Warning, this Diary is a rant, it contains lots of shitty language that isn’t appropriate for kids.
So I just saw this story (link forthcoming... if they post it) on Nightline about a wealthy Iraqi doctor who, after a near death experience involving his family, recently decided to invest heavily into making his own neighborhood safer. At first I thought this was awesome, it’s great to see things get better in Iraq and it’s great to see people standing up for their local communities. And then I read what he did to make his community safer... and it really pissed me off.
What did this doctorb(the b is for bargain) do? He hired locals to pick up the trash. He bought gas generators to provide electricity, and he convinced local business men to hire orphans, keeping them off the street and out of the insurgency. Yes, all of this makes sense, and these initiatives have made his neighborhood one of the safest in Iraq. The part that pisses me off is that all of the crap he did is shit we should have been doing 5 years ago, and shit that we should certainly be able to afford at the current $12 billion/mo budget we’re spending.
So what I heard was that 5 years, 3,990 deaths, and anywhere from 2 to 4 trillion dollars later we still can’t manage to even pick up their trash? Seriously? Where the fuck is all of MY/YOURS/OUR money/blood going? We know it isn’t going to veteran benefits. We know it isn’t going towards paying our troops. We know it isn’t going towards providing the best armor and mine resistant vehicles, and now we know for certain that It isn’t going, in any meaningful way, towards rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq, we’re waiting for wealthy local doctorbs to step up and do that.
Other things about this that really piss me off:
- The realization that if we had done something as simple as develop a system for picking up trash from the streets Iraq would be safer, for our troops and for locals (insurgents hide IEDs in piles of neglected trash).
- The realization that a lot of our troops have died because AFTER 5 FUCKING YEARS we haven’t been able to do what one local doctorb has done a few months with less than 1 percent of our budget.
- The realization that the administration never has and never will give a shit about any of this. What’s their goal? I have no fucking idea, but it certainly doesn’t seem to involve winning, and yet, somehow, we are the ones who want America to lose....
I think I finally get it though, if we can’t even pick up trash I bet toilet paper is hard to come by in Iraq, luckily tax payer dollars are very absorbent and non-abrasive!
P.S. I miss Nightline, after Ted Koppel left half of their stories seem to involve Transvestites working at microsoft and incredulous reporters asking questions like "isn’t having a transvestite for a boss confusing!!?" and "Is he/she the transvestite your husband or your wife? Snicker snicker". Ungh, I’m a pessimist so I’ll just say it, we’re all completely fucked, the economy is completely in the shitter (as this graph shows the only reason why people haven’t rushed the bank "It’s a wonderful life" style is because they don’t know what’s going on, either that or they still foolishly have faith in FDIC, hint: buying gold and consequently raising its price to over $1000/ounce is how rich people rush the bank) and what used to be our best news program is obsessing over the fact that transvestites actually exists outside of pay for play porn sites... I hope you have a lawn, because chewing on grass will be our only form of sustenance over the next few years.