Monday, May 16, 2005

Britt's Fat General is Off Base

I don't think Chris Britt struck the right chord with his cartoon on the 183rd story in Sunday's paper. The SJ-R doesn't publish his work online. It shows the Pentagon as personified by a fat, sloppy, highly-decorated general simultaneously thumbing his nose at and giving a raspberry to Springfield.

While the I83rd situation is unfortunate I don’t see how the decision was made specifically out of spite or indifference to the guardsmen and citizens of Springfield as the cartoon would suggest. There appears to be a lot of good reasons for the Pentagon to reconsider their decision and there are a lot of people who will put forth effort to try to convince them to do so. Britt isn't advancing that cause by portraying it as a case of being slapped down by the man or being victimized by a bloated bureaucracy. There's better ways to rally the troops than whining and playing the victim card.

Springfield isn't the only community that will be hurt by the announced closings. Hopefully, it will be the one to make the best case for reversing the decision.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not a conspiracy theory nut. Nor am I a democratic, liberal nut (I know I may be redundant here). But I hold out that there just might be something political going on here in regard to the closing of the 183rd Fighter Wing's fighter wing. I certainly can't help notice that a republican administration was making decisions on a base located in a state with a loud mouth senator whip, a bonehead governor, and in a city with a party-boy mayor. All of the democratic persuation.

Gee I hope Rita Gretchen Cormully (three really bad names, don't you agree?) or the Hagans or Diane Greenholt don't get ahold of this because George Bush is really gonna pay! I can't believe that we have not heard from them yet on this topic. Let's use their logic here. The board that decided the fate of the 183rd certainly relied on data and information gathered by others when making their decision. Now that the decision has gone against those in central Illinois, which unfortunately includes Cormully, the Hagans, and the rest of the pukes (I say puke instead of Milford Franks merely out of convenience), there is only one conclusion to draw. Someone LIED! No, they could not have received bad information, or simply flet it was the right thing to do, they LIED! They lied because it wasn't what the Pukes wanted to hear.

Of course I must consider that the 183rd's loss of the fighter wing may be just A-OK with the Pukes. In their twisted minds the removal of the jets is one step closer to limiting the evil George Bush from waging war on the earth and ruining life as we know it.

How's that for a segway?

Anonymous said...

One of the reasons that we should keep the fighter aircraft is overlooked by just about everyone. We have 8 nuclear power plants in this state. The only place with more is France. Those fighters are a quick first line of defense if those who don't like us on this side of the pond should take a notion to drop something on or try to visit one of them. And remember, the wind and the plume will blow west to east, right to D.C.