the one true path to enlightenment and good government.

I don’t see why Obama wants to leave troops in Afghanistan anymore than I understood why he wanted to leave them in Iraq. If it’s some little flurry, they are going to stay in their bases and not bother. If there is some big flurry, we are still going to want to keep our troops in their bases because we don’t want to get involved in a big war like we just got out of.

I think if we could find some sort of moderate Taliban to take over that would be the best of all possible worlds for us. Of course, how would we know they were really moderate, and how would we know they wouldn’t be overturned by some more radical group? Still that is the best of all possible Afghanistan worlds for us.

Once we have established relationships with Cuba it will be hard to remember why we were so all-fired pissed against them. It’s only a happenstance of the long gone cold war that happened over maybe five years fifty years ago that put them on the shit list. There are plenty of countries with more oppressive governments that we are all palsy walsy with.

This canard about businessmen being nobler or more efficient or more honest than politicians is just a bunch of bushwa.

First, businesses fail at an astounding rate, and businessmen go to jail far more often than politicians. Since they don’t have to run for office their crooked deals don’t come to light every few years like they do for politicians. If they had to run for their position against other businessmen, who would be tossing mud at them, their suits wouldn’t be all shiny clean.

Secondly they are basically the same guys. Some take the political road and some take the business road. And generally they move back and forth between the two. A businessman gets rich and decides to run for something. A politician drops out and there is always some business ready to take him in with open arms for his connections.

The thing is when a business fails, or some corporate head winds up in the slammer, most people think no skin off their nose, but when the same thing happens to a politician people get pissed because somehow they feel like these people are their employees and they have betrayed them, and half the time these are the people they voted for so now they have to sort of blame themselves and that really pisses people off.

What your poor misguided daughter is calling for by wanting corporations to run the government (like they don’t already, but that is another argument) is throwing away the right to vote.

Hey wait, didn’t you have a businessman running in the last republican primary, and didn’t you hate him?

Anyway the thing is we elect the politicians. If they turn out to be a bunch of crooks and evildoers the fault is at our feet. We should have studied the issues and the players. But wait, don’t you and I do that very thing and in every election won’t we be rooting for an almost opposite slate of candidates?

Well that is because we are divided. Isn’t there only one true path to enlightenment and good government? Well, probably not, but it has such a nice ring. Anyway we have to stop being divided, we have to thrash out our differences in an excellent, though not very successful forum such as this one, and then we will all be headed for nirvana, no wait, not nirvana, heaven, or maybe Las Vegas.  It is so hard to tell in these troubled times.