Can you say "Mayaguez"?

 My dear friend Alice Green is trying to encourage me to abandon anger in my life.....Anger at idiots, morons, and the socially inept or actual sociopaths does seem to be right up there with Caligula sending his Legions against the sea......Alice has a point.

Here is my point:  Doesn't Evil and Stupidity need to be confronted? Too many people don't seem to even notice either....much less confront them.  Looking at the available tools.....Anger seems to be the most useful.

So....deep breath.  Hold that breath for four months......At some point I defer to Bob Dylan: "What kid of price do we have to pay....to get out of going through all these things twice?"

What ever happened to intelligent dialogue?  Facts, history, experience, respect, the thrill of battle against opposing ideas and the glory of compromise that moves us all forward?

Done and dusted.....

My dearly beloved brother Rob was at one time entranced....or at least attracted.... to John McCain for his various feisty, principled stances on policy.  Rob died in 2001, and so did any sense of propriety and reality in anyone connected to Senator McCain...

Every single thing that President Obama is now trying to move forward with is now being tied up by Republican opposition.....not from any rational argument, just because.  Because....?

I am not a huge fan of the President.....I am on record as saying in print that Leon Panetta has a tiny little penis for continuing the attacks on privacy and personal freedom that started with Dick Cheney and George Bush....and were enthusiastically continued under our current President.

Don't start me on Medical Marijuana.....

Or ICE and Immigration.....

Democrats have always sucked.....They just suck less than modern Republicans....

But.....

Senator McCain and his buddies continue to bring up Benghazi as some kind of boogie man and tar-baby that is supposed to discredit every appointee that President Obama makes....no Secretary of State, no Secretary of Defense, no head of the CIA will be allowed because Obama did not rescue four guys in Benghazi in September, or Obama somehow lied about it.

We (Cachagua General Store) are locally famous for putting thousands of crosses on Carmel Beach to recognize our lost sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines on Memorial Day.  Our display was only made possible by help from some of those very Marines who did the groundwork.  I have kept track of them...most are OK.  Some not.  (We won't talk about the never spoken of effect of getting hit by an IED and surviving....and having your balls and dick blown off a few months after your wedding to your sweetheart....No one wants to pay that bill). Or even acknowledge it......

Others of my Marines are in task forces hovering in various places....some in the Med.  These guys and gals are ready to respond to any crazy thing that might happen anywhere from Rome to Malta to Cairo....to Benghazi.  Helicopters, jets, bombers, Special Forces, Seals, Delta.....whatever.

One thing they don't do.....and no one in the military will do.....is randomly fly into somewhere with our overwhelming skill, bravery and technology without local knowledge of what is going on on the ground.

Why?

Common sense.....and the "Mayaguez".

After the Vietnam War was over...way back in the day in 1975.....some random Khmer Rouge idiots captured a US container ship off Cambodia.

Long story short.....our response was unprepared, hyperbolic, with little info on the situation on the ground....and we wound up losing more Marines in the rescue than those sailors exposed on the ground.  Not one of the captives from the Mayaguez died....but the rescue crew was frankly humiliated.  Three captured Marines were executed in public, and the US could do nothing about it but watch. Not to mention the ten killed in the uniformed assault.

From Wikipedia:


The Mayaguez incident took place between the Khmer Rouge and the United States from May 12–15, 1975, was the last official battle of the Vietnam War. The names of the Americans killed, as well as those of three U.S. Marines who were left behind on the island of Koh Tang after the battle and who were subsequently executed by the Khmer Rouge, are the last names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The merchant ship's crew, whose seizure at sea had prompted the U.S. attack, had been released in good health, unknown to the U.S. Marines or the U.S. command of the operation, before the Marines attacked. It was the only known engagement between U.S. ground forces and the Khmer Rouge.

For John McCain to use the Benghazi incident as a bludgeon against President Obama and his appointees and his policies is an act of breathtaking hypocrisy.

Ever been to the Vietnam Memorial?  It will still your heart......You will sob like a schoolgirl.  So many dead young people. 

And when you get to the end......the kids from the Mayguez.

