November 31, 2005
AP News
San Francisco

Sources inside the military have confirmed rumors of a contingency plan to invade San Francisco. According to a well placed administration official, the plan was developed after the city of San Francisco voted to deny military recruiters access to area high schools. “That was an open act of rebellion,” claimed the official.

The plan was then “fast tracked” when the department of defense declared the city a “resource rich soft target” or RRST. Pentagon officials declined to comment on the resources that caused the fast-tracking, but beltway bandits have speculated that the inclusion of the Golden Gate Toll Plaza as a prime objective had something to do with it. “Follow the armor,” advised one wag. “Everyone knows our soldiers in Iraq are low on body armor,” he continued.

The plan, “Operation Birkenstockade,” was leaked to the media last Tuednesday and calls for a platoon of 12 Marines to secure and subdue the city of over 750,000. “We feel that’s a more than adequate force to secure those hippies,” confirmed a military source.

Judge Alito is apparently backing away from statements he made while applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department. Why? This is the conservative equivalent of “I was young! I needed the money!!” Why is it that the ghost of Robert Bork is so terrifying?

Anyone who has ever taken any legitimate course in Constitutional law knows that Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood were wrongly decided. Whether you are for or against abortion, it is patently obvious to anyone that this decision belongs outside the grasp of the judiciary and in the grasp of the political branches. The fact that these confirmations have become so politicized that makes it all the more obvious that abortion should not be a judicial issue. Why are Republicans always so afraid to make that principled stand?

My advice to Alito, Bush and everyone else with an R after their name, stop making this about abortion. It’s not. Justice Kennedy is against abortion (so he says), be he still voted (wrongly) in favor of Planned Parenthood. Who knows where Scalia and Thomas stand, but I’d be willing to be that they’d abide by a Constitutional Amendment codifying Casey or Roe. The point here is that, beginning with the Warren court, the Supreme Court has consistently encroached on the rights of the political branches. That should stop.

Thank you.

So the French government, after neglecting the poor underclass and hoarding resources for the snobby elite, finds itself on the verge of open rebellion. Who could have seen that coming?

Of course, like many Americans, I am glad to see that (1) the snooty French are getting their comeuppance for suckling up to Saddam, Arafat and every other two-bit thug Arab dictator and (2) the riots seem to be mostly about property damage than killing.

It is also heartening to see the French, who dared to lecture us on the alleged link between race and poverty in the U.S., especially after Katrina, have found that, not only does social engineering not work, but it creates an underclass that will always strain against their chains to open a can of whoopass on their captors (see Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany and soon to come Cuba and North Korea).

What I am concerned about, however, is the following three facts, a French version of the perfect storm:

(1) French immigrants and citizens of Arab and/or Muslim backgrounds are rioting. That rioting in the next few weeks may turn into open insurrection.

(2) France has demonstrated its propensity to surrender. All joking aside, the French military is about as useful in a fight as a used barf bag. It’s squishy, it smells and it tends to be bad for morale. When the going gets tough, the French get going, in retreat.

(3) France, and I will forgive you if you had forgotten, is a nuclear power. Yes, the cheese eating surrender monkeys have the bomb. In fact, they have about 350 of them.

I hope you’ll pardon me for being a bit paranoid, but I hope the U.S. military has a contingency plan.

The media has made much hay about the number of servicemen who have died in Iraq over the past 2 1/2 years. Annualizing that rate, it means that, on average, 800 (2000/2.5) servicemen (and -women) die in Iraq each year. Each one is a tragedy and our country does and should mourn each one. But is that really a large number? 800 per year?

As I have mentioned here before, the total number of servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over the last 4 years has still not equalled the number of innocent civilians killed in one day of unrestrained terror in the U.S. Perhaps that statistic is not enough.

Given that there are about 150,000 troops in Iraq at any given time, the mortality rate is about 5.3/1000 (800/150,000). Right here in the United States, the rate of incidence of violent crime is about 20/1000. In fact, if you’re reading this from anywhere within the United States, you’re about as likely to be the victim of aggrevated assault as a U.S. serviceman is of being killed in Iraq.

In fact, you are more likely to die of a heart attack than a serviceman is likely to be killed in Iraq. Some form of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is listed as the cause of death in approximately 1.4 million deaths every year in the United States. That means you have a 6.2/1000 of dying of CVD, 17% higher than a serviceman’s risk of dying from an IED.

So what about the raw number per year–800? Over 42,000 people die in motor vehicle accidents every year. That’s over 800 people every week! About 16,000 people are the victims of murder every year– that’s 800 every 2 1/2 weeks. 800 people die every 50 days from hepatitis. In fact, more people die from the flu and pneumonia every 4 DAYS than servicemen die in Iraq in one year!

Finally, and this one will leave a bad taste in your mouth: If it were only done from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday (with a 1 hour break for lunch), 52 weeks of the year, there would be, on average, 800 abortions by 10:04 a.m. on New Year’s Day. (1.37 million abortions per year. As for the total number, 2,000, you could abort that many fetuses before lunch on New Year’s Day.) Now, I’m not a big pro-lifer or a religious zealot, but the fact is that you can barely get from “I’m Morely Safer…” to Andy Rooney’s signoff without killing another 800 fetuses. Perhaps they’re the ones that need body armor.

The cost of keeping terrorists at bay, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere around the globe, will always be paid with the blood of our countrymen. Rates, totals and statistics can always give you some measure of what that cost is, but they can never tell you what it is worth. If this can’t convince you of the cost of not keeping the battle over there, I don’t know what will.