Afghanistan: A Fool's Errand and A Gross Betrayal of Our Troops - Part 2

NOTE: The opinions in this post are mine alone and should not be attributed to anyone else.

Earlier this week I wrote here about how, in my opinion, both America's senior military leadership and and too many politicians have betrayed our troops in Afghanistan by placing them in a situation that is impossible to win in the longer term and simply throwing away young lives needlessly.  Any half-witted student of history should have been able to see the handwriting on the wall as the USA ventured into an arid climate version of Vietnam under the leadership of a cretin, George W. Bush, and a megalomaniac, Dick "Emperor Palpatine" Cheney, both of whom approved torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions.  

As regular readers know, I have long been a strong critic of the fools errand missions put into motion by Bush/Cheney.  But what set me off this week was that now my family has been directly impacted.  My son-in-law has been seriously wounded under circumstances it would seem the U.S. Army hasn't fully disclosed.  But my son-in-law was luckier than some because while badly injured, he is still alive.  There's this in today's Seattle Times:

Staff Sgt. Rayvon Battle, a Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldier from Rocky Mount, N.C., died Nov. 13 in Afghanistan.

Battle, 25, served with the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division in Kandahar province. He arrived in Afghanistan earlier this month, and the cause of his death is under investigation, according to a base official.

Battle joined the Army in June, 2005, and came to Lewis-McChord in November of that year. He deployed twice to Iraq before serving in Afghanistan. He was assigned to the 38th Engineer Company, and deployed to Afghanistan as a squad leader.

Battle was the first soldier from the 4th Stryker Brigade to die during the unit’s deployment to Afghanistan, according to a base official. Since the start of this year, 33 Lewis-McChord soldiers have died in Afghanistan.

I don't know if this needless death arose out of the same incident in which my son-in-law was wounded or not, but I suspect that it was.  The cynic in me believes the statement "under investigation" really means, determining how to best spin this horrible circumstance.   Like Battle, my son-in-law was on his third deployment, having arrived back in Afghanistan just last month.  My sincerest sympathy goes out to the family of Staff Sgt. Rayvon Battle and all other families who have lost loved ones because of the hubris of politicians and disingenuous generals who forget that they are playing with the lives of real people and real families.  

I've noted before that Afghanistan has been an uncontrollable hell hole for at least two thousand years - a fact that should have been obvious to anyone who isn't a cretin and recovering alcoholic like George W. Bush and which should have been obvious to a senior military leadership that, in my opinion, likes to play at making war regardless of the consequences to our troops.  Here are highlights from how one South Asian analyst (his website is here) describes the current situation:

The publication Defence News comments expertly on military topics and recently described the performance of the US Air Force in supplying troops in Afghanistan with vital stores. It noted that last year “43 forward operating bases were supplied solely by air, with 27,000 troops receiving all of their food, water, ammunition and fuel from the sky, dropped primarily by the US Air Force... The necessity to resupply troops by air comes from several factors, not the least of which is the skyrocketing number of roadside bombs US, Nato and Afghan troops face, making travel by road a risky bet.”


This is a factual, down to earth (literally) record of proficiency. It is admirable that the US Air Force is capable of such expertise. But it is also an admission of total strategic and tactical failure, because the very reliance on airdrop resupply shows that the vast hi-tech military machines of the west are incapable of controlling roads in a country where they have been fighting a futile war for ten wretched years, in which so many thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed or wounded.


Yet the Secretary General of Nato Anders Fogh Rasmussen, declared in October that “The enemy is being pushed further back from the population.” Heaven knows what briefings he was given during his visit to Afghanistan, but for anyone to claim that “We saw Afghan security forces that are growing more capable and more confident” is misleading to the point of downright dishonesty.


And the International Force spokesperson fluttered even further into cloud cuckoo land last week when he declared that “Clearly, the security situation is improving, the number of enemy initiated attacks is decreasing and the vast majority of the Afghan population lives in areas where peace and stability has already been established.” In the week following his absurd assertion there were five Nato soldiers killed, an appalling slaughter of Afghan civilians, and a rocket attack on Kabul.

With very few exceptions, units of the Afghan army and police are a shambles. Of course there are some capable Afghans in uniform – but they are few and far between and are consistently let down by their corrupt and bungling government. Their logistic supply system is a bizarre disgrace and they rely entirely on foreign forces for air support.

It is far beyond time that our military leadership stop lying and admit to elected officials in Washington and the American people that Afghanistan is an utter failure and that American forces needs to be withdrawn IMMEDIATELY.

