Some guidance for election season

Can we clarify a few things?

And I know that this will be very difficult for many people to grasp because this is the season for obfuscation and muckraking. Yep, yes indeed, the TV commercials produced to get uninspired nitwits elected to office are filling the airways and if you pay attention to any of it, you will most likely find yourself steadily confused into a stupor most closely associated with the lobotomized.

So in an effort to cut through the crap and just lay it out like it is, I am going to tell you what the reality is.

1. Republicans have done a poor job at policing themselves. They have spent a considerable amount of time engaged in a lack of disclosure and a lack of frank dialogue, and in the end, it makes them look like dupes. Frankly like they have squandered the opportunity that was given to them by voters in 2004. Whether you like it or not, life was a lot better when Newt was running things. At least the man can articulate a concept and lay out a vision.

2. Democrats in the midst of having no salient compass other than the woefully tired and pathetic class warfare angle of the “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the solution is to tax the hell out of the wealthy…” have squandered their opportunity to raise the level of dialogue because frankly most of them are too chicken-you-know-what to ever leave the antiseptic confines of university campuses and actually pick up a weapon and do the dirty work of defending the Republic. Kennedy should be rolling in his grave over the joke that his party has become.

3. The slaves were freed by Lincoln, er um ahem, a Republican. Democrats were all too happy to see them continue to stay on the plantation. This is one of the principal reasons why I tend to lean toward the party of Lincoln.

4. Iraq is a very tough place.

5. Nitwits in charge, the sorts who have never left America other than on highly orchestrated junkets, read, “fact-finding tours”, have produced nothing in the way of solutions that are workable. No amount of ballyhooing can avoid the reality that none of the members of congress have said, “You know what? I am going to go volunteer for a month to embed myself with patrols and film everything I can and actually learn something about Iraq from the front.”

6. The military is and has been woefully ignorant of foreign cultures and has chosen to embrace a Tofflerian vision of technology as the panacea for all conflicts. They have chosen an easy and extraordinarily expensive approach that avoids the messy work of learning foreign languages and cultures. The people making these policy decisions have done this because they are woefully inept at understanding history, the nature of 4th generation warfare and how human beings work.

7. The HMMWV is perhaps the worst thing to ever enter the military.

8. It is incorrect to say that “We leave everything up to the commander on the ground.” and then go after washing one’s hands of everything that happens. Sorry, President Truman had a desktop sign that acknowledged his roll in the Unity of Command. A 5-Star lost his job because he failed to remember that little sign and upon whose desk it sat.

9. More troops would not have made a difference. That is like saying that more money would have saved the welfare system; aq familiar mantra of dispossessed and moronic liberals. We have spent more than any nation in history on welfare and we have the highest teen pregnancy rate in our history. These are tired and uninspired taunts raised by nitwits who think that a diploma from Georgetown makes them subject matter experts on everything. That said, an immediate installation of martial law and a shoot on sight curfew after the kinetics stopped, might have helped.

10. Putting a civilian in charge of Iraq, read CPA, was a very bad idea. Japan today owes a lot to the fact that a soldier ran the place after the war. A gringo, in a suit, in the middle of Baghdad, was not the authoritarian figure that Iraqi’s needed to see after the war. Any basic understanding of Middle Eastern culture would have made this clear. Oh and by the way, we should pass a law that says that any military officer who voices reservations about their command’s actions AFTER retirement, and cannot support that they held that position and conveyed it to higher command with an email or written memo trail created before they retired, will not receive any retirement benefits. The law should also say that any officer sanctioned for expressing internal written concerns over command’s policies will be compensated in retirement at a rate 1.5 times the standard rate, provided their reservations were made to their leadership and open for scrutiny. I for one am having a very difficult time reconciling my former division commander’s choice to criticize actions AFTER he retired. He was in charge of my life and if things were so damnably bad why didn’t stars get laid on the table to look out for us troops?

11. Saying I voted for the troops before I voted against them is a highly effective method of illustrating the profound lack of time that one has spent not being a soldier, not being outside of a comfort zone and not having any idea how foreign policy as the world’s sole superpower really works.

12. Lot’s of us qualified for purple hearts in the same manner that a certain Swift Boat veteran did for one of his and lots of us never claimed one. It would be a dishonor to all those kids in Walter Reed and Bethesda to do so, and again, it makes me glad that things went the way that they did.

13. Being the wife of a president is in no way a qualification for being the president. Certain people would be wise to remember that fact.

14. The United States needs to seriously look at the wasting of billions on contractors and realize that US Army cooks are a pretty good bargain. Contractors make sense if you plan on being someplace for 30 days or less. I ate out of an Army mess trailer and did just fine in Iraq. I shudder to think what my DFAC trips cost the US Taxpayers (including myself).

15. The United States needs to have a bottom up review of every weapon system and objectively determine what sucks and what works. Then toss the former and keep the latter. We also need to spend more than a few minutes in a bar in Maclean, VA, determining what soldiers ‘need’. The South Africans have 4 decades of countermine and IED warfare under their belt. What brain trust in acquisition failed to inquire of them just what kind of vehicle might be useful in a place like Iraq? What brain trust pushed the buying of HMMWVs instead of useful urban warfare vehicles? I cannot believe that 10 years AFTER the Soviets imploded that we still thought our wars would be fought in Fulda and procured based upon this notion. Rumsfield was right, “You go to war with the army you have…” Guess what? Rumsfield inherited his army from someone else and they had plenty of time to analyze and configure it for what we would face today. Let’s see, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo all happened under the previous watch and they bear a strikingly similar resemblance to Iraq. I guess blue dresses kept the serious business of configuring an order of battle for the future conflicts as a lower priority. You go to war with the Army you get, and if the people who give it to you are tactical and operational idiots, well, you do the math.

16. Politicians that can only criticize their opponents and avoid discussing ideas and the future of the nation need to be marginalized and encouraged to seek employment outside the government in the low level management positions for which they are obviously well-suited.

17. Politicians who have so much extra time on their hands that they can spend it emailing minors and discussing lewd sex acts, driving while intoxicated, verbally harassing a police officer, accepting free lunches and claiming ignorance of conflicts of interest or taking lavish trips to play golf in foreign countries need to be immediately identified and forced through overt shame into resignation.

18. It would behoove us all if every member of congress was barred from residence outside of their home state, forced to sleep on a military cot in their office while in session, forbidden from participating in any fund raising while congress is in session AND forbidden from the use of any personal funds for re-election AND subject to the exact same laws and penalties of the citizenry. I suspect that we might see more sobriety in the performance of government duties. As well, lobbyists should be banned from Washington, DC. Lobbyists should be forced to meet with congress members in the member’s district, in a public place, so that any discussion is open to observation by the public.

19. What part of “Mission Complete” was thought to be representative of operations in Iraq and what idiot put it on a banner on the superstructure of the Abe Lincoln? A lot of us in OIF II are wondering about that right now. Whoever it was needs to be publicly identified and fired immediately.

20. Finally, the healthiest way to approach the election is to turn off all televisions and simply Google both candidates and read what comes up. Pretty quickly you can get a good idea what you are getting into and frankly, no matter what the party, my recommendation is that you vote against the incumbent if they have served more 2 or more terms.

Just some thoughts after a long month of bad dreams.