No Red States, No Blue States, Just Football

President-elect Obama told us there are no Red States, and there are no Blue States. There are only the United States. He was 100% right, but it had nothing to do with politics. As a nation we are still divided on any number of political issues: abortion, bailouts, tax policy, the Clintons, immigration, war, gay rights, women's rights, etc, etc, etc. We do have common ground, however. It's football.

Go to Massachusetts on a crisp fall Sunday when the leaves are in full color. There, in the land of John Kerry, gay marriage, and legalized marijuana, there is only one thing that matters come Sunday afternoon - the Pats game.

Compare that to an autumn Sunday in Texas, when the weather is still as warm as a pit barbecue. There, in the land of George W. Bush, evangelicism, and oil companies, there is only one thing that matters come Sunday afternoon - the Cowboys game (or, if one was unlucky enough to be from Houston, the Texans game. Go Sage Rosenfels!)

To paraphrase Lee Greenwood [FN 1], from the lakes of Minnesota to the hills of Tennessee, across the plains of Texas, from sea to shining sea, we're proud to be American football fans.

I have a story that proves this fact.


My good friend Pipes and I went to Texas to visit our Army buddy, Bakes. Bakes was born and raised just outside Dallas, and was every inch the Great American Hero: strapping young lad, blond hair, blue eyes, high school football player, West Point graduate, Army officer, married to his high school sweetheart, and life-long Texas A&M fan. Pipes and I flew to Dallas, hopped into Bakes's ginormous pick-up truck, and drove to the heart of A&M football - Aggieland, aka College Station, Texas.

Now, I grew up in NJ, where football is certainly popular - what kind of a week people are having often depends on how well the Giants or Jets are doing. But football in Texas is something else entirely. Once you get within 60 miles of College Station, you are in Aggieland. The water towers and billboards proclaim the greatness of the Aggies. Everything from gas stations to restaurants to doctors offices is dedicated to Aggie fanaticism. Every radio and television station covers some aspect of Aggie football.

We drove into College Station, and Bakes nosed his monster truck through the throngs of maroon-clad fans that mobbed the streets. We had arrived hours before the game - in which the Aggies would face the Cornhuskers of Nebraska - and the pre-game celebrations were already in full swing. "Where to?" I asked Bakes. "We're goin' to the Dixie Chicken," Bakes said, spitting a stream of Copenhagen juice into a Coke can.

Ah, the Dixie Chicken: a cowboy football bar to beat all others. A single-story pine-board building housing hundreds of feet of bar, serving cold beer and hot wings to the hundreds of Aggie faithful that mob it each weekend.

Bakes found a nearby parking spot and our intrepid trio walked into the bar. Inside was a sea of Aggie fans in maroon and gray, interspersed with a few brave Nebraska fans. Raucous groups of fans circled around their pitchers of Bud and Shiner Bock, scarfing down nachos and wings. Solid Red-Staters all. Bakes, Pipes and I grabbed a few pitchers and found an unoccupied corner between some Aggie college kids and Nebraska alums.

We drank up, and Pipes pulled out his camera for some group shots. We passed the camera around, each of us taking pictures of the other two. We looked around to ask someone to take a picture of all three of us. Who to ask? Aggie kids? Cornhusker alums? "How about that guy?" asked Bakes.

He pointed at a tall feller standing 20th in line for the men's room. "Who, the guy in the blue rugby shirt?" I asked. "Yeah," he said.

Pipes put his beer down and said, "Hey, you know who that is?" I gave him a blank look and shrugged. "That's Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks."

For those who don't know, Mark Cuban is a multi-billionaire. He lives in a 24,000 square foot mansion just outside Dallas. Recently, he was doing the Watusi with Wayne Brady on "Don't Forget the Lyrics." But there he was, elbow to elbow with the hoi polloi, waiting his turn for the pisser, enjoying some authentic football Americana.

"Let's get a picture with him," I said. "Nah," said Pipes, "People've probably been bothering him for that all day."

"Ok," said Bakes. "Let's just ask him to take a picture of us." He grabbed the camera and tapped Cuban on the shoulder.

"Yeah," Mark Cuban asked, looking at Bakes and eying the camera. "Excuse me, sir, but would you take a picture of me and my friends?" asked Bakes, smiling widely. Mark Cuban looked at him quizzically, clearly taken aback. I think he had a "Don't you know who I am?" moment. But Bakes didn't blink (good Republican that he is, he's incapable of blinking in the face of adversity). Mark Cuban recovered his composure, smiled and said, "Sure!"

