EXTRA: Syria strike cost? Who knows! Aside from Topinka, who seems to care

I couldn’t help but be amused earlier this week by Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka when she told a chamber of commerce-type gathering in suburban Tinley Park her thoughts about U.S. military involvement in Syria.

TOPINKA: War too expensive!!!

Her serious point is that any military effort that isn’t completely pointless is going to be expensive – probably to the point that the U.S. government really can’t afford it.

OR, AS THE blunt-spoken official put it following an extensive trashing of Illinois state government for its financial mess, “We don’t need another war, because we can’t afford that either.”

Perhaps she’s on to something. Because the Congressional Budget Office released a report this week saying that it doesn’t have a clue how much a military strike involving Syria would wind up costing the federal government.

“The administration has not detailed how it would use the authority that would be provided by this resolution (authorizing the conflict); thus, CBO has no basis for estimating the costs of implementing,” such a military effort, the report reads.

Not that cost is going to discourage those people who are determined to use military force and justify it on the grounds that we’re teaching Syrian officials a lesson for their use of chemical weapons on civilians.

ALL MILITARY EFFORT is inherently expensive. Cost has never discouraged our war-mindset from kicking into gear in the past. It certainly won’t now.

And let’s be honest. The people who will vote against this particular request by President Barack Obama for Congressional approval to use military force in Syria are largely doing so for their own ideological hang-ups.

OBAMA: The war-time? prez

Perhaps it is the reason I have become apathetic about this issue. I realize it’s going to happen, regardless of whatever opposition (which under typical circumstances I would be inclined to agree with) gets tossed its way.

Or regardless of whatever financial sense Topinka tries to talk us into. Perhaps our focus ought to be on trying to minimize its impact – which might go a long way to containing its cost.

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A trend? Or just a quirk?

Let me state up front that I have never attended Goshen College, nor do I know anyone who ever had a connection to the school in Goshen , Ind. And my exposure to the Mennonite Church (with which the college is affiliated) has been minimal.

So I don’t have a personal reason to want to praise that rural Indiana school that is going to find itself gaining national attention in coming days, and may well find itself becoming a target for the conservative ideologues who are determined to stage a cultural war to impose their sense of morals upon us all.

WHICH IN THIS case may be appropriate, since the issue we’re going to be fighting a “war” over is a “war” anthem.

Specifically, the Star-Spangled Banner, our nation’s anthem since 1931, which is based off an 1814 poem that tells the tale of how Fort McHenry near Baltimore sustained an attack from the British Navy and didn’t surrender – with the flag still flying high in the morning when the battle was complete.

Which may be an ideal worthy of mentioning – we don’t surrender.

But let’s be honest. It is an awkward song to sing, with a first verse of lyrics that way too many people manage to butcher and three more verses of lyrics that most people don’t even pretend to care about.

THERE HAS TO be a better song by which we can celebrate our sentiments about our nation than this one.

What is going to get ideologues worked up is the fact that Goshen College, following three years of debate, made the call to do away with the anthem being played prior to the ballgames played by the school’s athletic teams.

The Goshen Maple Leafs will no longer stand attention prior to a sporting event while a recording of the "Star-Spangled Banner" plays. Not that they’re going music-less.

Instead, the Associated Press reported Wednesday that the school will use "America the Beautiful" as a patriotic song to inspire us behind our country, before watching the Leafs take on their competition of other schools in the Indiana-based Mid-Central College Conference.

I CAN ALREADY hear the rants and rages from the ideologues about how this school is being disrespectful to the "Star-Spangled Banner." In fact, some of the student-athletes have already said they’re not thrilled about the change.

But no matter how much those individuals want to believe their thought represents the entirety of ideas on this issue, they don’t. There are those of us who realize that life will go on without the "Star-Spangled Banner," and who have become offended at the way the song routinely gets mangled prior to sporting events.

If not playing it prior to a ballgame means I no longer have to hear some third-rate singer try to pretend she is the Second Coming of Mahalia Jackson, I think we’d all be better off if sports teams followed the lead of Goshen College.

In the case of Goshen, they say their primary objection to the anthem is its war-like imagery (the Mennonites are pacifists). Hence, "America the Beautiful" is a more pleasing image – considering that it honors the physical beauty of our nation.

NONE OF THAT “rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air” stuff that dominates the U.S. national anthem. Although it’s not like the U.S. is the only nation on Earth that has a martial overtone to its anthem.

Just look to the south to Mexico, where “Mexicanos, al Grito de Guerra” tells of the roar of the cannons and how Mexicans will rise to fight off any, “enemy outlander (who) should dare to profane your ground with his sole.”

Get into the more obscure verses of Mexico’s national anthem, and you learn that those same enemy outlanders will have their blood spilled all over the land and will be devastated for trying to invade the Mexican homeland.

By comparison, Francis Scott Key composed a virtual love poem.

