“Kinetic military action, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” as Edwin Starr once almost sang in a different context a few short decades ago. “Finish your fi rst two wars before you start a third war” as my sainted Mother would say. You may have noticed, things that your own Mother told you have a way of sticking around in the back of the old cerebral cortex despite your best earlier efforts to ignore everything she said to you. Quoth my Mother, “You can’t have desert until you finish your vegetables.” “Make up your bed.” “Always close the kitchen drawer after you open it so you won’t spill things into it.” “Procrastination is the thief of both time and money.” “Brush your fi shy teeth.” You get the picture. It’s your Mother’s voice in the back of your head that you will hear the rest of your life until you fi nally fi nd out what’s behind the light at the end of the tunnel. “Finish what you started before starting something new.” She would not be pleased with our third Muslim war.

I watched President Obi’s recent address to the nation explaining why we needed to make like Pat Boone and use the friendly persuasion of A-10 Warthog attack planes to nuance Moammar el Gaddaffy Duck out of Libya. I kept hoping President Obi would convince me we should be bombing Libya. As George Orwell said “War is Peace.” Could I stop worrying and learn to love the bomb, like Dr. Strangelove counseled? If NATO lightly roasts Gaddaffy with a basting of napalm into a Libyan version of the old Girl Scout favorite Somoammars, will we all end up singing around the campfi re of democracy?

As I watched the President I thought, please Obi, do your magical word thing. Make me believe. Convince me. Let your overarching wisdom pour down on me like the cooling radioactive rain over the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan. I prayed I wouldn’t fi nd myself in agreement with the crazy talking heads on Fox TV that the Libyan war was a double plus ungood idea. Alas, my prayers went unanswered. The unthinkable happened. I found myself agreeing with Republican Presidential candidates that our latest Libyan war was less than a most excellent adventure. The horror. The horror. Surely I couldn’t be in agreement with Newt Gingrich’s most recent fl ip fl op against the Libyan war. How could I have fallen so low as to agree with the Newtster? I cringed in shame. What was I missing? Had I dropped into some black hole of twisted Neo-Con anti-anything Obama radioactive cess pool of bitterness? Have I been eating too much Japanese sushi with Plutonium and Cesium sauce? What is disrupting my thought patterns? How can I be agreeing with the Republicans on this issue?

Who are the Libyan rebels we are now allied with? As Butch Cassidy once said to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?” What do we know about them? Will the Libyan rebels turn out like the mujahideen in Afghanistan and morph into an unpleasant Libyan version of Al Qaeda?

As I watched Obi’s speech, realizing I wasn’t buying what he was selling, my confusion grew. I thought of George Washington’s band playing “The World Turned Upside Down” as Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. What will happen next, will I fi nd myself agreeing with Crazy Joe Lieberman that we need to bomb Syria to help the citizens who are protesting against Assad? Do we need to bomb Yemen and Saudi Arabia to help out democracy there? Is there any Muslim country we shouldn’t bomb back into the Stone Age so we can rebuild it with borrowed money from the Chinese back into a paragon of peace, love and democracy? Can we make the Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites, Stalactites and the Uptites link arms and sing Kum Bay Ya by blowing up their cities? Does love have to hurt? Crazy Joe Lieberman thinks so.

Despite our silver tongued President’s best efforts, I am not convinced we need to keep invading Muslim countries even though it seems like a good idea at the time. What would Charlie Sheen do?