Tag Archives: Aesop’s Fables

But Who Plays The Wolf?

Posted on by under Environmental Issues, guns, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

The Boy Who Cried Wolf  … from Aesop’s Fables

There once was a shepherd boy who was bored as he sat on the hillside watching the village sheep. To amuse himself he took a great breath and sang out, “Wolf! Wolf! The Wolf is chasing the sheep!”

The villagers came running up the hill to help the boy drive the wolf away. But when they arrived at the top of the hill, they found no wolf. The boy laughed at the sight of their angry faces.

“Don’t cry ‘wolf’, shepherd boy,” said the villagers, “when there’s no wolf!” They went grumbling back down the hill.

Later, the boy sang out again, “Wolf! Wolf! The wolf is chasing the sheep!” To his naughty delight, he watched the villagers run up the hill to help him drive the wolf away.

When the villagers saw no wolf they sternly said, “Save your frightened song for when there is really something wrong! Don’t cry ‘wolf’ when there is NO wolf!”

But the boy just grinned and watched them go grumbling down the hill once more.

Later, he saw a REAL wolf prowling about his flock. Alarmed, he leaped to his feet and sang out as loudly as he could, “Wolf! Wolf!”

But the villagers thought he was trying to fool them again, and so they didn’t come.

At sunset, everyone wondered why the shepherd boy hadn’t returned to the village with their sheep. They went up the hill to find the boy. They found him weeping.

“There really was a wolf here! The flock has scattered! I cried out, “Wolf!” Why didn’t you come?”

An old man tried to comfort the boy as they walked back to the village.

“We’ll help you look for the lost sheep in the morning,” he said, putting his arm around the youth, “Nobody believes a liar…even when he is telling the truth!”

We are so bombarded by lies every hour of every day told by Republicans that if, by some miracle, one of them ever tells the truth, we will discount it as just another lie.  The “Grand Old Party” has lost its integrity, its reputation, and sold its values to the highest bidder.  Collectively, they are the little shepherd boy in the fable, and the people who watch Fox “News” are the sheep, while those of us who recognize a lie when we see one are the ‘woke’ villagers who are trying to ignore the lying, cheating likes of George Santos, Matt Gaetz, Marge Greene, Lauren Boebert, Kevin McCarthy, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and all the rest, while realizing the potential for danger.  And the wolf?

Well, you see, the little shepherd boy crying wolf are the Republican politicians and media clowns who are painting Democrats as the wolf, but when the real wolf shows up, they may be surprised to find it isn’t at all who they thought.  The real ‘wolf’ is a combination of climate change, guns, racism & bigotry, wealthy corporations, technology, and a few others.  And yes, the wolf is really there, creeping ever nearer, unimpressed by the deniers and the conspiracy theorists who have laid the path, allowing him to creep forward at an even faster pace.

The Little Boy Who Cried 🐺

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, cartoons, Law and justice, Political commentary

Remember the story about the little shepherd boy who cried wolf?  You don’t?  Aw, c’mon … you’re not so old you’ve forgotten that one.  Well, the story goes that the little boy got bored while tending his master’s sheep, and I suppose to get attention, kept crying “Wolf!!!”, even though there was no wolf after him (not to mention that wolves aren’t bad guys anyway).  The townspeople all ran to his rescue, only to find there was no wolf, no threat, the kid was just bored. Then one day, a wolf really was after the kid, or more likely the sheep, and though he kept crying “Wolf!!!”, nobody came to his rescue, for they were all onto his tricks.  Thus, the wolf ate all the sheep and the little boy, mostly to get him to shut up (poor wolf had a severe case of heartburn for days after).  And the moral, according to Aesop, is “this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them”.thinking wolfSo why, you ask, do I tell you a fairy tale on this Saturday afternoon?  I wish I could remember!  I know I had a purpose … but I cannot remember it just now.  So, I shall just proceed with a few snippets and perhaps it will come back to me, eh?

