Reply to Hume's Ghost, who is Angry
at Right-Wingers
I am relieved to read that others are out here (although I am a bit concerned for your blood pressure, Hume's Ghost). Maybe we are not alone.
I tried to reply to your post but for some reason it wouldn't have it. So it is here.
You are angry, and you don't understand how everyone is not angry as well. There is a lot to that, for those of us who can see.
I'm not sure anger is the emotion for it. We need a conjunction of emotion and rationality, of course. For me, anger, justified as it may be, detracts from that conjunction, tending to overcome.
Yet something bendy seems to have gotten into me. Is it true that soon passports will be scrutinized and government-checked for validity, for the right and ability to depart this place? I don't know if that is true or just a scary rumor; I could not validate it.
For a lot of people, the 'un-angry' ones, the ones who think that everything is fine, we're winning in Iraq, they'll love us there, democracy will flower like a weed, there seems to be an unspoken but common assumption that the Bush administration in its fervent 'war on terror' and its critical eye on its citizens has the best interests of this country at heart. I believe that assumption is patently false.
Since taking office, this administration has undertaken to fulfill its unspoken agenda on every conceivable front. Reckless deficit spending is but one aspect of this government's policies. From that to regressive tax cuts, to obliterating the separation between church and state, to heedlessly overstretching the capacity of our armed forces while refusing, because of predictable consequences, to impose a draft to produce more cannon-fodder, to denial of habeas corpus and Stalin-like imprisonment without charges being filed—for years!, to making our citizens suspects instead of safer, to privatization of everything from prisons to soldiering, to blithe and blatant law-breaking and politicizing, to destabilizing, preemptive, preposterous war, to willful denial and unspeakably foolish promotion of the ongoing planetary climatic disaster and more, the neocons have only one interest in their sights that I can infer, and that seems to be continuing acquisition of more. More power, more wealth, more secrecy.
What they have done and are doing has done more to discredit, weaken, and polarize this country while fueling the fires of radical Islamic jihadism (and other incarnations of fear and hatred) that they, the neocons, purport to fight but in fact beget, than we may ever know.
I think that what we have to do is stop the pretense—Stop pretending that the participants of this administration are anything but the morally bereft and opprobrious traitors that they are. Mere impeachment is too good for them and too limited for their numbers.
They should be held accountable by every legal means possible except for the torture that they shamefully endorse and with which they have further sullied the honor of this country. All that is but a first step in addressing the horrific damages they are rendering.
But the trouble is, I'm afraid that, even as catastrophic, depraved, fascist, fiendishly amoral and avaricious as the neocon network and their jack-boot toadies are, the dems are not a whole lot better.
Clinton (H) and Edwards were heard a few days ago on tape (around July 13, 2007), thinking they were off-microphone, glibly agreeing to "decrease" the number of voices allowed in pre-voting debates, allegedly so that their message be better heard. Of course, if that happens, people like Kucinich and Gravel, less beholden to the Interests, will fall even farther off the screen. Surely we don't want to be confused by hearing anything that might contrast to the party line, do we?
According to Michael Moore, who allegedly had to fight Harvey Weinstein, normally a staunch Moore backer, to keep this part in "SiCKO", Clinton is now one of the (maybe, since departure of SantorumHeartily Dan Savage instigated, no doubt; long live Dan!, the most) heavily health-industry-supported Congress-people, so you can imagine how much might change in that direction were she to be elected.
Do you hear what they're saying?
- Hillary envisions "a continuing presence in Iraq to protect our vital American interests". Vital American oil under their sand, is that what you mean, Hillary? Not to mention all the bases we've been quietly building there, from which to protect and collect, mayhaps, 'our' oil.
- Obama vows to "increase and modernize" the Armed Services. That's what we need, isn't it, to throw more money at that hog, which, including past and current miliary, already takes up no less than one-half of all federal outlays. From an analysis of tables in the 'Analytical Perspectives' book of the US Government Budget, fiscal year 2008And thanks to the War Resisters League at www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm, 'current' includes the Department of Defense, the seldom-recited military portion from other departments, and the ludicrously unbudgeted but agonizingly regular 'supplemental appropriations' that are driving this war. Past military refers to veterans' benefits (those that Bush has not contrived to cut), plus 80% of the interest on our rigorously ignored and pullulatingTeeming and abundant; breeding freely. national debt.
- John Edwards will stop war profiteering in Iraq. Implication? We're still there, in Iraqnam.
These Democratic frontrunners are either actively dissembling or merely shuffling uncomfortably, unable to truly and effectively oppose this pinheaded, oil-appropriating, terrorist-engendering, warmonger-enriching war.
Anybody notice how many times since World War II the US has been involved in one conflict or another? More to the point, we are occupiers in Iraq. What would you do with armed foreign occupiers in this country? You would fight to eject the occupiers. When would you stop? When they left your country, and not before.
Put yourself in their place, people, and you'll suddenly understand what is happening there.
Is there really a powerful, unseen, maybe even bipartisan "force" out there that determines US policy such that, no matter who "leads" us as President, this country, reckoning itself the One World Leader, will act to persuade, coerce, buttonhole, or, if necessary, militarily force the remainder of the world to fall into line behind us? Are we acting as the grand new empire, with any country so bold as to doubt our total hegemony slated to be either punished or 'assimilated'?
Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA *and* the '96 Telecommunications Act that enabled all this dangerous media concentration, responsible for at least some of the apathy and torpor all around us, to begin.
That is why a lot of people are not angry. They are continually and cunningly mis-informed. They watch Fox News and that's all they know, and they think they see reality.
Or maybe they wish to be misinformed. That possibility scares me too. And that fear? Just a cover for anger.
Looks like we're back to the same page, Hume's Ghost.
