Violence in Iraq is a Sign of Progress

Today’s guest columnist is Earnest Apologist. Earnest is a spokesperson for the Bush Administration. In his own words: “If president Bush is the decider, then I’m the explainer.”

Violence in Iraq is a Sign of Progress
by Ernest Apologist

The nit-picking, nay-saying negativists in this country have got it wrong once again. They hear stories about violence in Iraq and start wringing their hands. Instead, they should be cheering. Why can’t they see that what they call “uncontrolled violence” in Iraq is really a clear sign—visible to anyone without preconceived notions—that Iraq is becoming a better, freer place. How can they deny it?

Think about it! Just a few years ago, Iraq was ruled by a dangerous, paranoid, megalomaniacal autocrat. Only he and his Sunni cronies had the right to torture, maim, and kill civilians. The ordinary Iraqi had no such freedom. Violence was centralized and controlled by an elite. What some people thought was “civil order” was simply apathy. The government had a monopoly on civic violence and no one cared enough to break it.

Today Iraq is free. Anyone who wants to torture, maim or kill someone else can do it. Anyone who wants to blow up a building or destroy a marketplace can do it. Free market forces are bringing the best and most sophisticated explosives within reach of nearly all Iraqis. Iraqis—with no jobs to distract them and with no gasoline for their cars—have the leisure time to create bombs—and to use them.

And most important, for the first time people care enough to get involved. They are speaking out in public; they are voting in elections; and they are blowing up their neighbors. That’s freedom. That’s something to cheer about. That’s progress!

And what creativity! Iraqis can now build, deploy, and trigger Improvised Explosive Devices so creatively and effectively that even best trained and best protected people in the world—the proud men and women of Halliburton— are being killed daily in new and innovative ways. That’s progress! And it’s our doing.

Violence by individuals is the sign of a free and healthy society. Can’t you carping critics see that? Our society is free and healthy; it’s the freest and healthiest in the world. And precisely because of that it’s one of the world’s most violent societies. Whether it’s O.J. expressing himself by killing his wife, or kids in Colorado or in Virginia giving voice to their feelings by slaughtering their classmates, Americans are free—as no other people in the world are free. We can kill whoever we want to; we can kill because we want to make a point; we can kill because we’re angry; and we can kill—just because. That’s the test of freedom. And we pass that test. We’re the freest in the world.

The Iraqis are making progress, but they’ve got a long way to go to be as free as we are. Have any Iraqis carried off an attack to match our Oklahoma City bombing? Not yet. That was done by free Americans. Iraqis are not free enough to do something like that—yet. But wait. With our help, they’ll get there.

And lest we forget: while the planes of 9/11 were flown by foreigners, the plot was hatched, the pilots were trained, and the mission was ultimately accomplished on free American soil. They used American planes as flying bombs and coffins and brought down two American buildings. Our free soil. Our free planes. Our buildings. Just try doing that in China, or Russia, or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and see how far you get. Violence takes freedom and we’ve got plenty of both.

Freedom is on the march in Iraq. We should all be proud of what we’ve done. And we should look forward to an increasingly free and violent future.

Bush Names General David Petraeus First "Surgin' General"

In order to recognize General David Patraeus's outstanding work in managing the "surge" in Iraq, The Wolf Report has learned that President Bush plans to name Petraeus as America's first "Surgin General."

Mineapolis Bridge Colllapse Linked to al Qaeda

According to campaign advisers to Republican contender Rudy Giuliani there are “growing indications” that the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis that killed eight people and injured more than a hundred might be traced directly to illegal immigrants, al-Qaeda operatives, outsourcing, gay marriage, and the tax-and-spend Democrats. “It’s just a matter of making the right connection in people’s minds,” said the advisor.

While the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is using scientific analysis to determine the roles of that bad engineering, poor maintenance, and the laws of physics my have played in this disaster, the Giuliani campaign, in cooperation with the campaigns of other Republican candidates, the White House, and Dick Cheney’s independent branch of government, called the Not Executive but Protected by Executive Privilege branch (also known as the NEBPBEP), are using sophisticated polling techniques to determine what part this tragedy might play in getting a Republican elected by linking the disaster to politically charged issues.

According to the pollsters, it’s not that hard. Early polling shows that voters can understand that the deaths may have been caused by homosexual al-Qaeda operatives who crossed into the US from Mexico and have been living on welfare money and money from family members working jobs taken from hard-working Americans far more easily than they can understand how the physics of bridge trusses and load weights might have caused the disaster. “Let’s face it,” said a member of the polling team, “physics is a boring topic and structural engineering is hard to imagine but the threat of gay Mexican al-Qaeda outsourced welfare workers brings to mind the chilling image of hordes of effeminate brown-skinned people with turbans under their sombreros collecting welfare checks with one hand while seducing our children and plotting against out-of-work Americans with the other. That’s an image that’s hard to get out of your mind once we’ve put it there,” he continued. “We should know. We’ve tried.”

