Between a Rock and a Hard Place.



Bite your tongue; cross your fingers.

Elections are coming up.

And the prognosis is not good for progressives at this time if I read the tea leaves correctly.

After eight years of the Teflon kid, it turns out that responsibility for everything that has gone wrong, including the weather, has floated around aimlessly until it found a target in Obama.

According to the prophets of “know nothingness,” the Republican Party, the real culprit is Obama. He is the anti-Christ, the angel of doom and destruction, the Hitler of our time. Obama has become the convenient excuse of the Right Wing. And the cause of everything that is wrong in America today.


Blotto, you might say, what has happened to memory?

It must be something in the water, you say.

No, the truth is that the public wants easy answers.
Nobody wants to think, to exercise judgment, to take the time out to figure who is really responsible and Obama is such a convenient target.

Never would they consider the truth: That maybe, just maybe, they were the guilty ones for ignoring what was happening on their doorstep.

Who cared, after all, they were making money. And that’s all that counts!

And in the process, GWB got the pass he needed.

The pass to push legislation that would give him and his buddies everything they wanted. From expanded powers of State to muscling the big guys who make money out of war to fill their war chests and their portfolios.

And so it goes.

Where we are wrong is in believing government is fair and represents the people.

That’s not the way the Right views it at all.

They see it as simply a way to build portfolios and eliminate taxes.

The hell with what goes on; sooner or later, the dems will have to clean up the mess!

And so it goes.

Today, Obama although a hardened realist who straddles the middle and strives for consensus with those who hate the left, is between a rock and a hard place.

No matter what he does, republicans find fault.

It is a “no win” proposition!

The party of “No” gets ecstatic every chance they can turn something around to their advantage.

Obama is wrong for wanting health care for people. No matter that the nay=sayers have the best programs because it’s part of the deal of being a rep.

Then there’s the tea baggers who bitch and moan about everything the dems do. One might ask where were they over the last eight years when Bush screwed everyone with programs for his buddies….

Where were they when Bush invested billions in a Star Wars program that never worked and had to fake results?

Where were they when Bush did nothing to keep insurance rates down, when he created the Medicare bill that sent the cost of pharmaceuticals through the roof?

Where were they when he condoned the off-shore movement of jobs?

Where were they when Education costs went through the roof?

And where were they when housing foreclosures forced millions of homeowners give up home and hearth.

That was the democrats’ fault, too?

We could go on.

Did we need to spend two trillion dollars for a War that we didn’t need?

But that was okay!

Everything Bush did was okay….because he was an American, a white boy who told dirty jokes.

And he was a conservative.

Only, he was a Reagan conservative who grew government faster than any democratic president ever.

And he never missed an opportunity to take care of his friends.

If these tea-baggers are serious, which I doubt, they need to rethink what they are saying and start considering the facts.

It’s not health care that’s going to put them into the poorhouse, it’s eight years of self-serving policies and bad legislation that has virtually pushed us towards the brink.

Be that as it may, the real problem staring us in the face is that we are in danger of losing too many seats to the opposition.

If this occurs as it now seems likely, there is a very real possibility that all democratic initiatives will be halted and that the republicans will continue policies of increasing debt,
supporting banking programs that are aimed at keeping the rich in power, and dismantling efforts taken by democrats to impose rules and control on business while putting the brakes on programs for small business and home town America.

If the republicans take over, and nothing else changes, we may be surprised to find democracy subjected to a bloodless coup and overlaid by a kind of authoritarianism that operates behind closed doors to continue the advance the interests of the few over the many and continuing the attack on the middle class and the erosion of the concept of America as the last best hope of mankind.

The only unknowable in this equation is whether man has the capacity to bring about change. And make the tough decisions.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

Snookered.

Every day, there is more evidence that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over!

We naively thought that when the term of the Bush presidency was fulfilled, we could go on and repair the damage he did and get back to business. In virtually every way, the optimists have been proven wrong.

It is beginning to appear as if Bush is the present from the Right Wing that keeps on giving. More evidence of that slipped out in the past few weeks. Remember, our ally Pakistan; a country that took the term “weaponizing” to new heights?… Well, after America caught up with a ship loaded down with components for Libya’s nuclear weapon-building program, our government pressured Musharef to put Kahn under the equivalent of house arrest. Kahn was blamed for putting together nuclear programs with others on our enemies list, including North Korea. In this, they had been aided and abetted by China who saw Pakistan as the enemy of their enemy, India.

What we didn’t know at the time was that it was Musharef’s government that had been and continued to double deal with our enemies. While they were taking money from us and seemed to have their own nuclear weaponry under control, the truth was that they were working with terrorists governments, like Iran, to help them build their nuclear capabilities.

