A nice country…….

If I had time to see it. Problem is all of my trips to Korea are for work. Long hours type of work. And I don’t have an international drivers license so they won’t let me rent a car. So, so far all I have seen of Korea is Seoul and some of the better bars of Songtan. And even that last part will stop Monday-which means some light blogging ahead.

Eat, suck down a couple of beers, sleep and then get up and do it all over again. That’s my life for this coming week. I kind of feel like Gar on his taxi ride:

I had an interesting ride home last night with my wife. We jumped in an AAFES taxi, her in the back, and I in the front. Usually the wife lets me do the talking so I can practice my hangul. I gave directions, but I admit, I wasn’t in the mood to really think about what I was saying… I was a little buzzed and used minimum words. The AAFES taxi driver goes into a speal about how most of the foreigners she’s met don’t speak any Korean, nor even try. She continues with how she doesn’t understand why foreigners who live here haven’t learned proper Korean, blah blah blah. Finally I asked my wife to tell this lady that, contrary to popular thinking, most foreigners never even think about Korea, can’t find it on a map, and certainly don’t study the language in elementary school. She asked why not? I replied “it would make much more sense to learn Chinese, Spanish, or Japanese than to learn Korean.” She asked why I thought that was so. I told her “because Korea is only a tiny country on the world stage, and not the center of the universe like some of you think it is.” I gave her a handsome tip before I got out of the car and then suggested she keep studying her english, particularly if she wanted to work for AAFES driving foreigners around. She never spoke a word of english during the ride.

I can relate.

Weather today was terrible. Rain, fog, and just kind of a blah day. It was a short day, but I just could not get motivated. Spent a lot of time watching the TV news.

Which all together made very little sense.

In the US the House of Representatives votes a nonsense funding bill of supplemental budget money to pay for Iraq war. However, to get passage of the bill, the Democratic majority had to buy off reluctant members (you know those who actually care about what the US does and about the personnel serving in uniform) with what we Americans affectionately call “pork”. A few million here and there for stupid stuff-like Peanut Farmers. What that has to do with the war in Iraq is beyond me.

Even crazier, to my opinion, is how the Democratic leadership can think the American people will not notice how this happened. Or how the bill is DOA when it arrives in the Senate, because Sen Quisling Liebermann will hold the Senate hostage by not voting with his own party. Nancy Pelosi believes that Americans don’t pay attention and are therefore stupid. They are not, and they had no intention for the debate to get this silly. They just want the damn war over with, but at the same time they do not -repeat that- want financial restrictions placed on the Soldiers fighting.

Not the President believes that the people are stupid too, he for a different reason. See George W. Bush wants people to believe that the war is not taking money from other parts of the budget, or that federal budget is not growing obscenely because of the war. So instead of acknowledging that the US will be fighting in Iraq for a generation many more years and building all of the expenses into his annual budget, his administration resorts to the subterfuge of submitting a bill asking for supplemental money-“to pay for the cost of war”. Except it just does not pay for the wars direct costs. If you look deep into it, you will find that aircraft purchases are in the bill and a few other things, like 13.9 billion for force reconstitution. Read that as procurement. Now IMHO that should be in the DOD annual budget. John McCain used to agree with me.

And when he wants to condemn the Congress, George W Bush decides to use his favorite props-American Military people, instead of just calling a spade a spade. So who is guilty of political theater? Both sides are.

There’s a lot more to say about that, but I just don’t have the energy. What I need, would be wearing makeup, some perfume, a short skirt and boots and a tight fitting sweater. She would be handing me a beer as she drapes her arm over my shoulder. Don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Sigh……..

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