Thank God For Small Favors

I’m not a military or foreign policy maker for the US government, thank God. If I was, I would have to wrestle with such vexing questions as to whether we should “degrade” the Taliban and “eviscerate” Al-Qaeda, or whether we should do the opposite, eviscerate the Taliban and merely degrade Al-Qaeda. I would have to determine if this was an effective strategy, or if it actually brought both groups together into a “witches’ brew” of forces who shared money, material and bomb making expertise. I would have to wonder aloud with my colleagues if launching drones strikes on Pakistan was a “force multiplier” that caused blowback against the US, or if it was, in fact, successfully degrading the witches’ brew of enemies so deviously arrayed against us — assuming, of course, that there was a witches’ brew and that we’d settled on merely degrading and not eviscerating it. On the other hand, if we had wanted to eviscerate and not merely degrade it, then we would have to … nevermind.

(These are the kind of problems we spend billions of dollars trying to solve, while at the same time Obama’s witches’ brew of former hedge fund managers and Goldman Sachs officials, i.e., economic advisors, keeps informing us that unemployment is going to remain unacceptably high. It’s a damn shame, but there’s nothing we can do. We all just have to hunker down and wait for that invisible hand to work its beautiful magic.)

Luckily, I don’t have to deal with such bewildering conundrums. I only have one simple problem to worry about, how to pay the rent. Thank God for small favors!