The Conundrum of Memory

Sometimes I get to wondering, sometimes I get confused about what our conservative brethren are trying to tell us.  I was reminded recently that my former Republican congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) amongst others,  vociferously  threatened to impeach the president for having provided air traffic control for the UN incursions into Libya; for having exceeded his constitutional authority by arming Syrian rebels.  Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) back in June of 2013 threatened to impeach President Obama if any U.S. troops are killed in Syria.  Is there a relationship between rhetorical amplitude and political passion and the shortness of it's half-life? 


I ask because currently the same party is chastising him for not having gone into Syria thus allowing ISIS a breeding ground. We need those airstrikes -- why didn't he make those airstrikes?  We need airstrikes, says John McCain, in his time-worn tradition of  damning Obama if he does or if he doesn't.  Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to commit ground troops. This is all

 "due to our total inaction. And it's going to be one of the more shameful chapters in American history," says John McCain

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said the President's limited foreign policy is no longer acceptable. I have no idea whether that refers to the hundred airstrikes the Obama administration has unilaterally launched into Northern Iraq to help the hopelessly rickety and incompetent government Republicans bragged about setting up not long ago, but we can be assured of at least one thing: Republicans will damn him for doing it and damn him for not stepping in earlier back when they were trying to impeach him for it.

Thank you Mr. Bush

 Our efforts against Al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere have been much like the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, killing off the weak bacteria and letting the strong get stronger.  The group they're now calling ISIS seems more radical and has more blind hatred for America and the West than the old guard and they're likely to "take back" the Iraq we set up for destruction, killing hundreds of thousands and putting control into the hands of brutal and incompetent people.There's not a hell of a lot we can do, even if  that most strange of bedfellows Iran joins forces with us, setting new records in the World Cup of irony.

As much as that idiot John McCain and that fool Tony Blair would like to re-invade, it's not likely to happen, although some wag might suggest that the only reason to suggest such a thing would be an opportunity to call Obama cowardly and weak.  They're already doing that and have been doing that since before he was elected.  But speaking of irony, hardly anyone seems, except perhaps for Fareed Zakaria, to be calling attention to the weak, cowardly and dishonest George W. Bush who lied us into invading a country, a recent ally, where Al Qaeda was not, that had nothing to do with an attack on our country and doing it with an inadequate force and a non-existent plan for what to do after the conquest.

This is nothing less than an inevitable continuation of Bush's War, a war we lost by starting it.  For those who remember the premises of that war: the nuclear program, the WMD, the connection with 9/11 and the presences of al Qaeda and its training camps within Iraq, it might be a sad thing to remember than none of those things so often repeated in such bellicose language actually turned out to be true and all of us who were called anti-American traitors, cowards and worse were actually right -- and that includes whole countries like France.  In a sane country apologies would have been made long ago, but this is not a sane or honest country, but one still trying to justify it's tragic mistakes and to blame it all on others. 

Al Qaeda, as we were warned, is now bigger, uglier, more insanely brutal and about to take over in Iraq.  Thank you Mr. Bush although you'll have to share the ignominy with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, inter alia. This is the world you have given us along with an America too divided and self-hating to pay its bills and maintain itself.  We stay up nights listening to lies, inflated or invented scandals and hating each other for it. We install depraved religious idiots, fascists, anarchists, separatists, denialists and bigots in the legislature while slandering, libeling the president and thwarting every effort to deal with the mess the Republicans left us. Thank you for uniting Syria and Iraq under the flag of  death, for destroying any hope that this new century might be better than the old one. Thank you for bringing back the spectre of nuclear war in the middle east, for giving Iran and other nearby countries a good reason to build nukes. Thank you so much.