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For the past few years, we in the West have been sacrificing civil liberties, along with a good deal of blood and massive amounts of future output.
This has been required in order to have our State's hired killers go thrashing about in poor, brown, non-Christian bits of the planet... blowing things up, shooting children, sticking odd items in detainee's anuses, and generally behaving like the Waffen SS in the Sudetenland during the 40's.
For why, again?
Oh, yes, because a while ago soem "furrners", outraged at militaristic western foreign policy, exploited "asymmetric" 4-th generation (non-State) warfare in retaliation... which inflicted a death toll (as a proportion of population) on the US about as great as that inflicted by the IDF in an average month in the Palestinian occupied territories.
Apparently, people who do things that result in the death of large numbers of US civilians are bad... and if you're responsible for some number of deaths of 'ragheads', it's not really that important even to count them.
But back to this very basic idea: that folks who do things that kill US civilians are bad - they're "Terrists" (or is that "Terrrrists"?).
Apparently - according to the Mayor of New Orleans - the death toll from the flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina may be in the thousands. Any more than 3000 and it beats the WTC... and while the WTC resulted from decades of abusive foreign policy, the hurricane damage- and the death toll - is due in no small part to central government incompetence, too.
Guess whose Administration vetoed virtually all of the budget for flood and other disaster relief for the Gulf Coast (which includes Louisiana)?
There is a very good chance that if the funds had not been vetoed, the emergency response would have been better - but more to the point, the planned refurbishment of the levees may have resulted in Lake Pontchartrain draining more readily - and therefore less flooding, full stop.
Bush's personal death toll - only counting US civilians - may have just bumped up past Osama's. Should we send our troops to wherever he's holidaying, Mr Prime Minister? Of would you like a banana while you pick your arse and wait for the organ grinder to return?
