General Jack Keane was on Diane Rehm this instant.. He is a proponent
of a change of mission in Iraq to the security of the population which
will require a surge of 20 - 40,000 troops.  I happen to agree with
him.  Listen to what he has to say: he pretty well explains what should
have begun happening immediately after Fallujah.

 Here's the thing: if you are a male of the Barack Obama/Billie Bush
Generation, between 16 and 35 years old or you have a son between 16
and 24,  and you have the same moral values as Dick Cheney, Rush
Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich in regards to military service, you better
hope this works. Thanks to 25 years of conservatism and 6 years of
Bushie's tax cuts, we're fucked without a draft if this doesn't
work.  I mean, among other things, there are 550 Abrams tanks sitting
in a motor pool waiting for repair because there isn't any money in
the budget to fix them to pay for that tax rebate stunt that Bushie
America is about as flat-footed after 5 years as America was AFTER
Pearl Harbor.  Our Army was too small then and lost the garrison in the
Philippines to add injury of the insult of Battle Ship Row and the
civilian sector pretty well has its head stuck up its ass, more
concerned about whether Britney Spears is wearing panties or Miss
America should keep her crown for having too much fun than what the
sand people are dealing with in the name of The Project for the New
American Century.

I mean, it must make you proud to be a part of the Swift Boat Veterans
for T. Boone Picken's Tax Subsidies to watch the war making
capacities of the world's last super power grind to a halt for a lack
of cold hard cash.  You know that bumper sticker that yearns for the
day when the military will have to hold a bake sale to pay for an
aircraft carrier?  Thanks to conservatism, that day is upon us.  If you
are a subscriber to VeteransforVictory.com, you sound like Ditto Heads,
and it is people who think like Rush Limbaugh who thought it was smart
to fire Eric Shinseki.

One of my heroes of Iraqi Freedom is Ltc. Steve Russell, who was the CO
of the 1st/22nd Infantry, which is the unit I served with in the
Central Highlands.  Russell is retired, now, and he is involved with
these people.  All I can say is that Jim Webb was part of this segment
of the Vietnam veteran's population until Bushie went into Iraq and
now he is basically on the same side as Jane Fonda.  With me and
retired officers like Colin Powell and General Keene.  As far as I am
concerned, when Webb was aligned with the Veterans for Victory crowd,
he was being pulled around by his dick.  And, now, Ltc Russell (ret)
has taken his place.  He may believe in what he is doing, but I can
only reflect that he has earned his right to his own opinion.

I mean, who cares if Miss USA has had sex only twice: once with the
Green Bay Packers and once with the Red Chinese Army?  That's a lot
of work, but she's young and it's why I went to Vietnam in the
first place. She admits to underage drinking?  We have a president who
spent 40 years becoming a drunk and then built a political career by
repenting his rowdy youth.

Speaking of Bushie's military career: yesterday on Washington
Journal, a Bush voter called in and was allowed to go on at some length
about how Bushie had volunteered for Vietnam as a National Guard puke,
but that he wasn't qualified to fly the aircraft they had in Vietnam,
so his request was turned down.

        Bushie may have volunteered to go to Vietnam, but he didn't try very
hard.  If you could fly a kite and wanted to go downtown, the Air Force
would fall all over itself to bring you up to speed on what they were
flying in Vietnam.  Bushie was in the National Guard to avoid going to
Vietnam while being able to continue the college boy rowdy life style
he perfected at Yale. Actually going to Vietnam would have spoiled the
effect.  Mission Accomplished.

        On a related subject, Chris Core announced to day that he is changing
his mind about the legalization of pot.  He read a Harvard study that
correctly points out that hemp is one of America's biggest cash crop
and he reflected that the quantifiable market for dope suggesting that
the War on Drugs isn't going much better than the war in Iraq.

        He is exactly correct.  The War on Drugs is yet another artifact of
conservatism as an element of the Reagan-Bush/Karl Rove political
agenda.  There isn't a dime's worth of difference between the War
on Drugs and the 18th Amendment: both violate natural law.  The 21st
Amendment is evidence that legislating against natural law may be
noble, but it is unavailing and needs to be discontinued if not avoided
in the first place.  Given the 21st Amendment, as an example of the
product of 20/20 hindsight arising from the Hegelian historical
processes embedded in the US Constitution, the War on Drugs is an
exercise in applied stupidity.  The War on Drugs is financing terrorism
in the same way the 18th Amendment financed Los Vegas and The Project
for the New American Century has supplied the manpower and the petri
dish conditions for global insurgency.  And Chris Core has just started
to connected the dots on the War on Drugs.

        Better late than never, Chris, but don't stop with the $8 billion in
law enforcement we can more usefully direct at repairing 550 Abrams
tanks.  Before the Reagan people came to town, there were about 100,000
prisoners in America's prison system.  After the Reagan people came
to town and cranked up the War on Drugs and allowed private prison
corporations to list on the NYSE, the prison population has grown in
more or less constant terms to about 2.2 million people, which is
larger than everyone but China.  Red China.  Who have employed slave
labor to drive their economy until Hong Kong accelerated the
transformation of Marxist theological communism into a form of Marxist
entrepreneurial socialism and slave labor is becoming a burden to the
emergent entrepreneurial impulse.

The cost to America for its Gulag is $20,000 per person in opportunity
loss for everyone in the system, including the administration.  A
prison system is a necessary cost in a republican-based democratic
milieu such as America, but it needs to be as minimal as possible in
terms of populations.  America gets a much bigger bang for its buck
from its military community, including dependents because the wasting
process is at the end of the dynamic and doesn't define the dynamic.
The opportunity loss is in addition to , and at least equal to, the
administrative costs of the system.

 And when Chris Core begins to connect these dots, he will begin to
measure the foolishness of his own intellectual conceits as they are
embraced of conservatism.  And if he is honest, these connections will
chisel the crack in the cosmic egg of his own perceptions and he will
be struck momentarily blind by the resulting revelation.  I hope he
isn't driving, but it would make great radio.  The sort of thing Peter
Rosenberg and The Franchise were trying to do.

          And then he will connect the dots further and, lo and behold, there
will be Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat majority on the leading edge of a
renewed political realism and the only people standing in the way think
and vote like William F. Buckely, Jr,, and the Zionist Fascist cabal of
the Karl Rove wing of the GOP.  Which included Chris Core before he
realized that the War on Drugs was dumber than dog shit.

        And that' the truth.

20 December 2006

        Col. Paul Hughes was on Diane Rehm this instant explaining the logic
of a draw down of US troops and the embedding of trainers with the Iraq
Army.  These 2 agendas are complimentary in nature and the mystery to
me is why they haven't been implemented at this point.  It is a
measure of the narrowness of Rumsfeld's command of the military arts
and sciences and he was the best the neo-cons could put forward.  The
administration and its apologists can blame the media and the Democrats
all they want about the fiasco in Iraq, but the whole project began to
go into the toilet when Paul Wolfowitz fired Eric Shinseki, As I say,
whatever planning for the occupation there was evaporated with
Shinseki.

        A total withdrawal seems to be Diane Rehm's preferred option, but it
really isn't viable.  Gen. Keane observed that the military option he
recommends is not the solution, but the means to the politicsal
solution. At best, it's a crap shoot. Bushie has built his entire
career on raising on a busted flush with the expectation that Bush the
Elder would buy the pot and bail him out.  Now, he wants to call on
Aces and 8s, but he has to add troops to the pot on the wan hope that
the troops will be able to bail him out.  

        And that's the truth.