Snowd

Hmm…must be a common surname. There have been Asshats in charge of our miltary for years.

Hope is not a policy? Damn! Do the voters know this?

What boggles the mind is the straight faces with which they all lie like flatfish, and make up new, prettier lies the minute the old ones become unsupportable. And begin respecting civil rights the minute we kick their toad-eating flunkies out of Congress…

Take troops from Afghanistan and send them to Iraq, and take troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. That’s a great ideal! And the administration can pay for it with their Visa Card which they can pay off with their Master Card, which they can pay off with their Visa Card, which….

I was reading Adam’s suggestion as being that we train Ahghani troops to fight in Iraq, and Iraqi troops to fight in Afghanistan. Sort of a cross-cultural encounter. The experience will be good for troops on both sides. And if it devolves into a full fledged war btween Iraq and Afghanistan - well, hey, at least they’re not fighting us!

Alberto Gonzalez had an 11th hour conversion? Is this the same Alberto Gonzalez who just yesterday informed federal judges that their role is to simply support decisions made by the President and not to interpret the law on their own? What do they think thy are, part of a third branch of the government?

It’s still a secret tribunal. It sounds better than it smells.

I can see it now, Bush was at some Progeny-of-Republican-Donor birthday party, things were dragging, kids were crying, and then someone had the bright idea to start a game of musical chairs. And so a military strategy was born. (”C’mon boys! I’m going to start “God Bless America” and when the music stops, everybody better be deployed in a different Islamic country!”)

hedera, David, Boomer, siobhan - remember George McGovern? Of course you do. Well, he’s still a fun read. This column from The Nation is a right and proper skewering the Jr Bush.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070117/cm_thenation/20070129mcgove rn

My favorite slogan from McGovern’s Presidential campaign - “Don’t change Dicks in the middle of a screw; Vote for Nixon in ‘72″. Wow, we baby boomers really had a way with words, didn’t we?

Cooper, is that the excuse Dubya’s using to deny the obvious?

Groovy post, coop. I’ll be tripping on it all night. I hope it doesn’t become a bummer, though.

I wonder if Fanny still hates the phrase “wingtip shoes”?

George McGovern continues to demostrate why he was a far, far superior choice in ‘72. Pity American voters have such a penchant for voting the myopic cliches, expressing anger at the polls only when they can no longer deny their choices are fubars. ‘Course I’ve got to factor in the reality that W couldn’t win an honest presidential election, but then why in hell was it close enough for electoral theft to be a possibility?

Other bumper sticker: Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You. Problem was that we didn’t Dick him until after he had well and truly Dicked us. And now W has gotten away with out-Nixoning Nixon by an amazing margin, and Lobster only knows how much worse it will get before the bastard is retired to his photo op ranch.

Dale,

I suspect Fanny is using us as her lab rats, perhaps in a brain-damaged attempt to emulate the mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The fanaticist’s wardrobe: wingnut shoes and an ass hat.

Katie, according to the Administratin’s own logic, aren’t they the same theater of operations? I mean, it’s all just one big “war on terror,” no? And what do national borders matter in this “new” war against a “new” enemy that “knows no borders”?

It’s worth a shot, anyway.

I guess it goes along with the whole If you think about the soldiers’ lives, really think about the soldiers’ lives, beyond the immediate context of troops trying to keep their buddies alive in a deadly confrontation, you can’t be a military commander. You’re a tank, you’re a humvee, you’re an M-16 (in the case of the soldiers I’ve known, you’re also a damned decent human being, but that is a whole separate issue from commanders and assets). I have no trouble remembering why I wasn’t about to be a troop in Viet Nam under Johnson or Nixon, or their SecDefs, especially in the context of utterly misguided, disinformed anti-communism, and in the middle of a civil war killing women, old men, and children, including the ones who might have been guerillas trying to defend their homes from invaders.

Luckily, of course, our troops are not trapped in an even remotely comparable dilemma in Iraq.

Dale, I think you’re mistaken to assume that a WWII doughboy redeployed from Europe wouldn’t have been shipped right back out to Okinawa - I think he would have been. I’ve read a lot about WWII, and I don’t ever remember anyone mentioning a year off between duty rotations. Guys served consecutive years in that war without seeing the home front. You got to go home if you were wounded enough to incapacitate you, and if you recovered before it was over, you went back. Go back and read Catch-22; that was what drove Yossarian crazy.

Also, Katie’s talking about reserve deployments, and in WWII we were not talking reserves, it was the draftee army. Everybody who was physically capable was deployed to the front, except for occasional quite short R&R breaks, which were only in the U.S. if you happened to be near Hawaii.

The mess we have now is organizationally and logistically almost entirely different from WWII, and not just because the weapons are more advanced.

There’s nothing wrong in re-reading a favorite book as often as you want. Librarian Savant Nancy Pearl here in Seattle admits to reading John LeCarre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” every year. And why not, it’s a great book. Read what you want when you want. Unless you’re in graduate school and what you read isn’t under your control.

Dale -

Bush doesn’t know his *ss from second base. Yes, in his speeches lumps everything together as a war on terror, and it is all meant to avenge 9/11. Yaddah yaddah yaddah.

What *I* am talking about is the actual military policies.

Operation Enduring Freedom (Afganistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom are 2 separate, distinct entities in terms of DOD policies. If you are mobilized for one theater, it has absolutely no effect on your potential to be mobilized for the other theater. A soldier/sailor/arman/marine who is coming off of 24 months of activation in Iraq cannot be forced back to Iraq for 2 years. They can be forced to Afganistan the next day, because that is a *different* war. They have not been sent there, so there is no impediment to their deployment, they have a totally new clock to start. Also, the DOD can ‘request’ units waive their full 2 years of home rotation to go back early. And some troops that are mission critical can also be sent back early due to operational needs.

This is why we have troops in total burnout.

I laugh at the blind assumption that we are going to be able to increase troops by 10s of thousands, just because POTUS says so. We are offering unheard of incentives - bonuses up to 20K, extra pay, etc etc etc and we are loosing troops at a faster rate than ever, and we are having trouble meeting recruiting levels right now, much less increasing by thousands.

Kids aren’t lining up saying, “pick me, pick me! I want to go drive a HUMVEE and pray I don’t get killed by an IED or randlom Iraqi on the street.”

Also, right now, kids that would have never made it into the service 7-10 years ago are being let in by the thousands. Test scores are being dropped….. the military gives everyone considering the service a standardized battery of tests called the ASVAB…. basic math, reasoning, reading, direction following, mechanical aptitude, etc. etc. Nothing was above about a 9th grade learning level. To get into a specific branch of service, you had to score a minimum amount, Air Force was the highest cutoff, Army was the lowest at 39%. Your actual score determined which job or jobs you could pick from. Each job within the military has a minimum ASVAB score associated with it. (A very few specialized positions require prior learning before entering the military.)

The Army has now dropped its’ enterance minimum to 34%. Think about that for a minute. 34% on a standardized test at the 9th grade level, from kids who have graduated high school. these are the kids that can’t even get a job asking, “Would you like fries with that?”. (And before I get a barrage of hate mail, I am in no way disparaging people who, for one reason or another, have a very low apptitude. I am merely pointing out that these MAY NOT be the people you want in a war zone. We have had enough friendly-fire deaths.)

So, either the DOD institutes a total stop-loss over all branches of service (meaning that no one can retire or leave at the end of their contract. During stop-loss, you are forced to continue serving until the stop-loss is lifted.) and/or they will have to seriously look at reinstituting the draft. (And then there will be an outcry to end the war).

katie

I see that there is a WWII parallel going on here; Katie’s description of stop-loss sounds like something Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe would instantly recognize.

A propos the lowered recruiting standards, think about this for awhile: the ones who don’t get blown up by an IED will come back to the U.S., eventually, with detailed training in how to kill with advanced weapons and still a 34% aptitude level on a 9th grade test. I’ve read in at least one article that they’re already having problems with gang affiliations. The Latino street gangs already have heavy weapons; do we really want them to have heavy weapons and military training??

And, Dale, I’m guessing your favorite #1 book has something to do with that good Knight of La Mancha?

Huh? Was he in “Schrodinger’s Ball”?

…all civil institutions we and the Brits destroyed…