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1 comment:
OK, a couple of things:
First, while I find your media commentary interesting, informative, and helpful in the digestion of some of the things that I encounter on this here computer screen, I don't feel as if I can engage with it in these comments, mostly because I'm sixty years old and have never owned a television. Best to avoid ranting about shit I'm entirely ignorant of, if I can help it.
Second, Bad Tux wrote a post a few months ago outlining just why we could not in fact have "won" the Vietnam war. It was rich with on the ground details and with the substitution of a few names could have been describing Afghanistan.
That was a few months ago, before every goddamn jackass newscaster decided to make the awful, awful pictures of the Kabul airport about the guy trying to evacuate it instead of any of the despicable fucks that put us there in the first place.
Ani DiFranco so aptly described the goddamn overreaction to 9-11 thusly:
And I'll tell you what, while we're at it
You can keep the pentagon
Keep the propaganda
Keep each and every tv
That's been trying to convince me
To participate
In some prep school punk's plan to perpetuate retribution
...with the pronunciation of those last two lines a reminder of why it is that they say someone is "spitting" their rhymes.
Perhaps now, after twenty years of constant effort, Barbara Lee may actually get the goddamn AUMF repealed, but if so, only after the media frenzy has died down and the Republican revenue streams from the demagoguery of the war they started and lost dies down.
Someone on Twitter last week pointed out that the evacuation is the only thing we've done right in Afghanistan in twenty years, and while that may be an overstatement and an over simplification, when you consider the fact that we should never have "invaded" in the first place, I say it stands.
Lastly, remember when us anti-war folks were derided as un-American and a host of other invective calling our patriotism into question?
We were the ones who believed that the American system of justice was robust enough to easily handle the crime that was 9-11. We didn't think there needed to be special military trials, torture, Guantanamo, and overseas invasions to deal with a bunch of backward-ass theocrats who couldn't even get the tenants of their own religion right.
They were so terrified that they wanted to throw something really big at the problem they had allowed to happen, and their faith in America as it really exists was feeble at best.
But they were all about revenge, and making their dicks look bigger than Islamic dicks, and their decisions were made in the service of that, and what we have now is 100% the result of such "prep school punks' plan to perpetuate retribution" instead of a criminal justice mission to neutralize Osama bin Laden and his band of assholes.
Which is the answer to "Well, why didn't Obama get us out when he had the chance?" Osama bin Laden was still alive when Obama inherited the war, and the only real purpose for us to ever be there at all was still not accomplished.
Thank you again for the podcast. And thank Blue Gal for her IKotW archive; it helped me weasel out of answering a blogger's teasing over me not having my own blog: She wanted to see what my cat looked like, so I posted her a link...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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