War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
UPDATE BELOW In a crunch of massive news events the last couple of weeks — Hurricane Sandy, President Obama’s re-election, a most-delightful Karl Rove meltdown, etc. — another chunk of headline material rolled out of DC. Puffed-daddy warlord extraordinaire, Gen. David Petraeus, resigned his position as director of the CIA on Friday, stating he’d f*cked-up…
Another gorgeous early morning up here on California’s northern coast with stars glittering the sky and the waning moon still pulsating with light — supposed to be another warm day, the high expected to be ’72,’ which for us is like 102 elsewhere. Across the spectrum, though, life is a bitch, or whatever. President Obama…
Six US GIs have been killed since Friday in a conflict Mitt Romney says is just a ‘word‘, four this morning, shot dead by an Afghan soldier during a firefight with insurgents in a remote area in the southern part of the country. One aspect of this horror show is getting worse: It was the…
Quiet and sad this morning up here on California’s north coast, with the ugliest of ugly shit falling like scalding rain all over everywhere else, it seems. This planet is wedged into a gnarly pickle. And this morning, a report two more US GIs were shot and killed today in Afghanistan by another one of…
Seven US peoples have been killed in Afghanistan the last few hours, but where’s the political outcry? The Washington Post laments: Yet this may be the first presidential campaign in U.S. history in which an ongoing war fails to produce a significant debate. Explicitly or implicitly, the candidates have successfully encouraged much of the media to…
Hiding in plain sight behind the crazed presidential election and the extreme weather experienced by most US peoples the last couple of weeks, the killing fields of Afghanistan are still being plowed. Six US troops were killed yesterday in a single IED blast in eastern Afghanistan, where fighting has started to increase in recent weeks…
Deep fog covering the northern California landscape this early Tuesday morning, but it does feel a bit warm, keeping hopefully the streak of great weather up here going — the fog always burns off early on leaving a beautiful day. Not so with a bat-shit crazy world I encountered online — some stories that pierced…
In the wake of another attempt this morning to fight modern life in Afghanistan — 160 girls were poisoned at a north Afghan school, the second such incident in a week — the conflict there is a telling example of failure, and the dodge-ball concept of leadership. Not only is Afghanistan been considered “the graveyard…
In the wake of last weekend’s big NATO Afghan pow-wow, the war in Afghanistan has to be considered finished, kaput, wiping-hands-clean, get-the-shit-out-of-Dodge over with and a debacle for history scholars. Except for the Afghan people: Aleema, a sad-eyed girl in ragged clothes, is one of the 447,547 “internally displaced persons†who have fled their homes,…
In the neurotic groundswell last week of the absorption of gay people and the bullies that define the genre, the wars overseas have lost a lot of its news flavor with American audiences, despite the fact young GIs are still killing and dying over there — now they’re being made dead by their Afghan comrade-at-arms.…