The VA scandal in which veterans had to wait months before seeing a doctor, even when in critical condition, was finally, after many years, brought to the public consciousness by whistleblowers telling of veterans dying because of cooked books. How did the books stay cooked all these years? They stayed cooked because the arithmetic always added up. Until now. The arithmetic finally did them in. You can beat time, but you can’t beat arithmetic.

Quantum physics shows that time and space do not exist
The real and the illusion are the same
But somehow little numbers shake their heads and do insist
That they are real and still can play the game
Max Planck discovered Quantum and the world forever changed
What once seemed true became just ancient lore
The subatomic world revealed that all was rearranged
Except that two plus two still equaled four

I hope the Bergdahl fiasco hasn’t dimmed our outrage at these guys who put on the uniform and then betray us. Have we forgotten about Bradley Manning? Pfc Bradley Manning was convicted by a military court of stealing sensitive and secret United States government documents and giving them to Wikileaks, and thus to our enemies. He is now in prison, but has recently demanded a taxpayer paid for sex change, and the Pentagon has agreed to give him one. He is now Christine, and I have the feeling Obama felt sorry for him and was sorry the military put him in prison. After all, what’s a little treason among friends? I spoke to Manning’s former cell mate, a very disappointed Leroy Johnson, who said:

This Bergdahl thing now, it’s a hoot
I’ve seen his pic, he’s mighty cute
But what’s he done but walk away
Is that a crime, and who’s to say
But Manning now, I called him Brad
We shared a cell, it wasn’t bad
They say that opposites attract
I can attest that is a fact
We’re different in every way
I’m black, he’s white, I’m het he’s gay
Yet still we’ve shared love’s sweet delights
The still, cool morning, darkest nights
A woman born, the body male
An error that is doomed to fail
He changed his name, he’s now Christine
But I’ll remember love pristine
I’ll miss him now that he is gone
The lonely nights, the bitter dawn
It’s Bush’s fault, or Bush’s dad
They’re not to blame, Bergdahl and Brad
Both traitors yes, there is no doubt
But once you know what that’s about
It makes no sense to fill with rage
What’s done is done, let’s turn the page

Today is the seventy-second anniversary of the Battle of Midway. June 4, 1942, the Glorious Fourth of June. The Battle of Midway has lessons in it for the Obama administration in its treatment of the Battle of Benghazi, in which four Americans were killed defending American territory, the consulate in Benghazi, Libya. In a recent book titled The Shattered Sword, an account of the battle of Midway, the authors argue that the Japanese military hid the defeat from the Japanese public and denied the reasons for the sinking of the Kido Butai, the unbeaten and invincible Imperial carrier fleet, and that it was the denial that doomed the Japanese military. The Obama administration, for reasons we shall soon discover, hid the defeat from the American public by blaming it on a YouTube video no one saw, denying that a failure had ever occurred. Why did Obama hide Benghazi from the American public? What was so disastrous for the administration if the real story got out? The House of Representatives has convened a Special Committee to look into it. We don’t expect anyone in the administration to tell the truth, even under oath, but maybe we will soon know the answers, and if we do, will those answers spell the end of the Obama presidency? Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bombers took care of the Jap carriers at Midway. The only SBDs we have now are Stalinist Bastard Democrats.

The Kido Butai its fearsome name
Was heard from nevermore
And from that day the end became
A Small Boy/Fat Man war
Benghazi on the other hand
Was blazoned on our shields
And trumpeted by Barack’s band
To cities, towns and fields
As caused by an insult to God
Upon him there be peace
Whose adherents put in the sod
Brave men who saw life cease
What happened on that fateful night
Has entered into lore
And buried deep, and thus well might
Be heard from nevermore

President Obama gave the commencement speech at West Point the other day, and in a speech praising himself he told the cadets that thanks to him the world was a more peaceful place than it was when he took office, that al Qaeda has been decimated, the war in Iraq ended and the long war in Afghanistan coming to a close. Never mentioned was the Russian annexation of the Crimea, a territory belonging to another country, the Russian attempts to return the former Soviet Union’s territories to Russia, and the Chinese active military measures to dominate the entirety of the South China Sea, claiming territory belonging to the Philippines and South Korea. None of that is part of Obama’s world. Obama has constructed a world where lions and lambs lie down together, with the United States the lamb. The following is a transcript of the president’s speech to the West Point class of 2014:

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. Isiah 11:6. And I say to you that Isiah had it right.

