Dare To Be Great

 There's a senator from Alabama who is holding up promotions in the United States' military, including the Navy's Fifth Fleet. I suppose there is a reality in which a peacenik got themselves elected to the Senate with the expressed intent of throwing a monkey wrench into the works of our nation's military-industrial complex, but this is Tommy Tuberville. No one is going to mistake Coach Tommy for a peacenik. But his continued insistence that the US Armed Forces reverse their of reimbursing service members for health care-related travel, which the senator has argued facilitates abortions.

The telescopic view suggests that Coach Tommy would prefer for all those children to be born, raised with indifference or worse until such age as they can be coerced into military service where they can fight and die for their country. 

Meanwhile, the United States is creeping toward being involved in yet another shooting war in the Middle East. The Persian Gulf is under the purvey of (checks notes) the US Navy's Fifth Fleet. 

Once again, if you could make me believe that Coach Tommy really had peace as his ultimate objective, I would sit back and watch passively as events took their surreal hippie turn. 

Then there's that guy who is running for president who describes his interactions with the military leaders he has worked with: “I don’t want to tell you what I had to go through with these people. Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life.” And the sheep wearing red baseball caps applauded. Contrast this opinion with comments he bleated earlier: “You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart.”

This coming from a guy who couldn't find Alabama on a map. 

All the while, of course, the House of Representatives keeps running their own version of The Bachelor, hoping to find someone with just the right mix of personal charisma and willingness to lick the boots of the former game show host who believes that Hezbollah is very smart. In a few more weeks, it won't matter because the government will be shut down because the work of the government will be shut down. All of which would be fine if it was a massive incursion of peaceniks, trying to gum up the works.

But I don't think we can count on that kind of fiction. We're stuck with the ugly reality of the attempts to Make America Great Again. 

Great.