 by Thomas Keister
It gets less and less surprising by the day. Now, the Obama administration is cutting the villain formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide a deal for numerous and various violations of U.S. export control regulations in Sudan, Iraq, and who knows how many other places.
In deciding not to bring criminal charges, the U.S. government and Xe Services are in the process of negotiating a "multimillion dollar fine" to put the whole matter to bed.
That's convenient. If Xe Services had been indicted on any charges, it could have spelled the end of them doing business with the U.S. government, and if they can't do business with our government, then how in the hell are they expected to do business wherever and with whoever they damn well please with little or no accountability? I mean, they have recently been awarded new contracts worth over $200 million, so it wasn't like the gravy train was seriously in danger of being derailed.
Why, what would happen if we weren't busy flushing this extra amount of cash down the crapper in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan? Would Obama have to actually take that timetable seriously? Would military yesman David Petraeus be able to magically recreate the nothing he accomplished in Iraq in Afghanistan without the backup of taxpayer-overpaid mercaneries to do whatever the hell it is they are paid to halfass over there? I think we both know the answers to those questions.
This is quickly becoming the way the legacy of Obama is going to be remembered. This whole "hope and change" has become the equivilent of repainting the car instead of fixing the engine, but never losing that smile on your face as you remain stranded in the driveway.
 by Thomas Keister
With the political circus in full swing over President Obama's nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, I found it much easier to simply avoid the punditry on cable than hear a hundred talking heads split right down the middle using the same three or four talking points. Wise move on my part. So far, it's boiled down to experience, opposition to military recruiters on Harvard's campus, and some kind of nonsense about lesbianism somehow being tied to softball. Here I was, thinking the height of foolishness had been the pubic hair on the can of Coke.
Thankfully, whenever there seems to be a lack of foolishness, Pat Buchanan is right there, yelling for it to get back on his lawn, right next to the lawn jockey.
I have, for years, unsuccessfully tried to figure out why MSNBC continues to give America's racist grandpa airtime to do anything other than dramatically clutch his chest and topple from his chair. Even Rachel Maddow seems to be powerless to act any way other than happy when "Uncle Pat" is in the same frame. For a woman with a Ph.D., that is just a bit disappointing.
In Buchanan's latest show of proof he either needs stronger pills, or a tripling of the current dosage, in his syndicated column for World Net Daily last Thursday he bemoans the idea that, should Kagan be confirmed, there will be three Jews on the Supreme Court. Buchanan panics that "If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than two percent of the U.S. population, will have thirty-three percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats' idea of diversity?"
Pat Buchanan talking about diversity is like Tiger Woods talking about preserving fidelity in one's marriage. Both men are big on their particular concepts now, yet both secretly yearn for simpler days, when the situations were more to their liking. Granted, I doubt Tiger wishes it was 1955 like Pat does, but the logic is still sound.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Pat Buchanan's scared of a world in which the white Protestants and Catholics are victimized by liberal bias, a world in which, gasp, Catholics only hold six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court. The horror. "Not in living memory," Buchanan swoons, "has a Democratic president nominated an Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic." And yet, through it all, the Catholics find themselves with six justices. It would be nothing short of inspirational that the Catholics have risen above such obstacles, except for the plain fact that Pat Buchanan does not have a clue what the hell he is talking about. This guy probably still expects Clarence Thomas to park his car for him when he visits the high court.
Debating experience? I always like to say if it were for experience, man would never have walked on the moon. When it comes down to experience for a Supreme Court justice, I would rather take the candidate who's never been a judge, but can at least tell the difference between receiving an email and receiving a page. Who the blue hell even uses a pager anymore?
Debating the presence of military recruiters on Ivy League campuses? I'm not arguing against serving one's country, or recruiting others to do the same, but I do have a problem with those same recruiters trying to convince someone gaining that level of education to go take a chance on getting blown up for $14k a year while propping up the Afghan opium industry. Come to think of it, I have a problem with recruiting for that mission on any campus, college or otherwise.
Debating lesbianism and softball? Not sure where to tell you to go for that. The RNC may have some ideas, but I couldn't even begin to tell you how much a softball game in S&M gear would run your checkbook.
Debating diversity? That's all well and good, unless you are debating with a fine print kind of guy like Pat Buchanan, whose ideal Supreme Court would have a sign on the front reading "Jews need not apply."
