Darth Vader Also Doesn't Give a Shit About His Victims

     Drunk on Spaten Optimator, a doppelbock from Munich.  Saturday, almost midnight.  Memory of a black Trump supporter on CNN tonight, struggling to defend his chosen candidate.  Colin Powell, former General and Secretary of State, a pusher of the Iraq-must-be-invaded argument in 2003, also a black Republican who nevertheless voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.  In my view that means he's a Democrat.
     His e-mails got hacked.  He doesn't like Trump, thinks the Benghazi hearings against Hillary Clinton are "a witch hunt."  He didn't specify if he thinks Clinton is a witch or not, but I suspect he can relate to doing an important job, a cabinet position, and having to listen to lesser folk snipe at their betters after important decisions are made.
     Colin Powell himself never got investigated by Congress for helping George W. Bush and Dick Cheney rape Iraq, a crime against humanity resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths with repercussions felt today in the very existence of ISIS.  Republicans in Congress, rather, have focused on four American deaths in Benghazi during Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.
     Four, but they were Americans.  Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed, displaced, tortured, all because of decisions originating in the minds of Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Powell, and every motherfucker in Congress (including Hillary Clinton) who believed their fake WMD evidence, do not matter.  Yet, that is America's spiritual problem.  That is a damnation carried on from this country's legacy of imperial conquest, domination, and exploitation since the Spanish-American War of 1898.
     Those innocent Americans paying the price incurred by the ambitions of Bush, Powell, and others, are more linked to Washington's leaders in their deadly fate than to those in other countries stirred to rebellion by the actions of men and women in think tanks, presidential cabinets, and Pentagon world-shapers.  After Tsarnaev, the younger brother, was caught in Boston after the Marathon bombing, no one in the news media or in the government talked much about the bomber's stated purpose: to inflict damage on America because of America's actions in the Iraq War.
     It's utterly unthinkable, I guess, that someone should so give a shit about hundreds of thousands of Bush's, Cheney's, and Powell's victims that he, along with his brother, would inflict counter-damage.
     We in America don't think too often about what our foreign policy does to other countries.  This subject is not part of the nation's educational system.  I never heard a thing about it in high school.  One teacher in college had a textbook with a chapter or two about CIA shenanigans in Latin America, but that was a class in Religious Ethics, touching on Liberation Theology; not a required class for the typical Business Administration student, a major familiar to George W. Bush.
     Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations in February 2003 to give a mendacious presentation about something that didn't exist: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the raison d'etre for the coming war.  Powell didn't like the presentation given to him initially to read, so he went through it line by line with his chief aide, removing the most outrageous and unsubstantiated parts, but leaving in such later discredited sources as the man whose codename was Curveball.  This source was a prisoner in U.S. custody who was tortured into saying shit that wasn't true.  Powell presented this shit as fact, and went on to watch his government bomb, kill, and torture Iraqis for many years, ending up as a distinguished guest on many news talk shows, not arrested and jailed for participating in the mass murder of a nation's people.
     From his leaked e-mails, he's a Republican who dreads a Trump presidency.  From his voting record, I suspect he'll vote for Clinton, a candidate he can count on to wage war as consistently as Bush and Obama have done.  He probably doesn't like Trump because the Republican candidate doesn't fit the mold of a politician willing to smile and pretend nothing bad is happening while little foreign children are dismembered by American missiles.  Trump is too open with his hate for a gentleman like Powell.  Trump, who will, like Clinton, kill lots of people if elected president, doesn't present the polite exterior so respected by people in expensive clothes, who murder people and appear on talk shows.

                                                                              Vic Neptune