Trump says he wants everybody to be stopped from coming into the United States until "we figure out what's at the bottom of this."
     Everybody.  Sloppy with his words, as usual, but to expand his anti-Muslim rhetoric to every human being outside U.S. borders, including, presumably, U.S. citizens traveling abroad, smacks of hyperbole masquerading as foreign policy in a Tom Clancy-based video game.  U.S. journalists continue to accept Trump's insane ideas without going after him relentlessly.  Truth is nothing compared to ratings.
     Ted Cruz, reacting, like Trump, to the terror bombings in Brussels, called for mass surveillance of American Muslims; make Dearborn, Michigan, I guess, into a police city state.  These idiotic ideas pass for serious solutions in today's America.  Just because Trump is the Republican frontrunner, we supposedly must accept his intellect as sound, yet all he can come up with is predictable, and useless, bigotry against, primarily, practitioners of a major world religion, most of whom have nothing to do with acts of terror.
     Trump and Cruz remind me of Osama bin Laden.  The late bin Laden carried out his dirty work from a distance; he got minions to put their own safety at risk.  Currently, Cruz hasn't reached Trump's level of degeneracy as the latter encourages violence against protestors, but Cruz nevertheless uses rhetoric designed to inflame the passions of the stupid.  Putting Muslims in America under surveillance simply because they're Muslims is hardly far removed from the same spirit of post-Pearl Harbor mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans, none of whom piloted the warplanes that sank American warships on December 7, 1941.
     Pearl Harbor was an act of war, not terrorism.  The U.S. military was targeted, not civilians.  In Brussels on March 22, 2016, civilians were targeted, killed, and wounded, by probable ISIS assholes. I heard someone on CNN today say that ISIS leaders regard Europe these days as "the soft underbelly" of the West.  The term, "soft underbelly," was used by Winston Churchill as he urged Allied commanders to attack Mussolini's Italy and the Third Reich from the south; a more feasible series of violent hits against the Fascists and Nazis, Churchill believed, than going at them from northern Europe.  The Allies hit from both sides, and one of their soldiers later said that Italy proved not to be "soft."
     The dredging up of old descriptions to account for what goes on in Europe now, with fanatical Muslims so extreme they're not recognizable as Muslims, seems weird.  A pundit on U.S. cable news using Churchill's memorable put-down of southern Europe makes Europe itself, to some anyway, seem weak and pliable, when it should be kevlar-strong.  Belgium today has been described in the U.S. news media as a messed-up fragmented country, lax in security, a poster child for the fragility of the European Union, with its open borders, which allow asshole terrorists to pass from one country to another freely.
     I recall that a decade ago, during the Iraq chaos-causing Bush administration, hundreds, thousands, millions of Iraqis fled their war-ravaged nation to neighboring countries, including Syria, which, like Jordan and other Middle Eastern nations, had to deal with a massive swelling of alien population.  Syria's troubles, caused by Assad's rule but also by seething civil problems exacerbated by the overall chaos created by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their partners in war crimes, led to a civil war still raging, involving a group that mutated from al-Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of bin Laden's own assholes, into what came to be called ISIS, among other names.
     Ridiculing "soft" Europe for letting itself be fucked by ISIS, an organization that would never have existed had it not been for the Bush-caused radicalization of disaffected Middle East men and women, misses the reason why the War on Terror has been so successful.  After all, if ceaseless conflict is the goal, as Dick Cheney admitted on Meet the Press soon after 9/11, explosions and gun violence in Europe are just the thing to keep the stew bubbling.  Cheney said the war would "go on for a very long time."  The only purpose such a war can have, from a practical standpoint, is to profit those who perpetuate it, through policy decisions and actions.  Obama, in spite of seeming like some to be a relative peacenik compared to Cheney and Bush, carries on the successful war doctrine.  His attitude toward NATO member Turkey can only be understood if we realize that going against Turkey, which bombs and antagonizes the Kurds, would be akin to a betrayal of a regional ally, one which opposes both Assad and Russia.  The Kurds, the only ground force practically capable of possibly defeating ISIS, is therefore left standing on the ledge of a high slowly burning building.
     Obama, therefore, is not trying to defeat ISIS, but to, as he's put it many times, to "degrade and destroy," with most emphasis on degrade, or containing the threat with aerial bombardments.  Putin and his military also bomb Syria, but they're not attacking ISIS, but the enemies of Assad, including lots of civilians.  The whole thing is so disgusting.  They're all motherfuckers.  I don't think they care.
     There isn't an expression I hate hearing more than, "the greater good."  Put up a photo of a child with no head, blown up in a Russian, or U.S., airstrike, and caption it, "The Greater Good."  The politicians, including the wannabes in America these days and months, all speak like everything they're up to is sacred, patriotic, worthy of posing near American flags.  Big sacrifices required, security is more important than ever, and still, just four months after Paris on November 13, some ISIS motherfuckers blew up a bunch of people and ruined a lot of dreams.  This bullshit will just keep happening, but don't expect the power brokers of the world to really give a fuck, because chaos is coin.

                                                                              Vic Neptune