Watching the Simpsons syndicated on my local channel - the one where Marge gets thrown in jail and the town comes to realize her contribution...her absence causes a shortage of funds at the bake sale, forcing buying a cheaper statue for the town than Abe Lincoln. The unveiling reveals Jimmy Carter; the town voices its outrage - Lenny cries "He's history's greatest *monster*!" and the statue is toppled. Looting ensues.
Just...big coincidence there, eh?
VMacek
It took me a few reads to understand what you were getting at, but now that I understand: yeah, big coincidence. If only they knew what was going down now. History's greatest monster, indeed.
BTW, I think it's great that Hussein is out of power in Iraq. I was (and still am) anti-war, but still, the people of Iraq seem to be down with what we did, so hopefully things get better for them.
Mike Coddington wrote in message news:...
And we thought Marge was psychic with her "24 hour hard core sex" comment about Fox TV several years ago.
Yeah. Too bad we put him in to begin with. And propped him up as a hedge against Iran. I am pretty sure we booted (ANOTHER SIMPSONS REFERENCE) him out because he was getting too stubborn to kow-tow to American business interests. The human-rights thing had nothing to do with it. I saw a bunch of people on TV in Jordan last night. They see Saddam as a stalwart against foreign intervention. They were unhappy. Some people want the foreign interventionists out, no matter what the cost.
Space
Sorry, what board is this? Since you brought it up, tho...
<<Yeah. Too bad we put him in to begin with. >>
Not exactly true, for glavin out loud (to keep on topic). The Ba'ath party, with Saddam as their new leader, took power without the help of the US in 1979 -- we had aided the Ba'ath party in the mid-seventies, though (the Disco Stu era).
<<And propped him up as a hedge against Iran. >>
Arming the Iraqis to get a Iraq-Iran stalemate seemed like a brilliant cold-war strategy at the time. No one wanted Iran running that region in the '80s (remember Homer's anti-Ayatolla shirt in Two Bad Neighbors?), and we couldn't just roll tanks into Iran without getting a response from the Soviets. In those days, we had to support bad guys against worse guys in a lot of the world -- much like Mendoza was backed by US interests until McBain took him out ("Ice to see you"). Now that we don't have to pussyfoot around the Soviets, we can just do what we did in Iraq -- roll in the tanks.
<<I am pretty sure we booted (ANOTHER SIMPSONS REFERENCE) him out because he was getting too stubborn to kow-tow to American business interests.>>
What American business interests? This is quite nonsensical when you take the oil sanctions into effect, hoyvin mayvin. If we cared about American business interests so much, wouldn't we have continued trading with them as normal? We only hurt American business interests by the way we dealt with Saddam.
<<The human-rights thing had nothing to do with it. I saw a bunch of people on TV in Jordan last night. They see Saddam as a stalwart against foreign intervention. They were unhappy. Some people want the foreign interventionists out, no matter what the cost.>>
When all Saddam's atrocities are discovered, it'll show that "intervention" was the only moral thing to do. Saddam was a madman and needed to go sooner than later -- well, in this case LATER than MUCH LATER. We should've done this 10 years ago, when Clinton knew that Saddam had no intention of disarming. But as he himself said, "I'm a pretty lousy President."
Life is full of coincidences.
Scrappy Doo wrote:
What do you know - *I* was just going to say that!
A few years back I encountered coincidence on a much lesser scale - on another favorite show, 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', one of the principal characters, normally quite mild-mannered, was fueled by rage and set an adversary's lair ablaze, wielding a flaming baseball bat. Then a couple days later, Homer does the same thing at Moe's Tavern. (oddly enough, not in the 'Flaming Moe' episode)
VMacek
Yes and no. The US didn't plan yesterday's statue-toppling, but they did make sure to liberate the friendly Shiite parts of Baghdad first, hoping something like this would happen.
"I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me" - General George S. Patton.