2021 Archives

The Covid pandemic has exposed how corrupt and dysfunctional our American patchwork-quilt for-profit system has become: America can and must do better. It has to be a scurrilous lie. Seriously: nobody is that evil. Although it is the sort of thing that we’ve come to expect because our unique-in-the-world, for-profit health insurance system leaves Americans financially vulnerable to sickness but offers huge profits to companies and CEOs in the system. Some cynical people are suggesting that the reason Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is forcing teachers and children to sit for hours every day in classrooms with unmasked children is because he wants them all to get infected with Covid…to make money for a friend of his.

Language matters, because it’s how we understand what’s real and what’s a scam or a lie. When statecraft language is misused people can die, as happened for decades in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attack was a crime by a small group of criminals, not an act of war by a sovereign state. But we responded to that crime with two war-based assaults, and we won both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in a matter of weeks, not years or decades.

The best of the rest of the news. — Afghanistan falls. George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy is finally coming to an end. Bush, you’ll recall, turned down the Taliban’s offer to arrest Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, and instead began bombing Afghanistan because he thought it was good politics. Twenty years later, here we are. Meanwhile, if President Biden really expected the Taliban to hold back until we’d evacuated the country, he needs to fire his advisors. No country wants to be occupied and every nation fights occupation: that principle was at the foundation of our nation, when people who’d lived in North America for generations rejected occupation by British forces. The Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban that let Trump ignore the crisis of Afghanistan and further empowered the Taliban; it also made a safe withdrawal even more difficult. But at the end of the day, leaving was really the only option America had. Hopefully, after having experienced this twice in the past 50 years, we’ll learn from the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan…and probably soon Iraq as well. When presidents lie us into wars, it always turns out ugly.

Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens – and thousands of their citizens’ children – die and the people of their states will simply forget and move on. Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement. Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.