Remind me why anyone, anywhere, including the people who work for him, would think that this pendejo isn’t basically a 300-pound parakeet entranced by his own reflection?
• Trump Undercuts John Bolton on North Korea and Iran
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• Miffed at Fox News, Trump Flirts With an Even More Fawning News Network
Remember the war in Afghanistan?
Some folks would prefer that you didn’t. Or at least remained blissfully ignorant about its purpose and progress.
As Tom Udall and Rand Paul noted in an essay for The Atlantic, starting this fall American soldiers will begin deploying to fight in a war “that began before they were born.”
They, along with their friends, family and neighbors, may not understand just what they’re getting into, because the U.S. military command in Afghanistan has gone all tight-lipped on just what — if anything — it is accomplishing there.
This concerns the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John F. Sopko, who told The New York Times that while he and many members of Congress had access to illuminating classified information, the rest of us were being treated like a cash crop of mushrooms, being kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of bullshit.
“The only people who don’t know what’s going on and how good or bad a job we’re doing are the people paying for it — the American taxpayers,” he said.
The brass hats seem happy to gin up some numbers to keep the easily distracted President Beelzebonespur in the game. In January 2018, according to the Times, the military began announcing Vietnam-style body counts “as part of an apparent strategy to rally White House support for remaining in the conflict.”
The practice ended abruptly when the Times started asking questions about it.
There’s a certain irony in using a dubious metric from a war dodged by the present commander in chief to hold his wavering interest in this one. Especially since shortly after his inauguration, according to the Times, a special-ops unit was told to prepare for a number of missions deemed too risky by the previous administration.
Again, the Times: “The commander of the unit, according to one American commando who was at the briefing, said the operations were meant to show Mr. Trump what they were capable of achieving in Afghanistan.”
This took me back to “Dispatches,” by the late Michael Herr, who recalled an encounter with a publicity-hungry commander when the Esquire correspondent, Sean Flynn and Tim Page choppered into a landing zone in Vietnam.
Wrote Herr: “(H)e wanted to throw a spontaneous operation for us, crank up his whole brigade and get some people killed. We had to get out on the next chopper to keep him from going ahead with it, amazing what some of them would do for a little ink.”
And the sales pitch continues. We still owe on this beat-to-shit 2001 Afghanistan — $45 billion per year, according to the Pentagon — and now they’re trying to get us into a brand-new 2019 Iran. We can give the ’01 to the kids, I guess.
Aw, who are we kidding? The kids will get both of them. And the rest of us will stick plastic flags in our planters, fire up the grill, and wonder idly if there’s anything good on TV. Hey, there’s a 24-hour Memorial Day tribute on TCM! Score!
• Mad Dog Media thinks the best way to honor those who serve is to equip them with top-shelf civilian leadership and bring them home.
It’s International Donkey Day. Or so says Hal Walter, who should know.
That may explain this bit of jackassery. It’s time to impeach everyone. Maybe we can get a bulk rate. While we’re at it, let’s have the stonewalling shitheads cuffed and frog-marched down to the various congressional committees that would like a word with them.
In other news, Hal and I may be doing a bit of podcastery here directly. Got any questions you’d like answered?* Leave ’em in comments.
* And no, we’re not tackling the old George Carlin favorite, “If God is all-powerful can He make a stone so big that He himself can’t lift it?”
“Impeach him? Of course you impeach him. And convict him, if you haven’t been ‘fixed’ like the Turk, who by the way doesn’t think you ‘fixed’ anything by having his nuts cut off. They weren’t broken, f’chrissake. Not like the Senate’s, anyway. Talk about your nutless wonders.
“If this clown were a cat, we’d have hissed at him and swatted him and run his fat orange ass all the way back to New York by now.
“We’d have shit in Pelosi’s shoes, too. And barfed hairballs into the kneepads McConnell wears when he’s getting the Kentucky Meat Shower at those Federalist Society clusterfucks.
“And to think you call us pussies.”
The best take on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report so far comes from Kevin Drum at MoJo, who writes: “The truth is that we barely know anything more today than we did a week ago. It’s likely there’s a reason for that.”
Runner-up is from Charlie Pierce, who observes: “In fact, the basic overriding result of [Attorney General William] Barr’s summary is that the whole matter now has been dumped into the laps of a divided and hyper-partisan Congress in such a way as to guarantee that the Congress will be more divided and more hyper-partisan than ever before. The Democratic House will hold hearings and the Republican Senate will yell about Hillary Clinton. The Internet will be indiscriminately insane for the foreseeable future.”
For what it’s worth, my own uneducated guess is that our keepers have decided that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is the people’s problem. We shit the bed, we do the laundry. No indictment, no impeachment, and open a window, f’chrissakes. It stinks to high heaven in here.
Absent an abrupt change of course based on the Mueller report, the Donks seem to be betting that they can clean Il Douche’s clock in the 2020 election, which sounds an awful lot like drawing to an inside straight. Or maybe it’s more like the kind of lame-ass, no-balls, break-even poker playing that sends you home neither richer nor poorer while the big boys take all the pots.
Are they still hunting, Elmer Fuddlike, for that mythical Moderate Republican, hoping they can bag enough of these fabled centrist unicorns — without hurting the MAGA dummies’ fee-fees — to take the White House and the Senate, pad their edge in the House, and govern free of interference from the Flying Monkey Caucus?
Fuck me running. I wish I had some magic beans to sell these rubes. I could use a more reliable income stream. This hand looks more like a foot.
In the meantime, we all could use some more information. There’s an election coming up, or so we hope. Release the damn report, shitheels. We paid for it, and in more ways than one, too. It’s ours.
Mad Blog Media 