(Warning: This post wanders a bit. to incorporate a couple of things I've been thinking about. But I've got a great quote with which to close)
I've been looking for an excuse to mention something about former President Clinton. As he sells his new book and campaigns for his wife, he's made what I think are important statements on the need for the US to withdraw from Iraq.
He's done this both on the David Letterman and Larry King programs, but the statements haven’t gotten a lot of attention from the media, with the exception of this from Bloomberg.com:
Former President Bill Clinton said the U.S. will have to withdraw a ``substantial'' number of troops from Iraq this year because the war has stretched the military too thin.
Any new national security emergency would require tapping the Navy and Air Force because the Army, National Guard and Reserves are ``overstressed,'' Clinton said in an interview on CNN's ``Larry King Live'' program.
``I don't see any alternative consistent with the responsibilities for national security to a substantial withdrawal of troops this year, because the military is so overstressed,'' Clinton, 61, said.
Has anyone seen anything from any of the Democratic frontrunners as concise, plainspoken, sensible and sane as that?
The media, meanwhile, would rather talk about how he can't be Hilary's VP. They're also sure it must gall him to bury his innate charm so that his wife looks less creepy.
But gosh, he's still popular; imagine that, they seem to say. The media has never really gotten over the fact that the United States Of America actually likes a guy they chose to be in charge of their country twice.
At least when that guy doesn't fuck it up by lying us into an unending war, invading our privacy and ignoring the science on climate change.
Which brings me to something else I wanted to mention: When people like me ask Can we impeach them now? we get treated like radical fringe children only slightly above your average Dennis Kucinich supporters.
We don't have the votes, we're told (and for some reason I always imagine we are being patted on the head as we are told so). Well, maybe we don't. But I keep wondering about something, and yes, I'm serious about this even though I know it sounds like that Simpsons running gag: Won't somebody please think of the children?
Right now we are teaching more than one entire generation that sticking fingers in your ears when people tell you things you don't want to know is okay. And so is lying so that people will kill and be killed for you.
I keep thinking, with black, black humor, of how Rush Limbaugh said Bill Clinton made America's youth obsessed with blow jobs. But of course, he's not concerned with what George W. Bush's words and deeds, and our apparent rollover acceptance of them, have done to that youth.
Not that I was really expecting him to be. But neither is any "serious" newspaperman or, apparently, many of us sitting out there at our keyboards. So it must be okay. Because otherwise, we'd actually do something about it.
Don't just rush past that, please: Really think about it. That is the message we're sending. Refusing to listen; lying to and hurting others is perfectly all right in the good old US of A.
And now, to send you out on an upbeat note, this from former President Bill Clinton:
In 1982, when I was trying to regain the governor's office, a man called and said he'd had a message from God telling him my opponent was the instrument of the Lord and I was the instrument of the devil and he was going to do God's will and eliminate me. He turned out to be an escapee from a Tennessee mental institution.
-My Life
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