Staying Out Of Foreign Entanglements

Both President George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower were military men.  Both were elected by a landslide of popular acclaim.  In his final weeks, President Eisenhower warned us against the rise of the military industrial complex.  George Washington advised us to stay out of foreign entanglements.  For over a century the United States was known as a nation that stood for Peace and staying out of foreign wars, which were raging almost constantly in Europe.  How strange if citizens of the United States who lived in 1816 could see us now.  We have been in a virtual state of continuous war for the past fifteen years.  We are still, fighting in Afghanistan.  President Obama's instinct has been to resist withdrawals of troops anywhere.  Now we hear Mitt Romney lodge the accusation that Trump wants to use ISIS to get rid of President Assad of Syria before we get rid of ISIS.  Washington's blog charges something entirely different.  They say that Turkey is secretly supplying armlements to ISIS and the United States is secretly going along with that because the United States secretly desires the implementation of Solifist Islam everywhere in the Mideast because it's authoritarian and despots are easier to deal with than leaders of democracies.  I don't know what to think at this point.  It used to be that Hillary Clinton would say "I'm not running for a third term of Obama's administration but the first year of my own administration".  She's not saying that anymore.  Instead she is dropping President Obama's name as if it were seeds used in spring planting.  Some say that powerful military men really run the country and that when a new President such as Clinton or Obama gets elected, this military junta in this country sits them down and tells the new President how things will be.  I am more in sympathy with this point of view than over twenty years ago when Michael Benner first suggested it.  We know that the Obama administration tried desperately to maintain neutrality on the XL Canadian pipeline.  Obama could have taken a stand in the 2012 election but didn't. President Obama could have taken a stand against firearm polifferation in that same election of 2012 but he didn't.  President Obama could have done a lot of things but he didn't.  President Obama could not get reelected today.  Everyone agrees about that no matter what their political perswasion.  Perhaps Donald Trump is a wild card.  Maybe he really is mentally unstable.  But whether you are to the left or two the right, you agree that we need major change in the way Washington is run.  Bernie Sanders won two states on Saturday.  He's still in the running.  If you disqualify all of the Republican candidates as "just not Presidential" you're basically left with Bernie Sanders as the last man standing.

At ten after six I tuned in 640 KFI and the Democratic debate was on.  Apparently KFI is making a habit of carrying these debates.  It was a spirited debate but they stayed on respectable topics.   One can only contrast the difference in topics.  It's a case of "never the twane shall meet" because you'd think it was a different country with the issues the Republicans bring up, if they even ARE real issues.  Someone today said the Republican debate was more like an episode of planet of the apes.  At least the democrats argued on substance and "How BEST to solve the problems that face Americans".  There was no praising of Governor Snyder the way Marco Rubio did at his last debate.  There is absolutely nothing praiseworthy about ANYTHING Michigan Governor Snyder does.  I think Bernie Sanders' remarks were more "engaging" than Hillary's and seemed more likely to be the sort of remarks Black ghetto people could identify with.  It seemed to me that Bernie Sanders won that debate and he gave a better closing speech.  Others said that Sanders was kind of over-bearing in this debate.  I wouldn’t say that.  But the debate wrapped up just after seven with closing statements.  Then I watched “Once upon a Time” till a quarter to nine.  It was a special two hour segment of the problem, with all their usual stories.  

There were four contested states among the Republicans on Saturday.  Trump appears to have won in Kentucky and Louisiana was apparently a draw where they split the delegates down the middle.  Ted Cruz won outright in Kansas and Maine so basically it was kind of a Ted Cruz day since he won outright in two states and split another.  Bernie Sanders won in Kansas and in Nebraska.  But Hillary won in Louisiana and got more delegates than Sanders.  I don’t know how powerful Judy’s prayers are but maybe Cruz can pull it off if Trump loses on the Ides of March in Ohio and Florida.  March 15^th is the first “winner take all” Tuesday so that’s why this day is so important.  Washington’s blog stated that after the fifteenth Sanders will find it a whole lot easier to win states and his delegate count will draw even with Hillary eventually, if he’s lucky.  At any rate Sanders had pledged to stay in the race till June or convention time.  I just feel the progressive cause could be better served by having a candidate without skeletons in his or her closet the way Hillary does.  This whole Honduras coup thing is just one more strike against Hillary.  They had Lindsey Graham on “Meet the Press”.  Graham has gotten over his disgust for Ted Cruz long enough to endorse him for President, though he’d prefer either Kasech or Rubio if he had the choice.  They also had Mittens on.  Romney has come out of the obscurity of post candidacy and roared into the spotlight again and the voters are listening to his words. 

Nancy Reagan died today.  Don’t ask me to say anything nice about her because my heart’s just not in it.  The best thing I can say is they were truly in love and remained so for the rest of their lives.  I think Nancy led Ronnie around by the snout in the early days and also when he was President.  I’ve read Kitty Kelly’s book and I know about all of the skeletons and sketchy areas in Nancy’s closet.  I didn’t like her “taking over” and firing Don Reagan as Chief of Staff.  I thought the astrology stuff was questionable.  If she is destined to be with Ronald in the afterlife she’s had about a 25 year wait since Ronald was last lucid.  It was about the time of Iran Contra that Ronald Reagan first began having his memory lapses.

(Saturday) Rhapsody in Black was back today and they had a good crop of songs ranging from late spring to early fall of 1963.  There was an obscure Mary Wells song I thought was called “Nevermore”.   They played “El Watuci” by Ray Baretto, “If You Want to be Happy” by Jimmy Soul and “Walking the Dog” by Rufis Thomas.   I remember the Olympics song they played.  They played the original versions of “The Bird is the Word” and “Land of a Thousand Dances”.  They played “Fingertips” and a rather Carebean version of “Que Sarah Sarah”.   There was “Pride and Joy” and “Monkey Time” and “Just One Look” by Doris Troy.  There was a song I thought was called “Lonely Surfer”.  They played “I’m Busted” by Ray Charles and “Sally Go Round the Roses” and “Shake Your Tail Feathers” (Not sure I remember that)  I remember the tag line from “Ruby Baby” (not to be confused with Ruby Ruby)  The final track I had it on for was another Mary Wells song.  Then I went out to buy John Blacks at the liquor store.

The murder in Honduras on March 3rd of the global prize-winning environmental activist Berta Cáceres is one of the current achievements (though indirect) of Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s decision in 2009 to allow the newly-installed coup-regime in that country to solidify and remain in power.  As the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton resisted and ultimately overcame the virtually unanimous efforts of other Western Hemispheric and European leaders to oust the coup-regime. She was backed-up in this retrograde decision by U.S. President Barack Obama. Without her efforts, and President Obama’s passive acceptance of her decision, the coup-installed regime wouldn’t have remained in power, and the freely elected President would have been restored to power to complete his term.  The results of this for both the U.S. and Honduras have been disastrous: the world’s highest murder-rate, soaring drug-trafficking, and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Honduran children who don’t want to spend their lives drug-trafficking, and who have left Honduras because the gangs kill children who refuse. Then, U.S. Republicans, whose representatives in Congress were passionate supporters of the coup-installed regime, complain about the influx of those children into the U.S. and demand they be sent back to die there.  The democratically elected progressive President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by Honduras’s aristocracy, in a coup on 28 June 2009, organized by that country’s nearly dozen aristocratic families, whose suffocating control over Honduras was being threatened by the entirely lawful and progressive democratic policies and actions by Zelayas’s government, including land-reform and workers’ rights — two things that aristocracies everywhere oppose.