“Feeling Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag” for Obama’s Afghan War

Top Obama foreign policy aide Richard Holbrooke believes Obama’s escalation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan “will last a long time – longer than the United States’ longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam.”

And new VP Joe Biden — a chickenhawk like Obama — says U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are going to go up.

So, it’s time to update that old anti-Vietnam War classic song, by Country Joe and the Fish (original lyrics here; YouTube audio here):

Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag (Afghan Version)

Well, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Obam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Afghanistan
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Afghanistan;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

Come on Wall Street, don’t be slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go
There’s plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of its trade,
But just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on a wedding throng.

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Afghanistan.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

Well, come on generals, let’s move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Now you can go out and get those beards
‘Cause the only good Afghan is the one that’s dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Afghanistan;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

Come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Afghanistan.
Come on fathers, and don’t hesitate
To send your sons off before it’s too late.
And you can be the first ones in your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

And it’s one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Afghanistan.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

Romney wins Mittchigan: riots to follow?

Mitt Romney’s home state isn’t Massachusetts, where he was governor, but Michigan, where he grew up. Even today, the Romney family is the biggest political name in the Great Lakes State.

I know because I grew up there about the same time as Mitt (left picture). His father, George (right picture), was governor from 1963-1969, when Nixon apointed him the Dud from HUD (where he tried to spread the blight of “urban renewal” to the suburbs).

As governor, George was so bad that, in 1967, Detroiters rioted and burned down large parts of the city (see picture). George R. was so incompetent that his own Michigan State Police and National Guard couldn’t quell the riots and the 82nd Airborne Division, bloodied from fighting the man in the black pajamas over in Nam, had to be called in by President LBJ to restore order.

If Mitt becomes president, maybe the All Americans will have to be called in from Iraq for the same duty in the same city — or your city.

A major, global city, which I remember from my youth as beautiful and bountiful, was leveled. Detroit helped make the weapons that turned Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and Dresden into molten glass in WWII. Those cities recovered. Detroit hasn’t.

It was after George Romney’s riots that the MC5 shouted the song, “Motor City is Burning” :

Ya know, the Motor City is burning babe,
there ain’t a thing in the world that they can do.
Ya know, the Motor City is burning people,
there ain’t a thing that white society can do.
Ma home town burning down to the ground,
worser than Vietnam.

G. Romney essentially was a liberal, Rockefeller Republican who favored big taxes and big government. His 1968 presidential bid fizzled. Republicans even preferred Nixon to him.

Why Michiganders, especially Republicans, would want another Romney to run anything is a mystery.

But favorite sons tend to do well in their home states, no matter what. As I write, Mitt is carrying Mittchigan with 39% of the vote (as of 7 p.m. California time). Back in 68, Papa George, despite having pulled out of the race, got votes from 44 of 48 Michigan delegates — 92% — at the Republican Convention in Miami.

On the positive side, Ron Paul is beating Giuliani again for fourth place. It’s time for Rudi to quit. This is the kind of state — big, Northern, industrial, “ethnic” — that he’s supposed to win.

Huckabee also should call it quits after another dismal third-place finish. He should have done better, too. A lot of his fellow Southern Baptists moved up to Michigan to work in the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II and stayed for the high paychecks and bad weather. That didn’t help the Huckster.

Thompson napped through it all again and should sleep for the rest of the campaign.

For that matter, Mitt Romney should quit, despite “winning” Michigan. He got just 39% of the “favorite son” vote.

Let’s narrow the GOP down to just two candidates: McCain, the Establishment’s favorite “Maverick” (yeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahright
yeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahright
yeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahrightyeahright)…

…and Ron Paul, America’s Great Libertarian Hope.

Let Paul and McCain, both septegenarians and Military veterans — one, McCain, favoring, massive, intrusive, expensive, warmongering, totalitarian, centralized government; the other, Paul, favoring freedom — go at it.

Mano a mano.

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Karl Rove no “genius”

I’ve written before about how I never was impressed with the “genius” of Karl Rove, who barely got Bush elected two times, lost the Senate for Republicans in 2000 and lost Congress in 2006. Rove also is supposed to be a walking, jabbering Wikipedia about political history.

