Blessings and a great 4th of July to all!

(Army Strong!)

I just got sworn in today and am ready to ship out to Afghanistan if I need to go. I am in one of the branches of the Army that almost always gets deployed. I want to thank you for your support.

Proreason, I understand your point and I respect the fact that you have the interests of people like me and others who serve, at heart. I am willing to make great sacrifices so you have the freedom to exercise your free speech, so I salute you and say, keep provoking. You make us proud, even if I can no longer criticize Obama and I will probably have to go to Afghanistan, hopefully, with a servant”s heart.

Best to all!

I think we can still do good work in Afghanistan, but we have to take a more decisive leadership role and stop trying to workshop everything there with our European partners. I am excited and honored to go, especially with the branch I got into.

It was inspiring in any case to see the thousands upon thousands of Californians who are eager to join the armed forces now. Partly the economy, partly they really want to defend the flag. The one big change this means for me is, now, President Barack Obama is my boss, and I have to hold back from criticizing him publicly.

(Do I still get to criticize liberals though?????)

There are two differences between healthy self-love and pathological narcissism: (a) in the ability to tell reality from fantasy, and (b) in the ability to empathise and, indeed, to fully and maturely love others. As we said, the narcissist does not love himself. It is because he has very little True Self to love. Instead, a monstrous, malignant construct – the False Self – encroaches upon his True Self and devours it.

The narcissist loves an image which he projects onto others who reflect it to the narcissist (the False Self). This process reassures the narcissist of both the objective existence of his False Self and of the boundaries of his Ego. It blurs all distinctions between reality and fantasy.

The False Self leads to false assumptions and to a contorted personal narrative, to a false worldview, and to a grandiose, inflated sense of being. The latter is rarely grounded in real achievements or merit. The narcissist’s feeling of entitlement is all-pervasive, demanding and aggressive. It easily deteriorates into open verbal, psychological and physical abuse of others.

Maintaining a distinction between what we really are and what we dream of becoming, knowing our limits, our advantages and faults and having a sense of true, realistic accomplishments in our life are of paramount importance in the establishment and maintenance of our self-esteem, sense of self-worth and self-confidence.

Good luck with your induction, Professor.

The problem with Afghanistan, which Bush understands quite well, is that the country is medieval, and satisfied with that. There is NOTHING we can do that will bring it into modernity. It will not and cannot be like Iraq, which is probably the most modern of the Muslim states. The BEST we can hope for is to shut Afghanistan down as a staging platform for terrorists. And that doesn’t require hundreds of thousands of troops. A small force in a hardened safe environment can do the job.

All of the rest need to come home, NOW.

Could it be that Obama wants to see Afghanistan fail in order to tie the failure around the neck of Petraeus?

Godspeed professor!

Jones says that he doesn’t want Afghanistan to be like Iraq.

We invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001 (or started). We invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003.

So it is a fact that we have been in Iraq about18 months less time than we have been in Afghanistan.

On June 30, 2009, we “turned sovereignty of Iraq over to the Iraqis.” Iraq has a government, a constitution, a democracy, and 4,000 women who ran for political office. Iraq has an $80 billion budget surplus. Almost a million Internet users. We are close to “winning” in Iraq, so close we can actually turn over the cities to Iraqi forces and, in the measurable future, leave. That took 6 years to do, plus a few months.

Am I wrong, or is Afghanistan not a mess??????? It’s been EIGHT years (not six), and their democracy seems, from what I can tell, nowhere near as developed as Iraq.

If I were in charge, I would look at Iraq and say, “let’s treat Afghanistan more the way we treated that stuff.”

And wasn’t the entire argument from Petraeus and McCain — an argument that proved correct — that you needed a surge of troops in order to do nation building and stabilize an economy? If there is no security across the country, it’s impossible to get business done; it becomes impossible to train an indigenous troop force, and nobody can develop the economy.

So maybe I’m dumb. That’s possible. But it seems to me that if there’s a solid rationale for not sending more troops to Afghanistan, it is not the rationale provided by the National Security Advisor. I could see someone saying, “hey, we’re tired, let’s give up, al qaeda just feeds off our fighting with them, and we can spend more time on our border security.” I could see someone saying, “Afghanistan is inherently more unruly than Iraq, so let’s give up on developing their economy.”

But I don’t get the argument that Afghanistan can get no more troops because we need to develop their economy, and we don’t want them to be like Iraq. That makes no sense.

By the way, it’s midnight here in LA and in four hours the sergeant picks me up to bring me to the military station where I’m going to weigh in and, if I make weight, get sworn in. So soon enough Afghanistan may figure much more prominently in my life than it does now!

We’d love for Jones to let us know how poor obama’s feels snif snif, but as far as those with lives at stake, I’d say their answer to Jones and his Obambi Highnass would be a show of middle fingers around the table and across the boards.

Obama will not feel any guilt if our soldiers die and get killed in Afganistan, because he feels that it is in their genes. He has already done everything he can to demonize soldiers as a threat to our own country. Read what he says at the end of the below excerpt. “a coalition of the willing” Don’t forget Robert Gibbs worked for John Kerry before Obama.

barack Obama audicity of hope 2006 the end of 292 to beginning of 293

~ With justice at our backs and the world by our side, we drove the Taliban government out of Kabul in just over a month; Al Qaeda operatives fled or were captured or killed.
It was a good start by the Administration, I thought – steady, measured, and accomplished with minimal casualties (only later would we discover the degree to which our failure to put sufficient military pressure on Al Qaeda forces at Tora Bora may have led to bin Laden’s escape). And so, along with the rest of the world, I waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow:
the enunciation of a U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning, intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but build a new international consensus around the challenges of transnational threats.
This new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together, and with new labels affixed. Reagan’s “Evil Empire” was now “the Axis of Evil,” Theodore Roosevelt’s version of the Monroe Doctrine – the notion that we could preemptively remove governments not to our liking – was now the Bush Doctrine, only extended beyond the Western Hemisphere to span the globe. Manifest destiny was back in fashion; all that was needed, according to Bush, was American firepower, American resolve, and a “coalition of the willing.” ~

Once again our ‘dear leader’ is overburdening our troops by saying no help is arriving. I wish there was more moral outrage about this from the high ranking officer corps. But instead of telling the troops ‘I’ve got your back’, they’re more focused on keeping their careers intact.