Teh Stoopid - It Burns!! (Part 2)

From last night's debate between Harry Reid and Tea Party fave Sharron Angle:

Angle: "...we need to support our military with all of our resources, not only our military in service right now, but those veterans and their families as well. That’s one of those priorities in the enumerated powers of our Constitution. We should be setting our priorities on our military.

But when you said this war is lost and said that General Petraeus was dishonest, that emboldened our enemies, dis-, demoralized our troops, and endangered them, and you need to apologize to them, Senator."

Hmmm. Let's see:

1. Disarm Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? NO GO - he didn't fucking have any, we knew that, and lied our asses off about it, ruining our credibility and staining our national honor. Big fucking NO GO.
2. Remove Saddam? GO - we did that
3. Install democratic pro-American regime in Baghdad? NO GO - at least so far, we have installed an Iranian client/theocratic kleptocracy
4. Reduce tensions in region? NO GO - still as much of a fucking powderkeg as ever, if not more.
5. Reduce the need for U.S. forces in ME? NO GO
6. Improve the lot of the Iraqi people NO GO - at least for now; the jury's still out on how this will play out. In the short run, a fail, given the immense death and misery the war produced.

That's one "GO" out of six tasks.

And I loves me some soldiers and some veterans, but "supporting them with all our resources" is an enumerated power of the Federal Government? What the fu...?

Article 1, Section 8, says that Congress has the power to:

"...declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; provide and maintain a Navy; make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; and to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;"

That's it. Nothing in there about vets, nothing in there about the degree to which the Congress and People of the U.S. are obliged to "support our military".

Christ, this idiocy makes me go all drill sergeant. Word up to young Private Angle: the armed forces of the United States are there to protect and defend the Constitution and the lives and, at the direction of the Congress and the orders of the officers appointed by the President, defend the lives and property of the citizens of the United States.

It's not the other way around, dummy. When the state exists to support the armed forces it called "fascism", knucklehead.

As I used to tell my trainees, "PVT Angle, you are a "NO GO" at this station. You have the option to retest imediately, or you will be retrained and retested at a later time.

What is your option?"

And what is OUR option? Congresscritter drone Reid versus this nutjob?

WASF.

Teh Stoopid - It Burns!

I don't think it's a big secret that I am not impressed with the "Tea Party" "movement".

From its rhetoric to its heroes, this camorra has always seemed to me to be nothing more than the more gooberist elements of the Republican Right whose desire not to pay taxes for anything while continuing to fund everything they enjoy (killing Muslims, subsidies for "small farmers", that sort of thing) exceeds even the fairly fantastic complacency of the less-unhinged elements of the GOP.

But this is really idiotic - GOP candidate and Tea Party flavor-of-the-week Christine O'Donnell;

"Well if you remember when we were fighting the Soviets over there in Afghanistan in the '80s and '90s, we did not finish the job, so now we have a responsibility to finish the job and if you are gonna make these politically correct statements that it's costing us too much money, you are threatening the security of our homeland."

Before we can have any sort of sensible discussion about our Little Wars in central Asia and the Middle East we need to have, at the very least, a grown-up understanding about What They Are and What They Are Not. And one thing - the most central thing - they ARE NOT is about the "security of our homeland".

The Taliban, including all its permutations, is not and never will be an existential threat to the continental U.S., Hawaii, Guam, the U.S.V.I. or anything else underneath our starry flag. Ain't now, never was, won't be, until the moment the Taliban High Seas Fleet hoves into view off the Virgina Capes or the Taliban Air Force pounds San Francisco flat (though given their philosophical differences O'Donnell would probably give the Talibs the City by the Bay...).

I'm not saying that there is NO argument for pursuing a conventional war on the Asian mainland or in the Middle East. But I am saying that if you try to halt the argument by saying that making a cost-benefit analysis of fighting cabinet wars is the equivalent of surrender then you're not arguing seriously, and, in fact, your credibility as a particpant in the entire discussion is in serious jeopardy.

I think that the Bush years have badly damaged the GOP and that is a problem, because the United States does need a party to speak for the political, economic, and social conservatives. But these Tea Partiers are starting to move - have moved - beyond the sort of crony-capitalist, national-security-state-Washington-Rules sort of intellectual poverty that dominated the GOP after two terms of Dubyism into real tinfoil hat territory. And if they come to dominate the party we as a nation are in real trouble; first because they will shift the national conversation WAY over towards Teh Crazy, and second, because their insistence in the political purity of their positions makes them ever less unlikely to accept compromise than when Karl Rove used the term to mean "bend the Democrats over and show them who runs things in D.C.".

I wish I could retire this term but, shit...WASF