Today the lamb dwells with the wolf
And you are now the lamb
And leopards lie down with young goats
And goats won’t give a damn
A little boy Isiah says
Will lead them all to peace
And I, the little boy he saw
Have caused all war to cease
So now the wolves, the lions, lambs
All have my peace to keep
Though lying there together little
Lambs won’t get much sleep

Obama plans on having 10,000 troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2015. If memory serves, wasn’t that the number of soldiers Xenophon wrote about? But then the Anabasis was a trip upcountry, into the interior, and getting our guys out of Afghanistan will be a trip down country to the coast, a Katabasis and maybe even a Kata-strophe.

On whose false word should we believe
The Afghans will not turn around
And shoot our guys down as they leave
And turn the roads to bloody ground
A fight for every little hill
An ambush waiting at each pass
A road bound army standing still
As tankers loaded up with gas
Are set aflame with RPGs
As choppers hunt the white robed host
Who disappear with practiced ease
The only guys who now can boast
They beat the Russians, made them run
The British too they showed the door
And now it’s us for whom the fun
Will lie in getting to the shore
Through bearded men who lie in wait
With IEDs by every road
With Russian arms to seal our fate
For tit for tat is nature’s code
Oh yes we’ll force it, mile by mile
With dozens dead for every one
Of ours who, leaden, fills the file
Of those who’ll never see the sun
The savagery will be insane
On either side no quarter shown
As bombs and shells come down like rain
Entire mountain ranges blown
To dust and rubble in the throes
Of savage fury gripped by men
Who know they’ve been betrayed by those
Who never loved them, now or then
A president who understood
That putting them where no way out
Of land locked country in time would
Lead to the trap where there was doubt
That any would survive the trip
Down country to the waiting shore
Where waited there the steel gray ship
Where they were safe forever more
Oh yes, they made it home at last
Though many lay beside the roads
But that was then and in the past
Just one of many episodes
Of criminal incompetence
And oftentimes of something worse
Still written in the present tense
As written in the ancient verse

While we were enjoying our Memorial Day weekend, other parts of the world were voting, and the results have been described as an earthquake. In India, the right wing Hindu religious party BJP won a sweeping victory over the secular Congress Party that has been in power since after World War 2. In Britain, the far right UKIP won a large share of local councils, and in France the far right National Front won 24.95% of the vote, well ahead of its Socialist rivals, and is now calling for the dissolution of the French Parliament. Socialism is dead. Or so some believe. You will pardon me for being skeptical, but haven’t we seen this Earthquake movie before?

They scream delight when counted votes
Say twenty-five percent
Is quite enough to float their boats
That’s what the voting meant
But I recall elections past
The voters cried enough
And left wing politics at last
Was thrown into the rough
As earthquakes go this wasn’t much
The culture hasn’t changed
The Euro Left still has the touch
They’ll simply rearrange
The payment schedules to the Right
No paper trail, just cash
And for a time be out of sight
And wait for the backlash
From voters used to getting free
Stuff like their dental care
And so next time they’ll all vote oui
For left wing mamma bear

Memorial Day celebrates the lives and deaths of our military, but ours are not the only soldiers we should celebrate, for there have been many other soldiers, in many other times, forming the eternal circle.

Roman
Past green trees newly leaved, new green fields on either side, we marched. Distant white farmhouses, distant dogs barking nervously, cloaks against the misty Spring rain, we marched. North Africa the rumor, Zama the town. We didn’t care. We marched. And sang. Sang because we were young, sang because we were immortal, sang because we were Scipio’s boys. Publius Cornelius Scipio. We would die, and they would call him Scipio Africanus. We marched, to the sea and the waiting ships.

 British
The long swells laid many of us low, but finally, blessedly, we reached the bay and the river. Alexandria at last. We formed up on the quay, a bit unsteadily, still weak from the seasickness. Fifers leading, we marched up King Street, past capering boys and waving and cheering men and women. Braddock was but waiting on us, it was said, before pushing off for the great western forests. FortPitt was the rumor, and that meant a long campaign for the Forty-fourth Regiment of Foot, but that was all right, we were young and immortal. The long sea voyage and the longer campaign was a hardship on the married men, but for the rest of us women were a luxury of camp. But that was all right too, for we all loved the same woman, and her name was Brown Bess. 

Hittite
In the forest clearing we made camp, fires flaring into light, the smell of bacon on the cool night air. We thought of home, and of the coming days. The Cilician Gates was the rumor, then south along the coast to Aleppo, where was waiting King Muwatalli and the rest of the army. The weather, thanks to Tarhunna the Weather God, has been fair. Crown Prince Hattusili has told us the Pharaoh Ramses has left Damascus and is marching north, that the fight, when it comes, will be a hard one, for the Mizziri are accomplished warriors. We lay on our blankets, and in the growing dark came a voice, singing softly, an army song, a song a man sings when far from home and family, a song that reminds him of why it is he fights, why it is he dies. Welling up from the darkened field, the voices of the Tuhkanti regiment joined the lone voice, singing of home. Across the fields it spread, to the other regiments, sitting in the dark by their dying fires, until the night was filled with the sadness of young men thinking of mothers and sisters, wives and sweethearts, seeing their fathers in the fields, hearing the crickets and the birds and the wind in the plaintive leaves. The coast road to Aleppo was clear, the Mizzri still far to the south. Rumor was if we hurried we would reach Kadesh before the Mizziri. The sea sounded very near at hand, and through a break in the trees we could see a beach. 

American
Curiously, the beach looked peaceful. Boats coming ashore as if on a summer outing, no machine guns, no mortars, no arty. Equipment rolling off and onto the beach, long files of men trudging up the beach to the exits, not a shot fired.  It was surreal. I found the beachmaster, and he stuck out his hand. “Welcome to Okinawa,” he grinned. Inland, clear in the distance, lay a range of hills. 

Roman
Purple hills shimmered in the heat hazy distance, the day growing hot. The muted sounds of birdsong and insect hum swirled around us. Across the field, drawn up in battle array, waited the Carthaginians. We raised our shields, and at the order, advanced.

Richard Fernandez, at the Belmont Club, wrote that in the very near future we will converse with (hear and speak) to reality itself. As it happens, I spoke to reality just the other day, and this is what he said: “I am, like you, an intelligent being, with a body to house myself, a brain to think, pellucid lenses to see, and appendages to push my body through the murk.” I agreed that pushing our bodies through the murk was the most we could hope for. 

We push our bodies through the murk
Believing we are first in line
That we alone make all things work
And disregarding every sign
That universes come and go
Pellucid lenses dim with age
Synapses gradually slow
And every book has a last page
It matters not what lawyers write
Or mountain heights the techies stride
We’re born at dawn and leave at night
Along for life, a wondrous ride

In the late 1980s I read a book called Generations, in which the authors posited that the US enters a major war when an Aggressive generation is in power, a generation that will respond to a blow with a blow. The authors argued that  generations succeed one another every 23 years or so, from Aggressive to Aggressive/Passive to Passive to Passive/Aggressive and back to Aggressive, the operating principle being that it takes two to tangle, and the other three non-aggressive generations, when in power, tend to paper over major provocations. The authors were so persuasive that I counted forward and found that an Aggressive generation should be coming into power along about 2014, and on that basis predicted we would be in a major war, probably with China, sometime before 2020. It is beginning to look as if the authors were right, but not because we were aggressive enough ourselves to react to aggression, but because we now seem to be unable to even see aggression let alone react to it.

None are so blind as will not see
The restless waters, dark’ning sky
The jagged rocks just off our lee
The monsters stirring where they lie
We pay no heed to foreign threats
No danger that we can descry
With closed shut eyes and wailed regrets
We’ll kiss our once great land goodbye

Is it possible we are misreading President Obama, that what is perceived as weakness is strength, and what is perceived as incompetence is prowess, grace and style? Is it possible the president is playing a much deeper and much more clever game than thumb suckers like us can possibly imagine? I see, in some future time, a golden tomb on the banks of the Chicago River crowded with admiring mobs, the alabaster walls adorned with the word Barack surrounded by a golden cartouche, with painted hieroglyphs praising the glorious reign of the Pharaoh.

Oh Potentate of Mars, oh sailor of the Sun
How grand thy wonders and how bright thy smile
We bow in awe at all thy works and when the day be done
We praise thee for magnificence of style
Appear thou did from out the mists in time of great travail
And calmed the great wild waters of much trial
With charm and grace and competence of mind that could not fail
And patience that would walk the extra mile
And now thy efforts come to pass and start to bearing fruit
The Middle East is Switzerland with sand
The Chinese and the Russians play sweet songs upon the lute
And all the world has come to understand
That thou art placed upon the Earth to see that Heaven’s gate
Swings wide to welcome every man and child
And standing there in snow white robes the mighty Potentate
Will see that his great works are not defiled