Will Mike Pence Betray Trump to Advance Himself?

For the record, I see Mike Pence as a dangerous opportunist who likes to wrap himself in the cloak of religiosity.  Yes, he is by all accounts a evangelical Christian extremists, but he has one thing more important to him than his processed religious belief: advancing himself and securing power - especially the presidency.  A very lengthy piece in The Atlantic looks not only at Pence but also his short lived effort in the immediate wake of the release of the Access Hollywood tape to stage a coup and replace Trump as the presidential nominee.  With Trump's approval levels hovering in the mid 30th percentile, his proposal to move the U.S. embassy to Israel to Jerusalem, and Trump's tweet storms increasing the risk of nuclear war with North Korea, one has to wonder when Pence may feel emboldened to push for a 25th Amendment move to remove Trump from the presidency.  While, Pence and the falsely styled "religious right" are plummeting in popularity along with Trump, one has to wonder when Pence's ambition will get the better of him.  Of course, all of this could be changed radically by Pence's numerous lies about the Trump campaign and transition team's communications with Russian operative.  Here are highlights:

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years . . .

When the time comes, Pence takes the stage and greets the crowd with a booming “Hellooooo, Indiana!” He says he has “just hung up the phone” with Donald Trump and that the president asked him to “say hello.” He delivers this message with a slight chuckle that has a certain, almost subversive quality to it. . . . . It’s almost as if, in that brief, barely perceptible moment, Pence is sending a message to those with ears to hear—that he recognizes the absurdity of his situation; that he knows just what sort of man he’s working for; that while things may look bad now, there is a grand purpose at work here, a plan that will manifest itself in due time. Let not your hearts be troubled, he seems to be saying. I’ve got this.

As he nears the end of his remarks, his happy-warrior buoyancy gives way to a more sober cadence. “We’ve come to a pivotal moment in the life of this country,” Pence soulfully intones. “It’s a good time to pray for America.” His voice rising in righteous fervor, the vice president promises an opening of the heavens. “If His people who are called by His name will humble themselves and pray,” he proclaims, “He’ll hear from heaven, and He’ll heal this land!”

It’s easy to see how Pence could put so much faith in the possibilities of divine intervention. The very fact that he is standing behind a lectern bearing the vice-presidential seal is, one could argue, a loaves-and-fishes-level miracle. Just a year earlier, he was an embattled small-state governor with underwater approval ratings, dismal reelection prospects, and a national reputation in tatters. In many ways, Pence was on the same doomed trajectory as the conservative-Christian movement he’d long championed—once a political force to be reckoned with, now a battered relic of the culture wars. . . . But after eight years of Barack Obama and a string of disorienting political defeats, conservative Christians were in retreat and out of options. So they placed their faith in Trump—and then, incredibly, he won.

In Pence, Trump has found an obedient deputy whose willingness to suffer indignity and humiliation at the pleasure of the president appears boundless.

Meanwhile, Pence’s presence in the White House has been a boon for the religious right. Evangelical leaders across the country point to his record on abortion and religious freedom and liken him to a prophet restoring conservative Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life.

But what does Pence make of his own improbable rise to the vice presidency, and how does he reconcile his faith with serving a man like Trump? Over the past several months, I’ve spoken with dozens of people who have known the vice president throughout his life—from college fraternity brothers and longtime friends to trusted advisers and political foes. . . . . for all his aw-shucks modesty, Pence is a man who believes heaven and Earth have conspired to place him a heartbeat—or an impeachment vote—away from the presidency. At some crucial juncture in the not-too-distant future, that could make him a threat to Trump.

For all Pence’s outward piousness, he’s kept the details of his spiritual journey opaque. Despite his conversion to evangelical Christianity in college, he married his wife, Karen, in a Catholic ceremony and until the mid‑’90s periodically referred to himself as an “evangelical Catholic.” That formulation might befuddle theologians, but it reveals the extraordinary degree to which Pence’s personal religious evolution paralleled the rise of the religious right.

To his colleagues on Capitol Hill—an overwhelmingly secular place where even many Republicans privately sneer at people of faith—everything about the Indiana congressman screamed “Bible thumper.” He was known to pray with his staffers, and often cited scripture to explain his votes.

Pence didn’t have a reputation for legislative acumen (“I would not call Mike a policy wonk,” one former staffer told the Indianapolis Monthly), and some of his colleagues called him a nickname behind his back: “Mike Dense.” But he did have sharp political instincts. Before long, he was climbing the leadership ranks and making connections with key figures in the conservative-Christian establishment. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has documented Pence’s close ties to the Koch brothers and other GOP mega-donors, but his roots in the religious right are even deeper.

[I]in early 2015, Pence stumbled into a culture-war debacle that would come to define his governorship. At the urging of conservative-Christian leaders in Indiana, the GOP-controlled state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed religious business owners to deny services to gay customers in certain circumstances. Pence signed it into law in a closed-press ceremony at the statehouse, surrounded by nuns, monks, and right-wing lobbyists. A photo of the signing was released, and all hell broke loose. Corporate leaders threatened to stop adding jobs in Indiana, and national organizations began pulling scheduled conventions from the state. The NCAA, which is headquartered in Indianapolis, put out a statement suggesting that the law might imperil “future events.” The Indianapolis Star ran a rare front-page editorial under an all-caps headline: “FIX THIS NOW.”

