I have to give a great, gargantuan, big round of applause — not fire or firing — to the commander in chief, and for once finishing what he had started a few months ago.
Let’s hope we can check this off, for once and for all, in that rare, promises kept box. The apparent “grand slam” coming almost to the day of the start of the playoffs for baseball’s World Series.
The war between Israel and Hamas has been declared to be over. All hostages were said to be soon on their way home. That was quickly amended to happening on Monday, and before that a ceasefire.
— Moving a tad north, (bass tab?), longtime area musician Phil Kitze and his band The Resonators are holding a CD release party at Big Guys BBQ Roadhouse between Hudson and Houlton on Friday evening, Oct. 10. Resonators, is that like The Regulator, a bass-driven-voiced song by the hard rock group Clutch, that is replicated by singing in the Firewater Gospel Choir. Their recent performances, toned down sound, drew rave reviews.
And now in the here and now, we have college football game day. And more important here, the NFL. Why?
Two accompaniment specials to make note of. At The Wild Badger in New Richmond, buckets of five beers and also drinks and such, going for $15 to $25, depending on the variety. And going crosstown to Ras on Main in Hammond, two-for-ones every time the Packers or Vikes score a touchdown, plus halftime prizes. If they are playing each other, and the final is like 45-40, look out. Count on the Vikings to get shutout and save the sobriety day!
On this day there is a major art crawl in Hudson, plus great weather for the semi-annual Frost Your Nuts motorcycle run. So they are melting. Also, the streets of Hudson are ablaze with cool traffic and also cranked tunes galore. And the bikers accommodated those on the crawl by making it a point to stop for pedestrians. “It’s the law,” one was overheard saying to the one kitty-corner behind him. —
Fantastic and other platitudes, have said I and most all others about the truce news. Trump is being given, and accepting, plenty of praise for brokering the deal and concerning the number of countries coming together to advance safety in the region and in most if not all of their countries, it’s said to be a feat that took some fancy footwork, and also said to need some details hammered out.
Said. Not signed. Qualifiers here. Let’s not move too fast with the peace announcement. I’m not sayin’ I’m just saying.
Remember, the plan that Trump helped forge has 20 phases, and there is only one of those that had been implemented at the end of the first day and night, and maybe that component was still sliding in. Trump and several other world leaders, proclaiming peace, were given the credit, so great credit goes to them. Like my grade school teacher/coach would always say about such people, “more power to you.”
Or a college prof, who said that the definition of power is the ability to get things done, and politics is the wielding of power. Like negotiating a truce amongst many parties, some aligned and others throwing in scores of agendas that vary based on political need. It’s not always as quick and easy as the even more unlikely, Christmas Truce one-day alleviation, by the stellar Swedish anti-war band Sabaton. That was in a hate-filled world war, and hey, we could have seen another one coming these days, and the eve-of-Christ’s-birth-break done in the fighting in the first one was just as improbable.
For those losing out, in part, in this compromise, I invoke The Bullet Boys and their song, “Smooth up in ya.” (So made as palatable as possible, but this phrase encapsulates that the whole new deal still has question marks in its final follow-through and workability.) The song from the boys is back from close to the Reagan Era. Can we break you? “We won’t know until we try …”
But we won’t Take It Easy over such issues. Is the here-and-now end-of-war scenario, in older musical terms, to throw caution to the winds, Hell Bent for Leather, so Open Up I’m Climbing In?
So plunge into Where Eagles Dare.
To make this plan fly, like an eagle, to the Red (Sea), I’d offer this bold concession: Allow Hamas a seat or two at the governance table, sitting a distance behind the local technocrats that will be the ones mainly making the decisions. (Some of this could work out to carve up many parts when you Head East from the Meditteranian Sea, over to the Red Sea. Somewhat like they did with Germany after the world wars. Parts is parts in this high stakes game of chicken.)
This by way of my suggestion, would be my vital and final — do you believe it? — caveat: Their role would be strictly advisory, and perhaps to fill in anyone’s blankness of information or circumstance coming from their perspectives, when they have merit. So we don’t have all this war shit with them happen again. Blessed are the peacemakers, Trump says, as suddenly religion is at his forefront.
But now everyone has come together, with many platitudes, over Trump — so give him praise as the man knows how to use his sheer brute-based force, primarily, as negotiation to create a deal, as that is his art, very useful in power global politics — but this blowout of a game might still have an overtime.
Got the ball to the 43 yard line, and the ref places the football wrong for the next Snap? (Then he’s at some point overruled by the head official, like many of our appeals courts. Wrong 43 yard line? Canadian football fields can complicate measuring matters. So further court review. Right vs. left.)
The treaty calls for a geographic line to be placed over which withdrawn DEI troops will not cross — unlike jumping the war bunker and then charging into a barrage of bullets — but just where will that line be placed, in order to avoid the ease of any actor returning to warlike engagement? How far back is push-back?
What are further barriers to the treaty over which politicians will battle?
As far as the previous paragraph to the one before paragraph before that, (and it seems the treaty language is just as complicated), is there a firm guarantee Israel will now fully withdraw its soldiers and move far enough away? Or that Hamas will let go of the last of the hostages. They have not let go since the get go. It’s been a tremendous game of trying-not-to-get-fried chicken, with many chickens playing at once, that Trump seems to have won. Let’s hope so.
The original language of the deal was that hostages will be released “soon,” and we know what happens with Trump when things are left open-ended. Often it is a negotiating point, but … Remember when on the campaign trail, he promised he would end crucial wars such as this one on his day one in office. Don’t trust his words.
There are other points along this line that are very fine, but still exist.
Just agree to it and they will come, back to the table for further resolution. To sweat out the last minor details of the deal. That appears to still be the approach.
(The flip side)
The shutdown shows that everyone only looks out for their own. Ask the wife of a military servicesman who was rebuffed by Speaker Mike Johnson over a public request to reinstate pay that she said could take the lives of her young children.
So Trump will get no accolades here for his use of the stoppage. Just bite the bullet and come back into session, he says, and then we will work it out with the Democrats. Do you trust this, the way the man lies? Just like the situation where federal employees who have been furloughed, or worse yet ordered to work without pay, have been assured they will get the due back pay. To me that promise would have little more value than a single $1 coin with Trump’s likeness that will be minted. Maybe workers could get side jobs — or full-time? — carving Trump’s proposed and graven image on Mount Rushmore.
And when he made the great big ugly flub, one of many, when he got wrong the details of taking out bin laden and the redoubled, getting the countries wrong that — and remember this — he said he’d helped find a way to peace when they weren’t even at war, or far afield from each other, or maybe even in existence. So in total, a triple threat. The bin laden factor, concerning Biden and the GOP’s war waged about him mentally failing, when in fact Trump is flailing far worse. Maybe we should be calling him medical patient, not president.
So as far as Republicans in Congress, I’m going to double down. I in my last post referred the very tongue in cheek song by AC/DC about having Big Balls, for ballroom dancing and uhm otherwise, think midsection, and being totally Ballsy, like very many in the GOP, the further up the line, the more absurd: “Some balls are held for charity/and some for fancy dress …” Maybe Trump would host some of those balls, in his great big beautiful White House ballroom under construction. Better get that Biden infrastructure funding fast, while it’s still available.