Picking Our Next War via Magic 8-Ball

Let me be clear. I won't know where I send troops until I see it on TV.

So, here we are after a decade of America's finest sons & daughters coming home in metal boxes draped with a flag, a flag later dutifully and solemnly folded and handed to a grieving family member with the thanks of a grateful nation, and John McCain and other alleged Great Men are shaking dice in a plastic cup like a Yahtzee Game  or looking at a Magic 8-Ball to see where we'll send troops next.

Steve, you sound like a pacifist. What the hell? That's not like you.

Me, a pacifist? Not bloody likely. I love seeing Bad Guys get a beat down courtesy of the best warfighters the world has ever known. But as a former soldier I am keenly aware of what it's like to be a pawn of Great Men and being the pointy end of the spear. No one longs for peace like a warrior, for the warrior is the one who has the most to lose in war.

What fresh Hell is this? If it's Wednesday it must be Asscrackistan...

 I'm okay with US troops being deployed to hot spots to protect American citizens in danger or to assist good, solid, proven allies in protecting their people. I'm okay with sending US troops to help after a disaster like an earthquake of tsunami. I'm not okay, however, with just sending troops in pell mell every time some Third World crap hole country with a tin pot dictator or Jihadi government says "boo" to us or thumbs its nose at the impotent United Nations. Worse, I am most certainly sure as hell not cool with sending troops into harm's way to satisfy some politician's need to use troops to extend his penis and garner what he thinks is gravitas points.

Hi ho, Hi ho...it's off to war we go. With guns and blades and hand grenades, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho...

I find it ironic that John McCain, the RINO with the biggest horn in Washington, likes to gut immigration reforms that leave our borders unprotected but hawkishly calls for us to scurry into Syria to help topple their government like that's going to make us more secure. Even more ironic is that as a guy who spent years as a POW getting the crap kicked out of him he's always willing to send in the troops if it makes him look more like a prototypical Republican, especially when he needs to score points with Conservatives after he does something progressively liberal to appease potential voters who just vote Dem anyways.

Yeah, after a decade of Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with few tangible results in our favor we've just recently sent a couple hundred troops to Jordan to curb Syrian violence (It hasn't worked) and now Capitol Hill wants to send in more troops and send in arms shipments to equip the rebels. But last time I checked, we were under a sequester, right? They cut military spending because all those babykillers and evil war mongering knuckledraggers are just a drain on the coffers of polite society when that money is better served on welfare and food stamps for baby-mommas and generational lagabouts who vote Democrat because the Dems keep handing them free money.

I digress.

But if we're cutting military spending, with troops seeing tuition assistance cut and public affairs events like annual airshows cancelled, with thousands of federal employees losing hunks of their paychecks due to furloughs, where the hell is the money coming from to magically deploy troops for Syria? Why are we able to cobble together billions in military aid packages to an anti-American Islamist government in Egypt or billions for Pakistan, a country known to harbor Islamoterrorists, a country we routinely drone-strike because of it?

We cut money and punish the military when it suits the whims of politicians and then deploy them to satisfy the whims of politicians. We have troops deployed all over the place and while most of the locations are well-known spots like nearly 30,000 in Korea or 35,000 in Japan or 55,000 in Germany or 20,000 in Italy, or 6,000 or so in Panama, maybe 5,000 in Guam, there are a dozen or more that are less known.

We have a thousand or so people in Cuba at Gitmo even though Obeezy closed it when he took office as promised. Oh wait...no he didn't. He couldn't because we kinda need it to keep scumbags off the streets. We keep 500 or so troops on a rotational basis in Honduras as part of Joint Task Force Bravo. We've got 700 or so out in the Philippines chasing down Islamists there. We have over 3,000 in Djibouti coordinating drone strikes and Special Ops missions. We have at least a hundred in Niger to help the French fighting Islamists in Mali by doing drone recon. For the past year and a half we've been rotating about a hundred Special Forces advisors in and out of Uganda at a cost of about $4.5 million a month to operate in Uganda, South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic, helping to eradicate Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army terror group.

There are already over 1,000 Marines from the USS Kearsarge amphibious group in Jordan on a training exercise, along with 4,000 more from the Army & Air Force, many of whom will be staying behind with their F-16s and Patriot missile batteries after the exercises are over at the behest of the Jordanian government.