Now, if someone could just figure out how to get Pat to retire to Boca...
by Thomas Keister
"Because there's one bombing, it doesn't mean the situation is going down the tubes." That remark belongs to NATO yeshole Major Mario Couture, speaking on the continued resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
No, maybe that doesn't mean the situation is going down the tubes, but it is hardly cause for optimism, especially given the shaky state of Southern Afghanistan. The Taliban has been gradually increasing their hold on Kandahar for years now, even with thousands of American and Canadian troops in and around the city.
While Gen. Sher Mohammad Zazai, the Afghan National Army's commander in Kandahar, said a counteroffensive is being planned, one had to question how effective it will be, as even NATO can not accurately measure the extent of Taliban control.
Yet, NATO and the Afghan National Army say this while struggling to keep a straight face, as August has now caught up with July as the deadliest months of the war thus far.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has said the supply of militants is "effectively endless," and that the new strategy will be to make the safety of the villagers the top priority, rather than racking up enemy body counts.
I think by this point in the proceedings, eight years in, we've heard it all before, and this is nothing particularly surprising. The only part I think Americans are buying, and those are the Americans who make it to page A5 of the morning edition, is the phrase "effectively endless."
by Thomas Keister
Ah, yes...Memorial Day. While I am avoiding most of television's offerings today, to avoid seeing 3,000 different sales I could care less about, or watching Obama lay wreaths and make more speechs that are "all fart, no shit," as my grandfather probably would have said, the one thing I could not avoid was this morning's newspaper. Yes, I still read a newspaper every morning, despite the fact I read most of the content a full day and a half earlier online. One of the few good things left in reading a daily newspaper in this day and age is the letters to the editor. Where else can you see people write things either so wrong or so full of fantasy as to cause alarm at the notion they operate motor vehicles out there in the real world with the rest of us, without the pages of snarky, vaguely racist, outright racist comments, or the couple of dozen spam links thrown in, just in case you'd rather watch some college sophomore drowning in student loan debt work it off the hard way.
Case in point- in today's Louisville Courier-Journal, a letter writer manages to say, over the outraged spittle that no doubt coats the inside of his house when one of these tangents occur, that President Obama, with no military experience, does not have a clue simply because he took the unprecented step of proposing budget cuts for our bloated, inefficient, and massively overworked military.
First of all, the writer states that Obama "doesn't have a clue," due to his lack of military service. Not to mention the rest of the previous administration's chicken hawk club (Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice) who had no problem waging war without any prior military duty, what about the head of the pack? George W. Bush has no military experience, simply because no one can attest to most any part of it. Spending a war hiding in Alabama doing rails of blow off the visor or your flight helmet gives you no more of a clue than apparently using an old episode of F Troop as your blueprint for war.
The writer continues by bemoaning the inhumanity of making troops serve three, four, or more tours in combat zones, calling it worse than torture. Fair enough, given the circumstances in one of our two wars currently in progress, but ask this same writer about possibly, oh, I don't know, ending one (or both) of those wars, and then the outraged spittle really starts flying. For all the nonsense I have heard on why we can't simply "cut and run," what I want is for some congressman or senator to stand up and remind the rest of us that we don't care what's going on in Third World toilet countries like Sudan or Darfur, so why the hell do we care what's going on in Third World toilet countries like Afghanistan or Iraq? It's lot like Sudan or Darfur have any oil, and it's not like all this "liberation" (or whatever in the hell it is we are after over there) is doing us a lot of good at the gas pumps.
No rest for the writer's delusion, as he then proclaims his opinion that the military should use the money from "equipment the military doesn't need," so we can put more boots on the sand. Try again, slappy. We have all the money our military could possibly need, yet, for some reason, we have troops in Iraq who can't even get fresh drinking water. We are paying some Dick Cheney shell company billions of dollars a year, and our troops can't even get a fresh canteen of fucking water! That should be classified as torture, or those who think otherwise need to sweat off fifteen pounds in one day with nothing to drink. Get back with me on how that works out for you.
The most laughable assertion the would-be voice of reason makes is how the Clinton administration and Congress repeatedly cut the military budget during his two terms in office. Uh, yeah...the Republicans were living large in the majority during most of Clinton's time in the White House, so that excuse holds less water than Ann Coulter's bra.
It may be easy for people to start lining up with the criticisms on the job Obama is doing thus far, and even easier when you are a member of El Rushbo's Tinfoil Hat Brigade. I mean, sending more troops to either hot spot is a mistake. Continuing on with either of these BS wars is a mistake. Given the state of affairs currently, however, the only bigger mistake one could make is throwing more money on this bonfire.
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