So, while I’m just finishing choking down the news about the DC Gummint – at the urging of Fox Channel 5 News — trying to sock the ANSWER Coalition with a fine for exercising basic Constitutional rights, I get a mailing from Rob Naiman’s “Just Foreign Policy” list mentioning that their Iraqi Deaths Estimator has just rolled over a million. That’s right, a million Iraqi dead since the “Shock’n'Awe” of March 2003 — or 1,012,979, to be exact, as I write this.

That’s right, one Friggin’ MILLION. Jesus Herbert Walker Christ. And that’s not counting the million and a half or more Iraqis this nation murdered with sanctions throughout the 1990s (nobody died when Clinton lied? My ass.).

I’d been noticing lately that Fox News hasn’t spent a whole lot of time reporting on Iraq because, y’know, there just isn’t any goddamn’ good news coming out of that goddamn’ place, unless you count some oft-repeated DoD press release mentioning that the Army has rebuilt some goddamn’ stretch of highway from the airport (that they bombed the piss out of just a while back).

Yeah, when your Empire’s crumbling, the outrage and dissatisfaction are so palpable you can cut ‘em with a goddamn’ knife, the one thing you need your press to be doing is exposing the nefarious doings of bands of left-wing wheatpasters defacing the Seat Of Our Empire with free expression.

Left-wing posters? In OUR Capital?

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So, anyway, I see last week where Congress approves another million billion zillion dollars for President Chimp’s War in Iraq. No surprises there. Then, this bridge collapses in Minnesota, to much wailing and voyeurism from the press, and the predictable calls for us to send our prayers to Minneapolis — even though no prayer requests were forthcoming for the victims of similar bridge collapses caused by US bombing of Iraqi civilians.

Shortly afterwards though, Congress somehow manages to find another few hundred mil or so under their sofa cushions — a huge-ass surprise, to see that anything was left after the million billion zillion they just poured into the friggin’ war.

Then, this past weekend, as reported so gloriously on AP, President Chimp himself pays a visit to the collapse site and casts his own personal eyeballs on the scene, allows himself to be personally spoken to by a common, ordinary worker, makes a big fat promise about repair and restoration — but, get this, he says “I make no promises on the timetable”; he never was much on timetables, was he — has his picture taken in a hardhat surveying the devestation, gets back onto the helicopter, and flies home.

So, all this stuff starts crashing together in my head — fat wads of cash pissed away on an illegal war, public works budgets going begging, bridges collapsing in the USA — at which point the conceptual collisions build to critical mass and, just as the pile detonates, my first thought out loud is, “whoa, payback’s a bitch!”

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So, it seems a bunch of yahoos in various state and county legislatures are bound and determined to rid the place of “illegal” immigrants — “illegal”, that is, in the sense of legality randomly pulled out of some racist politician’s ass about a century or so ago. Of course, “illegal immigration” probably ranks right up there with “intellectual property” on the all-time list of concepts totally pulled out of the asses of politicians.

So, Fine. Just fine. Go ahead, make life so miserable for them that they leave. Hell, why not just deport ‘em while you’re at it, if it’ll make you feel better…?

Great. They’re gone. Congratulations. So, who’s going to build your houses and fix your streets? Who’s going to clean your office building at night? Who’s going to do your landscaping work? Who’s going to be your nanny — especially at the wages they’re paid for these jobs, and considering the crap they have to put up with from employers. Most of your average Americans sure wouldn’t take those jobs because of that; either that, or — more likely — they’re all on their sofas waiting for their phones to ring with an offer to be Donald Trump’s Apprentice, or perhaps keeping their options flexible in case that lucrative position as an American Idol Winner comes open.

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Ahh, it’s “election” season once again! This one slammed head-on into my brain after reading little bits of Dubya’s speech on the Katrina anniversary, after seeing the montage of drowning victims in Spike Lee’s documentary, and after reading in various news reports that a year after the hurricane, corpses were still being found.

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