Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

I may never sleep again.
I grew up in a region with scorpions and poisonous spiders. To this day, I can't slip on shoes without first lifting them by the toe, turning them sideways heels away from me, and banging them on the floor to shake out potential arachnids.
These creatures are in blatant violation of my "no skittering" policy. And they don't even seem to care.
So, this morning I read an article on Wired which linked me to a story about how a camel spider in the cockpit may have caused a high-speed F-16 crash in Afghanistan last year.
Now, any spider in my car would cause me to veer off the freeway in a panic, so I well understand the pilot's decision.
And then, I mistakenly looked up camel spiders. I share the link because I can't keep this information to myself.
While the stories are exaggerated, these things are well past the "icky" bracket and well into the "must destroy everything within 1,000 feet" category.
"They aren't actually spiders", the article tells me -- as if that matters. They are actually horrible, and apparently they flock to soldiers tents in the Middle East in great herds to enjoy the shade.
There is a video online of one catching and eating a lizard.
I usually try to keep politics out of this blog, since so many others do that better, but I think approval ratings would shoot up for the current administration if the President would just say, "Okay, there may have been no weapons of mass destruction, but look at these freaking bugs! Our bombs kill these icky freak monsters too, you know! And we cannot commit to a date to pull out of Iraq until we have squished them all into goo. Some of them may have already stowed away in our equipment and we can't just haul the spiders back here to the States or the terrorists have already won."
Sure, they can play on a citizen's fears of another terrorist attack. That's just good political spin.
Great political spin is playing on our fear of giant, terrible-looking spiders with huge jagged fangs and a skitter factor off the charts.