The impeachment trial, for those who might not know, is in its fourth day.  Funny, the senators haven’t done a bit of work all year, but they are so eager to get this trial out of their way, supposedly so they can, as one senator claimed, “get back to doing the work of the people”.  What work???  What “people”?  They haven’t passed a piece of meaningful legislation in the Senate in over a year now!  They don’t even discuss meaningful legislation.  Oh wait … they voted to re-name a few federal buildings … that was pretty important to us all, wasn’t it?

Anyway, one Senator, Roger Wicker from Mississippi, responded to the impeachment charges that Trump had acted inappropriately, had abused the power of his office, in attempting to withhold aid to the Ukraine in exchange for personal gain …

“I do things every week that are inappropriate. So no, I’m not going to go down that road.”

Yo!  Mississippi voters … are you listening here?  Your ‘esteemed’ Senator does things that are inappropriate every week!  Now, I might make mistakes on a near-daily basis, but … ‘inappropriate’ carries a connotation of corruption, of a lack of morals, of values.  I think you Mississippians better be keeping a closer eye on ol’ Senator Wicker!

wicker

He looks a little confused, don’t you think?

Funny, but the republicans seem a mite on edge these days, don’t you think?  For example, yesterday Mike Pompeo apparently didn’t like some of the questions asked of him by NPR radio host Mary Louise Kelly.  His answers were brief non-answers, but it was what happened after the interview that is telling.  As he walked out of the room, he stopped at her desk, leaned in and silently glared at Kelly for several seconds before leaving the room.  Within a minute, an aide asked Kelly to follow her into Pompeo’s private living room at the State Department without a recorder.

She would have been wise to decline, but curiosity got the better of her, I suppose, and she went.  According to Ms. Kelly, Pompeo shouted his displeasure at being questioned about Ukraine. He used repeated expletives, according to Kelly, and asked, “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”   Either the republicans are nervous about something and on a short fuse these days, else they are trying to win brownie points by emulating their idol, King Trump.king-trump

And then there was the freshman senator from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn – a real nasty piece of work in my book.  It seems almost as if each republican picks his or her own target to vilify, and Ms. Blackburn’s target is Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman.  Vindman, you’ll remember, testified to House impeachment investigators about Trump’s July 25th phone call to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and concluded that he considered it to be inappropriate.

blackburn-2

Notice anything about the mouth … the exaggerated contortions … reminds me of???  And didn’t women stop teasing their hair in the ’70s?

Blackburn has been busily tweeting, appearing on television and social media that she considers Vindman to be vindictive and a coward.  A coward?  Excuse me, but Vindman is a combat veteran of the Iraq War. He served in Iraq from September 2004 to September 2005. In October 2004, he sustained an injury from a roadside bomb in Iraq, for which he received a Purple Heart. He was promoted to the rank of major in 2008, and to lieutenant colonel in September 2015.  That, to me, is not the career path a ‘coward’ would take.

During his Army career, Vindman earned the Ranger Tab, Combat Infantryman Badge, Expert Infantryman Badge, and Parachutist Badge, as well as four Army Commendation Medals and two Defense Meritorious Service Medals, yet Ms. Blackburn writes …

“Alexander Vindman broke the chain of command and leaked the contents of the President’s July 25th phone call to his pal, the “whistleblower.” Over a policy dispute with the President! How is that not vindictive?”

“Vindictive Vindman is the “whistleblower’s” handler.”

“Adam Schiff is hailing Alexander Vindman as an American patriot. How patriotic is it to badmouth and ridicule our great nation in front of Russia, America’s greatest enemy?”

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support any of her claims.

I think Tennesseans, like Mississippians, need to re-think their choice of people to represent them in Congress!toon-1

I still don’t remember quite where I was going with the ‘little boy who cried wolf’ story, but perhaps you guys can come up with something?  Ah well, it’s a good story anyway.  And now, I shall return you to your weekend activities!

The Little Boy Who Cried “WOLF”

Posted on by under Global Issues

Remember Aesop’s tale about the little boy who cried wolf?  A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, “Wolf! Wolf!” and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last, but nobody believed the shepherd boy, nobody came to his rescue, because he had cried “Wolf” one time too many.  This is what our politicians are doing today with the issue of terrorism.  It seems that rather than try to convince the public that they are twolfhe most knowledgeable and capable person for the job, they prefer to run on a platform of fear, blaming everyone else for the wolves, real or imagined, then saying that they and they alone have the “the plan” that will kill those mean ol’ wolves.

