Beau Elliot
So welcome to the week before Thanksgiving, long known around campus as the week you can finally exhale. Go ahead; give it a shot. (Well, give it a try, not a shot. We’re not advocating open carry here, unless you mean open carrying of groceries.)
Well, OK, perhaps exhaling week is only long-known by me. I’ve discovered that so many things in this life (as opposed to some other, parallel life) are only long-known by me. These would include, but not limited to, you may never hyphenate “ly” adverbs and storing your shoes with the right on the left and vice versa will bring you good fortune.
I’m still waiting on the returns on that second one, but someday, that ship will come in. How, exactly, is not clear, given that Iowa no longer has a coastline. But if global climate change and the rising seas continue, who knows? Welcome, Burlington on the Gulf.
What do you mean Iowa no longer has a coastline? you ask. Iowa’s in the smack-dab middle of the smack-dab continent.
Well, true now, but Iowa (which was not known as Iowa then because there were no human languages yet — hard to imagine but true) once did have a coastline. That’s why Art Building West is built, partially, over a limestone quarry. You get limestone from ancient seabeds. So those art students who believe the Art School is at sea aren’t totally wrong, just a little late (250 million years or so late).
Kind of like Republicans.
Not to imply that the GOPers are 250 million years late, because not even they could pull that off. But they are certainly not above using a horrific tragedy for political gain.
Take Erick Erickson, a Republican pundit, and his take on the Parisian attacks and the French response, which was to bomb the hell out of ISIS positions in Syria:
“Dear President Obama, today France is leading from the front to contain what you couldn’t contain leading from behind.”
Or then there’s Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal contending that President Obama has a “deep-seated aversion to using military force.”
“If not after Paris, when?” Kraushaar asks.
Um, how about for the last 15 months or so?
Yes, for around the last 15 months, approximately, U.S. air strikes under the Obama administration have pounded ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria. U.S. and allied (including the French) air strikes have aided the Kurds in Iraq to push back against ISIS incursions and retake territory.
In fact, according to the Pentagon, the United States has carried out 6,353 such air strikes in the last 15 months. The U.S. allies have carried out 1,772.
That, in Republican eyes, seems to be “deep-seated aversion to using military force.” It makes one wonder what unbridled military force would look like. Hiroshima?
Of course, it takes Ann Coulter, the genius of conservative yackety-yak, to sum it up concisely: The attacks on Paris will make Donald Trump the next U.S. president.
Kind of makes you long for the days when Iowa had a coastline, doesn’t it?