TBT: The Brutal Truth

Got A Yarn To Weave

DAMNED SONSABITCHES:

The Iraq war has been the war fought on the cheap - not enough body armor, not enough armor on vehicles, not enough night vision equipment.

It has been the war in which packages from back home have had to fill some crucial needs.

Now, we have chow call at the Greenwood Credit Union in Warwick, R.I. It's the latest in home-front intervention. It's partially in response to the unthinkable image of U.S. Marines approaching Iraqi citizens and asking for food because they do not have enough.

There's a big barrel in the lobby of the credit union on Post Road in Warwick. It's decorated with ribbons and it's there because Karen Boucher-Andoscia's son, Nick Andoscia, called and asked his mother to send food.

Nick's a Marine corporal. He was in Afghanistan last year, where there was enough to eat. He's in Iraq now even though his enlistment was up last year.

He's one of those Marines who can't walk away. His unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marines, was headed for Iraq and he just couldn't head for civilian life while those he had served with were heading to their second war.

"He extended," says Karen. "He told me, 'I really have to go. I can't let my guys go alone.' "

There are a lot of stories like that. We don't hear them much. They're kind of personal.

So Nick Andoscia went to Iraq. And hunger soon followed.

"I got a letter," says Karen. "And he had called me before that. He said, 'Send lots of tuna.' "

Nick told his mother that he and the men in his unit were all about 10 pounds lighter in their first few weeks in Iraq. They were pulling 22-hour patrol shifts. They were getting two meals a day and they were not meals to remember.

"He told me the two meals just weren't cutting it. He said the Iraqi food was usually better. They were going to the Iraqis and basically saying, 'feed me.' "

...

Nick Andoscia, who is 22, is due to come home later this year. He wants to study criminal justice, his mother says, then go to work for a fire or police department.

But for the next few months he will be on patrol in western Iraq, dealing with the heat and the dirt and the danger.

The last thing he should have to worry about is an empty stomach. The last thing he should have to do is approach Iraqis and ask for food.

You have to wonder what the gracious hosts must think when a fighting man from the richest country on earth comes to their door in search of something to eat.

A story like this is not just an open condemnation of Bush, Cheney, and every $1,000-a-plate dinner eating motherfucker in Washington D.C. regardless if they're a Republican or a Democ-erm, I mean, an Other Republican. It's also not just an open condemnation of the well-paid prima donna pinhead TelePrompter readers that sanctimoniously pass themselves off as actual journalists. What it really is is part and parcel why I've been relatively silent in blogging the last few weeks: an open condemnation of SOCIETY.

I mean, for fuck's sake, it not only implies the following notion but champions it and then bludgeons us all over the goddamned head with it: in the same week that Dick Cheney was busy salting every cubic side of bitesized steak, while Stephen Colbert was roasting the hell out of the media and the politicians, and while a half-dozen A-List liberal bloggers were busy trying to catapult another A-List liberal blogger's book to the #1 spot on Amazon, we've got Marines in Iraq scrounging for a fuckin' peach pit.

Mind you, the above took place in the same week where ...



... legal and illegal Mexicans said, "Fuck you, Senor, we're not working today!" and instead put their feet in the street carryings signs, obstructing traffic, and raising hell. They empowered themselves like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Susan B. Anthony did long before them and their activism knew no financial or social bounds. In other words, they're taking a hit in the ol' meager paycheck as it is to not work and instead pound the streets to defend their principals and the amazing thing is ONE large ooops by the Republicans was responsible for it. It's embarrassing considering a SLEW of large ooopsies by not just the ReThugs but the Dems as well has not put the collective audiences of AmericaBlog, DailyKos, Atrios, FDL, and Crooks And Liars out in the streets, too, and I've been sittting here for the last few weeks -- as quiet as a church mouse, as peniless as a Katrina victim, and as powerless as Maryscott O'Connor screaming from a Log Cabin Republican rooftop -- and say to myself, "Wow."

Wow.

And when I say "Wow", I'm not talking "World Of WarCraft".

I'm talking "wow" as in ... well, maybe I'll just write a book about it and see if the above named blogs will catapult it to #1 on Amazon, too. I doubt they will once they discover the plot: a group of young but pissed off American men and women get so disgusted with their country and the mainstream media that take matters in their own hands by launching blogs but soon discover there's a mint to be made from their readers by simply marketing and distributing a meme of "neo-activism" which, by some fluke, they influence politics to such a degree that the former crooks either get impeached or tossed into the Hague, every citizen gets public health care, a decent paying job, and the right to marry whoever they want when they want. But all is soon not well as the group of young men and women (whom by then have since replaced the old guard media heads they loathed so much and collect salaries twice as larger) get older and then senile as success and an over-inflated sense of their own self-worth starts making them believe in crazy shit they blasted in their salad days like extreme fundamentalist religion and political think-tanks. Their new found sanctimony and elitist snobbery starts pissing off another young group of American men and women so disgusted with them and their country that they take matters into their ...

In other words, NON-FICTION. Well, maybe except for that universal health care, gay marriage, and impeachment/The Hague stuff. That's gonna remain fiction for quiet some time in the near future. It's for that reason, I've picked a wonderful and appropriate title for the yarn that's uh really catchy. Just rolls right off the tongue.

It'll be called "They Suck ... But We Swallow!"

Because if that isn't the truth, then I don't know what is anymore.

(Hat Tips: Alternate Brain and "Misty" at Ms. Shakes)

posted by Sizemore at 10:43 AM

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