Small Dick Energy, Taliban Edition (Left Behind Is A Lie II, Six.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

...

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. 

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke. 

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

I saw this last night at work.

Sameera Khan, former beauty queen and current right-wing influencer, hosting a Twitter space with the Taliban to discuss Andrew Tate's arrest.

You know, maybe it's just me, but as far as I'm concerned if you've picked sides with the goddamned Taliban for any reason, that shouldn't end well for you and I say that as somebody who used to be a conservative Republican.

Of course this...person...this alleged American, is a devotee of Ramzan Kadyrov, tin-pot Chechen strongman. Maybe it's just me but I can remember when all these things would come together to get this bitch a rather unfriendly visit from the FBI, a national scandal, and a not-necessarily-metaphorical tarring-and-feathering in specifically Conservative media.

Now? Meh, it's Sunday. No one, at least on the side that allegedly should, cares. Of course we have long ago established that these motherfuckers don't believe in one damn word of traditional conservatism in any sense that it has previously existed in America.

Supporting American values or, ya know, supporting your own country over its enemies is apparently optional for the trendy-online-"Conservative"-Right.

Fuck these motherfuckers and I say that with all the invective I can manage as a former United States Air Force security police Sergeant. 

There's effectively no enemy of America these fucking people won't get on their knees and blow under the table, like some kind of a high-class hood-rat, and they [think they] call this crap "Owning The Libs."

But that's not really what's going on here. They'd rather be owned by some dirty Commie stooge with an office in the Kremlin and a Dacha in Sochi who makes his real money off a criminal empire that does god-knows-what. Or they'd rather be owned by some semi-literate warlord who buggers little boys and both deals and uses drugs...while claiming to be Muslim, knowing that any pious Muslim should reject narcotics automatically...but of course none of this is ever really about any of that.

Because they've looked at America and said no, they want to be Dirty Commies like the newly re-Sovietized Russia where you an get hauled away by the police for any reason, or none at all, with no recourse against either the power of the State nor the whims of the current Strongman.

It's New Years Day, the last day of our holiday season.

Tell me how the fuck we live in a world where Ukrainians are doing a better job of fighting for freedom and (small-D, small-L) liberal democracy, you know, living the values espoused by dudes like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush than current American Republicans are doing??

Like I said awhile back, can you imagine Reagan or George H.W. Bush if, say, things would have been less peaceful at the time, and Ukraine had ripped down the Hammer And Sickle and told the Russians to go fuck themselves while either of them was in office? 

Especially Bush 41 right after the fall of the Berlin Wall when, yes, we were looking for something to use all that big green and haze-gray firepower on while we still had it at the ready, simply to prove that there'd been a need for it all this time? 

The response would've been right out of all those Cold War novels and it would've been on like Donkey Kong...because Freedom, and at the time that was more than just an empty slogan. I ain't saying it's right or wrong. That's just how it was.

Sweet Jesus, if the Ukrainians are fucking the Russians up this bad with a few HIMARS systems and flood of more basic weapons we've given them...any conflict where it's us against the Russians would make Desert Storm look like slow motion, leave a big smoking crater where the Red Army used to be, and leave the Commies wondering what the fuck even happened.

The difference between the citizen-soldiers of a democratic nation and their courage and values, and the subservient conscripts of Neo-Communist totalitarianism in their obedience to Power could not be any more plain than the battlefields of Ukraine have made it.

And back in the day Uncle Sam would've kicked their ass, used the Red Banner for toilet paper and put Lenin's taxidermied ass in the wax museum at Knott's Berry Farm (Look that place up, its history and who started it, I fuckin' dare you) as a trophy of war and triple-dog-dared anybody to do anything about it...judging from the battlefield performance of Putin's New Soviet Men, we'd have gotten away with it.

And don't get me started on the fucking Taliban, I'm old enough to remember the days after 9/11 when saying you agreed with a bunch of drug-addled illiterate goat-fuckers who'd given shelter and operational support to Osama Bin Laden would have got you beat up, and the beatdown probably would've been pretty Bipartisan at the time. 

But I'm here to tell you, it would've been the Republicans wearing the steel-toed work boots and using phrases like "Bite the curb, Bitch."

The Taliban, you know, the motherfuckers that had conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike outraged at their brutality and evil towards women and children, at their disrespect for their own country's history, at their use and selling of drugs, the list goes on...

I was there. I remember. 

A couple of the guys I'd served with were still in, and went over there. I've heard some stories. There's a reason pretty much everybody hated the goddamned Takfiris, let alone the Arab terrorists they feted and gave arms and money to and these so-called pious holy warriors let Bin Laden's goons hack up innocent Afghan civilians, for basically no goddamned reason.

No one cried for the goddamned Taliban.

Trust me, given some of the friends I had at the time I can tell you straight up that any observant Muslim whose belief was worth the time it took to say "Allah Akbar" hated those motherfuckers just as much as we did, more, even.

And that's what a whole bunch of "Americans" think they want to be like??

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that seem a little fucked up to you?

There is no enemy of America that modern American "Conservatives" won't get on their knees and fellate, and they'll openly claim to do so in defense of human traffickers and rapists, on a mainstream social media platform at the presumed sufferance of Elon Musk.

Let that sink in.

To be clear, I've occasionally found Feminists annoying.

But I hate Fascists, Putinist neo-Commies, Radical Islamists, and any of those who would gleefully hop into bed with the same...especially if they are or want to claim to be Americans.

Especially when it's for no better reason than to show off some kind of trendy anti-Americanism.

Like there was a whole bunch of people yesterday insulting our military because some troops posed for a selfie with the Vice President. For the love of God, why? Who cares? Why does this even bother you?

I can remember when plenty of conservative Airmen were perfectly well willing to shake Bill Clinton's hand, and there was nothing wrong with that. 

Dude was...for better and worse...the personification of so much of what we were in the 1990's. I know, I was there. I was a Republican. If you did not live it, you will not understand the mind-flattening level of change packed into that one decade and I can't explain it to you. It really was a brave new world.

So let the kids have their goddamned Selfie.

You know, when the Left did that whole anti-American Radical Chic thing, and you had the whole Jane Fonda thing and lots of dudes walking around dressed like Che Guevara, at least they could say that Jane was kind of dumb and the dudes dressed like Che were at least following after somebody that had morals and had acted on them, even if he was on the other side. 

(And for what it's worth, I read The Motorcycle Diaries in the 1990's as a conservative during my first attempt at college. You might not have agreed with Che's course of action, but he was acting on principle.)

What's these fucking people's excuse? 

I've never heard about nor read any accounts of the 1960's/1970's American Left that come anywhere close to billionaires and beauty queens conversing with the Taliban in the public square of the era, over the fate of a human-trafficking rapist whom a foreign ally likely has dead to rights and intends to put away for a long time.

As far as I'm concerned, at the very least, Sameera Khan should get politically tarred-and-feathered for 50 years the same way as the conservatives treated Jane Fonda, and fuck, throw Elon in on that for good measure and make an example of him, too. His platform facilitated that shit!

People collectively need a reminder of just what these motherfuckers are stanning for. People need to hear that all that Left Behind End Times Rapture shit was a lie, for it surely must have been if this is what those same people support now!

You cannot have both the Cross of Christ and the Hammer And Sickle. You cannot support Takfiri radical Islam and claim the Blood of Jesus. You can't support either and claim to be for democracy.

One of these things is not like the other one. Yet not one goddamn "Conservative" Evangelical preacher will point that out.

Pick a goddamned side, and then be prepared to face the consequences.

We're all going to have to choose, no one will be exempt.

And there's going to be a test, soon.

Слава Україна!

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

Five