Hogwash

Man asks friend to shoot him,
blame ex-wife’s boy friend,
get custody of his son. He dies.

As near as I can tell it’s all hogwash, pig pucky, horse manure, or BS. Does anyone really have a handle on what is going on or likely to happen? Mitch McConnell said the Republicans “got their groove back.” Does anyone know what the hell he is talking about? He might as well have said “23 skidoo,” or “Oh you kid,” or even “Wanna buy a duck,” as far as I can tell. These Republican clowns seem to believe they will take back the House during this year’s elections. Perhaps they will, or at least gain some seats, but why this should be so I have no idea. Row vs Wade doesn’t seem to be a big issue this time, nor does the threat of Gay marriage, there is no sex scandal in the White House to exploit, the birthers have lost credibility, both sides are questioning the “war,” so what does that leave? Well, it seems to leave unemployment, immigration, health care, the economy and the debt. Surely they do not intend to run on their well-known and repeated blocking of extending unemployment benefits. They have already infuriated Hispanics, most of whom will probably never vote Republican again, health care has passed and most probably has no chance of being repealed. So…the economy and the debt would seem to be the main issues. As they were largely responsible for the debt I can’t see much traction there for them, and their answer to the economy, believe it or not, is to maintain and even improve tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and the corporations. Oh, and also doing away with Social Security, 86% of the American public oppose. How can this be a winning strategy? It can’t, unless there are unusually large numbers of voters who have lost their minds. Thus it is the election will come down to that – how many voters are out of their minds? There are always some, otherwise we would never have had a Nixon, Reagan, or George W. Bush, but will there be enough to put the country back in charge of the criminals that brought all this about? As my neighbor says, “Who knows what goes on in the minds of baboons?”

When it comes to hogwash little can surpass the sad and absurd story of Afghanistan. After years of no clear story of just what we were doing there, one has emerged. We are now being told we are there to build a nation, train its army and police force so they can defeat the Taliban and live happily ever after. This makes a nice story, if you like fairy tales or hogwash, because such an outcome is not going to happen. The very people we are training to maintain their well-known completely corrupt government don’t want us there any more than they want the Taliban, perhaps even less. They don’t train well, desert in large numbers, turn on our troops, and in general do not cooperate. We seem to believe they cannot do well without us, they believe we should leave and mind our own business. We forget the Afghans overcame the Taliban on their own once before, they can do it again if they so choose. When the corrupt and basically useless Karzai government goes there is no telling who will eventually emerge as the central power in Afghanistan, it could be the Taliban for a while, it could be some other group, some other strong man, but whoever it is, it almost certainly will not be intimately linked with the U.S., that predatory nation having already made the situation worse and lost “the hearts and minds” through its routine murder of innocent civilians. The terrible act of 9/11 should have been treated as a routine international crime, but under the guidance of the criminals, Bush/Cheney, became a “war,” costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, a mistake of monumental proportions that could have been brought under control by Obama who elected instead to make it even more nonsensical. That al Qaida or the Taliban are a threat to the U.S. is hogwash, plain and simple. Our “war” in Afghanistan may have something to do with our wanting to control things in the Middle East but it has nothing much to do with a threat to us. Most Afghans would be delighted to see us leave. Most Americans would be delighted to have us leave. We are fighting for a goal that is unobtainable. But hogwash is hogwash and seems to know no particular political party.

LKBIQ:
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.
Fran Lebowitz

TILT:
There are about 4500 species of cockroaches.