The Blowback Tango

THE BLOWBACK TANGO

(spoken)

GEORGE I: Drugs.
RUMSFELD: Line.
CHENEY: Oil.
GEORGE II: Uh-uh.
POWELL: Weapons of...
AUDIENCE: BULLSHIT!

(repeat 5 times, then swing into chorus)

GEORGE I, GEORGE II, CHENEY, RUMSFELD, POWELL:

He had it coming!
He had it coming!
He only had himself to blame!
I know we paid him
And then betrayed him
But I bet you would have done the same!

GEORGE I:

(spoken)

You know how some puppet dictators have these little habits that get you down? Like…Manuel. Manuel liked to do drugs. No…not do. Deal. So I come home one night and I’m REALLY worried about my approval ratings and there’s Manuel, sitting on the couch, drinking a beer and ranting about how in 1999 he’s gonna own that damn Panama canal and our bases will be closed and we’ll have no access to Latin America and we’ll really be fucked then, ha ha. So I said to him, I said, “You keep trafficking in those illegal drugs Manuel, and I’ll tell ya, well, it wouldn’t be prudent.” And he did. So I got together 24,000 heavily armed American troops, and I went down there and opened a can of American whup-ass…all over his country.

GEORGE I:

He had it coming!
He had it coming!
He only had himself to blame!
So we killed thousands
Of his civilians—
I bet that you would have done the same!

RUMSFELD:

I first met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1983. And he hated the Iranian government, and we hit it off right away. He’d call me up and say, “Don, I bet that chemical shit you guys are working on would just work like a charm on that Iranian army,” and I’d say, “Hey, say no more, I happen to know Lockheed Martin having a two-for-one on biological agents,” and everything’d be sweetness and light. And then I found out. Pro-western, he told me. Pro-western my ass! Not only could he not beat that punk-ass Iranian army, oh no. He invaded Kuwait. One of our oil-rich allies, you know? So we fixed ourselves a coalition, and we got the U.N. to go along with it, as usual, and…you know, some guys just can’t take a relentless and brutal bombing campaign.

He had it coming!
He had it coming!
He crossed us when we drew the line!
So we bombed Baghdad
From dusk till morning—
It was mass murder, but not a crime!

CHENEY:

So I’m sitting there at Halliburton, minding my own business, carving out our road map for peace in the middle east. In storms my buddy Osama in a zealous rage. “You been screwing with Mecca,” he says. He was crazy and he kept on screaming, “You been screwing with Mecca!” I said, dude, it’s not our fault we used the first gulf war to manipulate the Saudi government into letting us have a few lousy military bases. I said, hey, what’s your problem, our money helped put your Taliban buddies in power, and anyway, talk about betrayal, where’s our pipeline, you bastard? So he goes crazy and masterminds the worst terrorist attack we’ve ever sustained on American soil. And then we sent the army over to Afghanistan and we bombed the crap out of a village we thought he or some of his buddies might be in. We bombed the crap out of a village we thought he or some of his buddies might be in ten times.

They had it coming!
They had it coming!
They harbored terrorists too long!
Sure, now they’re starving
And ruled by warlords--
But don’t you tell me that we were wrong!

GEORGE II:

Saddam tried to kill my daddy in his relentless pursuit of nukular weapons of terra because he needed them to gas his own people and cut their tongues out so we had to liberate them for their own embetterment. If he’s not evil, then evil has no name just like that horse in the song from the 70s only I don’t really remember them too well cause that was before I got born again. So we have to liberate the evil weapons of no-name evilment to secure my daddyland’s security from the abscess of weevil.

POWELL: Mr. President…do you understand what the hell you’re saying?

GEORGE II: Uh-uh!

He had it coming!
He had it coming!
He had it coming all along!
The market’s tanking
Dick needs that oil
So you just shut up and sing the song!

GEORGE II, RUMSFELD, and POWELL:

He had it coming!
He had it coming!
He had those WOMDs all along!
Blix couldn’t find ‘em—
And we can’t either—
But don’t you tell us that we were wrong!

POWELL:

So Cheney and I had this double act and our president, George, used to kind of tag along with us. Now for the last number in our act we would do this routine we used to call “Whack-A-Muslim.” Dick would go, “There! Over there! I see Osama’s head sticking out of that hole!” and then I’d bring the mallet down WHAM! on the village or cave or whatever the hell it was and when the blood and smoke and stuff had stopped flying and I was picking through the rubble to see whether we got him Dick would go “Hey! Right there! It’s Saddam!” and I’d run over and bring the mallet down WHAM! on the market or residential district or whatever and we’d do this over and over and over. So one night Dick and I are running around whacking shit right and left and suddenly he looks at me and he says, “Colin, there’s nothing left to whack, let’s take a breather.” So he kicks back with a cold one and he sends me out to get some ice. So I pop down to Syria to see if I can borrow their cooler and I knock on the door and there’s Assad and Saddam AND Osama, all sittin’ in the hot tub together.

Well, I will have been in such a state of shock, I won’t have known what I was doing. It won’t be until later, after we’re cleaning up the mess in the streets of Damascus, that we’ll realize we don’t know whether that bastard is dead either.

GEORGE I, GEORGE II, CHENEY, POWELL, RUMSFELD:

He has it coming!
He has it coming!
He has it coming, just you wait!
We’ll flatten his towns
Just like the others—
Then be surprised to encounter hate!

They’ve got it coming!
They’ve got it coming!
We’re gonna bomb them flat, you bet!
And those left living
Will then enjoy all
The rights and freedoms our own folks get!

ASHCROFT:

I love the American people more than I can possibly say. They're so articulate, sensitive, perceptive. But they're always trying to express themselves. They go around every day trying to express themselves and on the way they express truth, reservations, critical thought, and independence. In a way, you could say we parted over a philosophical difference. They saw their civil rights as alive...and I saw them dead.

They have it coming!
They have it coming!
Tom Ridge'll give me my pretext!
You say internment
Would be disgusting--
Well all I'll say is, all right, you're next!

GEORGE I: Drugs.
RUMSFELD: Line.
CHENEY: Oil.
GEORGE II: Uh-uh.
POWELL: Weapons of…

(long silence while ASHCROFT glares menacingly into the audience. The audience slowly gets to its feet. Finally:)

AUDIENCE: BULLSHIT!

(cellblock doors slide across the stage and slam.)

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