Old vets are loath to say so, but we know these guys are caught up in battles of attrition; we kill some of them, they kill some of us. We know “We’re making progress” is just so much command BS from field commanders and general officers—whose hands, at any rate, are tied by Washington and the leftist politics of this failing Commander in Chief.

It’s always been so: to our soldier kind and to most savvy Americans, “retreat” is anathema; “defeat” is never an option. But as things stand, we just won’t ever “take” the Afghan mountains, “secure” Iraq, and utterly destroy an asymmetrical, globally dispersed, elusive enemy—an enemy with centuries of time on its side. And now they’re even inside the American wire, cloaked and moving among Islamic communities, right here in our New York, New Jersey, and Virginia “back yards.”

Our present wobbly government says euphemistically, we will “officially end operations” in Iraq. America now “officially ends” its wars. Rest assured our global enemy, the Islamic Jihadists, will fill the vacuum of our ignominious exit in very short time, pushing Iraq back to Square One. After that, it’s anyone’s guess what unfolds.

The individual has been, and will forever be, elusive: the “perfect candidate.” Virtually all past presidents have checked in with varying pieces of personal “baggage,” some openly, others secretly kept from the national bellhop’s attention.

Gingrich is no exception. Still, there’s a growing sense this DC-experienced hand is the sharpest knife in the GOP drawer. In our history, we’ve seen that extraordinary times do need the “extraordinary character” to be put in charge. While Gingrich is no Churchill, he appears to be a kind of political Patton. Rough edges in personality, perhaps, but decisive, aggressive, and incisively intelligent about most things nationally and internationally political.

Watch him closely in the continued debates. This guy appears focused in battle, fast to respond to his shifty enemies, and gives as good as he gets, with unassailable facts.

And, more often, we’re seeing Gingrich prevail. That, for starters, is resonating with millions of us, particularly with old vets. Here it is, some 147 years after Lincoln put (reluctantly) scruffy-looking, farm-boy Grant in charge of the great Army of the Potomac, to do the job a succession of past commanders could not. Grant’s detractors flitted around Mr. Lincoln’s ear, telling him, “. . . Mr. President, Grant drinks . . .” “Yes,” Lincoln told them, “but he fights.”

The Catch 22 here is that the left/Democrats will have grabbed a political tiger by the tail. Gingrich is unflappable and takes no lip from anyone. More so, when his opponents, biased reporters and agenda- helping media interviewers confront him face to face. An attribute to consider, when we see how America has fared in international matters. Gingrich, moreover, is Washington smart and experienced, quick on his feet, fast to answer any question (and “charges” of this and that). Notice, no hemming, no Teleprompter. He gets right to the point. If he’s made what he admits was a poor decision, we hear him say so.

Unless the left believes otherwise, they will have also given Gingrich, with all his “imperfections,” the opportunity to shine if he gets the nod. Surely, even this glib, failed president knows now what would await him, facing a formidable Newt Gingrich on the debate stage.

Such timely timing by the American Association of Retired Persons, whose “mission statement” declares is “a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization for people age 50 and over . . . dedicated to enhancing quality of life for all as we age,” and to providing “a wide range of unique benefits, special products and services for our members.” Sounds socially good at first blush; but it’s the slippery phrase, “nonpartisan membership,” that begs the question: What, exactly, is a “nonpartisan membership”?

I’m anything but “nonpartisan”; and the AARP organization, it turns out, is anything but “nonpartisan,” which is also true of its membership thousands, who are as divergent in political thinking as DNA segments are divergent in their sequence. Where is the nonpartisanship in extolling Washington lobbying out of heartfelt concern for retired seniors while selling them out by actively supporting the Obama healthcare plan? A conundrum.

AARP doth protest too little. You’d have thought AARP would have instantly “lobbied” hard against the Obama “plan.” But no: they ignored the crushing trillions in debt Obama saddled this and future generations with, and (2) they effectively supported legislation that would cut Medicare benefits to “help pay for” that debt. A chimera. In today’s real world, such cuts would financially hurt the millions of retiring baby boomers and diminish the quality of their healthcare and life. If you’re one, would you want exposure to a possible “early death” caused by a treatable sickness, simply because some anonymous government bureaucrat determined, “treatment is not appropriate and is ‘not covered by Medicare’”?

Such was the first clear sign of “nonpartisan”AARP’s tendentious support of Obama, his agenda, administration, and the Democrat party. It wasn’t enough members suffered AARP’s insult in not polling us first before deciding to support Obama’s government-controlled plan for socialized medical care. No wonder AARP membership dropped by the thousands.

