A Balanced, Well Reasoned Analysis

Because these things have a way of sneaking up on us, it's never too early to start analyzing the upcoming Presidential election from the perspective of a typical Republican leaning independent voter:

Former President George W. Bush, Simple W. to friend and foe alike, and as Republican as you can get, came into office with a budget surplus which he quickly turned into the largest deficit in history. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, would go even further than Bush in cutting taxes--the root of the deficit. The Democratic incumbent, Barack Obama, would return taxes to the level of the Clinton years. However, Obama is black.

Goaded on by his Vice President, Dick Cheney, or if your prefer, the Dark Lord Cheney, Bush then started two "unfunded" wars. The one in Iraq was completely uncalled for and will cost us as a nation well over a trillion dollars. Romney's foreign affairs advisers are all Bush retreads. Barack Obama ended US combat involvement in Iraq, oversaw the elimination of Osama Bin Laden, and is winding down the US presence in Afghanistan. But Obama is still black.

The world wide economic meltdown was caused for the most part by an unregulated gang of Wall Street bandits who fancy themselves "Masters of the Universe." They wreaked havoc on the industrialized countries with a series of financial instruments so complexly structured that few understood them. Mitt Romney who was himself one of these "Masters of the Universe" would prefer that Wall Street be totally unregulated and we let the "free market" decide everything. Obama has called for more--not less--regulation of Wall Street.  However Obama remains black.

Health care in the US is much more expensive than in any other nation. Yet our life expectancy lags and we have millions of uninsured citizens. Mitt Romney is fine with this. Being a multi-millionaire, he has no worries about the cost of health care. "Whatever the market will bear" seems to be his motto. Despite the determined efforts of the Republican party, Obama was able to pass the first major overhaul of the US healthcare system in 40 years. It's major flaw is that it doesn't go far enough. Romney has promised to repeal every aspect of the President's program, once again depriving millions of people of healthcare.

As you can see, it will be a very tough decision for the undecided. Romney? Wrong about everything. Obama? Black.

Making The Hard Choices

'Tis the season of this politician or that harping on the terrifically onerous burden we all face of "making the hard choices."

Hard choices?

Let's see, should we continue putting the squeeze on the poor and middle class or raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires? Hmmm.

How about Federal subsidies for ridiculously profitable oil companies? Maybe we should send that money to the green energy side of the ledger instead?

What makes more sense, cutting a few hundred billion from the Pentagon or eliminating Head Start and the hot lunch program for school kids? Redundant arms systems or Pell Grants?

Make it easier for corporations to ship jobs overseas or harder?

Leave a few hundred thousand troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or start to rebuild America's infrastructure?

Hand Social Security over to the thieves on Wall Street or simply raise the existing wage limits to insure its solvency forever?

Leave your healthcare at the mercy of the "for profit" insurance companies or replace what we have with a single payer, Medicare for all system?

See, for a sane and honest person, these aren't "hard" choices at all.

Ahh, "sane and honest", there's the rub...

Forgetting the Past

This post is about Afghanistan. I was going to call it The Graveyard of Empires, but then I read an article in some foreign policy mag that claimed at great and learned length that that was an incorrect description of Afghanistan and I got really confused.

Which is only fitting, because confusion seems to be at the core of what we are dealing with.

What we have here is a primitive, incredibly poor, collection of tribes and loosely affiliated factions, masquerading as a country. A country that just happens to be strategically located and sitting on a fortune of minerals. A fortune that they do not have the wherewithal to exploit. And as the history of the world shows, if you cannot exploit, then you will be exploited. For the most part the Afghan people are illiterate or uneducated and shackled by religion and age old customs. How you change that in a couple of years is beyond me.

President Obama is a highly intelligent man, but one lesson American Presidents never seem to learn and retain, no matter how smart they are, is that it is much easier to get into a war than it is to get out of a war. Especially when there is no clearly defined goal. Osama Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda has metastasized. So what do we want now? A stable, let alone democratic Afghanistan? I'm not sure any of us will live to see that. Certainly not as long as the Pashtun region remains untamed. And pacifying the Pashtun without the complete cooperation of Pakistan is impossible. As we have seen, "Pakistani cooperation" is a sometimes thing, indeed almost an oxymoron.

The fact is that Afghanistan will only enter the 21st Century when the majority of its people want to enter the 21st Century. Until then, you can keep as many troops there as you like, spend a king's ransom, and all you'll end up with is a handful of sand. And a bigger graveyard.