supporting the troops
i'm perpetually confused, disgusted and discouraged by the vitriol aimed at the POTUS by so many hare-brained and hair-triggered rightie nut jobs over barry's perceived slights to the US military. here we have, if anything, even more of a gung-ho cowboy pro-armed forces president than the previous, (the only nobel peace prizer to say it with tomahawks, conduct four illegal--ie non-congressionally-initiated--foreign wars--iraq, afghanistan, libya and yemen--and on top of all that cheerfully run multiple covert assassination campaigns against both us and non-us citizens while his attorney general argues that it's all perfectly legal as long as the president says so), whose only apparent flaw in a doctor strangelove context is that he's simultaneously presided over a bankrupting of the treasury (again, just more and "better" at being dubya than dubya) that's had its consequent pinch on military spending. or, to say it another way, to be all that dubya was and more, just ain't enough for some folks.
so this week we're in the midst of an embarrassing-to-both-us-and-to-the-president fuck-up committed by no one else but military personnel, albeit about whom, according to the hare-brained and hair-triggered rightie nut jobs, we're all supposed to be so supportive without qualification or limit. (seems there was a little pajama party in a cartegena "zona del tolerancia" where the tolerance, unfortunately, could not be extended for not paying the bill at the end of the party, and here we have it).
so what's the president's supposed anti-military stance?
why, the president unequivocally stands behind the military (who have betrayed him in this one tiny and not significantly significant case, by the way) and insists that he has full confidence in the secret service and their armed services personnel regardless.
good for the POTUS.
i have confidence, too.
this is a team effort. our armed forces do yeoman's work each and every day. today, thanks to supposed lefty chickens like niki tsongas, barry o, and others, and NOT the previous cowboy administration who threw them into harms way, we have things like armored humvees and body-armored soldiers where once we had our men and women riding around ostensibly naked to IED's and enemy snipers in places destabilized by a supposedly right rightie commander in chief in the first place.
no, barry ain't perfect. it was dubya's timetable to leave iraq he used, and he's certainly done very little to improve the morass into which our men and women in uniform have been thrown to toil and lose their lives and limbs.
but he ain't what the hare-brained and hair-triggered rightie nut jobs say he is by any stretch of a reasonable imagination, and folks gotta get some perspective on that. this stuff in columbia is, in a real sense, boys being boys, (and i don't mean that in a dismissive or to-be-taken-lightly sense, but, rather, in a juvenile delinquents being juvenilely delinquent sense), and it's gotta get cleaned up in-house exactly as the president is insisting it be.
the us armed forces? i'm with the commander in chief: they're awesome. end of sentence. no qualification. awesome.
so this week we're in the midst of an embarrassing-to-both-us-and-to-the-president fuck-up committed by no one else but military personnel, albeit about whom, according to the hare-brained and hair-triggered rightie nut jobs, we're all supposed to be so supportive without qualification or limit. (seems there was a little pajama party in a cartegena "zona del tolerancia" where the tolerance, unfortunately, could not be extended for not paying the bill at the end of the party, and here we have it).
so what's the president's supposed anti-military stance?
why, the president unequivocally stands behind the military (who have betrayed him in this one tiny and not significantly significant case, by the way) and insists that he has full confidence in the secret service and their armed services personnel regardless.
good for the POTUS.
i have confidence, too.
this is a team effort. our armed forces do yeoman's work each and every day. today, thanks to supposed lefty chickens like niki tsongas, barry o, and others, and NOT the previous cowboy administration who threw them into harms way, we have things like armored humvees and body-armored soldiers where once we had our men and women riding around ostensibly naked to IED's and enemy snipers in places destabilized by a supposedly right rightie commander in chief in the first place.
no, barry ain't perfect. it was dubya's timetable to leave iraq he used, and he's certainly done very little to improve the morass into which our men and women in uniform have been thrown to toil and lose their lives and limbs.
but he ain't what the hare-brained and hair-triggered rightie nut jobs say he is by any stretch of a reasonable imagination, and folks gotta get some perspective on that. this stuff in columbia is, in a real sense, boys being boys, (and i don't mean that in a dismissive or to-be-taken-lightly sense, but, rather, in a juvenile delinquents being juvenilely delinquent sense), and it's gotta get cleaned up in-house exactly as the president is insisting it be.
the us armed forces? i'm with the commander in chief: they're awesome. end of sentence. no qualification. awesome.
posted by kad barma at 10:21 AM
1 Comments:
Great post.
And despite the attempts by some spin-meisters to say that slashing the Pentagon budget is somehow "against the troops" anyone who takes a closer look will see that much of that ENORMOUS budget has nothing to do with troops. At all. There are a tremendous number of people, many of them concentrated in northern Virginia or *that* part of Maryland, who earn their living from defense contracts. Others are government employees who earn very comfortable salaries working predictable hours with great benefits packages (and I'm tired of hearing about the cost-of-living in that area, esp. for couples that are both in that line of work...don't tell me how tough it is with two six-figure incomes, please!)
It's nothing against those people -- many of whom were once 'the troops' -- but a reduction in the budget of some futuristic weapons system is not the same as slashing the training or equipment budget for, say, a Marine battalion at Camp Lejeune.
The last major government payroll slashing (Reinventing Government, or REGO) was a Clinton-Gore initiative. Bush made things much worse, but still, Obama frightens me with the heightened spending.
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