To many Christians, the backlash against Indiana’s “religious freedom” bill was a frightening sign of the secular left’s triumphalism. Liberals were no longer working toward tolerance, it seemed—they were out for conquest. “Many evangelicals were experiencing the sense of an almost existential threat,” Russell Moore, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, told me. It was only a matter of time, he said, before cultural elites’ scornful attitudes would help drive Christians into the arms of a strongman like Trump.

After seven chaotic days, Pence caved and signed a revised version of the religious-freedom bill—but by then it was too late. His approval ratings were in free fall, Democrats were raising money to defeat him in the next gubernatorial election, and the political obituaries were being written. Things looked grimmer for Pence, and the religious right, than they ever had before.

Deliverance manifested itself to Mike Pence on the back nine of Donald Trump’s golf course in New Jersey. . . . True to form, Pence spent much of their time on the course kissing Trump’s ring. You’re going to be the next president of the United States, he said. It would be the honor of a lifetime to serve you. Afterward, he made a point of gushing to the press about Trump’s golf game. “He beat me like a drum,” Pence confessed, to Trump’s delight.

The consensus among the campaign’s top political strategists was that a Trump–Pence ticket was their best shot at winning in November. After a bitter primary season, Trump’s campaign had moved swiftly to shore up support from conservative Christians, who advisers worried would stay home on Election Day.

Even some of Trump’s most devoted loyalists marveled at what Pence was willing to say. There was no talking point too preposterous, no fixed reality too plain to deny—if they needed Pence to defend the boss, he was in.

On Friday, October 7, 2016, The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump gloating about his penchant for grabbing women “by the pussy,” and instantly upended the campaign. Republicans across the country withdrew their endorsements, and conservative editorial boards called on Trump to drop out of the race. Most alarming to the aides and operatives inside Trump Tower, Mike Pence suddenly seemed at risk of going rogue.  Trump’s phone calls to his running mate reportedly went unreturned, and anonymous quotes began appearing in news stories describing Pence as “beside himself” over the revelation.

It’s been reported that Pence sent Trump a letter saying he needed time to decide whether he could stay with the campaign. But in fact, according to several Republicans familiar with the situation, he wasn’t just thinking about dropping out—he was contemplating a coup. Within hours of The Post’s bombshell, Pence made it clear to the Republican National Committee that he was ready to take Trump’s place as the party’s nominee. Such a move just four weeks before Election Day would have been unprecedented—but the situation seemed dire enough to call for radical action.

The furtive plotting, several sources told me, was not just an act of political opportunism for Pence. He was genuinely shocked by the Access Hollywood tape. . . . . The couple was appalled by the video, however. Karen in particular was “disgusted,” says a former campaign aide. “She finds him reprehensible—just totally vile.”

Of course, Pence is far from the only conservative Christian to be accused of having sold his soul. Trump’s early evangelical supporters were a motley crew of televangelists and prosperity preachers, and they have been rewarded with outsize influence in the White House.

But the president has also enjoyed overwhelming support from rank-and-file conservative Christians. He won an astonishing 81 percent of white evangelicals’ votes, more than any Republican presidential candidate on record. And while his national approval rating hovers below 40 percent, poll after poll finds his approval rating among white evangelicals in the high 60s.

On one side, there are those who argue that good Christians are obligated to support any leader, no matter how personally wicked he may be, who stands up for religious freedom and fights sinful practices such as abortion. . . . On the other side of the debate is a smaller group that believes the Christians allying themselves with Trump are putting the entire evangelical movement at risk. . . . . “This is really a sea change in evangelical ethics,” Robert P. Jones, the head of the institute and the author of The End of White Christian America, told me. “They have moved to an ends-justifies-the means style of politics that would have been unimaginable before this last campaign.”

But even as the debate rages on, there is one thing virtually all conservative Christians seem to agree on: Mike Pence.

The religious right began reaping the rewards of Trump’s victory almost immediately, when the president-elect put Pence in charge of the transition. Given wide latitude on staffing decisions, Pence promptly set about filling the federal government with like-minded allies. Of the 15 Cabinet secretaries Trump picked at the start of his presidency, eight were evangelicals. It was, gushed Ted Cruz, “the most conservative Cabinet in decades.” Pence also reportedly played a key role in getting Neil Gorsuch nominated to the Supreme Court.

Pence understood the price of his influence. To keep Trump’s ear required frequent public performances of loyalty and submission—and Pence made certain his inner circle knew that enduring such indignities was part of the job.