No flat-lining the bottom line. But then, who can blame the 53-year-old AARP for wanting to survive? Such “support” is to be expected of many businesses whose best interests depend on the actions of the ruling administration. AARP certainly enjoyed the 80-plus millions in federal funds (our tax dollars) they received in years past—not to mention their expectation of becoming a premier vendor under the Obama healthcare plan. It’s no stretch that AARP taps into membership dollars and the huge federal largesse to pay for its lobbying, print and electronic publishing, and smooth, omnipresent marketing—the latter, an “arrangement” now called “crony Capitalism,” where government rewards select financial favors among the private sector for certain political “returns.”

Reviewing the check-up report. But on the eve of this failing president’s fourth year in office, we members certainly don’t have to help pay for the “arrangement” apparent in AARP’s campaigning and shilling for Obama himself, “Obamacare,” and the First Lady. Not when our national survival is at stake. That AARP effectively supports and abets one of the most adversarial, ineffective, and destructive presidents in history should be axiomatic. What informs us ordinary people of this are the soaring grocery, utility, and fuel bills; a dizzying, high unemployment rate; virtual below-ground housing starts; record home foreclosures; catastrophic failures of businesses nationwide; failing banks; a moribund financial market; a raided and depleted U.S. Treasury; endless pallets of printed fiat currency; the rise in costs for medical insurance, care, and medicines; rampant doubt and angst throughout the nation that, ironically, is taking an awful toll on our national and personal health.

And yet, Barack and Michelle Obama continue to “work the crowd,” disingenuously manipulating select segments of American society in seeking votes for another four years of dubious public service. With AARP’s blessings and help. Millions of senior voters need to see the Obamas featured by AARP are no friend of the American “middle class”; no friend of senior Americans; no friend of retired Americans; no friend of AARP members; and, still, during this crucial vote-building period, no friend of the active military and us veterans. The Obamas have known it from the outset, and we millions now know it, notwithstanding the campaign contrivance of an “outreach” program “to help America’s military families.”

He talks about it, but “tax cuts” and “Obama” are at once oxymoronic. He’s saddled the nation with insurmountable debt that will forever go unpaid, not in this generation, our children’s generation, and their children’s generation. Yet there he was, just a few days ago, looking squarely at us on TV, telling us we must support him in his effort to get America’s fiscal house in order.

Imagine that. Here’s a president, unlike any other before him, who raided the U.S. Treasury at the outset of his presidency. Then he proceeded, headlong, to printing fiat money by the millions—printing and spending money we just don’t have. And we’re to believe he’s ingenuous about improving America failing economic health? Not in this life. Like an upscale flim-flam man using “sophisticated” oratory and gimmickry, Obama continues selling us a nickel for a dime, and selling our national intelligence short in the process.

He’s made of our national political landscape some awful political game board, and it’s literally disassembling, corrupting, and dispiriting the nation. And if that weren’t enough, he’s sullied the office from Day One, and roundly insulted all of us along the way, obsequiously bowing before foreign dictators, never talking up America and his countrymen, and, it would seem, rushing to “apologize” for America for this or that “transgression.”

And for presidential cheek? It’s no secret we’re reeling under a manufactured energy crisis. But what was Obama’s flip answer to a citizen complaining about the severe economic impact sky-high gas prices are having on his family? “Get a hybrid.”

Obama remains antithetical to the American way of life. For all his on-camera stagecraft and contrived photo ops, he is the most adversarial, inept president ever to occupy the White House, Jimmy Carter notwithstanding. He just lacks the skills for the job. Indeed, in any other top-leadership job in the private sector, such telling failures would mean dismissal. Which is what millions of us (including U.S. military voters) are now preparing for Mr. Obama in 2012

Yes, the left and kindred Democrats, Socialists, et al, wouldn’t want Trump to trump Obama in any way politically. But making Trump himself the issue is to dodge the birthplace question. Some two years into an decidedly failing presidency, the entire nation is discovering it asked too little.

Given the nature of his public job, Obama could have laid this “birther” business to rest at the very outset of his campaign—shut everyone up, as we say—by presenting for the American people his official birth certificate, with embossed seal, from the vault at Hawaii’s Department of Health. And if he was, in fact, born in Kenya, then perhaps that honest admission on his job application would have still kept him electable and all the more credible today. After all, Obama can very well say now what he could have said back then: “Yes, I was born IN Kenya, but OF a mother who was an American citizen. John McCain was born IN Panama, but OF a mother who was an American citizen.”

Still, if we give any credence to these audio and video clips that unequivocally reveal he was born in Kenya, we have—what? The first U.S. president to have openly lied on his job application? We know well what our punishment has been under his stewardship; what his punishment would be, is anyone’s guess.

