Don't Be Fooled By Mike Pence - He is Part of the Problem

Mike Pence, erstwhile Vice President to Der Trumpenführer,  embodies the moral bankruptcy that now consumed the Republican Part and the evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians who bear the responsibility for having out Trump in office.  Hypocrisy and deliberate lies are now the norm be they about the non-existent persecution of Christians to the false claims that Trumpcare would increase healthcare coverage and lower premium costs.  In the midst of it all stands Mike Pence, a man who wears his feigned religiosity on his sleeve, but is only too ready to attack the civil rights and equality of LGBT Americans and give a wink and a nod to white supremacists.  Much of the misogyny one sees in the Trump cabinet likely lays squarely at the feet of Pence as well due to his apparent role in "vetting" the many unfit individuals nominated by Trump.  Betsy DeVos is merely the tip of the iceberg of incompetent ideologues promoted by Pence.  And then there is Pence's willingness to lie for Trump even when he has to know that the words flowing from his mouth are untrue.  Like so many of the Christofascists, lying for Pence is never an issue.  It's as if the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness has been conveniently removed from the Ten Commandments that Pence and his fellow modern day Pharisees pretend to revere.  Richard Cohen has a good take down of Pence.  Here are excerpts:

When history holds its trial to account for the Donald Trump presidency, Trump himself will be acquitted on grounds of madness. History will look at his behavior, his erratic and childish lying and his flamboyant ignorance of history itself and pronounce the man, like George III, a cuckoo for whom restraint, but not punishment, was necessary. Such will not be the case for Mike Pence, the toady vice president and the personification of much that has gone wrong in Washington.

On any given day, Pence will do his customary spot-on imitation of a bobblehead. Standing near Trump in the Oval Office, he will nod his head robotically as the president says one asinine thing after another and then, maybe along with others, he will be honored with a lie or a version of the truth so mangled by contradictions and fabrications that a day in the White House is like a week on LSD.

I pick on Pence because he is the most prominent and highest-ranked of President Trump’s lackeys. . . . He vouches for things that are not true — no talk of sanctions between Mike Flynn and the Russians, for instance, or more recently the reason James B. Comey was fired as FBI director. In both instances, the president either lied to him or failed to tell him the truth. The result was the same: The vice president appeared clueless.

I don’t feel an iota of sympathy for Pence. He was among a perfidious group of political opportunists who pushed Trump’s candidacy while having to know that he was intellectually, temperamentally and morally unfit for the presidency. They stuck with him as he mocked the disabled, belittled women, insulted Hispanics, libeled Mexicans and promiscuously promised the impossible and ridiculous — all that “Day One” nonsense like how the wall would be built and Mexico would pay for it.

The swamp that Trump kept mentioning in the campaign is not really one of tangled bureaucratic mangroves, but of moral indifference. Washington always had a touch of that — after all, its business is politics — but Trump and his people have collapsed the space between lies and truth. The president uses one and then the other — whatever works at the time.

The president cannot be trusted. He cannot be believed.

From most of the Republican Party comes not a whisper of rebuke. The congressional leadership is inert, cowed, scurrying to the White House for this or that ceremonial picture, like members of the erstwhile Politburo flanking Stalin atop Lenin’s mausoleum. . . . . I know, and they fear the voters back home, but their complicity ought to be obvious even to them.

[Trump's] own party has been sullenly complicit, showing how little esteem many politicians place in our most cherished values, not the least of them honesty and dignity. For all of them, an accounting is coming. 

I believe that Pence knew what he was getting into, but his lust for power outweighed all else.  Like many other Christofascists, he believes feigned piety, avoidance of alcohol and mistreatment of others based a few Bible passages authored by ignorant, unknown herders makes him "godly."  Rather, it shows his moral bankruptcy and unfitness for office.  I sincerely hope Pence is directly implicated in Trump's misdeeds.  He needs to go as well. 

The Betrayl of Our Troops Continues - Another Death in America's Longest and Needless War

While politicians in Washington fight over spending, the squandering of money and American lives continues unabated in Afghanistan.  One recent squandered life was that of 25 year old David J.Chambers of Hampton, Virginia (pictured at right).  Chambers was killed by an IED similar to that which severely injured my son-in-law two months ago also in Afghanistan.  Here's what the Virginia Pilot reported:

A soldier from Hampton has been killed while serving in Afghanistan.  Sgt. David J. Chambers, 25, died Wednesday in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province, the Department of Defense said. He sustained injuries in a mortar attack while on dismounted patrol.

Chambers was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. That is under control of the 7th Infantry Division at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the state of Washington.

Like my son-in-law, Chambers was based out of Fort Lewis and was a member of the Stryker Brigade.   And like so many others who have been sacrificed for nothing meaningful in Afghanistan, Chambers was ultimately sacrificed on the altar of American military and political hubris. Rather than call the Afghanistan War for what it is, namely a fool's errand from the start, the military brass continues to lie and pretend that we are "making progress" and asks for more time, soldiers and, of course money.  A piece in American Prospect looks at the disaster known as the Afghanistan War.  Here are highlights:

In October 2001, George W. Bush told the country he was sending the American military to Afghanistan in order to "bring justice to our enemies." It's safe to say support for the war would not have been as nearly unanimous as it was had he said, "Oh, and by the way, our troops are going to be fighting there for the next 13 years."

Last spring, Afghanistan passed Vietnam (measured by the time between the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and the departure of the last Americans from Saigon in 1975) to become America's longest war.