 

Donald Trump and others in the GOP have declared war on Islam.  Not on terrorism, but on a religion, on every Muslim in the world, all 1.6 billion Muslims, roughly 23% of the world’s population.  That would be bad enough, but stupid is as stupid does … Donald Trump actually told Anderson Cooper that “Islam hates us”.  Not radical Islamists, not Muslims, but Islam, the religion.  It is the same thing as saying Hindu hates us, or Christian hates us.  It makes no sense, and it merely points up the fact that Trump does not understand, nor has he taken the time to understand, the difference between people and their religion.  When asked by Cooper to clarify whether he was saying that all Muslims hate us, Trump replied that it is up to the media to “figure it out”.  Is this really the man people want to become the next president of the United States?  REALLY? Trump is apparently so afraid of Muslims that he has called for a ban on allowing Muslims to enter the country, has said we should murder the families of terrorists, and plans to bring back waterboarding and cryptically claims we “should go a lot further than waterboarding.”  Does he believe that terrorism is a genetic condition?

The main point I want to make is that Islam is not something to be feared.  Terrorism is an ideology, the violent results of which needs to be stopped, but Islam is a respectable religion, just as are Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism.  And even at that, I would not consider terrorism to be one of the most significant issues facing the U.S. at this time.  Radical Islamist terrorism targets primarily countries in the Middle East.  That is a fact.  That fact is well-known to those politicians running for president this year, but they seem to have an aversion to being bothered by facts and documentation, preferring instead to play on our fears.  In the fifteen years since 9/11, there have been 380 deaths from terrorist attacks in the United States.  While yes, that is 380 too many, consider this:  during that same fifteen years, there have been 406,496 gun-related deaths in the U.S.  Now which one do you think should be the higher priority of government?  Yet a large portion of our population would prefer to believe that terrorism is the bigger threat to our safety.

Even in the European Union, Islamist terrorism accounts for less than 1% of all terrorist attacks, the rest being perpetrated by Separatist, Left Wing and other terrorist groups.  Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan together account for three-quarters (75%) of the total terrorist attacks worldwide, while the west accounts for under 3% in total.  I think we can safely say that while terrorism is important, it is a growing phenomenon, it is simply not the most critical issue facing the U.S. today, and the politicians who would claim it is are, like the little shepherd boy, crying WOLF!

The danger, of course, is that eventually we all come to realize that this was merely a tactic on the part of the presidential wanna-be’s and their supporters to rally the nation around a cause, to detract our attention from the real issues, and eventually we all get tired of hearing it.  Deeply affected after the events of 11 September 2001, this nation rallied around our government, around our president (Bush), and we made the sacrifices that were asked of us.  We willingly gave up a degree of our privacy in the interest of national security.  We sacrificed the lives of our young men and women to fight two wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.  Eventually, however, we began to ask questions, such as why did we really go to war in Iraq?  How much of our privacy is it really necessary for us to sacrifice?  Where does it end?

Trump and his cohorts use the threat of terrorism as a smoke screen, perhaps because they do not have answers for the really tough questions.  It is easier to say that they will bomb ISIS, that they will get rid of the threat, and the free world will be safe once again.  Think about it.  First, how do you “bomb ISIS”?  It is not a country, not a physical place, they exist in cells throughout the Middle East and other areas.  It is impossible to bomb a terrorist cell without significant collateral damage (civilians).  Second, does it not make sense that if simply bombing were the answer, it would have already been done?  Vote for the candidate of your choice, certainly, but do so because he or she understands the real issues that face our country, not because they are promoting unhealthy fear among the citizens of our nation.  Let us not be made fools of by rushing to the little shepherd boy crying “WOLF”.

Note:  Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is the most comprehensive searchable database that I am aware of.  It requires no membership, no fees, no registration, so if you are interested in terrorism statistics, please feel free to use it:  https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/