We're all up in the 'Stans....Good old Afghanistan, of course, with about 70,000 or so pairs of boots on the ground in addition to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikstan, & Turkmenistan.....plus Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Diego Garcia, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and that good old standby, Iraq. We still have some people in Iraq, even though the average low-information Joe & Jane Voter thinks we completely pulled out. News Flash: while we stopped combat operations there ostensibly and pulled out the majority of our troops in order to continue grinding them up in Afghanistan, things in Iraq have just gone back to random bomb attacks on civilians between rival groups just like the Bad Old Days.

Oh, yeah, before I forget, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Messiah Obeezy (Blessed Be His Name) also has troops at bases on the borders of Bolivia in Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to hunt for drug lords or something like that.

Yeah, we have boots on the ground in more countries than WalMart does, only they're turning a profit doing it while we're pissing away billions to countries that hate us and we're pissing on the countries that actually still do like us. We're over-taxing our troops and wasting resources and giving away billions to be later used against our own people.

Meanwhile, the Obeezy Family is dropping $100 MILLION in our money to vacation in Africa and Ireland and Germany. Another vacation. Another damned vacation. I haven't had anything more than a long weekend away from home since 2007 and those assholes are on ANOTHER mufti-million dollar vacation. In the middle of a sequester. When we're 17 TRILLION in debt. While Americans are still dying in Afghanistan. (But Americans dying overseas is no big deal to Obama. Look at Benghazi...)

But Obama won't know he's on vacation till he sees it on the news, I guess.

It's so stealthy, it inserted itself into the budget unseen!

Y’know, Democrats just hate it when you use their own tactics on them, and by that I mean the tactic of taking an approved bill and sneaking shit onto it before anyone notices it and hoping that it passes through before anyone can stop it. Perfect example: underhanded scumbag Democrats adding 300 pages (yeah, three hundred) to the Climate Bill at 3:09 AM, 12 hours before it was being voted on in Congress. Anyone up at 3AM doing governmental paperwork shit is up to no good; just ask the boys from Watergate.

Well, when Georgia’s Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss tried to add an additional $1.75 billion to the Obama-approved defense budget to purchase seven additional F-22 Raptor fighters for the Air Force, everybody threw a shit-fit. With The Obamessiah threatening to veto his own budget, a hastily drawn up amendment to the budget to yank that money was ushered forth by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, Michigan’s Carl Levin, and Uber-RINO Turncoat Turd John McCain.

Sure, Chambliss can say he wants the extra seven jets to bolster our defense, but face it; his district includes the plant where Lockheed makes the $350-million dollar wonder-jets and he wants those 2,000 or so employees to vote for him, plain and simple.

It seems that Obama wants to keep with the recommendation of former President Bush and cap the purchase at 187 jets, and Secretary of Defense Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, both want to keep their cushy jobs so they sure as hell ain’t gonna argue with His Obamaness, so they, wrote to senators Monday to express their dismay at the 11th hour addition of the extra money. "We strongly believe that the time has come to close the F-22 production line. If the Congress sends legislation to the president that requires acquisition of additional F-22 aircraft beyond fiscal year 2009, the secretary of defense will strongly recommend he veto it…," the letter said.


Wonder Twin Powers......activate!

Gates earlier said the insertion of more money, into the already $680 billion defense budget, for F-22s posed a "big problem" for him. Analysts say it would be unprecedented for a defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs to urge the president to veto their own defense bill.

But they, and Obama, have made clear that they view such expenditures as wasteful.
"We do not need these planes. That is why I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress," Obama said in a letter Monday to senators.

Okay. We have a small amount of F-22’s now, a plane that was slated to replace the F-15 Eagle, which has been around since 1976. And yes, the Raptor is filthy expensive and requires 30 hours of maintenance for every hour of flying time, and costs the taxpayer about $44,000 an hour to fly according to confidential Pentagon test results.

Hmmm, Air Force One costs us over $57,000 an hour to fly and Obie takes that pig everywhere, and it’s neither stealthy nor capable of either offensive or defensive actions. The Raptor, on the other hand, is the baddest mother in the sky…anyone’s sky.

