Mission Accomplished

No, no, no...this isn't about me landing on an aircraft carrier at taxpayer expense to announce that major combat operations in Iraq are over and that we won. This is nothing of the sort...not at first. Rather, I came home the other day to find a small, brown, non-descript box waiting for me at my front door. It was the new power supply for my home PC that I had ordered. It was a quick fix to install it, but it was definitely pucker time when I hit the power button for the first time. I was reasonably confident that I had correctly diagnosed the problem, but the "what if's" kept creeping into my mind. What if the power supply wasn't the problem? Who do I take it to for repairs? There was no f*cking way I was trusting it to the yahoos at Best Buy. But fate smiled on me for a change and I was greeted with the familiar beep my computer makes as it begins the boot-up process.

Also accomplished was keeping my New Year's resolution of getting at least one of the DVD boxsets of the "Emergency" television series from the early to mid 1970s. I guess it was having the fire department show up at the building I work in that was the catalyst. One of our new faculty members burned some popcorn in the microwave. The resulting clouds of smoke triggered our fire alarm system, which resulted in a visit by the police and fire departments because someone with a Ph.D. can't microwave popcorn. Strangely enough, it was about a year ago when another new faculty member incinerated their lunch in the same microwave, setting the machine for thirty minutes when they meant to set it for three, filling the whole building with smoke and also tripping our fire alarm system. I plan on giving a brief lecture on Safe Microwaving at our next faculty meeting, as our microwave has survived two attempts on its life so far, and you know what they say about the third time being a charm.

Speaking of a detached reality program on television and people who don't know how to operate anything, did you catch our Commander in Chimp in his primetime special last week? You know, it's the one where he went before the masses to announce that in order to bring peace to Iraq he's going to send another 21,500 troops into the meat grinder that is Baghdad? Unlike the prior failed attempts to bring peace to Iraq, we have a plan this time to build infrastructure to help things along. Wait...wasn't that our plan almost four years ago when we went it? Didn't seem to work the first time we tried it, so what the hell...let's give it another go. Now dubya finds himself in over his head in a situation that the C he made in his international relations course in college ill-prepared him for. He's like a child who has broken his toy and thinks he knows how to fix it, but instead breaks it some more. The only thing throwing another 20,000 U.S. troops into the carnage that is Baghdad will result in is creating 20,000 more targets for Shia and Sunni militias to take shots at.

So why won't this plan work? Simple: Shias don't like Sunnis, and vice versa. Shias want some payback after years of abuse at the hands of the Sunni-dominated Baath party which ruled Iraq. The Sunnis think of the Shia as inferior and they should be ruled, not the rulers. Now throw in the Iraqi government run by prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia, who has been about as effective and useful as Rush Limbaugh's genitals. Al-Maliki is supposed to disarm the militias? Good luck! If al-Maliki tried to disarm al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, me thinks Nouri's days would be numbered.

So dumbya is sending in another 20,000 troops, and very quickly at that so that Democrats will look bad if they try to pull funding for troops that are already in country. But the bigger question here is, is our president learning? The answer is a resounding NO.