A Matter of Mercy

This is a syndicated repost courtesy of KUNSTLER. To view original, click here. Reposted with permission.
Paging Doctor Oz! A patient calling itself The United States wandered into the emergency room disoriented, wearing a filthy warm-up suit, claiming it was ‘the greatest’ this and that… but was unable to complete the nine-page admission protocol or present valid insurance ID. Patient is growing increasingly violent, threatening staff and other patients….
Nations do develop something like Alzheimers. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that for some time now nothing sticks in the national brain-pan – if that’s what we can call the news media and its analogs on the Web waves. For months, an obsession about ‘Russian interference in the election’ raged through the left lobe of the national consciousness. Then, about a week ago, it vanished utterly. Grandpa suffered similar delusions about the Russians meddling with ‘our precious bodily fluids.’ (Paging Doctor Strangelove.)
Not so far back as last summer, a candidate named Trump un-ironically called for ‘an end to endless war in the Middle East.’ The oft-applied policy of ‘regime change,’ he said, was not working out in the various US-engineered failed states such as Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine. About two weeks ago, I seem to recall, the State Department even declared explicitly that we had no brief for regime change in the case of one Bashar al-Assad over in Syria.

This post was published at Examiner by James Howard Kunstler ‘ April 21, 2017.