This Is Your Captain Speaking...

 

I present for you now, ladies'n'gents, my very first cartoon of the 2024 Presidential campaign — and leave all hope behind...

Human remains were reportedly found in the landing gear of a US military plane after it departed Kabul airport, with harrowing unverified footage purporting to show a person trapped on the plane’s exterior as it took off...

...In footage too graphic to publish, presumably filmed through a window by a passenger on board the plane, the person was seen trapped outside the craft in mid-flight, though it is unclear exactly when the video was captured or how long after the C-17 took off.

— RT.com, 08.17.2021

 

...and the tweet in question has since been pulled for "violating the Twitter rules" — though, luckily, that evil, terrible old Russian-controlled media nabbed us a frame or two. I wish I'd jumped on it and downloaded a copy of the video as soon as I saw it — barely 7 months in, and we already have a disgustingly apt visual metaphor for the entirety of the Biden Years.

This is your future, working-class America.

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Carbon Footprint

Congratulations, USA – another dirty, bloody regime-change proxy war down the crapper.

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It's A Quarter To Three...

...so, set 'em up, Joe...!

Am I the only one here who watches Presidential speeches and news conferences these days and gets the feeling he's just not into it anymore, somehow...?

One more for his baby, and one more for the road...

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Je Suis Charlie!

Self-Portrait With Pencil Launcher

 

...in memory and solidarity. Je suis Charlie! 

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Another Beheading

Police thuggery escalating? Economy in the toilet? Approval rating approaching Justin Bieber levels? What's a Nobel Peace Prize winner to do?

Of course! Start another war in Iraq!

And, needless to say, the Ferguson police are all like "Awright! News cycle! Woo hooooo!"  

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Goodbye, Blue Sky: 03.20.03

Sorry, gang; the YouTube copyright police are jerking me around again on account of the old Pink Floyd tracks I used in this piece. You can download a copy of the mpeg4 with the sound track intact (05:39, 66.3mb) from archive.org. Sic semper tyrannis.

Oh say, can you see
on the bridge named for Key
where the “Aqua Team” marched,
and a bunch were arrested…!

It was bone cold, rainy, sloppy, and miserable only a day before the official beginning of spring — in other words, your typical mid-March morning in DC. It was also a morning full of coordinated disobedience actions across DC marking the first day of Iraq War v2.0. Our group, nicknamed “Aqua Team”, was given the plum job of mobbing aboard a Metro to Rosslyn and taking Key Bridge early during rush hour.

Things turned out quite nicely. All the color-nicknamed groups gathered for their rallies at designated points around DC, not knowing where they were headed until it was actually time to go — a brilliant piece of strategy which greatly reduced the chances of any snitches in the crowd getting the word ahead to the cops — in our case, it was a meetup at Eastern Market, right in my backyard, then onto an Orange Line all the way across town to Rosslyn, where hilarity ensued…

Yes, We Can!

"Though I could not caution all, I yet may warn a few:
Don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools!"
–grateful dead.

Y’know, I’ve been hearing a lot of desperate yammering lately from shit-scared Liberals and Fauxgressives about how I need to support our Boy Emperor Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One and the Noble Democratic Party in their struggle against the Evil Rethuglicans. They agonize over the Tea Party freaks and their horrible lack of “civility”, although whenever I try to point out how the Democrats have either cut and run or else actively enabled the Evil Rethuglicans’ takeover on just about every issue — Iraq, Afghanistan, the banks, healthcare, the economy, the environment, you name it — the Fauxgressives promptly proceed to pitch a fit (how uncivil of them) and only seem to be able to respond with mindless chants of “Yes, We Can!”.

Indeed — Yes, They Can:
Bomb civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan with robotic drone aircraft. This has to be the most pussified way to fight a war you could think of. They’re using “Predator” drones to bomb homes, schools, weddings, and funerals. Funerals, f’crissake. So, where the hell are the Liberals and Fauxgressives while this shit is going on? When George W. Bush was doing it, they filled the streets; where the hell are they now that Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One is the one dropping the bombs?