In an embattled White House, the question of the vice president’s ambition for higher office is radioactive. When The New York Times reported last summer that Pence appeared to be laying the groundwork for a 2020 presidential bid, he denied the “disgraceful and offensive” story with theatrical force. But Pence has shown that his next move is never far from his mind—and he’s hardly the only one weighing the possibilities. One senior GOP Senate aide told me that pundits miss the point when they speculate about what kind of scandal it would take for the president to face a serious defection from lawmakers of his own party. “It’s not a matter of when Republicans are ready to turn on Trump,” the aide said. “It’s about when they decide they’re ready for President Pence.”

What would a Pence presidency look like? To a conservative evangelical, it could mean a glorious return to the Christian values upon which America was founded. To a secular liberal, it might look more like a descent into the dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale. Already, in some quarters on the left, it has become fashionable to fret that Pence’s fundamentalist faith and comparative political savvy would make him an even more “dangerous” president than Trump. He has been branded a “theocrat” and a “Christian supremacist.”

What critics should worry about is not that Pence believes in God, but that he seems so certain God believes in him. What happens when manifest destiny replaces humility, and the line between faith and hubris blurs? What unseemly compromises get made? What means become tolerable in pursuit of an end?

Trump and Pence are both extremely dangerous.  Both need to be removed from office as soon as possible. 

"Marcobot" Struggles to Find His Footing

Things seemingly have been going to Hell in a hand basket for Marco Rubio over the last week.  Rubio started out the past week cocky after a 3rd place finish in Iowa. Perhaps it was a case of pride going before fall.  For icing on the cake, Northern Virginia lunatic and gad fly Eugene Delgaudio is (pictured above) now assailing Rubio accusing him of being part of the "Homosexual Lobby" in light of Rubio's  support from pro-gay billionaire Paul Singer.  A piece in Politico looks at Rubio's possibly tettering campaign.  Here are excerpts:

He was supposed to be giving Donald Trump a run for his money. Instead, Marco Rubio could be on the verge of blowing it.

With just hours before New Hampshire begins voting, Rubio looked dead on his feet, delivering the “low-energy” performance Trump has so effectively attached to Jeb Bush. 

We face a critical moment,” Rubio told a group of more than two-dozen BAE employees. “I tell anyone who will listen, 2016 will be a turning point for America.”

New Hampshire could be a turning point in his candidacy, as well.

Rubio was expected to finish second here, propelled by a strong third-place showing in Iowa. His biggest goal — trounce Jeb Bush and force some of the establishment lane candidates to drop out in order to consolidate support and poach donors from other camps.

But after a week of getting repeatedly beaten up — first by his Republican opponents for giving a canned stump speech and not engaging with the press, and then for his dismal debate performance Saturday — it’s unclear he’ll be able to best Sen. Ted Cruz or the cadre of governors like John Kasich, who have spent significant time campaigning here.

And the donors who had been looking favorably at Rubio's camp have become less enthusiastic after his debate performance Saturday, when he froze up and awkwardly repeated one of his talking points on President Barack Obama's agenda to change the country.

Excuse me if I refrain from getting out a tiny violin for Marco.

The Middle East - What We Should Have Learned from Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence's plans for the Middle East included separate areas for the predominately Kurdish and Arab areas in present-day Iraq.

As the violence and sectarian hatred in the Middle East continues, some are recognizing that much of today's problems trace back to disastrous decisions made in the wake of World War I when the victorious allies carved up the former Ottoman Empire based on their own needs and rivalries with little regard for the religious and ethic divisions that spread across the region.  It's not that they were not warned about the dangers of what they were doing.  Rather, hubris and colonial ambitions overrode what should have been common sense if one wanted long term stability in the absence of overwhelming outside forces such as the Ottoman Empire had provided or local dictators who could at least temporarily keep the lid on the sectarian and ethnic rivalries.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at the advice of T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia, that should have been followed.  Here are excerpts:

In America, if we reflect on World War I at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war — against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.”

At war’s end, Lawrence’s vision of Arab independence was shattered when the Versailles peace conference confirmed the carving of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine into British and French spheres of influence; arbitrary boundaries drawn in the sand to satisfy the appetites of empire – Britain’s Foreign Office even called the former Ottoman lands “The Great Loot.”

The hopeful Lawrence drew his own “peace map” of the region, one that paid closer heed to tribal allegiances and rivalries. The map could have saved the world a lot of time, trouble and treasure, one historian said, providing the region “with a far better starting point than the crude imperial carve up.” Lawrence wrote to a British major in Cairo: “I’m afraid you will be delayed a long time, cleaning up all the messes and oddments we have left behind us.”

[T]hen and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.

