Swine of the Week: T-Paw

With a fist full of mud and an arm cocked and ready to fire, Tim Pawlenty let er rip into Swine of the Week infamy!

On his not-so-veiled presidential campaign trip to Iowa last weekend, the Minnesota Governor was nothing but a lowly mud-slinging politician.

T-Paw, who didn’t have time for a special Legislative session to address health care in his own state, instead took pot shots at President Obama.

“My goodness, unless you’re a Guantanamo detainee they can’t even get us in a reasonable time a vaccine for the H1N1 virus,” Pawlenty said. ”How are they going to manage our health care?”

The utmost problem with T-Paw’s jab: It was incorrect. When he said it, detainees at Guantanamo Bay did not receive flu shots nor were they in line to, said Obama press secreatary Robert Gibbs in the week before T-Paw’s rant.

That somewhat changed Tuesday with the Petagon announcement of 300 vaccines destined for Cuba. However, they will not even cover the base’s soldiers and health care workers, much less its detainees, who are last in line.

Whatever. The point is that when Pawlenty ignores the facts, he looks like a further farce.

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From negative to noxious numbers: War deaths

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The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan in October marked the highest total in any month of the war.  The October tally raised the ever-growing total to more than 830 since the 2001 invasion.

That’s grim news indeed, but not as startling as what the Soviet Union encountered when they faced the same enemy during its 10-year war there.

13,000

The total of Soviet soldiers killed from 1979 to 1989. Sadly, the number of afflicted skyrocketed to more than 500,000 when the wounded and those addicted to Afghan’s vast supply of heroin were added.

The comparison of negative to noxious numbers is stressed now because of the pending decision from President Obama on whether to add more of America’s youth into combat zones.

Although this next quote from “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair is in reference to a war a century prior between Japan and Russia, the Tank thought of its timeless pertinence to current affairs.

“Realize it! Realize it! Realize that out upon the plains of Manchuria tonight two hostile armies are facing each other — that now, while we are seated here, a million human beings may be hurled at each other’s throats, striving with the fury of maniacs to tear each other to pieces! And this in the twentieth century, nineteen hundred years since the Prince of Peace preached as divine, and here two armies of men are rending and tearing each other like wild beasts of the forest! Philosophers have reasoned, prophets have denounced, poets have wept and pleaded — and still this hideous Monster roams at large! We have schools and colleges, newspapers and books; we have searched the heavens and the earth, we have weighed and probed and reasoned — and all to equip men to destroy each other! We call it War, and pass it by — but do not put me off with platitudes and conventions — come with me, come with me — realize it! See the bodies of men pierced by bullets, blown into pieces by bursting shells! Hear the crunching of the bayonet, plunged into human flesh; hear the groans and the shrieks of agony, see the faces of men crazed by pain of a man. This blood is still steaming — it was driven by a human heart! Almighty God! and this goes on — it is systematic, organized, premeditated! And we know it, and read of it, and take it for granted; our papers tell of it, and the presses are not stopped — our churches know of it, and do not close their doors — the people behold it, and do not rise up in horror and revolution!”

Last week, I had the privilege to listen to a first-hand account of war from a Vietnam veteran. The Tank watched as his eyes widened with intensity as he described his story about ”men pierced with bullets, blow into pieces by bursting shells.” Saw his face “crazed by pain of a man,” if you will.

The nearly 60-year-old man believes in service to country — either military or peace corp. – and he stressed the importance of Obama taking a thoughtful deliberation on whether to send more troops to theater.

During his ongoing deliberation, Obama took a rare trip Wednesday night to honor dead soldiers as they arrived in caskets from foreign countries. He called the rare trip a “sobering” reminder.

Let’s hope that reminder convinces him that the risk is higher than the rewards.

Keep the troops home so we don’t have to witness their “shrieks of agony.”

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Don’t look kids

“Hey, Suzzie, do you see Minnie Mouse! … And, Bobby, over there is Goofy!” says an energetic Dad to his impressionable young children.

“Oh, no,” Suzzie howls. “Who is that man in the orange suit and black mask?”

In a stroke of utmost juxtaposition, Banksy, a one-of-a-kind artist, put this figure of a Guantanamo inmate near a Disneyland ride.

Now, picking back up the story:

The startled Dad stammers for a few seconds and mumbles, ”Oh, that is just one of the bad guys.”

[But Dad should have said, "Oh, that's an in-your-face reminder of how the U.S. government purports freedom only to hold hundreds of men for years in Cuba without any charges against them."]

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Don’t fall into the booby trap! … Doh!

As The Tank predicted last week, wacko conservatives ate the bait and attacked President Obama instead of the Nobel committee on the issue of him winning the Peace Prize.

Liz Cheney, daughter of you know who, called it a “farce” and said Obama should snub the committee. The new “red state rock star” then suggested that Obama “send the mother of a fallen American soldier to accept the prize on the behalf of the U.S. military.”

I’m not even going to begin to dissect the obviously warped logic of that, and therefore, I’m a step ahead of the quick-to-meddle White House.

President Obama’s subordinates — Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, among others — are directing the media to ignore Fox News in following them into coverage of certain stories, with Acorn as example No. 1.

Everyone knows Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Co., will cry foul. On his radio show today, Hannity said it was an assault on free speech and watchdog journalism. Although I think that’s extreme – Hannity provides nothing of the latter. But his next point was spot on.

He said, and The Tank paraphrases, the criticism of Fox comes 50-some days after General Stanley McCrystal requested more troops in Afghanistan, meaning there are much more important and unresolved matters than finagling over what one of the cable news channels covers.

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‘Presence in perpetuity’

Answering the wrong question can be worse than getting the wrong answer to the right question.

When it comes to Afghanistan, the question isn’t  a matter of how many U.S. troops are necessary to “win,” which has been the current debate in Washington.

It isn’t a matter of 10,000, 20,00o or 40,000 more.  The question is focus; the answer is more acute than simply  counterinsurgency.

As one of Frontline’s many commentators said, Afghanistan is currently a “presence in perpetuity.”

Instead of battles against the mildly terrorist threat in the Taliban, a corrupt Afghan government and a complicate Pakistani government, the focus needs to be small highly-skilled American units seeking out al Qaeda. (The current focus saw both a Northeastern Minnesota soldier and marine killed last week.)

As this war quickly becomes the longest the U.S. has ever fought, it’s increasingly obvious that the current blanket approach that momentarily displaces the relatively benign Taliban has not worked.

The U.S. military and government must realize that the majority of Taliban forces are not going to bring terrorism to U.S. Once that happens, the U.S. can answer the right question: What must be done to quell the most radical Taliban, the ones with terroristic intents and means, and — most importantly – al Qaeda?

Change is not what Obama calles the “necessary war” in Afghanistan. Change is an approach that brings the majority of our soldiers home and focuses on the worst perpetrators in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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