It wasn’t my plan to write about politics four days before the day of our savior’s birth, but...that’s 2018 for you. In a year marked by an unending series of baffling ineptitude in high places, the last few days have brought the chaos to a fever pitched crescendo. In less than 36 hours we have witnessed the President declare the fight against ISIS won, followed by the resignation of his Defense Secretary in protest, and a government shutdown hanging by a thread in the United States Senate over a 5 billion dollar appropriation for the border wall...or roughly the amount of wealth wiped out by the stock market’s reaction to this shit show during the first five minutes of the President’s explanation of the mess during his press conference. Yesterday afternoon was a dizzying example of what the world becomes when you decide to elect a television show as president.
I don’t care about the wall one way or the other. It’s a football, and a meaningless one. Every President, from both parties, over the past twenty five years has voiced support for a wall. The amount of money requested by the President doesn’t even qualify as a rounding error in a trillion dollar budget. This is about politics, not border security. It’s posturing, not policy. Given the meaningless impact it will have either way, the fact that it can shut down the government is an open, mocking rebuke of logic and reason.
As far as Gen. Mattis’s resignation goes...I do care, but not all that much. When Trump was first elected, one of the things that I hung my hat on was the idea that he would surround himself with competent, professional patriots who would discourage him from his most loony tendencies. The lynchpin of this strategy was...General Mattis, the adult’s adult. Now that he has finally had enough, I count exactly zero adults left in the administration. Maybe you can count Pence? It’s hard to tell about him though...sometimes when he’s sitting there in the Oval Office listening to Trump prattle on about some cockamamie idea in the full hearing of a dignified foreign leader and the press corps, he has the look of a man gazing upon a chimpanzee in a suit juggling a bottle of nitroglycerin, a ticking bomb and the nuclear codes while blindfolded...struck dumb by the spectacle, and powerless to do a single thing about it!
What I do care about is the President’s decision to withdraw the 5,000 American troops from Syria. Word on the street is that this edict will be soon followed by a similar edict for Afghanistan. I have spent the last 36 hours reading all the Washington DC beltway crowd along with all the smart internationalists among us decrying this betrayal of our allies. I have listened to all the pearl clutching pundits declaring this withdrawal as a dark day for American leadership in the world. In response, I have the following to say:
# How does the presence of a mere 5000 troops guarantee anything but an eternal presence in a war zone? If the threat of ISIS is so potentially catastrophic to the survival of civilization, why have we committed so few to the fight? And...where the hell are the troops representing the rest of civilization?? Where are France’s divisions? Great Britain’s? Where are the legions of blue helmeted United Nations troops rushing to fill in the gaps in the line? The foreign policy gurus at the State Department who have set this open ended, unending, and unwinnable war on terror before us have never had a plan for victory. Their plan has always been a permanent presence on foreign soil of the American military as some sort of mythical deterrent. What I see as the result of this is permanent hostility towards America in that part of the world. What I would like to ask each of these pearl clutching pundits is this...Why do you insist on asking American men and women to continue to die trying to save the lives of people who hate us?
Every week, news trickles in about some marine who stepped on an IED in some backwater village somewhere a million miles from here. Nobody cares except the kid’s parents. Why? Why did we ask him to make such a sacrifice? Oh..we are there to protect the defenseless innocents, the Kurds, peaceful Afghanis who don’t want to be governed by the Taliban. There are plenty of defenseless innocents in the world, millions of them in Africa. What of them? Are we to place 5,000 troops in every hot spot on the planet to protect innocents? What about the innocents on the south side of Chicago? Who is protecting them? And what of the cost of these adventures? Will the other nations supposedly made safe by our vigilance in the Middle Easy quagmire pony up some Euros to compensate us for our trouble? If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brussels I’d like to sell you. No, all we will get from our famous European allies is criticism and contempt, while they enjoy having the American taxpayer subsidize their own national defense. Let those stupid Americans police the world while we take potshots at them from the safety of our summer villas. Everybody hates the cops, right?
If nothing else, much like a broken clock that is right twice a day, if Trump follows through on getting us the hell out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, I will actually be grateful to him. So grateful, in fact, I will remember to send him a Christmas card every year when he’s serving his prison sentence.
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