The world keeps getting more complex every day. It’s getting harder to differentiate what’s bad from what’s good.
For example, Obama and Putin shook hands at the United Nations — that’s good.
Of course, Putin — in a front-page New York Times photo —looked like he was checking Obama out for concealed weapons. The Hawks would say that’s good. The Russians should be afraid of us. The Doves would say that’s bad because we need the Russians in the battle against ISIS.
Recently, the Russians said they are joining the fight against ISIS — that’s good.
On the other hand, they are joining in that fight with both Iraq and Iran — that’s bad.
Iraq was our ally. It only cost us $2 trillion and 20,000 American dead and wounded. Now they’re Iran’s ally — that’s bad
Dick Cheney said that the Iraq War would cost us $50 billion, tops. He was only short by $1 trillion, $950 billion — that’s bad
Now the Hawks want us to go fight in Syria and environs to take down ISIS, which pretty much exists because we knocked off Saddam Hussein and all of the radical Sunnis went looking for a new team, which they found in ISIS. I suspect that Iran was overjoyed because we pretty much took out their main competitor for power in the region. Now we’re not happy because the Iraqis turned out not to be such good friends after all, even after we sent them pallets of shrink-wrapped American money — that’s bad.
I could go on, but it wouldn’t get any clearer. And the sad reality is that there are thousands of people streaming out of Syria, in numbers we haven’t seen since the end of WWII, which is definitely bad.
But if the international scene is undecipherable, at least our domestic politics make good sense, and you can tell the good guys from the bad guys. The Democrats stand for a little touchy, feely, slightly left-of-center politics and the Republicans stand for low tax, less regulations, free enterprise government. Right … well, maybe not so right.
The bête noire of the new Republican politics is no longer old Muslim socialist, secretly foreign-born Barack Hussein Obama or even the Benghazi villainess Hillary Clinton with her secret emails corresponding behind our backs with lord knows who.
No, the new villains are that treacherous two-some; those closet appeasers, those gutless surrenderors John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. Most of you just have no idea what a moral dilemma this poses for a liberal Obama Democrat. If the Tea Party Republicans or the Freedom Caucus (or whatever they’re calling it now) think that Boehner and McConnell are bad, bad, bad, that must mean that to a liberal Democrat, they are actually good.
Now I must confess that I have never before have used the word “good” and either Boehner or McConnell in the same sentence, but there is a first time for everything. Now that Boehner and McConnell are good, I think it’s only fair that we offer them both a chance to become Democrats because it’s obvious that there is no future for a couple of lefties like them in the new Republican party.
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In a world where it has become progressively more difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys, there is one individual who appears to have transcended it all, and that is Pope Francis. He is absolutely the rock star of the modern world. He has put a totally humane and compassionate face on Roman Catholicism by not just what he says, but also who he is, and we all stand in awe.