Critics are arguing that we don’t even need the Raptor since we’re soon to be getting the first production airframes of the F-35 Lightning joint-services strike fighter. The F-22 took a long time to develop, as did the F-35, but let’s not be short-sighted and think that just because the F-35 is newer that it’s necessarily better. The two planes are vastly different in their roles.

The Raptor is a pure air-superiority fighter, with all-aspect stealth capabilities. It’s made to go forth and shoot down other planes. The Lightning is a strike fighter, meaning that it is primarily an attack aircraft to bring ordnance to bear against ground targets but still be able to act as a fighter aircraft. It can fight its way in, engage its target, and fight its way out, much like the Air Force’s current F-16 Falcon or the Navy and Marine F/A-18 Hornet. The F-35 will augment and then eventually replace both aircraft in service-specific variants starting when the first production models reach units sometime next year. The F-35 is partially stealthy, virtually invisible from radar from above, whereas the F-22 is pretty much invisible anywhere, anytime. The planes are not interchangeable, but rather will work together as a combined force.

"This plane has never flown over Iraq or Afghanistan -- the two wars that we are in," McCain said in criticism of the F-22.


Well, no shit, Johnny. Maybe that’s because the fucking Taliban doesn’t have a fucking air force, you numbnuts. It’s a waste of gas to fly them around those two Third World shit holes when they won’t really be doing much of anything. We invaded Iraq in April of 2003 and the Raptor entered active service in December, 2005. By then, there wasn’t anything over Baghdad to shoot down. Dude, you used to fly a strike fighter over Vietnam; surely you haven’t forgotten the concept of fighter cover for the attack planes as a guardian against enemy fighters? Oh, wait…you used to be a Republican, and you forgot what THAT means, too. Asshole.

You keep those F-22’s as a trump card against all those shiny new MiG’s in Russia and their Chinese-made clones instead of utilizing other assets better suited to the conflicts at hand. Oh, wait...China and Russia are our friends, aren't they?

"While the administration is emphasizing winning current conflicts, its stance regarding the F-22 does not adequately account for other kinds of threats," Senator Chambliss said, and I gotta agree.

I have seen both planes up close. I also got to see an F-22 flight demonstration, and that thing is seriously shit-hot. History Channel’s “Dogfights” series did an outstanding profile of both aircraft in the episode “Dogfights of the Future”. Check it out.

The F-35 I saw in 2007 at MCAS Beaufort


Tell you what. It’s only seven airframes. In the grand scheme of things, I guess seven more won’t make or break the universe. Granted, we do need at least one extra to replace the one that crashed back in March, but if we have to make do with 186, so be it. I say we keep the $1.75 billion in the budget but redirect it towards something else, like Dragon Skin body armor or funding for the Veteran’s Administration to help take care of returning wounded vets with rehabilitation and counseling for PTSD. Perhaps we can use that money as an emergency relief fund for military families who are having financial hardships with their service members deployed, or for reservists who no longer have jobs to come home to because the economy sucks.

Keep the money in the budget, but use it to actually help the troops? What a novel concept.

The Knee-Jerk 1-20-09 Sheeple Crowd

I swear, If I see one more bumper sticker reading “1-20-09” or see another rolling to-the-second countdown clock on MySpace to 1-20-09, I’m gonna climb a bell tower with a rifle and a bag of Doritos and have me a grand old time, snacking & sniping. I guess the chips are optional.

For over a year now I’ve been seeing these countdowns, done by eager people who probably don’t even vote, waiting for the end of the Bush presidency. I guess these folks have a better source of information than me. Because according to them all of America’s problems will instantly go away on the 21st of January next year.

Wow, that’s amazing.

On the 22d, if I’m to believe the Sheeple, the economy will be on the upswing, gas will be a dollar a gallon, unemployment will cease, the mortgage crisis will evaporate and allow the housing market to auto-correct in a heartbeat, Social Security will be funded in perpetuity, and all troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will be home by the weekend.

What utter bollocks. That’s not optimism. That’s not even properly wishful thinking. That even surpasses fantasy and delves into The Moon Is Made Of Green Cheese.

Look, I get it. Americans on the whole are looking to be rid of an unpopular President Bush; I’m really not used to seeing a sitting President being so openly reviled by the nation. But no matter who wins it’s going to take a year or two to get us back on an even keel. I myself have never exactly been a staunch Bush supporter, but I’m also not so much of a starry-eyed idiot to think that all our troubles will be over on January 21, 2009. While he latest poll I saw showed Bush's approval rating at 31%, the latest poll for the Democrat-led Congress that I saw had their approval rating at a paltry and sickening 16%.

All the Bush Bashing and 1-20-09 countdown crapola has me seriously concerned about knee-jerk voting. So many people simply hate Bush that come November they’ll just blindly and ignorantly vote for whichever candidunce the Democrats foist off on the American public after they finish slitting each others’ throats at the convention this summer.

I’ve heard dozens of people say they were going to vote for Obama simply because he’s black. And still dozens more have said that they’ll vote for Hillary because Bill was such a good President…… (What coma these people were in during the 90’s is beyond me). But by far the most people I’ve heard have said that they were simply going to vote Democrat because they hated Bush. That, dear readers, makes no freakin’ sense whatsoever. Why?

Regardless of who wins, George W. Bush will no longer be President in January. Voting for a Democrat doesn’t hurt him. Not one iota. You’re not voting him out of office, people. He’s already leaving. Get that through your noggins.

So instead of voting for someone out of spite, make sure you’re voting for someone who honestly will represent your interests and beliefs. I personally will not be voting for either Democratic candidate, as I feel neither are really qualified to lead me or my country.

Senator Clinton has served but one term in the Senate, and although re-elected in 2006 to a second term, she’s spent most of that term chasing the nomination. She keeps saying that she’s qualified because her husband was President. Big whoop, lady; just because I have a CDL doesn’t make my wife qualified to drive a truck. My first wife was a teacher, so does that mean that by default I’m qualified to teach, too? I mean, we lived in the same house & all. Just because you lived in the White House, that doesn’t mean you’re qualified to sit in the Oval Office. Unless I miss my guess, you weren’t exactly aware of everything going on at Bill’s desk anyways. She wants universal health care but has no plan on how to fund it. Her campaign has been rife with scandal on illegal contributions and all the usual Clintonian baggage, and don’t even get me started on her alleged landing in Kosovo under sniper fire. I trust her about as far as I can throw her.

And then we have Barack Obama, a first-term Senator who has spent a good part of his time in the Senate trying to become President. Congressional records show that he missed about 25% of the votes in the Senate last year. Senator Obama’s issues with Jeremiah Wright and his desire to sit & have tea and crumpets with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran leave me worried about his ability to lead much more than a pack of Cub Scouts to the dumpster & back without getting lost.

I believe in lower taxes, smaller government, and a strong military that we don’t send pell-mell to every Third World crapfest conflict that crops up. I guess I’d consider myself a moderate conservative, since I don’t completely toe the party line of the Republicans. I support the death penalty but am pro-choice. I support gay marriage and advocate responsible gun ownership.

I’ll be voting for John McCain in November, it looks like, unless a legitimate third party candidate can actually get onto my state’s ballots and can accurately represent my interests. But so far, Johnny’s my man. He served two terms in the House before being elected to the Senate in 1986, bringing 26 years of experience to bear. He’s a retired naval aviator who flew over Vietnam and spent five and a half grueling years as a prisoner of war after being shot down. That builds a lot of character, character that you don’t always find when ducking Whitewater allegations or listening to Jeremiah Wright spew rhetoric for 20 years.

Granted, I do have some concerns over John McCain that trouble me. He’s a bit weak on immigration. Of course, the state he’s represented in Congress for 26 years borders Mexico, whose chief export is Mexicans. If he wants to appease the locals at home, he can’t really be seen helping Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) building a border fence. And it seems that he’s pandering to Liberals by dabbling with the Global Warming conspiracy crowd, but over all, I think that given what we have to work with he’s my best bet. I honestly, deep down, do not feel that either Democratic candidate represents my interests.

But hey, don’t vote McCain because I said so. Vote for who you believe in. Please, do vote, and encourage everyone you know to vote. Don’t let American Idol have a better voter turnout than the Presidential elections of 2008. And for the love of all things small & fuzzy, don’t just knee-jerk Sheeple-vote Democrat thinking it’ll hurt Bush. He’s past caring who you vote for.