the olive ream

Sung to the tune of My Way

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, is only Bush, that much is clear,
We’re both war criminals, of that I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life, full of misdeeds,
Left trails of dead bodies on Iraqi highways,
And more, much more than this,
I screwed up My Way.

Regrets? I should have so many,
But then again, I can’t recall to mention
I did what I was told by Bush
And saw it through without exception
The US planned each charted course
each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this,
I still claimed it My Way.

Yes all the time, I’m sure you knew
When we bit off, more than we could chew
But through it all, as was our goal
We ate it up and swallowed whole
The sovereign rights of an entire nation
And did it Our Way.

I’ve loved kissing Bush’s arse,
I’ve laughed and hardly cried,
I’ve had my fill, my share of brown nosing
and now as sanity subsides
I find it all so amusing
to think I did all that
and may I say not in a shy way

Oh no, oh no not me
I did it My Way

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not usurping another country’s oil reserves, then he has naught.
Possessed by avarice, one hardly feels,
Which makes it easy for the one who steals.
The record shows
Iraqis took the blows -
All because I did it my way!

“I before E except after C” is a mnemonic device that helps me remember the rule for spelling certain words in the English language, such as deceive and siege when I’m describing the actions of the Bush Administration. There’s also a less known memory aid which I qualify as “I before SY when preceded by a ‘Hypo’ “. This writing standard helps formulate the word hypocrisy, which describes the current global, rather repugnant, political status quo.

Allow me to pontificate on the absurdity of their logic. A South Vietnamese student goes on a murderous rampage on a college campus and he is to be seen as ‘deranged psychopath’ (and rightly so). A neocon led army goes on a murderous rampage in sovereign nation and we are supposed to classify that as ’spreading peace and democracy’. That’s rather an absurd logic, don’t you think? Skewed so far off course, you can’t even see its connection to reality.

18 british sailors accused of spying, are detained for two weeks by Iranian authorities. They suffer severe torture for two strenuous weeks. Initially blindfolded and then isolated they are then further tormented by being well fed, given cigarette breaks, allowed to lounge around and play table tennis and board games, given new suits to wear and then finally released after receiving a gift bag each. We (the public) are then expected to sympathize with the tremendous suffering of these 18 admitted spies (according to the Sky News) who vacationed in Iran for a fortnight and then released to make money by selling their stories.

Along with the detention of the alleged Al Qaeda, Taliban and the frightfully dangerous Al Jazeera News channel reporter currently being held in indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, there are unknown number of world citizenry who have been kidnapped and ‘renditioned’ by CIA or their approved proxy agents under the umbrella of ‘War on Terror’. There are no signs of their release or an end to their REAL torture (as apposed to what the british sailors suffered). Any one in the world can be classified an ‘enemy combatant’ and suffer indefinite detention and torture, but we are all expected to feel safe because the sanctimonious saviors of this world are busy fighting EVIL and we should not disturb them. Our only responsibility here is to acquiesce when they come to unlawfully abduct us. Apparently, the meek shall not be inheriting the earth. We were misinformed.

We are all expected to support the right of others to voice their opinions on politics, race, religion, culture, etc. in order to ensure our own right to free speech. We should also be tolerant of criticism and ridicule of our own faith, as we cannot expect everyone to conform to our own religious norms and tenets. (And yes, I am referring specifically to the case of the religious caricatures in the mainstream media which caused a furor in many countries. Geez! People really need to chill out if South Park lampoons Tom Cruise and Scientology.) This point is key if you truly believe in free speech and freedom of expression. BUT, what you cannot be allowed to do (currently in Germany and Austria and soon to be applied to the rest of the EU and even the US) is to deny, question or revise (the facts about) the Holocaust. This is the one and only free speech issue most of the western media and even some activists groups I imagine, are really truly afraid of touching. Can u imagine what would have happened had Salman Rushdie written a holocaust revisionist book instead of the Satanic Verses. The darling of the British media would be rotting in some European jail without any complaints from the English press. Personally, I do not deny the holocaust and I think what happened was horrific to say the least, and Hitler was completely off his trolley, BUT I don’t want any country that criminalizes the discussion, revision or denial of the holocaust to claim to be a complete supporter of free speech – ever! Because that is just a lorry load of horse excrement!

Religious extremist groups generally lack the ability to recognize their own hypocrisy when it comes to human rights. They desperately complain and start rioting if you don’t allow them to exercise their (self-anointed) privilege to infringe on the rights of others. They couldn’t spot the ‘irony’ if it came and bit them on their gluteus maximus. After much contemplation, I’ve come to the conclusion; it is pointless to argue with them because they lack the requisite amount of brain cells and having seven or eight will just not do. I’m sorry!

And of course, there’s the pretentious bunch of so called ‘professional’ media and broadcast journalists who routinely question the abilities of bloggers to tell the truth, while the same lot (CNN, New York Times, The Associated Press, UPI and many other agencies) ran propagandist disinformation news stories courtesy the Office of Strategic Influence (which should have been appropriately called Department of Shoveling Sh*t). All these news stories were uncorroborated but the media published them anyway. So the next time you (as a blogger) gets questioned by the likes of Wolf Blitzer from CNN, you have the right to attack his journalistic integrity by kneeing him in the groin.

And here’s something even more asinine:
- US = 10,000 nuclear warheads
- Israel = 100 plus nuclear warheads (conservative est.)
- Iran = 0 nuclear warheads (currently)
And guess who is being classified as the biggest threat to the world? I’m sure you know the answer to that one. They further claim that Ahmedinajad is actually what makes Iran more dangerous, which supposedly justifies their covert attempts (by CIA and Mossad) to bring regime change in Iran. Excuse me?! Has anyone considered the other two geniuses (Bush and Olmert) in question in this current political stand-off ? Surely, by all rational, logical and factual reasoning, a regime change is far more desperately needed in the US and Israel.

The truth is, like you, I am severely frustrated by this growing hypocrisy. It started as like a small pimple but now this uncontrollable blemish has blossomed into a festering boil on the backside of humanity. And who is to blame? The current crop of fascist leaders. And by the way, they don’t give a damn about any of this. If you questioned them now, Bush would show you the finger and Cheney would signal you as a “Loser”. Don’t believe me?

Here’s proof:

Press: So, how were you treated by your captors?

British Sailor (BS): We had a really tough time there for a bit. We were blindfolded.

Press: How absolutely horrifying!

BS: Yeah, and that wasn’t all, they then proceeded to isolate all of us.

Press: Gruesome!

BS: It was, yes! They put us in these cold, cemented cells.

Press: Oh dear God! Have they no decency?!

BS: Apparently not. But that wasn’t the worst of it. They then forced us to make false confessions by threatening us with 7 years in prison. Obviously, we all cracked under pressure.

Press: Oh the inhumanity of it all!

BS: Tell me about it. They fed us, got us cleaned up and dressed and then paraded us on television to have us make our false confession, one by one. But we made it clear by means of surreptitious winks, smiles and scratching of the ear lobes that we were being coerced into making these claims.

Press: Wow! I’m suitably impressed.

BS: You should be.

Press: So, what exactly did they make you confess?

BS: Well, as soon as we got back to England, they made us confess that we were actually in Iraqi territorial waters even though we all had confessed otherwise. They also wanted us to say we faced unrelenting psychological pressure from the Iranians to justify the reason for our cracking under pressure so quickly and in confessing to our uninvited sojourn into Iranian waters.