Not a lot of time on my hands just now, so I’ll just take a few wild swipes at some foreign policy issues.
Benghazi hearings. It’s a little hard to suppress laughter when I hear Republicans complaining about the Sept. 11 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. As only they can do, they are keeping the flame of this ludicrous conspiracy theory alive even though it was cooked up on the fly late in the election season to offer Romney a foreign policy talking point. The Obama administration rose to the bait back then, of course, and probably said way too much about the attack, trying to put the controversy to rest; they’ve been backpedaling ever since, probably kicking themselves for having commented so much in reaction to Romney’s ridiculous embargoed media release on 9/11.
The fact remains, though, that the attack killed three Americans. Three too many, of course, but the senators who are complaining the loudest – McCain, for instance, and the yargle-bargle caucus in the GOP-controlled House – are directly responsible for many, many American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on manipulation of intelligence, including faulty claims extracted through torture. I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton, but I was glad to see her knock it back to them a bit. (Spoiler alert: she voted to authorize Bush’s war in Iraq, too.)
Bad options. As they vet John Kerry to replace Clinton at State, the North Koreans are signalling more missile tests. Talk here is that all options are on the table, but any fool can see that there is no military solution to the disagreement with North Korea. Wipe them off the map? We did that back in the 1950s – that’s an important part of how we got to this point today. Memo to Kerry: This is solvable without resort to pointless killing; that should simply be off the table.
Iran again. Prevention is the strategy on Iranian nuclear weapons? Could have fooled me. We invaded and destroyed countries on either side of Iran, neither of which possessed nuclear weapons. We didn’t attack Libya when they had nuclear capability, and then attacked them when they gave it up. Our “Axis of Evil”, which included Iran, featured Iraq (no nukes; attacked in 2003) and North Korea (nukes; not attacked). If you were Iran, what lesson would you draw from this?
luv u,
jp
We’re still in the subway toilet, thanks to our friends at Dotster. I spent the last two days working on restoring our main site to something like normal functionality, but I’m no closer than I was on Friday, so…. so it goes.
Sometimes I forget that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) isn’t an undereducated human like myself. He is, in fact, a mechanical man. Much must be explained to him, and what can’t be explained must be programmed in by force, if necessary. That’s the lot of a robot assistant, I’m afraid. Work, work, work.
Listening to the series of Republican interviews that is NPR the other day, I heard some talk of raising the Medicare eligibility age as one means of covering their failed fiscal policy decisions. That has to take the prize as the stupidest idea ever proposed. Sure, take the youngest people out of the Medicare system – the people who need the least care! That’s a surefire way to bankrupt the program, which I’m sure is their ultimate aim. The G.O.P. has always hated Medicare, almost as much as they hate Social Security, despite their claims to the contrary. If they were truly serious about saving money, they would be expanding Medicare to include younger, healthier people, not the other way around.
Oh, hi out there. As I’m sure you already know, the morning after Thanksgiving is always a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you have a mansized tuber who has just discovered juicing. (He’s trying to win some of his bi-weekly pickup basketball games, but I think even with the Miracle Gro he’s reaching.) Morning starts kind of early around here – sometimes before noon, even. (You fellow rock musicians out there better sit down: There is a thing called morning. It’s not just another hallucination. That’s right … I’m talking to you, pothead.)
You don’t have to be a cynic to believe that Netanyahu wanted this flare-up, with elections just weeks away. He is following in a long tradition of Israeli political leaders who know that the iron fist earns votes. Already he has 