Pearls of expression.

The question before us is a relatively simple one: What would be the criteria for removing our remaining troops from the Iraqi, Syrian, and more general Middle Eastern conflicts? Or, for that matter, from Afghanistan, where we have been trapped for more than 17 long years of still open-ended occupation?

If the answer to that question is that only when each of these countries is a healthy pro-American democracy, and Islamist terrorism has ceased to be an “enduring” threat to the West, then the answer, as the old Bob Mankoff joke has it, is “How about never — is never good for you?”^[1]

That's the way it's being set up. We can only disengage from our pointless foreign military adventures when conditions are juuuuussst right. Jihadis lining up to learn to be heavy equipment operators, foreign civilian populations strewing rose petals at the feet of our generals, jihadis naming their sons Ralph and Jesus, and Jupiter aligns with Mars. Close enough for government work just won't cut it. Or application of the 80/20 rule. Or the notion that the best is the enemy of the good. No, baby. We want perfection. Lion lie down with the lamb brand of flapdoodle.

The point Mr. Sullivan makes is a clever and insightful one but he’s hardly ready to be discharged from the observation ward at the state hospital:

• Trump “ordered 5,000 troops to the Mexican border as a political stunt.” [Yay.]
• “Mattis was a vital obstacle to some of Trump’s criminal and impulsive tendencies.” [Where was he when we were arranging for the gruesome death of Gaddafi and thousands of Libyans?]
• The “need to constrain Russia. Fair enough.” [Stalin rides again!]
• Trump “told NATO that Article 5 was effectively void.” [27 years after the need for NATO evaporated?]
• Trump’s “bizarre love-in with Kim Jong-un.” [Accomplishing more in months what the CFR pretty boys and girls couldn’t do in decades.]
• The “disastrous G7 meeting.” [“Allow me to show my contempt for you girls.”]
• The “staggering Helsinki press conference.” [It were ‘orrid.]
• Trump “openly tried to break up the European Union.” [To the eternal gratitude of all patriotic Europeans.]
• Trump “moved to change his plans on transgender troops by fiat.” [Transgenders allowed in by fiat.]

All rather odd. Sullivan shows the stupidity of those globalist/prog twerps who want eternal war for nothing east of Long Island but then proceeds to mouth every other moronic position of those same people.

Oh, well. I’ll take someone willing to step outside the Bubble of Moron however hesitantly.

Partially woke is better than not woke. In a New Year’s phone call to a friend of the moon calf persuasion this afternoon she stated that without immigration none of us would be here. She’s still in the bubble, utterly stupefied by the word “immigration,” which has powers to put the mind to sleep like a Nancy Pelosi speech on gun confiscation control.

Now where was I? Oh, yes. Happy New Year to all. May our Holger Danskers appear by the tens of thousands this year and our millions of confused, precious, proglodyte neighbors fall into a deep Sleep of the Dialectic for a decade while we put things back together.

Notes
^[1] "The Establishment Will Never Say No To A War." By Andrew Sullivan, ZeroHedge, 12/31/18 (formatting removed).