A Profile In Cowardice

This is a profile in hypocrisy and cowardice. It is a black mark and a stain on the legislative branch of our federal government. The do nothing Republicans shirked their duty to this country again by literally running away from Washington rather than remaining in session to vote on authorizing and funding the war on ISIS. In the Senate this neglect of duty was bipartisan, with Democrats cowering because of the false charges their Republican opponents are using to poison well. What is particularly galling about the cowardice of the Republicans are those false charges and the other outright lies they are telling. Frankly the people of this country should be outraged over the disdain the right wing shitbags have for the knowledge and intelligence of the voters. I know he has been getting most of the attention, but Scot Brown is not the only disingenuous Republican candidate running blatantly false advertisements designed to scare the hell out of the gullible Republican base and perhaps some undiscerning independents as well.

I find it hard to believe that the cowardly, do nothing, Republican congressman who are literally running away from the fight on terrorists actually have the nerve to say that the man who killed Osama Bin Ladin and is now attacking ISIS is not doing enough to protect this country. And what would those Republican morons do differently? They seem to think putting a border agent on every square foot of our southern border is a good idea. Never mind the fact that that would be prohibitively expensive. Gotta prevent Lucy from bringing toxic tamales into the garment factory, don't you know. All right, so maybe I should not have made the tamale comment, but I want to show you just how hypocritical and absurdly racist the Republicans have become. There is absolutely no evidence of terrorists entering this country from Mexico. The Republican claims to the contrary are merely an attempt to tie the immigration issue to a debate over how best to protect ourselves from terrorists. Incidentally, the only President who granted amnesty to illegal immigrants was Ronald Reagan. So I guess Saint Ronny isn't infallible after all. I guess maybe if he had provided some very stiff penalties to companies who hired illegals we would not have had such of flood of illegal immigration. Holding employers accountable for providing jobs to illegal immigrants, however, would stifle the exploitive advantages those businesses have, and it would raise the price of the goods they produce. Gotta protect the exorbitant salaries the oligopoly hands out to its CEO s, you know. And, of course, Republicans want us to believe that deporting millions of people is better than giving them a legal status that would allow them to make a greater economic contribution to this country.

I am sorry but what we have seen over the last six years is a Republican Party that is incapable of protecting us from any real threat. So while the President is doing his best to confront a threat to everything that is decent, the Republicans are still trying win elections by selling us straw dogs and bogey men. The people should demand that the politically impotent Speaker of the house, John Boehner, call the House back in session to deal with a real threat for a change. The bottom line here is that it is congress that has the power to declare war, and congress should grow enough of a back bone to do its duty.

Get Real:

Enough with the damn distortions! General Dempsey said if the current strategy against ISIS does not work he would recommend the introduction of American ground troops. Now everyone is blowing his testimony way out of proportion. “General Dempsey is skeptical about the effectiveness of Obama's Plan,” some hand wringers scream. Andrea Mitchell, along with many other drama casters, said President Obama seems to be out of sync with his generals. As much as I hate to disappoint people who are trying to add a bit of excitement to attract an audience, I have to say that General Dempsey's testimony was not a Truman v. MacArthur moment; nor was it an indication of what is likely to happen. Here is a news flash for you: no general is ever happy unless he is rolling into a situation with overwhelming force, is able to quickly roll up the enemy's flank, win the war and become the great hero everyone hails as a military genius. Ain't likely to happen in the modern world folks!

There really are no good options. This is going to be a protracted struggle with no clear bench marks or end game. Until the countries in that region rise at least to the level of the last half of the twentieth century, there will be medieval religious conflicts fought with modern weapons. The misfits and sociopaths will gravitate to the worst scum in the sewer, and the rest of the world will try to keep that scum from destroying civilization. This is not the fault of Islam any more than the crusades were the fault of Christianity. There will always be people who will misuse religion. All military action is a holding action until diplomacy, education, and economic development make the extremists unattractive to the people in that region. This struggle has been going on for decades and will continue for decades.

I know what I have said is not very appealing. People want quick resolutions, and that is what politicians, particularly demagogs, promise them. I think Bush's war should have taught us the folly of that. I also think that the cold war should have taught us the virtue of persistence and patience. We should risk as little as possible to do what must be done to protect ourselves and to provide the help others need to make things better!

At The Water's Edge

Yesterday I looked up the Logan Act in Legal-Dictionary. The act was passed during the Adams Administration in 1799. In short, the act prohibits any citizen from negotiating with another nation on behalf of the United States without the authorization of the United States. As Legal Dictionary points out, however, the language is so broad that it “... appears to encompass almost every communication" between a U.S. Citizen and a foreign government that could be considered an “attempt to influence negotiations” between the two countries. Perhaps it is because of the first amendment concerns caused by the broad language, but no one has actually been charged with violating the act (although the act has been used as a threat on a few occasions). Furthermore, two former Presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, could have been charged under the Logan Act before either of them became President. In fact in his book, Chasing Shadows, Ken Hughes asserts that Richard Nixon's involvement in trying to cover up the Watergate burglary was motivated by his fear that an investigation of the crime would turn up evidence that Mr. Nixon had violated the Logan Act by interfering with Lyndon Johnson's negotiations to end the Vietnam War!  

If Mr. Hughes is correct, and he does present a compelling argument, the fear that the act would be enforced has had quite an impact on our history. Mr. Nixon, the cold warier, frequently talked about the moral and patriotic imperative of a bipartisan effort to contain the Soviet Union and the spread of communism; add to this Mr. Nixon's fear of the condemnation he would face because of the thousands of lives lost as a result of prolonging the Vietnam war and you can easily see why he might fear prosecution under the Logan Act. Indeed it is the loss of those lives that makes something like the Logan Act desirable. The question, of course, is how much opposition to an administration's foreign policy is healthy and what actions in opposition to those policies do we deem to be too harmful to our nation's interests.

During the cold war foreign policy was hotly debated but the consensus in regard to the policy containment and the patriotism of both parties placed limits on how far either party would go. The point being that both parties recognized the necessity of presenting a united front to the countries that threatened us. Thus we embraced the concept that partisanship ended at the shoreline. The hyper-partisanship of the Republican Party now seems to defy that wise concept of national unity. The Republicans scream that President Obama is to blame for every thing going wrong in the entire world, but when penned down they offer no viable alternatives for dealing with any of the situations they complain about. I think what President Obama is going to say about how he intends to deal ISIS is fairly predictable to anyone who has been paying attention. How the Republicans will react to the course of action he intends pursue is also predictable, I would say sadly predictable. I will be pleasantly surprised if I am wrong. It would be nice to know that the Republicans are capable of placing some bounds on the partisanship.

Octopi

What do you do when an octopus takes over the company you work for as well as all of its competition in the area and then lays you off. I'm screwed! At my age trying to find a job in a new field is really difficult, but that is the world we live in. The jobs in so many industries and fields have been eliminated or moved out of the country, and the good people who have spent most of their adult lives working in those industries and fields have been discarded faster than cold sufferers discard used facial tissues. This is social Darwinism rather than capitalism, and we must curtail it.