Believe it or not I had hoped when I wrote about politics that I would take a more intellectual approach. I have heard people talk about the politics of politics without exposing much of their own political alignment. My reasoning was that there are imperative rights and wrongs that transcend partisanship.
However the annoyance of the Partisan Warriors derailed me almost straight out of the gate. So since I have started down the road I might as well expose my positions on the politics of the day.
First there are emotional, hot button issues that aren't real issues. Those are not politics or really issues. At least not ones that politics or political operatives have any right exploiting. If it has something to do with legislating what consenting adults do in the bedroom or some issue that inflames the passions but an elected official have little or no authority to effect... then it is simply a hot button issue. Hot button issues addle the brain and distract from looking at the content of ones character. I don't fight over them. I don't bash my head into a wall just to watch the wall bleed either. So don't expect me to bite of popular hot button issues. They aren't what the real world is about.
Second the Wars. Do them right and completely or don't them at all. The currents wars we (the United States of America) are being done wrong. People say that wars in tribal nations are impossible to win. That isn't true and as Americans should know that. However this isn't the way you win a war against tribal peoples. The way you do it is in our own history. You kill and relocate all the tribal peoples while you colonize the lands. Anything short of that in Afghanistan is a waste of time and resources. Iraq is lost. Not because of our armed forces but because of bad policies that saw the oil wells working in under a year and (last I checked)five or more years to turn the lights and water back on. Lots of people have a lots to answer for.
US Armed Services. We are treating them horribly and in that sense I am ashamed of our country. We are destroying our nations security by long engagements, stop lose policies, underfunding them while paying mercenaries top dollar to undermining our troops efforts. It is disgraceful that we are faking a withdrawl from Iraq while paying more to move more Blackwater Soldiers of Fortune at better wages and no clear rules of engagement to give our great nation more than just a black eye. Most empires fall when they resort to hiring Mercenaries to fight their wars... especially when they have the best troops in the world at their disposal and are simply stretching them to far.
Bailout. Like I said I am an economical conservative. Bailing out the banks and not investing anything that will bring a tangible asset to the nation because they are Too Big To Fail is complete and utter tripe. If there are abuses in a company or industry that is that big to threaten our very existence we need to do what we would to any threat to our nation. Take it over and restrict it to the point where it is impossible to hurt us again. In terms most people can understand, if it were an aggressive nation that even in some remote way threatening our national security, we would have special and secret operations crawling all over their country to figure out what they were about and their weaknesses. We would then mobilize our troops, bomb them into near submission until they were softened and disorganized enough land the ground troops to swiftly neutralize the threat.
It is the same with the too big to fail banks along with everything else that adversely effects us. We need to carpet bomb the banks, there are not innocents so we won't worry about the inhabitants. We need to nationalize or simply audit the fed (same as making it disappear with a magic wand), break up the 2 failing car companies, get rid of Nafta and apply tariffs that are at least on the same order as those countries that enjoy putting massive tariffs on our goods while they import with impunity to our nation. Let us make China and Japan at least work to permanently topple us as the world's premiere economy. If we are the greatest nation in the world let's get it all back and start being that great nation.
Healthcare. Which is not the same as health insurance, though the insurance companies would have you believe that. There is no reason that health insurance should be 16% of our GDP. Prohibitive cost for health insurance make us an unhealthy nation and an unhealthy nation is not a productive one. This is another thing that ends empires.
This is all I have stomach for at the moment. More later.
It’s Still OK to Make Eye Contact During a Pandemic (video)
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An update and message of love from yours truly It’s a time that has most of
us practicing physical distancing to prevent the spread of a microscopic
and ...
4 years ago
Lady Erin,
ReplyDeleteThese are dangerous words that you speak!
The world just can't handle the straight out truth anymore. If you want to run for office I'll be you VP:)
For starters I was part of the military machine for more than a quarter of a century and deployed to the gulf more than a half a dozen times during that period.
You are dead on the money with the fact that we are doing it all wrong. In WWII we stomped the shit out of the enemy and then in some cases made amends afterward, but you can't fight a war while attempting to befriend your adversary and be politically correct at the same time. That gets people killed. Trying to carry on the media circus during combat operations is also a modern day fiasco unless the CNN crew wants to fight the enemy as well. I'm reminded of Joe Galloway in Vietnam.
Most Americans today live with a Disney World mentality, as long as they have their leased BMW and over limit gold card they are OK. The problem is that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily live that way.
There is very little common ground between Americans & the peoples that we are STILL at war with currently. We build swimming pools, and worry about their having cellular communications while the worry about warlords and IEDs. Those nations have been in conflict for thousands of years it's a way of life, a means of survival for a great many of them. We have the greatest fighting force in the world but the Iraq people see our rifle carrying, Ipod tuned troops as the great green devil in many cases.
We went to Iraq based on lies! Can't get around that fact. However, Saddam was an evil SOB. BUT WE PUT HIM THERE! America has a very bad habit of helping tyrants get to power through funding and supply, then they tell us to piss off after they have what they want and cut us off from what we want (oil in this case).
So, who is to blame? The tyrant or the tyrants creator? Americans always seem to forget these tiny facts.
Our troops are treated poorly beyond belief in comparison to the sacrifices they make. The veteran care is more of an atrocity than what Saddam was doing to his people in my opinion. The pay that our troops receive is a joke, but like you said gotta pay those mercenaries. Funny that Black water and several other moved operations to the Middle East. Hey and so did Halliburton, after they were told they couldn't operate in the capacity which they are by congress.
Lady E if you will forgive me, PLEASE! We have to bail out these big banks and industry. Be realalistic most of those FAT CATS have never done a honest days HARD work and we can't expect them to start now.
Unfortunately the machine that operates this nation has become so out of control that it now defends and protects it's own at the expense of the populous. Does anyone remember Eisenhower's speach as he left office in Jan. 1961? He warned Americans that the greatest enemy up and coming for our nation would be it's own industrial military complex, and to think that a man who had actually been at the wheel of the ship would give us that warning.
As for the healthcare debate and reform, IT"S A JOKE!
My apollogies for getting so long winded and fired up over this post but I am becoming more and more ashamed as I get older, that I was part of this machine for so long.
I love my country I always have, but we are not fufilling the dream as we should.
All My Respect & Affections to You & Yours,
Nikki