As things get more and more surreal every moment on this planet, it becomes difficult to write in a way that
A last romp at the beach?
doesn’t send you the reader or me the writer into tears or over a cliff. While the oil continues to gush, there have been some truly bat-shit scary ideas of how to stop it, including the Dr. Strangelove nuke it solution. Nuking a hole in a gushing hole, radiating the gulf and who knows what else when the wind blows is helpful how?
One thing to be said for that idea, it makes the idea of putting the military, you know the one that is winning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in to deal with it almost sound sane. I said almost. But not to worry,
“U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is rejecting a more forceful role for the military in plugging the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.Gates says the deep-water disaster is beyond the military’s expertise.”
Osama Bin Laden is rolling on the floor laughing in his cave. We spend how much every year to protect ourselves against all manner of ‘terrorism’ and when we actually have a real something to be afraid about, the military’s response is ‘We got nothing’? Oh and in answer to how much we spend to not be able to defend ourselves against real threats, here is the growing count and amount,
“The US spent $661 billion on its military in 2009, a 75.8 percent increase from 2000. While current US military spending is still a carryover from the years of George W. Bush, President Barack Obama shows no signs of cutting spending. The Nobel Peace Prize winner excluded security-related expenditure from a planned three-year squeeze in discretionary expenditure. At a recent hearing before Congress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about efforts to trim the fat but the proposed Defense Department baseline budget for fiscal 2011 is $708 billion.”
But don’t look to divert any of those funds to cleaning up wetlands or providing employment assistance for those along the Gulf who now joint the ranks of the already beleaguered unemployed. After all, a strong defense is important.
And then there is the Goldman Sachs oh so timely sale of BP shares? No need to be suspicious of that with Tim Geithner at the helm.
And the recession remember the recession? Is it back? Might could be, hardly a surprise, ‘splains the mirage like quality of our supposed recovery.
And in the miscellaneous oh there’s a surprise category:
1. Meanwhile, we spent how much money fighting the less than epic swine flu pandemic to the benefit of big Pharma and why? Remember Rumsfeld’s connection with Tamiflu? Nuf said.
2. And radioactive fish? Has nothing to do with proximity to nuclear plants.
Meanwhile, Arizona is doing its damnedest to whitewash itself, Israel went into its bat shit bully mode and the DADT debate is promising to last longer than the healthcare debate. I won’t even bother with links for those, you know, and I can’t bear to even spend the time to remind you. Stay tuned, the bad news is there will be more bad news and worse yet, more bad lies. And you’ll never guess who is going to get stuck paying the tab.
