by Joe Galloway

It is traditional to count our blessings this time of year but giventhe general state of affairs and Washington's wholelot of talk and no action it's hard to get into the holiday spirit.

Harder still if you are one of the many in the unemployment lines orone of the many who are cleaning out the shelves of the charity foodpantries so their children don't go hungry.

The national treasury is pretty much empty and our line of creditwith our traditional allies, formerly known as RedChina, is drying up. We still have plenty of paper and ink,though, and the Treasury's printing presses are running 24/7 with nosign of falling apart. The dollars they crank out are sinking like theTitanic and gold is at $1,300 an ounce and risingfast.

Our new president is either snake-bit or vampire-bit and hasn'tmanaged to keep even a token number of his campaign promises. But that'sabout to change with tomorrow's Decider act onAfghanistan when he will up the ante by anadditional 34,000 U.S. troops, bringing our total investment in a losingsituation to more than 100,000 by the time they all get there nextyear.

He did promise to do something about that 8-year-old war, and he didnot promise that it would be the right something.

Health-care reform -- which was supposed to be passed and signed into law by last August -- isn't even halfway done yet and will likely bepushed off to next year.

Our president left this badly needed fix to our broken down healthcare system to the tender mercies of a Congress largelybought and paid for by the big health care and pharmaceutical andinsurance corporations who are what's wrong with our health care in thefirst place.

Predictably they have neutered the bills of any real possibility ofreform, turning even the thought of a public option alternative to therobber barons into an exercise in Socialism, Communism and Nazism.

Like nobody in America ever heard of Medicare or theVeterans Administration medical system -- both very popularprograms run by and paid for by the big bad Government.

What's the point in having a Democrat in the White Houseand Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress if theyare all going to act like Republicans?

The new president arrived on the scene in the middle of a very scaryrecession triggered by the unabashed greed and incompetence of a bunchof Wall Street bankers and brokers and insurers. Atrillion dollars of taxpayer money was flung at them on grounds thatthey were "too big to fail" and reforms were promised that would restoresome semblance of order and legality to what had become a nest ofpirates and looters.

Now we approach end-of-the-year Bonus Time on WallStreet and you can believe the bankers and brokers arealready salivating as they wait for their millions in ransom money toarrive.

Nothing has been reformed. Nothing has been done to keep the thievesfrom doing it all over again. They feel quite secure if no one else inAmerica does. After all the new president put some of WallStreet's favorite handmaidens in charge of the Treasury, theSecurities Exchange Commission, and our very economyitself.

Happy days are here again. Or still.

Now, let's turn back to Afghanistan. There areseveral very good reasons why sending 34,000 more U.S. troops there is avery bad decision. The very terrorist enemy they are supposedly goingthere to fight, al-Qaida, isn't there at all. They are really goingthere to fight the Taliban, who are 100 percent Afghan, on behalf of oneof the most corrupt governments we have ever installed anywhere.

We have politely asked President Hamid Karzai andhis kleptomaniacs to stop stealing most of the millions we've sent tohelp rebuild a country torn apart by four decades of war. We've askedKarzai to counsel his family to get out of the opium and heroin trade.They've all promised to do much better and no doubt they will.

So billions more of the money we can't afford will be poured down theAfghan rat hole, and hundreds more fine young American men and womenwill die and thousands more will be injured or wounded in pursuit of animpossible dream.

If this is the best the new president and his Congress cando, then God help us. We might just as well have kept George W.Bush and Dick Cheney for another four years.Nobody's hopes would have been dashed with those guys.

 

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