Blame Who?

Don’t blame the soldiers? What soldiers did I blame for anything. It’s a common trope for hawks to react to criticism against any war to accuse the criticizer of being against ‘our boys.’ so maybe this is just a habit of usually hawkish Beagles dying hard. And what is this with ‘esteemed colleague?’ I don’t recall ever hearing this phrase when we were slinging emails at each other, but maybe now that we have this fancy blog we should begin putting on the dog a bit. I want our esteemed, but nonexistent, audience to know that even as I type this, I am wearing a three piece suit, and one of those English wigs too, because what the hell?

I don’t know that we have a mission for the armed forces in the sense of anything written down, and really how could we, inasmuch as what we want the armed forces to do is defend us against any enemy at any time? I don’t know. I guess I could add ‘and don’t get involved in any stupid wars,’ but then there are those who don’t believe any wars are stupid.

As far as declaring war that whole thing was probably a dead horse even when they wrote that rule. If the prez wants to go to war, all he has to do is beat the drums for awhile and congress will give him the authority because nobody wants to be seen as unpatriotic when it comes to the next election. Generally at the start of a war most of the people are for it, and generally the soldiers are too. And it doesn’t matter what the soldiers think because the whole essence of a soldier is that he is somebody who obeys orders.

And yes Obama has prosecuted this war to a far greater extent than he led us to believe he would when he was running for office. It is a lot harder to get out of a war than to get in one. I like to think he let the one in Iraq lapse, and after giving the one in Afghanistan the old college try, he is letting that one lapse too, and so even if the whole operation is taking longer than I would have liked, we are getting out of these wars. I remember some years ago this guy told me that Nixon had gotten us out of the Vietnam war, and I thought what the hell, but then if you look at it, even as he kept up a hawkish rhetoric, and hid behind the fig leaf of ‘Vietnamization,’ he did get our boys out.

Funny thing about Canada. That’s where a lot of the Americans who were on the British side during the Revolutionary war went, and then when we tried to encourage them to leave Britain during the War of 1812, they refused in their polite Canadian way. So while our patriots fought and died to free us from the awful yoke of British tyranny, the Canadians had no such relief.

And yet if you amble across the border they look and act much like us, even to the extent of having major league baseball teams. But then you have to remember that they suffer under the awful yoke of SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, which I hear is even worse than OBAMACARE. It occurs to me that we should tell the tea partiers that while Obama favors OBAMACARE he opposes SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, then maybe they would be for it.