Good Enough

A very busy holiday weekend has passed and so I’m looking forward to a more relaxed week. There are not a lot of demands on our time now that the garden has eclipsed and the trees have stopped producing nuts. There are plenty of winter time chores; that’s for sure, but just not this week.  

Well, one of those chores won’t be postponed; I have to clean the ashes out of the woodstove and get ready for the next icy blast of weather. The low temperature is supposed to get down into the mid 20’s later this week. I think that deserves a fire.

Winter time is a time for retreat. Yes, I know it’s not officially winter; that happens sometime in December, but I don’t care…it’s winter here. And I have been retreating from the news outside of our small world. I just gave it a cursory glance over the long weekend. I guess I need to look at it again.

As expected, World War III rages on. Officially, it’s now one of our longer wars; the 3rd longest, a record we certainly didn’t need. There are some who say that World War II has never ended as we still have occupying troops in Europe and in Japan. They may have a point there. But measuring it simply by days never tells us what it cost in lives and misery. But those in power, especially the ones from this administration, have never served in the armed forces during a time of war…so why do they love it so much? If I were king; you wouldn’t even be allowed to comment on war, let alone make war unless you could produce a DD214, the official document that tells the world that you served in the armed forces.

And the dollar cost of war needs to be examined as well; here’s a web page that does it quite well with some simple graphics.

There are still some who think that W should be impeached because of what he did to Iraq. And they have a point…but it’s useless to try. Have we ever had a president punished as they deserved to be? Nixon should have been, but he skated, thanks to Ford. Reagan claimed that he had a bad memory and that was good enough for his misdeeds. Truth be told; Clinton is the only President that has ever apologized. For which he was vilified; most conservatives said it wasn’t a “good enough” apology.