Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 27, 2013

Bring our troops home.

Naw, let’s continue denying reality. That will solve any problem.

Karzai deserves the Congressional Medal of Horror.

Trudeau slamming Obama? That cold front that has hit the north has apparently affected Hades as well!

“… (foreign) government support.”

Not to mention poppy farming?

The Afghan gov. is like dirty water in the bathtub, and our troops are like the plug.

Back when this whole fiasco began in Afghanistan, I wrote an article condemning the misadventure as an exercise in futility and likened it to Uncle Remus and the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby.Sadly, time and circumstances have proved me only to prescient. I wished I’d been wrong. There is no easy way for us to extricate ourselves from this Tar-Baby !

For almost two years I watched to see if Republicans would grab the big ripe fruit hanging right in front of them: end the Afghan War. A position with 70% support among Americans of both parties. They never grabbed it.

Haven’t seen one of these White House exterior strips in a very long time.

“Jews + IgnorantEnlistedKids”

Take your Nazi racist excrament elsewhere.

No, no, no… Not Afghanistan….

MEXICO.

heard that afghanistan has a culture of men and underage boys. that the practice is widespread among the dominant ethnic group. that members of karzai’s family practice it. that we had to explain to our troops about the practice. sometimes i wonder if it had better if just let the russians run afghanistan, and didn’t support the rebels.

Not for nothing do they call Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires”!

“How about a witch doctor’s mask [avatar]?”

Infinitely better: How’s about an icon of gmartin997 as a po’ shoeshine bo’ bent down but looking up with reverential eyes at U.S. Commander-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama begging to polish his Presidential shoes for a quarter — before the Secret Security hustles you off to lockup and “enhanced” interrogation?

Bring them home. I’m a Conservative Republican and this is one policy that I do not and have never supported. Afghanistan is not called the graveyard of empires for nothing. They shot at the each other until the Brits showed up and then they shot the Brits until they left. They shot at each other until the Russians showed up and then they shot at the Russians until they left. They went back to shooting at each other until we showed up and now they will keep shooting at us until we leave — then go back to shooting each other. It’s what they do. There is no help for the place.

Getting out is the only policy that makes any sense. To Hell with them.

“Corrupt, illegitimate narco-state supported by US money (in the form of both military aid and customers for the drugs)” is also a pretty good description of Colombia.

They supply one-ply where I work. It’s false economy, because users use twice the area for the same safety.

The 2 wars are coming to a close. As far as the war on drugs in the US, this is a bit complex.

A Hawaiian lei would be a great avatar for Obama.

Dr. Ron Paul has many things to say besides being against the war on drugs. He is also anti choice in the same way that all the other GOP prez candidates were in 2012, for example. The fact that Dr. Paul is agains the war on drugs is certainly not enough for me.

Quick sand, tar baby, quagmire, or a burr in a woolen mitten. The more you try to pull the burr out of your left mitten, the more it gets stuck in your right one.

“… it’s too late to stop the Taliban in Afghanistan or Pakistan."

Or in a number of other venues of the planet, such as the northern half of the whole continent of Africa.

Are drones the new “nukes”? There’s “drone proliferation”. Israel is using them against Palestinians and Iranians. We’re using them against our perceived enemies in sovereign Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here we go round on the merry-go-round: Making “friends” fast and furious by killing them! “Winning hearts and minds” by killing them!

How do we know what a target should be? Well, a “terrorist training camp” = “three guys doing jumping jacks"!

http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-drone-strikes

Or killing a whole bunch of folks at a wedding or funeral just to get one “bad guy”!

Drones are reportedly cheap and easy to make. And Iran already has one of ours (supposedly) relatively intact after it crashed on their own sovereign homeland.

How long will it take for China and Russia to wake up and start their own “terrorism from the sky” against their own perceived enemies?

Well, a “terrorist” to one nation is a “patriot” to another nation, I guess.

“What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world. The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes … is much greater than the average American appreciates.”

—General Stanley McChrystal, recently retired top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/07/us-usa-afghanistan-mcchrystal-idUSBRE90608O20130107

Is the strip not about the war on drugs?

“TERRORISM FROM THE SKY”: LEARN TWO NEW TERMS — COINED BY THE WHITE HOUSE

SIGNATURE STRIKE A strike against someone believed to be a militant whose identity isn’t necessarily known.

TADS Terror Attack Disruption Strikes, sometimes used to refer to some strikes when the identity of the target is not known.

http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-drone-strikes

We’re spending $150 B to support Afghanistan over 2 years? This can’t be in foreign aid?

MEXICO. Basic reading skills. A new idea. We are on our way out of Afg.

Have you ever missed a day?Have you ever reported a single piece of evidence?The answer to both questions is, I believe, “NO!”

Yes, the strip is about the “war on drugs”.

The “failed narco state” that costs billions could include the Drug Enforcement Agency and the prison system. The gigantic number of people incarcerated in the US at massive cost is a testament to the futility of current policies.

“… an African witch doctor’s mask as a symbol for Obama was quite novel”

for a birther, absolutely!

Yes, screw the American tax payers in New Jersey that had a little storm and send the $$$$$$$$$ to a foreign country.

I thought he was talking about the United States.

The subject has to be Afghanistan. “….corrupt, illegitimate, failed narcostate.” And besides, a narcostate is one supported by narcotics trade, not one with a compulsion to fight it.

Bring the men and women home.

Obviously, the failed narcostate is Mexico.

We have troops in many countries all over the world. this creates a mini economy for said country, sometimes 25% of their GNP. We do not charge said countries for the protection, but theire are corporations that set up operations because our military is there. If we take the troops home, those corporations lose their security. Talk about corporate welfare.If we are forced to put our military in a country we should demand payback(or tribute). In Iraq’s case 25% of their oil sales until we are paid back should work.

“… an avatar for Barack Obama…. ¶ Who wants to be the first to open that bad box?”

How about you, SkepticCal?

“No, I will pass [on suggesting a Doonesbury icon for Obama]. There are too many black holes in the Obama administration ….”

Aha! Gotcha, Skep! You just (inadvertently) suggested one: a “black hole”. Two criticisms:

(1) The “black” part is racist. A Freudian slip, perhaps.

(2) There is an intrinsic, highly negative, ambiguity that the term “black hole” connotes. (Hint: In the Russian language, it has long referred to a specific part of human anatomy.)

Artist’s depiction of a “black hole” that is purely physics.

http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2011/06/17/black-hole-eats-a-star/

Yes — REALLY!!!

I got blasted, sort of, commenting on a news article about the Syrian problem. The gist of my comment was simply to bringour troops home and prepare better homeland defences. I was called an isolationist. I feel that we were so empowered by WWII that we thought, collectively, that we must settle all the world problems. How has that worked? I don’t feel isolation is the answer. But, we can’t afford to prop up all these corrupt regimes. And, it seems we always back the corrupt ones. How do we change this?

Bloviating begets blowback.

Since almost any ikon would need to include racial content. Better to leave it out altogether. Trudeau is a bit leftist, but he’s almost always right, and uses facts to present his cases.

For Obama’s icon, a halo