Tom Brokaw’s new book about the 1960s, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties,” has this comment by Rove:

It’s funny, you look back at 1968 and think everybody was against the war — and two of the candidates were not (Nixon and Alabama Gov. George Wallace). And they got nearly 60 percent of the vote.”

Except that the third candidate, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, was vice president under President LBJ, and was carrying the pro-war torch for him in the election. The anti-war candidates were Bobby Kennedy, who was shot, and Clean Gene McCarthy, who was outmaneuvered at the Democratic Convention. The convention violence is the backdrop to the movie “Medium Cool.”

Doesn’t Rove remember the anti-war, anti-LBJ, anti HHH riots at the convention that were suppressed by Mayor Daley’s cops? And who can forget HHH’s logorrhea backing the war. The guy never stopped talking. At the 1980 Democratic Convention, Jimmy Carter, in a classic Freudian slip, called HHH “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.”

The 1968 denial of the nomination to McCarthy led to the party’s reforms before and during the 1972 convention that brought about the control of the party by the Far Left, and the suppression of the “hard hats” and other blue-collar Democrats, permanently shifting the party way to the left. Those frozen out of the party became the Reagan Democrats.

It’s also surprising that Brokaw would include this quote by Rove. Surely, as a longtime journalist, he must have remembered what happened in 1968? Maybe this explains it. Brokaw says:

Yes, I smoked a little pot. I even inhaled.

As they say, if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.

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Democrats demand surcharge for war — forgetting that LBJ’s war surcharge smashed the economy

American voters elected Democratic majorities in Congress for one overwhelming reason: to end the Iraq War. Democrats have not done so. So much for “the will of the people” and “democracy.”

Now, Democrats have dug into their dark past for a really bad idea: a war surtax:

The plan, unveiled by Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., John Murtha, D-Pa., and Jim McGovern, D-Mass., would require low- and middle-income taxpayers to add 2 percent to their tax bill. Wealthier people would pay an additional 12 to 15 percent, Obey said.

It’s true that the war is being paid for on borrowed funds, meaning today’s little children will be paying for this war long into the future. That’s shameful.

But a tax increase would be even worse. In the late 1960s, Democratic President LBJ — whose initials stood for “Lying Bull(expletive deleted) Johnson” — and a Democratic Congress imposed a 10% surtax to pay for another really bad war, the one in Vietnam. The late, great economist Jude Wanniski explained what happened next:

The U.S. economy began to sour in 1967 because of the LBJ war surtax, which was a progression on top of a progression. The Dow Jones hit 1000 in midday trading in January 1966 and then began its long decline in real terms — taking the real wages of workers down with it as one error after another was made. Nixon campaigned on ending the war and the surtax. When elected, he was persuaded by Chairman Paul McCracken of his Council of Economic Advisors and Herb Stein, a member of the CEA, to defer elimination of the surtax in order to narrow the budget deficit. He was also encouraged to raise the capital gains tax, with Stein the culprit along with Peter Flanigan, who ran Nixon’s council on international economic policy. The stock market fell and the economy followed. (I seem to recall the number of IPOs dropped from 300 in 1968 to one or two in 1969.)

That’s what would happen again if a surtax were imposed. Bush has been so wrong on the war, but at least he has been right in opposing tax increases.

But the Democrats likely will give us a surtax next year under President Hillary.

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Do you feel a military draft?

Here’s to all the draft resisters who will fight for sanity
When they march them off to prison in this land of liberty
Heed the threat and awesome power of the mighty Pentagon
Which is wasting precious millions on the toys of Washington

— Steppenwolf

Is there going to be a military draft to support Bush’s unconstitutional Iraq War? Will we have student protesters marching through the streets, demanding an end to the draft? Will student protesters be shot down, as they were at Kent State in 1970?

One of Bush’s top military advisors said we should think about a draft. AP reports:

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

The generalissimo is Bush’s new “War Czar” — as if we didn’t already have a Secretary of Defense and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to run the military and advise the president.

Apparently not being considered is ending the Iraq war, which would mean a foolish, murderous policy would be over, America would become safer, the troops would come home, and there would be no need at all for a draft.

But I don’t think a draft is likely. Enough of us remember how it ripped America apart in the 1960s. The Democratic Congress includes some former anti-war activists, such as Sen. Hillary. And Americans just aren’t going to put up with Bush’s absurd war much longer. In any case, Americans certainly wouldn’t put up with a draft.