He took the camera, and Bakes stepped back and put his arms around me and Pipes. Cuban held up the camera and focused it. "A little closer, guys." We got closer. "No, cheek to cheek," he said. We got cheek to cheek. "Good. On 3. 1, 2, 3." Flash, click. "One more, just in case," Cuban said. Flash, click. "Ok guys, that's great," he said.

Bakes stepped forward and took the camera back. "Thanks a lot, sir, I really appreciate it," Bakes said. "Oh, no problem guys," said Cuban, and he turned to resume his place in line. Bakes came back over to our corner, and we noticed the dropped jaws of the Aggie kids and Husker alums around us.

"Y'all know who that was?" asked one of the Nebraska guys. "Yeah," said Pipes, "that was Mark Cuban." "Well that's about the most awesome thing I've seen," said the Nebraska guy, laughing, and he high-fived us all around.

Indeed, it was pretty awesome. It's not every day you can get the billionaire owner of a championship-caliber sports franchise to take your picture in a bar.

And even more awesome was the disparate group brought together by this little scene: Bakes, the red-blooded Texan; Pipes, the hockey kid from Minnesota, don'cha know; me, from Joisey; the Husker and Aggie fans that would be clamoring for each other's heads in the upcoming game; and one of the richest men in America who really just had to pee. But backgrounds didn't matter, because we were all united in our desire for cold beer and good football.

See, there are no Red States, and there are no Blue States. Just the United States of Football. The end.

[FN 1] Lee Greenwood pretty much has one hit, "Proud to be an American." Because this song only gets air time when America goes to war, I wonder if it bothers Lee that the amount of his royalties directly corresponds to the severity of our armed conflicts.
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Fox and Friends

Obama's election has apparently rendered the Bush administration the lamest of ducks. "Lame" might even connote too much activity - Bush is more like the duck enjoyed by Ralphie and family in "A Christmas Story." He's been roasted and served on a platter, patiently awaiting carving at the hands of historians, and yet he's still got that goofy, incongruous grin on his face.

Suffice it to say that it seems Bush retired, and I'm 98% sure he won't do anything between now and Inauguration Day. That does leave a wary 2% that fears preemption of CBS' broadcast of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," at which time Bush, clad in a Santa suit, jeerily announces that he's sent our zoom-bombers to drop their boom-boomers on all the Whos still asnooze in the town of Tehran. That spine-chilling scenario aside, I'm pretty sure that nothing of substance will get done before Obama takes over.

This surprises me. The Bush administration has been nothing if not industrious over the past 8 years. I'm not sure you would score everything the administration accomplished as an "achievement," but starting multiple wars, squandering both international good will and budget surpluses alike, deregulating the economy, rewriting the Constitution, and turning the Vice President into Emperor Palpatine - all of this takes time and effort. Especially because Bush did all that in the fewest proportion of working days of any president ever. He took more vacation days than any other president, including FDR, who served almost twice as long. Understandable though - that brush in Crawford doesn't clear itself.

I mention Bush's industriousness, and the current lack thereof, because of all the underhanded things Bush did, he didn't do the most obvious one. Sure, he redefined torture, then outsourced it when CIA agents expressed moral qualms about torture; he removed the transparency required for democratic government; and he sent soldiers to die for questionable causes. And it is that, the purported justifications for the war in Iraq, that brings me to the point of today's posting: the one devious thing that Bush did not do. He did not order the planting of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Why not?



Why draw the line there? W. thought it was ok to willfully misinterpret WMD intelligence, browbeat poor Colin Powell into selling it to the UN, bully Congress into supporting a war based on the misinterpreted intelligence, then send soldiers to die for it, right? So why not seal the deal, and plant some WMDs in Iraq? We have chemical weapons in our own arsenal. Would it have been so hard for a few clandestine operations to scatter a few chemical weapons around Iraqi arms depots? The short answer is no, it would not have been that hard. Here's why:

In the very early days of the Iraq war, the hunt was on. Every U.S. soldier was looking for 4 things: Saddam, Uday, Qusay, and WMDs. And we looked everywhere - every truck, every factory, every weapons depot, every hillside, and every nook and cranny in a country that is nothing but nooks and crannies.

