No answers in MidEast, so why blame Obama?

Did you see that Dick Cheney, the rusting Tin Woodsman of the Republican Party, ambled back up to Capitol Hill to advise others in his class on how to handle the ISIS problem.  According to the New York Times, his remedy could be reduced to a handful of words:  Embrace a strong military and reject rising isolationism.

But wait.  The Times report also noted that he didn't embrace specifics.  Smart evasion.  For one thing, nobody - not the president, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's allies in Europe, John McCain, Dick Cheney,the highbrow pundits, the fly on the wall know how to resolve this crisis without a lot more people (see Bush Iraq) getting hurt or killed.

It remains a challenge to political historians, however,to explain how the Republican Party can listen to this world class loser's hollow rambling. At the outset of the Iraq invasion, Cheney did tell us that the war wouldn't last more than a few weeks. How desperate must the GOP be to continue to kneel at his altar.

Obama critics do, however, have the luxury of using it as one more assault on the president before they leave for lunch. Let me know if I've missed something.

In his deadpan column,  McCain, called for the U.S. to embed additional American forces on the ground with our allies.  But he also writes:

"It is a truism, to say there is no military solution to ISIS",  ignoring another thought that told us "We need a military plan to defeat ISIS,  wherever it us." ..And then: "Still, we must face facts: A comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS  would require more troops. assets, resources and time."

As a college freshman history student I filled all 16 pages of an essay exam and  the exam came back with an F.   I told the prof that I had filled all of the pages. " I know,"  he said. "so you wrote everything that you could.  "The  answers may have been in there somewhere but you didn't  know what they were".  He was absolutely right!

Oh, for the luxury of being John McCain.  (We'll never forgive him for accepting Sarah Palin as his veep candidate.  Nor his buddy, Dick Cheney, for being a driving force in leading Dubya  into an Iraq invasion.

In the current global darkness there are no fail-safe answers. Not even close.   Which leads me to the famous response by Bertrand Russell, when he was asked to explain the universe.

"The universe is just there, and that's all."