According to the campaign, there are many indications of potential connections. “For example,” explained one, “we know there are bridges in the United States. We know there are illegal immigrants. We also know that every day, many illegal immigrants use bridges. We know there here are bridges in Iraq, too. We know that there are al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. And we know that several bridges in Iraq have been destroyed by al-Qaeda terrorists. So there are just a few of the connections.

“We also know,” he continued, “that there are people in America who are on welfare and we know there are gays in America. We know that some of those welfare people and gays use bridges, too. We know that many illegal immigrants are Mexicans and we know that many Mexicans have voted for Democrats. We know there are outsourced jobs. We know that many of these jobs are done by people with brown skin. We know that many illegal immigrants have brown skin. And we know that most al-Qaeda operatives have brown skin. So we know that the connections between al-Qaeda, bridges, gays, Mexicans, and bridges are all there, if you just look for them.

“These connections are all facts,” pointed out the source. “And that means we can't rule out the fact that one or more of the al-Qaeda operatives that are operating secretly in the United States, waiting for their chance to strike, is one of the gay Mexicans who helped sabotage the bridge.

"You just never know," he concluded.

Department Announces New Threat Warning System

The Department of Homeland Insecurity has announced that the old five-color threat awareness system, sometimes called "The Traffic Lights of Death" will be retired. In its place the department has unveiled a new warning system that is "more appropriate to al-Qaeda's expanded tactics.

Using the new system, the nation's entire threat posture can be characterized using a single image created by choosing colors singly or in pairs from a palate of 75 federally approved colors, and combining them with one or more of the one hundred patterns and textures currently authorized by the Department. New colors and textures will be added as new threats are imagined.

The threat status within the image can be interpreted in two levels. First, the basic threat status can be interpreted using the 200 page Department of Homeland Insecurity manual, called the Feng Shui of Modern Threats. The details of the threat can be understood using the Department's five volume set called Modern Terror Explained.

These documents will not be released to the public but will instead continue to be classified SECRET, according to a Department of Insecurity spokesman. This must be done “to keep this wily enemy from using our own threat warning system against us.”

Today's threat status is mauve and puce on a classic Williamsburg brick texture.

New Wave of Al-Qaeda Attacks Already Underway

Following revelation by the Department of Homeland Security that al-Qaeda’s threat posture had notably improved, a representative of newly formed Department of Homeland Insecurity, announced that al-Queda was now known to be responsible a growing number of heart attacks, automobile accidents, breast cancers, dog, shark, and insect bites, as well as a wave of inner city crime possibly dating back over several decades. Staying off airplanes, out of buildings and away from cities will not help you anymore,” said the spokesman. “They can strike anywhere. They can strike in any way. No one is safe. And,” he concluded, citing, the new department’s motto, “be sure and have a nice day.”

Asked for comment, a white house spokesperson pointed out that the number of al-Qaeda-related traffic- disease- and insect-related deaths would even higher if we were not fighting them in Iraq. “By keeping them pinned down over there,” the spokesperson said, “we keep them from following us home and destroying our lawns, our gardens, our SUVs and our strip malls.”

"War on Facts" plan uncovered

The Wolf Report has learned that the Bush Administration is finalizing plans to publicly announce its “War on Facts” to the American people. The war, which has been underway for years, will be the subject of a special Presidential address to the nation, which really won’t be so much of as an 'address' as it will be a short but extremely boring speech.

“We have reasons to believe that the ‘War on Facts’ is the Bush Administration’s response to The Wolf Report’s recently announced ‘War on Declaring War on Abstractions and Collective nouns,’” said The Founder, Publisher, Editor in Chief and Political Analyst for The Wolf Report. “Our reasons for believing this include, but are by no means limited to: an overactive imagination and a vastly inflated sense of our own self importance, traits we share with the Administration.”

According to The Wolf Report’s sources, the President, who has spent nearly his entire life fighting facts, has acknowledged privately that his old strategies have not been working, especially in the face of the “fact insurgency” arising from Democratic subpoena power, a renewed activist press, and what one staffer called “such huge, enormous, gaping holes in the logic behind what we say that we can’t even fool Republicans.”

“We have to move beyond the old ways, and seek the new,” said another staffer. “While emotional appeals, slogans, simplistic arguments, half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies all have their place, they are simply not enough to counter the world-wide dissemination of facts through word-of-mouth, the Internet, and Bill Mahr. We need to do more,” he said, smiling at the incidental and wholly irrelevant fact that ‘Mahr’ sounds vaguely like ‘more’ especially when someone from Texas says it.