The Bush’s government’s failure to apply critical pressure to Pakistan during this watershed, when we could still had sufficient clout to do so, encouraged Pakistan to continue with its program of aiding and abetting the enemies of the West. As a result, all of the organizations and policies in place aimed at preventing nuclear expansionism were never used and are now after the fact. We now know through secret sources that many of these countries listed on the most dangerous lists, now have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to Pakistan and the aid of the Chinese, making the world a much more dangerous place than we could ever imagine.

While Cheney has harped on Bush’s success in keeping us out of War, he never touches on the truth that the democratic government of Obama has inherited a much more dangerous world and that the Bush government has set the stage for a much more dangerous outcome than we might have ever expected or anticipated.

Have the Winds of Change Been Reversed?



The Middle East.

We have enough information available to make a prediction

But first, let’s take a look at the background.

When we first became engaged with Iraq during the First Gulf War, it seemed that we would be in and out in a matter of months and that would be it.

We will have made our point, returned the borders to what they were, and kicked Saddam in the pants.

But it has not worked out that way.

Yes, we accomplished our short term goals.

It is the longer term one’s that have eluded this country.

While the American people sat still for all of the reasons for wanting to go to War, the murkiness never went away and although we skirted around what really happened, the troops were content to believe that we went back to Iraq to settle for what happened on 9/11; that was the immediate reason.

Only, it never happened; it was a fiction created by the Pentagon and the “inner circle” of Neo-cons to justify their intentions of bringing Iraq under the power of America. For what reason?

It is hard despite all of the smokescreen to think that this is about anything but commodities, the power and riches that oil infers.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and anyone who understands the positions of both leaders, Saddam and bin Laden, would have no trouble understanding that these two men were polar opposites.

The unceasing hunt for more resources, however, is another matter.

Few know or recall that the allies of the Al Qaeda who controlled Afghanistan would be important allies in any program to transport Caspian Sea oil to other locations throughout the West…

We also seem to forget that the president of Afghanistan was an operative with Unocal; or that Iraq has the world’s fourth largest supply of oil remaining in the ground. Therefore, this author believes it was only a matter of time before we would find a way to take what they had. We saw it at the off-limits Energy session sponsored by Dick Cheney. We saw the motivation popping up in Neo-con references and comments…
And if 9/11 hadn’t happened, it would have had to be invented!

Because it opened Iraq to being victimized by public relations aimed at linking the country with events in New York.

Everyone who was objective and fair thinking objected to the assumptions but only the president, exercising his rights through Executive Privilege and whatever he was able to take away from Congress, was able to speed through the arguments for going to War and setting up the Pentagon to become his new research branch, the branch that rubber stamped everything he, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted.

That was eight years ago!

We are still there.

We’ve had an election since and voted in a democrat, a democrat who won because he had the support of the Left and the Progressives and many of the Independents who were turned off on Bush conservatism and bad policies….

If the best the Left can do is to continue with Bush policies, especially in the Middle East, we should all take a long break and ask ourselves what that really means.

Keeping abreast of the latest news, we see that Al Qaeda is far from dead in Iraq.

In fact, they are seeking to keep Iraq alive and on our front pages with plots to steal a plane and use it to attack one of Iraq’s most cherished mosques.

What does this mean to us?

It means that we may be forced to reexamine our plans to depart Iraq on schedule.

As part of the exit strategy, we had agreed to reconsider if Iraq asks us to stay….

Will we? Should we?

We are now approaching having as many Allied troops in Afghanistan as we had in Iraq.

And we are winding down in Iraq, according to Cabinet Secretary Gates.

As I see it, if our present commitment is the best the representative of the Liberal Democrats can expect, it looks to me as if we have another Cuba on our hands, and a much deadlier one that will outlive many American presidents.

I say this because president Obama seems to be listening intently to Gates, and his generals including McCrystal who seems to believe that we need to perform a hands-on role of pacifying what is generally considered impossible to pacify, the northern provinces of Afghanistan and the border regions with Pakistan.

If this is all we can hope for in light of the new clamor being made by the followers of Al Qaeda, our tenure in both countries is not going to end next year, or the year after or the year after that.

Consider that we have been in a peacekeeping role in Korea since 1953….more than fifty years!

I would be willing at this time, based upon what we know and suspect, that our participation with troops and money will last at least until 2025…and there is no guarantee it will end there….

What will this mean?

It will mean we will continue to play a subservient role to China.

It will mean that our institutions at home will suffer.

That jobs and futures will be affected.

That there will not be enough money to support both our schools and our troops.

That prison populations will increase.

That recidivism will increase proportionately considering our present record.

And that more and more of the Western world will be influenced by Arab voices seeking the destruction of the West.

I don’t personally see any solutions over the short term.

And there are few great men, or women, on the horizon to change our direction
As a nation.

I may be perilously wrong; but I don’t see it based on experience and historical perspective.

The only qualifier here is the people, themselves; whether they will wake up and recognize their power to change things.

And alter the course of events.

And that could be the game-changer we are all after.

Respectfully submitted,