a decisive victory

When I was an adolescent I loved cars.  I spent evenings hanging in front of Talman's at 55th and Kedzie, smoking cigs and trying to look tough along with my three or four nerd buddies, and watching the cars go by, I could name them all, year, make and model.

But I was pretty ignorant of what went on under the hood.  It was all so complicated, this thing connected to that thing and I don't know it never floated my boat.  I knew they had carburetors. which I think helped mix the air with the gasoline, pretty sure they were near the top of the engine, but I have no idea what they looked like,  They had a cool name though, exotic yet kind of an action word.  Guys were supposed to know about engines, it was a manly thing.  I remember some women in Texas running up to me because they had a car that wouldn't start and because I was a guy they thought I would know.  I think I told them that maybe it was their carburetor, because that was what men who didn't know anything about cars would say because at least we knew what carburetors were, or what they were called, and who knows, maybe it was what was wrong.  I don't think cars have had carburetors for years, not sure what replaced them or why or when that was and really don't care much.  Anymore you can just say it's probably the computer.

This long shaggy dog talk of carburetors is a long way of saying if your car is not running there is no point in asking me how to get it running.  And if you want intelligent discussion about what to do with the middle east don't talk to somebody who doesn't know a sunni from a shia, and is militantly not interested in learning anything more.  The subject has indeed been around since out childhoods and how Beagles has managed to learn so little about it is beyond ,me.

The news media has its ear to the ground, they are all competing with each other to give us what they think we are interested in, if we are not interested in some subject they will drop it like a hot potato.  They don't shove things down our throats that we are not interested in.  Perhaps there are things that you are not personally interested in but plenty of other people are.  I just spent on whole post patiently explaining why Bin Laden is a much bigger deal than the Quds guy, but Beagles, true to his life plan of not ever learning anything, has apparently not heard a word, and then in a truly Trumpian way instead if refuting anything I said, he just blames the press for the whole thing.  

The best way to win an endless war it to declare victory and pull out.  It worked very well in Vietnam.  No dominoes fell, and we don't have Vietnamese battleships cruising off California aiming to invade, I don't know, Hollywood,  I believe it would work as well in the mideast where the real battle is between sunni and shia and our guys are being killed because they are in the middle of it.  You don't see any of our guys getting killed by a roadside bomb on I-57 by Kankakee.  The only times they get killed is driving down some highway deep in the mideast, sent there by guys who don't know a sunni from a shia, and don't want to know because they both look the same dead.

Which is basically Beagles' preferred method of winning a decisive victory, kill all the guys he doesn't like, then kill all the guys that are pissed off about that, then kill all the guys who are pissed off about killing the guys who were pissed off and so on until you've basically killed everybody.  Declaring a decisive victory and pulling out is easier, cheaper, and more humane.