The Putin Olympics: Grotesque Corruption, Gay Bashing, and a Jihad Next Door

The 2014 Winter Games begin next month and numerous articles are increasing looking at the uncooperative weather, gross corruption, gay bashing and threats of terrorist attacks that make the idea of the Sochi Olympics look questionable at best.  Behind the whole endeavor is homophobe extraordinaire, Vladimir Putin.  As expressed previously, I wish the best to the athletes, but a stinging humiliation for Putin would be most welcome.  Politico Magazine has a long piece that looks at Putin's hubris and the challenges ahead as the Olympics get underway.  Here are highlights:

Who would hold the Winter Olympics in a summer resort? Vladimir Putin is who. In the triumph of what can only be called a preposterous idea, three short weeks from now the Russian president will draw the world’s attention to a grand legacy project of his own fantastic design. Nearly seven years ago, Putin personally pitched the International Olympic Committee to choose Sochi for these winter games. Sochi? Picture the Jersey Shore in the 1950s—plus palm trees and minus, until recently, the widespread luxury of indoor plumbing in the huts that locals rent to beachgoers. The place sits on the same latitude as the French Riviera, and until Putin fell in love with it, was best known for the packs of Soviets who used to sun themselves on the rocky shore of the Black Sea.

Sochi today is Putin’s personal pride, a project of such colossal authoritarian branding that it’s hard to think of a more recent example of a political leader so closely involved in such a grandiose building spree.

The overall price tag for the Games has now reached somewhere between $50 billion and $55 billion, a figure that makes this not only the most expensive Olympics in history, but also pricier than all previous Winter Olympiads put together. 

Putin’s Olympics are first and foremost political, a chance to project the image of the new, confident and rich Russia, one “risen off its knees” by the neo-authoritarian administration of the last 14 years.

And yet Putin’s expectations for a triumph may run into a stone wall of reality. Many are bracing for a disruption, even disaster. The Sochi games will be the first Winter Olympiad held in the subtropics and not unrelatedly, the gap between what has been needed by way of infrastructure and what was already available had never been as deep and wide. It is also beset with protest; it’s the first Olympics to be held in an area of mass expulsion of an indigenous people, whose descendants accuse Russia of genocide. Perhaps most hazardously of all, it is the first (and almost certainly the last) Olympiad to be held within a few hundred miles of a low-intensity but deadly jihad.

Of course, there are some things that Putin’s scrutiny may not be able to fix. Sochi is literally the warmest place in Russia and features daily high temperatures in February that occasionally peak at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. It will be colder in the mountains, where the open-air, snow-requiring events are hosted—but not by much and certainly not consistently enough to count on. Russian wits have begun calling the Putin Games “the first Spring Olympics in history.”

Last February, frustrated skiers and snowboarders were seen coming down from the mountains wearing raincoats over their parkas. And last year’s World Cup free-ski and snowboard competitions, which were to be a kind of test-run for the Olympic venue, had to be canceled “due to lack of snow and continuous warm and rainy weather conditions.”

Russia’s Audit Chamber, the parliament’s watchdog, has estimated that state-run companies misspent more than $500 million in Sochi. The government’s critics estimate the stolen and wasted funds at around $30 billion.

In addition to tapping the Kremlin’s habitual cash cow, the world’s largest natural gas company, Gazprom, the tab for all of this was supposed to be shared with some of Russia’s top billionaire oligarchs and their companies, such as metal tycoons Vladimir Potanin (the world’s nickel king) and Oleg Deripaska (his aluminum counterpart). The model was meant to evoke a kind noblesse oblige imposed by the modern-day tsar on the richest boyars, yet the wealthy investors have publicly and repeatedly complained about their financial burden and the dwindling prospects of ever earning their investments back. Apparently their whining has reached the right quarters and, in the end, reportedly, 90 percent of these “private” investments have been covered by loans from the state-owned bank Vnesheconombank.

In addition to human rights defenders, environmental activists, and disgruntled locals, two groups are thought especially likely to precipitate disruption. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists intend to draw attention to the 2013 Russian law that bans “propaganda of homosexuality to children.” The controversial piece of legislation, signed by Putin, defines “propaganda” so broadly that it effectively criminalizes the subject of homosexuality in mass media, online or at public events, such as gay pride parades. Russian LGBT activists plan to defy the law and hold a pride parade on Feb. 7, the opening day of the Games.

Protests could also come from Circassians, a North Caucasian people who claim Sochi as their historic capital. During the final phase of Russia’s conquest of the Muslim North Caucasus in 1864, 1.5 million Circassians were deported to Turkey. With the Olympiad held on the 150th anniversary of this expulsion—which they consider a genocide responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands—Circassian activists in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and the United States have called for Russia’s recognition of and apology for the 1864 expulsion and for the boycott of the Games.

Of course, all fears of protests are dwarfed by the threat of terrorist violence by Islamic militants seeking to detach the North Caucasus from Russia and establish a fundamentalist caliphate there. According to Russian experts, 98 percent of all terrorist acts in Russia occur in the North Caucasus, in the immediate proximity of Sochi. Between January and September 2013, the jihad left 375 people dead and 343 injured. Among those killed were more than 100 police and security troops and 200 terrorists.

Last summer, Doku Umarov, the self-proclaimed leader of the North Caucasian jihad and self-declared emir of the Caucasus Emirate, posted a YouTube video in which he called on fellow jihadists to “do their utmost to derail” the Olympiad.

