This better be good!

Buzkashi, Afghan game played
on horseback with headless goat,
wants to become Olympic sport.

This better be good, President Obama. It seems our President has finally decided to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan, “to get the job done.” What job? He supposedly is going to explain this decision in the next few days which will, I sincerely hope, define this job with some precision heretofore lacking. Personally I think this is a terrible decision and I cannot even conceive of what job he has in mind to finish. Unless this job has something to do with the stupid pipeline that Cheney and his oilmen friends wanted all along (an item conspicuously missing from all news about Afghanistan these days) I cannot imagine what it could be. Afghanistan is not called “the graveyard of empires” for no reason. The British failed miserably, the Russians likewise, as well as even Alexander the Great, so what makes Obama and his kill-crazy generals think they can prevail? Obama cannot win here no matter what. If he fails with the 34,000 troops, they will say he didn’t send enough troops, and if he “wins” what is it he will have won? I have feared all along that Obama would give in to pressure from the Pentagon (and their interests in the Military/Industrial/Political complex) and continue this hopelessly lost adventure, and he has. No good will come of this, only more and more deaths and more and more misery and destruction. We simply cannot win anything in Afghanistan, and we cannot complete the job, unless the job is getting out of there as graciously as possible.

Not only are we going to lose in Afghanistan, it appears now there is a very good chance we are going to lose on Health Care Reform as well. The Bill has been diluted so greatly the only thing it has left is the public option, and that, too, may fall. The Republicans, whose stated plan all along has been to kill any reform of our dysfunctional health care system, cannot defeat it by themselves. But with the help of four apparently deranged Democrats they can. If these four holdouts cannot be persuaded to vote in the public interest all is lost. It may be that some of them, perhaps at least three, may be persuaded eventually if given enough “goodies” to satisfy them. Whether Lieberman (who I believe truly is deranged) can be persuaded I do not know. The reasons he offers for resisting for the most part are demonstrably false, but he continues non-stop on his holier-than-thou claims of conscience (this must be a newly minted conscience as he never had one before). This is a most interesting situation. The public wants a public option. The President wants a public option, The House wants a public option. A majority in the Senate wants a public option. But four democrats, along with all Republicans are going to stand in the way. At least two, maybe three, of the democrats say they are philosophically opposed to giving the government control over health care. But the government already has control over much of health care. And furthermore, if the majority of their colleagues don’t agree with them you might think they would graciously concede to the majority (I rather think they will when it comes down to the wire). If Lieberman doesn’t come around he should not only be relieved of his chairmanship (democrats have coddled this jerk long enough), he should be drummed out of the Senate for willful obstruction of the public interest (he should probably be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, but as such a great friend of Israel he may be untouchable (Israel does tend to run things here in the U.S.).

Keith Olberman listed Glenn Beck as today’s worst-person-in-the-world. He was wrong. Glenn Beck is the worst person in the world every day. It appears that Beck tries to sell gold on his program. This is presumably because some of his sponsors (that he has left) sell gold. Now why would people who sell gold want to sponsor Glenn Beck? Could it possibly be because they know his audience has to be composed of the most gullible suckers on earth? It constantly amazes me to know that Beck actually has an audience, a following. I shudder when I think of what his audience must really be like.

There are hints now that Silly Sarah may be an end-of-the-earther, a believer in Armageddon. If this is so, and I don’t doubt it, I don’t think it is merely a result of her recent dinner with Billy Graham. The fact that she is, and has been all along, some kind of religious nut, seems to get little or no play in the MSM. At least so far she hasn’t claimed that she talks directly with God. She, too, has a following, apparently a pretty good-sized one, so perhaps a Palin/Beck ticket is not so far-fetched after all. Bring ‘em on, I say.

Desolation
marks the path of victory,
and also the shame.

Morialekafa