$1.5 trillion and counting

Ned seems to recall that a historian, Paul Kennedy, wrote a tome years ago called "The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers" in which he described the reasons for the decline of once-mighty world powers including Spain, Britain and by inference, the United States. Ned finds Johnson's thesis to be more and more persuasive in view of the money pissed away on wars by the criminal Bush regime and, sadly, the Obama administration, which, like a grouper repeatedly trying to eat a porcupine fish, are very slow learners. Comes word today from Bloomberg News that the total cost of the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan is at least $1.26 trillion and counting, and this does not count the cost of maimed soldiers returning with severe mental and physical problems. Adding these, and Ned gets about $1.5 trillion. It makes Ned's blood boil to think of the waste of lives and treasure carried out in the name of "defending freedom" and "protection from terrorism", not to mention, "spreading democracy."
As an exercise, Ned asks his friends to think of how this money could have been spent productively; for example, giving every city in the US a rapid transit system and paying for it for fifty years, or retrofitting every house in the country with the latest in energy-saving devices, or giving every kid with a B average a free college education, or even giving free memberships in the Delta Sky Club to anyone who wanted it--no, scratch that, Ned has to rub shoulders with enough riff-raff as it is.
One day, Ned hopes the criminals in the Bush regime will answer for their crimes with their heads, but by then the damage to the country will no doubt already be done.

Ned Under Fire

Ned is being criticized by some of his friends for saying, in another forum, that someday (soon) some president is going to be held to account for the indiscriminate use of deadly force without a declaration of war. Ned hopes it is not Obama, but feels that Obama, for whom Ned worked for six months, is falling into the trap of hubris that any person with virtually unlimited power can fall prey to. Obama now has, as Bush had before him, essentially as much war-making power as Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914, and we know where that led. Furthermore, actions are within the area of critical U.S. national security interest whenever the President says it is. Nothing more is required.
We believe that the greatest perversion of the Constitution, for some reason unfathomable to us, is the ceding of war-making powers from Congress to the Executive. Even the British Prime Minister has no such power, and is answerable to parliament. Not so Obama.
To be sure, he is simply following in the footsteps of every president since Roosevelt, who, ironically, is the last President to have had a legal declaration of was issued by Congress. Since then, the U.S. has been involved in countless wars and 'police actions', resulting in the despoiling of a significant part of the earth's land and sea area, the deaths of countless creatures and hundreds of thousands of human beings, many of them innocent and many of them children.
But what we hear from this president is 'we need to address bullying in schools,' as if the deaths of innocent children, howbeit dark, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya is just 'collateral damage'
Ned is sick of it, and this president, who opposed Iraq, should know better, and eventually there must be a reckoning.
Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope against experience that this most recent adventure ends well.