The Quicksand Empire and its Lost President

I seem to remember making the very point that some Dems in Congress are making now (ah, yes back in August) — that we cannot afford any further human and economic waste in Afghanistan. I’m glad to hear that the Speaker and many of her blue friends are coming round.

Vets of the war will be descending on Washington one more time to remind their Commander in Chief of the truth, the reality of his little game. They’ll be taking along a petition signed by Americans who know better than their President — I hope your name’s on it.

I was talking last week with someone who chose to defend Obama’s surge: he said that it’s only a clean-up operation to make the exit safe and clean both there and politically at home. He assured me that it would all be shutting down by this time next year. How many kids of ours and innocents of theirs, I wondered, will have to die in the coming year, to make this break clean and the Presidential image appropriately shiny?

Obviously, the President should not be made to bear the blame alone for this disastrously persistent quagmire. It’s the culture of Washington: it is a quicksand factory. They roll in it like flies in wet shit; they revel in it; they export it around the world. Quicksand in Afghanistan, quicksand on Wall St., quicksand in Gitmo, quicksand in Iraq, quicksand on the unemployment line, quicksand on Capitol Hill. Yet it is we and innocents around the world who suffocate.

How many of the 34,000 kids to be sent over will no longer be breathing by next year? How many more will have to die for a corrupt druglord, vote-stealing chieftan of a country that has been a charnel house for every army that has ever occupied it since Biblical times?

Another truth that has been recurrently demonstrated amid the human race since the Biblical era: if you would like to see a good man thoroughly ruined and disgraced, just give him power, and a lot of it. He will spawn his own undoing for you.