The 'new' New Colossus (White Christmas In August, Part One.)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! ~Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus.

This is one of the saddest things I've ever seen in my life.

We're all watching the death of a nation, the death of people's dreams, in real time.

I saw this video last night, people running alongside a C-17 Globemaster III jet as it taxis, some of them grabbing onto the sides of the aircraft or trying to climb onto it.
 

And all Lauren Blowbert can fucking do, seeing this, is make some passive-aggressive pro-Trump comment "Oh woe! Oh woe! If only my Lord and Savior Donald Trump were here!" Well, ya dumb fucking bitch, this wouldn't even be happening without Donald fucking Trump, who is the one who negotiated with the Taliban and threw the elected government of Afghanistan to the fucking wolves to start with. Lauren Boebert's idea of the 'new New Colossus is nothing more than a giant statue of an upraised middle finger.

I mean, seriously, do you think Trump even gives a shit about anybody in Afghanistan other than the fucking Taliban? Whose current leader and 5,000 of their soldiers he personally went to the mat for and had them released from prison?! All so he could bro it up with some other authoritarian shitbird during the negotiations in Qatar for a few minutes.

I love these fucking people who think that American white male Republican politicians have some magic authority that people who otherwise don't give a shit about us will magically have to obey and respect. No, it doesn't work like that.

And Trump used what authority he had to get some Taliban out of jail.

I'm going to be honest here, I quite suspect that most of the Taliban are just as tired of twenty years of war as we are. It's starting to look like they're going to at least appear to behave and moderate their conduct a little, at least where it can be observed...which will just make them more vicious when they do what they usually do out of sight. But I rather suspect their patrons in China, Pakistan and Russia probably want this thing to be over, too, and so have pressured them to appear to behave.

The Afghan people on either side are tough survivors, and remember, a great many of them are already nearly as Fundamentalist as the Taliban.

Those who want to stay will stay and tough out whatever, as long as the Taliban don't run the country's infrastructure and technology base into the ground again or fuck with the country's agriculture and food supply...well, things will be bad, but likely survivable. Likely the ones the Taliban intended to kill or punish have already been dealt with, seeing as they issued a general amnesty this morning and are trying to get whatever's left of the government to go back to work.

Usually in this type of situation you only do that after you've killed whoever you thought needed killing.

Not that I trust these people's word, but I suspect they won't break it as much as some people (including me) thought they would. 

In fact, if anything I think their newfound apparent pragmatism will make them more dangerous in the long run...particularly when you consider they just inherited 20 years of our work in building up their country and have a much higher technology level with which to support Jihad.

And those who want to get out will likewise find a way, as many are already doing, to their dubious credit, the Taliban are not interfering with our evacuation thus far, and those who've made it to Hamid Karzai International Airport are facing not much more obstacles than long ass lines.

Well, that and 600-800 people being packed into a Globemaster sounds miserable as fuck to me. I hope the hell nobody had to take a piss on that long ass flight to Qatar. I've flown on these planes, they aren't comfortable under normal peacetime circumstances for the 102 people rated as their standard rated passenger complement, and it's worse when you're taking off or landing under adverse or field conditions. But at least they got out, and relatively quickly.

Others will drive out, or trek over the mountains, or get smuggled out, and I don't envy what they'll have to go through.

And those who helped us, or our allies, have every right to go wherever they wish to start new lives.

They have every right to come here, if that's what they want to do. Considering that a lot of these people have learned English and dealt with us for all this time it's a likely outcome in a hell of a lot of cases. 

I'm going to be honest, I'd rather deal with people who, coming from a vastly different cultural context, agreed to adopt and support our way of doing things than with people like Laura Ingraham whose entire bit is undermining America and its culture and ways in favor of how they think it's supposed to look. 

Personally I had enough of their vision of America, white as a goddamned sheet of computer paper but with unending Tijuana donkey show politics in the last four years. It's literally taken me months to recover from five years of this bullshit and I hit rock bottom last month.

Fuck all that, and fuck anybody who wants it to start again.

People have a right to come here, and they have a right to expect decent, functional government and society when they do. Lots of them will hope for exactly that, and work for it when they become able to.

Some Americans, on the other hand, seem to think that the purpose of government is to bomb people, that indeed the cruelty actually is the point.

And they're dumb enough to think using nukes on the soil of an allied country is actually a good idea. 

