Wow, big news, our boys in Afghanistan are buying drugs. Why, you know, they may even be USING THEM.

No shit. Why else would they buy them? Besides having first-class opium available cheap, Afghani pot is pretty famous too, not to mention the hashish the locals make up. They get naked except for shoes and run through the ripe female plants wearing leather aprons. The goo from the pot plants gets all over the aprons and then they scrape it off, mix it with male pollen to give it body, form it into little cakes and sell it to buy baby new shoes.

Just like Vietnam. Exact same deal, same situation, the only real difference is this time the generals are watching their asses more closely, no more inflated body counts or wiping out whole villages. They can’t get away with making necklaces out of ears anymore, or throwing enemy combatants out of helicopters. (You take 3 of them, go way up, throw out the first two without a word, then grab the third one and say “Talk or out you go”. The guy tells all he knows, then they throw him out.

But no more. All that good fun has come to an end.  At least they can get high on patrol and in between sorties, so what the hell, war isn’t all bad. Right?

What did people expect? I mean really. You send a bunch of young, party-age guys into a backwards country where the primary industry is growing drugs, and subject them to intense and unrelenting stress, and of course they’re going to use drugs. After all, liquor is sorely limited and the strongest thing most of them can get is usually beer if they’re lucky, and they have to keep that hidden because it’s a Muslim country and alcohol is forbidden.

When the Vietnam War that Nixon declared to be officially an “Era” (God, what an ass) because it had never been officially declared a war, finally ended and what was left of our boys came home, we suddenly had a whole bunch of really shell-shocked heroin addicts roaming the streets. These guys went and lived in the woods or formed militias in remote areas, or went berserk, got locked up in looney bins and never got out, or just generally fucked up our society because we’d fucked them up so bad.

SO! Guess what treat America is in for when Johnny comes marching home? It’s gonna be another Yogi Berra moment, deja vu all over again.

I read this yesterday but just shook my head and went on to other news, but there it is, not just still there but growing, even. Democrat Senator Harry Reid says that old people love junk mail.

WHAAAAT?

Oh sure, just like everyone else does. We all just love sorting through the worthless crap that fills our mailboxes just to pick out the bills and the rare note from a friend, or maybe that check we’ve been waiting for forever.

At what age do we suddenly start loving worthless mail, pleas for money for starving African kids or starving South American kids or starving dogs, money for this religious cause or that Leftwing cause or that Rightwing cause. Reasons why you should buy gold from this outfit and sell your “junk” gold at a huge loss to this other outfit.

Yeah, we all just love it. No age discrimination against junk mail, we all feel pretty much the same about it.

“And when talking about seniors, seniors love getting junk mail. It’s sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they’re part of the real world.”

In fact, 1000′s of Post Offices are due to close because of the lack of mail being sent. The Postal Service just isn’t selling enough stamps anymore to pay to keep them open, because the Internet and email have taken over so much of the services the Post Office used to provide, and at no cost for stamps.

Even so, we do need our rural post offices. Young working people can drive into a larger town to get packages and mail but our oldest citizens may not be able to drive any longer and rely on their postal carrier to bring mail to their homes.

All that is going to end for millions of rural postal customers soon unless Congress decides to underwrite the cost of running our Postal Service.  Considering all the Govt. agency scandals that have been hitting the news, blowing big wads of money, diverting some of that waste to saving our postal system seems like a damn good plan. So for that I give Reid a round of applause. It happens that junk mail brings in more money than regular mail. That he claims that old people love junk mail and that is why we should save our postal system, is really nuts, but you know, in this case, whatever works is fine with me. Just don’t ask me to vote for someone as looney tunes as that.