Hey, George, you abysmal horse’s ass-you got your rogue state, now why won’t you stand up and fight? Saudi terrorists blow up the World Trade Center in mid-morning of 9/11/01 and at 2:40 PM exactly, your brain (Donald ‘Duck and Cover’ Rumsfeld) says “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) Go massive Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” You cretins were thirsting so bad for a piece of Saddam you were willing to pervert and derail the most important mission of your presidency–to hunt down Osama Bin Laden–in order to go after the dictator that shined the red-ass at your daddy. You diverted the might of our nation, you spent every last nickel of our diplomatic currency and wrote a thousand IOU’s to get your war with Iraq on you even let the culprit of 9/11 get away. And then the unthinkable happened. A real enemy came along. George, you silly fuckwit, allow me to introduce North Korea.
A while back, you sucked Chinese butt to get one of our spy planes back. You blinked first, and you groveled and it worked. Seems you learned your lesson: you’ve been extremely diffident with China ever since, and all our spy planes now fly over American airspace where they belong, looking for muzzle flashes out of the backs of cars. During your staring contest with the Yellow Menace, Nixon was rolling over in his grave, but more importantly, North Korea was watching. And I get the feeling Kim Jong-il (who runs the joint) thought to his inscrutable self, “that there George, he’s a long streak of paralyzed piss. I can do what I like.” And after a few aimless diplomatic slaps in his face by the US, he’s pissed off to boot. Meanwhile all eyes are bent on Iraq, and all of our troops and materiel as well. Maybe this would be a good time not to tweak Kim Jong-il’s nads but hey, why not?
After all, we can take a corn-studded dump on two fronts at once, even if, as our highest-ranking military generals suggest (although Rumsfeld disagrees) we can’t fight a war on two fronts at once. So dump on Pyongyang we did, but not the fuel oil and food aid those crazy commies were expecting. It gets cold there in the winter, George. People starve and freeze to death in North Korea, just like in Boston and Chicago when the unemployment benefits run out at Christmas time. So Kim Jong-il says something in Korean. Says it to you, George. Hard to figure out exactly what he’s saying because as you know them Shovelheads don’t talk English, but the Korean sounds like this: “Fa Kyo”. Come to think of it, maybe he’s speaking English after all.
And what do you have to say about it? According to the closest thing to an Asian in the Bush cabinet, high yellow Colin Powell, the situation with North Korea is “not a crisis”. They’re just “playing with the fool’s gold of nuclear weapons”. I don’t think they’re playing, George. They just threw out the United Nations inspectors, George. They reopened their nuclear plant and they’re stoking up the furnace, George. They say it’s to provide heat to the North Koreans, but given that those folks have the Bomb, and given that this self-same nuclear plant is the one they use to make the plutonium for said Bomb, George, don’t you think maybe that heat is intended for us?
I’m going to look at this situation the way you do, George, in good old black and white. No shades of gray in your world. For us or agin us, right? North Korea is waaaaay agin us. So are you going to shuck and jive for this Kim Jong-il? Are you really going to shake your head like a sad but tolerant father while this fang-toothed baby eating devil does the Macarena on international arms treaties? I thought we were the only ones allowed to do that. Couldn’t be a double standard, could it, George? One set of rules for the nigh-powerless little creep in Baghdad and another set of rules for the extremely authentic, bull-necked threat in Pyongyang?
Maybe it’s because North Korea ain’t got dick in the natural resources department. Maybe it’s because you’re actually a coward who got caught with his drawers down, and you’re scared merdeless. You tell me. But I have this terrible creeping feeling that you don’t realize how weak and expedient your international adventures are starting to look to the real threats in this world. You think Bin Laden is afraid of America now? Au contraire, he’s high-fiving everybody he sees and handing out cigars. You made his millennium, George. And if you don’t live up to your self-appointed world cowboy image in North Korea, we’re going to see an awful lot more of these crazy mercenaries coming out of the woodwork. These days, I won’t live or work within five miles of anything there’s a postcard of.
You put on the boots, George; do you have the guts to walk the walk? It’s your quagmire, and you really ought to get out of office if you’re not going to wade through it. I can’t help you there; my feet don’t reach the bottom so like most Americans I’m just treading water, trying not to drown. But I’m going to pretend I’m a belligerent halfwit like yourself, but that unlike you I have some consistency and follow-through. What would I do? I’d recognize a terrible, real danger that could secure my endangered ass a footnote in the history books other than “made the Nixon administration look good”. I’d get our forces the fuck over to the Korean Peninsula and take care of business, if that’s what it takes; march into North Korea with everything we’ve got and pull the fuse, NOW. Why? Because North Korea is an authentic Axis of Evil type place.