In response to all of this, the Russian authorities have committed mammoth resources to minimize the danger. Building on the security experience of other Games, especially the 2012 London Summer Olympics, the Kremlin plans to deploy between 37,000 and 42,000 police, as well as at least 10,000 Ministry of Internal Affairs troops and an unspecified numbers of elite paratroopers and FSB agents. High-speed patrol boats and sonars to detect submarines will be guarding Sochi from the sea. A special detachment of veterans of the two Chechen wars and antiterrorist operations in the North Caucasus will patrol the wooded Caucasus Mountains, and an unknown number of FSB border troops will concentrate on routes that could to be used by fighters coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.

The Sochi Games so far have epitomized the seamy underbelly of the Kremlin regime: corruption, incompetence, profligacy, lack of public input, secret police as the country’s most powerful institution, the stifling of debate by de facto censorship and no effective limits to the leader’s fiat.

Designed to legitimize the neoauthoritarian regime, could the Sochi Olympics instead become Russia’s moment of truth, prompting national soul-searching and spurring the movement for democratization? For Putin, the consequence of a failure could be more devastating still. With the oil-dependent national economy slowing down to a crawl and the specter of stagflation haunting a country used to 7 to 10 percent growth in real incomes in Putin’s first two terms, the Russians’ trust in him, which is the backbone of the regime’s legitimacy, has fallen to 30 percent (half of what it was in 2008), and support for his policies has dropped to its lowest point in 12 years. In the high-risk/high yield venture that is the Sochi Olympics, Putin may triumph despite the handicaps he’s facing. But, like with every once-popular autocrat, the Russian president’s hubris may also be tempting the gods in a style befitting the very Greeks who gave us the Games.

Why Was My Son Killed in Fallujah - The Fool's Errand In Iraq?

I nearly lost a son-in-law in Afghanistan, so I know some of the ritual of asking "why?"  Thankfully, he and we were lucky and he survived and he has made a steady recovery.  Far too many young Americans and their families were not so lucky.  And many of these less fortunate struggle to believe that their child's or spouse's life wasn't thrown away for nothing other than the cretinous hubris of George W. Bush and the ego of that megalomaniac known as Dick Cheney.  Sadly, these lives were thrown away for nothing.  At least nothing honorable and meritorious.  It was always about trying to control oil and furthering an insane anti-Muslim jihad.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at one family's struggle to avoid accepting that they were betrayed by the leaders of America who in the final analysis did not care a wit about their son or the thousands of other Americans who needlessly lost their lives.   Here are excerpts:

The sniper was subsequently freed by the Iraqi government and he might even now be back in Fallujah with the Al Qaeda forces that have taken the city where McKenna and Glover and so many other fine Americans died.

Yet, however much she wishes her son’s killer would spend the rest of his days behind bars and however hard it may be to know that Islamic militants now occupy the very place where he was killed, McKenna’s mother believes that what happens now in Iraq is a worry for the Iraqis themselves.

“It is not our war,” Karen McKenna said on Monday. “It is a civil war. It’s their problem. Not ours.”

But she also voices a firm belief that we initially went into Iraq with what she terms a “high minded” purpose.

“Once Saddam Hussein was out of the picture, we really didn’t belong there anymore,” she then adds.

She is equally certain that her son’s life was not wasted.

McKenna was quite literally an Eagle Scout as he grew up on East 2^nd Street in Brooklyn. He demonstrated that he had the makings of a future Marine after his mother sent him on a last minute errand to a nearby deli. He still had not returned a considerable time later.

The doctors later said the boy might very well have died if young John had not aided him until an ambulance arrived.  John went on to Binghamton University, where he rowed crew. He of course wished to serve his country and he was among the first wave of Marines into Afghanistan after 9/11.

McKenna, now 30, was the best kind of combat infantry officer, smart and focused and brave and fair, with a clear and unshakable sense of the right thing to do, big or small. His fellow Marines revered him.

McKenna and everybody else knew that the sniper was just waiting for someone to come to the wounded Marine’s aid. But McKenna was not going to leave Glover sprawled unattended in the street.

McKenna dashed from safety into the most mortal danger. He knelt beside Glover just as he once had by that injured boy back in Brooklyn.

“Ignoring imminent peril from heavy incoming fire, Capt. McKenna ran into the intersection in an effort to save his downed Marine,” reads the citation for the Silver Star that McKenna was awarded posthumously. “Completely exposed to enemy fire, he calmly knelt next to the stricken Marine to assess his condition. As he began to drag the Marine to a covered position, Capt. McKenna was hit by enemy fire and mortally wounded.”

The families of McKenna and Glover were assured that “as long as there is a Marine in Iraq, the sniper will remain in jail.” They learned otherwise only after McKenna’s father wrote a May 16, 2011 letter to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates. John McKenna III noted in the letter that the sniper who killed his son and Glover had been captured by their fellow Marines.

The unfortunate truth is that thousands of wonderful young Americans died for nothing other than George W. Bush's idiocy and Dick Cheney's greed - Haliburton made billions - and mania.  Worse yet, if Bush and Cheney are never held accountable, we will have made the next Iraq like disaster happen all the sooner.  America truly doesn't learn from the past.  Bush and Cheney are war criminals and need to be tried and punished severely.

