punditman says...
A little levity for these panic-ridden times is just what Dr. Punditman has ordered for you today.
You may know Garrison Keelor as the American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, radio personality and the host of the Minnesota Public Radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," who also wrote the screenplay and appeared in the '06 movie of the same name. Or you may not.
Here, he makes a series of witty points about about stubbornness and futility we are seeing on the part of officialdom as the Afghan War continues to drag on...and on.
www.antiwar.com
The former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for, deserves all the attention he’s gotten and more. The Obama administration faces hard decisions there, and the man made a good case against deeper American involvement. He says that our presence among the Pashtun people, the rural, religious people, is only aggravating a civil war between them and the urban, secular (and, it seems, fraudulent) government of Kabul, and the role of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is not central – the real issues are tribal and cultural.
American families, he said, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."
It is rare that a high-level official – he was the senior State Department guy in Zabul province – resigns in protest, and in all the to-do about his four-page resignation letter [.pdf], nobody had a single bad thing to say about Matthew Hoh.
The American people tend not to admire quitters, which is maybe why protest resignations are so rare. You can get up on your high horse and talk about your principles, but we suspect that you’re just another slacker looking for an easy way out. Your old football coach told you that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and by "get going" he didn’t mean "write a four-page letter about your disillusionment with his coaching and the split-T offense in general" – he meant, Toughen Up, Assume the Three-Point Stance, Hit ‘Em Hard, Eat Some Turf, Get Up and Hit ‘Em Again.