But you don’t have to be a Patton (or a Rommel) to see the “public relations” aspect of deploying the drone. You see it on the evening news, its visual impressiveness, in how they play up footage of an isolated, big-time hit—a single hit we’re expected to feel (?) marks the end of the battle and defeat of the Libyan leader. We’ll get more bang- for-our-bucks, I suppose. . . .

But the A-Bomb-on-Hiroshima, it ain’t. The reality remains that the individual drone is little more than a multimillion-dollar “artillery shell” that won’t be any more effective than the hundreds of rocket-propelled Buzz Bombs and V2′s were when they hammered London. England, we know, never surrendered. And it’s likely the good Colonel won’t surrender to anyone. He’s like that.

I think old ground vets in particular would agree intermittent drops of this super mortar won’t defeat a fast-moving, dispersed enemy flitting around the North African desert.

Better to answer the many hard questions: Why haven’t the Colonel’s sundry supplies and munitions run out? We’ve a good idea who’s paying for them, but where are the supply feeds coming from? Where are materiel being stored? Who’s doing the selling and sending? His Hollywood-looking bad-guy mercenaries are weighted down with fresh bandoliers and loaded for bear with spanking AKs. No chintzy surplus-level stuff. So Walmart’s out of the question.

And speaking of chintzy: Why hasn’t his paltry air force been neutralized by now? And the movie-corny but real military question? Where’s he getting vehicle and aviation fuel? The refineries, now-Hawk Commander Obama: Where are the refineries? (Let us hope we don’t find them along “Refinery Row” on the Texas coastline. But, hey, you never know, these uncertain days under an oily president.)

Perhaps the ultimate question is, Where is Qaddafi? Why not just focus on finding him? Indeed, maybe Obama can extract still more campaign points here if he can get the trooper who nabbed Hussein in the hole to get Qaddafi. After all, how many places, and for how long, can the Colonel hide and survive out there on the waterless, food-less, fly-ridden, cold, windy, sandy, and . . . gas-station-Seven Eleven-free Libyan desert?

When this president and putative Commander in Chief’s immediate objective was to shut a military prison holding enemy combatants who engaged and killed his countrymen-soldiers and, by extension, American citizens, millions knew right there, we had trouble in our own national back yard. Guess what.

The whether-or-not-to-get-involved-in issue is nothing new: Monroe’s, let’s not get involved in foreign “affairs”; the American Isolationist Movement; let the Europeans fight this one out; that’s the Jews’ war . . .

Call it what they will, we are, and have been, at war. Bullets, bombs, and body parts are flying every which way, and still . . . still we’ve yet to hear this Fifth Columnist of a national leader even say metaphorically of our “undeclared” battles and battle dead, “We are in a war on terror.” Only now, the order is out to refer to wars and battles as, “kinetic military action.” Kinnetic . . . Military . . . Action. “NUMBER OF PERSONNEL MORTALLY SUFFERING KMA’s:,” unit Morning Reports will read.

This has really tripped the emotional wires across America. I see and hear a shared national anger that grows still hotter because we just can’t get some common relief from this president. Everything, virtually everything in our national life and polity is being compressed, distorted, disrespected, ripped apart : law, political conduct, language, national values, traditions, the Constitution, prices at supermarkets and gas stations–all turned on their respective heads by a now-suspect, failing American government. It’s put millions more of us in some immeasurable, unrelieved rage.

I feel it, my neighbors feel it–especially now, when I envision our past wars from down on the ground of the American infantry guy, enveloped in every kind of detritus of battle and human body, and when I think of his unearthly places that made Dante’s Inferno a Heaven, and of the unrelenting, personal terror that never let him alone;

especially now, when I continue to see the great gap in my Manhattan skyline, whose ugly hole at the base is covered over by an artsy, delicate, and meek below-ground necropolis “memorial” to mark “the passing” of some 3,000 American civilians murdered by terrorists who’ve engaged us for a timeless war they started;

especially now, when I think of the life sacrifices Americans have made by choice, or had to make by chance, or by no choice; and

especially now, when I think of all such things against a backdrop of a scheming president and administration, and what they are purposely doing to hobble, diminish, push us off course, disarm us, and reduce us to a third-rate nation no better than the Third-World nations who have, in their demonstrable way, “formerly declared” war to murder us all.

So, as in Obama, there is in Charlie, much humor to be mined, the Dark kind, but humor nevertheless, of the political kind. Which is why I’m suggesting to the vast array of liberals and leftists out there who chance to read this, that you can get some political mileage out of Sheen’s most apolitical plight, despite its unfortunate, tragic aspect. In light of the red-hot battle between rank-and-file union workers and Capitalist America (and, by extension, Republicans and Conservatives, your whirling political spins just might take serious flight among receptive Americans of similar political bent.