Fools Errand in Afghanistan: $861 Million Spirited Out of Country

Warlords, constant civil strife and utter corruption and graft have been the way of life in Afghanistan for centuries, if not several millennium.  These facts ought to have been apparent to anyone who bothered to make the slightest amount of due diligence before throwing billions of dollars and thousands of American lives down a proverbial rat hole.  Such minimal due diligence would be expecting too much from the cretinous George W. Bush, the power mad Dick Cheney and the hubris filled senior American military leadership.  The examples of the magnitude of America's fools errand in Afghanistan just continue to grow despite the disingenuous, face saving lies and bullshit by the senior military leadership and politicians who refuse to admit that they made a huge and deadly error.  The Virginia Pilot is reporting today that $861 million in foreign aid/loans was spirited out of Afghanistan by corrupt Afghan bankers and officials.  Realistically, the amounts of money stolen is likely much higher. Here are highlights:

Hundreds of millions of dollars from Kabul Bank were spirited out of Afghanistan - some smuggled in airline food trays - to bank accounts in more than two dozen countries, according to an independent review released on Wednesday about massive fraud that led to the collapse of the nation's largest financial institution.

The report, which was financed by international donors, offers new details about how the men at Kabul Bank and their friends and relatives got rich off $861 million in fraudulent loans in what the International Monetary Fund has called a Ponzi scheme that used customer deposits and operated under nascent banking oversight in the war-torn country.

The report describes Kabul Bank as a sophisticated operation with one set of books for the eyes of regulators and another in the back room that logged how those running the bank and others were fattening their wallets.

Loans were made, but rarely repaid. Borrowers took out loans to pay back loans. Company documents and financial statements were fabricated. The bank's credit department used more than 100 corporate stamps for fake companies to make documents look authentic. The bank operated some of its more than 100 branches without a permit from the government.

The 87-page report, which was conducted to satisfy one of several benchmarks the IMF asked the Afghan government to meet in cleaning up the scandal, points to poor oversight by Afghan banking regulators, political interference in the criminal investigation and activities by a special judicial tribunal hearing the case that it said were "well outside the legal norms of criminal procedure."

The Kabul Bank scandal is a saga about money-grabbing, weak banking oversight, lax prosecution, nepotism, political contributions and fraud. The cast of characters includes a poker-playing bank chairman, an Afghan central bank chairman who feared his life was endangered and fled to the U.S., the wealthy brothers of the Afghan president and vice president, and bank shareholders - some who bought posh properties in Dubai and spent lavishly on themselves and their circle of friends and relatives.

There's much more in the lengthy story and little of it is good.  Meanwhile, another American has lost his life in this fiasco:

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.  Cpl. Christopher M. Monahan Jr., 25, of Island Heights, N.J., died Nov. 26 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to Combat Logistics Battalion 2, Combat Logistics Regiment 2, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

When will the American public demand that this idiocy stop?  And if the congressional GOP is serious about cutting the budget deficit, an immediate end to all funding for Afghanistan would be a good starting point. 

Afghanistan: The Ongoing Betrayal of Our Troops

The image above shows a U.S. Army honor guard carrying the casket of Army Spc. Ryan Jayne, 22, Tuesday at Elmira Corning Regional Airport. According to the Department of Defense, Jayne died of wounds suffered Nov. 3, when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device in Paktia province, Afghanistan.   The sad thing is that, if one knows the history of Afghanistan stretching back for two milennia, is that Jayne, and some 2030+ other young men and women gave up their lives for nothing.  Nothing other than the hubris, idiocy and  sabre rattling of Chimperator George W. Bush and Dick "Emperor Palpatine" Cheney.  The Daily Advertiser summarizes the wasted lives of our troops at the hands of Bush/Cheney and predominately the Congressional Republicans who maintained pressure on Barack Obama to not admit the futility of the war in Afghanistan.  Here are highlights:

As of Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012, at least 2,030 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count.

The AP count is one less than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Tuesday at 10 a.m. EST.

At least 1,693 military service members have died in Afghanistan as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

Outside of Afghanistan, the department reports at least 118 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, 11 were the result of hostile action

Since the start of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, 17,992 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department.

Like my son-in-law, I am sure that Spc. Ryan Jayne was following the flawed orders of senior military officers and seeking to honorably serve his country.  Meanwhile, my son-in-law had yet another surgery today to repair his body from burns, shrapnel, and related wounds incurred two weeks ago today.  He faces many weeks of recovery.  Yet he's one of the lucky ones, because he is alive.   The Pakistan New Service shows the continued inability to maintain even a semblance of order within Afghanistan:

KABUL/JALALABAD: Defence ministry on Monday said six Afghan National Army (ANA) troops were killed and 10 more wounded during separate hostile incidents over the past 24 hours.

The ANA troops were killed and wounded in explosions and direct attacks while discharging security responsibilities in Ghazni, Helmand, Uruzgan, Wardak and Faryab province, the defence ministry said in a statement.

