I predicted via Twitter four days ago that Rick Perry would soon announce he supports and encourages U.S. Marines who wish to urinate on slain and captured foes and anyone they suspect of looking even a little bit French.
Except for the part about the French, I was right on the money. The man who grew up partying at a camp called “Niggerhead,” said on Sunday, shucks, when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go.
“Obviously, 18- and 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what happened here,” he said, adding the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode was -- surprise, surprise -- Obama opposed it.
Inflammatory stupidity is Perry’s knee-jerk reaction to any issue.
Or would it in this case be a jerk-off reaction?
Growing up in America, I never thought I’d evolve into the role of the nation’s moral conscience, but 9/11 and 10 endless years of war have thrown many more cerebral thinkers off kilter -- and don’t mistake my use of “cerebral thinkers” to conclude I’m referring to the current Texas governor (or the last one).
Now, let’s all pay attention: We’re the good guys. We don’t piss down on the dead. We lift up the living.
We’re the Berlin Airlift, The Peace Corp and The Marshall Plan.
The trade surplus of all that’s good that America’s given the world will never be exhausted. We gave the world the cure for polio, the iPhone and Bugs Bunny.
We’re Benjamin Franklin, Elvis Presley, and Arnold Palmer.
It wasn’t self-evident that all men were created equal until we said it was.
There’s never been a people more devoted to helping the helpless. We’re the nation of good intentions and there is tremendous value in that for people who like to travel around the world, walk into a strange place and say, “Hello! I’m an American!”
It’s the sort of thing we shouldn’t so carelessly piss away.
A friend of mine said, “Strapping bombs to a kid and sending him into a crowd to murder innocents is fine for them to do, but it’s wrong for us to piss on dead terrorists?”
Well, yes, my friend, it is.
We do unto others as we’d have them do unto ourselves.
Notice, it’s not “we doo-doo unto others . . .”
Because there’s this: There are a lot of good men and women in harm’s way who joined the armed forces for the very reasons I mentioned. They want to help good people and kill bad ones.
They believe that stuff about winning hearts and minds. They are guys like Pat Tillman or guys who are inspired by guys like Pat Tillman.
And some of them are going to be captured and some of them are going to be killed.
For God’s sake, why would you do something that would put your buddies in any more jeopardy?
As justification for his pro-urination stance, the idiot Perry cited a picture of General George Patton “doing the same thing in the Rhine River.”
Here’s the obvious difference. Patton never did it on the body of a dead enemy; he did it on a body of water.
Like Patton and Winston Churchill, also cited by Perry for urinating on a German fortification, I’m a worldly man prone to enjoying a ceremonial pee.
I’ve peed in both American oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and leaked in great lakes named Michigan, Erie, Superior and, of course, the one pronounced “Urine.”
I’ve peed off a 7,000-foot Canadian Rocky precipice and once took a squirt from high atop Old Smokey. There’s something about peeing from a proud perch that always thrills men like me.
Maybe someday we’ll mature and give yodeling a shot, but for now that’s just the way we are.
But one perch from which you’ll never catch us tinkling is atop the moral high ground.
We understand what Perry and those four now-disgraced Marines do not: Pissing on anyone pisses off everyone.
That’s enough preaching from me for now.
I gotta go.
And rest assured, it’ll be someplace responsible.
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