America's Newest Hostages:
A hostage crisis is always messy, no matter which way it turns out. The thugs that hold them hostage are, in essence, creating a human barrier between themselves and the authorities. Better a sixty year-old bank manager takes an AK-47 barrage than a robber, you know? Or better a few battalions of twenty year-olds face the Iraqi roulette than the leaders of this country have to admit they've fucked up. See, when the Army first announced its "stop-loss" program, oh, how a hue and cry went up. Now that the "Stop Loss/Stop Movement" program has been expanded, maybe it's time to say that the military must be ready to gut Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and leave their still alive bodies in the middle of the desert for the buzzards and starving children to feed on.

The "stop-loss" program is fairly self-explanatory. How do we "stop" the "loss" of troops whose tours of duty are over? It's simple: we don't let the whiny bitches come home. And we sell it by saying it's good for the "cohesion" of the troops on the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not that we have to do this because no one wants to fight this war because no one knows what the fuck we're fighting for. And thus you have the hostage drama being played out, with the Bushkoviks as the the masked kidnappers, threatening, "Support our war or we're gonna get these soldiers shot." Which leads to the question: who's gonna take the place of the hostages? You? No, you're not. 'Cause you either don't support the war or you do and you're just a little punk ass waiting to be smacked, Patton-style.

And, really, and, c'mon, we all know that our Bush would have been first on George S.'s list to feel the sweet, stinging caress of the old bastard general's leather glove. Especially when Patton heard Bush's speech at the Air Force Academy, where our President decided to take a gigantic shit on the memory of the veterans of World War II by daring to compare his Iraq adventure of choice to WWII. It's so easy, one guesses, because both dictators had moustaches and because the U.S. was attacked. Except for the persnickety detail that the moustachioed dictator this time didn't attack us or our allies. Oh, and the niggling little fact that Japan was, like, a nation, with borders and shit, not a bunch of fundamentalists strung out on ideology, spread across the face of the globe, not an amorphous, nebulous eeeevil. Nope, there'll be no nukin' this time (one hopes). Yeah, there's that and the whole being welcomed as liberators with flowers and candies back in the "Good" War.

Another major difference between the War on Terror and WWII is that, back in the day, young men crowded the recruiting offices to sign up to fight. Now, Rumsfeld may as well be standing at the airfields of Persia with a submachine gun and ski mask, screaming, "Any of you motherfuckers tries to leave, I'll execute every last motherfucking one of you."