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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