Bullets or Beds? You Decide!
The other day in a chatroom I was unchivalrous enough to ask a woman if she actually reads or whether she just scans the material that she likes to email me and several others, all of them liberals and progressives. This stuff that she likes to throw in our faces is in full support of GWBush's policies.
She answered by asking if I thought she was a fool, and that of course she reads it.
I didn't take advantage of that obvious opening, because everything else in that room is always cordial. She knew that that was as far as I would take it, and that irked me some more.
She has a son-in-law in Iraq, as she is always quick to mention. But my thinking is that that obligates her to be more responsible in speaking of things connected with that country, not less.
I had in mind a message that she had sent a few days earlier. It consisted of a long recital of Saddam Hussein's perfidies in bloodshed, couched in some especially hysterical language. One statement especially attached itself to my attention like a starving lamprey.
It went, "Saddam Hussein killed millions of Iraqis on a daily basis."
If my understanding of the English language is still reasonably intact, and noting that the number given is in the plural, this means that at some point Saddam Hussein regularly killed at least two million Iraqis a day. And we must assume that that is what the writer meant, because surely these people write as carefully as they think!
My 1978 edition of the World Book gives the estimated population of Iraq in that year as a little over 12 and a half million. Saddam officially became Iraq's ruler the next year. So it should have only taken him a week of "good days" to depopulate Iraq totally, and by the time Bush ordered the shooting to start, there should've been no one left there to shoot!
But in fact the CIA World Fact Book says that last year, in 2003, the population of Iraq had risen to nearly 25 million. That is exactly double the number of Iraqis that were around when Saddam took power -- quite a jump I would say.
In that same time span, the population of its neighbor, Iran, rose from an estimated 36 million to 68 million. Thus Iran's population didn't increase quite as much, even without a Saddam Hussein in charge and notwithstanding its war with Iraq in the 1980's that approached the taking of a million lives between them, though eight years were needed to do so, even with the use of poison gas.
This suggests that Saddam Hussein actually missed quite a few days while "killing millions on a daily basis," and surely at this very moment his interrogators are demanding an explanation for this and many other discrepancies between the Believed and the Actual.
On receiving that missive from that lady, I wrote a return email in which I said much of the above, and I used the same title as that of this post.
But I didn't send that response either. ...She may be disappointed!
She answered by asking if I thought she was a fool, and that of course she reads it.
I didn't take advantage of that obvious opening, because everything else in that room is always cordial. She knew that that was as far as I would take it, and that irked me some more.
She has a son-in-law in Iraq, as she is always quick to mention. But my thinking is that that obligates her to be more responsible in speaking of things connected with that country, not less.
I had in mind a message that she had sent a few days earlier. It consisted of a long recital of Saddam Hussein's perfidies in bloodshed, couched in some especially hysterical language. One statement especially attached itself to my attention like a starving lamprey.
It went, "Saddam Hussein killed millions of Iraqis on a daily basis."
If my understanding of the English language is still reasonably intact, and noting that the number given is in the plural, this means that at some point Saddam Hussein regularly killed at least two million Iraqis a day. And we must assume that that is what the writer meant, because surely these people write as carefully as they think!
My 1978 edition of the World Book gives the estimated population of Iraq in that year as a little over 12 and a half million. Saddam officially became Iraq's ruler the next year. So it should have only taken him a week of "good days" to depopulate Iraq totally, and by the time Bush ordered the shooting to start, there should've been no one left there to shoot!
But in fact the CIA World Fact Book says that last year, in 2003, the population of Iraq had risen to nearly 25 million. That is exactly double the number of Iraqis that were around when Saddam took power -- quite a jump I would say.
In that same time span, the population of its neighbor, Iran, rose from an estimated 36 million to 68 million. Thus Iran's population didn't increase quite as much, even without a Saddam Hussein in charge and notwithstanding its war with Iraq in the 1980's that approached the taking of a million lives between them, though eight years were needed to do so, even with the use of poison gas.
This suggests that Saddam Hussein actually missed quite a few days while "killing millions on a daily basis," and surely at this very moment his interrogators are demanding an explanation for this and many other discrepancies between the Believed and the Actual.
On receiving that missive from that lady, I wrote a return email in which I said much of the above, and I used the same title as that of this post.
But I didn't send that response either. ...She may be disappointed!
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 4:36 AM
1 Comments:
I have a friend who has the same annoying habit - sending along anything she finds funny, sensational, or inflammatory. Thanks for the ammo! If I get a similar e-mail, I'll know just what to say.
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