Category Archives: Americana

Wow, the coin has two left sides

Americana, Politics

Yesterday, on Facebook, almost every post that isn’t about cute animals is about Mattis and what a disaster his quitting is. Over at Twitter, everybody I follow thinks it is great, well, good.

A Facebook sample: Syria yesterday, Afghanistan today. No planning. No collaboration within admin. I think our fake president is an imminent threat to our safety. He is incapable of honoring his oath to protect the country.

A Twitter sample I’m confused as to why Mattis has been the recipient of so much love– he has been a willing participant in all of Trump’s insane racist bullshit and now he’s resigning because he wants to continue to carpet bomb civilians across the middle east forever.

Another Twitter sample: The hysterical reaction to the decision to withdraw troops from Syria is astonishing & shows just how attached to war some are. Lindsey Graham & others want us to continue our regime change war in Syria and to go to war with Iran. That’s why they’re so upset.

I’m with the Twitter group. We’ve been at these wars for 17 years. Does anybody really think we are going to change these countries in the next year? in the next five years? Yeah, we’re screwing the Kurds, but, realistically, whenever we leave we are going to end up screwing them. Maybe the Taliban will beat the Northern Alliance but can’t we console ourselves with the fact that we stirred up the Taliban, to fight the Northern Alliance, in the first place so they can’t be entirely evil. 

My preference is that Obama would have gotten us out in his, careful, thoughtful, way.  I know that Trump wants to get out in his usual, incompetent,  petulant, way and quite possibly he only wants to get out to get money for his stupid wall. I also want to acknowledge that this is no way to treat our friends and allies. Somebody on Facebook said that our allies will think they can’t trust us, well, as long as Trump is President, they can’t and the sooner they learn that, the better. Still, we can’t lay that entirely on Trump, after all, it was Henry Kissinger who said: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests” and it my opinion staying in an endless war in Afghanistan or Syria is not in our interest. 

 

 

Alternate Universes

Americana

I woke up at 4:15 in the morning, a couple of days ago and couldn’t go back to sleep. That is very rare for me but I do have a sort of pseudo-cure; get up and get cold. In this case, I got up in the cold house, didn’t get dressed, and sat in the dining room reading the news from the New York Times and Fox News. The difference was shocking. The top headline in the New York Times was Playing by His Own Rules, Trump Flips the Shutdown Script

Over at FOX News, the headline was: Migrant group demand Trump either let them in or pay them each $50G to turn around: WTF? 

The Second headline at The Times was: TURMOIL IN EUROPE Britain’s Conservatives Will Vote Today Whether to Topple Theresa May.

At FOX, it said: Earthquake, magnitude 4.4, rattles Tennessee, Georgia…The quake hit about six miles north of Decatur around 4:15 a.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey The shaking was felt by residents as far away as Atlanta — about 149 miles south of the epicenter. I wondered why it wasn’t in The Times and the only explanation I could come up with was that this is flyover country, the hell with them. 

And the beat went on, can you guess which news source had the following headlines in the third spot? Michael Cohen, Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Who Implicated Him in Hush-Money Scandal, Faces Sentencing……Court docs reveal shocking difference between FBI’s treatment of Hillary, general [Flynn]

BTW, in only a few short minutes, I was cold and tired, went back to bed, and immediately fell asleep.