BrickWeekly.com: Where Richmond goes for entertainment

Vice President for life Dick Cheney. Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP

The entertainment outlook for the week looks grim—barring the 24/7 coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s body lying in state at the Capitol and leftover Valentine’s Day schmaltz that threatens blood glucose levels well into March, one of the few alternatives has been to sit down with a big bucket of popcorn and listen to our representatives debate the Iraq war.

Although they’re only debating a non-binding resolution—which means that President Bush doesn’t need to issue a signing statement in order to ignore it—Congress is at least thinking about whether the latest Bush plan to save his original Bush plan is good common sense or just another pin in the 9/11 voodoo doll.

The only problem, though, is that debating one plan doesn’t go very far towards solving the problem. As every pro-occupation voice in the country has said already, it’s pointless to criticize a plan if you don’t have an alternative. Granted, those are the same people who said that even discussing an alternative was aiding the terrorists, but they deserve some slack—their version of reality, which once included Saddam Hussein threatening to storm the beaches of Oklahoma, is now officially an endangered culture, relegated to a few so-called think tanks whose members exchange gutsy war stories that oddly resemble the last episode of “24.” But even setting aside the moral bankruptcy of the pro-war crowd, it would be useful to propose some alternatives to the current alternative before we need another alternative to guarantee victory. So in the spirit of patriotic boosterism, here are several strategies that are at least as sane and well thought-out as the current batch of ideas—just pick one, get your pom-poms out and wait for the parade.

The Draft Cheney Movement

If you can insist you’re winning while all about you are burning their file cabinets and clambering to get on the last helicopter out, then you’re either hooked up to an OxyContin drip or you’re Vice President for Life Dick Cheney. Recently Cheney disagreed with his own administration’s negative view of the Iraq occupation so far, asserting that there have been some “spectacular successes” there. This comes on the heels of his claims that the Titanic’s maiden voyage was a pleasant cruise and the Great Depression was a necessary market correction. How can you go wrong when your conclusions are entirely unrelated to the facts? The sooner we put Dick in charge, the sooner we can declare victory and bring our troops home so they can prepare for America’s biggest challenge—the upcoming invasion of Narnia.

Poppies Got a Brand New Baghdad

Here’s a strategy option that kills two birds with one stone. Over the past years, our neglect of Afghanistan has turned that little patch of rock into the world’s leading exporter of opium. And it’s obvious that one of the major problems in Iraq is the constant gunfire and religious fanaticism. Well—Problem Number One, meet Problem Number Two. As anyone who’s read Tintin cartoons or the verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge knows, the ingestion of opium leads to lethargy, wild flights of fancy and bad, rambling poetry. So let’s pay the Afghan farmers for their harvest of the magical poppy, and drop the stuff all over Iraq, simultaneously reducing the funding for the Taleban and undercutting the incentive for fanatical violence. Who needs 72 virgins when you have a stately pleasure dome instead?

Strategy for Defeat

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the administration you have, not the administration you’d like to have. And frankly, the administration we have couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if you printed directions on the heel. It’s unfortunate, then, that the six-year-old Bush team has about the same maturity level as most six-year-olds: they’re full of sweeping, grandiose ideas but completely incapable of carrying them out. Which is why Dr. Spock would tell the dissenters out there that they’ve been using the wrong approach the whole time. Instead of telling Georgie that his cape does not, in fact, enable him to fly, they should give him a challenge that needs screwing up. If the White House had been convinced before the war that Iraqis needed weapons and welfare, they would now be the most peaceable, self-sufficient people in the Middle East. Of course that’s in the past—but there might still be time to send them dictatorship and chaos, so maybe we still have a chance at success. Let’s cancel their democracy, and send Alberto Gonzalez and Mike Brown to run the country—even if they wreck the place, we’ll have saved New Orleans and online pornography. It’s the least we can do for posterity.