Wiretap the Internet. It’s been reported this past summer that Boy Emperor Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One wants to make it easier for the FBI to obtain information about your private emails and Web surfing history as well as enable direct surveillance of Internet traffic in what is a 180° about-face from his lofty campaign promises of 2008, a return to Bill Clinton’s odious “Echelon” program defended by Democrats as “a necessary evil” (yeah, that’s right — Democrats). When George W. Bush wanted to do this, Liberals and Fauxgressives screamed so loudly you could hardly hear yourself think; where the hell are they now that Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One wants to spy on American citizens and suppress dissent?

Prop up the banks: Liberals and Fauxgressives like to claim that this was George W. Bush’s doing, but they conveniently forget that it was then-Senator Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One who was being the good “house negro” by helping round up the votes authorizing the biggest transfer of wealth from the People to the Rich in this nation’s history. The Liberals and Fauxgressives raised holy hell about this when it was going on towards the twilight of the Bush Regime; where the hell are they now that President Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One — with the assistance of the Democratic Party — has continued enriching the banks and Wall Street brokerages at the expense of the foreclosed-on and unemployed?

Let the Gulf Coast die: Back towards the end of last March, President Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One served up his “Drill, Baby, Drill” speech — although, of course, he couched it in his classic pompous professorial speaking style, not actually using the GOP faithful’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” phrase in order to avoid freaking out the Liberals and environmentalists (who supported him in ‘08 anyway despite his stated support for offshore oil drilling). Then, as BP’s Deepwater Horizon well catastrophe unfolded, the number-one recipient of campaign contributions from BP sat by and let it happen, even as BP’s attempts to stop the gusher resulted in one pathetic FAIL after another, and BP worked itself to death to keep reporters and news photographers from reporting the extent of the devestation — hell, The Boy Emperor even helped BP suppress reporters by lending the services of the Coast Guard. When George W. Bush sat on his ass and allowed the near-total destruction of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the Liberals and Fauxgressives were howling at full throat; where the hell are they now that Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One has allowed the decimation of ecosystems and economies all over the Gulf Coast, and allowed BP to escape punishment?

Appease the Right: From Israel to trade policy to financial “reform” to healthcare, Barack Obama’s your go-to guy for pandering to rightists and Teabaggers. I’ll keep it brief here and concentrate on the prime example: the alleged healthcare “reform” which basically leaves the criminals responsible for our problems in charge. There was endless sound and fury in the media about the healthcare “debate”. Huh, some debate; nurses and activists demanding the inclusion of single-payer healthcare — the system favored by a majority of Americans — in Senate hearings on Capitol Hill were ordered ejected from the hearing room and arrested by Senator Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Obama and his Donkeycratic cronies were so utterly desperate to pass a bill — any bill would do — that they legislated bailouts for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, sweetheart deals with the hospital industry, the compromising away of abortion rights and the supposedly-more-important-than-anything “public option” (a shallow mockery of single-payer) and a measure which forces citizens to become customers of the insurance industry no matter how broke and/or unemployed they are. Meanwhile, at the Democrats’ phony town-hall meetings where they pimped their worthless healthcare “reform”, the places were overrun with Teabaggers busting up the scene — while the Liberals and Fauxgressives just sat on their asses and whined about those mean old Teabaggers. Hell, they knew this bill was a piece of shit; why the hell weren’t they out in the streets and busting up the Democrats’ cheesy dog’n'pony shows? If George W. Bush were putting over a sham like this, you can bet the Liberals and Fauxgressives would be out for blood; where the hell are they now that this same corporate-backed fraud is being perpetrated by Mr. Hope’n'Change?

Bully the Left: I thought I’d save the best for last. During the 2008 campaign, delusional Liberals ranging all the way from United For Peace And Justice to Code Pink were drooling all over Barack Obama, a supposed “peace candidate”, based on one single weak-assed speech he gave at an anti-war rally just before the US invaded Iraq — a speech in which he said he wasn’t opposed to all wars, just “dumb wars”. WTFF? This is a peace candidate? …Fast-forward to this past September 24, when Obama’s FBI conducted raids on the homes of antiwar activists in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan, issuing grand jury subpoenas to at least a dozen activists. Remember, this was our peace candidate — President Hope’n'Change, the man who emitted a vile “just war” speech when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. If George W. Bush was pulling this crap, the Liberals and Fauxgressives would be busting blood vessels all over the place, but now all they can say is that we have to support the Democrats, no matter what. No matter what.

