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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (481030)	10/8/2021 12:20:40 PM
From: koan	1 Recommendation Recommended By Maple MAGA Respond to of 540753

Eugene Robinson is such an intelligent, decent human being who writes with clarity and empathy. Opinion: How dumb can a nation get and still survive? Anti-vaccine demonstrators protest outside the San Diego Unified School District office on Sept. 28. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images) Opinion by Eugene Robinson Columnist Yesterday at 4:34 p.m. EDT T.S. Eliot wrote that the world ends "not with a bang but a whimper,” but I fear our great nation is careening toward a third manner of demise: descent into lip-blubbering, self-destructive idiocy. How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb? Why is the news dominated by ridiculous controversies that should not be controversial at all? When did so many of our fellow citizens become full-blown nihilists who deny even the concept of objective reality? And how must this look to the rest of the world? Read the headlines and try not to weep: Our elected representatives in the U.S. Senate, which laughably calls itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” agreed Thursday not to wreck our economy and trigger a global recession — at least for a few weeks. Republicans had refused to raise the federal debt ceiling, or even to let Democrats do so quickly by simple majority vote. They relented only after needlessly unsettling an international financial system based on the U.S. dollar. The frequent games of chicken that Congress plays over the debt ceiling are — to use a term of art I recall from Economics 101 — droolingly stupid. In the end, yes, we always agree to pay our obligations. But the credit rating of the planet’s greatest economic superpower has already been lowered because of this every-few-years ritual, and each time we stage the absurd melodrama, we risk a miscalculation that sends us over the fiscal cliff. Today’s trench-warfare political tribalism makes that peril greater than ever. An intelligent and reasonable Congress would eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Our Congress is neither. In other news, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was speaking to a crowd of Republicans at a country club in his home state Saturday when he tried, gently, to boost South Carolina’s relatively low rate of vaccination against the coronavirus. He began, “If you haven’t had the vaccine, you ought to think about getting it because if you’re my age — ” “No!” yelled many in the crowd. Graham retreated — “I didn’t tell you to get it; you ought to think about it” — and then defended his own decision to get vaccinated. But still the crowd shouted him down. Seriously, people? Covid-19 is a highly infectious disease that has killed more than 700,000 Americans over the past 20 months. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all but guarantee that recipients will not die from covid. I have, or had, an acquaintance who refused to get vaccinated, despite pleas from his adult children to protect himself. He got covid-19, and it killed him. Most of the deaths the nation has suffered during the current delta-variant wave of the disease — deaths of the unvaccinated — have been similarly needless and senseless. Covid-19 is a bipartisan killer. In the tribal-political sense, the safe and effective vaccines are a bipartisan miracle, developed under the Republican Trump administration and largely distributed under the Democratic Biden administration. People in most of the rest of the world realize, however, that vaccination is not political at all; it is a matter of life and death, and also a matter of how soon — if ever — we get to resume our normal lives. Why would people not protect their own health and save their own lives? How is this anything but just plain stupid? We are having other fights that are, unlike vaccination, partisan and political — but equally divorced from demonstrable fact. Conservatives in state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation to halt the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools. I put the term in quotes because genuine critical race theory, a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, is not actually being taught in those schools at all. What’s being taught instead — and squelched — is American history, which happens to include slavery, Jim Crow repression and structural racism. I get it. The GOP has become the party of White racial grievance, and this battle against an imaginary enemy stirs the base. But the whole charade involves Republican officials — many of them educated at the nation’s top schools — betting that their constituents are too dumb to know they’re being lied to. So far, the bet is paying off. And then, of course, there’s the whole “stolen election” farce, which led to the tragedy of Jan. 6. Every recount, every court case, every verifiable fact proves that Joe Biden fairly defeated Donald Trump. Yet a sizeable portion of the American electorate either can’t do basic arithmetic or doesn’t believe that one plus one always equals two. How dumb can a nation get and still survive? Idiotically, we seem determined to find out.

To: koan who wrote (481030)	10/8/2021 12:36:47 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540753

"You said 12,000 and 25,000" That was if we stayed beyond the deadline. = "Still 4,500 is reasonable" That's why Trump left Biden with 2500. = "worrying about starving children" There are starving children in lots of places, yet you never seem to notice them. Why not? Bangladeshi woman and her child. Mehedi Rahman/WFP BY GERNOT LAGANDA, PROC, CHIEF OF CLIMATE AND DISASTER RISK REDUCTION PROGRAMMES, UN WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME 2021 is going to be a bad year for world hunger How climate action can make a difference Today, the UN World Food Programme's live Hunger Map aggregates 957 million people across 93 countries who do not have enough to eat. The Global Humanitarian Outlook projects 239 million people in need of life-saving humanitarian action and protection this year. un.org

To: koan who wrote (481030)	10/8/2021 12:50:49 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 540753

When the Bush-Cheney cretins were planning to invade Iraq, there were about 25 million people. General Eric Shinseki said that they would need about 500,000 troops to keep the peace there. He was treated derisively by that moronic administration that convinced themselves that the Iraqis would dance in the streets and accept Chalabi as their leaders--after all, he was a Shia! Yay! One of them! The Bush-Cheney people found some generals to overrule Shinseki and some DoD intel people to overrule the CIA intel people and off they went into Iraq to -- wait for it! -- establish democracy in the mideast, get rid of all of the WMDs that Saddam was hiding, and finally bring peace to that troubled area and the cleverest part of it all was that it would pay for itself! Yay!! Generals said it would work, so it must work! Those effing idiots were as stupid as progressives. They all pretend that they have the answer! The main difference is that the progressives actually believe that they have it while people like Bush-Cheney people believe that they can fool everyone into believing that they have the answer while they sneak the wealth out the back door into their pockets. The Bush-Cheny people thought they could pacify 25m Iraqis with less thank a quarter million troops. Afghanistan has something like 40 million people and some friggin general says, oh we only need 2500 troops. Or maybe 5000 troops. Or maybe 20,000 troops. It doesn't matter what the number is. If they aren't willing to kill minimally hundreds of thousands of people and more likely several million people and sustain 10s of thousands of US casualities, then walking into an Afghan civil war is nuts. Crazy. Idiot. The US lost its chance to maybe (emphasize that word!) change a part of that war torn country when the Bush-Cheney people decided that Iraq was a far tastier target. Hell, we can't even change the minds of 10s of millions of Americans about Trump and the Rs, yet people like Koan somehow believe we can transform a poor uneducated Muslim society much of which is stuck in the 15th century.