The general’s blabbing reflects more the top brass’ descent into unreality than a serious attempt to bring back the draft.

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Democrats still addicted to tax increases

I keep hoping Democrats will go back to JFK’s philosophy of favoring tax cuts. His tax cuts, enacted in 1964 after he was killed, put the boom in the 1960s economy.

But since then, Democrats have become obsessed with tax increases. LBJ imposed a 10% income tax surtax in 1968, causing the 1969 recession.

Democrats should realize that tax increasers usually lose, while tax cutters usually win. In 1991, the first President Bush broke his “Read My Lips: No New Taxes” pledge — and lost in 1992. In 1993, Bill Clinton increased taxes — and lost Congress in 1994. He won re-election after switching to a tax-cut program; Clinton actually cut capital gains taxes twice.

Yesterday the Democratic Congress passed a massive tax increase on cigarettes to pay for a Soviet-style takeover of even more children’s health care:

Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, said, “Today’s debate comes down to this: Do you favor big tobacco or children?”

Actually, Big Tobacco isn’t going to pay for it, taxpayers will. And cigarette smokers nowadays tend to be low-income folks. So this is a tax on the poor. Moreover, cig taxes are so high now, especially in Taxifornia, that this tax, if it sticks, will create a huge black market. When Canada increased cig taxes this high in the 1990s, revenues actually dropped from cig taxes due to smuggling. The Canucks then cut their taxes back.

Bush is gong to veto this tax increase, as well as any others. But Democrats, who are the odds-on favorites to win everything in 2008, can’t stop doing things that hurt them — and the country.

Hillary: Nixon really won 1960 election

Did you know that young Hillary Rodham grew up a Goldwater Republican conservative? She only became radicalized in the late 1960s.

In 1960, she even found proof that JFK’s political machine stuffed ballot boxes in Illinois, where she lived. Nixon actually won in 1960 in both Illinois and, therefore, the nation.

That story comes from the new biography, “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” by Jeff Gerth and Dale Van Natta Jr. Here’s a summary from CounterPunch magazine (not online) on the 1960 election,

the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of [corrupt] Mayor Daley, [Mafia boss] Sam Giancana and [Kennedy mob moll] Judith Exner. Hillary was a Nixon supporter. She took it on herself to probe llegations of vote fraud. From the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chicago’s westside, she journeyed to the tenements of the south side, a voter list in her hand. She went to an address recorded as the domicile of hundreds of Democratic voters and duly found an empty lot. She rushed back to campaign headquarters, agog with her discovery, only to be told that Nixon was throwing in the towel.

What’s amazing is that Hillary was only 13 when she did that.

Can you imagine what would things would have been like had Nixon, who really won in 1960, become president? I think Nixon was a terrible president from 1969-72.

But from 1961-69, Nixon might have been a lot better, an extension of Eisenhower: a prudent foreign policy, not a quagmire in Vietnam. But he probably would not have gone for the Kennedy tax cuts that supercharged the economy in the 1960s, so the economy might have lagged; and so Nixon might even have lost a 1964 bid for re-election.

And a 1960 Nixon victory might have meant Hillary stayed a Republican in Illinois, married an accountant, and became a housewife with six kids in the suburbs whose favorite song was, “Stand by Your Man.”

Why can’t kids these days get their own music?

I was walking around my neighborhood the other day and a garage band of young kids was playing in somebody’s garage. It sounded like a garage band from 40 years ago, when I was 12.

When I was that age, we wouldn’t be caught dead playing 40-year-old music, which would have meant 1927. That’s when Bing Crosby was just getting started.

I’ve just read a couple of essays on why popular music has stagnated. Here’s Steve Sailer, whose site took me to Jaron Lanier.

My speculation is that electric music has taken us farther each year from the original, non-electrical music. The Beatles, Stones, and Dylan grew up listening to the old, mostly non-electric music, including, yes, Bing Crosby. That’s what their parents played. Dylan also heard a lot of the blues and old gospel tunes on the radio, as he writes in his interesting autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”

They didn’t start hearing electric music — rock music — until their mid-teens. So they had that influence. Even when I was growing up in the mid-1960s, my parents played old show tunes, such as “Oklahoma!” and “My Fair Lady.”

