Sir Basil Hudson-Landry
He May Not Be In Louisiana But He Sure Is Shoveling It
The front runner's massive lead among the party faithful has me once again despairing that conservatives just don't get it (to recycle a criticism from a past election).
A wall...?!! It's going to take more than a wall. That's not even "thinking outside the box", and what it's really going to take is some thinking outside the perimeter wire. Like, say, some of that there "job creation" among those of my neighbors who give my part of town the nickname "Little Saigon", who probably won't be averse to a juicy government contract to import all those punji stakes, because it's going to require 1900-some-odd miles of those plus another 1900+ of concertina wire, with machine gun positions and four-deuce mortar pits every 50 meters or so with interlocking fields of fire, God knows how many Claymores and enough command-detonated 55-gallon drums of fougasse to force us back to those of odd/even plate number days at the pumps we all recall so fondly from the Seventies, with an unbroken chain of firebases a few miles to the rear to provide artillery support. And, if he's really serious about interdicting the Ho Chi Menendez Trail, we're going to need a 50-mile-deep free fire zone where if so much as a Mexican bean jumps, we ARC LIGHT every madref-----g grid square from Matamoros to Tiajuana.
But even all that is just TOO conservative, the sort of effort that's about 15/32nds short of a half-measure, precisely the kind of meaningless gesture that we've consistently seen out of congressional conservativettes under Crybaby Boehner and, from what I've seen so far, what we can continue to expect with the guy who's waffling between the Charles Atlas and Maynard G. Krebs look. Besides, it's a plan based on our weakness rather than playing on our strength. As Patton's romp through Europe in '44-45 proved, and was reconfirmed by the Gulf War and the initial phase of the Iraq War (and proven in the negative by Vietnam and Iraqistan since 2003), if there is one thing that the United States Army absolutely excels at, it's the division-level drive-by shooting.
Therefore, fuzzy-thinking Liberal that I've become, I propose a much more expansive Big Government Spending Program to SOLVE the problem. Namely, have everybody at Hood, Bliss, Riley and Carson mount up, head out the main gate and DRIVE SOUTH! I figure by the time 1st Cav and 1st Armored are holding at PHASE LINE AY CHIHUAHUA! six klicks south of Mexico City waiting for 1st and 4th ID to finish mopping up, security along el viejo Rio Grande will have become pretty much a non-issue.
On a serious note (and I do trust that everyone realizes that I had my tongue planted firmly in my cheek in writing the foregoing; well, except for the part about invading Mexico, of course--you can take the boy out of Texas, but you can't take the Texas out of the boy), what really worries me about the lunatic wing of the party's adoration of The Donald is that I don't trust him, and am just astounded that so many of them have been fooled into doing so.
To begin with, he IS a Republican, which means he talks a good fight but once he wins the election, taking the oath of office will be the only real accomplishment of his entire administration. If voting for those lying, double-dealing, two-faced, back-stabbing bastards for forty-plus years has taught me anything, it's that Richard Nixon was not only the first of them I ever voted for, he's still the best of them. And even he wimped out in the end. As the saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and Republicans only have one: roll over and play dead.
More importantly, I believe the most serious problem confronting the United States today is our shrinking middle class and their even-more-rapidly-shrinking real income. There is a reason "bourgeois" is the F-bomb equivalent in commie lexicon, and why so much commie agit-prop hammers at and attempts to discredit, destabilize, demoralize and destroy the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, the middle class, are the backbone of the civilized world, and no Christian democracy can survive without them. They are most certainly what The Greatest Generation, who won WW II and then came home to make America the world power and Middle Class Heaven on Earth it was in the twenty years after, were. They're dying out, the number of their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren who have remained in their socioeconomic strata are becoming fewer and fewer every year, and those who remain find ourselves paying higher and higher prices to stay there, while working longer and longer hours at jobs that provide less and less real income to pay for the privilege. We have hit the point where we in the middle can no longer do a proper job of taking care of the poor, and certainly can't enjoy the dubious luxury of tolerating an increasingly self-indulgent wealthy class--especially an increasingly self-centered and unpatriotic CEO class. And I don't see The Donald as the man to do anything about it, unless it's everything in his power to make the situation even worse. As his supporters like to point out, he's a successful businessman. They are 100% right, of course, but they seem incapable of grasping the obvious, that that's precisely 100% the danger: he IS a successful businessman, and no successful businessman ever became a billionaire by giving a fat rat's ass about the working class, or failing to screw 'em over any way he could, every chance he got.