The President’s new approach is called ‘spinsurgency’, which staffers tell us is clever play on ‘spin’, ‘surge’ and ‘insurgency.’ The very name, and the time that they spent explaining it, are characteristic of the kind of thinking that underlies every part of the plan.

As part of the spinsurgency plan the White House will add thousands of new ‘fact fighters’ over the next few months to the already large force in place. Their job will be to ‘wage war on reality’ and 'stabilize the political landscape.'

“It’s practically impossible to govern this country our way,” one veteran explained, “when every time you turn around, you run into facts. Facts have to be gotten under control. If not, then we’re not going be able to finish the job that we’ve started.”

Administration sources have told The Wolf Report that they will mobilize the entire nation behind the President’s 'War on Facts.' “It’s not just the President who has to deal with facts that he doesn’t like. We all have facts that we’d like to get rid of. Thank goodness we’re led by an individual who won’t just ‘cut and run’ in the face of unpleasant facts, but who can face them squarely and deny them unflinchingly.”

Wolf Report Declares on War on "Declaring war on Abstrract Terms and Collective Nouns"

Citing the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s 'War on Poverty,' Ronald Reagan's 'War on Drugs,' and George W. Bush's 'War on Terrorism,' The Wolf Report has declared 'War on Declaring War on Abstract Concepts and Collective Nouns.'

"Declaring war on abstract concepts like 'terrorism' or 'poverty' or on a collective noun like 'drugs' has done nothing to change terrorism, poverty or drugs," said The Founder, Publisher, Editor-in-Chief and Socially Responsible Policy Maven for The Wolf Report. “This sets a very low bar for success, an ideal situation for The Wolf Report, provided we don’t trip over the low bar and hit our head.”

“In doing our research,” he continued, “we found that the millions of dollars spent on these 'wars' have benefited no one but the lobbying group behind these 'wars.' So we’ve launched our own war for two reasons: first, as a public service, mainly to serve the public that we serve, and second to get our own piece of the ‘war on stuff you aren’t going to do anything effective about’ action.

“Actually, the latter would alone have been a good enough reason,” he added, referring to the second choice in the prior sentence.

According to The Wolf Report, the esteemed newspaper discovered the hidden influence of this lobbying group during an intensive research campaign lasting well over fifteen minutes. The research project, which was staffed by as many as one person “at times,” turned up incontrovertible evidence of nothing in particular which was later replaced with far less rigorous, but far more exciting evidence of wrongdoing, evil, and bizarre sexual practices.

According to The Wolf Report’s made up facts, all ‘war on…’ programs have been created by one organization: The Word Institute of Fatuous Slogans, better known as the WIFS, the name given to it by the Global Institute of Stupid Acronyms, better known as GISA, the name given to it by the Meta and Self-Referential Institute of Meta-Self-Referential Acronyms, or QZYXZ. According to the research, the WIFS has been not just behind the ‘war on…’ programs but behind nearly all the badly thought out government programs of the last two decades. WIFS entered government segment after a string of commercial slogan failures including the famous “Coke—It’s Brown Swill That Costs a Lot and Wrecks your Health,” campaign. The company has found its niche in government programs, where stupidity is less easily detected, and has not looked back since.

Today, according to The Wolf Report, “if you hear something stupid in a government program like 'Mission Accomplished' or 'Stay the Course' you pretty much know that the WIFS has been at work. George Bush does not make most of these stupid things up by himself. He has help.”

The Wolf Report believes (assuming any collective noun can believe anything--even when the collective noun is as smart as The Wolf Report) that unlike these previous ‘wars’ that The Wolf Report’s 'War on Declaring War on Abstract Concepts and Collective Nouns’ will see positive and immediate results.

“We’ve going to start by attacking the enemy that we know best—ourselves—and proceed from there,” said the Founder, Publisher, Editor-in-Chief and Strategy Tipster for The Wolf Report. “I predict that attacking ourselves as part of the ‘War on Declaring War on Abstract Concepts and Collective Nouns’ will force The Wolf Report to shut down its self-referential program by the end of this sentence, if not

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Deaths in Iraq Prove Surge's Success

According to an anonymous, but highly placed source in the Bush Administration, the increase in both Iraqi and U.S. Military deaths since the "surge" began is "proof that the President's 'surge' strategy is working."

"These are desperate people," said the source, "and they are killing more Iraqis and more Americans just to make it appear that things are not going well for us. But when you look behind superficial indicators, like the number of dead Iraqis, the number of dead Americans, the number of bombs going off, the number of bridges that been blown up, the number of Iraqis who feel safe, well, you can see clear and undeniable evidence that the President's 'surge' strategy is working."

"And I'm a highly placed source," he continued, correcting the way that he was described in the previous paragraph. "I'm not just a any old source. I'm highly placed."

