A Nod To The Gods

Lindsey Graham went on Face the Nation and blathered on about his intellectual superiority to anything Trump. He was condescending and dismissive of Trumps plans and inauguration speech.

He continues to be clueless about why Trump won and thinks that he and his RINO buddies can just gain the trust of the American people and all will be well. Sorry to break it to you squeaky but you have had since 2010 to gain our trust and all you did was give Obama whatever he wanted.

You and your feckless partners had your chance and you failed miserably. It’s Trumps turn, try and act like a supporter or switch parties, we are having a hard time figuring out whose side you are on.

Graham urged Mr. Trump not to summarily cut foreign aid, saying it’s more effective in combating terrorism than using weapons and warfare.

“You want to destroy radical Islam, Mr. President, you will never do it by taking soft power off the table,” he said. “You cannot kill enough terrorists, you cannot drop enough bombs …  building a small schoolhouse for a poor young girl in Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq will do more damage to radical Islam than any bomb you could drop.”   here….

Once again, Bush, Obama, and Hillary tried that, with Graham and McCains blessing;

Looking at the botched projects collectively — rather than as one-off headlines — reveals a grim picture of the overall reconstruction effort and a repeated cycle of mistakes.

• In just six years, the IG has tallied at least $17 billion in questionable spending. This includes $3.6 billion in outright waste, projects teetering on the brink of waste, or projects that can’t — or won’t — be sustained by the Afghans, as well as an additional $13.5 billion that the average taxpayer might easily judge to be waste. Exhibit A for “You be the judge”: $8.4 billion was spent on counter-narcotics programs that were so ineffective that Afghanistan has produced record levels of heroin — more than it did before the war started.
• Often the programs’ ambitions were out of whack with the reality of life in Afghanistan. After the invasion, the US rushed forward with bold plans to create a democratic, fiscally secure, ethical government and society — out of whole cloth. It was the same country-building bravado that had earlier tripped up the US in Iraq when it dismissed the local culture and ignored corruption.
• “Pie in the sky” projects, as one USAID worker called them, were routinely launched without any thought to the financial and technological ability of the Afghans to maintain them. It turned out that the Afghans couldn’t afford most of them, so even the best programs could end up becoming waste.
• None of the programs were required to prove they had even limited success. Officials tracked dollars spent, not impact. For instance, no one evaluated whether Afghan security forces actually learned to read and write after going through a $200 million literacy program.
• Those who signed off on the failed projects appeared to suffer no consequences. As head of SIGAR John Sopko puts it: Reconstruction efforts are “like a child sports game where everyone gets a trophy.   Here….

Yep, that “soft power” worked well didn’t it.

Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way Lindsey, Americans are tired of your shit.