Hello, I have been away and under the weather for about the last month. Call it a combination of flu, a nasty cold parents and grand-parents sometimes call a "School Cold," and assisting at my old shop...I retired and sold the business and have now been rehired as a "consultant!" Who would have thunk that; retire and go back to work in the same place?
Like many of you I have watched the debacle of the HCR debate with a growing sense of dismay. A call for reform of the way healthcare is paid for has gone from a bill likened to say, a rich gumbo, and then it was, like they say in Louisiana cooking, "baptised" to make room this provision and "baptised" again for that amendment, and on and on until what passed last night was a dead ringer for the "soup" that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about in his great book, "The Gulag Archipelago." Let's jump.
Folks, Representative Stupak needs to be primaried right to the point where he is nailed politically, heel and hide, to a Michigan barn door. Like the famous painting of the French Revolution mob being led by a bare breasted woman carrying the Tri-Color, women should take the lead of the charge to eject this lout! (Leave your shirts on though, please.) There can be no waffling about this, male or female; Stupak must go...if he wants to be a lackey for the Catholic Bishops, let him quit Congress and join a monastary...we all might be happier including Brother Stupak.
Folks, Harry Reid is the worst, most incompetant political leader of the Senate that I have seen in my 61 years on this ball of mud. He needs to go....just go...for the love of God, LEAVE!
Folks, why is anyone letting Joe Lieberman continue to hurt the Democratic party? Just Why?
Folks, why do Democratic Congresspeople do stupid Republican tricks? GOoPy the Elephant is making a list and checking it twice to see who can be bumped off in 2010. People will vote FOR a real Republican over a Democrat running like a Republican every time! If any of these fools who voted AGAINST their constituents think for one minute that the Pubbies will leave them alo-o-o-one in the next election they have heads farther up their asses that anyone thought humanly possible...Pubbies WILL attack them as "unprincipled" for not supporting their own President. "How can Bright, or Adler, or Childers be trusted when they won't stand with their own, and voted against 'The American People'". I can see it already.
Folks, why does anyone take Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann seriously? Bachmann is angling for a Senate seat, maybe #2 on the 2012 Pubbie ticket. It's so damn obvious that a blind man could see it. So why does the trad med enable this lunatic and her ravings? Is it to piss people off? I can't believe that the trad med is that juvenile, but then I read about David Brooks and the neo-cons who won't go away and realize that the trad med is a commercial front...how sad, for us.
Folks, why does Obama and his administration continue to endure slight after slight, leak after leak, from the Pentagon? Commander Jeff Huber notices, and it seems like no one wants to talk about it.
By saying the war in Afghanistan will fail without 40,000 or more additional American troops, Hersh said, Gen. Stanley McCrhystal and his Pentagon allies have put Obama in a no-win situation. "If he gives them the extra troops they're asking for, he loses politically. And if he doesn't give them the troops, he also loses politically."
The Pentagon has been boxing in President Obama since he was Candidate Obama. When he made his pledge to get U.S. troops out of Iraq in 16 months, the military’s top brass screeched like wet wicked witches (what a world!). Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen all came out against the idea. Months after Obama’s inauguration, Gen. Ray Odierno expressed his desire to keep 30,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2014 or 2015, well beyond the December 2011 deadline for U.S. forces to be out of Iraq as dictated by the Status of Forces Agreement.
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McChrystal’s media blitz against the President was unprecedented insubordination. Not even Douglas MacArthur would have pulled a stunt of that magnitude. Sanctioned leaks galore: Stan will resign if he doesn’t get his way. Bob Woodward gets a copy of Stan’s assessment on Afghanistan that says the mission will fail if he doesn’t get a boat load more troops assigned there. Named and unnamed senior officers tell the press how frustrated they are with Obama. There’s a Newsweek spread on Stan. There’s a 60 Minutes infomercial on Stan. Dexter Filkins does 13 pages of verbal sex on Stan in the New York Times Magazine. Petraeus and Mullen endorse everything Stan does and says.
Is Gates enabling McChrystal's insubordination and sneering lack of military decorum as regards President Obama? Is the Pentagon view of the President really "he's the wrong color and from the wrong political party?" Why hasn't Obama and his crew taken this Gates out back and given him a "tune-up?" Why isn't McChrystal out selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door after his leaking of information to the media? Here's more and even more.
And while we are on Afghanistan and the madness of the Pentagon, take a look at this article by John Mearsheimer
The real tragedy of Vietnam is not that the United States lost, but that it became involved in the first place. It pains me to say this as someone who served in the American military from 1965 to 1975, but the anti-war movement was right: It did not matter to U.S. security whether North Vietnam conquered the south and unified that country under communist rule. More than 58,000 American soldiers and more than 2 million Vietnamese died in an unnecessary and foolish war.
A similar logic applies today with regard to Afghanistan. The Republicans and General McChrystal claim that it is absolutely necessary to win the war in Afghanistan for the simple reason that a Taliban victory will allow al Qaeda to re-establish a sanctuary in Afghanistan. And we all know what happened the last time Osama bin Laden was free to scheme and plot against the United States from Afghanistan: September 11. The fatal flaw in this argument is that al Qaeda has a sanctuary next door in Pakistan from which it has been operating since it was driven out of Afghanistan in Dec. 2001. It does not need a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who helped General McChrystal formulate his strategy for Afghanistan, recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Pakistan is "superior in important ways to Afghanistan" because it is "richer and far better connected to the outside world than is primitive, land-locked Afghanistan with its minimal communications and transportation systems."
Folks we have a lot to worry about. But, unless we get on our feet again and start banging the drums for better Democrats and far more sensible policies, I worry that by 2012 we won't be able to energise the "base" with multiple cattle prods, let alone ideas.
President Obama, SNAP OUT OF IT! Get a grip sir. It's leadership time whether it be healthcare, routing out Conserva-Dems, or ending the military follies in Afghanistan. Please sir, don't let us down.