A ‘Greatest Hits’ of Romney Untruths

If I seem to be harping against the lies of Mitt Romney today, I'm sorry, but there is just so much to comment upon on this front.  In my roughly 20 years as a political activist, I do not think I've ever seen as dishonest a campaign or candidate as Mitt Romney (and his PAC buddies like Karl Rove).  The truth simply doesn't matter and there seems to be a cynicism that views Americans as being too stupid to figure out that they are being told bald faced lies.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at some of the biggest lies being told by the Romney campaign.  Here are some article excerpts:

“If Barack Obama is reelected, what will the next four years be like? One, the debt will grow from 16 trillion to 20 trillion dollars. Two, 20 million Americans could lose their employer-based health care. Three, taxes on the middle class will go up by $4,000. Four, energy prices will continue to go up. And five, $716 billion in Medicare cuts that hurt current seniors.”

— Voiceover in new Mitt Romney campaign ad titled “The Obama Plan”

[A] new ad released by the Romney campaign [see the voiceover above] is almost a “greatest hits” version of claims that have been thoroughly debunked by fact checkers, including this column. Let’s spin the record once again! 

“The debt will grow from 16 trillion to 20 trillion dollars”

Here, the Romney campaign is using “gross debt,” which includes U.S. Treasury bonds held by Social Security and Medicare. Generally, what matters for the federal budget is the publicly held debt, particularly the percentage of debt compared to the overall economy (gross domestic product.) The House GOP budget plan authored by Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, for instance focuses on its impact on publicly-held debt, no gross debt.

“Twenty million Americans could lose their employer-based health care.”

This is the worst case scenario in a recent Congressional Budget Office report, and thus using this “20 million” figure is fairly misleading.  The most positive scenario in the CBO analysis has 3 million people being added to employer coverage. “On balance, the number of people obtaining coverage through their employer would be about 3 million lower in 2019 under the legislation than under prior law,” the CBO concludes.  It’s worth noting that the baseline scenario — 3 million fewer people — represents just 2 percent of the people who now get insurance through their employers.

Of course, Mitt Romney, as governor, ushered in health-care legislation that served as a model for Obama’s health plan

“Taxes on the middle class will go up by $4,000.”

The first time the Romney campaign made this claim, it earned three Pinocchios. But it just gets worse each time this bogus claim gets reasserted. Obama has no plan to raise taxes on the middle class . . . this claim is drawn from a dry report from the American Enterprise Institute, titled “A Simple Measure of the Distributional Burden of Debt Accumulation.” The study tries to calculate the burden of servicing the national debt by various income groups, examining what would happen under current law, current policies and Obama’s budget.

“Energy prices will continue to go up”

What’s the source on this? The Romney campaign based this claim about “energy” on just one fact: Gasoline prices have more than doubled from $1.85 per gallon to $3.82 per gallon during Obama’s presidency.  But this is a misleading comparison because cost of gas had plunged to an artificially low level at the start of Obama’s presidency because of the Great Recession.  What was the price of gas the week of Sept. 15, 2008, before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered the economic crisis? It was $3.84 — virtually the same price as today.

“$716 billion in Medicare cuts that hurt current seniors”

We’re getting tried of writing about this claim, which stems from efforts to restrain Medicare spending in the Obama health care law.  The $716 billion figure comes from the difference over 10 years (2013-2022) between anticipated Medicare spending (what is known as “the baseline”) and the changes that the law makes to reduce spending. Year over year spending on Medicare would continue to go up.

The savings mostly are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries — who, as a result of the health-care law, ended up with new benefits for preventive care and prescription drugs.

I continue to hope that the American public doesn't prove itself to be as stupid as Mitt Romney and the GOP see them to be.   But if Romney wins, then it will be a sad commentary on the idiocy, racism, extremism and greed of a majority of voters.

Mitt Romney Showed His Arrogance Last Night

It's no secret that I do not like Mitt Romney.  Frankly, in my view he's an arrogant prick: the spoiled little rich boy who thinks living an apartment while living off of trust funds while attending graduate school was a struggle.  And his equally bitchy and arrogant wife, Ann "Marie Antoinette" Romney is no better in my book.   Fortunately, some of Romney's arrogance and sense of extreme entitlement came through last night - along with his patent dishonesty mentioned in a prior post.  Also telling was Romney's failure to give any specifics on how he would grow and strengthen the U.S. economy.  He merely said that he would and that was supposed to be all the voters - who he views as peasants and would be serfs to GOP plutocrats - need to know.  Thus, the real issue becomes whether or not voters wake up to who the real Mitt Romney is over the next couple of weeks or not.  Are Americans as stupid as Romney believes them to be.  I for one hope not.  A column in the Washington Post looks at these issues further.  Here some highlights:

[T]he most electorally significant performance was Romney’s. Under pressure this time, the former Massachusetts governor displayed his least attractive sides. He engaged in pointless on-stage litigation of the debate rules. He repeatedly demonstrated his disrespect for both the president and Candy Crowley, the moderator. And Romney was just plain querulous when anyone dared question him about the gaping holes in his tax and budget plans.

Any high school debate coach would tell a student that declaring, “Believe me because I said so,” is not an argument. Yet Romney confused biography with specificity and boasting with answering a straightforward inquiry. “Well, of course, they add up,” Romney insisted of his budget numbers.

Romney’s stonewalling was so obvious that it opened the way for one of Obama’s most effective lines of the evening: “If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t have taken such a sketchy deal. And neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.”

The most instructive contrast between Debate I and Debate II was the extent to which Romney’s ideas crumbled at the slightest contact with challenge. Romney and Paul Ryan are erecting a Potemkin village designed to survive only until the polls close on Nov. 6. They cannot say directly that they really believe in slashing taxes on the rich and backing away from so much of what government does because they know that neither idea will sell. So they offer soothing language to the middle class, photo ops at homeless programs to convey compassion and a steady stream of attacks on Obama, aimed at shifting all the attention his way.

In the first debate, Obama let Romney back into the race by failing to shake his opponent’s self-presentation. But Romney also put himself into contention by pretending to be a moderate, shelving his plutocratic side and hiding his party’s long-term objectives.

In the second debate, the disguise fell. Romney revealed more of himself than he wanted to and asked voters to endorse a radical tax-cutting program without providing them the details that matter. Sketchy is one word for this. Deceptive is another.

Bloomberg Tears Apart the Romney/Ryan Tax Plan

Click image to enlarge

I've noted previously that the math behind the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan tax plan simply does not add up.  Therefore, one can only assume that Romney and Ryan view the American electorate as so stupid that we cannot figure out that we are being sold a bunch oh snake oil or worse.  As for what they would actually elected, it is simple impossible to know whether they would back away on the tax reduction promise or move forward and make the nation's budget deficit explode even more.  A column on Bloomberg.com takes apart the "studies"  that Ryan and Romney claim support their smoke and mirrors tax proposal.  As you will note, some of these "studies" are in fact merely blog posts or opinion pieces.  True studies, these pieces are not.  Here are some column excerpts:

 

Mitt Romney's campaign says I'm full of it. I said Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible: he can't simultaneously keep his pledges to cut tax rates 20 percent and repeal the estate tax and alternative minimum tax; broaden the tax base enough to avoid growing the deficit; and not raise taxes on the middle class. They say they have six independent studies -- six! -- that "have confirmed the soundness of the Governor’s tax plan," and so I should stop whining.  Let's take a tour of those studies and see how they measure up.

The Romney campaign sent over a list of the studies, but they are perhaps more accurately described as "analyses," since four of them are blog posts or op-eds. I'm not hating -- I blog for a living -- but I don't generally describe my posts as "studies."

None of the analyses do what Romney's campaign says: show that his tax plan is sound. I'm going to walk through them individually, but first I want to make a broad point.

The Tax Policy Center paper that sparked this discussion found that Romney's plan couldn't work because his tax rate cuts would provide $86 billion more in tax relief to people making over $200,000 than Romney could recoup by eliminating tax expenditures for that group. That means his plan is necessarily a tax cut for the rich, so if Romney keeps his promise not to grow the deficit, he'll have to raise taxes on the middle class.

The piece then goes on to debunk each of the "studies" cited by Romney/Ryan.   In closing, the piece makes the following points:

Finally, I would note one item that the Romney campaign does not cite in support of its tax plan: Any analysis actually prepared for the campaign in preparation for announcing the plan in February. You would expect that, in advance of announcing a tax plan, the campaign would commission an analysis to make sure that all of its planks can coexist. Releasing that analysis now would be to the campaign's advantage, helping them put down claims like mine that their math doesn't add up.

Why don't they release that analysis? My guess is because the analysis doesn't exist, and the 20 percent rate cut figure was plucked out of thin air for political reasons without regard to whether it was feasible.

What's so troubling is the fact that I know people who are planning to vote for Romney simply because they want to reduce what they pay in taxes.  Most of them, unfortunately, have no idea that the Romney/Ryan tax plan is a sham and that if the GOP ticket wins, either the tax cut proposals will not be implemented or, if they are, the budget deficit - which these people claim to be worried about - will explode.  The math simply does NOT add up.  What does that make Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan?  Liars.  Deliberate liars.

Lying: The Secret to Romney's Recent Success

While The Onion is a parody site, it often hits at the real truth.  A case in point is an imaginary interview where Romney tells the truth - a shocking concept, I realize - and admits that lying is the basis of his comeback to date:

"I’m lying a lot more, and my lies are far more egregious than they’ve ever been," a smiling Romney told reporters while sitting in the back of his campaign bus, adding that when faced with a choice to either lie or tell the truth, he will more than likely lie. “It’s a strategy that works because when I lie, I’m essentially telling people what they want to hear, and people really like hearing things they want to hear. Even if they sort of know that nothing I’m saying is true.”

“It’s a freeing strategy, really, because I don’t have to worry about facts or being accurate or having any concrete positions of any kind,” Romney added.

Romney said he is telling at least 80 percent more lies now than he was two months ago. Buoyed by his strong debate performance, which by his own admission included 40 or 50 instances of lying in one 90-minute period, the candidate said he will continue to “just openly lie [his] ass off” until the Nov. 6 election.

Whether it’s a senior citizen, military family, working mother, businessman, or middle-class American, Romney said, he will lie to every single one of them as often as he can if that’s what it takes to win the presidency.
 
The best part is, it’s really easy to lie," said Romney, who added that voicing whatever untruths come into his mind at any given moment is an easy thing to do because all it requires is opening his mouth and talking. "For example, if someone accuses me of having a tax plan that makes no discernable sense, I just lie and say that I do have a tax plan that makes sense. I also say there is a study that backs up my plan. See that? Simple.

We heard what Romney really believes when he was talking to his millionaire donors earlier in the year.  The big questions is whether or not voters realize that they are now being cynically played for fools or not before election day.  

Afghanistan - A Fool's Errand

America's continued presence in Afghanistan defies all logic and reason.  Yet the waste of money and American lives continues and the deal recently signed by Barack Obama guarantees that the idiocy will continue.  The phenomenon is akin to the conservative mind described in the last post: select supposed facts no matter how wrong to support the war's continuance even though all of recorded history and the experiences of other empires (e.g., British and Soviet) in Afghanistan underscore the fools errand nature of the endeavor. A column in the Washington Post looks at this upsetting refusal by Obama and others to face reality and get the Hell out NOW!  For the record, I have a son-in-law scheduled to go back to Afghanistan this fall for his 3rd deployment.   Here are column excerpts:

Show of hands: Does anybody really understand the U.S. policy in Afghanistan? Can anyone figure out how we’re supposed to stay the course and bring home the troops at the same time?   I’m at a loss, even after President Obama’s surprise trip to the war zone. The president’s televised address from Bagram air base raised more questions than it answered. Let’s start with the big one: Why?

According to Obama, “the United States and our allies went to war to make sure that al-Qaeda could never use this country to launch attacks against us.” I would argue that U.S. and NATO forces have already done all that is humanly possible toward that end.

That smells like victory to me. Yet 94 American troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan so far in 2012, U.S. forces will still be engaged in combat until the end of 2014, and we are committed to an extraordinary — and expensive — level of involvement there until 2024. Why?  Of the U.S. troops who died this year as a result of hostile fire — as opposed to accidents, illnesses or suicide — at least one of every seven was killed not by the Taliban but by ostensibly friendly Afghan security forces.

A report by military and political behavioral scientist Jeffrey Bordin, commissioned by the Pentagon last year and now classified, concluded that “the rapidly growing fratricide-murder trend” of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police against U.S. and allied troops reflects “the ineffectiveness in our efforts in stabilizing Afghanistan, developing a legitimate and effective government, battling the insurgency [and] gaining the loyalty, respect and friendship of the Afghans.” 

These friendly-fire killings are not just isolated incidents, the report says, but a “continuing pattern” that is leading to a “crisis of trust” between allied and Afghan forces. Unless there is reform of “profoundly dysfunctional Afghan governmental systems and key leaders,” the report predicts, “any efforts in developing a legitimate, functional and trustworthy Afghan army and police force will continue to be futile.”  It should be noted that U.S. commanders in Afghanistan strongly disagree. They express confidence that the Afghan army is becoming a much more competent and professional fighting force.

Another question: Obama said we will establish no permanent bases in Afghanistan. But the agreement he signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai gives the United States continuing use of bases that we built and intend to transfer nominally to Afghan control. What’s the difference?  The United States has agreed to support Afghanistan’s social and economic development and its security institutions through 2024. Does this sound like nation-building to you? Because that’s what it sounds like to me.

Obama and the military leaders need to get their heads out of the asses and end this idiocy NOW.  Chimperator Bush began this fools errand and Obama needs to tell the nation that we cannot accomplish the impossible in a nation where much of the population despises us - and all westerners.

The Republicans' Selective Memory

The chart set out above speaks volumes and underscores the fact that the GOP attacks on Barack Obama are severely misplaced. The real big spender was Chimperator George W. Bush not to mention his GOP sycophants in the U. S. Congress. Lest we forget, the big explosions in the nation's debt levels were fueled the most by the Chimperator's fool's errands in Iraq and Afghanistan and the tax breaks given to the wealthiest Americans. One can only hope that this chart is shown over and over again between now and November. Otherwise the GOP will try once again to play the public for fools.

The GOP Presidential Candidates Want Never-Ending War

The Republican Party slate of would be presidential nominees gives the typical GOP lip service to "supporting the troops." Unfortunately, as we saw during the years of misrule under Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney, this claimed concern for the troops doesn't actually translate into providing needed equipment or proper care for troops that are injured or the psychologically damage from the fool's errand wars that Bush/Cheney brought to the nation. Yet the GOP base continues to eat up these disingenuous platitudes of support and the current GOP presidential candidates seem only too happy to talk of a never ending war on terror. Perhaps part of it is the mindset of the Christianist/Tea Party base that requires that there always be an "enemy" be it domestic or foreign. Or maybe it's a related psychosis that requires that the GOP base always needs to have someone to look down upon. A column in The Daily Beast looks at the never ending war promised by the current GOP line up. Here are some highlights:

Should the United States be permanently at war? Listen carefully to this week’s Republican presidential debate on national security and the answer becomes pretty clear. For most of the major GOP candidates, the answer is yes.

Within the first few minutes of the GOP debate, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum had all declared the United States at war while answering a question about the Patriot Act. In making this assertion, none of them mentioned Afghanistan or Iraq, the two countries where large numbers of U.S. troops have in recent years actually been fighting. No, for the Republican presidential candidates, talking about Iraq and Afghanistan is thinking small. They were talking about America’s “war against terror,” a war they believe should define the way the U.S. government approaches civil liberties, and spends money, for, in Gingrich’s words, “the rest of our lives.”

[A]t the debate, the major Republican candidates didn’t even bother to explain why. They simply declared that because there is a threat, America remains at war. Sure, there’s a terrorist threat and there always will be, even if Al Qaeda itself goes out of business. But if that’s all it takes for the United States to be at war, the United States will never be a peacetime nation again, which means we’ll never be able to regain the civil liberties we enjoyed before 9/11, or tame a defense and homeland security budget that has grown so massively in the last decade.

They would never dream of suggesting that America’s “war on terror” requires higher taxes, a draft or anything else that would burden the ordinary American. And yet they keep using the language of war to insulate America’s defense budget from serious scrutiny and to suggest that people accused of terrorism don’t deserve basic protections under the law.

As George Orwell famously noted, bad public policy often hides behind dishonest language. Nations that truly are permanently at war generally go bankrupt or become police states or both. Nations whose leaders pretend they are permanently at war when they are actually not simply suffer a profound distortion of their national priorities. In the United States today, that is bad enough.

During Bush Years Remains of War Dead Dumped in Landfill

Chimperator Bush surely loved to use members of the nation's military as backdrops for political events - all the time claiming that he revered "our troops" as do many demagogues in the Republican establishment today. As the sayings go, talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. A breaking scandal at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware is underscoring just how cheap such pro-military words were under the dark years of the Bush/Cheney regime. It seems that throwing remains of war dead returning from the fool's errand war in Iraq and Afghanistan sold to the American people based on lies into a landfill was just fine. No wonder the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney never wanted to allow the press to take pictures of the returning coffins, etc. The Washington Post has details on this disturbing story. Here are highlights:

The Dover Air Force Base mortuary for years disposed of portions of troops’ remains by cremating them and dumping the ashes in a Virginia landfill, a practice that officials have since abandoned in favor of burial at sea.

The mortuary in Delaware, the main point of entry for the nation’s war dead and the target of federal investigations of alleged mishandling of remains, engaged in the practice from 2003 to 2008, according to Air Force officials. The manner of disposal was not disclosed to relatives of fallen service members.

Gari-Lynn Smith, portions of whose husband’s remains were disposed of in the landfill after his 2006 death in Iraq, said she was “appalled and disgusted” by the way the Air Force had acted. She learned of the landfill disposal earlier this spring in a letter from a senior official at the Dover mortuary.

“My only peace of mind in losing my husband was that he was taken to Dover and that he was handled with dignity, love, respect and honor,” Smith said. “That was completely shattered for me when I was told that he was thrown in the trash.”

The disclosure of the landfill disposals comes in the aftermath of multiple federal investigations that documented “gross mismanagement” at Dover Air Force Base, which receives the remains of all service members killed in action in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere overseas.

On Tuesday, the Air Force acknowledged that the mortuary had lost a dead soldier’s ankle and an unidentified body part recovered from an air crash; had sawed off a Marine’s arm so his body would fit in his casket; and had improperly stored and tracked other remains.

“What happened at Dover AFB exceeds on many levels the nationwide anger that resulted from reports of mistreated wounded at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007 and reports of lost or misplaced graves at Arlington National Cemetery,” said Richard L. DeNoyer, the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “You only get one chance to return our fallen warriors to their families with all the dignity and respect they deserve from a grateful nation — and that mortuary affairs unit failed.”

Smith,spent more than four years trying to find out what happened to her husband’s remaining body parts before she learned of the landfill disposal. Sgt. 1st Class Scott R. Smith served more than 16 years in the Army and volunteered for dangerous duty defusing and destroying bombs in Iraq. He was killed when stepped on a pressure plate that triggered a buried bomb.

Gari-Lynn Smith said she believed that Dover officials would treat the remains with respect. The deceased soldier’s parents declined to comment. In April, Trevor Dean, a senior official at the Dover mortuary, informed her in a letter that some of her husband’s body parts were cremated and dumped in a landfill in King George County. In the letter, Dean listed her husband’s first name incorrectly, an oversight that Smith saw as yet another sign of disregard for her spouse.

“This has been nothing but a nightmare,” she said.

I would posit that all 8 years of Bush/Cheney was more or less a nightmare. Yet simpletons continue to listen to the disingenuous bullshit coming from the faux patriots in the Republican Party. I know I will offend some readers, but in my estimation, to be a Republican nowadays requires one to either be mentally ill or to have suffered a lobotomy. The lies and disingenuousness are simple mind numbing.

GOP Dominionists Play the Victim Card

I guess we should have seen it coming given the fact that Christianists always love to depict themselves as victims. Now in a Washington Post column Michael Gerson - who served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006 and once wrote as a ghost writer for Chuck Colson - whines about "an unholy war on the Tea Party" and claims that allegations that Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin are unfounded. Indeed, Gerson would label those who want religion out of politics as the ones who are intolerant. What Gerson ignores is the fact that the U.S. Constitution promises freedom of religion to ALL citizens. That means no one group gets to imposes its beliefs on everyone else. It's a concept that the Christianists and Dominionist refuse to accept. Here's a sampling of Gerson's disingenuous bullshit:

Now the heroes of the Tea Party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats. “If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry,” argues Michelle Goldberg in Newsweek/Daily Beast, “understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.” A recent New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza contends that Bachmann has been influenced by a variety of theocratic thinkers who have preached Christian holy war.

As befits a shadowy religious sect, its followers go under a variety of names: Reconstructionists. Theonomists. The New Apostolic Reformation. Republicans. All apparently share a belief, in Goldberg’s words, that “Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions.”

The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of sharia law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any New Yorker subscriber. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth. The followers of R.J. Rushdoony produce more books than converts.

Bachmann is prone to Tea Party overstatement and religious-right cliches. She opened herself to criticism by recommending a book that features Southern Civil War revisionism. But there is no evidence from the careers of Bachmann or Perry that they wish to turn America into a theocratic prison camp. If this kind of attack sounds familiar, it should.

In the case of Dominionism, paranoia is fed by a certain view of church-state relations — a deep discomfort with any religious influence in politics: Even if most evangelicals are not plotting the reconstruction of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, they nevertheless want to impose their sectarian views on secular institutions. It is a common argument among secular liberals that the application of any religiously informed moral reasoning in politics is a kind of soft theocracy. Dominionism is merely its local extension.

Such secularism shows a remarkable lack of self-consciousness. Like any ideology, this one has philosophic roots that are subject to argument. Yet secularists often assume their view is the definition of neutrality and thus deserves a privileged public place. The argument that religion is fundamentally illiberal thus provides an excuse to treat it illiberally. Pluralism is defined as the silencing of religious people. Thin charges of Dominionism are just another attempt to discredit opponents rather than answer them. . .

As the saying goes, you are known by the company you keep and Gerson, Bachmann, Perry, and Palin have all kept some pretty nasty company who make it 100% clear that their goal is to force their religious views on the nation. The fact that they are being called out by those who want to maintain religious freedom for ALL is the result of their own acts, statements and associations. They're not victims of anything but the consequences of their own actions.

Leaving Iraq - Obama's Missed Opportunity

I will admit that I did not watch Barack Obama's speech earlier this week on the alleged departure of combat troops from Iraq - although I did read the speech transcript. As readers cannot help but know, I am none too happy with Mr. Obama and his statement that Americans "turn the page" on the disaster in Iraq leaves the nation vulnerable to future fiascoes when played by liars and demagogues. George W. Bush is many things, but honorable and sincere are not two of them. By failing to throw the Iraq debacle squarely at the feet of the GOP and Chimperator Bush, Obama missed a golden opportunity to remind American's that much of the current deficit derives from 7 years of needless war in Iraq. He also missed the opportunity to tie the current economic hard times on the delusional Bush and the anti-regulation Republicans who set the stage for the financial market melt down. Only by clearly focusing on past mistakes and laying blame where it belongs can voters hopefully learn that voting based on slogans and/or cynically manipulated social issues does not replace electing candidates to office who are not focused solely on short term elector advantage. Frank Rich has a column in the New York Times that looks at Obama's failure and Jim Wallis has a piece in the Huffington Post that revisits the true cost of the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney's fool's errand in Iraq. Here are highlights, first from Wallis' piece:
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The emotion that grips me this morning, after watching President Obama's speech last night and listening to the commentary about the "end of our combat mission in Iraq," is a deep sadness. Even in the Oval Office speech last night, the mission of the war in Iraq still wasn't made clear -- and it never was.
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This was a war started on a false pretext -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them or hand them off to terrorists.
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That Saddam Hussein was a terrible and brutal dictator was well known, but bombing his cities and people wasn't the only way to deal with him, as many church leaders pointed out at the time. And, of course, the U.S. hadn't made war on the countries of every other dictator who was as bad, or worse, than Saddam. But those dictators weren't sitting on deserts full of oil -- always the unspoken reality of our foreign policy and wars in the Middle Eastern region.
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But what makes me so sad this morning is the enormous human cost of the war in Iraq; and how a massive number of people and families -- in America and Iraq -- have had their lives ended or changed forever because of this war and will have a hard time turning the page.
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The human cost of the Iraq War is literally breathtaking. I went to a website last night that has documented the number and published the pictures of those who died, 4,400 so far. I couldn't stop looking at their pictures -- so young -- so many husbands and wives, fathers, mothers, and those still almost children themselves. . . . . Even conservative estimates of Iraqi civilian causalities are now over 100,000 with some estimates peaking over 1.3 million.
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The unbelievable financial cost of the Iraq war also has clear human consequences. What could that $1 trillion -- $745 billion in Iraq and $330 billion so far in Afghanistan -- have done instead of war? How might the eventual $3 trillion in estimated costs that include long-term consequences and veteran's needs have been better used?
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So was the war in Iraq worth the enormous human cost? My answer is no, the results are definitely not worth the cost.
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Obama sadly would have Americans turn the page on this enormous waste of human life and U.S. dollars. By doing so, he has given a huge gift to those in the GOP who brought us the debacle in the first place - and who want to resume control of Congress. I simply do not understand it. Frank Rich has this to say:
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What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking.
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This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office.
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In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
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We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security.
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Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University who as a West Point-trained officer served in Vietnam and the first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was killed in Iraq in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama’s speech, he decimated many of the war’s lingering myths, starting with the fallacy, reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that “the surge” did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the catastrophic American blundering that preceded it.
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As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.
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The cultural synergy between the heedless irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq and our economic collapse at home could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down mortgage holders on Main Street and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that governed the fight-now-pay-later war.
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The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds.
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[T]here was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.
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The sad truth is that thousands died for no legitimate reason and trillions of dollars were wasted for no reason. That's right, no reason, other than the Chimperator's hubris and Cheney's greed and megalomania.

Afghanistan: Your U.S. Tax Dollars at Work (Warning: Graphic Photo)

As any reader who has read this blog for any period of time, it's no secret that I believe that the USA's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq have always been nothing more than a delusional fool's errand sold to the American public via the deliberate lies of Chimperator George W. Bush - the nation's village idiot - and Emperor Palpatine Cheney whose moral standards seem to mirror those of Darth Vader at his worse. If the U.S. was going to do anything, we needed to do limited, surgical strikes to take out and cripple elements of Al Qaeda. That would have struck back against those who launched a terror attack on the USA. Sadly, Barack Obama is continuing the Chimperator's fool's errand and - I believe in the long run - sowing seeds of long term anti-USA hatred. I will be the first to admit that our enemies in Al Qaeda and the Taliban are committing horrific atrocities. But without the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, would their be so many atrocities, or has the USA's presence increased and intensified them? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, the USA is committing its own atrocities that will only engender hatred towards us for many years. The following photo is of civilian victims of a U.S. air strike gone bad. It is graphic and disturbing, but every American needs to know what is being done in their name.
* Andrew Sullivan notes as follows concerning this photo :
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Asan Bibi, 9, (R) and her sister Salima,13, (L) stand in the hallway of Mirwais hospital October 13, 2009 Kandahar, Afghanistan. Both were burned when a helicopter fired into their tent in the middle of the night on October 3rd, according to their father. Three members of the family were killed in the incident. The family belongs to the Kuchi ethnic tribe, nomads living in tents out in the open desert whom are very vulnerable to a war they have little understanding of.
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Each and every American bears some responsibility for this horror. With two daughters of my own, words do not begin to describe the unrelenting hatred I would bear towards anyone or any nation that did this to one or more of my children. And Obama thinks we are winning? Would he be making the same disingenuous statements if one of his daughters was the deformed girl in the photo? I suspect not. And again, I can only ponder WTF is wrong with him? It's far past time that he stops listening to the bullshit emanating from the Pentagon. Here are more of Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the Afghanistan nightmare:
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As we fight an unwinnable war in an ungovernable country, the enemy simply ratchets up the evil by targeting more and more innocent civilians, especially women and children. . . . then you see an image like that above (having scanned many of them I feel numb from the images of agony and despair) which was the result of a Coalition air-strike gone awry and you see the awful, horrible, gut-wrenching moral dilemma we are in.
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I still favor withdrawal as soon as possible. I do not in any way discount the moral price. If I thought there was any way to win, my calculus might change. But I don't. And we're broke. And evil like this occurs tragically every day all over the world. The art of politics and warfare is the art of the possible within certain limits. We've reached them - and then some. It gives me no pleasure to say this, and my heart is torn. But politics is not the art of the heart in the end. It's the art of the mind.

George Bush Obama's Fool's Errand

I watched the majority of Barack "George W. Bush II" Obama's address this evening - staged at West Point in a manner reminiscent of the Chimperator - and I felt sick to my stomach. Is Obama oblivious to Afghanistan's history? It has ultimately proven ungovernable not for centuries but rather for thousands of years dating at least back to the time of Alexander the Great who married Roxanne, a Bactrian princess, as part of his effort to tame the area and stop marauders from attacking more civilized areas of the Persian Empire he had conquered.

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Wikipeda has an good run down on Afghanistan's history and it is not pretty. The British basically spent over 70 years trying to control Afghanistan before washing their hands of the disaster. The former Soviet Union invested a decade in its effort to control Afghanistan before withdrawing in defeat. For those with memories, the Afghanistan adventure was one of the factors fueling unrest which ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the communist regime in Moscow. Yet, "George Bush" Obama somehow thinks that an approach not so unlike that of the Soviets will somehow magically work this time. I doubt it. Bob Herbert has a good op-ed column in the New York Times that looks at the idiocy of what Obama is doing. There was a narrow window of opportunity that the Chimperator and Emperor Palpatine Cheney botched when they took the nation to war in Iraq based on deliberate lies. Here are some column highlights:

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I suppose we’ll never learn. President Obama will go on TV Tuesday night to announce that he plans to send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted most of the decade and has long since failed.
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After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.
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It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.
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More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.
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I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.
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Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. But that war was botched and lost by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better. . . . We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.
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Obama continues to disappoint. Perhaps the mess he inherited from the Chimperator was too great. But i still cannot wonder if Obama deliberately lied to the public at large and gays in particular to get elected. I had hoped he was different, but increasingly it seems not to be the case.

AIG Arrogance

One has to wonder how some can be so greedy and utterly out of touch with public relations realities. Personally, I think the Obama administration needs to pull the plug on AIG.