Mark Drolette: Spaced Cowboy's Space Cowboys

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Mark Drolette: Spaced Cowboy's Space Cowboys
Thursday, 2 June 2005, 2:37 pm
Opinion: Mark Drolette

Spaced Cowboy's Space Cowboys

By Mark DroletteAs any politically-minded American should know (which really should mean every American but is about as likely a scenario as George W. Bush correctly speaking English, even by accident, although, I suppose, if you put him inside a room with 1000 monkeys and 1001 typewriters and then locked the doors, you'd have yourself some mighty pissed monkeys), it's never a bad idea to regularly revisit the document that enumerates the core principles by which the American government operates.

With that in mind, it's time once again to delve into the Project for the New American Century's (PNAC) September 2000 report "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century." For those interested in history (before it's rewritten), it used to be, prior to 2001 B.F. (before fascism), America's bedrock principles had been laid out in an old yellowed piece of parchment that contained lots of funny letters and even funnier ideas, with its authors actually asserting (apparently in all seriousness) that said document had been "ordain and establish" to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Can you even imagine?

I don't recall its name, exactly, but it's not important anyway since we haven't used that ratty old thing for some time now and obviously have no plans of ever doing so again. I do think, though, that since "Rebuilding, etc." is now unmistakably el documento numero uno dictating American policy, it certainly could do with a spiffier moniker. Had I, like the Bushies, been using it as my blueprint to militarily take over the world, I'd likely have christened it "Ensuring Military Presence In Regions Everywhere," thereby providing it both title and acronym far more representative of the contents within.


Clumsy label or no, PNAC's RADSFARFANC (I'll do my darnedest to keep all those letters straight as we continue) recently came to mind yet again upon perusing a very brief article from Reuters on Yahoo. (Helpful hint #1 for budding political satirist/commentators: the shorter the item, the more important the topic.)

Headlined "Air Force seeks Bush nod for space weapons-NYT," it leads:





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http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0506/S00030.htm