The source (who says he is highly placed) pointed out that America has learned important lessons in the Viet Nam war and that we should appply to the the situation in Iraq which "definitely is not a war, just situation." In Viet Nam, according to the source, we made desicions based on body counts. We now understand that is was a mistake in Viet Nam, and it would be a mistake to do it in Iraq.

"I can understand the temptation go by body counts," continued the source. "It's just that you can't make decisions based on body counts, when they don't support what you've alread decided.

According to news reports, 1,646 Iraqi civilians were killed in February, a number which surged to 1,869 in March. The number of Iraqi policemen killed in surged from 131 to 165, while the number of Iraqi soldiers killed surged from 29 to 44. Only the number of US military personnlel killed failed to surge, with the numbers in February and March being about equivelent in the "high eighties."

"These numbers are surging," said the source. "They might be surging in a direction that some people might call 'the wrong direction,' but they are surging."

"And these numbers have to be put in perspective. With a population of 26.7 million people dying of natural causes like old age and starvation, 1800 more dead Iraqis is not that signifcant. We need to look at the big picture."

The big picture, according to the source is that in spite of all appearances, all statistics, all data, and all objective evidence, "they are losing and we are winning." " That's the only conclusion you can come to," the source, declares "if you don't get stuck on facts. Robert McNamara got stuck on facts and look what happened to him."

According to the source, you've got to look beyond the facts to get the big picture and if you look at the big picture you can definitely see that the surge is working.

"It's working," he said, resolutely.

What would convince the highly placed source and the President that the surge wasn't working? "Well, basically, nothing," said the source. "The rise in Iraqi deaths proves that the surge is working because the enemy is desperate; a drop in deaths would prove it's working because there are fewer attacks. A drop in US casualties would prove the surge was working because the mission was really being accomplished; a rise US casualties would prove that the surge was working because more enemy were being confronted. The absence of attacks on US soil proves the surge is working becuase the enemy is too busy in Iraq to do us any harm; an attack on US soil would prove it was working because the enemy was being driven out of Iraq and forced to do mischief elsewhere."

"The surge is working," he said again.

"It's undeniable," he repeated.

"Completely undeniable," he asserted.

"Even for people who are in total denial, like the President, his administration and me," said the source, "it's undeniable."

"Why can't everyone see that and just stop denying that it's working?"

The Return of The Wolf Report

In the years since The Wolf Report was published regularly many bad things have happened.

George Bush was elected President at least once, depending on how you count, and became President twice, unfortunately no matter how you count. Some believe that if The Wolf Report had been published regularly, this would not have happened.

Iraq was invaded at least once, and the mission has been accomplished anywhere from zero to fifty times, depending on how you count. More than 3,000 Americans have died, depending on how you count, not to mention a greater number of deaths of other people, such as Iraqis, who are not Americans and therefore don't seem to count. Some believe that if The Wolf Report had been published regularly, this also would not have happened.

Some people believe that these are not bad things. If The Wolf Report had been published regularly, this also would not have happened.

The Founder, the Publisher, and the Editor In Chief of The Wolf Report individually and jointly disclaim any responsibility for, or arising from the consequences of The Wolf Report not being published. But in an effort to stem the tide, turn the tables, reverse the trend, and possibly gather the moss from many rolling stones, these staffmembers have decided that it is their sacred duty to create a web-enabled version of The Wolf Report. Maybe then things will get better.

In doing so, they are not just carrying out their sacred duty but also responding to the many subscribers who have written asking that The Wolf Report resume publication and the ever greater number of suscribers who have not written and asked that The Wolf Report not resume publication.

Consider this letter:

Dear The Wolf Report
Just because I did not pay for my subscription is no reason for you to stop publishing.
Sincerely,
A Loyal Sercrbier

Or this one:

Dear The Wolf Report
I have not read an issue of The Wolf Report because I can't read yet, but my mommy says it was very funny when it was being published. I can't write yet either, but emails keep getting sent with my name on them and there's a whole web site full of pictures that I've posted too even though I have no idea how to use a Web browser, whatever that is.

It's all very confusing. Maybe when I grow up.

Anyhow, please start publishing The Wolf Report soon, whatever that is.
Sincerely,
Kaya Greenland

Or this one:

Dear Dad,
I know you write The Wolf Report. Don't pretend you don't. Start writing it or I am going to be very annoying.
Sincerely,
Dana

Or this one:
Dear The Wolf Report,
Are you interested in pictures of naked Ukranian women? If so, check out this site?
Sincerely,
Name held until I can check out that website

With letters like that pouring in, how could we not return to publication?

If you have any ideas, please let us know. We've been publishing for years without any ideas, but you never know when one will come in handy.

In cany case, we're back to publishing, bigger and badder than ever.