4537 Knee Deep in the Big Sandy

Tehran at night. No sign of sand here, but you don’t have to travel far to find it.

LBJ brought marathon escalation to modern warfare. Now trump is carrying on a great American tradition.

Johnson didn’t start the war in Vietnam.  But he didn’t finish it, either. Ho Chi Minh did that. We lost.  Folksinger Pete Seeger had a small label mini hit record with “Knee Deep in the Big Muddy (And the big fool says to push on.”)

Now, we have the Big Sandy. It’s more complicated than ‘nam.

Ho was a national hero. He had the support of his own puppet regime and the secret allegiance of millions of South Vietnamese who didn’t see him as a commie, but as a great wall against China.

LBJ had some saving graces, even so, the war did him in.  The present occupant of the White House doesn’t have any graces or savings.  But he will not fall victim to the kind of public outcry and uproar that ended the Johnson presidency. And that says more about us than it does about him.

Does the coming war with Iran have any big-time US supporters?  Um… it doesn’t look that way. The chorus of democrats seems pretty united about the idea of not having another shooting war. But if you are a person of draft age, it’s time to have those bone spurs or flat feet certified by a friendly physician.

And some notes to the Pentagon:

1.    Agent Orange doesn’t work in places where the average annual temperature is in three-digit numbers.

2.    It’s way harder to dig secret hiding places and tunnels in sand than it is in the rich, rice-growing soil of ‘nam.

3.    Attention Department of Defense: It’s tougher to work up a supply line from anywhere in the middle east to Tehran than it was from South Vietnam to Hanoi.  So build some roads.

4.    Kissinger is the Ikea of peace talks. He has diagrams for big tables. Learn from his experience. The Iranians are better at complicating things than North Vietnam was.

So, seriously… do we need another shooting war to lose? Do we need another perpetual war?  Do we need another draft? All of these “winning” strategies loom large in the future.

There’s another little problem in fighting with Iran. As far as we know, North Vietnam did not have an atomic weapons arsenal. We can’t be sure that Iran doesn’t or won’t. And we can’t count on anyone else joining us in a new war.  Our alleged president has alienated all of our would-be allies.  There will be no coalition, not even the kind the Bushs faked in Iraq.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

4528 The President and the Hershey Bar

This used to cost a nickel.  And it was bigger.

What do you think of when you hear the name “Hershey?” Chances are it’s a candy bar, the chocolate of peasants and kings the world over.

Or maybe you think of the small, unincorporated company hamlet in Pennsylvania with the chocolate factory, museums, a large and well-attended amusement park where people don’t fall off rides. 

There’s also a pretty decent hospital, some charity offices and a couple of dozen saloons, none of which is called “The Hershey Bar,” where people can retire while their friends and families are busy not falling off rides, having their hearts transplanted or getting contact chocolate highs from the factory smokestacks.

And you can’t swing a dead cat in certain areas of the state without hitting someone named Hershey.

it’s also a place where people gather to hear tall tales told by America’s Storyteller, donald trump, currently pretending to be president and always on tour.

And there he was, earlier this week, with a sputtering 90 minute extravaganza of a tall tale, delivered to an allegedly unpaid cheering crowd. And showman that he is, he followed an important rule of vaudeville, never turn your back on the audience.  We’ll see why that’s important at the end of this tale, which is roughly five times shorter than the Great Man’s speech.

Selling his usual snake oil concoction of lies, brags, racism, sexism, antisemitism; salting it with seeds of victimization, and manufacturing fake enemies for you to devour along with him, trump zigged and zagged through his ever-expanding repertoire of disconnected insults.

--The FBI is corrupt, he says.  Then there are the usual cast of countries and characters:

-Hillary

-Russia

-Ukraine

-Any and every Democratic officeholder, former officeholder, potential officeholder… But especially

-Schiff

-Nadler

-Pelosi

-Obama

-Jews

-Nazis

-Socialists

The usual gang of people and things he’s either for or against.

An hour and a half of that is poison. Tell him that and he’ll give you the cure: more poison, more venom.

To use a trumpestuous form of the language: “I don’t know whether or not this is true.  But what I heard is that our teller of tales has a tail. Also, Doctor Bone spurs removed the horns.

The scars that may be on his head are why he wears his hair that way. And the tail is why he never turns his back.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Comments: please send to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019