Of course. Hussein knew he had a lot of time to get American citizens killed in Afghanistan, so he wanted to ensure that the government could save money on those fatalities, in order to buy guns to ship to Libya/Syria. Those guns are needed there so that more Americans, like Seal Team Six, could be ambushed and killed using the weapons sold to AQ.

The modern and popular concept of society is that it organizes individuals, to make people do the right thing. The contra concept is that society is a false concept, merely a distortion, a lens in space, that focuses the power of the individual to a larger area.

A system that breaks down and destroys the user will not function, not because the system is broken but because the user is dead, brainwashed, neural stroked, or rendered incompetent.

Since the majority of the Earth’s population are tools, not users per say, it was easy for them to form the mass manufactured common sense concept that society, the government, and the system itself is something to which we owe our loyalty and survival to. Their numbers overwhelmed better ways of living, similar to farming vs hunting. Farming was something anyone could learn how to do, thus the power was in the numbers. Hunting required kill and the ability to survive, on your own, by your own judgment, which tended to produce casualties amongst the stupid and weaklings. Quality over quantity.

The current day cultural awareness in the US is that our security and wealth comes from our numbers, that our power comes from our quantitative advantage over the world, not because of any qualitative difference. Thus in order to fund Obamacare or any totalitarian philosophies, one needs only produce more slave soldiers and slave workers, one does not need to improve the system or improve the users using the system.

A leader is useless without people to lead, and powerless to begin with. Power only comes from the people. There is no such thing as a country that has no people in it.

The first priority is in choosing the right leaders. The second priority is training up the bottom up leaders.

A benevolent dictatorship works great when the leaders in charge are competent and have the support of loyal citizens. A democracy works the same way. There is no, real, difference between systems, only differences between people. Society itself is a false concept.

From what I understand, it’s not the laws that are the problem. It’s the bureaucracy, which varies by region and locale. When it works, it’s fine, even praiseworthy. But in too many places, it doesn’t work and screws over veterans with Communist horror stories come to life.

That’s why I recommend activating pro bono lawyers and law students to hack away at bad VA bureaucrats. The laws (mostly) are on the side of the veteran with the legit claim, and pitbull lawyers and law students are the ones who can wield those laws on behalf of clients versus VA bureaucrats running shenanigans.

And that is yet another reason it’s necessary to correct the popular narrative of the Iraq mission in the zeitgeist.

Pelosi would have to be pretty ballsy to characterize OEF like that because OEF is still the righteous 9/11 reaction.

However, she might claim that Afghanistan would have been giftwrapped with low casualities, and done and gone home early had OIF not siphoned off troops and resources – an argument that has been made to me in debate.

The gist of my counter: one, the intrinsic difficulties of building the peace in the ‘graveyard of empires’; two, more troops, funding, and resources don’t compensate for lack of proper method, and COIN wasn’t proven viz Iraq until 2008; three, the one-way AfPak border is effectively like the one-way borders used against us in South Vietnam; and four, it’s not like OEF was starved of US troops, plus OEF is a full-on internationalized NATO mission that shouldn’t need to rely so heavily on US troops.

My take is that we were compelled to go to Afghanistan because of 9/11, but a high-impact strategic victory was always more likely for us in Iraq, comparing conditions and geopolitical value, where there was also a (Saddam) problem that needed to be solved ASAP.

southpaw Says:

Just my opinion, but I think Obama is keeping his face time on this issue to an absolute minimum, in order to avoid the obvious questions about government health care.

DING! DING! DING! We have a winner!

Second: think of any government project. Any. Think of the Big Ditch in Boston. Can we say “cost overruns”? By a factor of TEN? Every govt. project ends up costing about TEN TIMES what they say it will — it’s damn near axiomatic.

Third, actually: I worked for NGOs back in the 1990s. A Stalinist I knew who worked for the UN told me that through-put for food aid in sub-Saharan Africa was five percent. Wastage, kleptocrat rakeoff, 95%. And he giggled, obscenely.

So there you have it: even apart from the moral issue of cannibalizing your neighbors, it’s the most tyrannical, most wasteful, most desperate way to do just about anything.

Yes, the problems are endemic: but the outrage is that this guy claimed six years ago that he was Outraged by the VA situation back then, and hasn’t done squat about it: except for proposing, in 2009, that the veterans pay for their own healthcare for service-related injuries. Remember that? Even the Dimwit congressmen didn’t go for that one.

Also, This Effin Guy is the one who’s herding All of us onto the government plantation, where we’re All going to get treated like this.

In other words, this scandal is a preview of coming detractions, friends.

If that happened in Texas, the two would’ve been dead within minutes…even if it meant using bricks and bare hands.

“Why do we have veteran’s charities such as Wounded Warriors and the Independence Fund? If the VA was functioning properly, those charities wouldn’t be necessary.”

I understand your point, but I think the charities were formed because citizens wanted to help the soldiers, not because they needed to help.
And thank God for that. In the UK, social charity like this is becoming more and more rare because the feeling is, “The government takes care of this, why should I get involved?”

This is the perfect example of the state crowding out private society. We need private social organizations, because without the ability to group together we are just a collection of weak individuals.