“Only that crap that CNN reported. Even that was pretty vague with no real substance.” Chip took a long breath then added, “Anybody could have made up that claim and probably did.”
“You’d think that you’d be involved up to your ass in meetings, Chip. Are you?” Steven continued to try to pry while trying not to sound like it.
Chip played along as though he didn’t realize what was happening. “They’re waiting until later to meet because it’s a holiday. Do you believe this shit? Our oil underbelly has been slashed and burned, and they want to make sure the staffers have an easy morning. What horseshit!” Chip’s voice elevated as he spoke.
“Have you talked with David about your trip?” Steven asked, trying to change to a more subdued subject.
“No, I’m not going anywhere. Hell, they tried to order me to go yesterday, like I was some little school boy or something. That jackass of a popfart, Combs, seems to think that these terrorists are playing by some diplomatic code or something, and they’ll stop just because it’s time to talk. And that Bascome is such a moron. He honestly believes that the French are our ally, and if only we’d consult with them before making any major policy decisions, they’d follow us more closely. Rob us blind is more like it.” The general had not gotten out on the right side of the bed today.
“But isn’t Combs the president’s number one man?” Steven goaded the general a bit.
“Stuff his ass with crackers, also. He’s serving us up like Thanksgiving turkeys. Are they really that dumb, or are they doing this on purpose?” the general barked, probably loud enough to bring security to his office.
“Easy, big guy. I know it’s infuriating, but we gotta live within the system. Have you tried talking to your contacts on the Hill?” Steven asked.
“Shit! Those idiots are running and hiding as we speak. No one wants to question the president or even let anyone know where they went. The only fools stupid enough and publicity desperate enough are the same five or six popfarts that have been on the air for the last eight years, begging for the government to stop defending us and open a dialog for a peaceful surrender. You know, the peace mongers and the do-gooders that just want to be the last ones killed in the name of Allah.”
“You should call David and go as soon as you can but if you’re determined to stay around DC, just postpone your trip, ’cause you know you’d love to see the kids and besides the popfarts will still be here when you get back. You know that, right?” Steven tried to gently push Chip to follow through with his travel plans, which more often than not were canceled due to his being needed to run the Marine Corps or having to be part of top level meetings.
“Yeah, we’ll always be plagued by the popfarts,” the general lamented.
“So, tell me you’ll call and you’ll still go, maybe Monday or Tuesday at the latest, okay?” Steven pushed for a commitment. He knew that his friend needed a break from all the nonsense that is Washington, DC.
“After my briefing, and after I’ve had several drinks, you know, to calm down. It’s going to get pretty ugly in there, and I’ll be the center of attention because I’m not backing away from getting tough, very tough,” Chip explained.
“Fair enough, Chip. Just don’t get arrested for treason or sedition,” Steven teased, hoping to calm his friend a bit before they hung up.
“Yeah, but I’m not promising I won’t start a revolution,” Chip replied as he hung up.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
General Clarett and Jason Combs were the only actual members of the Security Council who bothered to show up for the holiday version of the daily security briefing. The general could hardly manage to keep his composure as the assistants to the assistants to the Security Council members introduced themselves, explaining that their bosses felt the incident in Houston was a routine police matter. They were quick to announce their function here today was to simply gather any pertinent papers and background.
“You know, observe the mood of the other council members, then report back,” one staffer offered.
All of them were dressed in business casual or less “With it being a holiday and all,” said another one of the staffers wearing a “USA” t-shirt and jeans. She might have still have been in college judging from appearances. Another little blonde staffer was dressed like she was about to go jogging.
“We don’t have anything to worry about today because they never attack that close together. 9/11 taught us that.” With that comment, before the introductions had ended, the general rose from his chair and started towards the door.
“General, where are you going?” Combs called after him, clearly annoyed by his actions. Everyone in the room stopped talking and turned their heads towards the general, watching the scene unfold.
“I’m going home to watch football,” the general stated curtly over his shoulder, turned away and started for the door again.
“We have important business to attend to here, General. You can’t simply get some bug up your ass and decide the business of this country isn’t important enough to miss a football game for,” Combs informed the general curtly.
The general instantly swung around and quickly stepped back to the edge of the table, his eyes flaring with anger. Then suddenly, the general slammed his fist down on the table with enough force to almost splinter the table. Several staffers and their glasses of water jumped, the water spilling over the rims on the glasses onto the table top. The pretty blonde jogger jumped in her seat, letting a startled “Oh!” escape her lips. The staffers closest to the end of the table where the general and the Chief of Staff were locked in confrontation, slid back their chairs and looked as though they might run for the door at any moment.
