Size Doesn’t Matter

April 14, 2017

Are we watching a “Mine’s Bigger Than Yours” contest? A bunch of adolescent males trying to outdo one another?

First, we get the Navy tossing 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airfield. The strike destroys a bunch of buildings, kills nine people, but remarkably doesn’t touch a single runway. Our favorite master of alternate reality, Sean Spicer, shares the little-known fact that destroying runways is not a good tactic for disabling airfields.

Then, as if to say, “Oh yeah! Watch this!” our Airforce drops the biggest bomb ever (except for nukes of course, you need special permission for that – damned over-regulation) onto Afghanistan. The $16 million ($300 million to develop) GBU-43B, flattened the ground, collapsed a tunnel system and killed 36 – they think. There’s no way to verify the actual damage except for flattened ground part.

General Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said the bomb was “the right munition” to use against bunkers and tunnels. Which is a little odd, since the device ignites above ground and was not designed to penetrate hardened targets like bunkers and cave complexes.

Could it be, the General is trying to tell a bigger lie than Sean? I sure hope not, because Sean is, indeed, the master of alternate reality. He lies for a living. A military man, trained to deal with harsh reality, like Nicholson, isn’t equipped to compete in that venue with the likes of Spicer.

General Nicholson should just come clean and admit, we dropped that bomb just to see how well it worked; we’ve been hanging into it since ’04 and REALLY wanted to blow something up with it. And, it did clear any IEDs from the affected area. Though, it also cleared roads, bridges and tunnels; so ground travel in that affected area, while safer, likely won’t be possible.

Then again, maybe the Airforce just wanted show us their bombs are bigger than the Navy’s. It happens.

In the one-hundred-fifty-seven days since the start of the Trump era, the bombs and the lies just get bigger and bigger. But, the republic doesn’t care about size, so just stop it.

In Peace and Justice
osv