisions made by politicians the population at large voted into office. It would also change the nature of the army - no longer would it consist of a few ring-knocker career officers, lifer sergeants and the poor, people of colour with little or no higher educational choices, rural people with no options, etc.

It would also reduce the chance of an all-volunteer force becoming simply a policy arm of a future presidency, sent to fight bogus wars for political expediencies and delusional ideologies as happened under Chimpy.

It would greatly expand the army making the term “surge” actually mean something. Not a mere 30,000 to Iraq but 100,000. If Bush, cheney and Rummy had listened to the generals in the first place, there’d have been more than enough boots on the ground right from the get-go.

Finally, it would galvanize the citizenery and make them less likely, as in the Viet Nam era, to accept fear-mongering and BS used by the Right Wing to drum up idiotic wars. People pay a lot more attention to politicians if it means it will be their ass or their children’s being sent to fight.

So - whaddya think? To draft or not to draft. Conscription would alleviate a lot of the problems the current army faces. Where’s your sense of patriotism, citizen?

Next article, why all of the above won’t work.

Pro (n): To be for something as opposed to its opposite, “con,” which is to stand against an action or concept. This would then seem to imply that the opposite of Progress is Congress.

Just a little sidebar on the Cheney “we didn’t torture” and “waterboarding isn’t torture” angle.

Waterboarding was actually cribbed by the US armed forces from the North Vietnamese during yet another asinine war. Their purpose, however, was not so much to extract actionable intelligence but to cooerce false confessions out of American troops and pilots that would then be used to justify trupmped up accusations of war crimes.

So,in other words, words, the Bush administration imitated a method of torture that was known to be ineffective in extracting the truth but instead was designed to promulgate lies for political purposes.

Now it all makes sense.

So this made America safer how, exactly…….

In 2007, Americans spent around $10 billion on health care, a rise of $2.8 billion from the preceding five years. So what’s the problem?They did it for their pets.

The quality of pet health care must certainly be the envy of other nations. I know it’s the envy of the almost 50 million citizens who have no human health care. Spot and Puff can receive Cat scans, MRI’s, linear accelerators for radiation therapy, even dyalisis. And yet, in the same year that people forked over $10 B’s for Fido, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill that would have expanded state health insurance coverage for children that would have included 3.2 million out of the over 9 million children in the US with no coverage at all. Bush vetoed it.

So, how much does this kind of coverage cost? Author Barbara Eherenreich found that one can get comprehensive coverage for a three-year-old mixed breed from VPI Pet Insurance, the nation’s largest insurer of non-sentient creatures for $33.00 a month. This gave her the idea to have the electorate demand pet insurance for children, although she feared (facetiously, one assumes) that such services might include euthanesia for the seriously ill.

One has to ask how warped our sensibilities have become, how twisted our priorities, when we are willing to treat a cat or a dog with superior medical services than almost one sixth the population of the nation.

BEHAVIOURAL TRAITS

Corporatis Warbux, as a sub-species, exhibits many fascinating behavioural characteristics. As a rule, it is extremely important for any life-form, species notwithstanding, to be able to distinguish friend from foe. C. Warbux, however, appears not to have developed this most basic of survival instincts, depending largely upon Administratum Anomie to provide for its defense when it makes a faux pas.

Example: In 1988, the Bechtel Corporation (a giant within its sub-species) signed a $2 billion deal with Saddam Hussein to build an immense petro-chemical plant near Baghdad. One of the chemicals it was to produce was ethylene oxide which is used in the manufacture of plastics. It is also used in the manufacture of mustard gas. Bechtel did not cancel its project until just prior to the first U.S. – led invasion. Despite prohibitions against providing “dual-use” chemicals to Iraq, Bechtel was never sanctioned or fined by the government. Indeed, in 2002, when the Hussein regime submitted its list documenting its current store of chemical weapons to the UN, it identified Bechtel as one of its chief suppliers. Fortunately, this piece of information was redacted by the George W. Bush administration prior to being released to the press. Bechtel was only implicated when the French released an uncensored version of the document. This, fortunately, did not stop Bechtel from being given contracts for reconstruction after the “end” of hostilities in the second Gulf War. Indeed, it was actually indemnified by the government against law suits brought by both U.S. workers and Iraqis as a result of shoddy construction techniques.

This sub-species also demonstrates an interesting, albeit somewhat convoluted sense of logic. During the time of the above example, one of the board members of Bechtel, and its senior counsel was former member of Administratum Anomie, now migrated to nest with C. Warbux, former Secretary of State George Shultz. In 2002, Shultz wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, pleading with the public to support an invasion of Iraq to destroy the very weapons of mass destruction that his corporation had helped to create. The fact that the Bush Administration knew at the time that these weapons no longer existed might be considered ironic. That is, unless you are an Iraqi.

Another fascinating trait of Corporatis Warbux is the manner in which they utilize science to improve our quality of life. One innovative corporation, in an attempt to breed a less odiferous pig, has fabricated a creature it calls Enviropig by splicing into its DNA genetic material from both mice and the bacteria e-coli. This promises to be a brisk seller amongst those who prefer pork that has been obtained from an animal that not only eats offal, but is now genetically enhanced with one species that carries Hantavirus and another that eats shit.

