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Fraggin'

By Bill Shunas

The Wife has a complaint. (Nothing new there.) It seems that certain people have stolen her party. They call themselves the Tea Party. If nothing else, The Wife is a tea drinker. Whether it be chamomile, seven spice Chai, French vanilla, cinnamon apple spice, sweet coconut Thai or plain old Lipton's or Tetley's, she is ready to party. She mixes two or three kinds together in a large pot which stays on the stove top all day long. These Tea Party people probably don't even drink tea.

Couldn't they have called themselves the Know Nothing Party like their 19th century forerunners? At least that's more descriptive. Michelle Bachmann seems to be one of their main spokespeople, and she obviously don't know nothin'. She's the one who said the "3/5s of a person" Founding Fathers were anti-slavery. And then she gave this speech in New Hampshire talking about the New Hampshire Revolutionary War heritage at Lexington and Concord which happen to be located in nearby Massachusetts. Hey, who am I to bicker with a know-nothing who confuses facts.

These Tea Partiers are proud of themselves. They hold up their shining example of Ronald Reagan, and if there ever was a president who could confuse facts it was the Gipper.

And now Bachmann is following in his footsteps. Maybe there is some method to their misstatement. It might be that Massachusetts is a blue state, and they want to excise it from Revolutionary War history. Only problem is that Massachusetts is where they had the original Tea Party. They should take the name Know Nothing or maybe Whatareyousmoking.com.

This is not a good year for world leaders. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy is in trouble for dallying with a 17-year-old and paying some others for sex. Paying? Didn't he learn anything at World Leader School? He should have paid to hear one of Bill Clinton's high-priced speeches. From no less than Newt Gingrich we receive understanding how these politicians get mixed up with these young babes. Wannabe world leader Newt recently admitted that his love for his country is what caused him to cheat on wife #2. Imagine him tip-toeing through the door at 4 AM, and she wakes and catches him. Says Newt, "My country was calling."

This year is shaping up to be one of those historic years where everything is in play. In addition to Berlusconi, the prime ministers of Portugal and Canada were tossed out due to budget crises. And most important of all, you've got all these dictators in the Middle East on shaky ground. Mubarak is gone after thirty years in power. Tunisian Ben Ali is gone after 23 years. Gadhafi might hang around for awhile, but he might only have half a country.

I write this long before you will be reading it which means that things will have developed further in various Middle Eastern countries. Hopefully we haven't invaded Libya.

In February and March we saw Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at several press conferences/speeches making statements about one or the other Middle Eastern country undergoing protests, uprisings or revolution. Usually Hillary was verbally supportive of the rights of the protesters — except when a man wearing a Vets For Peace t-shirt staged a silent protest while she was speaking in favor of the right to protest. He kind of got manhandled a little bit. This might seem odd, but you have to understand the difference. Here we don't have dictators so this kind of protest is unacceptable.

I had a dream about Hillary. In the dream Hillary was standing on a balcony overlooking masses of people who were standing on a giant map of the Middle East. They were broken down into groups with each group standing on the part of the map that corresponded to their country. Every now and then Hillary would point down at one of the groups. "Bahrain," she would say. "Good dictator. Just be nice y'all." Then she'd point over at North Africa. "Libya. Bad dictator. Lockerbie bomber. Rise up people."

In between pronouncements she would step back into the shadows of the balcony and confer with figures who looked somewhat like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Robert Gates and her former husband — excuse me — the former president. Then, back in the light. "Iran. Bad dictator. Power to the people." Then she spotted the bright lights of Saudi Arabia and clapped her hands. "Good dictator. Our rock in the region."

Yemen's leader received plaudits for helping fight Al Qaeda despite the unrest of his people. Likewise Jordan and Iraq received praise, but then she pointed at Syria with an upturned nose and a down turned thumb. And so went the dreams, leaving me with a restless night.

Supporting dictators is hard work. You've got to keep them from being too hard on their people, or at least pretend that you do. You've got to keep the people from thoughts of overthrow. It's not easy being State Department. Or Defense. If an individual wishes to advance a State Department career they need to qualify at the dictator support classes given by some of the finest minds in the country.

One person who broke the rules on dictator support was Defense Secretary Gates. A couple of months ago he made a speech at West Point suggesting that any Secretary of Defense who advised a president to partake of a land war in Asia or the Middle East was out of his mind. This explains a lot. Flash back to the Reagan era. He cut spending for mental health, and that meant many of the mentally ill lost their bed in the institution. And that's about the time future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld emerged into the spotlight. See the connection? I don't know the explanation for McNamara, but he and Rummy have a lot in common.

What's that place over in Asia? The one where we just destroyed a village in order to save it? They say we've been having collateral damage there. But at least our body count is better than theirs. And those people don't care about life. Why, according to the number one general, some of that collateral damage really was the result of parents burning their children to receive compensation from the naive do-gooders at the State Department.

Seldom can you say this about a Defense Secretary, but Secretary Gates was right. We shouldn't get involved in a land war in Asia. Strange bird that Gates. Must have missed the dictator support class. He'll never pass Tea Party muster.

Bill Shunas is a Vietnam veteran, author and VVAW member in the Chicago chapter.