Mitt “I had a ministerial deferment” Romney got some headlines with a series of cheap-shots at Obama in front of an audience at a VFW meeting in San Antonio, thereby demonstrating what a tough-ass guy he is and that his dick is at least as big as Rick ”Where’s my holster again?” Perry right there in his home state. Romney seemed to following a typical republican script for talking about democrats, saying Obama was guilty of coddling our enemies with all kinds of peacenik gymnastics instead of charging right into the barbed wire like he certainly, probably, might do.
Never mind that he joined Chief Chicken Hawk, Dick Cheney on the sidelines when thousands of their terrified peers were creeping through the Vietnamese jungle. He is one tough mother and Obama is a softy whose foreign policy has done nothing to make American safer and encourages all manner of mischief and misbehavior and plus, the Arab Spring revolts are all because of brilliant long range republican strategy, hahminah, hahminah, hahminah…
Never mind that he joined Chief Chicken Hawk, Dick Cheney on the sidelines when thousands of their terrified peers were creeping through the Vietnamese jungle. He is one tough mother and Obama is a softy whose foreign policy has done nothing to make American safer and encourages all manner of mischief and misbehavior and plus, the Arab Spring revolts are all because of brilliant long range republican strategy, hahminah, hahminah, hahminah…
Next I fully expect the republicans to trot out their aging stable of fossilized war criminals – Kissinger, Rumsfeld, etc. – to pile on and blame Obama for everything that hasn’t worked out and take credit for everything that has, all the while repeating the standard talking point; democrats are soft on defense. Romney actually had the balls – or he was drunk – to suggest that Obama supporting the debt ceiling heist by the republican controlled House of Representatives was evidence of his hostility towards the military, since continued republican insistence on a budget that doesn't interrupt the croquet games in the Hamptons would mean that the defense budget would be cut along with social services and Obama would be to blame.
And in a final blast, he puffed up his chest, turned so his good side was towards the cameras and said – I’m paraphrasing – negotiating with your enemies might be how they do things at Harvard but “it’s not what they know on the battlefield”; coming from Mr. Draft Dodger, a remark so stupid and insulting to a group of men and women who actually were on a battlefield, that you would expect him to get boo’d off the stage. Maybe Mitt should check with the dead Taliban that are the result of constant drone strikes in Pakistan before deciding how much of a softy Obama is.
And in a final blast, he puffed up his chest, turned so his good side was towards the cameras and said – I’m paraphrasing – negotiating with your enemies might be how they do things at Harvard but “it’s not what they know on the battlefield”; coming from Mr. Draft Dodger, a remark so stupid and insulting to a group of men and women who actually were on a battlefield, that you would expect him to get boo’d off the stage. Maybe Mitt should check with the dead Taliban that are the result of constant drone strikes in Pakistan before deciding how much of a softy Obama is.
The report just issued documenting 60 billion dollars wasted due to fraud, corruption and incompetence – and that’s what they can track – should give pause to the whole stable of republican neocons and the blockheads who loved them who were convinced, for whatever reason, that deposing a cartoon character like Saddam was worth the monetary cost as well as a couple of hundred thousand dead – after all – they were mostly Iraqis so who cares. It was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate American exceptionalism and teach others who may cross us a lesson. How’s that working out for you, fellas? As Bill Maher noted, that 60 billion lost to waste and fraud is presumably on top of the trillion spent on the idiotic endeavor in the first place. And while it’s true we haven’t “suffered an attack on our soil”, we have plenty of dead American soldiers on other soil and a comet hasn’t hit the Earth either. I’m not clear what's coincidence and what’s correlation but I am quite sure the bad guys haven’t stopped trying.
I’m not really interested in defending Obama’s Iraq & Afghanistan policies; I think that both have been extremely ill advised exercises in perpetuating 50 years of American foreign policy blundering – an incredible, unimaginable waste. But continuing Bush and the Neocon’s foreign policy of belligerent, bellicose posturing and aircraft carrier rattling certainly would have made it worse. At least we’re trying to get our foot out of the muck.
The Libyan revolt is a good example of what Obama faces from the “critical class”, the punditocracy, the chorus of profession experts who are only too happy to chime in on any subject, any time. He was criticized for intervening to the limited extent he did and criticized for not doing more when it took longer than our short attention span media thought appropriate. I would take Obama’s thoughtful, measured approach – even though I disagree with some of his decisions – over another half crazed mouth breather like Perry, who seems to have come right out of Blowhard University and just as likely to get all wound up and bomb somebody as not. Bachman is waiting for the end of the world so I don’t exactly trust her to make intelligent decisions and Romney is the fair haired boy for corporate interests who are, generally speaking, more for war than against it. It’s a scary god damn group.
The Libyan revolt is a good example of what Obama faces from the “critical class”, the punditocracy, the chorus of profession experts who are only too happy to chime in on any subject, any time. He was criticized for intervening to the limited extent he did and criticized for not doing more when it took longer than our short attention span media thought appropriate. I would take Obama’s thoughtful, measured approach – even though I disagree with some of his decisions – over another half crazed mouth breather like Perry, who seems to have come right out of Blowhard University and just as likely to get all wound up and bomb somebody as not. Bachman is waiting for the end of the world so I don’t exactly trust her to make intelligent decisions and Romney is the fair haired boy for corporate interests who are, generally speaking, more for war than against it. It’s a scary god damn group.
Meanwhile, the content of Cheney’s auto-lie-ography is becoming more and more widespread and his reptilian visage is appearing everywhere you look because of his intentional crossing swords for one last time with Colin Powell and Ghaddafi’s pin up girl, Condy Rice. When asked about the book, Bush took a break from his usual summer reading – The Iliad, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dostoevsky, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and Valley of the Dolls – to weigh in on Cheney’s new book, saying, “It’s OK but I thought there’d be more pictures.” I think Robert Sheer put it best in a post for The Nation:
"Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader."
A republican friend of mine once said to me, in the face of my bitching about Cheney, “Hey, you don’t need to convince me; Dick Cheney is a peckerhead.” I think that says it pretty well.
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