On the other hand, when science threatens corporate revenue, C. Warbux has been known to take a different path, the repressing of its own scientific data that smoking causes cancer being a good example. Recently, in wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s damning report, (arrived at by peer-reviewed data accumulated over many years by over 2500 scientists in 113 countries) an organization called the American Enterprise Institute has offered scientists and economists in the U.S, Britain and elsewhere $10,000 plus expenses to write articles disputing or undermining the IPCC report. The AEI’s funding (a total of $1.6 million) was discovered to come from the oil giant ExxonMobil. It was also found (in yet another example of migratory symbiosis) that over 20 of AEI’s staff had worked as consultants to the W. Bush administration. Thus, we see once more the striking similarity between Administratum Anomie and Corporatis Warbux especially when it comes to the subject of global warming. Science, when it provides means to enhance the Bottom Line is to be embraced. Science, when it threatens the Bottom Line (or an established mode of behaviour) is to be discredited or at least typified as “flawed” or “inconclusive” regardless of its demonstrable veracity. Or, as has been previously stated, “two and two equal four, unless there is a financial or political necessity that they equal five.”

God, I just can’t get enough of Dick Cheney. At least when he’s on TV he’s not irritating the neighbours playing that depressing organ music in his dungeon.

So he and Chimpy kept American safe? Gosh, I seem to recall it was their administration that dropped the intelligence ball on the 9-11 attack, even after they had been specifically and repeatedly warned by the out-going Clinton administration. Guess Cheney just had “different priorities” just like he did when he was fleeing the draft back in the ’60’s… But that’s just so much flogging a dead horse.

We’ve been told by the Big Dick and sundry right-wing blowhards that water-boarding, AKA: torture, has brought vital information to light that has saved the Republic and the Corporations For which It Stands… to which, as a former military officer and veteran, I say bulls__t.

I have a friend - a very unasuming looking gentleman who is a military officer and practitioner of what he refers to as “the dark arts.” He’s a professional interrogator. And he is of the decided opinion that any information obtained through physical duress is virtually worthless for reasons that anyone with a two-digit IQ could readily guess.

All right - let’s say that the Bush administration in September of 2001 decided to act on the warnings the Clinton administration left them. Let’s assume that they managed to corral a couple of suspected Al Qaeda operatives and subjected them to waterboarding to obtain information on the possible upcoming attacks. Let’s see - how many times was one suspect at Gitmo waterboarded? 83 times. Now why would it be necessary to waterboard anyone 83 times?
BECAUSE HE WASN’T TALKING, YOU MORONS!

Now - tell me honestly - would it have served a bit of good to have waterboarded any suspected Al Qaeda agents prior to 9-11? When an attack is imminent, do you honestly think that taking over two and three-quarter months waterboarding somebody is going to get you timely and operable intelligence?

It’s not surprising that Bush and Cheney both signed off on this. After all, they’re the idiots who wouldn’t listen to the generals and admirals when planning the invasion of Iraq and never had a single page of a plan in place for dealing with the aftermath and reconstruction save for throwing untendered bids to their corporate campaign supporters. Neither of these boobs have a very strong grip on reality. They simply think they can create their own. They are the very definition of hubris.

Torture doesn’t work, people. Even top generals agree on this. It produces unreliable intel at best and can take forever. Oh … did we also mention that it’s illegal? Get out of your Jack Bauer “24″ delusions, Dick. You tried your own hand at script-writing and we’ve got almost 5000 American dead to show for it.

SPEECH AND ETYMOLOGY

Any attempt to examine the speech patterns of Corporatis Warbux is frustrated by the fact that they never actually say what they mean. In this, we see again the  similarities and interchangability between Warbux and Administratum. However, certain approximations between statement and truth can be inferred, as the following examples show:

Statement: Our company operates strictly within governmental guidelines.

Translation: …Which we have been lobbying to keep as ow as possible for many years.

Statement: Our studies prove that there is no conclusive proof that ______ causes _______.

Translation: Researchers on our corporate payroll found it politic to arrive at the appropriate conclusion.

Statement: We must respectfully disagree with the results of the (university/independent laboratory/non-partisan foundation’s,) conclusions regarding _________.

Translation: We can’t control their results since their scientists aren’t on our payroll.

Statement: We have always complied fully with the law.

Translation: We haven’t been caught yet.

Statement: It would bankrupt the company if it had to comply with every goverment regulation.

Translation: Our 500% profit margin would drop a point if we were forced to increase the mileage of our vehicles by 5 MPG.

Statement: Government has no place in the private sector.

Translation: The people who have to breathe the air and drink the water have no business messing with our bottom line.

Statement: The problem has just come to our attention and we will be making every effort to deal with it quickly and effectively.

Translation: Some whistle-blowing bastard just leaked it to the press so we’ll be trying to put a positive spin on it while clamping down on information and fending off allegations with both hands and feet.

Statement: If these extremists had their way, thousands of jobs would be lost.

Translation: …Not mine, of course. Boiling your water isn’t so hard, is it?

Statement: Our industry is vital to the nation’s economy.

Translation: …Therefore, it is your patriotic duty to drive fuel-inefficient cars, over-consume, support deregulation and swallow every egregious greed-driven price hike without a whimper.

Statement: The environment is everybody’s concern.

Translation: Provided that we are allowed special dispensations to ignore and exploit it.

Statement: The situation warrants further study.

Translation: Because if we claim to be studying it we can proceed with business as usual.

Statement: Our employees have a right to keep traditional family jobs.

Translation: …Until we out-source them.

Statement: The environmental impact will be minimal.

Translation: Cockroaches and viral forms are expected to survive.