Time to Think

  Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't    #186 By Hank Silverberg  Much is being written and said this week about Afghanistan. There have been horror stories about the chaotic evacuation of Americans and Afghanis who have worked for the United States over the last 20 years. We have lost another 13 Marines and sailors, young people who are often the best of our future.  It is a bad situation. I am irked by the blame game that is playing out with politicians in Washington and the right-wing media everywhere. So I will put this to the critics in simple terms that even the uneducated and misinformed can understand.  Kabul Airport, Aug 17  (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Taylor Crul) Put yourself in the Oval Office. You are President of the United States and you have inherited a 20-year-old war that has failed to bring peace to a region that never seems to have it. Your predecessor (Donald Trump) has made an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U...

Those Who Forget The Past                                #185 By Hank Silverberg  My blog is a bit late this week, and I apologize for that. After 185 weeks of commentary and thoughts, I missed a deadline.  But maybe that's a good thing. I have been a bit angry about an experience I had in a local antique store last week, and I needed a bit of time to calm down before writing about it.    (One of my display cases) My hobby is collecting political campaign items like buttons, pins, posters and such. I have done it since high school and have a modest collection of seven display cases in my home office. Many of them I collected from various campaigns or events I covered as a reporter. Some of them were gifts from friends and family, and one I actually got off the late Congressman Mo Udall's lapel. He gave it to me on a campaign stop in Connecticut back in 1976 when he had a brief run for the...

  End Of A   Quagmire                                                #184 By Hank Silverberg  There is an eerie sight and sound to what is going on in Afghanistan this week. It's like a flashback to 1975, to a place that used to be called Saigon, and a country called South Vietnam that no longer exists. The United States had fought a long bloody war there to prop up a failed and corrupt government and had pulled out most troops two years earlier. After more than a decade of  military campaigns (between 1961 and 1973) and the deaths of more  than 58,200 American military personnel, we just left. The South Vietnam government fell quickly, and we simply turned our backs and tried to forget about that war. More horrifically, we also tended to forget about the American men and women who came home with physical and emotion scars.   The situ...

Double Standard                        #183 By Hank Silverberg Nothing disgusts me more than people in power, through politics or celebrity, who abuse that power. I'm not talking about political corruption or financial malfeasance. That's the subject for another day.  I'm talking about sexual harassments or assault. The list over the years is long. Trump, Frankin, Kavanaugh, Gaetz, and now Andrew Cuomo.    NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women, Attorney General James says (cnbc.com)   The Governor of New York is in his third term and like most New York governor's, he has used his power often to ramrod through legislation and state policy. He became highly visible nationwide during the pandemic and received generally good marks for how he handled it. But beneath the surface there was a dark side, which some in Albany probably knew about long before it came to national attention....

Community                                                #182 By Hank Silverberg There was some hope when Joe Biden took office that the division in the United States which plagued the Trump era might subside a bit. That the community debates and national politics that had consumed many of us for five years would tone down and we could get back to philosophical arguments about baseball or religion or health care.  But it hasn't happened. Trump still lingers in the background and his minions cling to the ridiculous concepts of rigged elections, cancel culture and anti-science.   Nowhere is that more clear than over the resistance of many people towards taking the Covid-19 vaccine.  All the infectious disease scientists and most other medical experts says the vaccines available are safe and effective. And now, with the mutated Delta variant...

  The Plague By Hank Silverberg There's a popular meme going around the internet this week. I am not sure who created it, but it's easy to understand where the message is aimed. All of the people out there who have refused to get the Covid-19 vaccine or follow the mask instructions are guilty of involuntary manslaughter. You are killing people. Okay, now you're asking, "What kind of a self- righteous  SOB is this guy for trying to tell me how to live my life?"   Sorry, but I have consistently said that anyone who won't take these necessary steps, a mask and a vaccine, is irresponsible. You are not a model citizen, nor are you patriotic. You are refusing to  fight America's biggest enemy right now--a microscopic virus that still threatens us all.  Please don't start sending me all those internet stories you have found about side effects or freedom of choice, or unconstitutional mandates or any other idiotic opinion minus facts, that you can find. I have...