That'll teach me to make my Email address available on my blog...

So I got a very angry email from some anonymous asshat, who had excised a few key passages from a few entries in this blog (often severely out of context), had decided that I was a radical left-winger, based upon what I can only assume was a severely twisted view of what constitutes "radical left," and proclaimed proudly that I simply "[didn't] get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans."

I get a lot of email from asshats, usually in the form of spam, but this one deserved a response, I felt. Unfortunately, attempts to respond to said email were bounced back to me; so I can only hope that said asshat is reading this now.

In truth, the asshat in question isn't the first to claim that I "don't get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans," not by a long shot. I've had members of my own family tell me that I "don't get that there are people who want to kill Americans." As if I'm running around with my fingers in my ears singing "lalala, nobody wants to kill us." As if, were the amazing revelation that people out there want to kill Americans were to penetrate my thick skull, I'd suddenly love Bush, support the war in Iraq, and hate Muslims.

Why? Because apparently not supporting the war in Iraq means that I somehow don't get it. Somehow, because I think that attacking a country that presented no threat whatsoever to us is stupid, I'm missing out on this mysterious truth that "there are people who want to kill Americans."

Let's pretend that's true, for the sake of argument. Let's assume that if I don't support the war in Iraq, then I simply "don't get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans." One would have to therefore accept that because a certain group of a certain race and religion want to kill Americans, that the logical response is to go after a country that had absolutely nothing to do with any attack on American soil, ever; but happens to have people living in it who have a similar race, and sorta-similar religious beliefs.

I'm hoping that the aforementioned asshat realizes just how absurd that position is.

Now, I can hear said asshat's whiny voice now saying "well, what do you think we should do?" For the record, I can't say for sure whether the asshat has a whiny voice or not, but the voice my brain made up for him was sure whiny when I was reading the email. I have a bunch of answers for that question. We could've actually finished the job in Afghanistan, for starters. I fully supported the invasion of Afghanistan, for the record. I was all for going in there and making sure that it was no longer a breeding ground for terrorism. And we could've done it, too. If, after the Taliban had been overthrown, we'd dedicated resources to rebuilding that country, getting it back onto its feet, making it a reasonable contributor to the world stage, we may well have actually gained an ally in the middle east. At the very least, we'd have one less country populated by "people who want to kill Americans." We could've actually caught Bin Laden, rather than abandoning the search for him for no logical reason whatsoever. We could've spent money that we would instead waste in Iraq, trying to rebuild a country which still desperately needs rebuilding.

I could think of a dozen things, and it's mostly things that would cost a miniscule fraction in both dollars and lives than this unending, pointless, and very likely illegal war in Iraq cost us. It's not sexy. It's not a grand gesture like blowing the crap out of a country which does not present; and could not, in the foseeable future, have presented; any reasonable threat to the United States of America, but at least it would make some degree of sense.

While we're on that subject, let's talk about the fact that we're getting our asses kicked in Iraq. Who's kicking our asses? Yes, admittedly, they're "people who want to kill Americans." But really, can we hold that against them? They were, quite literally, minding their own business when we decided that we, for some reason, didn't like them and ploughed onto their soil to depose a dictator we put in power in the first place. Frankly, I'd be a little pissed at Americans myself if it were me. It's like having someone kick in the door of your house, rip up your furniture, light a fire in the middle of your living room, take a shit on your couch; then watch them complain indignantly when you try to kick them out. So, yes, there are people in Iraq who want to kill Americans, because we made them hate us. To presume that the people who are mopping the floor with us in Iraq had any thing to do with the guys who blew up the World Trade Center is absurd in the highest degree. We're not preventing another 9/11 in any way, form or fashion by fighting the insurgency there. In fact, I would go so far as to say that by annoying an entire new generation of terrorist recruits, we're guaranteeing another one. In his six years in office, Bush has done more to ensure that at some time, we will have another 9/11 than any other president before him. But I guess he figures that's okay. He'll probably be out of office by the time that rolls around anyway.

So yes, I disagree with the majority of this administration's policies. I disagree with the Patriot Act, I disagree with the Military commissions act. I disagreed with Congress when they suddenly decided that the thing that most needed doing was the creation of a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. I disagreed with congress when it decided that the greatest threat to American society was Gay Marriage. I disagreed with Bush when he decided that stem cell research was a dire enough threat to require him to exercise his first ever veto. Bush keeps claiming that those people who "want to kill Americans" hate us for our freedom; and he's doing his damnedest to ensure that pretty soon, that won't be a problem.

So, a couple of final notes to the anonymous asshat.

1. If you're so pretentious to put an "MA" after what I can only assume is a pseudonym, you should realize that "it's" is only spelled with an apostrophe when it's a contraction of "it is." "It's" is not the possessive of anything. On an unrelated note, "catastrophic" has no "f"s in it; if you're going to compare Bush to the mythical character Gilgamesh, you really should know a little more about it: it's not as much of a compliment as you seem to think it is.

2. You really shouldn't put an "MA" after what I can only assume is a pseudonym if all your ideas are stupid.

3. Yes, I do get that there are people out there who want to kill Americans. Do you?