Sometimes I like to watch CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network, home of the 700 Club, and Pat Robertson. Actually, I like watching it to scare myself, and to realign my perceptions of the world, and how other people out there are thinking. Cause let’s face it, I’m not exactly cut from the same political or social cloth as the majority of the country. So I’ll run around thinking to myself that everybody thinks roughly the same things as me, but maybe uses different vocabulary or has kind of a different focus. CBN helps snap me out of that daydream. CBN is also very “enlightening”, because it’s basically a steroidal version of FoxNews, with all pretenses of fairness stripped away. They say all the things that you know FoxNews is thinking, but is still just too afraid to say. CBN is sort of like the out-in-the-open flamingly gay cousin of the closeted, effeminate FoxNews. So it’s basically a direct lifeline into the worst kind of propaganda, fear, hatred and small-mindedness - all in the name of Our Lord God.

Anyway, today, I saw a bit of an interview between Pat Robertson, king of the “Prayer-Face”, and retired General Tommy Franks, who “successfully” lead the American “liberation” of Iraq. And by “successfully” I mean, in fact, “poorly and illegally” and by “liberation” I actually mean “invasion, subjugation and colonization.” But anyway, I digress. Pat Robertson had a bunch of questions for Tommy Franks. Which went something like this. I don’t remember the exact wording on all of them, but I swear that I’m being truthful to the spirit of what was actually said:

Prayer-Face: So, we know by now that Saddam didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, but we do know that he had elements to build WMD’s, right? How long do you think it would have taken him to build them?

General Retard: It would have taken him perhaps days… or weeks… or months, or maybe even longer.

Seriously, that was the general’s response. That it would have taken a completely indeterminate period of time, possibly stretching out towards infinity. Then…

Prayer-Face: Well, if Saddam had these WMD’s, why didn’t he use them on the American troops? Why did he just roll over, basically?

General Retard: Yes, that’s something of a conundrum in my mind. It’s a puzzle, the answer of which we may not know for another 10 years maybe, or 20 years.

What? He’s supposed to be a military strategist. He should be able to answer a simple question like that. I have to say, that this was a half-way decent question on the part of Prayer-Face. And the clincher, although I don’t remember how this fit into the other questions. It had something to do with yet another question Franks wasn’t really able to answer, but he said, and this is a word-for-word quote, because it was so unforgettable. He said:

Well Pat, we know what we know, but we don’t know what we don’t know…

That’s perhaps the most profound thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Not that the job of a general is to issue great metaphysical truths, but let’s get serious here a second. What a fucking moron. How did this guy get to a be a fucking general? No wonder Iraq has become such a fucking horrendous mess, with this guy at the helm. The weird part of all this, is that Prayer-Face was clearly trying to be really respectful og the general, and wasn’t at all trying to give him a hard time. If I had been interviewing that guy on tv, and he said that shit to me, by the time I was through with him, I would have not only ripped him a new asshole, but I would have crammed the entire Middle East up it. He would have had to commit seppuku at the end of the interview, because he would have been humiliated worse than anyone in the history of the world.

Normally, at the end of the day, I might just laugh off this sort of public incompetence. But then I found something far more damning of General Tommy “All Beef” Franks. Rather than try to summarize it, I’m just going to paste in the relevant parts here:

Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men’s lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.

In the magazine’s December edition, the former commander of the military’s Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of government.

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that “the worst thing that could happen” is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, “… the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”

Franks then offered “in a practical sense” what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”

It sounds very much to me like he is in fact planning for that to happen. Like he kind of wants it to happen. Now, I recognize that this guy is “just a general” and probably thinks pretty strictly in militaristic terms, but I mean shit! Do I really have to go on and on about how bad that is? Fortunately this asshole is retired, but I’m sure there are thousands of android soldier clones just like him with the same fucked up thoughts gurgling through their little reptilian minds. Yay! Living in the New American Police State is going to be so much fun. I can’t hardly wait.