The Sisyphus of Kabul (Part Three)

 "No dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other, poor dumb bastard die for his country...". -- George S. Patton, "War As I Knew It"

"A good plan, executed violently, is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite time in the future...".George S. Patton, "War As I knew It"

In Part Two, we took a look at what the United States Government did in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Today we will look at some of the people who made it all happen and why they did what they did. If one is to ever examine why a great nation began an enterprise with such an apparently noble cause and ended it with an apathetic, whimpering surrender two decades later, we must start here.

With people

Usually, the first identifiable weakness in any system is a human failing. Whether this is a lack of foresight, lack of attention to detail, ignorance, bad planning, laziness, arrogance, some form of bias, almost does not matter. At the initial stages of any great undertaking, it is axiomatic that someone has or will fuck it up. That fuck up will eventually come back to haunt someone and if the fuckup was of sufficient scope, it will come back to haunt everyone.

This is why we test the shit out of things before we let them go "live".

It's always the same: someone wrote bad code, pushed the wrong button, didn't check data, didn't build enough redundancies into a system, made guesses in the absence of fact.

We have had a shitload of failure across multiple systems and they all led to running from Bagram in the dead of night, and then fleeing Kabul like thieves.

But, hey, at least we got to celebrate Pride Month with the child-molesting heroin pushers, right?

We have three categories of people involved in this failure. They may overlap in some areas, and there are sub-categories within each, but these are the constants -- not the variables -- in our simulated debugging. The variables are doozies, best left for last in Part Four).

1. The Politicians
I begin with this group because it is the easiest to identify...and the easiest to dismiss.

Politicians in the modern world, especially in the United States, don't matter. Governments are not run by political figures as these are merely the visible face of government. Presidents, Congressmen, Supreme Court judges, are all temporary. Most are simply holes in the air or transitory odors. They die, they get indicted, they lose elections, they retire, whatever, no politician in America lasts forever (they only seem to). They can manage to nudge the levers of power this way or that for a time, and then they disappear, and the populace is left to live with the results.

What is done by today's administration is undone by tomorrow's. The only time a politician becomes important in American Life is when a certain individual takes any initiative (first rule of politics: don't take initiative). The Modern Politician is more of a marionette than s/he is independent entity: their actions are dictated by outside forces, whether this is an identity group, a class prerogative, an ideological motivation, the need to mollify and satisfy a disparate electoral coalition.

The Politician is merely a salesman, selling the interests of someone else -- often large groups of someone else's -- as the true business of America. This is similar to the function of a CEO in a major corporation. Warren Buffet doesn't actually work: he's just the face people associate with success and the business, for example.

There is no principle here, no following of rules, it's essentially all about delivering the goods. People complain about Congress, but then send their own Congresscritter back 85% of the time on election day.

This means s/he delivered the goods. The people were so happy, they re-elected the vermin.

Then the voters demand the returned Congresscritter impose a Term Limits rule on himself.

Because voters are stupid that way.

The last last five presidents have been godawful doofuses on the subject of terrorism. And yet three of them were re-elected while the War on Terror is being waged, or in Clinton's case, international terrorism is being ignored for domestic political ends. This is no testament to their effectiveness or popularity: it is a merely a reality that when it came to handing out the favors, granting the privileges, the coalition(s) that sent them to Pennsylvania Avenue got paid for their support with goodies and so sent them back to do it again.

Terrorism wasn't even much of a factor, except as a debating point in elections.

Bill Clinton whiffed on Usama bin Laden multiple times. His tendency to surround himself with people very much like him -- venal, petty, vain, eager to bend America over to gain the favor of the International Community, most of them recycled hippies of the Vietnam Era, or young, insanely-stupid neophytes -- ultimately had consequences for US foreign and domestic policy.

 At home, this was a more-ideological/technocratic slant to more aspects of American Life and an attitude that the Constitution was merely an inconvenience that could be sidestepped whenever that became necessary, because "progress'. In foreign affairs, it was to cast America as the progenitor of All That Is Wrong In The World, and we had a duty to set it all right...mostly by giving in.

These idiots will later be sanitized and serve as the celebrated archetypes of Sorkin's The West Wing.