It said two anti-government gunmen were killed by combined force in Charchino district of Uruzgan while three suspects were detained in Kandahar city and Muhammad Agha district of Logar province, adding the security force also recovered 450 kg of explosions in Narkh district of Wardak province.

Meanwhile, two police among six persons were wounded in two back-to-back bomb explosions in Haska Maina district of eastern Ningarhar province this morning, sources said Monday.

A roadside bomb exploded near a police vehicle in Baghiband Kandao area of Haska Maina at about 7:30 a.m. (local time), injuring two police, security forces told Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).

To use one of Chimperator Bush's terms, its a" heck of a job" that our disingenuous senior military officers have done in Afghanistan.  Anyone who truly supports our military troops ought to be blowing up the phones of their Senators and members of the House demanding that ALL of our troops come home NOW.

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.

Family Update

UPDATE: Both my daughter and son-in-law are both in San Antonio as of today.  My special thanks to U. S. Senator Mark Warner and his staff for their support and assistance during this difficult time. 

My son-in-law will soon be back in the USA (most likely tomorrow) and my daughter will be on her way to see him.  My thoughts and prayers are with them both - I wish them both the best and much happiness and that he has a speedy recovery.  Sadly, others continue to be less lucky.  I hope readers will call their Senators and Representatives and demand that the insanity in Afghanistan end NOW.  It's been interesting that over the last few days, just about everyone I speak to equates Afghanistan with another Vietnam.  Would that our leaders could see what us average folks so readily see and stop betraying our troops.

The Imperial Life Style of Top Generals and Admirals

While rank and file troops often live in bare basics accommodations or far worse in the field, the military's top brass live a lifestyle akin to a Tsar or maharajah and, from the ones I have encountered locally often have an attitude that their you know what doesn't stink.  One cannot help but ponder whether such an out of touch lifestyle doesn't impair their ability to care about their troops many of whom in the chain of command are treated as if their were members of India's untouchables versus Brahmins.   If we need to cut military spending, let's start with the lavish perks of the top commands.  A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the ridiculous luxuries and staffs these men outrageously enjoy.  Here are highlights:

The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.

The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.

Since Petraeus’s resignation, many have strained to understand how such a celebrated general could have behaved so badly. Some have speculated that an exhausting decade of war impaired his judgment. Others wondered if Petraeus was never the Boy Scout he appeared to be. But [former Defense Secretary] Gates, who still possesses a modest Kansan’s bemusement at Washington excess, has floated another theory. “There is something about a sense of entitlement and of having great power that skews people’s judgment,” Gates said last week.

Other veteran commanders concurred with Gates. David Barno, a retired three-star general who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, warned in an interview that the environment in which the top brass lives has the potential “to become corrosive over time upon how they live their life.”

“You can become completely disconnected from the way people live in the regular world — and even from the modest lifestyle of others in the military,” Barno said. “When that happens, it’s not necessarily healthy either for the military or the country.”

Although American generals have long enjoyed many perks — in World War II and in Vietnam, some dined on china set atop linen tablecloths — the amenities afforded to today’s military leaders are more lavish than anyone else in government enjoys, save for the president.

Compared with today’s plutocrats, their pay is modest. In 2013, the base salary for a four-star general with at least 38 years of service will be almost $235,000, although federal personnel regulations limit their take-home pay to $179,700. Unlike top civilians in government, top generals also receive free housing and subsidies for food and uniforms. And when they retire, those who have served at least 40 years get an annual pension that is slightly more than active-duty base pay — this year it is $236,650.

But the frantic search for cuts to reduce the growth of government debt could soon put some of the four-star benefits at risk. When he was at the Pentagon, Gates wanted to trim some of the perks but ran into resistance. It was, he said, the “third rail” of the Defense Department.

“You don’t need a cadre of people at your beck and call in an age of austerity, unless you are a field commander in Iraq or Afghanistan,” a former top aide to Gates said on the condition of anonymity.

I would further argue against such perks for those who have so poorly advised - or perhaps even lied to - leaders in Washington.  Candidly, some of these a-holes need to spend a few days or a week at the front living like average troops, with no attendants and special meals, to help get their heads out of their pampered asses.

Afghanistan: A Betrayal of Our Troops - Family Update

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From the latest reports, my son-in-law is now in Germany and should be back in the USA within a day or two to continue his lengthy recovery from his combat related injuries in Kandahar Province on Tuesday.  Beyond that, I cannot say too much about the incident in which he was wounded.  Needless to say, I am relieved that he is out of Afghanistan.   And while he is badly injured, at least he's alive.  Many, including one of his compatriots, have not been so lucky.  

A roster of squandered lives in the continuing fools errand in Afghanistan can be found here.   That's right, 2,155 wasted American lives (3,229wasted lives if coalition nation casualties are included).  If one includes the number of wounded, the number increases by another 17674 through the end of September.  And for what?  I suspect as we saw after the fall of Vietnam, the deaths and squandered billions of dollars will end up having changed nothing other than enriching defense contractors and corrupt Afghan officials.

