Let Them Drink Coke

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Let Them Drink Coke
by Peter Kurth
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 27, 2003

So, they’re going to fry the Sniper, are they? Good work, America! Evidently, John Moo-ha-ha Muhammad, the elder of the two snipers under charge, never actually pulled the trigger of the gun that killed 13 people last year in the Washington, D.C. area. But he’s going to his death all the same, inasmuch as the “strong influence” he had on his (just barely) underage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, is thought to have been the … uh, trigger for Malvo’s murder spree.

Got it? Malvo will undoubtedly get off, in one way or another, either by grace of his youth or on grounds of insanity, whichever comes first. But Muhammad will die, because -- well, his name is Muhammad and his murders weren’t sanctioned by the U.S. military. The only way you get to kill people lawfully in this country is by going to war. Then you can do whatever you want.

Please understand me -- I’m trying to keep up. I was all set to write about President Bush’s trip to England when this Muhammad thing came up, Michael Jackson got arrested for child molestation and People ran a cover story featuring Amber Frey, “The Other Woman” in the Laci-Peterson-and-Her-Unborn-Son-Connor murder trial in California. Laci‘s husband, and Connor‘s father, Scott Peterson, is charged with killing them both a couple of Christmases ago -- again, without sanction of warfare, and therefore, you know, illegally.

Talk about dumb! All he had to do was go to Iraq or Afghanistan and he could have killed anyone he wanted! For that matter, I expect he could do it here, provided the person he murdered was suspected of “terrorism” or its intent. The war on terror is going to be won, you see, by terror, terror, and more terror. It’s in the Bible -- “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” etc., etc., ad nauseam and infinitum.

"If they [the terrorists] think they are going to somehow weaken us or make us think, well, let's shuffle to the back of the queue and hide away from this, they are wrong," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week in London, during a press conference with Dubya that was staged only hours after a couple of bombs went off in Turkey and killed dozens of people. Among the dead was the British consul-general in Istanbul -- that is to say, a white man, one of ours, and thus an “innocent victim” of the evil-doers.

You might think that a lot of Turks walking past the consulate that day were innocent, too, but you’re forgetting their crazy clothes and their nutty religion, which promises martyrs -- sorry, girls, only males! -- a big banquet in heaven and 70 virgins apiece if they give up their lives for Allah. Thank God we don’t have people like that in this country! We’ll make do with the Ten Commandments, if “liberals,” “leftists” and “a runaway judiciary” don’t sabotage the intent of the Founding Fathers by making us all marry homosexuals under penalty of law!

Of course, foreigners are funny to begin with, as President and Mrs. Bush can tell you after their visit to London. Not only did the Queen serve five kinds of wine at the official banquet in Buckingham Palace, but she wouldn’t even give Dubya a Coke when he asked for one.

Criminy! And these are our friends, our “coalition” partners! They played the theme song from Titanic at the dinner party, along with “tunes from South Pacific,” “Greensleeves” and “It’s Now or Never” -- and still the people went tramping through the streets, 100,000 strong, or 200,000 if you believe the protest organizers.

Let’s meet in the middle and say it was 150,000 -- that’s still a lot of liberals and leftists who don’t seem to know what freedom means, who don’t know how lucky they are to be able to gather and protest in any way they want. True, Bush never saw them, shielded as he was from all signs of disagreement. And when he says that the Iraqi people weren't allowed to march through Baghdad until the coalition freed them from “the lash of Saddam Hussein” -- well, I don’t think anyone wants to put it to the test. Two of our soldiers have already been murdered this week in Mosul, their bodies dragged from their jeep and robbed by an angry horde of teenagers. So let’s not try to guess what might happen if the Iraqis took to the streets en masse and gave Dubya a piece of their mind. Ingrates!

Meantime, Laura forgot to take off her gloves when she shook hands with the Queen -- tsk, tsk! Dubya kept clapping Her Majesty on the back, even though no one is allowed to touch her, ever, unless a bomb is about to go off and she needs to be pushed under a table or something. She’s said to be “furious” right now over the mess the Americans have made of her lawn -- angrier than anyone has ever seen her, in fact. Trees and shrubs dating back to the time of Queen Victoria were destroyed last week by Bush’s helicopters, his bullet-proof Cadillac, his 250 bodyguards, 15 sniffer dogs, 50 White House political aides, 20 armored vehicles, three jumbo aircraft, and the man who gets to carry the button to set off the atom bomb -- should that become necessary in the war against evil.

Even the royal flamingoes have fled, according to report, “traumatized” by Ding-Dong’s stomp across England, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bush cartel.

Peter Kurth is the author of international bestselling books including Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, Isadora: A Sensational Life, and a biography of the anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. His essays have appeared in Salon, Vanity Fair, New York Times Book Review, and many others. Peter lives in Burlington, Vermont. He can be reached at: peterkurth@peterkurth.com. Visit his website at: http://www.peterkurth.com/

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