Afghanistan- The End- Finally

This week, Biden gave a budget speech that wasn’t a budget speech and the Democrats loved it. Most of his proposals, received with glee by most citizens, will never pass the GOP led House. So, knowing that, why did he bother to make the speech at all? Simple. He has now established what he wants to do and how it will benefit America as opposed to what the Republicans want to do and how it will help only the rich and hurt the rest of America.

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Ron DeSantis, seemingly lacking any other suitable target, this week attacked the concept of woke. I know, it seems way too intellectual for a faux dock walloper like DeSantis, but it flies very high with the MAGA crowd. Trump has his 60% favorability with the base. But the approaching indictments will probably raise that number into the stratosphere, so DeSantis has had to come up with something equally appealing to the red neck vote if he expects to steal some of Trump’s backers.

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We should have learned a lot from the COVID pandemic but unfortunately, we seem to learn squat from our experiences in this country.  One of the most important things we should have learned is the absolute necessity of universal medial coverage. Instead, as soon as things begin to calm down one of the first things the GOP tries to do, is eliminate Medicare & Medicaid. Do they really think their constituents don’t need medical insurance? Is it humanly possible for anyone to be that out of touch? How about free access to COVID testing or money for extra food, benefits that are also beginning to disappear. Do we really think these benefits are no longer necessary for anyone?  The billionaire supported GOP would have us think so, but I can guarantee there are a lot of folks out there that don’t agree. Many have learned their lesson the hard way and for many more, those who are still taking the hits, their needs have not changed. They understand the lesson, they just can’t do anything about it.

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Mike Pence made it pretty clear last night that he was looking to be our next President when he attacked Donald Trump for his position on what he thought Pence should have been doing to keep him in the White House after he lost the election.

Then Pence attacked Tucker Carlson for his lies about 1/6. It now seems inevitable that Pence will hit the road on a serious election campaign.

The other question in all this is what will Carlson do? How the hell do you re-create a following after you have lied about everything

you have tried to sell to your viewers? Sure, some of these dumb clowns will continue to follow him even after he lied to them because

he says the things they want to hear. These are the same moronic dolts that don’t care if what Carlton says is true or false, as long as it reinforces their own strongly held hatreds and prejudices. They will vote for these same liars again and again because, like their idol Donald Trump, it is more important for them to appear right, than to actually be right.  They are the same kind of people who live in and around East Palestine, Ohio and who will vote Republican in the next election.

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GOP hack Mike McCaul had a lot to say about the, up until now, silent sniper, who never got to take a shot at the bomber that created bloody chaos at the Kabul airport on that awful evacuation day. Where has he been hiding, this sniper and why? Two questions that must be asked. But more important, why has McCaul brought him to the surface now?

Someone in a higher position of power in the non-functional GOP than McCaul has decided that it was a bad idea to end the war, and that if this premise can be proved it will damage Joe Biden and help to beat him in the next election.

The first thing we must recognize is that there are always people who benefit from war, every war, and those people never want wars to end.

In the case of the Afghan war, there were three principal groups. The first were those engaged in the war. This included those who gained power from it like the non-functional, clearly criminal members of the Afghan government we were keeping in power. As soon as the war ended, they were finished and so they wanted it to last forever.  Then there were those making fortunes from the war. This included those who made the tools of war and those who sold them, both of whom had powerfully financed lobbying groups aimed at keeping the war going. They are not at all happy with Biden for ending it and killing their golden goose.

Most important in this situation is the third group, those that want to use the ending of the war as a means of attacking Joe Biden by indicating that in ending the war he did something wrong. This, of course is a kind of warped logic that can only be attributed to the GOP.

Yes, it’s wrong to stop the war and end the killing of American kids so that a non-functional gang of incompetent crooks can continue to steal from us and the Afghan people. Yes, the loss of a dozen or so American soldiers and a number of Afghani civilians is worse than the continued murder of both those groups over the next unlimited number of years.  This is ridiculous, illogical, nonsense which could only come from the clownish morons that now lead the GOP.

In fact, Biden got us out of a two-decade long mess from which no other American leader seemed capable of extracting us.

The fact is we all should be kissing his ass but instead, a small cabal of MAGA rats are trying to use Biden’s triumph as a political minus.  It just won’t work.

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What the hell is happening to Israel? What the hell is causing one of the most inspiring democratic governmental stories in history to crumble into a pile of dictatorial ashes?

Tzipi Livni, former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs was interviewed recently by Fareed Zacharia on the movement toward dictatorship led by Bibi Netanyahu, which like many of Trump’s moves, are inspired by a desire to stay out of jail.

She points out that it is time for American Jews to stifle their unqualified support of everything that happens in Israel and use their money and especially their influence to help the fight to keep Israel a functioning democracy and to keep the people of Israel from sliding into the kind of approach toward their own ethnic underclass that inspired the birth of Israel in the first place.