BUT MY REAL objection to the "Star-Spangled Banner" as an anthem that must be played prior to ballgames is really in the fact that so few people really know the song. They butcher it so badly that I can’t help but feel those moments when sports fans try to sing along are the most dreadful of any event.

I wonder at times if people really have any clue what it is they are supposed to be singing, and if they’re all so incredibly tone-deaf that they don’t realize how badly they’re singing it?

Besides, it’s not like the anthem has been around forever. There are generations of people who lived their full lives in this country of ours who would have thought our current obsession with singing the anthem prior to drinking a beer (or three) while the New York Yankees beat up on the Boston Red Sox is bizarre.

Our nation went for just over 150 of its 235 years of existence without the "Star-Spangled Banner" as its anthem, and the idea of a ballgame requiring the anthem is a product of World War II that probably should have withered away with the WACs.

FOR LET’S NOT forget that our nation’s “anthem” used to be a song called “Hail, Columbia,” which now is regarded as the theme music for the entrance of the Vice President.

Perhaps Goshen is giving us a nudge in the direction where someday, the "Star-Spangled Banner" becomes the theme for the Secretary of Defense – while the rest of us celebrate the “spacious skies” and “amber waves of grain.”

Except maybe for the atheists, who will be offended that the song says “God shed His grace” on “America! America!” Or maybe the American Indian tribes who will resent the reference to “pilgrim feet” whose “stern impassion’d stress, A thoroughfare for freedom beat, Across the wilderness.”

But those are commentaries for another day.

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EXTRA: As I lie in my bed with a laptop computer, a television set tuned to CNN tells me that Osama bin Laden is dead

I’m a little hesitant to get too excited, unlike the crowds gathering outside the White House late Sunday into early Monday to celebrate the death of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

OBAMA: Will ideologues apologize?



My television set was tuned to CNN when President Barack Obama made the announcement that an attack in Pakistan by U.S. military forces resulted in bin Laden being killed – and that U.S. officials had control of his body.

I HAVE HEARD commentary offered up that bin Laden’s death is a moment comparable to the instant when we learned that Adolf Hitler was dead (which resulted in the end of the European portion of the Second World War).

In fact, looking at the video images being offered up live outside the White House, you’d think that people were trying early Monday to create 21^st Century versions of the V-E Day celebrations that burst out around the nation back in 1945 when the Nazis went from being a legitimately elected government entity to just a batch of malcontent kooks with a particularly sadistic streak. All we needed was a sailor bending a nurse over backward while giving her a smooch (an image I'm sure bin Laden would claim was an example of western decadence).

I did get my giggle from the one person in the crowd who prominently waved his “Latinos for Obama” campaign sign left over from the ’08 campaign season.

But my fear is that too many people are going to think that this “War on Terror” is now over, and that “we” won. One pundit on CNN literally came out and said “the war on terror is over.” Nonsense. The ideas and images of this current conflict are bigger than any one man.

WE MAY WELL prevail. I certainly hope so. But this fight is far from over for us. If you want a World War II analogy, this is the death of Mussolini. The war continued for another two years.

I fear too many people are going to let their guard down, which only makes us susceptible to whatever form of retaliation that bin Laden’s followers will try to drum up – all in the name of Islam and the prophet Mohammed.

That was actually the one point Obama brought up during his roughly 10-minute address that I liked – he pointed out that bin Laden was NOT really a Muslim. His actions were criminal, and that many true Muslims were among bin Laden’s victims throughout the years. Obama said, "bin Laden was not a Muslim leader, he was a mass murder of Muslims."

That is a statement that I’m sure will upset the conservative ideologues – those very people who like to believe that Obama himself is some sort of Muslim (that is, when they’re not accusing him of being a “socialist”).

HISTORY IS GOING to wind up “crediting” Obama for the downfall of bin Laden, similar to how George Bush the elder gets credit for the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall – all because he was in the position at the right time.

Talk about good timing!

What will the ideologues complain about now? What will Donald Trump rant about next? Or is he still going to try to claim that Obama really wasn’t worthy of an “Ivy League” education? I’d think that the actions of Sunday show just how irrelevant a campaign “issue” that truly is.

Actually, I think I know what it is they will try to use against Obama – the fact that Libya leader Moammar Gadhafi is still alive. Don’t forget that a U.S. military operation meant to kill him a few days ago failed – although it seems that Gadhafi’s son and other relatives are dead.

PERHAPS THEY’LL CLAIM he’s a failure, although I’d claim that U.S. forces came through on the big one. Because quite frankly, Gadhafi is a third-rate threat that we all too often exaggerate into a significant power.

Although I suppose Gadhafi himself will now issue some sort of statement denouncing U.S. imperialism. He may even call our nation a “criminal” state.

Which would be about as absurd a statement as some of the Obama-bashing rhetoric we get from people who want to think they’re on “our” side.

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