It's not that I don't understand his appeal to the party base. It's obviously symptomatic of our growing frustration with the unrelenting failure of the GOP to represent us in a meaningful way, to whine and bleat and blather incessantly about the problems but never, ever get them solved like we elected them to do, and in comparison to the others he does SEEM to be saying what needs to be said. I mean, after all those years hearing all that phony sincerity about "my respected colleague, my closest friend and esteemed opponent" being jabber-babbled on the debate stage, it IS kind of refreshing to hear The Donald make it plain that Carly Fiorina is so damned ugly he wouldn't do her with Jeb Bush's erectile dysfunction, nor would he piss up the rest of 'em's asses even if the sorry bastards' guts were on fire. But...if you listen between the lines, it's just the same old Crapola - Breakfast of Losers with a new picture on the box. Just like all the others, he's got his favorite Scripture passage, as if he wasn't a business man whose god is The Almighty Dollar and he worships no other (or as if you didn't have a better chance of finding a Christian child pornographer than a Christian politician), and, yes--rah-rah-rah it's a grand old flag!--him and his third or fourth or seventeenth or whichever mail order Bolshevik babushka he's on now love America with all their Red, White and Blue hearts. It's not a wall, it's a smokescreen, the same old hypocritical Bible Thumping and Flag Waving and Fear Mongering to keep us from seeing that we're getting the business as usual, and the only difference between him and the other betrayers is that he managed to finagle considerably more than thirty pieces of silver for his soul.
Presidents don't create jobs, businesses create jobs, and we only need to ask ourselves a few questions about The Donald's record as a "successful businessman"--and view the answers in light of the old business law, "The boss is always right", and its corollary, "Since the boss is incapable of error, if things are screwed up it must be because the boss wants them to be screwed up"--to know just how much we can expect out of a President Trump. So, how many steel workers have good jobs at the rolling mills of Trump Steel in Pittsburgh? How many engineers, stylists and assembly line workers are on the massive payroll at that massive Trump Motors plant in Detroit? How many pilots, mechanics, dispatchers, ticket agents and what have you are pocketing fat pay envelopes for keeping all those Boeing Triple-7s flying in Trump Airways International's scheduled service? How many engineers and machinists and sheet metal workers are making the big bucks at Trump Aerospace? How many train crews and track gangs and yard and backshop hands does the Trump Pacific R.R. have getting a good paychecks every week and looking forward to a comfortable pension--and how many crack passenger trains do they have in service? Once upon a time in America we had industries like that, industries that made us The Arsenal of Democracy and The Envy of the World, with millions of Americans having secure, and securely middle class, jobs in them, because American--that is, REAL American--Captains of Industry wanted things that way. We don't have them anymore, we have minimum wage plus tips service jobs instead, because The Donald and all his breed of Corporate Thugs found out they could maximize their personal profits by simply selling off--and selling out--their country. And now he wants us to reward his treason by giving him the most prestigious job in the world?
Because regulations prohibit the carrying of weapons in polling places, I may have to turn a one-off incident into a Family Tradition this time around. My great grandmother voted in every single election she could vote in from the time women got the vote until she died in the 1970s, except for one. In 1960, being a good Baptist she couldn't bring herself to vote for that papist Kennedy, but, being an Eleanor Roosevelt clone right down to the klunky toes of her sensible shoes, she sure as hell couldn't vote for "that snake in the grass Republican Nixon". I now have a much more sympathetic appreciation of her predicament. I sure as hell can't vote for that snake in the grass Republican Trump, and thanks to those aforementioned weapons laws, I can't hold a gun to my head and force myself to vote for Hillary.
On an artistic and historical note, those of you familiar with military history, and with the life of George S. Patton, Jr., in particular, may have looked at the helmet of our LUCKY (REEEEEEALLY) FORWARD heroine here and thought that, ever the stickler for uniform regulations, Patton wouldn't have tolerated a brigadier general (or a major general or a lieutenant general, for that matter) running around with the chin strap unhooked like that. But in this case he couldn't have said anything, because, if you'll look again, she's NOT a brigadier general. Altogether, she's wearing as many stars as Georgie had (although one of them IS a bit smaller, due to the limited room for maneuver in the area of operations, so to speak). Whatever his misgivings about her chin strap might have been, however, I'm pretty sure Old Blood'n'Guts would have looked favorably upon the kind of kick-ass pole dancing moves she could make in her spit-shined M1940 3-buckle cavalry boots!
