Happy Mission Accomplished Day!

Three years after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1944. By that time, most of Japan's navy lay on the bottom of the sea. Waves of bombers were turning Japan's major cities into rubble, with the exception of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which were reserved for other things. The United States had floated over 40 aircraft carriers, thousands of other warships and cargo ships, built hundreds of thousands of tanks and aircraft, and equipped tens of millions of soldiers in order to defeat and occupy major threats to America. A pre-war army of under 300,000 had been built into an army of over 20,000,000 charged with defeating and occupying enemy nations. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German-speaking Americans had been drafted as interpreters and translators or to train other Americans in how to speak Japanese or German, and the plan for occupation of Japan and Germany was well underway. Taxes had been raised to over 70% of income in order to pay for the war, and the majority of Americans of working age were either in the military or were in war-related industries supporting the military in its goal of total defeat of the enemies of the nation.

Three years after George W. Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, our soldiers in Iraq still don't have adequate equipment. The majority of American units in Iraq still do not have Arabic-speaking interpretors, and the NSA and CIA still don't have enough Arabic-speaking translaters to properly handle the masses of intelligence they receive about the movements of people who want to do harm to America. Rather than millions of boots on the ground such as during the initial occupations of Germany and Japan, there is only maybe 40,000 boots (the rest are support troops in heavily-fortified bases). Rather than raise taxes to pay for the war, Bush cut taxes, thereby selling our nation to the Chinese who are in the process of bankrupting our nation. Rather than building mighty war industries, Bush has accelerated the process of shipping critical industrial infrastructure overseas, a process that started during the Presidency of Saint Ronald Reagan but has reached an exponential curve today. Rather than defending our borders, our borders are a mess, with millions of illegal immigrants crossing it every year, so many illegal immigrants that any terrorists who wished to cross it could easily merge with the herd and be almost impossible to stop.

But yesterday I paid $3.10 per gallon to fill up my gas tank.

Yeah, Mission Accomplished. If you're an oil company in pursuit of record profits. Vice President Halliburton rubs his hands together and chortles in glee every time you or I take it up the rear at the pump. Mission Accomplished. Yeah.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin