USA! USA!

The next time somebody asks "How can we possibly afford universal health-care?" or even, god forbid, free lunches for poor kids, remind them that America has occupied Afghanistan (and Iraq) for two decades now, trillions of dollars were flushed, and every bit of "progress" made was a complete fucking lie:

"What’s more is that this military-industrial-congressional complex is largely insulated from public accountability, so what’s the incentive to change course? The Pentagon’s entire budget operates in much the same way: unprecedented amounts in unnecessary appropriations resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. Yet Congress continues to throw more and more money at the defense department every year without ever requiring it to account for how it spends the money. In fact, the war in Afghanistan is small potatoes by comparison.

The bottom line is that the Afghanistan Papers clearly show that a lot of people were killed, injured and subject to years, if not lifetimes, of psychological trauma and financial hardship because a bunch of men – yes, mostly men – in Washington didn’t want to admit publicly what they knew privately all along. If we don’t start holding these people to account – and it’s not just about Afghanistan – the DC foreign policy establishment will continue to act with impunity, meaning that it’s probably more likely than not that in 50 years there’ll be another batch of 'papers' revealing once again that we’ve failed to learn obvious lessons from the past."

I'm old enough to remember when any criticism of the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were met sincere, doe-eyed questions to the extent of "Why do you hate America and our freedoms?"