Remember the Maine

The proprietor of the rightist blog, Little Green Goof Footballs, is one of the fantasists who has opined that no secret CIA prisons ever existed and that former CIA agent Mary McCarthy is behind the decision to send Joe Wilson on a luxurious junket (for no pay, to an impoverished African country) simply to undercut our fearless leader's fears-restated-as-facts over Iraqi uranium. Jesus' General, God bless his Heterosexual soul, has pointed out that said individual -- aka He Who Must Not Be Linked -- has been pretending to support democracy, the rule of law (meaning the autocracy of Bush, but let's not quibble), and the American Way, while simultaneously advertising illegally-imported Cuban cigars on his website.

(A hypocritical rightie Republican who puts personal profit over principle? Who woulda thunk. With the recent shuffling in the White House, perhaps he can get a job at OMB.)

But some people have lost track of the argument (Democrats!), and have been sidetracked into snark about Cuban cigars, which are uniquely savory and delicious and make Dominican and Honduran plagiarists seem like the grocery-sack-paper cigarettes I pretended to smoke in Boy Scouts. In defense of cigars and Americanism, which are inextricably linked, the following is a comment I posted over at the General's which has NO RELEVANCE WHATSOEVER to the wars in Iraq or Iran (where we do have troops on the ground at this moment):

Sir:

I'm distraught that some are innuendoizing that cigars resemble male anatomical nunits. They are forgetting the sacrifices of the Spanish American War.

Good American trees died to convince the world that the Spanish in Cuba harbored (get it? the Maine, Havana, "harbored"?) malicious intent and posed a clear and present danger to the U.S., and though we won that war quickly, good American boys died by the thousands in the Phillipines suppressing the insurgency that arose there after the war. Why? In order to secure a steady source of good Cuban cigars for Mr. Hearst and the other brave corporatists of the day.

There are lessons to be learned there. To those here who would denigrate their sacrifice, I say: remember the Maine. Remember the lessons of a war which was manufactured by the press and then quietly sapped the vital juices from our nation's lymphatic system: to-wit, once you've conquered a good cigar-making nation, don't let the Commies take it away without a fight.

Respectfully and reportingly yours, sir,
Thersites

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