BlameBush!

Grim Milestone 4000!!!!

"So?"

That's what Dick Cheney, whose daughter is a lesbian, replied when he was informed that 2/3 of Americans who answered the phone and didn't immediately hang up when they heard "CBS News!" believe the war isn't worth fighting.

I was so furious when I heard about Cheney's flippant defiance of the Will of the People that I nearly fell off the Stop The War float at yesterday's Alternative Lifestyles Easter Parade.

Oh, I wish you could have seen it! We built this gigantic pink coffin on wheels and covered it with glow-in-the-dark prophylactics as a solemn reminder of all those who have lost their lives since Bush led us to war on a lie. A couple guys in Shrub and Rummy masks pulled the float behind them while Haliburton execs showered them with blood money. I assumed the Abu Ghraib Torture Pose on the "bow of the ship", so to speak, completely naked save for a pair of yellow ostrich plumes wedged between my ass cheeks to symbolize the horrifying destruction Bush's war has wrought on our economy.

As we rolled down Fifth Avenue, several of my midget students wearing rainbow fright wigs would waddle out and toss IUD's under the wheels. It's amazing that one of those tiny, little things a women puts in her uterus can actually blow apart a huge tank, but over 2500 Gay/Lesbian/Transgendered troops have been killed in such blasts since Bush began his illegal and immoral war for oil. The other 1500 died from back-alley abortions.

4000! It's what I still like to call a "Grim Milestone"; an opportunity for progressives to show we care about the troops when their death toll reaches a nice, round number that's easy to screech and looks good as a headline next to pictures of us marching through town in our Che Guevara t-shirts and rainbow fright wigs. Perhaps if Dick "So What?" Cheney came out to one of our peace rallies, he'd learn to take the war as seriously as we do.

3000!

With the passing of the New Year came the passing of another Grim Milestone® - a signal that the U.S. casualties in Iraq have finally reached a number useful to our political agenda. It means it’s time for us progressives to once again make a sincere effort at pretending like our opposition to the war is about about the lives that have been lost, and not really just the fact that George Bush is peeResident. I don’t expect conservatives to understand the importance of the Grim Milestone®, because the numbers don’t mean anything to them. Their puny brains and blackened souls simply render them incapable of looking forward to each Grim Milestone® the way we do.

My heart goes out the family of the fallen soldier for their tragic loss. I pray that the fancy “Grim Milestone” graphics on the evening news will in some way help to assuage their pain, and that they will perhaps find some comfort knowing that the loss of their brave son will serve as an opportunity for peace activists to light some candles and get stoned tonight. Perhaps it will also be of some consolation that he wasn’t the 2999th, or the 3001st to die, or his death would have been completely useless to progressives – not to mention harder to market. At least at a nice round number like 3000, his sacrifice will serve a far more noble purpose than simply defending America and the lives of it’s citizens: He will have died to drive more traffic to DailyKos.

2000!

With the announcement of the anxiously awaited Big Two Triple-Donuts last night, we passed what I like to call a "grim milestone". Two thousand soldiers killed for a lie. Two thousand lives destroyed in an illegal and immoral war waged without cause, reason, nor France's blessing. Two thousand young men and women who will never experience a consensual relationship with a member of the same gender, nor enjoy their Constitutional right to choose.

TWO THOUSAND! Let that figure sink in for a moment. It's a hard number to fathom, especially for caring, sensitive progressives such as us. Most of us don't make two thousand dollars a year, or take two thousand showers in our entire lifetimes. A stack of two thousand pennies would tower 9.5 feet off the ground and come to about twenty bucks. $16.98 if they're Canadian pennies. Two thousand pencils lined up end-to-end would stretch from the earth to the moon and back again, not to mention waste a lot of nice trees just to prove a silly point.

Although we wouldn't be caught dead at a Support-Our-Troops rally or a Veterans' Day Parade, progressives across the nation will gather in their communities tonight to honor those we've spent the last 40 years dishonoring: the baby-killing, corpse-burning, genital-mocking, Quran-mishandling, innocent-civilian-torturing, wedgie-giving, uneducated, brainwashed fascist morons who were tricked into joining the military by unscrupulous recruiters. It's not a celebration mind you, but a time to collectively mourn the loss of people we care enough about to actually pretend like we give a damn. And while our maudlin displays of national self-loathing may ultimately embolden the enemy and bring us closer to the Big Three-Oh-Oh-Oh, each candle we light will cleanse us of any misguided guilt we share for constantly kicking our uniformed men and women in the metaphorical nards.

We owe the troops that much.

UPDATE: Here are some photos of the somber "2000 Dead Troops" festivities in San Francisco.