He May Not Be In Louisiana But He Sure Is Shoveling It
The front runner's massive lead among the party faithful has me once again despairing that conservatives just don't get it (to recycle a criticism from a past election).
A wall...?!! It's going to take more than a wall. That's not even "thinking outside the box", and what it's really going to take is some thinking outside the perimeter wire. Like, say, some of that there "job creation" among those of my neighbors who give my part of town the nickname "Little Saigon", who probably won't be averse to a juicy government contract to import all those punji stakes, because it's going to require 1900-some-odd miles of those plus another 1900+ of concertina wire, with machine gun positions and four-deuce mortar pits every 50 meters or so with interlocking fields of fire, God knows how many Claymores and enough command-detonated 55-gallon drums of fougasse to force us back to those of odd/even plate number days at the pumps we all recall so fondly from the Seventies, with an unbroken chain of firebases a few miles to the rear to provide artillery support. And, if he's really serious about interdicting the Ho Chi Menendez Trail, we're going to need a 50-mile-deep free fire zone where if so much as a Mexican bean jumps, we ARC LIGHT every madref-----g grid square from Matamoros to Tiajuana.
But even all that is just TOO conservative, the sort of effort that's about 15/32nds short of a half-measure, precisely the kind of meaningless gesture that we've consistently seen out of congressional conservativettes under Crybaby Boehner and, from what I've seen so far, what we can continue to expect with the guy who's waffling between the Charles Atlas and Maynard G. Krebs look. Besides, it's a plan based on our weakness rather than playing on our strength. As Patton's romp through Europe in '44-45 proved, and was reconfirmed by the Gulf War and the initial phase of the Iraq War (and proven in the negative by Vietnam and Iraqistan since 2003), if there is one thing that the United States Army absolutely excels at, it's the division-level drive-by shooting.
Therefore, fuzzy-thinking Liberal that I've become, I propose a much more expansive Big Government Spending Program to SOLVE the problem. Namely, have everybody at Hood, Bliss, Riley and Carson mount up, head out the main gate and DRIVE SOUTH! I figure by the time 1st Cav and 1st Armored are holding at PHASE LINE AY CHIHUAHUA! six klicks south of Mexico City waiting for 1st and 4th ID to finish mopping up, security along el viejo Rio Grande will have become pretty much a non-issue.
On a serious note (and I do trust that everyone realizes that I had my tongue planted firmly in my cheek in writing the foregoing; well, except for the part about invading Mexico, of course--you can take the boy out of Texas, but you can't take the Texas out of the boy), what really worries me about the lunatic wing of the party's adoration of The Donald is that I don't trust him, and am just astounded that so many of them have been fooled into doing so.
To begin with, he IS a Republican, which means he talks a good fight but once he wins the election, taking the oath of office will be the only real accomplishment of his entire administration. If voting for those lying, double-dealing, two-faced, back-stabbing bastards for forty-plus years has taught me anything, it's that Richard Nixon was not only the first of them I ever voted for, he's still the best of them. And even he wimped out in the end. As the saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and Republicans only have one: roll over and play dead.
More importantly, I believe the most serious problem confronting the United States today is our shrinking middle class and their even-more-rapidly-shrinking real income. There is a reason "bourgeois" is the F-bomb equivalent in commie lexicon, and why so much commie agit-prop hammers at and attempts to discredit, destabilize, demoralize and destroy the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, the middle class, are the backbone of the civilized world, and no Christian democracy can survive without them. They are most certainly what The Greatest Generation, who won WW II and then came home to make America the world power and Middle Class Heaven on Earth it was in the twenty years after, were. They're dying out, the number of their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren who have remained in their socioeconomic strata are becoming fewer and fewer every year, and those who remain find ourselves paying higher and higher prices to stay there, while working longer and longer hours at jobs that provide less and less real income to pay for the privilege. We have hit the point where we in the middle can no longer do a proper job of taking care of the poor, and certainly can't enjoy the dubious luxury of tolerating an increasingly self-indulgent wealthy class--especially an increasingly self-centered and unpatriotic CEO class. And I don't see The Donald as the man to do anything about it, unless it's everything in his power to make the situation even worse. As his supporters like to point out, he's a successful businessman. They are 100% right, of course, but they seem incapable of grasping the obvious, that that's precisely 100% the danger: he IS a successful businessman, and no successful businessman ever became a billionaire by giving a fat rat's ass about the working class, or failing to screw 'em over any way he could, every chance he got.
