Verse-afire

Mimi Alford, now a sixty-nine year old grandmother, has written a tell all book in which she reveals that as a nineteen year old intern in the White House in 1962, President Kennedy took her to the living quarters and removed her virginity, and that the affair continued until his death in Dallas in 1963. Miss Alford also reveals that Kennedy wanted her to give oral sex to his friends while he watched, and she did. What Miss Alford did not say in the book was that while she was giving head to JFK’s friends, she always hummed a few bars of that 1939 hit Oh Johnny, by Wee Bonnie Baker and Orrin Tucker and his orchestra.

Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, how you can love

Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, heavens above

You make my sad heart jump with joy

‘Cause when I’m done with Dave I’ll

Get right on to any other

Friend that you might have, just sitting around

Who needs relaxing like you do

You’re so handsome, it’s true

That when I’m doing you

I’m so oh Johnny, oh Johnny, oh

They’ve done musicals about Oklahoma and Calcutta, how about a musical about Zimbabwe? It has all the dramatic elements: an evil dictator; a white population driven off the land and persecuted; runaway inflation as the poor starve and the dictator and his pals get richer and richer. Maybe a re-do of that old Broadway hit Finian’s Rainbow, and the hit song How Are Things In Glocca Morra?

How are things in old Zimbabwe

Are the farms and lands still growing there

Or has Mugabe stolen them

And dolin’ them

To poor folks to be fair

How are things in old Zimbabwe

Does Mugabe force the whites to flee

Has he forced on old Rhodesia there

Amnesia there

Of mem’ries of once free

Oh I see the rich black farm lands

That the settlers made to bloom

And the happy, prosperous farm hands

Who got slaughtered to make room

For Mugabe’s friends and cronies

Who now run a land of doom

How are things in old Zimbabwe

Some hacked and published secret Syrian government emails reveal how American journalists toadied up the criminally murderous Assad regimes, father and son. They did so, the journalists piously declaim, in order to provide the American public with a look into the regimes, a look they would not otherwise get. Yet what they got for their pains was propaganda, what the American public was fed was a view that the Syrian government wanted us to see and hear and accept, a view that was totally false, and which the American journalists knew was false. And yet they reasoned, if we tell the truth, we will no longer have access to the government. But to what end is that access? To report the truth, or report the propaganda? The problem of reporting only what the dictators want you to hear is that you are essentially in a hall of mirrors, where nothing is reality. T. S Eliot wondered if the spider, in a wilderness of mirrors, would suspend operations, and would the weevil delay. They would not, and neither would our journalists.

The spider does not cease its toil

Nor weevil doth delay

The daily round of endless work

That won’t admit of play

But weevils have no mirrors and

The spider in the grass

Sees not the world as we do see

When we look in the glass

The mirror sees what we do not

Reflections are not real

We see but dimly in the dark

What only mirrors feel

We see light of a thousand suns

And think only of doom

We see a sickly child but not

The mother in his room

Reflections sear bewildered minds

Kaleidoscopic, burnt

Into our souls in all their strength

Expunging all we’ve learnt

The spider soon will cease its toil

The weevil slowed at last

The mirrors tell of what’s to come

As told of what is past

Saudi Arabia has declared that if Iran gets the nuclear bomb they will immediately buy off the shelf nukes from Pakistan, and willmake funds available to their Sunni neighbors to nuke up as well. The Saudis believe they can dance their way to safety once Iran has a nuke by nuking up the neighborhood. But what tune will the band be playing as King Abdullah, accepting a bow from President Obama, steps to the microphone and sings that old 40s standard, Oh, What It Seemed To Be.

It was just a neighborhood dance

That’s all that it was

But oh what it seemed to be

It was like a trip to the stars

To Venus and Mars

‘Cause Pakistan’s in love with me

It was just a wedding of nukes

That’s all that it was

But oh what it seemed to be

It was just some nukes at the door

From our friends in Lahore

All Pakistan’s in love with me

And when I touched them, darling

They were more than just some nukes to me

They were the answer, darling

To some folks who’ll steal my oil from me

I won’t name the people I mean

I’m not into that scene

But they know just who these are for

So if they risk the chance

I am ready to dance

‘Cause Pakistan’s in love with me

A few days ago, a school lunch inspector took a child’s lunch away and told her the lunch her mom packed for her did not meet Federal guidelines for school lunches and was therefore  unacceptable. The unguidelined object in question was a turkey sandwich, and the inspector then gave the child some presumably more wholesome and definitely more guideline acceptable chicken nuggets. This is where we are now, and it is frightening. The government is now your momma.

