Tag Archives: obama

Political Rants

Next round.

Sure, I’m surprised that the Affordable Care Act survived this past Thursday. I thought the mainstream media was going to talk it to death, frankly. Talk about wind-ups … by the time 10:00 a.m. rolled around, I was too bleeping sick of the issue to even care, and let me tell you – that’s quite a distance for me. It’s just that the horserace coverage of every political issue gets under my skin in the worst way. The merits of a given issue are never deeply examined; it’s always he said this, she said that. No way to work out which is closer to the truth.

They did this with health care, pretty much all day. After the decision was handed down, NPR had some guy from Cato and a policy wonk from the administration. Basically just put them in a room and watch them spar. Of course, Cato guy is much further to the right than the Obama person is to the left, so it’s kind of a straw man argument at best. How is this news? They pulled the same thing with the “Fast and Furious” faux-scandal. Even though Fortune Magazine blogger Katherine Eban blew a hole in the standard story about this a full day before, NPR, NBC, and other mainstream outlets were still framing the argument the same way – the GOP want documents, Holder and Obama say no. He said, they said.

What about the merits of the Affordable Care Act? I was never a big fan. It is, of course, a conservative idea, like cap and trade – market-based policy designed to head off something saner and more effective. Basically profit insurance in its purest form. Nevertheless, it establishes the concept of national health insurance for the first time, so that’s a minor step forward. The mandate requirement includes a penalty that the Supreme Court has called a tax; there’s a shocker. I wrote about this herein a few times, I think, most recently in March. Arguably any cost the government imposes can be described as a tax. I would go so far as to say that the failure to provide affordable universal coverage is a kind of tax, since everyone ends up paying through the nose as a result of its absence.

The G.O.P. is crowing because it thinks it has a tax issue for the coming election. All I can say is that, for all their bluster, they are responsible for the single largest tax hike I have ever had – their refusal to renew the “Making Work Pay” tax credit cost me $800 last year, as it did millions of other Americans. Where’s your tax issue now, boys?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Memento mori.

Another Memorial Day come and gone. PBS played the annual extravaganza in Washington D.C., replete with stars of stage, screen, and studio, in some respects bizarre beyond description. It always strikes me as odd that a day reserved to commemorate the dead from this nation’s wars should carry such hyper-patriotic overtones. As I watch, I keep wanting to say, “Take it down a notch – that’s the kind of talk that got them all killed.” It’s long been my contention that the very ostentatious hero-ization of our active military and veterans is, at its heart, an effort to make our pointless wars seem somehow noble and just. The laptop bombardiers crowing “hero!” most loudly are the ones who gladly see their heroes shipped off for a fifth tour of duty. Doesn’t bear close inspection.

Perhaps even stranger is the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the American war in Vietnam – like that was something to celebrate. Obama spoke to this point during his Memorial Day address at the Vietnam memorial wall, and I have to say that his central point was one that Reagan might have made twenty years ago.

And one of the most painful chapters in our history was Vietnam — most particularly, how we treated our troops who served there. You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor. You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.

Um… really, Mr. President? We’ve heard this trope before – the insinuation that people opposed to the war blamed the people fighting it, spat on them when they returned, etc. Bullshit. They were our friends, our brothers, our uncles, our fathers. A lie like this assumes that people don’t remember how close every 18-24 year old male was to being press-ganged into that war via the draft. It was not us and them; it was us and us. What’s more, many of them were at the forefront of resistance to the war. I have a local vet to thank for much of what I know about that awful conflict.

And… the “actions of a few”? What few? The people running the administration at the time? This makes it sound as though Vietnam was some noble enterprise sullied by isolated incidents of nastiness. What could be further from the truth? Vietnam was a dirty war of malevolent intent from the very beginning, not a mistake or a tragic chapter – a crime. It is a crime that should not be blamed on those forced to participate in it; but rather on those who formulated that policy that resulted in the destruction of three countries.

That’s where that “hero” jiu-jitsu comes in. Criticize the war and the pro-war pirates claim you’re criticizing the troops, as if the troops are responsible for the conflict. They were not then, and they are not today. That’s down to us … and to the scoundrels heaping praise on our military as they plan yet another pointless war.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Go, Dick.

This is going to be brief. My back is a disaster area today, and that’s no Jonathan Harris imitation.

I was listening to President Obama speaking at the NATO summit this past week, talking about ending the Afghan War “responsibly”. And I had this impulse to say, “Thanks, Nixon!” Back in the day, old Dick was winding down his war, so to speak, standing up a colonial army (the ARVN – south Vietnamese army) and always talking about “peace with honor” after nearly a decade of mindless slaughter. They were fighting “terrorists” as well – just look at Life magazine or some other news publication from the late 1960s and you’ll see that that was one of the terms they used to describe the Viet Cong (NLF). Not so different.

Except that it was actually more brutal, as brutal and ugly as the Afghan war has been and continues to be. Vietnam and more generally Indochina was almost totally destroyed during the American war there, particularly from 1962 forward. People are still being killed by that war, by virtue of tons of unexploded ordinance, Agent Orange hotspots all over the south, and more. I don’t want to minimize that fact. For every drone strike Obama launches, there were likely 1,000 sorties over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia dropping high explosives, napalm, and cluster bombs by the ton. The fact that this likely would not be tolerated today speaks to a gradual increase in our collective humanity. If anything constrains our leaders, it’s that.

Still, even within these constraints, we can do a lot of damage. The drone strikes are a very easy option for the administration. It’s a political winner, since American lives are not put in jeopardy, and it has the vague perception of accuracy going for it, though our targets have very little to say on the subject (because they are, of course, dead). It is a very corrosive weapon, though, on both legal and moral grounds, and it is likely causing a great deal more hatred of the United States than could be propagated by the likes of those we are targeting. Like Nixon’s (and LBJ’s) Vietnam war, it is approached as a project of eliminating the “bad guys” so that there will be fewer of them. That, of course, does not work and never will. Aside from being wrong, it is strategically stupid, and it is putting us in greater danger with every attack.

Still, the alternative to our little Nixon is Reagan on steroids – a Romney administration following a neocon-powered foreign policy, with multiple additional wars on tap. That being the case, well… Nixon’s the one.

luv u,

jp