They were softening up and getting all friendly for a while there, but you sure as shit took care of that, and now they’re fighting mad. They heard what you said about the US making a first strike against its enemies, and they heard you call the North Koreans enemies, back when we were looking for someone to replace Osama Bin Laden. The North Koreans have nukes, and they intend to make more, and they just threw the inspectors out, like you said Saddam Hussein did, although he didn’t–we pulled the inspectors out of Iraq so we could bomb the place with abandon– North Korea really threw the UN inspectors out. They really have the Weapons of Mass Destruction. They really are the threat we claim Iraq to be. I’d be responding to the North Korean threat with everything I have if I was you. But thank the Lord Jesus, I am not you.
So what are you going to do about it, George? Let me guess. Nothing, because you can’t. Our entire military is massed in the wrong place around a straw man you set up to distract the angry American people from the simple, inescapable fact that you’re the lowest-rent, dumbest, most ignorant, big-money screw-the-public tax-and-spent fuckwad ever to steal public office in this nation’s history. At least Reagan was elected. You are going to send your lily-livered chickenhawk shills out to quell domestic dissent and spread the bullshit while you gamely press on with this schoolyard bully routine with Iraq. The media will follow your orders, because the same handful of rich men that own you, own them. But there’s no hiding the facts, George. North Korea is the 500 pound gorilla in the corner of the room, and it’s thinking your neck looks mighty like a banana. I’ll tell you what, though. I believe the rest of the world is going to pull our asses out of the fire on this one. I believe the rest of the world still has intelligent diplomats at its disposal, and some pragmatic thinkers, and some ability to compromise on issues of mutual benefit. They’ll work something out while we’re knocking Saddam’s dick in the dirt.
I’ll quote Colin Powell again, if only because quoting Rumsfeld gives me shingles: North Korea “can’t feed its people, and they are investing in the wrong kind of things.” Gosh, George, that sounds just like a description of North America. Look behind you: all those dim, jingoistic good ole boys that voted for you, that voted your Congress in ?and only by the narrowest of margins, George, it’s no mandate–they’re losing their jobs. This Christmas was the worst in retail since we started keeping records. The better part of a million Americans just lost their unemployment benefits, and 100,000 are slated to fall off the roll every week from here on in. The stock market’s got squitters and entire industries are folding around your ears, and you can’t hide that in the dust and smoke of a desert campaign in Iraq. These chickens will come home to roost on your head, and for that I can be patient, especially as said chickens look more like vultures than poultry: schadenfreude is enough to keep me going, that and the occasional crust of bread. But we can’t wait on the meltdown in North Korea. It won’t disappear the way unemployed Americans or Osama Bin Laden will.
The last time we had this kind of trouble it took president Clinton and ex-president Carter (talk about your Axis of Evil, George) to put a lid on the situation. They had to make all kinds of concessions, which got them mocked at the time but it worked. Real Americans make concessions every day, George. We pay the rent instead of the electric bill, or we accept unfavorable refinance terms on the mortgage from the bank because it’s better than losing the house, or we take three jobs (if we can find them) and we don’t see our kids in daylight hours. Those are concessions, and people make them every day for teeny-tiny reasons, like six bucks an hour or three meals a day. Surely you can make a few concessions yourself, if only to avert World War Three?
Like maybe we back our military down off Iraq, not because some peaceniks begged you to (although we’re right) but because we might have to throw some muscle at Pyongyang, especially if they’re talking about building more nukes. To date all you can muster to stop them is Colin Powell clucking his tongue at their childish antics. I think they might need to see some sabers, clean out of the scabbards and skip the rattle. Hell, I don’t much like the next idea–I think you’ve been too soft on them already, what with allowing those North Korean Scud missiles to go to Yemen and so forth–but you could even make some more concessions and maybe calm North Korea down, what about that? Because if you’re so goddamn tough, if you’re such a man, you can take it. You can lose a little face. You did it for a single spy plane, now do it for the rest of us. Just pretend Kim Jong-il is Chinese.
BEN TRIPP is a screenwriter, political satirist and cartoonist. He can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
