It's About Damn Time on 'Don't Ask' Repeal

Hey there don't ask, don't tell. Don't let the door knob hit you on the ass on your way out. But make no mistake, your departure is a celebrated and overdue event. Obama may be having trouble with the economy, but he can certainly hang his hat on finally doing the right thing when it came to treating a sizable minority of our population as human beings, who, while defending our belief in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were precluded from fully enjoying those rights themselves.

I have heard so many twisted arguments over the years as to why gays should not be able to serve openly in the military and they were all specious. It never made sense to me that you could take a kind and caring human being, train them to the point where they are able to kill, maim and torture other humans yet cannot tolerate the idea of taking a shower or hiding in a foxhole with someone who is gay.

Now that there is a little momentum in straightening out unreasonable military policy, maybe the time is right to address some other oddities. for instance, why do the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all have, in essence, their own air forces. Isn't one air force enough? Doesn't the overlap cost the taxpayers money? If someone proposed that we have four high school boards of trustees in Novato, one for each grade, setting policies, procedures, etc., Novatans would be justifiably up in arms about the waste. I may be wrong, but I'm guessing the overlap waste in the military is even bigger.

And while we're at it, why do we have so many different intelligence agencies, both military and civilian. Is it basically a jobs program for spies? If we combined them and streamlined the overlap, would we be accused of class warfare against Ivy League graduates? 

Maybe after we've straightned those things out, we can revisit the notion of whether corporations should be treated as people — well, people who get much more benefit from the government than they pay for in taxes. 

Ah, well, one can dream.