It's not that I don't understand his appeal to the party base. It's obviously symptomatic of our growing frustration with the unrelenting failure of the GOP to represent us in a meaningful way, to whine and bleat and blather incessantly about the problems but never, ever get them solved like we elected them to do, and in comparison to the others he does SEEM to be saying what needs to be said. I mean, after all those years hearing all that phony sincerity about "my respected colleague, my closest friend and esteemed opponent" being jabber-babbled on the debate stage, it IS kind of refreshing to hear The Donald make it plain that Carly Fiorina is so damned ugly he wouldn't do her with Jeb Bush's erectile dysfunction, nor would he piss up the rest of 'em's asses even if the sorry bastards' guts were on fire. But...if you listen between the lines, it's just the same old Crapola - Breakfast of Losers with a new picture on the box. Just like all the others, he's got his favorite Scripture passage, as if he wasn't a business man whose god is The Almighty Dollar and he worships no other (or as if you didn't have a better chance of finding a Christian child pornographer than a Christian politician), and, yes--rah-rah-rah it's a grand old flag!--him and his third or fourth or seventeenth or whichever mail order Bolshevik babushka he's on now love America with all their Red, White and Blue hearts. It's not a wall, it's a smokescreen, the same old hypocritical Bible Thumping and Flag Waving and Fear Mongering to keep us from seeing that we're getting the business as usual, and the only difference between him and the other betrayers is that he managed to finagle considerably more than thirty pieces of silver for his soul.
Presidents don't create jobs, businesses create jobs, and we only need to ask ourselves a few questions about The Donald's record as a "successful businessman"--and view the answers in light of the old business law, "The boss is always right", and its corollary, "Since the boss is incapable of error, if things are screwed up it must be because the boss wants them to be screwed up"--to know just how much we can expect out of a President Trump. So, how many steel workers have good jobs at the rolling mills of Trump Steel in Pittsburgh? How many engineers, stylists and assembly line workers are on the massive payroll at that massive Trump Motors plant in Detroit? How many pilots, mechanics, dispatchers, ticket agents and what have you are pocketing fat pay envelopes for keeping all those Boeing Triple-7s flying in Trump Airways International's scheduled service? How many engineers and machinists and sheet metal workers are making the big bucks at Trump Aerospace? How many train crews and track gangs and yard and backshop hands does the Trump Pacific R.R. have getting a good paychecks every week and looking forward to a comfortable pension--and how many crack passenger trains do they have in service? Once upon a time in America we had industries like that, industries that made us The Arsenal of Democracy and The Envy of the World, with millions of Americans having secure, and securely middle class, jobs in them, because American--that is, REAL American--Captains of Industry wanted things that way. We don't have them anymore, we have minimum wage plus tips service jobs instead, because The Donald and all his breed of Corporate Thugs found out they could maximize their personal profits by simply selling off--and selling out--their country. And now he wants us to reward his treason by giving him the most prestigious job in the world?
Because regulations prohibit the carrying of weapons in polling places, I may have to turn a one-off incident into a Family Tradition this time around. My great grandmother voted in every single election she could vote in from the time women got the vote until she died in the 1970s, except for one. In 1960, being a good Baptist she couldn't bring herself to vote for that papist Kennedy, but, being an Eleanor Roosevelt clone right down to the klunky toes of her sensible shoes, she sure as hell couldn't vote for "that snake in the grass Republican Nixon". I now have a much more sympathetic appreciation of her predicament. I sure as hell can't vote for that snake in the grass Republican Trump, and thanks to those aforementioned weapons laws, I can't hold a gun to my head and force myself to vote for Hillary.
On an artistic and historical note, those of you familiar with military history, and with the life of George S. Patton, Jr., in particular, may have looked at the helmet of our LUCKY (REEEEEEALLY) FORWARD heroine here and thought that, ever the stickler for uniform regulations, Patton wouldn't have tolerated a brigadier general (or a major general or a lieutenant general, for that matter) running around with the chin strap unhooked like that. But in this case he couldn't have said anything, because, if you'll look again, she's NOT a brigadier general. Altogether, she's wearing as many stars as Georgie had (although one of them IS a bit smaller, due to the limited room for maneuver in the area of operations, so to speak). Whatever his misgivings about her chin strap might have been, however, I'm pretty sure Old Blood'n'Guts would have looked favorably upon the kind of kick-ass pole dancing moves she could make in her spit-shined M1940 3-buckle cavalry boots!