Merry Christmas, Baghdad

By L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

          I was at the rink this afternoon, as I am nearly every other day of the week, this time watching my nine-year-old daughter -- and about a million other little girls, colorfully dressed as fairies, birds, mice, Indians, and "sailorettes" -- rehearse for the local ice show, Winter Wishes, held annually here in Fort Collins for the past 16 years.
          All little girls, by the way, should be born with membranous, pastel, translucent wings, they look so perfectly right and natural in them.
          I'd worked until dawn the night before, and so when I awoke that afternoon, the first news I heard was that Generalissimo Bill Clinton had ordered the American military to start incinerating Baghdad the way he'd had Mount Carmel incinerated five and a half years earlier, and that the Republicans -- probably to avoid getting themselves and their families incinerated, too -- had suspended the impeachment process.
          A great many thoughts came churning up in my mind, all of them at exactly the same time, all of them in a hot and angry jumble that has probably kept me from writing political stuff for the past year and a half.
          The first thought, I suppose, was that while I was watching my little girl and other little girls retell Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and other Disnoid cookie-cutter fables of political correctness on ice, some little girls -- the little girls of Baghdad -- would be screaming out their horror as the missiles and bombs rained in upon them from a safe and cowardly distance, lighting the night sky with flame, shaking the ground they huddled on in mortal terror.
          Some of the little girls of Baghdad wouldn't be able to scream, because they would already have been burned to death or crushed under the rubble of buildings collapsed by weapons we're expected to believe were engineered and forged to defend freedom -- especially the freedom of sweet little girls to go on living in truth and light and music and joy.
          I couldn't erase the images of those little girls from my mind's eye, their bodies broken and twisted, their blood, thick as motor oil, boiling out into the dirt, their tiny bones and flesh cooked and charred until they're hardly recognizable as anything that was ever human. He was doing that right now, this very minute, just as he did at Waco. How many more thousands of innocent little girls, I asked myself, must die horribly to keep this 220 pound pile of excrement in office?
          Another irony involves my wife, who's in the ice show, too. For reasons defying logic (not to mention artistic unity), the second half of Winter Wishes is all about Bob Hope and the USO. My wife is dressed as one of the "girls back home"; she's down there on the ice with Rosie the Riveter, plenty of other Bette Midler clones, three fake GIs (it's hard to get guys to skate in these things) and a 4F or two.
          What's so ironic about that?
          Well, thanks to Waco Willie, we are now the badguys, we're the brutal remote-control dismemberers of innocent little children, the murderous aggressors that were supposed to have been defeated for all time in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. Clinton has debased everything that was ever admirable (or even merely decent) about American civilization. And the Republicans have let him do it, cheered him on, and now -- perhaps because they never saw a war they didn't like -- even interrupted the process by which they were going to remove him from office for the very least of his offenses.
          None of this would have happened if he'd been impeached, tried, convicted, and removed from office for his real crimes. If he'd been indicted for what he did at Waco, what he may have done at Oklahoma City, and for the trail of corpses that comprise the "Clinton Body Count", the year 2000 might have been something worth looking forward to.
          Instead, as death rains from the sky of Baghdad on helpless little girls and others, we have no alternative but to look at one another and ask ourselves if our future holds anything but more dishonor and death. We've seen what the man will do to maintain his hold on power. Do you believe that he'll relinquish it once he's been impeached and convicted?
          Or even simply at the end of his term?
          For the most part, the Y2K computer crisis is simply a hoax being propagated by "consultants" and others who stand to make fortunes from exaggerating it. The genuine threat it represents is the excuse it also offers creatures like Clinton to assume emergency powers, suspend what's left of the Bill of Rights, and cancel the general election of 2000.
          Of course this will spark greater "fear" of terrorism on the part of the government and their TV prostitutes -- in fact the only real terrorism in America is that waged against Americans by government -- and further restrictions on our rapidly dwindling liberties. After all, they tell each other and themselves, we can't have all those nasty weapons out there in the hands of the unwashed. Why, they might even be preventing the very thing that gives us our excuse to seize them!
          And as for that pesky internet ...
          The great tragedy it that we libertarians of cyberspace seem to be at the very forefront, helping to spread the panic which will make those outrages justifiable. Instead, we need to stop all this Chicken Littling, trust the free market, trust human action, warn Clinton and his ilk to back off -- or else -- and let the chips fail where they may.
          There are a number of ways to prevent a Clinton coup. First, we must demand that the impeachment process be resumed immediately and perhaps even that those who suspended it be removed from office themselves.
          Second, we must stand up now for the Bill of Rights. We must make it abundantly clear that no matter what happens, the names and other particulars of every one of the individuals who collaborate with Bill Clinton's illegal edicts will be taken down (perhaps to be archived safely overseas) and that a future regime -- a near future regime -- dedicated to Bill of Rights enforcement will put them in a glass box on public trial. Some of them, those involved in illegal government operations where someone died, will find themselves on trial for their lives.
          So help spread the word. Tell those stupid, cowardly, evil Republicans to impeach the murderous bastard now or to impeach themselves.
          Do it today before our little girls end up being incinerated by Bill Clinton. He's certainly capable of it, just ask the tiny handful of survivors -- falsely imprisoned for resisting him -- from Mount Carmel.

Looking for a perfect gift? L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach, Pallas, Henry Martyn, and Bretta Martyn can be ordered from Amazon.com via http://www.lneilsmith.org//index.html, from Laissez Faire Books at http://www.laissezfaire.org, or call 1-800-326-0996. And THE BAIRD COMPANY, http://www.bairdco.com [email protected] phone 909-943-4180 fax 909-943-8491

Next to advance to the next article, or
Table of Contents to return to The Libertarian Enterprise, Number 43, December 25, 1998.