Stosselpoopery

Stosselpoopery as in nincompoopery.

What ever happened to John Stossel?  I hadn't heard about him for years since enjoying his segments on a TV program called 20/20.

A link posted in a forum took me to a blog he has over on Fox Business.  From ABC to Fox.  Quite a fall.   Drugs?   Alcohol?  Depression?  Loss of motivation?   We may never know.    And that blog confirms it:  the clever and insightful John Stossel is no more.  He has joined the brain-dead at Fox.  The Zombie Network.

Here's the blog post I'm talking about:  http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2011/04/25/where-did-all-anti-war-protestors-go   

It never occurs to Stossel that those who protested over Afghanistan or Iraq trust Obama more than Bush to bring those occupations to an early conclusion.   But there's more than that to what Stossel terms "the anti-war movement."

For me, I opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and of Iraq from the outset, especiually the Iraq invasion.   Why?   Was I "anti-war"?   Not really.  What I was was "anti-roll-over-and-play-fetch,"  which was the role the Bush administration and overwhelming political correctness tried to force Americans into back in 2002-2003.  We were to be the good doggies, and Cheney-Bush the ones who had us on a leash.

Ever had a tenacious salesman in your living room, one who simply would not leave until you signed his contract?  A really, really, hard sell?  And what does that tell you about the product the salesman is selling?   That was the Bush-Cheney administration before invading Iraq.   Quite obvious at the time that there was something wrong with what they were pushing, or else they would not have been pushing so hard.  Obvious that we were being conned by all the scare tactics relating to 9/11 and al Quaeda.

And most everybody went along, almost all the "liberal media," Oprah Winfrey who basically talked down someone who wanted to oppose the Iraq invasion on her TV show, even in the senate and house.  To oppose invading Iraq was to be ... unAmerican.  Only a handful of well-known people dared speak up.   The story of the emperor's new clothes updated to 2003.

So, I was anti-invasion, not anti-war.   I was anti-occupation later, because the occupation was so horribly mismanaged in the early years, politicized, with positions parceled out to the party faithful on the basis of their support, not on the basis of ability.  

At the same time, I did not favor full military withdrawal.  I mean, if you bomb a nation back to 1850, do you just go away and leave them to rebuild by themselves?  Don't you have a duty to stay and lend a hand?

The Chinese say that if you save someone's life, then you are responsible for them.   I  say that if you destroy someone's house and kill members of their family, and discover it all was a mistake, then you have a heavy burden of responsibility and that you can't turn your back and go home and forget about it.

Back to Stossel.  He does not see the nuances in opposition to Bushgressions and Cheneycasualties.  He struggles to string together words to throw like scraps of raw meat to ravening Fox-readers.  RIP John Stossel.