March 27, 2014
John Kerry
Source: Shutterstock
You start by getting a toy president, or amateur Kaiser, who doesn”t know squat but you can”t tell him because that’s disloyal or, depending, racist. Besides, he can have you shot. Then you let the military get the upper hand”von Tirpitz, von Schlieffen, von Petraeus, von Hagel, they”re all the same. It helps if the amateur president or Kaiser wants to be a Wahhhhh! President or Kriegs Kaiser. You know how short men act. It would be less trouble to buy them a codpiece.
Then you surround him with incompetent toadies like von Bulow or Pickle Boy. Then you tell the public about German Exceptionalism and how God meant for Germany to rule and civilize the world and everybody hates Germany because it’s so wonderful so we need a bigger and bigger army. It works every time. It helps to tell people there’s a Serb under everybody’s bed, or a Brit, or a commie or a Islam or terrorist or something. Pretty much anything will do. I figure it must get crowded under those beds.
The final part is to get yourself in trouble by having damn-fool mutual-defense treaties. You tell half the world that if anybody attacks anybody else, you are gonna jump in. Now the Kaiser had his own list of these traps. But Pickle Boy and the Obama Squad labor under the accreted load from years before. So Washington has to defend Japan, Estonia, Korea, the Philippines, Georgia (bof “em), most all of Europe, Ukraine, and lots of other places nobody ever heard of or wants to.
It just might be smarter to let the rest of the world settle its own problems.
I”d like to set these milli-Talleyrands and micro-Metternichs down and see whether they know anything at all about, say, Russia. I mean, like where it came from, how it got to be what it is, and what it wants, and why it acts the way it does. I don”t mean hard questions, like what did Oleg nail to the gates of Constantinople. Could Relish Man tell me who Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel were? What was the NEP? Just simple Russian history. I”ll bet good money they wouldn”t have the tiniest underfed clue. But they can bark from under the sofa.
A wise old newspaper editor once told me: “A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A reporter should know the difference.” Now, I wonder why that thought just came to mind.
I remember what my Uncle Hant told Burnside before the battle of Fredericksburg: “Jinral, if you got the brains of a goddamed retarded piss-ant, you won”t try to cross that river under all them guns.” You couldn”t take Hant anywhere in polite company. But he had a point.
