Disaster

YouTube's been frustrating me lately. There's a video there where Bill O'Reilly and and Geraldo Rivera have a shouting match over immigration. It's pretty nuts stuff. I always thought of Geraldo as Bill's little buddy, after the way the two of them went after Comedy Central's fake news. But to see these people so angry over this... It's just frightening. My thoughts are that Geraldo was right (they're disagreeing; I HAD to side with one of them): the death of a girl to a drunk driver should not be used as a political springboard about immigration. Yes, Bill, he shouldn't have been here. And I'm sure that after this event, he's been deported. (If not, then shockingly, Bill's right too - immigration policy is a mess.) But to turn a tragedy for this family into a "Talking Points Memo" does a disservice to everyone involved.

Anyway, I looked on YouTube for some more videos of him. I'm still looking for the bastion of literate, smart, Bill O'Reilly fans. I'm sure they're out there. They must be. There's no way there's not at least one Bill O'Reilly fan-site out there. If you find it, please let me know.

Anyway, a lot of the videos I found dealt with the anti-War protesters. Bill doesn't seem to like them that much. But they got me thinking. What the hell do we do now in the Middle East? I think it's pretty clear that the war was started somewhat unjustly. "Iraq is arming WMD's." Not so. "Freedom is on the march." Just as long as they vote in the guys we like, right? The insurgents don't get to be free. So now the only justification for the War is "We had to get rid of Saddam."

You'll often hear conservatives criticize the Anti-War crowd with the jab "Would you prefer it if Saddam were still in power?" And they love to compare him to Hitler, even if the comparison is merely implied. I'm going to take a giant flying leap here and say the following: "I THINK EVERYTHING WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF SADDAM WERE STILL IN POWER." As politicians are now finding out, the population of Iraq is not as streamlined as, say, China, or Japan, or even the vastly divided United States. Inside of the European-drawn borders of Iraq, we have found the warring Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. And these guys HATE each other. So, why then, are we just now noticing this? Saddam kept them in line.

Metaphor time: Saddam was like a barbed knife, plunged in the chest of Iraq. Yeah, its bad. Its a fucking knife plunged in there. But you don't just rip it out. That makes things worse. The same thing happened here. Saddam kept three waring factions from killing each other through fear. Yeah, it's bad, but the alternative was worse. Obviously, the answer is "don't take out the knife". For whatever reason, people now-a-days don't want to admit they messed up. And because they believe they did the right thing, they refuse to accept that things aren't going well. Their logic flows such that doing a good thing = getting good results. And that makes perfect sense. Except, they DIDN'T do a good thing. They made a bad thing worse.

So, step one, then, in fixing this mess, is admitting that mistakes were made. Admit that removing Saddam was not the right solution. Maybe not publicly, but at least to yourselves. Realize that there IS a civil war going on in Iraq. You are not just fighting a small resistance group in its final throws. Once you move more in line with reality, it will be that much easier to fix the problems of reality.

Okay, theres an hour I'm never getting back. Time for homework.