The Crack Epidemic of the 1980's and 90's demanded immediate and harsher action from those in authority. An important leftist voting bloc -- the African-Americans -- demanded protection (from their own, a request they now regret, hence BLM) . In essence, this meant better-armed police forces, it led to stricter and harsher penalties for drug crimes, the will to use it all, and in the process Civil Rights would have to be sacrificed in order to combat a problem of crime. Such things become habit-forming in government circles, and in the hands of a Clintonista, the habit got as bad as any of the crackheads they were busily locking up..

Under Clinton, we (some of us, anyway) became used to the idea that a government working to get drugs off the street, to get guns off the street, could occasionally abandon the Constitution "for the greater good". The ends justified the means. This was presented to us as a useful and healthy thing: Government doing something positive and responding to the needs and wants of the citizen. The residue was that government got a taste for greater enforcement powers and authority, and started abandoning legalisms whenever it felt these could be "safely" shunted aside.

It put the drug dealers in prison, it rid the world of an Apocalyptic Cult in Texas with machine guns. It worked, right? So STFU.

If you're under lockdown now because you might catch a bad cold, in part this is because you got used to government fucking you over during this time.

When Timothy MacVeigh destroys the Murragh Building in the Oklahoma City bombing, he gets the speediest trial and death penalty in living memory just to get this off the front pages; conversely, Usama bin Laden skates for lack of evidence against him. There's TERRORISM and then there's terrorism, you see. The difference being one act of terror happened here and has immediate political effects here and the rest happened somewhere over there, where no one gives a shit.

The other difference being MacVeigh was easy to catch and prosecute, bin Laden not so much. Terrorism, you see, is a criminal matter.

It's still a display of government power.

The Clinton regime was especially good at both selectively applying law and selectively sidestepping it whenever it could.

Probably because it essentially was led by a couple of criminals.

As long as it was all "over there" it was not a priority for the Clintonistas. Terrorism was not a national security matter to them, unless we're talking white men running around in the woods with Daddy's shotgun.  The threat of Terrorism was defined as a domestic criminal problem, and more-importantly, a racially-and-ideologically motivated one.

Tim MacVeigh, Eric Rudolph, The Unabomber, David Koresh, the Ruby Ridge victims, the "Militias", and poor Richard Jewell all become the poster children for this misdirected policy, and their particulars  fit the "narrative" to a tee. The impression is given that all "bad" terrorists were discontented, right-wing, white, American males.

The other kind of terrorists overseas -- Islamic Jihad, the PLO, the IRA, Red Brigades, and others -- are all seen and presented at this time alternately as "misunderstood" or "freedom fighters", depending on how far left your brain has sloshed inside your head or if you went to Berkeley or Columbia. Anyone who says different was a Reagan-loving doody-head.

(The Left's once-vaunted ability to persuade was beginning to fade in the 1990's, primarily because with Clinton it became clear just what sort of craven douchebags the left really were. The mask seems to have fallen with Billy Jeff's trousers).

Some brown dude blowing up embassies on the other side of the planet? No biggie. No evidence and doesn't fit the profile narrative.

But even before all of this, Clinton gets himself in trouble by being persuaded to engage in a program of "nation building" along old-time Wilsonian Progressive principles when the United States undertakes a humanitarian mission to feed Somalis under the auspices of the United Nations (the mission starts under GHW Bush). This ends in disaster and the United States retreats ignominiously (it will be immortalized in the movie "Black Hawk Down").

A backwards nation of starving illiterates defeated the United States military with armed Toyota pickups and RPG's.

Clinton apparently learned no lesson from this, or if he did, it was that it was better to beat up on illiterate white people with armed Ford's and RPGs, and so, again under international auspices -- this time the European Union would join the U.N. -- Americans bomb the fuck out of Serbians who are "ethnically-cleansing" their little corner of the former-Yugoslavia. Clinton comes to the defense of Serbian and Bosnian Muslims...many of whom we will later encounter on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

He bombed the wrong people. 

Mostly because his "progressive" tendencies and those of his sycophants were as warped as his penis is alleged to have been. If non-Christians are being picked on, it must be because angry, discontented, white right-wingers -- in this case Serbs -- are running around in the woods in Yugoslavia with Daddy's shotgun and their Bibles being racist, just like they did in Waco. Just like Oklahoma City. Just like Atlanta.

