by Barry Hastings

GOP Presidential candidate wannabee (but soon to withdraw)  Lindsey Graham stuck his foot in the water recently, trying to tie Hillary Clinton to the President’s reactive foreign policy. All these GOP criminals are working overtime trying to hang what’s happening across the middle east on Clinton and Obama, when the world knows what brought us to our current dilemma was the poorly planned, under-manned, Bush-Cheney invasion.

“Mission Accomplished” indeed! The whole equatorial belt aflame, not one meaningful thing accomplished. Our own military in tatters. Many active enemies. We’re in it…  and deep.

Graham likes to portray himself (and be portrayed by others) as a “military expert.” But he’s a lawyer, and military lawyers have a poorer reputation for sleaze than even their worst civilian counter-parts. (“Impossible,” you say?) My personal feelings about the whining little twit will always be colored by memories of a visit he made to Baghdad’s “green zone” with McCain and Joe Lieberman, at height of the Petraeous “splurge” (lavishly wasteful expenditure of American soldiers lives).

I’ve seldom seen a man painted so frightened. He just couldn’t pull his neck up outa’ that flack jacket. My guess is he’s none too proud of the footage. If he were perceived as a threat by any leading GOP contenders, it would be airing as we speak, so to speak.

I’m not knocking the guy for being scared — who wouldn’t be scared? I’m knocking him for showing it. McCain didn’t, nor did Joe Leiberman. No, I’m quite positive Graham is no Joan of Arc. All the “failed policy,” “weak leadership” and “foreign policy failure’ he likes to whine about resulted from military planning and strategic errors of GOP leaders before and after invasion of Iraq.

If the most ignorant of Americans are aware of our “untogetherness,” what do our (many) enemies see?

Two guys were sittin’ in a bar. One asked the other, “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a carp?” His friend answered, “That’s easy – one’s a scum-sucking bottom dweller; the other’s a fish.”

Since Lincoln, every time we’ve trusted Republicans with national leadership in war, they’ve lied like Nazis, led us into intolerable cesspools, eventually had to admit failure, and blamed it on Democrats. Tried to, anyhow. And their fear of Hillary Clinton is palpable.

“We’ve come to take our country back,” Rand Paul cried. “From whom?” the sinking millions answered.

Among the world’s known nuclear powers are most of the world’s worst actors; Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, China, and soon, quite possibly, Iran. There are also a number of groups who’d be more than happy to make delivery of packets prepared by any one or more of them. Boko Haram, Hooti, ISIL, al Quaeda, and some few home-grown American super-patriot nut jobs. Yes, the country creates at least one Tim McVeigh for every one we dispatch. Probably more than one.

We should recall the events since 9/11. The towers collapsing into a roiling cloud of dust, huge Air Force cargo planes stuffed with pallet after pallet of hundred dollar bills (to the tune of 12 to 14 billion dollars a month) landing at Baghdad; and much more at Bagram Airport in Afghanistan. Those long casualty lists. “Mission Accomplished.”

Is the current Muslim-world situation a realization of the dreaded “domino” theory? Seems to me our reliance on the web makes it at least as likely a possibility, as not. The web, to my way of thinking, takes away living time, facilitates anonymous fraud and crime, helps spooks and spies know, on a whim, every thing about anyone. I don’t have a lot of confidence in our fractured government. I believe Republicans have been the force behind the fracture.

Looking around at these Republican heads in the news is akin to watching a shark feeding frenzy. Not much likeable about them, as all of them work every day to some way inhibit civil rights of some segment of society. Michigan GOP leaders have recently been roundly boxed on the ears by MLive Media Group for failing to work, at all, on equal rights for all.

Meanwhile, the VA health care system is still struggling to recover from the scandal over long waits for veterans trying to enter the system. In Michigan, nearly fourteen thousand vets have waited over a month for appointments (recently) in the system. Nationwide, the VA is doing better than when the scandal broke more than a year ago, but a new scandal is evolving as we watch.

The original whistle-blowers at the Denver VA facility, where oft-delayed appointments for some 40 veterans actually brought about death from their physical (or mental) afflictions, have been reporting harassment and intimidation from superiors and fellow staffers. Does anything in American government work the way it should. Civil service employees seem to feel they’re entitled to a paycheck whether or not they work for it, or perform the work in a timely way. “You fought for a year in Afghanistan? Well, you don’t look sick, so come back in six months and we’ll try to get you in to see a doctor.”

Maybe what we should be doing is trying to get the roadblocks, and their builders, out of the VA health care system. Maybe even out of the entire civil service system.