Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It's the illustrious Mr. Y.

"So, JS, what say you? A shabby-ass cease fire -- quite a denouement."

He's calling me? As if i'm the oracle, not him. What a transparent ploy. But no, I won't ask his take, the egomaniac. Instead i go "Errrrrrrrr... indeed... exactly... good point... all I dare add is thank God uncle's got too fucking few boots, eh?"

Bzzzzzz... and he's gone.

I guess if you boil it all together long enough, that is the empire's final bone, and consequently its weakest link -- the footsoldiers, the grunts and jarheads. The ultimate smart weapon system is mostly made of meat. There's no substitute when you get to the short strokes.

Forget the cruise missile phase of wardom -- lesson from Iraq and reinforced by Lebanon: no more sky-hawkery. Hillary et al. want to give Uncle precisely more "boots", so he can get in there on the ground and rumble.

So who's the fightin-er party, gang? That corporate profiteers' grappler Don Rummy with his shock and awe blitzkrieg update and its minimalist ground force concepts, or Hilary, no longer the bomber-borne saint of Kosovo -- Hillary, who now has a new mystical inspiration: "We need lots more brigades ready to hit the beach -- lots and lots...."

Don Rummy is content with more hi-tech weapon systems, but our lady of the mano-a-mano wants tens of thousands more hard-ass regular forces flesh puppets.

Then what? Two, three, maybe more armed civilizin' projects going on at once? Hill and hubby Bill wanna create a chain of decent-acting emerging nation states all across this globe of ours. Build 'em from scratch out of the hundred or so post-cold war and post-colonial shambles we got lying around the planet. They're much bigger thinkers than old jackass Jimmy -- Carter only builds houses for the poor, but St Hill and her man Bill are fixin' to build whole civilized nations for 'em, and with the help of enough armed missionaries, who can say its just a dream?