Where the hell are they now? I’ll tell you. They’re flailing and failing, able to offer nothing but warmed-over excuses and apologia for Barack Martin Luther Gandhi Aquinas Timberlake Obama The One and the Democrats, telling us that we have to support the Democrats because the Evil Rethuglicans would be worse — yeah, that’s right, we have to support the Democrats because while the GOP sucks, the Democrats suck just a little less, an excuse so lame and tired that it’s gone from amusing to annoying — and that to stay home and not vote in this, The Most Important Election Since The Earth Accreted Enough Material For Gravity To Compress It Into A Sphere, would be to invite disaster.

What, you mean we’re not in a goddamn’ disaster now?

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Happy Anniversary, Obamabots!

Well, here we are, a year into this glorious new post-racial, post-partisan Hope'n'Change Era, so let's just pause to take stock of all the momentous Change that President Booker T. Obama has brought us:

The Economy: worse. President Hope has given away absurdly huge buttloads of our tax money to bankers and Wall Street. Bonus? Of course. That's what the bankers have done to us for the past year or so.

Health Care: worse. To paraphrase a recent Keith Olbermann broadcast, it's not health, it's not care, and it sure as hell isn't reform. President Change's idea of health care reform involves shutting single-payer supporters out of the "debate", massive corporate giveaways to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the threat of fines or jail for people who don't buy corporate health insurance even if they can't afford it -- and if you can afford decent health insurance, President Yes We Can wants to tax the living shit out of your benefits. Still, with any luck, that Coakley woman will lose that special Senate election in Massachusetts, and it'll be Sayonara Charlie to The Bill That Needs Killing.

Civil Liberties: worse. Some doorknob in Detroit tries to blow up a plane with his underwear, and the next thing we know, President Hope wants to institute Jim Crow for Muslims and make us all to pose for digital x-ray porn. Meanwhile, one of President Hope's fellow Harvard punks over at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs wants to assign CIA spooks to troll duty at any blogs that happen to bug him.

Illegal Foreign Wars: worse. President Change -- or, as Code Pink called him during the campaign, the "Peace Candidate" -- makes a big-ass deal out of appearing to seriously ponder the situtation before initiating a 40,000-troop escalation of the war in The Graveyard Of Empires -- or, as it's more commonly called, Afghanistan. The Nobel Prize committee finishes slurping the dregs out of the bottom of the Kool-Aid bowl and awards President Change a Nobel Peace Prize; President Change, on accepting the Prize, gives a pro-war speech. Now, that's class.



So, congratulations to one and all of you Obamabots who allowed yourselves to be motivated by fear and desperation and fall for the first slick-assed huckster who can speak in complete sentences and knows how to pronounce the word "nuclear". I just can't thank you enough.

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T-shirts and Stickers at Mike's Schwag Shop.

The Language of Washington

"Bipartisanship..." "On the table..." Y'know, gang, I'm actually from DC, and all this Capitol Hill Sunday Morning doubletalking bullshit still makes my brain hurt. Still, a well-informed citizen is a well-armed citizen; so, after many, many Sunday mornings of slogging through hours of Meet The Press and Hardball and Face The Nation so you don't have to, I've put together this quick guide to the phrases and words you hear the most in Washington.



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Oooooh, LOOK! The FUTURE!

So, here we are hardly a week into this Shiny New Hope™ and Change™ Era, and we've already pretty much seen what The One and his Donkeycratic cohorts are all about: The Future. They want to move forward, move ahead, don't look back, don't stop thinking about tomorrow (MoveOn just wants to take another swig of Kool-Aid and – move on). They're so much about The Future, in fact, that they want to totally ditch the past – including their enabling of war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, their role as accomplices in the destruction of the Constitution via USA PATRIOT, their endorsement of US-backed Israeli atrocities in Palestine.



Do you people – those of you who know who you are – honestly think the Donkeycrats will so much as lift a finger to bring the Bush mob to justice? Arrest Bush? In your goddamn' dreams. President Timberlake has kept Robert Friggin' Gates on as Secretary Of War, f'cripesake – not to mention that The One has also already gotten his hands bloody in Afghanistan and Pakistan this week. Does this look like the kind of guy who's going to raise so much as a murmur of objection to the crimes of the Bush Regime, anymore than he's spoken barely a whisper about US-financed Israeli war crimes in Gaza? Wake the hell up, US Left.