At one point, probably in April or very early May 2003, my unit arrived at a large airfield west of Baghdad. It was an enormous facility - dozens of bomb-proof bunkers and jet hangers, plus luxury facilities like a swimming pool and gym. We were not the first ones there, though. We were the third. The Air Force had swung by and dropped their share of boom-boomers. Shortly thereafter, the super soldiers showed up. You may remember having met some of them in my previous post, "Duck!" These were the guys who rode horses and ATVs around in Afghanistan, wore sporty wrap-around Oakleys, favored moisture-wicking outdoor gear to actual uniforms, and went by "Fox" and "Duke" and, probably, "Snake Eyes." [FN 1] Men wanted to be them, and women wanted to be with them.

By the time we arrived on site, the super soldiers had been there for a few days. We pulled in, circled the vehicles in a defensive posture, and got the humvees ready to begin a sweep for WMDs. My commander, Stumpy [FN 2], had spread his map on the hood of his humvee and called First Sergeant, me, and the other officers over to divvy up the sectors. As we pored over the map, naming the sectors cool things like Red, White, and Blue, another humvee full of super soldiers came through our defensive perimeter (there's another story in there about one of my soldiers almost killing them because they didn't know the challenge and password, but Stumpy let them in essentially because they were white and spoke English. Ah, racial profiling. I digress).

The super soldiers came over to our little coffee clatch, which was gathered around Stumpy's humvee. Their leader strode over. He looked remarkably like a mustached Michael Phelps decked out as a Guns And Ammo centerfold. "Hi, y'all, I'm Fox," he said. "Which one a y'alls in charge?"

"I am," said Stumpy. Fox lowered his Oakleys, looked down - far down - at the 5'4" dumpling that was our fearless leader, laughed, and said, "Really?"

This made me laugh, along with First Sergeant, who I'm sure would have happily killed Stumpy were it not for all the paperwork that would ensue. Instead, he satisfied his bloodlust by taking Stumpy's boots when he slept and super-gluing them to the ceiling, where Stumpy couldn't reach them.

"Yes, really, I'm Captain Stumpy, I'm the commander," Stumpy fairly squeaked. "Ok," said Fox, still smiling bemusedly. I couldn't tell, what with the black Oakleys, but I thought he gave the rest of us a sympathetic look, one that said, "You have to obey this guy?" Anyway, Fox continued, "We thought we'd save y'all some trouble. We've already been through here, searched and cleared everything. No need for you to look for WMDs, place is clean."

"Well, we're going to search again," said Stumpy defiantly. "No, you don't understand," said Fox. "You won't search again. We cleared it, it's our AO [area of operations]. You sit tight here. Bear's orders."

Huffy at having been told what to do by someone obviously much cooler than he was, Stumpy snapped back with, "Yeah, who's Bear? He's not in my chain of command."

A hush fell.

"Son," Fox replied, a steely edge coming into his voice as the folksy "y'alls" fell away, "Bear's the boss here, and I don't give a flaming pile of shit about your chain of command. But, if it makes you feel better, I'm sure Bear will meet with your old man, and you'll be told to sit tight here. Like I said, just trying to save you some trouble. Understood?"

So let it be written, so let it be done. In less than 20 minutes after Fox and crew took off, the radio beeped, and we were informed that all units were to cease movement and remain in their current positions. Which we did.

But here's the point of all this. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Bear and Fox and the rest of them to have planted chemical and biological weapons at that sight. Fox could have rolled up to us in his humvee and taken us over to see Bear. Bear could have been seated on a big pile of chemical weapons, all stamped with Iraqi markings. He could have told us, "Here it is boys, Saddam's stockpile." We would have called our commander, he'd have called his, and in a matter of hours God and everybody would have descended on the site. In the meantime, Fox and Bear would have disappeared into the desert, and Mission would actually have been Accomplished.

Do I want my government to lie to me? No. But they lie anyway, so they should make it a good lie, one that at least convinces me of the rightness of their decisions. Imagine the difference - if we were told WMDs were found, everything else would have been so much easier to stomach. The insurgency, the mismanagement, the loss of life - all just a small price to pay for keeping those weapons away from America, and we'd all have been happy in our ignorant bliss.

Interesting, isn't it? That Bush is so incompetent that he could be criticized not only for doing so many bad things, but also for not doing enough bad things? Oh well. Incompetence is as incompetence does - the Bush administration isn't even good at being bad. Let's hope they don't try to fix it in the last few months. The end.

[FN 1] I would have been Snake Eyes if I was a super soldier. He was the best G.I. Joe ever. However,if someone else had already taken Snake Eyes, then I would have been Panthro.

[FN 2] Stumpy was a different commander than the Rock With Lips, who you met in "Iraq Story #1." Stumpy was an equal pain in the ass as Rock, however, and you'll hear more about them both, I'm sure.

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