He said his name was Tony

But he had such shifty eyes

That I thought he was a phony

Till he took away my fries

Saying those things aren’t healthy

And your mom should be ashamed

And he looked into my lunchbox

And took out the things he named

As contrary to the FDA

And Michelle’s wishes as well

Like my momma’s Saltefleske

And a cod dish I can’t spell

My fried apples he could not decide

If they would pass the test

And so he ate them all and said

He thought that would be best

For fried apples had much sugar

And were fried in sizzling fat

Making them much too unhealthy

For a boy and that was that

Then he tossed my turnkey sandwich

Saying turkey too was banned

But it’s not the turkey that I mind

It’s the baloney I can’t stand

Clausewitz once described war as politics by other means. Lt. Col Daniel Davis, a serving officer, veteran of Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq, recently concluded, after spending a year in Afghanistan to report on equipment, that the entire Afghan war as fought by the Obama administration by a fraud, driven by spin to make the president look good. Davis’s conclusions coincided with the conclusions of Anthony Cordesman, a respected military analyst and correspondent, who wrote that the Afghan war was being run on a political template, where the difficulties were glossed over and the small successes highlighted, with operations conducted with no apparent tangible goal. You may remember that the Democrats in Congress tried mightily to lose Bush’s Iraq war, believing that losing the war would result in Democrat election victories. And so it seems that wars, whether run by Republican presidents or Democrats, are considered by the Democrats to be not wars to be won, but elections to be won.

War was once just politics

We fought by other means

But now a war is just a play

Put on with shifting scenes

Where actors stand in shadowed light

And say each scripted word

While knowing that the words are false

Yet going with the herd

We once had Democrats who felt

That winning wars was right

But that has changed with Dems today

Who vow they will not fight

For God and country any more

No matter right the cause

Unless a Democrat’s in charge

And then they’ll briefly pause

To say the war’s a holy war

The good war we must win

And then they do as Dems will do

Send men to die for spin

That shows the president is skilled

And pure in heart and wise

All while the lapdog MSM

Feeds us the same old lies

Fifteen term Republican Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana has recently announced he will not run for re-election, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. It turns out Burton’s decision was facilitated by a group called the Campaign for Primary Accountability, a group that thinks that long term incumbency is harmful to the proper governance of the United States, and tries to find challengers for long term incumbents, regardless of party, in the primaries. The driving force behind this effort is a wealthy Texas construction magnate named Leo Linbeck, who says he wants to take a wrecking ball to the unhealthy system where 99% of all incumbents are re-elected.

Incumbents may be hurtin’

If the case of Danny Burton

Doth presage the death of long term in the trough

All because a man named Leo

With amazing charm and brio

Has put fear of God in Dan and seen him off

It is long past time eliters

Who spend lifetimes as repeaters

Have to face the voters and to prove their worth

‘Stead of rich from hanky panky

And then getting old and cranky

Laying long in Congress ‘til they lay in earth

But now Leo has the answer

Like an old time gandy dancer

He just swings his hammer and the buzzards fall

Just a guy who’s in construction

Who’s just giving some instruction

On just how to swing that big old wrecking ball

The Pakistani government has recently confirmed that they were the target of an anthrax attack. Someone mailed anthrax spores to a major newspaper, much as anthrax spores were mailed to a US newspaper just days after 9/11, and the mailing in Pakistan was from a school, as were the anthrax attacks in the US to Congress and others just after 9/11 mailed from schools.  On top of that, all the anthrax came from a single laboratory strain. So what gives? Is there any connection, over ten years later, between the US anthrax attacks and the recent Pakistan one? Mysteries. What went before? And what came after?

Mysteries surround us

The anthrax and the spores

With questions that confound us

The afters and befores

At the end of the day, and particularly this day, Valentine’s Day, when dusk is about to settle down, thoughts sometimes go to a youthful love, and we wonder where she is, and what she is doing. And sometimes, just sometimes, we see her again in our dreams.

I saw her yet again last night

As radiant as then

With flowing hair and red red lips

And eyes that whispered ‘when’

She smiled a smile that stopped my heart

I tried to speak but no

So long it’s been, why did we part?

I whispered please don’t go

Those golden days when we were young

And loved each other so

All gone, for us the song unsung

The why I’ll never know

She smiled again and turned away

I called but she was gone

I lay awake and prayed for day

Just hoping that the dawn

Would find me still in blessed sleep

To dream and dream again

Of flowing hair and red red lips

And eyes that whispered ‘when’

Pakistan has betrayed us for many years, taking our money and aiding the Taliban, taking our money and hiding bin Laden, professing undying loyalty while stabbing us in the back. All this is known to the State Department, yet they insist we must continue sending them money lest we lose influence with them.  I think we should send them the money, but to the wrong address, then the money would come back to us marked Address Unknown. I can just see the Pakistani Army chorus singing ‘Address Unknown’ by the Ink Spots (#1 on the charts week of 11 Nov 1939)

Address unknown, you asked where Osama abides

Address unknown, you ask where the Taliban hides

You were a fool to stay Afghanistan so long

You should have known there’d come a day when you’d be gone

Address unknown, oh how could you be so blind

Who’d think that you could think that we’d be so kind

As to be on your side with your arrogant pride

You may search never to find

Who has betrayed you

Address unknown