Killed by bad intel, no intel....political over-reaction......and letting the civilians get in the way of the pros. 

Obama and Secretary Clinton are only guilty of having learned from history, and having decided to not repeat it....regardless of the temporary cost.

Senator McCain......what can I say?  When hard core, life long, Republican gung ho Marines are embarrassed by your behavior because it is against all rational modern military tactics and policy.....Just to score "political points"......You have jumped the shark, buddy.

There is a reason not a single one of his fellow residents of the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam supported his bid for the presidency......

If our carriers had responded to the attack in Benghazi.....and we had Marine helicopters shot down and lives lost, and captives executed.....hours after any realistic possibility of helping our four State Department workers.....what would he have said?  Support for the President's decision to send in troops with no intel?  I am so sure......

Oh.....and the ultimate hypocrisy: Senator McCain voted with his "brothers" to cut the security budget for the State Department as part of their crusade to cut "wasteful" government spending.

Once an authentic hero.....maybe. Or not.

Now just a rancid piece of shit stuck to all of our shoes......

Sad......

Now denying the approval of a Secretary of Defense....during wartime.....for the first time in the history of our country.

I think "shit" would be offended to be compared to John McCain......

Let's Roll.....

Not to be a drag at the party....as an irregular handball fan (oops, I mean football...they do kick every now and then) I was looking forward to looking back tomorrow for the Super Bowl.

I remember being on the road to a famous 49'ers house (YA Tittle) for a party when "The Catch" happened. Joe M and a bunch of Niner's crashed the dinner party.  If you ever want to buy a Porsche, I have the hook-up.

 We did Jim Plunkett's wedding..... with all the Niners present (I gave Randy Moss his own bottle of Jack and he fell down and broke his leg). The full story involves: a six-pack of piss, chocolate hand prints, Farmer's Market pasta.....

We used to rent a house at Alpine on MLK/Super Bowl week and ski and ski on empty slopes, just checking in from time to time as the Niners beat the Bengals or whoever bothered to show up. Being a Niners fan was being close to God.

 Bill Walsh was a client...we served him dinner four days before he died.

Still, the air ran out of my balloon when Idiot Boy Culliver went on his anti-gay rant the other day.
"I ain't into the sweet stuff....no room in our locker room for that shit".

Really?

I was impressed at the Niner brass response.....and then:

Two other knucklehead Niners realized that the video they made for "It Gets Better" was directed to bullying yes, but specifically anti-LGBT bullying.....and withdrew their support, and even denied having made the video!  South Pacific Islanders being paid millions of dollars a year are not cool with bullying....some group of people....but not gay people.  Perhaps they didn't notice that in Polynesian culture there are actually at least three sexes....and last year one of the "other" sexes actually made a local national soccer team.  

Well, reading is really hard.....

Every sport team on the planet made an "It Gets Better" video....even Canadian hockey teams. (Love Canada and hockey (Ken Dryden....the Abraham Lincoln of Canadian hockey is my fraternity brother from Cornell).

 Did these morons ever hit the bars in the city they play for? Are they so dumb that they don't realize the hottest chicks they ever got a lap dance from this year weren't probably actually "chicks"? Have they even checked in with their own culture?

I am grumpy and depressed. I just had to write an essay about my near miss with 9/11 for a book (I was drunk on good champagne and great Calvados and missed Flight 93). 

The main guy behind "Let's roll!" on that flight was a gay friend of mine from PG who played on the gay rugby team out of Berkeley....and, like all rugby players, any other team he could find. Even lame-ass straight alcoholics in Monterey. (I wound up at CHOMP for alcohol poisoning after my first practice. Practice....not a game.)

 He was a lock...meaning a big guy who would kick your ass and run like a deer. 

 Rugby doesn't need pads....it's flesh to flesh, and bone to bone. Or time-outs. Pussies need not apply. There is a keg on the sideline and a jar of Vicodin, not oxygen tanks, Culliver. We play for 45 minutes straight....no pun intended...without commercial breaks and time to gasp. 

 No rugby player I ever met ever disrespected a gay player.....I guess the dregs drift towards "football".

Go Niners......

Let's roll......