To bring Bush and the Gang to justice would require the Donkeycrats to admit to their own extensive complicity in crimes against the Constitution, international law, and humanity in general, crimes the Bush Regime could not have carried out without help from the Donkeycrats – kinda like the spot they found themselves in about ten years ago this month. To have impeached Bubba Clinton for his complete "rap sheet", aside from all that blowjob nonsense – murderous sanctions against Iraq, the continuous bombing of Iraq, the "Lewinsky Bombing" of Afghanistan and the Sudan, the two and a half months' continuous saturation bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia – would have required the Donkeycrats to 'fess up to their having allowed it with barely a peep of protest.

In other words, don't hold your breath.

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It's Going To Be a New Day...

Well, fan-damn tastic! The Armani Democrats are in the house! Let's find out what new, exciting changes we'll see on these major issues...
I'll never forget seeing Nancy Pelosi on Meet The Press back in May; after mentioning that the impeachment of President Chimp is "off the table" -- despite having a record of impeachable offenses as long as his arm -- she then goes on to say that when the Democrats get a majority in Congress in November, "it's going to be a new day"... a statement almost as cringeworthy as her appearance on the NBC Today Show in November of '02, after her election as House Minority Leader, where she declares the Democratic leadership "stands shoulder-to-shoulder with President Bush" in the rush to war in Iraq.

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Stay the Course!

Finally, a Plan For Victory! Oh, sure, the GOP may not have any real plan -- and the Democrats may be even worse -- but at least the Bushites have the good sense to put up big signs all around the stage reading "Plan For Victory" whenever President Chimp gives a speech. All the Democrats have is Howard The Duck, living in a party he never made.

Seriously, the Bush Regime flacks must have assumed Americans are even stupider than they actually are to serve up that old Reagan-era bromide "Stay The Course" when, in fact, there were a goodly number of us who remember that load of bullshit from back when it was still fresh and steaming. The war in Iraq is shaping up to be a Fail even more epic than Vietnam, and all President Chimp can think of is to say "Stay The Course". What was that old Pete Seeger song... "waist-deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says..."



In 1989, one Dr. Francis Fukuyama penned what had to be one of the most conceited loads of triumphalist blathering ever, The End Of History, in which he claims that the fall of the USSR and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe heralded the end of the struggle between Good and Evil (aka Capitalism and Socialism, or the absurdly distorted, simplistic media images thereof). What I found especially laughable was Fukuyama's treatment of the USA as a state that was somehow immune to collapse and above it all, the "winner" of the aforementioned struggle when, in fact, even as US politicians and pro-capitalist idealogues celebrated the victory of "freedom", the first rumblings of the collapse of the USA could be heard in the form of NAFTA and George I's initiation of renewed imperialist adventurism in Panama, Iraq, and Somalia.

The end of history? No, sorry, Dr. Fukuyama, what you heard in '89 was just the first shoe dropping. Seriously, Dr. F, didn't you realize that if a regime the size of the USSR could end up as historical roadkill, it could just as easily happen to the USA? Jeezus, what is it with these goddamn' Harvard jerks?

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Turn Your Back on Bush

Another personal favorite, this was commissioned by The Progressive magazine for a Counterinaugural event they were sponsoring as part of the weekend of protests coinciding with the Second Chimp Coronation.



Truthfully, though, I have to confess to not having been in DC during the Chimp's Second Coronation as my wife and I decided we weren't into hanging around here in the miserable depths of January, freezing our asses off in some fenced-off "free speech zone", and chose instead to spend the week in relatively balmy New Orleans, watching our comrades shivering in bone-cold Washington on TV. Let's face it, it was a helluva lot more fun hanging out in little jazz dives drinking beer until closing time, then stumbling down to Cafè duMonde for black coffee and beignets at 3am. Happily, though, we managed to find ourselves in a big, healthy, counterinaugural protest anyway -- the Jazz Funeral For Democracy, held on a sunny, dry, 70-degree day, featuring a couple of real live New Orleans marching jazz bands in a traditional funeral parade that started at Congo Square and marched through downtown to a rally at Jackson Square, followed by a "second line" that marched through the French Quarter, finishing off at a gig at this cool little joint with a mean-assed blues band and the all-important cheap beer. God damn, they really do know how to throw a protest down there in the Big Easy.

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New York City 2004 GOP Convention Protest Poster

Here's another one of those gags that pretty much drew itself. On hearing the news that New York City would have the dubious honor of hosting the 2004 Republican Convention, this image slammed into my head like a runaway train and refused to go away:



This was my part towards inspiring locals and visitors alike to hit the streets and give the GOP a good old-fashioned New York City welcome, and to let the Bush Mob know that the people of NYC weren't going to allow themselves to be cast as "extras" in a fascist corporate infomercial (which is basically what the Republicratic and Demopublican Conventions had become by this time).

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Let's Roll!

A friend of mine noted that it'd been quite some years since I did one of my good old-fashioned blood-spattered antiwar cartoons, so I came roaring back with "Super Service", and the even more brutal piece here. As I recall, it was about this time that Lisa Beamer, wife of a 9/11 victim, went on a whirlwind promotional victimhood-pimping tour including a stop on the NBC Today Show plugging her book, and -- what really sent me over the top, inspiring this cartoon -- her attempt to register a trade/service mark on the phrase "Let's Roll". Sweet friggin' Jayzus, I thought, does this goddamn' woman have any shame at all?



While pretty much everyone I knew in the antiwar activist community was totally down with the message, many found the imagery disturbing (much to my delight). Washington DC media activist Zoe Mitchell wrote:

...the argument he chose to present his argument with disturbs me. It's violent. It's bloody. It makes me sick. Unfortunately, it's dead-on accurate. US soldiers driving SUVs have shot and killed Iraqi civilians. Contrary to the US Media's imagery, Persian Gulf War 2.0 is violent and bloody. It should make us ALL sick.

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Fall 2002 IMF/World Bank Series

By this time, the approach of summer meant one thing: time to get going on the posters for the Fall World Bank/IMF Mobilization! A more militant local outfit, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, was taking a large part in this year's mobe as many in the movement were becoming dissatisfied with the more "moderate" position of the large NGOs such as Global Exchange, and DC's own Mobilization For Global Justice (originally formed to organize the A16 WB/IMF actions in 2000).



As was customary, my posters for the IMF/WB Mobe sought to be simple, easily-read portrayals of the issues our movement was addressing; in addition, this year I also added a series of images depicting our movement's vision for a peaceful and just society, to shut up all those conservative wags out there predictably whining "we all know what you're against, but what are you for?"

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Pig Nation

In the midst of all the fear and paranoia following 9/11, George W. Chimp somehow thought it a good idea to show The Terrorists™ how courageous we all were by getting out and going shopping, and actually went on TV, looked us all in the eye, and told us that. That crass, shallow admonishment remained seared into my brain for some months before finally emerging as a fully-formed inspiration in the wake of the release of the latest Star Wars "prequel" with its attendant marketing blitz of toy tie-ins and Star Wars-themed McDonald's happy meals.



The original idea, "Pig Nation", came from Abbie Hoffman's famous remarks regarding the keep-up-with-the-Joneses, ticky-tacky suburban house-dwelling, station wagon-driving middle-class America of the late 1960s. It seemed an even more appropriate and apt description of the modern-day McMansion-dwelling, blockbuster movie-going, SUV-driving America of the early 21st Century.

This piece also appeared in Adbusters Magazine's annual "big ideas" issue in 2005.

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Afghan Women's Liberation

Needless to say, the media environment was one of rah-rah flag-kissing zaniness. So, it was with little surprise that I opened the Washington Post's World News section to find a steaming heap of blather that had to be some of the worst "safari journalism" I'd yet encountered, at least in the Post. With the predictable headline starting with "Lifting The Veil..." in what had to be the most cynical ever attempt to rope Liberals into supporting the brutality, the article attempted to indicate that one of the major "war aims" of the US was to restore "women's rights" in Afghanistan, citing as "success" the fact that the beauty parlors had re-emerged from underground, and that the local video-rental shops had re-opened. Never mind that the Taliban were still forcibly keeping girls from going to school, or forcibly keeping them shrouded in burquas, at least the women of Afghanistan could go out and have their nails done, or rent the entire first season of Sex And The City on high-def DVD.