“Important business?” the general sneered at Combs, his eyes throwing daggers at the man. “Important business?” he repeated, his voice rising to a roar. “After all, it is a holiday!” The young woman who had made that remark slunk down into her chair with a sheepish look upon her face. “What could be so important that no one other than the two of us could be bothered to attend? After all, it’s just a terrorist attack! Oh, excuse me, I forgot. The incident in Houston is a police action and that is all that’s happening. You know, the one where the death toll is now reaching eight thousand, and the fires are still burning. You know, the one where our nation’s oil refining capacity has been serious hampered. The one that no one in the current administration has the balls to confront and prefers to place the country in harm’s way rather than do the right thing! Like, oh, I don’t know, closing the damn borders!
“Hell, yes! Football is more important than sitting around with a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears staffers who are here to observe the process and report back to their lazy, self-serving windbags of bosses, who can’t be bothered to focus on anything other than how to make it appear as though they’re actually doing something. When you get someone here who can make a damn decision, call! I’ll see if I can’t make time in my busy schedule, or better yet, I’ll send a staffer right over to take notes.”
The general turned and marched out the door without looking back. Combs, having been thoroughly intimidated by the general, took a moment to find his voice, and then shouted after him that he’d have his job for this and that he couldn’t talk to him that way. But the general wasn’t listening. He was too busy fighting the urge to strangle Combs to listen to anything the man might have to say.
The general, needing to cool down, took the long way back to the Pentagon. As he drove, he struggled to focus his thoughts, he was so angry. He wasn’t just angry; he was gut wrenching, nail spitting, ass whipping, choke holding, head busting mad. Just yesterday, America was attacked and the pencil neck bureaucrats that were in charge in Washington couldn’t be bothered to take time out of their busy holiday schedules to assess the damage or even determine if the attack was over. What bullshit!
These popfart idiots are going to get us all killed. They didn’t have an ounce of courage between them. Nobody wanted to offend the Muslim
s! What about the Americans? You know, the people they were supposed to be serving!
Didn’t these dumb bastards realize that it doesn’t matter if the terrorists are Muslim, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists or Druids, they are killing Americans? They aren’t doing this because they want better trade terms with us or they want to corner the market on some resource we both need. They want to kill us, period! It’s their religion! Yes, they are Islamic terrorists! They are Muslims! Do you see Catholic terrorists or Baptist terrorists? How about Shriner’s Club terrorists or Boy Scout terrorists? The fact of the matter is the current terrorists that are plaguing the world and killing thousands yearly are Islamic. That may offend some people, but it’s a fact.
American politicians and the news media are afraid to call a spade a spade because if they do, they might be targeted by the terrorists. They are true gutless wonders who need to be removed from their positions and replaced by someone with some guts. These popfarts are sitting around hoping the terrorists will talk peace with us, even though they’re winning the war. The religious, fanatical and political leaders in the Middle East proclaim that America, the great Satan, is to blame for all of their woes, when addressing anyone other than Americans. They continue to teach, or rather, brainwash their citizens into believing it, and they tell them that attacking us is their religious obligation. It was the same old story the general kept rehashing in his mind.
The general remembered the tapes of the blind cleric, Omar Abdel-Rahman, the master planner of the first world trade center bombing, preaching to his followers: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Take them captive and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush. Fight those who do not believe in Allah…”
It’s not like this is some new idea. The Muslim Brotherhood has proclaimed for years that they are engaged in “a grand Jihad for the elimination and the destruction of Western Civilization!” The war on America started over two hundred years ago, though the overall conflict has been the undercurrent for the Middle East since before the Crusades. Yes, the Crusades! The Islamic war against all other religions (or the West, for short) has been mainstream since the end of World War II when the Palestinians suddenly claimed, along with all of the other nonaligned Arabs, the land designated to become Israel. They took their name from the ancient name for the land, Palestine, in an effort to add legitimacy to their cause.
Upon the opening of the land to the Jews, the Muslims/Arabs began attacking the new state of Israel, and the attacks continue even today. There are some in the Middle East that still believe they are fighting the Crusades and live their lives accordingly. Does the Taliban come to mind? Hell, the brainwashed Palestinian simpletons, elected Yaser Arafat, a known terrorist, thief and murderer time and again to be their president, though they called him a freedom fighter and patriot. He stole them blind and they loved him for it—all because of brainwashing.
The West, America included, have spent countless years and billions of dollars trying to negotiate with that madman, only to have him repeatedly declare war over the first stupid thing he could think of so he could cover his tracks and abscond with the money that the world had donated to help the Palestinian people. All the while, his people lived in squalor of his making. Nuts, who are the real simpletons? We are! We kept dealing with the guy.
Every attack against America that goes unchallenged deflates our national pride and our international standing. It emboldens our enemies and strengthens the belief that we are vulnerable, and the sad truth is, we are. Because the very politicians we elect to protect us have a financial interest in the destruction of our nation. The political con games of Global Warming, Cap and Trade, Green Energy, Energy Credits and a One World Government top the list of the schemes they are deeply involved in.
The takeover of industries like the banking system, insurance companies, automakers, and health care providers through stimulus plans are some of the other schemes in which members of the Senate and Congress are deeply invested along with members of the administration. Many of our so called leaders are so greedy they are willing to sell their souls—and the country’s—in order to line their own pockets, even if it means we lose what is fundamentally America in the process.
