All Along the Watchtower

On this President’s Day, let’s all take a moment to salute one of the most consistently performing Presidents in American history, that, of course, being the current one. Unfortunately, he has been consistently performing at the level of disaster, and this observation in the Grey Lady about the reemergence of some centralized control of its network by the al Qaeda leadership should give us all pause, if not complete and total apoplexy. (It would seem, btw, that as yet another article in The Times laments the new design of the Freedom Tower for the World Trade Center site as reflecting anxiety and paranoia rather than ambition… maybe that makes some sense…)
In short, over five years after September 11th, nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq, after spending hundreds of billions out of pocket so far, over three thousand of our service personnel dead, tens of thousands maimed for life physically, probably hundreds of thousands scarred psychologically, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Iraq… not to mention the moral authority that this country once had flushed-down-the-toilet so we could expediently defy our own Constitution, laws and treaties by detaining and torturing the people swept up in our wake without care to whether they even remotely had anything to do with terrorism… in short, the premise of our entire so-called “war on terror”… appears now to have all been for little or naught, as the original perpetrators seem to be up and about, regrouping, and, if anything, beyond our control, as they lie protected by the sovereignty of a “friendly” country that we dare not push too hard, lest we irremediably destabilize it.
“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
Happy President’s Day.