KILL JAPS

Hoagy Carmichael's I'm a Cranky Old Yank, in a Clanky Old Tank, on the Streets of Yokahama with My Honolulu Mama, Doing Those Beat-o, Beat-o, Flat on My Seat-o, Hirohito Blues is recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest song title in history.

My father used to remind me, apros of nothing (we liked to watch war movies on the boob tube) that Admiral Bull Halsey, his commander as head of the 3rd Fleet, had a banner on his capital ship that read KILL JAPS. Unlike George W. Bush, the Alabama National Guard's errant fly boy, Bull & his men got the mission accomplished.

"Hit hard, hit fast, hit often" was Bull's credo. The Iraq war has now go on longer than World War II. If George W. Bush were president on December 7, 1941, history's most-famous paper-hanger Adolph Shickelgruber & his spaghetti-eating socialist side kick, the eye-tie muscle-man Il Duce, probably would have joined Hirohito in dying of natural causes.

Ignoring Japan, Shrub would have invaded Mexico to get back for the Zimmerman telegram of the First World War, the Great War, the "War to End All Wars" and Japan would control the Pacific Rim from Tibet to Hawaii, like it did during the heyday of its second crack at a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during the 1980s and '90s.

And so it goes....

As an early Christmas present in 1945, Bull got five stars due to his mentor in Congress, Carl Vinson D-GA, Chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, who also made sure that Halsey's rival, Admiral Raymond Spruance, remained stuck at four. Politics has always been part of the military, though it was a little more discreet than nowadaze.

Post-script: Bull Halsey, only the fourth sailor to attain the rank of Admiral of the Fleet, was played by the great Jimmy Cagney in a little-known biographical film that is only available only on tape. I bought it to watch with my father. He didn't make it.

Illustration: Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. with Admiral John McCain, Sr., grandfather of Senator John McCain, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination