Friday, November 27, 2009

O, the burens of leadership!

Pity poor Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard work getting her spineless charges to vote against their principles. ‘Tis a task she describes as a “heavy lift.” But, by God, this true, blue liberal from San Francisco does her damndest to make sure House doves act like hawks whenever Pentagon brass come begging for more money to fund their Afghan enterprise.

Pelosi is who she is because she understands the key to acquiring power: follow the dictates of your handlers and contributors and not the dictates of your conscience. She even describes how this works:

You have to go to somebody who is totally, completely, entirely opposed to war funding, and you need to have them vote on it. And you don’t even want to vote for it yourself.”

O, the burdens of leadership! It’s hard work strong arming your underlings to violate their principles. But, Pelosi has always been a strong role model as she demonstrated when she informed the world that impeachment was off the table. In spite of this, the good liberals of San Francisco reelected her to another term in the House in a landslide victory.

It’s not many people who would be so willing to fight for a spineless stance. But Pelosi understands that the Democratic Party is basically a subsidiary of the Republican Party, which, in turn, is a subsidiary of K Street. And if K Street wants a war, there will be a war, and Congress’s battle cry will be, “Damn our principles! Full speed ahead.”

Rumor has it that Obama is going to ask for an additional 30,000 troops for Afghanistan. Senior aides say he will reassure the American people that the “end is in sight.” This is another way of saying he sees the light at the end of the tunnel, which he won’t say because to say it would be to stir up memories of the light at the end of the tunnel we saw in Vietnam just before we were booted out.

So, Pelosi will twist arms and make sure her underlings vote more money for another war we probably won’t win. But then, we must remember that the object of war is no longer victory. Rather, it is to continue to fund our corporate military machine because our economy is so addicted to military spending that it would go into a painful withdrawal were said spending to end. After all, we have to make up for the moribund consumer spending that once made up seventy percent of our GDP.

I mean, my God!, the “Vietnam syndrome” led to our wholesale slaughter of the people of Iraq. God knows what an “Afghanistan syndrome” would lead to.

6 comments:

Ivan Hentschel said...

If this post rings true in any way (and it should), you should quickly read this:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/colbert_conservatives_and_military_waste_20091125/

The more we feed this beast, the hungrier it gets.

Case Wagenvoord said...

Greed is never sated.

Anonymous said...

So why do so many otherwise well-meaning people CONtinue to talk about the damned "Pentagon" as though it was NOT the principle repository in the world today of stark raving MADness? "Nice 'doggie.' You can take an arm and a leg. Just please don't rip our throats out." It's pitiful!

Are theamericanpeople secretly praying someone else, like the Afghanis, will put the rabid creature down for them? Well, it's their very own "junkyard dog," and their cowardly unwillingness to put it out of ALL our misery is maybe the most telling evidence of all just how degenerate they've become here in these latter days.

"Land of the free and home of the brave," indeed.

HokaHey!

TAO Walker said...

Sorry, hit the wrong "button." This Old Savage owns-up to the above.

HokaHey!

Case Wagenvoord said...

Tao,

Hell, I knew it was you. As Samuel Beckett once wrote, "We have time to grow old; the air is full of our cries. But, habit is a great deadener."

TAO Walker said...

Alas, poor Samuel. Who knew?

Well, this Old Savage sure feels for all the inmates of the "global" CONcentration camp, but it's not so easy to pick-out a single 'voice' from the general din. That probably won't be much comfort to those CONvinced of their unique and special "individual"-ity.

There's always the "Power"-Ball Lottery, though.

Hokahey!