Duck Soup

     Donald Trump has picked for Secretary of Defense a retired Marine, General James Mad Dog Mattis.  The nickname between proper names is usually put in quotation marks by news organizations, but I choose to think of it as his full real name.
     Trump claims Mad Dog is "the closest thing to Patton we have."  General Patton, however, was a high-ranking U.S. Army officer who worked under higher-ranking officers, Eisenhower included--Patton had to follow orders just like any G.I. under his own command.  Secretary of Defense means something more controlling than anything Patton could accomplish.
     General Mad Dog (God dam spelled backwards) looks hard, erect, pale.  His resume working in the killing business includes the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq (much involvement with Fallujah).  He's well-read, owns about three times as many books as I do (I have around 2,500).  He has a special fondness for the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.  I guess he identifies with that Stoic second century A.D. Roman Emperor with the crazy son, Commodus.  (Of Commodus, a college history professor of mine said, "He had the physique of Tarzan, and the brains of Cheetah").
     Mad Dog Mattis, I'm guessing without any evidence, has the uptight look of someone who hasn't jerked off since the 1960's, but then, I think it's likely that warfare is the porn that makes him come.
     The focus on Trump these days, his cabinet picks, his dinner with pathetic Mitt Romney (going to Trump Tower to grovel for a chance at the Secretary of State job), his continuing addiction to tweeting, his loathsomeness as entertainment equaling ratings, keeps our eyes, ears, and hearts away from the murderous policies of the current administration.  An article from AlterNet, January 10, 2016, reminds Americans of something they all should think about: in 2015 alone, the United States dropped an estimated 23,144 bombs on predominately Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen).
     I did a calculation.  That number comes to 63.40821917808219 bombs dropped on Muslim countries per day in 2015.  In honor of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, I'll set aside the four-tenths of a bomb per day (still enough of a bomb to obliterate a two-story house) and concentrate on the sixty-three bombs dropped every day on those six cited countries.  The Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, set off two bombs in one day, sixty-one less bombs per day than the U.S. military released in 2015, a year characterized, War on Terror-wise, by the concept of "same old shit, different year."
     The article cites Foreign Policy magazine, which found that the Taliban control, as of 2015, more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001, when George W. Bush's military, backed by Congress and the will of most Americans (not me), began bombing that country, killing thousands, displacing a million, not killing Osama bin Laden who fled to Pakistan, a country bombed subsequently by Bush and Obama, Obama bombing it even after the man thought by most to be behind the 9/11 attacks was killed.
     An Obama defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called the war against ISIS a "thirty year effort," linking it to long-term military activities in Iraq and Syria.  When will their parents take away our war planners' game of Risk and tell them to go to bed?
     The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has made very low estimates of the numbers of civilian deaths caused by their taxpayer-funded annihilation tactics.  They make it seem as if explosions don't go outwards.  Admitting to murder is a difficult thing to do, of course, although government representatives always have a free pass when it comes to officially sanctioned violence.  They could be honest, like Trump was when he said he wanted to kill terrorists' families.  In the news media (not Fox), this was called out as advocating a war crime and rightly condemned, although it didn't end his candidacy, and in fact got him less in trouble than his admission, caught on microphone, that he likes to make sexually aggressive and predatory advances on women.  Unlike Obama, he hasn't actually killed any women with bombs, yet, although he will, and, like Obama, he won't give a shit.
     Trump and Mattis, I predict, based on extensive past evidence of U.S. involvement in parts of the world it likes to try to control, will simply follow the examples of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, McKinley (when the American Empire began), of using and abusing other nations and peoples for the sake of satisfying American business interests.
     2.6 bombs per hour dropped by the United States military in six predominately Muslim countries in 2015.  This practice helps no one, it yields no gains.  It merely increases the wealth of those who profit from it, and they're already wealthy--doesn't that make them admirable?  Terrorism practiced by the rich is a lucrative racket.  Somewhere inside the soulless mind of Leon Panetta a calculation sparks the thought, agreed upon by every bloodthirsty power broker running this country:
     23,144 bombs dropped per year times thirty years equals 694,320 bombs.  Bombs destroy structures.  Reconstruction contracts follow.  Use bombs, make more bombs, make more bomb delivery platforms.  Convince Americans, using fear tactics, that we who are doing this shit aren't the actual enemy.

                                                                           Vic Neptune