Marion Barry

The Week’s Most Baneful, Painful, and Disdainful Headlines

U.S. GAMBLES $6 TRILLION ON IRAQ, LOSES
The United States military spent eight years tearing Iraq to pieces in order to “€œstabilize”€ it, only to see the country tearing itself to pieces again.

Last week as Barack Obama flitted around the USA scolding climate-change “deniers” and worshipfully attending Sioux tribal ceremonies, Sunni insurgents poured into Iraq from Syria, captured the battered nation’s second-largest city, and blazed a 200-mile path of conquest before it was halted around sixty miles north of Baghdad.

George W. Bush justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the premise that weapons of mass destruction were being stockpiled there. These weapons never surfaced, although the US invasion left mass destruction in its wake.

And that was only in Iraq. It doesn’t include the thousands of dead soldiers and the tens of thousands of maimed, wounded, blinded, hobbled, and psychologically destroyed veterans. It doesn’t include those who wound up taking their own lives after returning.

Nor does it account for the economic destruction. Adding initial war costs onto pensions and interest, the US failure in Iraq may cost as much as $6 trillion. That’s close to $20,000 per man, woman, and child currently alive in the USA.

“Terrorism” is a loaded and deceptive word, especially when it issues from the mouths of politicians who’ve endorsed raining holy terror across the Middle East for the past dozen years or more. But Islamic “terrorism,” as US politicians and their media lapdogs define it, is alive and well in the Middle East. If anything, it’s stronger than ever. So if the invasion was intended to crush terrorism, it failed.

Many speculated that it had nothing to do with “terrorism,” that it was merely a ruse to mask a thirst for cheap oil. This doesn’t explain why gasoline is now twice as expensive as it was in 2003. If Iraq becomes further destabilized and Baghdad falls to the Sunnis, one analyst says “the price you’re paying at the pump today is gonna look like a bargain in a couple weeks.”

This wretched sequel of Vietnam was the most expensive horror movie ever made.

YOU CAN USE MY GENDER-SPECIFIC TOILET WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD FINGERS
James Nichols, a writer for Huffington Post’s “Gay Voices””€”one imagines these voices to be loud, whiny, and perhaps even prone to lisping”€”finds it “troubling” that a new CBS poll revealed that 59% of Americans say they would prefer that people use bathrooms that match “the gender they were assigned at birth,” which is a disingenuous way of saying, “the genitals with which they were born.” In another dishonest turn of phrase, Nichols calls the rampaging quest to crash the opposing gender’s public restrooms “self-determination when it comes to choosing which bathroom to use,” rather than “a rude imposition of one’s delusions about their gender identity upon the unwilling and the far less sexually confused.”

Nichols goes on to say, “The results are upsetting to say the least.” Why just say the least? Say how you really feel, Mithter Nicholth. Say that the results made you want to claw someone’s eyes out or commit suicide or eat a dozen glazed donuts while bawling and watching Logo TV. He also uses a “[sic]” after every occurrence of the word “transgendered,” as if someone is naturally “transgender” and doesn’t have to go through extensive and expensive medical processes to become “transgendered.” Nichols concludes that the poll “shows how much work we have left to do.” It’s quite obvious that once they do whatever work that might be, they will find something new, troubling, and upsetting that will indicate they have even more work to do. These types never seem to suffer a shortage of work to do, because if they did, they’d be out of a job.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Dr. Paul McHugh, former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, accused the transgendered of suffering from “a disorder of ‘assumption’” akin to anorexia and bulimia. He deemed it “a mental disorder” and proclaimed that “the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken”€”it does not correspond with physical reality.” Media Matters“€”but of course, since George Soros apparently never saw a Western cultural tradition upon which he didn’t want to defecate”€”accused McHugh of peddling “pseudoscience” and “thoroughly discredited” ideas that bigots would use to justify “hatred and violence.”