Down, Dark, and Cynical

Down, Dark, and Cynical 

Don’t Even Read It

Seems insensitive this morning, even sinful unto blasphemous, to think about lighthearted things in the face of what is going on, news on television last night, reinforced in this morning’s online news, unspeakable atrocities in Syria enabled by outdated concepts of “national sovereignty” untempered by international outrage, power, ability and conscience; desolated, evacuated morality of our presence in Afghanistan where we have so well and truly “got even” for 9/11 that it will be generations before memory and hatred of us begins to fade. After more than a decade, our success in that graveyard of empires will be to have given them yet one more nation of foreigners to hate even more than they hate each other. 

In Iraq and Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, we have shown history even if not ourselves that we are not what we thought ourselves to be, much less are we what the world once idolized us to be.

An alarming, frightening NYT headline just now -- “U.S. Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout. With a belief in the White House that the mission's costs now outweigh benefits, some suggest accelerating the drawdown, but military commanders remain opposed” -- forgets, or God help us perhaps doesn’t even know, that military power is an instrument of foreign policy, not its driver. What military commanders favor or oppose is irrelevant except for their professional advice about whether they have the ability to do the military part of what the policymakers decide. When policymakers begin to hold the military in overmuch respect, and then in awe, and finally in fear, we will at last see that we are going the way of all empires. 

A constitutional amendment should require that presidential candidates ace a doctoral degree in foreign policy and publish their dissertations before taking office.

Down. Should have stuck to the comics this morning.

Unfortunately, GoComics.com says "We are updating the site for you and will be back shortly. In the meantime, how about playing a game on our sister site. The Puzzle Society. Click Here!"

No thanks. I'd rather be mad.

TW