Sky Father, Heap Big Trouble
War is complicated. You have all the logistical nightmares of moving a huge amount of people with all the necessary supply and materiel, the morass of practical details involved in knowing whom to blow up and when, the mental and spiritual grind of deciphering intelligence data and then deciding which parts of that data to selectively ignore if it in any way countermands your publicly stated goals... it's a lot of work.

Taking a page from their own book, the Bush people have decided that the best way to fix an already complicated problem? Invent a whole new level of bureaucracy in the form of a new office which will need to be staffed and then shoe-horned into the chain of command.

Dear Easter Bunny,

Please send us a War Czar. And some of those marshmallow Peeps. And some of those Peanut Butter M&Ms. Those are really good. Oh, and Osama bin Laden. You know, if you see him.

The thing about war is that once you get going, it's not like playing Risk. It's not all about pushing some pieces from Kamchatka to Yakutsk and then rolling some dice until you have one piece left and your enemy has none. You've got commanders in the field who need all kinds of different things--personnel! body armor! orders!--and just won't get off your back about it. I swear, people start getting shot at and all of a sudden they get all insistent about stuff.

It makes sense that in that complicated situation, with all those commanders in two theaters clamoring for stuff like "supply" and "direction" you would need to invent a position within the government that was kind of a catch-all, someone to whom those individual commanders could turn for guidance... like if the commanders were represented by a tribe of Native Americans, they would have someone to turn to, like for instance a medicine man. Or no! A chief. Someone to be the Chief of the Commanders maybe, yeah. That would work. The last resort of decision-making responsibility. A commander, but the Chief-Commander.

Yeah, "War Czar". This is what you have to think of when modern circumstances demand it. I blame the Framers of the Constitution. If only they had thought of this originally. But I guess they were too busy being slave-owners and poncey book-readers to know that one day someone would fly planes into our buildings because they hate us for our freedom.

So not only is it their fault for giving us the freedom for which we are hated, but they didn't give us the necessary Chief-Commander either. One more reason I say take Jefferson off the nickel and replace him with Reagan. Not only is Reagan a real patriot whose contributions we can concretely measure by his total non-inclusion in any damning governing documents of note, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't fathering children with his or anyone else's slaves. He was too busy giving all the power of his lucid mind to the fight against Communism.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 2.2


Pops


PS- Oh, about yesterday. Yeah, kind of embarrassing... I forgot, I don't have any railing on my stairs. Or, to be more specific, any stairs. Man, was my face red when the FD got here. So no pictures.

Labels: abrogation

- posted by Pops @ 9:34 AM