Dr. Strangebomb,
or how I learned to stop worrying and not give a fart in the bathtub about the prospects for a global thermonuclear conflict
by: Schvach Yid

You know all that stuff on the news about a US Air Force bomber that flew from its base in North Dakota to a base in Louisiana, carrying cruise missiles tipped with nuclear warheads? Supposedly, it shouldn’t have (evidently, the honor for the entailed risk goes to Canada).

Do you recall that a scant few weeks prior to this story, Pres. Bush and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin emerged from some sorta meetin’. Pres. Bush appeared, and sounded, just a bit miffed - no, make that overtly shaken, over the prospect of renewed hostile posturing between the USA and Russia?

So? What to do? We had to get a message across to the Kremlin, you know, something like ‘we’re not a bunch of pushovers – we’ll match you and then some’, but one can’t say or do anything too overt, because once the gauntlet has been thrown down, one’s bluff might just be called, and then what?

Enter diplomacy, and I mean the sort of diplomacy far removed from threats of confrontation. Let’s just let them know we still have the ‘thing’, and it’s loaded and ready to go. But nothing too brash.

Let’s have a domestic incident. Yeah, that’s the ticket, and so, we have this news ditty about a nuclear missile (or several) that careened over the heads of unsuspecting Americans, rather than over the heads of unsuspecting Canadians (hey, someone has to pay the price – why should it be us?).

I’m no political scientist. I know nothing about politics, diplomacy, or international relations, and I mean nothing at all. I barely qualify to pick up a year-old copy of Newsweek at the dentist’s office as I wait for the drill ‘em - fill ‘em – bill ‘em torture fest to begin. And to top it off, this is a Jewish blog site, so what gives?

Well, I’m itchy about this matter, and so is the rest of the world. It’s been said by enough news commentators, so why not by me?

The world does not want to be shepherded by America’s current serving president. No one outside the US wants him as the custodian of the free world, and the gauntlet has indeed been thrown down – by Vladimir Putin. Fifty-one percent of American voters in the last presidential election voted to continue George Bush’s presidency. That’s the problem. A brainiac like Newt Gingrich is no match for our boy from Crawford, TX. Unfortunately, the rest of the world disagrees, and they’re doing more than just speaking up.

The presidential wannabes are all over the news reports. One primary candidate after another is after the job. The debates looked like reality TV gone Huntley-Brinkley (remember?). Fred Thompson was smart to not participate – the whole thing looked like a humiliation fest (the sight reminded me of a scene from the movie version of Catch 22 – enough said). But thankfully, as long as Trent Lott is out, the error of electing a George Bush clone seems remote, and to coin the popular phrase – ‘that’s a good thing’.

The last Texas president we put into the White House was LBJ. He gave us the Vietnam War. His replacement, Richard Nixon, continued the war for almost his entire, but not quite, two term presidency because, as he intoned at a news conference, he didn’t want history to record him as the first American president to lose a war (he was wrong; that honor went to Jefferson Davis).

Now our nation’s second son-of-Texas president is ‘winding down’ his term of national service, and another American war rages on with no end in sight. The rest of the world doesn’t approve, and despite Bush’s Texas bravado, that is a problem for America, and for the entire world, because in response, the former USSR’s head of dastardly deeds, Vladimir Putin, is on the march, and frankly, this can’t lead to anything good.