All white guys are the same the professed anti-racists reckoned.

This is a theme that resides in the front part of every liberal's tiny brain; that in any dispute the white, Christian, Right-wing guy must always be seen as The Oppressor, and this makes him automatically, cosmically evil. It will...ahem...color... the Clinton approach to terrorism, or at least condition the prioritization of which terrorists to go after, and which "nations" can be re-built.

Yugoslavia and Somalia should have proven to anyone with a brain that Western cultures, which Yugoslavia certainly is, with at least some traditions of liberalism, were easier to first defeat in the field by other western armies  -- because they utilize similar systems of warfare, and their societies were much easier to recast in a stricter, more-liberal mold because any change at least had a flavor of familiarity. The changes are not completely transformative an so not resisted with as much vigor.

Unlike those of savage ,tribal illiterates, like Somalis and Afghans who don't want to be western, at all.

G.W. Bush wins a contested election despite lawsuit and childishly self-serving arguments by Al Gore (who told us 20 years ago we only had 15 minutes to save the planet, when he wasn't inventing the Internet from his fossil-fuel-eating 62-room mansion financed by oil stocks).

Within nine months of taking the oath of office, Bush has to deal with 9/11 and the problem of bin Laden is hardly mentioned between the two events. It became clear during the 9/11 Commission Hearings that the Clinton administration didn't exactly tell the Bushies everything they needed to know on their way out the door with the White House furniture. This is why Sandy Berger was in the National Archives with a pair of scissors and sneaking papers out of the place tucked in his shorts; he was (IMO) attempting to destroy the evidence of the Clintonian fuckups.

Like when you wipe your bathroom server with a cloth.

Bush had a problem similar to Clinton's; he has surrounded himself with advisors who might be able to find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight and who have strange notions of what military force can, or rather, should be able to do. Like Clinton's guys, many of them are Old Washington Hands from the days of Vietnam-era and the Cold War, but some of them also have the ribbons of Desert Storm on their chest, and they believe this makes them omniscient and omnipotent.

That was a war where victory was prematurely claimed.

Remember that because it happens again.

The coterie of Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Bakers, et. al. who had served Papa so well that he failed to get re-elected (despite the fact that he "won" a war in a matter of weeks), recommended that the solution to a massive terrorist attack was all-out, combined-arms, high-tech, Desert-Storm-style war unleashed against an enemy living in the Stick Age with a history of resisting invaders going back to Alexander The Great. It also involved overkill on the national security side of things, lavish funding of the military and intelligence services, and the result becomes invading two countries -- one to apprehend someone they (probably) already knew was no longer there, and the other to tie up the loose ends of the First Gulf War.

The war is "fought" by alternately dropping high explosives and Islamically-approved snack packs on the Taliban -- while Geraldo Rivera gives play-by-play -- and the Iraqis are treated to "Shock and Awe", which later would become "What the fuck and huh?". There are clearly two strategies intended to solve the same problem.

Both wars will soon fall victim to "Mission Creep", largely because of the United Nations, entangling and shifting alliances, and partly because of rancorous domestic politics.

The Bushie's main weakness is their bugaboo of "stability". They fear that if they go "too far" in either theater that the Middle East will become "de-stabilized"(did they not know it already was?) and they will have multiplied the terrorism problem by a huge factor. They don't "fight" so much as attempt to nudge recalcitrant barbarians gently this way or that. This is the same mistake they made in Desert Storm. Iraq was the "de-stabilizing" force; instead they wished to keep it somewhat intact as a counterweight to Iran (another de-stabilizing force)).

They foolishly assume that Pakistan is "an ally" and seemingly ignore that it created the Taliban.  They are quick to claim victories before any are actually achieved, because if they don't the public's patience will wear thin, and the left will hammer them on CNN. The incessant cries of "No WMD's!" and "Bush Lied!" by the left and the United Nations mandate to dismantle NBC weapons programs in Iraq, complicate things even more.

The "Mission Accomplished" banner -- one of the worst public relations stunts in American history -- will come back to bite them on the ass, because it appeared as if much was still left undone...again. The 2004 election is interesting only because Thurston Howell III John Kerry is back in his anti-war mode and keeps digging his hole deeper, Kerry's wife is revealed as a drunken lunatic, and John Edwards says "lesbian" to Dick Cheney 11 times during a VP debate.

Bush's two wars are on a knife-edge; he still has not come to grips with the Taliban and Al'Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the Islamic militias in Iraq (who will eventually become ISIS) are giving us such a hard time that Bush has to "surge" more troops into the region just to keep stalemate.

Bush leaves office under the darkest cloud imaginable: two wars that haven't been won and an economic disaster not of his making hung around his neck.

It does not get better.

Along comes Barack Obama, a man whose only redeeming qualities might be that he likes basketball and dogs. He's a leftard's dream: a product of Affirmative Action, the "right schools" (from which we cannot ever see his grades), an empty suit who reads eloquent speeches from a teleprompter, racially-diverse, and yet another favored-pet non-entity vomited up by the hippie generation. His elevation is seen as "historic" (because half-black) and he "wins" a Nobel Peace prize for being (half)Negro, which gives Europeans the warm fuzzies (the Nobel Committee also practices Affirmative Action, it seems).

Obama inherits a country with two wars on it's hands -- vowing to end them both, and to close Gitmo, too, but eventually starting or engaging in three more wars before he's done  (Libya, Yemen and Syria), and all of them "Leading from Behind" (more marketing). He's surrounded himself with much of the same Clintonian scum that initially screwed the pooch(es) on terrorism. 

The non-Clinton people in his inner circle are even more-infected by Progressive stupidity, mostly because most of them are Affirmative Action products, too.

Obama's senior advisors are all chosen on the basis of Diversity and not ability. They check all the color/ethnicity boxes, but their own brain boxes are largely empty or full of hateful spite for America. Valerie Jarret, for example, a Half Iranian/Half black woman, is all but a shill for Islam. Van Jones is an unrepentant Communist. Leon Panetta, Eric Holder, Rahm Emmanuel, The Podesta Brothers, are all on the take...but for the right causes. Opposition to such figures or the President, himself, is often denounced as "racism" leading to a stifling of free speech.

Free Speech that might have afforded Obama the means to avoid making the same mistakes Bush and Clinton made. However, he was going to make one of his own, which is to say he will mostly leave foreign policy matters to Hillary Clinton and concentrate on going on vacation and his golf game.

His Vice President -- Joe Biden -- is a man who had voted the wrong way on every important American foreign policy decision going back to the 1970's, and who will eventually preside over the retreat from Kabul.

Obama, himself, will remark one day that we should "Never underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up". It may have been the only thing that Barry ever got right.

And Obama should know all about fucking up, as it's the story of his life. Beginning with his choice of (pri)mate and the stellar example of his mother who couldn't do much beyond marry shitheels who left  her flat and pump out mixed-race babies. But, I digress...

Obama announces repeated withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a (ahem) slave to his anti-war left and his own written-by-smart-white-guys-and-stuffed-into-his-teleprompter rhetoric. He denounces The Surge of his predecessor which may have, at least temporarily and to his benefit, prevented  Iraq from becoming a complete catastrophe. But nothing happens. The advisors are all against it and rather than make anything resembling a decision, Barry plays basketball and works on his NCAA bracket.

And goes on vacation.

In the meantime, "domestic terrorism" heats up, almost always involving an Islamic immigrant "self-radicalized, lone wolf" type who goes all Jihad on shit, is usually on law enforcement's radar before he kills everyone, and when Ramzi Al'Kaboom finally goes off on your local gay Bar or Christmas party, the problem is STILL angry, discontented, Right-wing white guys, because to think otherwise is "racial profiling"...and that's, like, bad.

Never that the dude ascribes to a violent, 7th-century religious code that absolves murder as long it is "The Infidel" that dies. Islam is a "religion of peace" we've been told since 2001, and the Obamatards are really good at repeating that mantra in defiance of reality.

He ends his term in office on diametrically-opposed notes: He finally "gets" bin Laden by doing that which the Bush we-know-how-to-run-a-war gang would not.

He presides over the unmitigated disaster of Benghazi. Yet another brutal defeat and retreat. He is fortunate in that he can't run for re-election and that Hillary Clinton takes the heat on that one.

In between disasters, he releases the Taliban from Gitmo (many of them broadcast from the Afghan Presidential palace this past week) and makes left wing heroes out of a deserter and a traitorous transgendered thing.

On his watch, the ISIS gang arises (and he does nothing). He makes various pronouncements about "Red Lines" concerning the Civil war in Syria, where government forces are using Iraqi WMD's the left said didn't exist to destroy it's opposition. The threats were empty, and the whole world knew it. Especially the ISIS guys, who become the world's newest terrorist threat. His Secretary of State practically runs an independent foreign policy as she plans to be his successor. It is the Hillary gang, led by the Podestas, that pushes Obama to involve himself in a war in Libya that didn't really start until he started it.

And then he lost it one evening on a rooftop in Benghazi.

Donald Trump. Donald fucking J. fucking Trump. Deer-in-the-headlights doesn't even begin to explain this one. He, too, wants to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, but at least he has something of a plan. He sees the War on Terrorism as secondary to America's true strategic goals. Involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, he believes, are impediments to America's true and necessary fights against China and Russia.

It should, logically, have ended when bin Laden got shot in the face by the SEALs in this scenario. There's resources being misallocated and money being wasted on what Trump sees as a waste of time and  effort to turn Afghans and Iraqis into Mid-Westerners.

Trump makes the same mistake his predecessors have in regards to his advisors; they're all cronies, most of them unversed in how government operates. Trump doesn't even know how government operates. He is going to depend on these people to carry out his policies and they haven't the faintest clue. They are resented by the professional bureaucrats who actually do things in Washington because their business-culture background -- reward success, punish failure -- threatens to upend the entire system by which the bureaucracy operates -- do stupid shit because you can, keep your job, get paid.

Worse for Trump, he's telegraphed his intent to get rid of the professional bureaucratic and political-appointee classes (The Swamp), so they undermined him at every step. Especially the Generals and National Security people, who have no respect for him, to the point where they attempt to have him impeached and indicted in the world's worst and most-obvious frame job ever.

And so we end with the man who has been wrong about everything his entire career and is flirting with Alzheimer's, Joe Fucking Biden. A classic example of advancing in government by fucking up, that one day entire academic majors will revolve around the study of his life. So, what does he do, this man who voted against every war -- even the ones we supposedly won -- in the previous two decades do?

Unilaterally surrender. With a Benghazi-times-ten-thousand, to boot!

We are led by idiots who surround themselves with bigger idiots and who make decisions based upon anything but common sense, sound moral principles, or good judgment.

2. The Government

When I say "The Government" I do not mean the elected dipshits. I've just told you they are about as useful and effective as fleas are to a dog.

"The Government" consists of millions of people who would otherwise be roaming the landscape aimlessly, scratching their asses and dying of malnutrition if they did not have "government jobs". "The Government" consists of two layers:

a) People who have a job because they managed to pass a Civil Service exam written so as to be aced by inebriated chimpanzees and the functionally illiterate. This is where the minor functionaries you run into on a daily basis come from: a vast pool of fucktards. This is a class of parasites. They exist at every level of government.

They don't care if they are running Reagan's America or Stalin's Russia as the only reason for existing is TO GET PAID; they will easily and seamlessly enforce this set of regs today and then turn around and enforce a contradictory set tomorrow. 

If this class has any political inclinations, it is to vote for whoever the unions tell them to vote for, and it will always vote for the party that promises to keep it in business. They are annoying, but generally not harmful.

And they are led by the really dangerous sub-category...

b) The Political Appointee.

These are people who are even less-useful than the person who delivers your mail in this Age of Electronic Messaging.

These are people I've already mentioned, and whose names keep popping up, no matter who is "in charge". I've already discussed the Bakers, Cheneys and Rumsfelds, and it should not be necessary to remind you of their counterparts, the Lerners, Klains, Koskinens, Comeys, Gorelicks, Holders, Ohrs, Strzoks, Pages and so on.

This Class lives to accumulate government jobs and hop between government and private sector so as to enrich itself. It is truly the instrument of power in this country because it is the group that exists between rulers and ruled; these are the people who know how to get the Washington Bureaucracy to do things, having spent a lifetime inside the belly of the beast.

They inhabit every corner office in every federal agency and cabinet position and the Pentagon. They come and go with changes in administration and collect meaningless titles like a camel hair jacket collects lint. The country is really run by Deputy Assistant Secretaries to the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary to the Underdeputy Assistant Undersecretary's Underdeputy.

At every critical juncture in our lives, these are the people who really make the decisions. They have reserved the right to do this on the basis of their self-proclaimed "expertise" in arcane areas of governance, and the pedigrees they bring with them -- the Kennedy school, Georgetown law, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, et. al.

Products of a stratified educational process that churns them out on a standardized industrial basis, regardless of party affiliation. A lifetime of lower-level sycophancy has allowed them to network their way to the better jobs.  They get these jobs as a reward for fealty to party or candidate, and then they lord over the Chimpanzees mentioned above.

This is the real aristocracy of Washington, and like the old lords of the manor, they are surrounded by their court -- the eager young things freshly-minted at The Old School, the reporters who treat their every word as if it were honey (because these are the gatekeepers in terms of "access" and the main leakers, the "sources say..." and "officials speaking on the condition of anonymity"). 

Slow Joe, Mitch and Nancy may get the facetime on TV, but these people call the tune Mitch, Nancy and Joe will dance to.

Whenever anything needs to be done in America, it to this class that the "leaders" turn to for advice. guidance, and execution. These idiots are in a position to ensure that whatever the final decision is, they will be the people who carry it out. But then again, they were the ones who suggested what the final decision should be.

These 'educated" and "sophisticated" people have largely replaced the Old Guard of the Cold War days. They have gotten a steady diet of "Peace Studies", "Queer Theory", "Gender Studies", and "International Relations", along with revisionist history, and Machiavellian insights on how politics works, or rather, SHOULD work in the "best" schools. This bunch sees war as an opportunity to export (questionable) Western values to uncivilized and violent people, rather than as a physically destructive contest of wills.

This is the prevailing attitude of the leftist side of this Class.

The Right Side has it's professional academics and title-collectors, too, and it's orientation is centered around exporting what they see as the good aspects of Western culture. It's the side that applauds when Burger King opens a restaurant in Fallujah. These are the morons who believe that what Afghanistan really needs is Christianity. It is the collective group of dumbfuck that insists all problems of war can be solved by blasting the ever-loving shit out of everything from long distances and then negotiating from "a position of strength". It's the band of retards that insists that wars can be won from the air and spooking the natives with your awesome high tech while failing to understand the simple fact that people live on the fucking ground.

If you are not occupying the ground, you are securing nothing, you are advancing nothing. This has been a prime consideration of warfare since we first fell out of the trees.

And this band of idiots got the same exact "education' the "sophisticated" leftists got, because they all went to the same schools that have become expert at producing the same model of over-credentialed/low-cognition doofus groomed to "play the game" in Washington.

Both are guided by a principle that they interpret in different ways, mainly as a result of ideology (which will be discussed in Part Four), that:

Inside every _______ is an American dying to get out.

They simply disagree on what "an American" is, or rather, what "an American" should be.

These are the inheritors of the of the old Progressive influences, suitably repackaged and reinvigorated by academics of both sides in the 1970's and 80's. These academics became the tenured professors, the recognized "experts" in their fields, and their influence has come a long way from the Ivory Tower.

On one end of the spectrum, we have the Wilsonian view that all men are perfectible, so long as it is a technocratic government of our supposed betters who gets to define "perfect" ("...to teach men to elect good leaders").

On the Right isTeddy Roosevelt's use of politics, economics, and military force to bully others into giving us our way ("Walk softly and carry a Big Stick"). It, too, is under the mistaken impression that Men can be made perfect if their "betters" can exert their influence.

This is the source of "Mission Creep" that turns into "Nation Building". We need to turn every mud puddle with savages in it into a carbon copy of Martha's Vineyard or Kennebunkport. There are very few differences in kind between these two sub-groups, just of degree. One seeks to export the College Quad to the Third World, the other to export the Country Club.

The fact that neither side of this Class actually understands the foundations of their own culture and systems of government (because who studies history, anymore? For one side, history is all evil, dead white men, and for the other history ended with the Cold War), their interference only results in confusion, chaos, and taking the collective eye off the ball -- which should have been "kill every last one of these towel-wearing, livestock-fucking, sandy little bastards".

Only THEN can you export your culture or negotiate from a position of strength...With whatever is left.

The Modern Politician simply chooses from a range of options provided by the Professional Bureaucrats and Political Appointees and rubber stamps them, to good or ill. This President* listened to the gang that advocated for complete surrender.

But only after Pride Month was over.

3. The People

I make no secret of having very little patience or sympathy for the masses of bipedal dogfood we call "people". 

These are the people who spend enormous sums on designer pet food and treat cats as the children they never had.

These are the people who are entertained by trailer park beauty pageant contestants and California Armenians with fat asses and a predilection for outrageous excess.

These are the people who get interviewed on the Late Night "man-in-the-street" segments who can't answer basic questions on anything not related to their own balls, or what they do with them.

This is the population that lives in a bubble of instant gratification, that has no intellectual curiosity, that will do something merely because someone else is doing it, that spends time with it's face buried in a smartphone that has to be smart because the people who will use it are assumed to be dumb (this is why you can ask Alexa).

It is the massive blob of protoplasm that tweets it's empty thoughts and sends pictures of it's lunch to everyone on the planet under the erroneous assumption that others really give a fuck. It puts its collective dipshit on display and celebrates it's own ignorance It measures its social value by how many "friends" it accumulates or how many "likes" its latest fecal formulation garnered.

The Average American is an ignoramus. And that was true 20 years ago, as well.

On September 12, 2001, the American people rose on their collective hind legs and demanded that government "do something" about the 9/11 attacks. It didn't care what was done, or how it was done, just the fact that someone appeared to be doing something useful was good enough.

Things were done in their names that they didn't understand. And they were willing to endure the pain that came with their sons sent off to foreign shores, their movements, activities, thoughts and words being scrutinized in secret, a world full of security cameras and voice- and photo-recognition software, being strip-searched at the airport, because it all had the appearance of someone doing something.

It relieved them of the burden of having to do something.

The People kept voting for more of it.

And what do they have to show for it?

They live in a virtual police state. The decisions that affect their lives on everything from bailing out bad government-backed mortgages to what medicines they're allowed to have during a pandemic, are taken out of their hands. They got anesthetized by the "Security State" and the apparent safety it provided to them over two decades, so much so that they were easily frightened into lockdown, destroying their own livelihoods and taking untested vaccines twenty years later. 

The People have been coordinated, trained, subtly directed in various directions according to political need by the dictates of a nameless, faceless anonymous and unaccountable professional bureaucracy (especially one involved in covering up it's crimes, mistakes and failures, right Dr. Fauci?), transmitted through the fake smiles and pretend gravitas of a politician..

For two decades your money has been stolen or wasted, your sons and daughters killed, maimed or mentally crippled for life, you live under constant the surveillance of a state apparatus that was lousy at finding terrorists, but which can ruin your life because of a questionable e-mail seized by extra-judicial means. Your rights are now (temporary and conditional) grants of The State. You are easily stampeded by the thought of Al'Qaeda or ISIS attacking you in your gated community, but to view the Islamic maniac living down the block is chastise yourself on your own racism.

You can be easily stampeded to the point where the flu causes you to be paralyzed with fear, and the people who are supposed to "protect" you instead contemplate mandating a vaccine that even the lab rats weren't given. Hundreds of thousands pour across an undefended border while The Government is preoccupied with the border of South Kandahar, or the shrinking border around Kabul International Airport.

We don't produce Pattons, anymore. We don't produce Grants, Shermans, MacArthurs or Halseys for that matter, either. This was one instance where a Patton would have shined. But then again, he'd probably have been dismissed because he said something that offended the Bluechecks on Twitter.

But the outcome would have been completely different.

War has just become another part of the marketing campaign.

Next up: The (non-)Intellectual Basis for everything.

Part One can be read HERE.
Part Two can be read HERE.
Part Four can be read HERE.

UPDATE; Fixed spelling, grammar and an incomplete thought or two.