OBAMA FOLLOWS NIXON TRAIL INTO AFGHANISTAN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

All the bad news out of the Gulf of Mexico is masking another series of awful facts developing on the ground in Afghanistan that could put Rush Limbaugh and Co. over the top, making Barack Obama a one-term president.

Obama’s frightfully imbecilic Afghanistan policy is slowly fashioning him into a 21^st century Richard Nixon. Both men inherited wars from their predecessors that they could have extricated themselves from at the outset of their terms, but neither had the guts. In our topsy-turvy politics it’s easier to ride a mindless war policy downhill toward disaster than it is to slam on the brakes.

Nixon, like Obama, tried escalation for awhile, turning the Air Force loose on Cambodia and bombing the hell out of a jungle filled with innocents in hopes that some of the ordnance would strike the enemy and disrupt his supply lines. Obama has upped his ante from approximately 35,000 troops to almost three times that amount plus lots and lots of extremely expensive private contractors doing jobs that used to be done by people in uniform. And casualties are climbing, with the U.S. death rate now approaching two lives a day.

Eventually Nixon, crippled by Watergate, began to disengage from his war under the cloak of “Vietnamization.” Still, we lost approximately 20,000 U.S. lives during his turn at the wheel. All for nothing.

The Nixonites used to put out the same kind of blather we’re hearing from Obama and Company. Really meaningless crap. If we’re to believe this Administration, the corrupt, blundering Hamid Karzai, a disturbed personality and a hopeless liar, will lead the Afghan people toward democracy. It’s just possible Americans will accept that incredible whopper for awhile, but tell it to the Afghans, who’ve watched this guy up close for eight years already.

We watched Bush for eight years. How many people at the end of his second term would believe he could suddenly turn into a fine leader making wise decisions at every turn? See what I mean? It’s all ridiculous insulting propaganda, junk food for foolish or preoccupied minds. Only one out of ten Afghan police recruits can read. Yet we’re supposed to spend billions and billions turning it into a Central Asian Nebraska? Don’t hold your breath.

Our poor troops on the ground are supposed to convince the Afghans that we’re going to stay. They’re not dumb enough to believe that either. Because at some point we will leave, and when we do, whether it’s tomorrow or ten thousand U.S. lives from now, the result will be the same.

It would be nice to civilize Afghanistan and bring it peace and democracy. But even if those goals were possible, the price would be much too high. The time to win there was right after Nine-Eleven, when we had Bin Laden trapped. But most intelligence people believe he’s been across the border in Pakistan for years. If we pursue wars wherever Al Qaeda establishes a safe house for a while we’d now be at war with the United Kingdom and Germany, among other countries.

Where do you think those 100,000 troops would do us more good? Fighting a stupid fight in Afghanistan or cleaning up the Gulf State beaches? I rest my case.

My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

TRADE OLBERMANNN TO MEXICO

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Brave journalists in Mexico and Russia are getting murdered for trying to print real news. But here in the U.S., journalists safe from such atrocities write about who's going to win American Idol and speculate on why Al and Tipper broke up.
Or they behave like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, the supposedly liberal antidote to right-wing Fox.

Olbermann is a clumsy, would-be clown who mimics Fox and other far-right personalities in a silly voice that has about as much entertainment value as taking out the garbage. Then there’s his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow who’s supposed to be a cut above the rest because she reads the news with a smirk.

These and other media gatekeepers are searching frantically for something to take the place of the BP-sponsored disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which is depressing and devoid of sex appeal. They might consider checking out why we're stuck in two wars and being barbecued by huge global banks, oil and drug corporations, and anyone else who knows how to channel legal bribes to political weasels.

This dereliction of duty by the media adds to American confusion on what constitutes news and what constitutes gossip and helps explain why Tiger Woods had to apologize to everybody for screwing waitresses but no one has to explain why they pursue crazy wars or, like Obama’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers, slither back and forth between government and Wall Street leaving a slime trail of betrayal.

The giant banking corporations have siphoned off so much of the economy under our klept-o-cratic government that their share now threatens to exceed Limbaugh’s weight. The top four banks have assets equal to 52 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. They didn’t siphon off all this wealth by natural selection or free enterprise. They paid off people in government to put the fix in, fashioning legislation that made it inevitable. These banks need to be taken apart, the same way we took apart AT&T almost thirty years ago.

The AT&T suit was initiated by the Justice Department in 1974 under a Republican administration. In those days Republican leaders were conservative, not crazy.

But the financial reform bills moving around committees in the Senate and House won’t break up the big banks or even re-establish a separation between broker-financiers and plain-vanilla banks that served us well from the FDR years until “moderate” Bill Clinton gave Wall Street free rein in 1999 when he killed the Glass-Steagall Law. His Treasury Secretary (Guess who?) Lawrence Summers was fanatically in favor of the crazy decision to fix a banking system that wasn’t broken.

In his new position Summers is still “fixing” things. And he’ll get away with it too because the global corporations that own U.S. news media spend their resources on clowns like Olbermann and Maddow instead of crusading Mexican journalists like Valentín Valdés, a crime reporter for Zócalo de Saltillo. He was grabbed off the street January 8, thrown into an SUV, tortured, and shot to death. Valdés was 29 years old.

Olbermann gets $7 million a year plus perks. Valdés did a lot more for a lot less.
My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.