This piece attempts a more accurate portrayal of the state of "liberation" of Afghan women.

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What Has Ariel Sharon Learned from the Holocaust?

The State of Israel -- headed at the time by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, architect of the 1982 brutalization of Lebanon as Israeli Defense Minister and quite possibly with the largest overall girth of any world leader -- was going on another one of its recent periodic ass-stomping parties in Palestine, this time directed at the towns of Ramallah and Jenin. It was starting to look more and more like the Nazis moving into Warsaw every day, to the point where the comparison was far more accurate than your average overblown "Godwin Rule" Nazi analogy rant on Usenet. While comparisons to Warsaw 1940 and 1960's South Africa are today made by everybody and their cat -- including former US President Jimmy Carter -- in early '02, with the big Crusade still going on in Afghanistan, to dare compare Israeli State behavior in Ramallah and Jenin to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw was taking a huge-ass chance not only with the rightist/zionist factions among Jewish America, but with the then-highly intimidated US Left as well.



A lot of folks here will also remember this piece in the context of the infamous Danish cartoon brouhaha because this fracas spawned the now-legendary Holocaust Cartoon Competition sponsored by Hamshahri, the major Iranian daily paper out of Teheran. As you recall, the contest called on cartoonists around the world to submit Holocaust-themed cartoons as a challenge to people who claim to support free speech to put their money where their mouths are. Iranian president Ahmadinejad, himself a Holocaust denier, was expecting to see cartoons denying the Holocaust; what he got instead was an outpouring of cartoons critical of US/Israeli policy on Palestine, cartoons which compared the Israeli aggression in Palestine to the Holocaust — cartoons which, by their very nature, assumed not denial but acknowledgement of the historical fact and reality of the Holocaust. As I recall, there was a grand total of one — count ‘em, one — cartoon actually denying the Holocaust in the entire competition.

I, along with five other Americans, were participants in this contest and exhibition, to which I submitted the cartoon you see above, which basically asked what Prime Minister Sharon and others of a generation of Israeli leadership old enough to have lived through the Holocaust, exactly what they’d leared from it; my own answer was that they’d learned precisely the wrong things, as both history and recent events had shown they’d become that which they themselves hated generations ago.

Needless to say, I caught a shitstorm of howling criticism from not only the reactionary right-wing Zionist factions, but the reactionary US right wing, in the form of interviews I gave on a couple of right-wing talk-radio programs whose hosts bitched and fumed at me for being “anti-Semetic”, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the cartoon was not a slag on Judaism or Jews but a direct, pointed criticism of Israeli state behavior in Palestine. Talk about your great truth beginning as blasphemy; here we are three years later, and everybody from the UN to former US President Jimmy Carter is comparing Israel’s behavior in Palestine to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, and to South Africa’s apartheid era.

It was tough going for a while, there, but man, it sure is nice to be right.

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Six Degrees of Separation

Y'know what really got me about all this was how everybody in the public and the media seemed to forget all about the great honking wad of cash that the Bush Regime gave to the Taliban, early in the Chimp's Presidency, ostensibly for the purpose of "fighting drugs" in Afghanistan. This was, of course, right about the time the Taliban were catching worldwide hell for doing things like destroying old Buddhist temple ruins and such.



Afghanistan, needless to say, was full of militant Muslim militia/guerrilla types who were trained by the CIA to resist the Soviet invasion back in the day, including an especially notable ex-CIA asset named Osama Bin Laden. It must not have occurred to the US "spooks" that folks like the Taliban or the Mujahideen see any outside invasion as a threat, not just the Soviets. Talk about more blowback than you can handle.

We first hit the streets with this one in early November, while the shit was just starting to fly hot and heavy here and in Afghanistan, and had an amazingly easy time considering the climate. Around Adams-Morgan, we'd just finished hitting a Washington Post box and were about half a block down the street when I happened to glance back to see a couple of women checking it out, and overheard one saying to the other, "yeah, we all know Bin Laden.".

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