Back in the day I saw an analysis or two of what people would have had to go through if NATO or the Warsaw Pact had used weapons of mass destruction during a hypothetical World War III scenario in Germany and to this day, I can't imagine how anybody expected that anybody short of troops in full MOPP 4 gear who weren't subject to direct attack would have survived for very long.

I saw the video of people running alongside that taxiing Globemaster last night too. 

Now imagine smoke-filled skies and those Chinooks flying over rubble instead of buildings, and those people clearly suffering the initial effects of radiation sickness, some of them vomiting, and some of them stumbling around blinded...with Airmen in full MOPP gear screening people's REM counts with a dosimeter and Geiger counter. Imagine our airwaves full of bellicose threats of Jihad from Iran and Pakistan, and calmer but more dire warnings from China and Russia amid reports that Strategic Rocket Forces have been placed on full alert...and sober meetings by the United Nations that brand us as the rogue state as other nations start to cut off trade and our economy craters yet again, and as other nations deploy their forces...not as our allies, but in case we do something crazy.

Imagine the world demanding we disarm...or else.

And starting with comprehensive sanctions that wreck our economy. Would this idiotic bellicose nationalism from these morons have made that better, or much worse, do ya think?

THAT would've been the bitter fruit of us using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan.

THAT is why one hell of a lot of Americans shouldn't be trusted with anything more lethal than a plastic butter knife or allowed to decide anything of greater import than what's for lunch...or allowed to leave the house without a helmet on.

Jesus Christ, dude, what the hell is wrong with you?

I'm a United States Air Force Bomb Wing veteran. I served in the 410th Security Police Squadron at K.I. Sawyer AFB and the 91st Security Forces Group at Minot AFB and the idea of anybody using nuclear weapons fills me with a bone-deep dread. That only ends one way; Apocalypse.

The United States of America has had a "No First Use" policy regarding nuclear weapons since the oh-so-politically-correct 1950's for a reason. We didn't want to blow up the world.

Authoritarian chucklefucks can go pound sand.

It really does seem like some people would rather blow up the world than accept that they were lied to, admit they were wrong, or learn anything.

I could have told you, hell I and lots of others DID tell you, the way we were doing things over there it was always going to end badly. Any veteran who paid attention could...and likely did...tell you that. Especially those who served over there. Kabul was always going to be Saigon with mountains, because we didn't build up the country and a government most of the people could support. It was always intended to be a permanent occupation, but as usual the military industrial complex never thought that Americans might get bored, or tired, they just figured we'd take it.

And idiots who think you can bomb an insurgency out of existence are why they think they can do that. In fact, they want to ride the bomb all the way down, whooping and hollering like Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove.

Because "Fight the Communists" or "Own the Libs" or something something Better Dead Than Red...

Hey wait a minute! Aren't WE "Red" he realizes too late...

BOOM!

At this point it seems like it'd just be easier to let the Afghans who want to come here in, dust ourselves off, sit down and learn a few things from this mess and move on.

If you want a better country, a better foreign policy, whatever, BE A BETTER CITIZEN!

I spent some of my younger years in Orange County, CA, where there was a large Vietnamese community. I knew people whose parents fled from Saigon on boats or helicopters. Hell, I worked with an old Vietnamese guy for years, a Republic of Vietnam Navy veteran who'd evacuated on one of their Navy ships, filled to the gunnels with thousands of people on April 30th, 1975. 

Trust me, that guy understood the concept of America, and how being a good citizen and voting and shit was important. Like me, he went back and forth between Democrat and Republican, based on who he thought made their case better or was better at the time.

His best friend was a Latino US Army retiree who had fought over there as a young man, fiercely Christian and Republican but like me, he voted for Obama in 2008, and for the same reason, just as anguished as I was that Sarah Palin and her ilk meant he couldn't support John McCain.

But making choices like that means you have to pay attention.

I guarantee you, those Afghans who come here and become Americans will understand that.

And they will appreciate being here, and strengthen this country, and contribute to it just like the Vietnamese did.

And that, my friends, is exactly what Laura Ingraham and Lauren Boebert and the C-SPAN nuke guy are afraid of.

That's all.

Part Two.

NOTE: As regards the series title, the code-signal for the Operation Frequent Wind helicopter evacuation on April 29th, 1975 was "The temperature is 105 degrees and rising" followed by the playing of the song "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas."