Do You Feel Lucky — How ’bout those WMD Odds?
Disinclined as I am to doubleclick on some silly diversion of a link in a forwarded e-mail, I couldn’t help myself.
First of all, I trust the sender. He’s an old comrade, loathe to dilly-dally through the day. The bloke’s got a mature outlook. Besides, he had the awareness not to forward the link in an e-mail containing 359 other addressees, in each of whose virus-vulnerable Outlook Expresses my handle would be deposited like a vagrant in a pauper’s staph-infected hospital ward.
Not to mention that the Internet dalliance reflected a sensible perspective — no Ann Coulter in this guy — about a subject of significant interest to the populace I like to refer to by its acronym: WMD. My pal wasn’t referring to White Man’s Disease either, a malady from which we both have suffered, at least since playing in a Tuesday night rec league. His e-mail advised that I visit google.com, type in “weapons of mass destruction” and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
His wish was my command.
What popped up was a page essentially identical to those that appear indicating you’ve tried to surf somewhere in the cybergalaxy that doesn’t exist. There was a little “i” in the upper left hand corner with this pithy copy next to it: “THESE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION CANNOT BE DISPLAYED.” Underneath it read: “The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate.”
The cleverness didn’t stop there. The page contained a “Regime Change” link that leads one to a site to buy some funny book with Saddam on the jacket. The “Detect Weapons” link goes to a page where you can purchase “Pieces of Intelligence — The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.” At the bottom was a “bomb” linked to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of Armageddon, “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
I mention more details than should be necessary. For some reason, which is most assuredly evidence of a vast and dangerous right wing government conspiracy, when I just tried the trick again before writing this, it didn’t work. Conspiracy or googleyglitch? You decide. Try this should you be so inclined: www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk.
Speaking of weapons of mass destruction that are real, palpable and acknowledged — how about Dub’s job on the economy? Pretty boffo, eh? This year’s deficit is $455 billion. Next season the number jumps to $475 billion. The five-year tally — $1.9 trillion in the red.
That, fellow citizens of the republic, is weapons of mass destruction.
How is the Dub crew confronting the economic freefall? By sending three kick-out-the-jams cabinet members — Snow from Treasury, Evans from Commerce and Derbyplace homegal, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao — on a let’s-party-hearty bus caravan through the Corn Belt. They’re sleeping in bunk beds, mingling with the masses. Hey, if it was good enough for Kesey and the Pranksters, it’s good enough for the Dub. Forget rising unemployment and plummeting consumer confidence, the word here: Have another tax cut and a hit of E. (That’s Ecstasy for those of you reared on purple microdot.)
And, speaking of governmental stupidity, remember the theory I parroted a couple months back, the gist of which is that Washington is always deeper in conspiratorial ka-ka than even the most paranoid can imagine?
Consider the idea of the Pentagon as your national bookie/stockbroker.
DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) — a unit of your U.S. government, the Defense Department, to be exact — was setting up “a futures market that would have allowed investors to bet on the probability of coups, assassinations, terrorist strikes and other events in the Middle East.”
My man Joey The Vig was beside himself in anticipation. He set the over/under on Saddam’s beheading at Aug. 13. Odds on a U.S. invasion of Syria: 25-1 before the end of the year; 9-5 after Jan. 1.
This idea was so off the charts that incredulity inside the beltway was immediate and non-partisan. The absurdity was axed with terrible swift sword.
Much to the dismay of Tony Tether, DARPA’s director. Sad that his agency’s thinking outside the usual bureaucratic box was deep-sixed, he said, “It simply didn’t make sense to continue in light of recent concerns.”
Which disingenuous statement accurately reflects clearheaded reasoning about Bush The Younger’s administration.
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