Elvis has left the building. At last.

…and as the band was playing him out, the Beltway chattering class was in a mass conniption over all those poor, helpless collaborators we left behind, and our lack of political will, and how, if we could only piss away another trillion or two and tough it out until mid-century, we could lick those mean old Taliban once and for all.

In the days leading up to Elvis’ departure from the building, the press was full of screeching and howling about how this wasn’t going to be like the evacuation of Saigon, honest it wasn’t, seriously, for real — and the louder they howled, the more convinced I was that it would be like the evacuation of Saigon, except even more awesome.

I was 18 when I watched terrified Embassy flunkies being plucked off the roof by the choppers on TV. The draft had officially ended around 1971 or so, but I still had to register. Got a ready-to-burn card and everything. The day Saigon fell, I was about two weeks from graduating high school, and classified 1-H.

Turn out the lights, the party’s over…!

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Continue reading "Miss Kabul" »

So, Liberals… how’d that Hope’n'Change horseshit work out for you?

Here’s Obama’s “George W. Bush Moment”.

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Continue reading "Mission Accomplished, no.2" »

Yeah, uh huh… like in Vietnam. And Nicaragua. And Iraq.

This was my other favorite quote from Obama’s Afghanistan speech, a crass naked appeal to American conceit. Matthew Rothschild writes in The Progressive:

Our war president promised more war. While he trumpeted his big Afghanistan speech as the first step in ending that war, Barack Obama essentially told the American people that tens of thousands of our soldiers would still be fighting there for at least three more years.

A year from now, Obama said all the additional “surge” troops will be back home. But the U.S. will still have close to 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, twice the number that were there when Obama took office.

Only “by 2014,” he said, will the Afghan people “be responsible for their own security.”

And even then, Obama appears to have left himself an out. “We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we made,” he said. But what if those “gains” aren’t kept? Would he reverse course and keep more troops there…?

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Continue reading "Like Generations Before…" »

Welcome, folks, to Day One of Obama’s second term.

Well, hot damn, America, you finally got Bin Laden. So… how many innocents did you have to slaughter, maim, torture and unjustly imprison; how many of your own citizens were stripped of their basic liberties, their privacy and their dignity; how many inconvenient truths did you have to suppress to accomplish the symbolic goal of nailing Osama Bin Laden?

Then again, what the hell; in the end, it was all OK for people like Bush, Cheney, Obama, Clinton, Yoo, Holder and Murdoch. Go ahead, America, throw yourselves a goddamn’ party. Enjoy it while you can, before you wake up and realize you’ve still got no job, your house is about to be foreclosed, and you’re about to lose your Medicare and Social Security.

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Continue reading "Awright! Got Him!" »