This is happening in Our Time... Remember these days...

If you can't see the picture very well then perhaps you're lucky. This cartoon, drawn with all the brutish acumen of a klansmen komic depicts Iran as a sewer and the Iranians as roaches scurrying out. This is the kind of evil I thought might be expunged from the west with literacy programs and the enforcement of incest laws but sadly the seething idiots at The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio have proven me wrong. Nice one Buckeyes!

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Let's be clear, Iran's theocracy is a sinister ruling class. Iranian people have to be careful or else their government might pick them up, rough them up and do worse if they don't smarten up. The United States has proven themselves morally superior by doing the exact same things only they make sure to do them to foreigners in far-away lands like Cuba, who they're supposed to hate too. This is the morality of the ambulance chaser; the slimy lawyer looking for the legal loophole.

This cartoon illustrates - yet again - America's propensity to lump the rank and file citizenry of a given country with its ruling class. They do this all the time and I guess it just makes it easier to comprehend for some. They did it with Castro, with Chavez, and they certainly did it with Saddam Hussein. He was a bad man, not bad enough for the U.S. to get in bed with back in the 80's when he was willing to slug it out with Iran, but bad enough to smash a country of nearly twenty-seven million people. By ineffectively lording over that conquered land there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths and at last count a couple million people have been reduced to refugee status.

No man is worth all that pain, suffering, and misery. Not ever.

The rhetoric against Iran is high and a bombing campaign is certainly feasible. Dick Cheney stood upon the deck of an aircraft carrier - one of four in the region - and made threats against Iran while only a hundred miles off the coast. That is an image that should never stand in place of foreign policy, not for a crazed African warlord high on cocaine and gunpowder, and certainly not for the Vice President of the United States of America. If Iran is bombed people will die, mostly the elderly and children as they are statistically the most prone to death by air warfare. More people will die then the aforementioned black-black snorting warlord could ever dream of in his wildest drug-fuelled psychotic rages. The question always remains 'for what?'

Ahmadinejad? The Ayatollah? Trust me, not a single bomb will fall on their heads. But who cares anyway, these Iranians, they're cockroaches after all. The Jews were thought of as rodent-kind long before the ovens were fired up. The dehumanization process has got be up and running in order for our collective apathy to kick in.

Here's a bigger version of the cartoon.

http://static.crooksandliars.com/2007/09/iran_dispatchsep42007.gif