Going hand-in-hand with the political scams is political correctness. Our leaders will bend over backwards in their efforts not to offend anyone other than Christians and Americans because of their investments in foreign companies wholly owned by corporate America, producing everything from computers to can openers to coffee makers to the clothes the average American wears. If our leaders are not careful not to offend non-Americans we could find the costs for the consumer goods we just have to have might skyrocket, cutting off the cheap labor gravy train.
Without cheap labor how will we keep the profits forever moving upward and the gravy train for the politicians (otherwise known as campaign contributions) choo-chooing along? How else are we going to pay those corporate presidents, the CEOs, CFOs and Wall Street fat cats hundreds of millions in salary and benefits to run their companies into the ground?
Every bailout plan that Congress passes does nothing but enrich the politicians through campaign contributions—legal bribes. These bribes are paid in exchange for the free money and special treatment in the stimulus packages, all at taxpayer expense, under the guise of the Federal Reserve keeping the country afloat.
As a country, we’ve lost our collective mind. We keep printing money and passing out stimulus money to the same people, over and over, with nothing to show in return except a spiraling, out-of-control debt that will eventually cause this country to collapse under its own weight. Currently, our debt is so large we cannot pay it off in the next two hundred years, even if we closed down all but the absolutely essential services of the government. Without printing more money, which devalues the money, we cannot hope to keep up with the payments to service the debt. Not pay it off, just service it.
Our border issues are a symptom of the corruption and politically correct nonsense that has led to our country to be an easy target for terrorists. By our government refusing to conduct any type of searches that might be construed as profiling, we leave ourselves open to attack.
But what’s a small terrorist attack, anyway? Who are all those people (those Americans) dying? America is such a large country; the average citizen didn’t know anyone who died on 9/11. To many, they were just some New Yorkers or people in Washington. Most people didn’t know anyone who died yesterday in Houston. It just isn’t a big deal, unless the mainstream media says so, or it directly affects the average citizen on a personal level. It is that lack of feeling connected that’s led to our being governed by such complete idiots in Washington, and yet, nobody cares!
Everything is viewed from the perspective of ‘what’s in it for me,’ or ‘how does this affect me personally?’ If the guy running for the White House promises to give tax breaks to the poor and middle class while taxing the hell out of the rich, he gets elected simply because the poor and middle class want to be rich and this guy says he’ll help them get rich, right? What does it matter if the guy is corrupt or hasn’t a clue about American values? He’ll make us all rich.
Somewhere along the way we have forgotten a couple of universal truths. One, you only get out of life what you put in it—garbage in equals garbage out. Two, if you make the rich man poor, you’ve only succeeded in making him poor like everyone else; not making everyone else as rich as he was. And three, there is no politician who will make you rich. He will only make himself and those he owes even wealthier.
Somewhere along the way, we allowed the politicians to create this separate society that keeps them well-insulated from the people, the supposed real power of our country. They wrote laws that never were debated in the public forum, giving them the power to tell us what to do, instead of the other way around as the founding fathers had intended.
Here we are, a day after a major terrorist attack, and the politicians have decided that they don’t ne
ed to address the issue because it’s a holiday. They’re safe and secure in their Georgetown brownstones patrolled by the Capitol Police, leaving the rest of us to deal with the problem until Monday. Then they’ll add they’re two cents’ worth of rabble rousing as if that were a major contribution to protecting our country. It is total bullshit!
At this point, the general realized he was pounding his fist on the dashboard of his car with real gusto as he drove. A depression had formed to the right of the steering wheel, and the neoprene covering was showing wrinkles and cracks. He was doing serious damage to both the dash and his hand which was red and throbbing. “Damn them!” he cursed out loud.
How was he going to get these silver spooned politicos to understand they can’t leave America so vulnerable? How would he convince them that what was happening in Houston wasn’t some street gang robbing the corner convenience store? They are all elitists, never having had to deal with bullies or tyrants other than those in their own families.
Apparently, they find nothing wrong with a few thousand people, a few thousand Americans, being killed by Islamic terrorists on American soil. Apparently, they’ve adopted the mindset of the Israeli people. The Israeli mindset is that it was tragic that people had been killed, but such is life in the ongoing struggle between good and evil. Oh well!
He slammed his fist against the dash once more, causing the neoprene to split wide open, end to end, along the leading edge of the dash. He then realized he had driven around in circles for several hours, venting his frustrations on his car, and he needed to get back to the office before he completely destroyed it. It was dusk before he arrived back at the Pentagon where he parked in his official parking space, and then made his way through the nearly deserted halls to his office.
Maybe Steven was right. It was time to leave; time to put the old warhorse out to pasture. Maybe he should just call David and get his vacation started. Maybe after he relaxed a few minutes, he’d calm down enough to make the call. Maybe.
Reprisal!- The Eagle Rises Page 16