My old pappy and I began this little Blog about 2 years ago in an attempt to alert the good citizens of our good old U.S.of A. to the seemingly intractable problems which have sort of wormed their way into the fabric of our society since our systems were kind of “reset” after the GREAT DEPRESSION.
Over those two years, we’ve tried to delineate what we consider the most important of those problems, and will review and update our analyses during next year’s exciting election cycle. Of course, currently overshadowing our very serious reality lapses is the problem of terrorism. Appropriately, our President spoke to our public from the oval office yesterday about one aspect of this scourge facing us and the rest of the world.
Old pap and I felt as though the Prez did a very balanced and thoughtful presentation of the problem of the so called ISIS threat and his plans to confront and resolve this scourge. Naturally, good old Fox “news” hurried to dismiss his effort as “more of the same,” but quite a few pundits of all stripes also portrayed the President’s approach as what one might call, “too little or too timid.” Briefly, here is our take on the situation:
Granted, this ISIS bunch, or whatever they are called, is extremely dangerous, but they really are just a relatively small (perhaps a few tens of thousands), well armed gang of deranged killers who have learned to use our wonderful so called “social media” to spread their vile ideology to other persons around the civilized world who have become disgruntled over real or imagined mistreatment. Old pap and I believe that our President’s measured approach will eventually destroy them as much as evil doers are able to be destroyed.
Voices calling for overwhelming use of our military with such measures as “carpet” bombing (if you recall, a method so successfully employed in Vietnam) and sending divisions of our combat soldiers in the areas occupied by ISIS would result in killing thousands of innocent bystanders while bogging us down in another foreign conflict. A side effect of such action would make the extremist message more alluring to the disaffected souls they are attempting to recruit both here and abroad.
The Prez is correct also in discouraging the inappropriate association of these ISIS “thugs,” as the he correctly describes them, with the religion of Islam. The billion or so other believers of this ancient religion are no more related to these bad actors than are the other believers in Christianity to the deranged killers of doctors and others at clinics operated by Planned Parenthood. President Obama properly desires to assuage the fears of our Muslim Americans (fears created by irresponsible rhetoric from some of the current batch of presidential aspirants) and procure their help in stopping the recruitment of local terrorists from their communities.
If we are to be successful in this struggle with terrorism, we need to try to be more akin to the old Brits during the horrendous bombings of London and not like the cartoonist’s rendering of our current reactions:
At least that is the considered opinion of one old hound dog and his teetering old pappy.
Buster's Two Cents 