Vin Suprynowicz

The president went on TV Monday evening and explained to the American people why we had to bomb Libya to keep Mohamyar Quadaffy (editor: check this week’s AP spelling style, please) from using military force against his own people, the same way Libya bombed the hell out of Texas in the spring of 1983 to keep Janet Reno from using National Guard helicopters to strafe those civilian Branch Davidian Christians in their church near Waco. …

No, no, that’s not right. Where are my notes? Our fearless war leader, Barack Hussein Obama (editor: check for this week’s Political Correctness guidelines on use of the middle name, please) went on TV Monday evening and explained why we had to bomb the bejesus out of Libya to keep Myanmar Goathaffy from using military force against his own people, the same way the Pasha of Tripoli had to send his fleet of slave galleys up the Mississippi in 1863 to destroy the gunboats of Ulysses S. Grant, to keep said defrocked Ohio storekeeper from shelling his own civilian populace in Vickburg with military artillery for attempting to escape the rule of the tyrant Lincoln, who had already jailed newspaper editors (in the North!) and killed thousands of their countrymen. …

No, wait, that’s not right. The Leader of the Free World went on TV Monday evening to explain …

Oh, never mind. It wasn’t that important, anyway. Nobody died but a bunch of foreigners; we used up lots of complicated and expensive munitions that will have to be re-stocked at taxpayers expense — a great boon to our domestic economy, as any Keynesian can explain by using Frederic Bastiat’s famous “Broken Window Theory” — and it was all done to benefit a bunch of Muslim radicals intent on getting rid of Mumblejar Gagadfly, wailing radical mullahs who 20 years from now will be sawing the heads off kidnapped American journalists and Belgian missionaries with rusty swords on al-Jazeera Islamic Television, the same way the grateful members of al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Mujahideen paid us back for all our help in booting the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

This only fails to make sense if you try to pay too close attention. The best approach is the way my grandma used to watch “Bonanza.” After a long, hard day she’d dim the lights in the living room, lie down on the couch with an ice cold Pepsi (I’m not a Pepsi fan; just striving for relentless journalistic accuracy, here), watch the first 8 to 10 minutes of the show, which introduced us to the unpleasant tangle from which Hoss and the rest of the Cartwright clan were destined to rescue Little Joe tonight … and promptly fall asleep.

Grandma would sleep about 45 minutes, and then wake up, like clockwork, in time to watch the final showdown, shoot-out, denouement, whatever you want to call it.

She made no bones about it: She expressly said this is what she loved about the top-rated Western TV show of the 1960s. You could watch the beginning, watch the end, and not miss a thing. It would all make perfectly good sense.

I believe the same thing would work for our Foreign Policy of Unending Pisspot Foreign Wars (FPUPFW), providing you were willing to doze somewhere between 15 and 40 years in between opening one eye to check to see how it was all working out.

Yes, you might be slightly confused, for a moment, about whether we were “rescuing civilians” in Bosnia or Iraq, in Libya or Afghanistan, in Vietnam or Beirut or the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, but what’s the difference, really?

It’s not a “real” war; we’re not “really” taking sides (though “Gadhafi has to go”); we’ll be there “for days, not weeks” (but maybe months); it’s only about a “no-fly zone” (though we’re bombing Gadhafi’s ground troops); and we didn’t go in alone, our brave NATO allies from “Denmark, Norway, Italy, and Greece” — or is it our brave SEATO allies from Australia and South Korea? — are right there with us, pulling guard duty and providing plenty of logistic support, from condoms to styrofoam coffee cups.

Gadhafi was bombing civilians who “had no means to defend themselves against air attack,” the president said Monday, explaining why we’re at war — but not really — in Libya.

Not like a free country, you understand. Not like America, where any law-abiding citizen can drive down to Lowe’s or the Home Depot and buy as many shoulder-launched, heat-seeking Surface to Air Missiles as we please to defend ourselves against the kind of National Guard helicopter assault that killed nursing mother Jaydean Wendel with a bullet through the head as she watched her toddler play on the floor of her upstairs bedroom in the Mount Carmel Church near Waco, Texas on Feb. 28, 1993, in a raid staged to demonstrate the need of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to acquire more nifty SWAT gear.

“It was not in our national interest” to let the leader of Libya re-take Bengazi, Mr. Obama explained Monday, so the president’s personal air force “hit” the Libyan armed forces, they “hit,” they “hit,” they “hit” (OK, maybe he only used the word “hit” three times) without even a pro forma request for congressional permission.

Absolute power. “Stroke of the pen; law of the land; kinda cool,” as one of the First Emperor Clinton’s grand viziers once said.

Next? “The transition of Libya to a legitimate” government, Mr. Obama says.

Nation-building! I’m just giddy with excitement, aren’t you?

And after that? “Wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States,” the president waxed eloquent Monday evening, quoting either James Taylor or Carole King.

A friend, and a couple hundred cruise missiles.

Tibet? Red China? Syria? Zimbabwe? Iran?

War without end, amen.