So listen up: You folks are creative at this (“Sarah Palin was responsible for the massacre in Arizona . . .”). Charlie, you can claim in usual, playbook hyperbole and other over-the-top language, has every right to file for Workman’s Compensation. That’s right, Workman’s Comp. In one sentence captured, he rasped, “I was fired.”(by inference, Charlie was fired “for cause,” as they say in the Firing business, which term, of course, American business never mentions, since it’s bad for business, if you will).

Anyway, stay with me. Charlie, you can scream, announce, and demonstrate through your usual outlets, is the victim of an . . . “unjust cause,”—yes, our Star is yet another union worker-victim, discriminated against by the greed of Big Business, of Capitalist-greed, of avarice among “the Rich” and Right Wing. yada, yada; . . . who are directly and indirectly guilty of working him (despite union contract and, he told the world, “a family to support and love”), under overly harsh, demanding studio heads, in an emotionally unsafe work environment that triggered his current behavioral disease (that’s right, “disease”), which, in turn, caused Charlie to publicly stress, which, in further turn, led to his further decline, which, in still-further turn, caused his Warner Brothers employer to (a) hook him off stage and unceremoniously toss him out Stage-Right—him! Charlie Sheen!—for behavior that was unintentional and tacit (b) to stem the outflow of lost millions in revenue from deserting Private-Sector-Rich-Guy sponsors, whose phones were probably ringing off the hook with, “I’m-not-buying-your-product” calls from the morally offended “Religious Right” and virtually every of other Christian group. Don’t mention that, of course.

But do emote on the evening news with the requisite liberal’s “sadness” (like Senator Chuck Schumer’s) that Charlie is another tragic example of the assault on worker “rights,” etc. Get a little poetic: Say, “It’s American Big-Business-1920’s-style all over again in 2011—exploitation that will impact the jobs and virtually destroy the lives of millions of other such struggling union workers and (get this in) their families and children—just like what’s happening to the Brothers and Sisters in Wisconsin’s beleaguered public-sector and teacher unions, who are about to be axed by their (Republican) employers.

So, remember, emphasize words along the lines of, “Worker Exploitation,” and in your friendly media “interviews,” the business about business’s failure to provide adequate “social safeguards” for keeping a worker’s mental and physical health on an even keel. For added punch, perhaps work in a metaphoric allusion to Charlie as a “victim of the Triangle Waist Shirt Company fire,” but survived his firing only to be forced into “Rehab for Actors with Afflictions”—an insufferable gig (outside of Hollywood), that will only increase his pain and suffering . . . and impact job prospects, to boot.

You get the picture. Something like that.

In all of American history, he is the first president to have about him an aura of political “foreigner,” a curiously displeased one of dubious political pedigree, disaffected with America and detached from the American way of life. This is not verbal histrionics; it is a cold reality whose real effects, this very hour, envelope us and freeze our national spirit and lifeblood. Our ordinary lives and welfare have not come first with Obama. “Things American” and Obama still remain contradictions.

Still, his messages will abound and rebound. In warm days to come, we will likely find him at an “inner-city” playground, where a sleeves-up Obama gets in touch with “the people” while “shooting hoops.” We may catch him before a packed auditorium of recruited college students, cheering uniformly as TV cams pan and zoom. A trendy night-time TV talk show might host him with star-fanfare—our president-celeb, whom Britain’s Reuters News calls in German, our “Uber President.” On TVs the world over will be the mature president, in de rigueur blue-collar jumpsuit, visiting a small business that just happens to be “able to hire workers now.”

Expect Obama to continue emoting the alluring lines that fooled millions of voters, the half-truths and full-lies delivered by a president-teacher and oil-portrait figure of statesmanship, in control of the moment, worldly and didactic, speaking in near-Rooseveltian cadence—forever pointing upward his pay-attention, paternal, “let-me-be-clear” index finger when he’s about to mentor and lecture us yet again.

But telegenic or no, Obama, unscripted and unmasked, remains little more than the inexperienced, tyro Junior Senator who has proven himself a political deer in the headlights of world politics. Millions more must be nearing national exhaustion having to reassess Barack Obama and company. But we must not let him and his administration hoodwink us again by the image-chimeras that saturate us. Such contrivances and photo ops have not been job-status reports but ongoing campaign captions since his Inaugural. No more canned images of an effectively faux president enfolded in a dazzling array of American flags. The deceptive image has dishonored America enough.

In the run up to 2012, question the veracity of his every report and finding regarding our national and international crises, and state of the union—and, most importantly, reject anything he says along the lines of, “. . . we are better off now than when I was not your president.”