To date, we've spent over half a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, a figure that includes only the direct yearly costs for both military expenditures and civilian aid. It doesn't include the cost of replacing materiel and weapons used in Afghanistan, nor the long-term costs of caring for the thousands of servicemembers who were wounded there. Those factors will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the tally in the years to come. And today, keeping a single servicemember in Afghanistan costs upward of a million dollars per year.

Last August, the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan passed 2,000.

If politicians really believed in "supporting the troops" we would have left Afghanistan years ago.  They give lip service to the concept for political sound bite purposes, yet in fact they betray our troops every single day.

Afghanistan - The Ongoing Betrayal of Our Troops

While the American pundit class trade shots over the merits of the adulterous General David Patraeus, the squandering of American lives continues in Afghanistan.   While American politicians continue to have their heads up their asses, France has apparently admitted the hopeless disaster that is Afghanistan and is accelerating its withdrawal from the continuing fools errand. The U.S. military makes me shake my head at times with the bullshit names for fiascoes like Afghanistan.  The military leadership must indeed think our troops and all Americans are utter cretins and morons like the GOP base.  Rather than call the operation in Afghanistan "Enduring Freedom" it would better be called enduring idiocy.   Here are details on France's decision to top the insanity:

France ended its last combat mission in Afghanistan today, withdrawing troops from a strategic province northeast of Kabul as part of an accelerated departure from the war-torn country.
Paris has said all French combat soldiers will leave next month, two years before allied nations contributing to the 100,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) led by the United States are due to depart.

Around 1,500 French soldiers will stay into 2013 to take responsibility for repatriating equipment and training the Afghan army to take over when all NATO combat troops leave in 2014.

[D]espite 11 years of fighting, a resilient Taliban insurgency has led to warnings of a return to civil war or the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan after 2014.

An AFP correspondent saw the last 400 soldiers deployed in Kapisa province start to leave Nijrab, the last French base outside Kabul, at 10:00 am after a departure ceremony.

France has lost 88 soldiers in Afghanistan and has been the fifth largest contributor to ISAF, behind the United States, Britain, Germany and Italy.  .  .  .  . Paris decided to accelerate its withdrawal after a string of deadly attacks in 2011 and 2012.

When will the U. S. military leadership stop lying about what is really transpiring in Afghanistan?  More importantly, when will Barack Obama admit that he will never be able to save the fools errand launched by Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney?  How many more young Americans need to die because of American hubris?

P.S.  My son-in-law continues his treatment and recovery.  It will be a very long hall, but at least he's alive and out of the hell hole in Afghanistan.

Bobby Jindal Needs to Look in the Mirror if He Wants to End Dumbed Down Conservatism

In some ways it is almost hysterical to watch some of the "stars" in the GOP suddenly sing a different song in the wake of the 2012 elections.  Before the election they pandered to some of the most ignorant and knuckle dragging elements in the Republican Party - i.e., Christofascists and the Tea Party - yet now the are talking about the need to restore some level of intellect and rationality to the GOP.  Obviously, they are suffering from severe cases of Romnesia.  Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is a case in point.  Jindal has repeatedly embraced some of the worse batshitery of the far right yet he now is lecturing folks that the GOP needs to "end 'dumbed-down conservatism.'  He is obviously talking out of both sides of his mouth since he continues to pander to the Christofascists on abortion and gay marriage - two issues that likely cost the GOP the election.  Politico looks at Jindal's farcical about face.  Here are highlights:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday called on Republicans to “stop being the stupid party” and make a concerted effort to reach a broader swath of voters with an inclusive economic message that pre-empts efforts to caricature the GOP as the party of the rich.

In his first interview since his party’s electoral thumping last week, Jindal urged Republicans to both reject anti-intellectualism and embrace a populist-tinged reform approach that he said would mitigate what exit polls show was one of President Barack Obama’s most effective lines of attack against Mitt Romney.

He was just as blunt on how the GOP should speak to voters, criticizing his party for offending and speaking down to much of the electorate.

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party.

[H]is analysis Monday suggests he’s aligning himself with an emerging school of thought on the right that the GOP’s consecutive White House defeats can’t merely be solved by passing an immigration reform bill and appealing more directly to nonwhites. Jindal, a Brown Graduate and Rhodes Scholar, is already a favorite of conservative intellectuals and his assessment that Republican difficulties owe as much to economics as demographics will be well-received by right-leaning thinkers. Since last week, a sort of backlash to the backlash has sprouted up, with some conservatives castigating what they see as too much knee-jerk pandering on immigration and not enough discussion of what they see as the party’s unimaginative, donor-driven fiscal policies.

On cultural issues, he suggested the party not retreat from its stances opposing abortion rights and gay marriage but rather soften its tone on such matters.

His home-state critics will argue that his rhetoric doesn’t match his policies — he’s currently taking heat for deep cuts to Louisiana’s public hospital system. But the governor said Republicans should frame themselves as on the side of the people.

Jindal, decrying the GOP’s tendency to reminisce about how things were “better in the good ol’ days,” is tougher on his party’s tone than its substance. He’s an unapologetic conservative who doesn’t want to deviate from small-government principles. But he’s firing a warning to Republicans that they must change how they’re perceived.

In sum, Jindal wants to put lipstick on the pig that the GOP has become and dupe voters even as nothing really changes.  That most assuredly is not a true change but simply more deception.  Jindal needs to get his head out of his bigoted and lying ass.