The situation in the United States reminds me of the old joke.
The Doctor tells the wife of the patient “if you don't have sex with him every day, he's going to die”.
The wife turns to the husband and says: “honey, you're going to die.”
this is how a country dies; and we're watching it.
President Obama announced that by the end of 2012, we will have brought troop levels in Afghanistan down to what they were before the “Obama Surge".
Pardon me for being underwhelmed.
Maybe I had the wrong impression; I was obviously under the wrong impression that President Obama would do the right thing and end the longest, most useless war that the United States has ever been involved in once we “got Osama bin Laden”.
Once you add everything up, (and I've written several diaries explaining why the costs of these wars are so much higher than what we're told.) You start to realize that we've spent an easy trillion on Afghanistan.
I know; this site is devoted to “electing Democrats”.
What I'm starting to see is that the Democrats are no better than the Republicans. Consider:
Vote to use military force in Afghanistan:
House: 420 Ayes, 1 Nay and 10 (the Nay was Barbara Lee - D-CA).
Senate: 98 Ayes, 0 Nays, 2 Present/Not Voting (Senators Larry Craig - R and
Jesse Helms - R).
I may not be spot-on with these statistics, but the fact is that this was an extremely bi-partisan war and 99% of our favorite politicians voted for it.
And no wonder; it's as if the body of the United States is riddled with the cancer called “defense industries”. They're everywhere. They're in every state, they have a lot of money. As an example, General Dynamics, which makes the Tomahawks with which we opened the “police action” in Libya, has a yearly profit of 2.5 billion a year. They can throw million-dollar peanuts to their favorite politicians on both sides, and it's just petty cash.
And we actually think that electing Democrats will make a difference.
I'm sorry; I just don't believe that this is true. Not even with “good Democrats”. Because even the “good Democrats” voted for these wars. And no wonder; every district has “defense industries”, and that means
A–jobs
B–money spent on “lobbying” (that means “bribes”) And believe me, it's a lot more money than all of us put together are willing to bribe our politicians with.
C–votes.
as usual, I'm really tired of having to vote for the lesser of two evils; it seems to me that in small ways, they're different, but in the ways that matter, both parties are going the same way, and the proof is that the United States is stuck while other countries are making enormous progress. Being a Roman, it really reminds me of the last days of the Roman Empire, with its politicians mouthing platitudes while the empire fell apart.
The floor is yours.
Disclaimer: I'm not one of the “big name diarists.”