But the boomers, as they grew up, played rock music, which is what their kids grew up listening. The old music, rooted in non-electric traditions, was gone. Rock ruled, then stagnated.

So, kids, how about coming up with something different? My suggestion: polyphony.

V.C. in O.C.

In 1979 I was in the U.S. Army studying Russian up at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey when the Sino-Vietnamese War began. I was too young to have served in the U.S.-Vietnam War. But several of the older students at DLI had served in Vietnam. To a man, they cheered on the commie Chinese against the commie Viets. They had bad memories of North Vietnamese, who won the war after 58,000 Americans and at least 2 million Vietnamese were killed.

But times change.

Make sure you read Martin Wisckol’s piece today on the visit to Orange County by North Vietnamese — excuse me, just Vietnamese (without the “North”; I have to break that old Cold War habit) — President Nguyen Minh Triet:

But while Vietnamese-American demonstrators filled the streets outside the Dana Point’s St. Regis resort, it was also Vietnamese Americans who were filling the dining room with Nguyen – Vietnamese Americans eager to do business with Vietnam….One official on hand said Nguyen was returning home with $11 billion in business commitments.

Since junking socialism over the past 20 years, Vietnam’s economy has prospered and now is one of the hottest in Asia.

That long-ago war of 1979 played into the transition from socialism to capitalism of both China and Vietnam. The Vietnamese more than held their own against the numerically superior Chinese. Hanoi had a modern, Soviet-equipped, battle-victorious army, while China depended on the old “human wave” techniques from the Korean War — meaning get a lot of your guys killed, in this war up to 26,000 Chinese, although the number is disputed.

China’s military also had been badly damaged by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was sort of like the 1960s here in America, but without the acid rock music. Vietnam also had satellite photos supplied by the Soviets, so they could track the movements of Chinese troops. China had no similar intelligence advantage.

The result of the war for China was that it showed the old socialist system couldn’t supply the goods to the Chinese Army, let alone consumers. So Deng’s capitalist reforms were given a strong impetus.

For Vietnam, the war confirmed that socialism worked, adding to the euphoria from the 1975 victory over America. But the 1980s were not kind to socialism, as the Soviet Union’s decrepit regime began tottering under the weight of seven decades of socialist incompetence and inefficiency. In 1986, Vietnam began some capitalist reforms. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself blew up. Hanoi’s patron was gone. It couldn’t get cheap military hardware anymore from Moscow, but had to buy it on the world market.

Meanwhile, China’s capitalist reforms have turned it into an economic powerhouse, which also benefited its military. Vietnam has seen this and has accelerated its capitalist reforms, as shown by President Nguyen’s visit to Orange County.

How would things have turned out differently if the U.S. had never become involved in Vietnam, letting the commies take over the whole place much earlier than 1975? The Hanoi regime might have given up socialism earlier for the reasons given above: to strengthen themselves against their ancient Chinese opponents. But the war would not have killed all those Americans and Vietnamese. And it would not have traumatized both countries in other ways. The Vietnamese boat people might have come here sooner.

We’ll be saying something similar in 30 years about another lost war, that in Iraq.

Americans should realize that our greatest weapons are not our mighty military forces, but our ideas of liberty and free markets.

That’s what Independence Day is about, too.

US IQ increases: Antioch College closes

The most politically correct school in America long has been Antioch College of Ohio. “In 2000, the school had death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, give a taped commencement address,” reported AP. Stalin must have been unavailable.

Now Antioch has closed.

It was notorious for requiring explicit consent for amorous activities between students, even kissing, for boys to avoid being charged with sexual harassment. An absurd group named Womyn of Antioch pushed for the policy.

Of course, in a better day the old Christian moral code banned anything beyond kissing before marriage, and colleges and universities upheld that code, mainly by teaching it. Which just goes to show that, when an ancient, natural, obvious moral code is dumped, some new totalitarian code takes its place.

Antioch is planning to design a “21st Century campus” for opening in 2012. They don’t get the irony. It’s already the 21st Century. And the up-to-date 21st Century college already exists, and is staring you in the face: it’s the Internet. Why waste a hundred thousand dollars getting brainwashed at a “college” or “university” whey you can get a decent education, and diploma, right at home for just thousands of dollars?