This One Is For Uncle Bob

(Uncle Bob is not doing well. He's suffered perhaps another stroke and is having some difficulty. JP)

Those who came back from World War II did not make much of a fuss about it all. Most of them were just glad to have survived. The war was an erratic adventure, in which many served out the war in menial and boring work, while others, almost at random, got to be the ones who were on the firing lines. Uncle Bob got to be one of those, as well as one of the ones who spent a long, long time in an unhappy prison situation. On balance, Bob was one of the luckier ones among those who were unlucky enough to (a) be in a combat situation (b) get captured, and (c) survive both of those experiences that many did not.

A fair number of those who came back from World War II tended to lean Republican, perhaps in part responding to Ike becoming President. Hard to say. Bob was one of the other kind of veteran, who came back from the war with all his social conscience intact and all his wits about him. All one needs to do is read his writing to catch on to that. Relatively few of us alive got to see what Bob saw and experienced before the war. The other day someone around here said that before the war his entire family had to work to support them, but after the war he was able to support his family on the proceeds of just his one job. I am not sure how such a profound change came about, but wiser heads than I can probably explain why our economy was stimulated by the war, instead of being run into the ground as is currently happening with our wonderful Desert Adventure, aka "The Bungle in Baghdad". For those who do not know the history of the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920s, it is worth noting that "victory" was proclaimed a number of times, only to be followed by periods of "non-victory", which finally culminated in the British leaving, with no good result other than some well-filled cemeteries. Oh, and the British garrisoned Iraq with 150,000 troops also, but at that time the population of Iraq was, are you ready for this? 3.5 million. Now? 23 million. Add 20 million Iraqis, give them some modern weaponry and communications gear, and put in the same number of troops. Smart? or foolhardy? You decide.

The big problem? There are relatively few veterans in the Bush administration. Instead it is a cabal of chicken-hawks. Cheerleaders waving bloody pom-poms. And the one vet that lead us into the Iraq war? Rumsfeld. Remember which service he served in? The Navy, as a Naval Aviator. Wikipedia tells us of his experience at: (Click Here)

So Rumsfeld was a fighter pilot, who never fought. Great. A frustrated Top Gun, who missed Korea and missed Vietnam. But he sure had lots of theories about how air power could win wars really fast and really cheaply. Bomb that crap out of everything and everyone and cow them into submission with your fireworks. Ground troops? Managing an occupation? Hey, those aren't really very interesting things to discuss, not for a manly guy like Donny Rumsfeld. So there we are, in a country that cordially dislikes us and wants us to go home, supporting a government that has thinly veiled contempt for our President, who they suspect of being a complete weenie. And while the Iraqi government is hoarding its reserves, we are being bled at the rate of $12 Billion a month, month in and month our. Before the election Keith Olbermann is going to be able to say that it is exactly 2,000 days since President Bush announced "Mission Accomplished" on an aircraft carrier parked ten miles off San Diego for that particular photo-op. Two thousand days of pointless violence and chaos. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. What a legacy.

And now another Naval Aviator wants to become President. Thanks, been there, done that, didn't like how that went. It seems that pilots have some idea that the way to handle conflict is to drop bombs on it. Kind of like throwing gas on a fire. The Brits found that out in the 1920s. They used to carpet bomb villages and drop mustard gas on them. All a part of bring civilization to those tribal desert heathens. We had a chance to read up on the history of that earlier war, but did we do so? Nope. Books have big words and you have to concentrate to read them.

Now there is this Omigod the Sky is Falling bailout thing. It seems to be a huge surprise to the Secretary of the Treasury. I could have told him it was likely to happen two years ago, but I doubt that he would have listened. Now, in less than a week, Secretary Paulson wants us all to panic and give him absolute authority to spend a ton of our money however he wishes. He'll tell us about it later, but right now he is too, too busy to talk with us because he is so caught off guard by the discovery that the economy is built on a mountain of fraud and phony paper. Oooopsie, those were those free market folks who, if their creative abilities were unleashed, could build the United States back into a World Colossus. Kind of like the Military Colossus that Rumsfeld wanted to turn us into.

Don't buy the story. Yes, there are some problems, but we don't need to get all "shock and awe" again. We need to slow down, think things through and do some of the hard work of sorting out the sheep from the goats. It'll work out. But your three bedroom house isn't worth $600,000 any more. And that's really okay. Warren Buffet, the smartest Billionaire in the country, is supporting Barack Obama and is on his advisory team. That's all you need to know about who to vote for. Hey, or you can trust John "Sleeps with Lobbyists" McCain, aka "The Maverick" who has turned into a walking talking cartoon this week. If you want to, all that I can say is, "Good luck". It is going to be hard to get through life being as stupid as that, but we'll try to get you some special support. I mean, that's what caring societies do, right? We help those who are mentally challenged.


Arthur