8/12/21: Sometimes, I like to check out
Fox News. It’s fun to see what they’re all lathered up about.
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Remember when tyrants fought Black Plague,
smallpox, polio, and AIDS?
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Today, we have a headline about how Obama lied when he said the War in Afghanistan had come to a conclusion. But the fact was, the U.S. role in the direct fighting was ending.
Which was good.
In 2014, only 68 Americans had been killed – perhaps you could say, 68 too many. In 2015, our losses fell to 26, and only 14 in Obama’s final year in office.
The toll remained low with Trump in office: 17 dead in 2017, 19 in 2018, 26 in 2019, and then 11 in 2020.
So far this year: 0.
The war wasn’t over for the Afghan people, but it was turning
in a better direction. Then Trump decided we should pull all our troops out.
Joe Biden interrupted his plans, but followed them in spirit, and virtually all
U.S. troops will be out of the country by the end of this month.
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Schmitt was fanning fear himself.
CDC NOTES that on August 10, another 664 Americans died from COVID-19, and total cases exploded. The country logged 132,000 new infections, the highest since January 30.
Strangely enough, Fox is not running stories about how Trump lied and said the virus was going away.
Rather, Fox was quoting Missouri GOP Attorney General Eric Schmitt who
was mad because Democrats used “fear” to get Americans to take their shots and
stop dying by the hundreds every day. No one at Fox noticed that Schmitt was
fanning fear himself, warning that this push for vaccinations was what
tyrants do.
“Yeah, if someone says that using fear is good, that is what every tyrant in the history of the world, and every dictator in the history of the world, has ever said to accumulate, aggregate, and maintain power,” Schmitt told reporters. “This is America – the freest country in the history of the world – and I don’t think that we should be allowing individual politicians who want to grab power and never let go of it gain it in the first place.”
No vaccine mandates for Schmitt!
No tyranny either.
As a former history teacher, I am scratching my head. I am trying to remember a time in history when a tyrant seized power by fighting, for example, the Black Plague. Or smallpox. Or polio. Or measles, mumps, and AIDS.
Since idiots like Schmitt keep howling about all these tyrannical plans, and scaring people into avoiding shots that would save their lives, it’s worth noting that two decades of war in Afghanistan cost roughly 2,300 American lives. By comparison, the U.S. lost more people to COVID-19 than that in just the last seven days.
Somebody should let AG Schmitt know.
POSTSCRIPT: I don’t know what to say about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan – and the incredible collapse, so far, of Afghan government forces. I do know the Pentagon estimates that the United States spent $824.9 billion fighting the War in Afghanistan.
If you like math, you can divide that figure by the population of the country (an estimated 38.04 million). We could have given every Afghan $216,850.68 if they agreed to stop the fight.
That would include babies.
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