"To Hell With Ukraine"
By Fred Reed
"Great. Just ever-lovin’pea-pickin’ great. In LA some sixty thousand people–who really knows?–sleep on the sidewalks, in tents, cardboard boxes, sleeping bags, or not much of anything. Others live in their cars. The same in San Fran, Seattle, St. Louis. There being no bathrooms,they defecate as the urge hits, and where. What choice do they have? Some are junkies, others crazy, many just with no jobs or jobs that don’t pay enough for a room.
Meanwhile Biden sends billions to Ukraine, lots of billions, our billions, while America crumbles within. A corrupt, senescent, second-rate lawyer mysteriously empowered to bankrupt his own country to benefit a corrupt, dirtball country of no importance to America. How is this possible? Why do Americans tolerate it? Because they have no choice. Americans have no influence over their government except in things that do not matter to that government.
Recently my stepdaughter Natalia, Mexican, went to Austin to visit friends. She returned and pronounced America a truly weird country. All the houses were the same, so how could you find your way home at night? And there were lots of people, she said, living under bridges and on the sidewalks. This she thought strange. She had never seen such a thing in Mexico. In twenty years, neither have I.
Meanwhile Biden sends fortunes to Ukraine. How is this? Couldn’t we have an American President? Just once? Someone who cares about people in his own country? No prospect of this is in sight.
In America there are people, lots of them, who don´t have enough to eat, or barely do. Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the rural Deep South. I wonder whether Biden has enough to eat. I wonder whether he cares that many of his citizens do not. No, come to think of it, I don’t wonder. But he cares, cares deeply, about Ukraine.
America crumbles, but Biden is going to rebuild Ukraine. Our trains look like something out of Turner Classic Movies. The passenger versions, across the continent, are nice, slow but appealing as period pieces. Chattanooga Choochoo, all that. They are also primitive and badly maintained. We have had four freight derailments in a month or so.
No, make that five. This morning we read of another, in Arizona. This is Third World, pushing Fourth. But Biden is going to do what it takes, for as long as it takes. For Ukraine.
I sometimes wonder whether Biden knows his own country, or anybody’s country. There is no evidence that he does. He wasn’t in the military, didn’t spend time hitchhiking through West Virginia, doesn’t know the blast of big rig wind standing beside the highways of the Far West. He has never worked for a living, probably doesn’t know anyone who has. A political hack and second-rate lawyer , finishing seventy-sixth in a class of eighty-five in a mediocre law school after bing caught cheating. But he will send as much of our money as it takes to Ukraine. Are you grateful yet?
The water is undrinkable in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi and, I am told by my daughter who lives there, in New Orleans. What the hell kind of country allows this? Answer: A bushworld country, or one whose government is more interested in Ukraine than in its own people.
But, if I may, another word on trains. My wife and I were in China several years back, and rode their high-speed trains (180 miles per hour). They are startling, smooth, quiet, gorgeous. China has 24,000 miles of them. Their high-temperature superconducting maglev version, with carbon- composite body, at 360 miles per hour, is in late-stage development. America has not a nanometer, not an angstrom, of either. Coming back from Chengdu was like returning from a scifi movie.
But Biden sends billions to Ukraine, a little, little man eating prime rib in the White House while a couple of hundred thousand die for him in Ukraine. Anything for Ukraine. Anything at all.
Americans do not go to doctors because they cannot pay the bills. Unlike countries of the First World, America does not have decent national medical care. Do you suppose that Biden lacks medical care while he sends money, desperately needed by America, to Ukraine?
China – if I may again say that horrid word – has a for-profit economy. China spends its money on China. America spends its money on Ukraine. Go look at China. You will see highways going in, four-lane tunnels running twelve miles under mountains, brightly lighted. Airports, astonishing bridges. Phenomenal high-tension electrical lines. If you are interested in such things, China has a massive Five G installed base and, now, from Huawei, Five five G.
Biden has just signed an $886 billion military bill. Add the VA, black programs of god-knows what size, and DOE, and you get well over a trillion. Most Americans, I read over and over, live maxed out on credit cards, don’t have five hundred dollars for an emergency. Biden, a draft-dodger during Vietnam and now a warrior President, probably is not maxed out on Visa. He probably has five hundred dollars, as his people do not. But he is not ignoring them. He is buying them aircraft carriers at thirteen billion per, and sending their money to Ukraine. Which do you need more, affordable dental care or an aircraft carrier?
Crime in America is at appalling levels. Tourists from normal countries must view visits as trips to a zoo. Education is abysmal and getting worse fast under Biden. Potholes come, bridges age, infrastructure rots. But Ukraine gets lots and lots of stuff free.
And now the banks collapse because of, well, backbreaking military giveaways to Lockheed-Martin, backbreaking national debt, backbreaking trade deficits, and unending wars. Now Ukraine demands fighter planes.
So let us thank the gods that we live in a democracy where the will of the people rules. Don’t ride the trains, drink the water, or need a doctor, and keep a comfortable pad handy because sidewalks are hard and get cold in winter. But we can be sure that Biden will send as much of our money to Ukraine as that dismal, trivial country wants. Are you grateful?"
No comments:
Post a Comment