For those not as knowledgeable about the history of Afghanistan, here are highlights from a CNN piece from December 2009 that we should reflect upon three years later:

Known as the "graveyard of empires," Afghanistan has a reputation for undoing ambitious military ventures and humiliating would-be conquerors, a fate his [Obama's]  opponents at home say is not worth risking more American lives for.

In the past two centuries, both Soviet and British invaders have been forced to beat bloody retreats from Afghanistan, deprived of victories that, on paper, looked easy, but ultimately proved futile.

And can it only be coincidence that in the wake of their Afghan disasters both the British and Soviet empires -- like that of Alexander the Great's, which extended over the region more than two millennia earlier -- crumbled? Almost immediately, in the case of the Soviets, a century later for Britain.

"The geography is very hard: It is a country of mountains and deserts, of quite severe winters and that makes it difficult not only to fight in, but also to operate logistically. It limits your mobility and it is difficult to project power."

 This, say some, is the inevitable Afghan experience. Isolated, poverty-stricken and brutalized by interminable conflict that technological advances in warfare fail to end, the country apparently remains as impervious to today's military adventurers as it was to yesterday's.

"It's a hard place to fight, to conquer and rule," says Patrick Porter, a lecturer in defense studies at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Kings College London.

"It is possible in wars against guerrillas to flood cities with troops. It is much harder to flood mountains. And Afghanistan is a country not of very powerful cities but of thousands of isolated villages cut off in severe winters, allowing guerrillas and insurgents to melt away and return."

For Gen. Victor Yermakov, a former Soviet commander in Afghanistan, the situation is more clear cut. Summed up by what he says are the words of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty that ruled much of central Asia in the 1500s: "Afghanistan has not been and never will be conquered, and will never surrender to anyone."

The article goes on to quote naysayers who say the past history of military failures by outside armies are not determinative.  I wonder if some of those windbags would say the same things three years later with the situation no better and perhaps deteriorating.  As the saying goes, "he who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it."  Our senior military leaders (perhaps some of those most guilty of American hubris) have obviously learned absolutely nothing from history and civilian officials - including Barack Obama - have stupidly listened to the generals.  Worse yet, some of these generals, as we now know, seemed to focus more on affairs and flirtations than running the war effort.

Those in Congress and the White House who say that they "support our troops" need to do so by ending the Afghanistan fiasco NOW.  Bring the troops home now.

Argentine President: Equality as Important as Liberty

On this 4th of July, America sadly still has a long way to go before it realizes the stated promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens.  Religious based bigotry and racial bigotry are alive and well - especially within today's Republican party which pretends to love and support the U.S. Constitution - and both LGBT Americans and other minorities are faced with daily discrimination often as a matter of government policy, especially in reactionary states like Virginia.  As a nation, the USA could really stand to learn somethings from other nations and we need to dump the myth of American exceptionalism (more on that in a future post).  A case in point is Argentina where this week Argentina's president (pictured at right) personally delivered the nation's first identity cards to people who legally switched their genders under a law that sets a global precedent.  We hear so much about equality under the law in America, but it is too often a fiction.  My fellow blogger Andrés Duque looks at this inspiring event in Argentina in his blog Blabbeando.  Here are some highlights followed by a video clip (in Spanish):

Argentinean president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner celebrated passage of the world's most progressive gender identity law by inviting a number of transgender leaders and personally handing them their new identity cards. The law was adopted by the Argentinean congress in May by a vote of 55-0 and became law last month after getting the president's signature. It allows transgender individuals to change their name and gender on government documents without having to prove that they have undergone gender reassignment surgery or need for court approval as had been the case before. It also grants government health coverage for transgender individuals who want to undergo a gender reassignment surgery.

[T]he Argentinean president also signed a presidential decree yesterday which put an end to a legal loophole that kept same-sex parents who began raising children before the 2010 marriage equality law passed from registering as co-parents of those children. If I understand correctly, the decree gives same-sex parents that weren't covered by the marriage equality law a full year to legally register their children as their own.

"Today is a day of tremendous reparation," the president said at the start of her speech, "today we do not shout for liberation but instead we shout for equality, which is just as important as freedom." 

Noting that the average age at which transgender individuals die in Argentina is 32, the president argued that part of it was due to the stress of being repressed and ignored and not having any rights and said this would change that.

"I do not want to use a word that bothers me greatly: Tolerance. No. I do not believe in 'tolerance'. To tolerate is to say I'll allow you to be because I have no other choice", she said, "I want to talk about equality and I want to talk about all of you who will now have the same rights I have enjoyed from the moment I was born and the rights that so many millions of Argentinians have enjoyed from the moment they were born. This is the society we want."

Yes, Argentina has its problems.  But as a society its civil laws are become a standard on how ALL citizens ought to be treated.  It's also ironic that while many America consider themselves to be "good Christians"  Argentina is far out stripping the USA from a legal perspective when it comes to treating others as demanded by the Gospel message.  I for one am very much over the hubris and hypocrisy of the Christianists and their boot licking puppets in the Republican Party.  Here's the video: