The president missed a great opportunity in his speech on national TV (August 23, 2017), delivering his long-delayed new approach to the Afghan War, the longest military operation in the nation’s history.
He could have announced we had won the war in Afghanistan—the first president to achieve that laudatory goal, which already has cost the nation more than a trillion in treasure and countless lives and trauma. He alone is bringing our boys and gals home, thus fulfilling the candidate’s promise to end stupid wars. “No more wasting money —spend on infrastructure,” as he wrote on Twitter in 2013.
By “winning” he would have meant the way we won the war in Vietnam, as he seemed to imply during the speech, a war of which he once said his own personal Vietnam was avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in the Battle of Manhattan. With his war record as a draft dodger, he was no Ike or even the naval officer Lieutenant Commander Nixon, a member of the Fighting Quaker wing of the peace-loving religion. Remember, those with their bone spurs and four student deferments necessary to study the art of dealmaking at Wharton, vital in the war against communism, also served their country.
Of course, the claim that we won in Afghanistan—something the British said after the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) and the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) and the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919—would have been a lie.
Nobody ever wins in Afghanistan, where foreign powers have been playing what is known as the “Great Game” for centuries.
But since when has the truth stopped the president from telling a lie?
In the first seven months of his administration, according to the scorekeepers at the Washington Post, he has made more than one thousand misleading public statements that were not true, otherwise known as lies. That’s an average of about five per diem.
We the lemmings of America elected what may be a total nutjob to lead us into a dangerous world based on his ability to lie. His suddenly telling the truth about anything would create credibility chaos. (See, for example, the oil tanker crisis of June 2019.)
Lying to the folks at home about wars is a great American tradition. Remember during the Vietnam War how we were always winning? The body count numbers, the tonnage of bombs dropped on the jungle bike trails by our B-52s . . . For ten years Saint Walter Cronkite was repeating the Pentagon line. And that’s the way it wasn’t! The light at the end of the tunnel the generals were always seeing turned out to be a train coming the other way.
Having established bragging rights as the man who won the war in Afghanistan, our commander in chief could then turn his limited attention span to dealing with the real enemy: our friends, the Pakistanis, who continue to fund, arm, and train the Taliban.
Given his total ignorance of history, our von Clausewitz has been convinced by his generals who have studied at the General Westmoreland School of Military Science that escalation is the way to go in an area like the Middle East, where they have been fighting and killing each other for five thousand years (check your Bible), with the added wrinkle of keeping the numbers secret.
Afghanistan is our Hundred Years War, and there are those who think that reopening the festering Afghan wound provides the House of Trump yet another distraction away from the multiple congressional and Special Counsel investigations into Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
So what’s the big deal if the Big Gonif is practicing bait and switch with his promise to end our stupid wars?
The Republican Party—the Party of Lincoln, the car and the Tunnel, and the idiots who don’t even believe he is lying when he lies—has become the Party of So What?
So what if he missed hearing some very fine people in Charlottesville who were chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil”?
So what if some folks were carrying Second Amendment assault weapons as they gave the “Sieg Heil” salute outside the synagogue?
So what if some of his best friends are neo-Nazis, white segregationists, and other un-Americans?
So what if he flip-flops on health care, moving from a campaign promise of insurance-for-everyone to being okay with throwing twenty-three million under the bus with a new unimproved Affordable Care bill?
So what if there was collusion with the Russians, without which the election of a minority president wouldn’t have been possible?
So what if there is obstruction of justice?
So what if the president and his avaricious family have conflicts of interest up the kazoo?
So what if he talks the North Koreans into launching a nuke strike against Guam?
So what if our big fat total nutcase destroys the world? The next one might be better.