Does Beagles want socialized medicine?

This whole large armies cause a nation to go to war more frequently or a country that gets involved in a lot of wars has a bigger army strikes me as a chicken or egg situation. I do think we Americans have a tendency to think we should be involved whenever something comes up that we don’t like, and the fact that we have this magnificent army and will almost certainly win only encourages us more.

That does seem to wax and wane though. Wanes after we have gotten our nose bloodied with nothing to show for it, then slowly waxes as time passes and we forget about it. I thought after Vietnam we would never get involved in something like that again but 25 years passed and we were at it again full of piss and vinegar. And then right on the heels of that came Syria, but the drumbeat was lost in the dripping of our bloody nose, so we passed.

Whatever happened to Syria? It was the most important thing going on in the world a few months ago, but now we have moved on to that crappy website.

I was about to say something about the problem is never with the troops on the ground, the problem is we seem to get into these wars with no rhyme or reason, but then I thought about it, and realized there was a lot of buzz about our Vietnam army, massacres, fragging, drugging, but you don’t hear that much about our current volunteer army. Is it the difference between a volunteer army and a draftee army? Is it a difference in the way things are reported? Well I don’t know.

Hard to say what Nixon was up to. He was into international politics, thought he could wheel and deal and fast talk his way to the top. Vietnam was kind of an obstruction to his real goal of cozying up to China and sticking it to the Russkies. I think he thought the Chinese could make the Vietnamese back down, but the Vietnamese were backed by the Russkies, and the Chinese didn’t give much of a shit which way that war went. Dicky came up with his plan of abandoning Vietnam to the ‘Vietnamization’ plan that everybody in the world knew was doomed to failure, and then when congress refused to fund those clowns he pointed his finger at congress as having lost the Vietnam war. Congress by the way, which was elected by the people, who were fine with ‘losing’ the Vietnam war as long as we got the fuck out.

What, are you the only right-wing nut who doesn’t believe that what Obama was aiming for all along was socialized medicine? Actually I had rather hoped he was aiming for that too, but like the rest of my lefty pals, I thought Obama was more lefty than he really is. Do I read you wrong or are you speaking in favor of socialized medicine, as in the Canadians seem pretty happy with it? Or is that just your way of saying it’s ok for Canadians, but not for Americans?

We should have had the single payer, we should have cut those blood-sucking insurance companies right out of the pie. You see their commercials all over the tv now, like everybody who belongs to some insurance group is one big happy family and are well cared for, but those greedy companies don’t cut out a single appendix, what they do is cut out a slice of what you pay the doctor.

You know the Republicans have slightly more than half the seats in congress, and the tea party types have slightly more than half of the Republican seats, and since Boehner won’t bring anything to a vote unless the majority of the Republicans are for it, that means a little over a quarter of the members of the house control the whole house. Well not really control, they can veto anything, but they can’t pass anything. But then they don’t care about passing anything, they are quite content to bring about votes against Obamacare which they lose everytime, but they don’t care because they get to tell the folks back home that they voted against it, and those are the folks that butter their bread. Well not all the folks back home, 60 percent is a pretty good margin, and let’s assume they get that. That makes it roughly an eighth of the voters in the country who are blocking anything from going on in congress.

There was a situation like that back in the 60s where the Senate ran on seniority and the south reelected the same people every time so all the heads of the committees were southerners and the only way any civil rights laws were passed was through wily LBJ.

There are signs that the tea party is weakening, but its base is so strong that I don’t know.