Abigail, Abigail, & Gretchen - and a CIA Trick Called "Limited Hangout"

First: Abbie, I "criticize" (your word, but I'll accept it) women so much because I care about women and their role in the proverbial "scheme of things" more than anyone else and anything other. I criticize black Americans' attitudes and what they say for a similar reason.

A coach who cares doesn't criticize the champions on his team; he criticized the ones he wants to be champions. We're either going to get there all together or we won't get there at all. Say or do something that's right and I'll agree. Say or do something wrong, and I won't be quiet. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk", you know.

You're wrong. That ("Mother") nature assigns roles in her creation is so gigantically apparent that I have to find suspect anyone who ignores or denies it. That man and his societies have to subordinate themselves to the planet and the ecosystem they live on and in is equally obvious, and to speak and argue that all of women's problems were caused by men is like arguing that pollution of the air is caused by trees (that happens to be the latest nitwit nostrum that comes to mind).

One, more, time (frankly, I think I'm wasting my time with the subject - read what the lady "ravenqueen" had to say a while back - this has become a lesson only experience can teach): For women and girls to go obliviously about, alone and dressed as sexually tantalizingly as possible (hell, I love it - I'm a man), in a culture and nation like this one constitutes some kind of schizophrenia; and no asinine "ism" and its rhetoric can change that. Delusions don't serve as armor when the inevitable happens, either.

You'll note that "ravenqueen" says, "If you are serious in your views of women, then you are mentally ill. I'm sorry to break it to you. Everyone has a right to some risk in order to live fully. Everyone has a right to make these decisions for themselves. In your mind women are property and have no right to make choices, because they are vulnerable."

"Right." Damned right, you have rights. You have a right to put a gun to your head and play Russian Roulette, too. "Raven" also says "Everyone." Really? EVERYone? How about fourteen year olds? How about Carlie Brucia? Natalee Holloway?

"Rights." While I'm "how about"-ing, how about responsibility? Who was responsible for giving Carlie Brucia the idea that her "rights" would protect her against the bastard who took her like you pluck a plumb from a tree? Mom and dad didn't know that for a high school girl like Natalee Holloway, parading alone around places like Aruba was suicidal?

Abbie, I've lived all my life doing the most dangerous things possible. Everything from aerobatic flight to parachuting to rock climbing to hunting dangerous big game to much worse. I'm alive because I never did any of it oblivious of the danger inherent. NO ONE intelligent does. Every daredevil, whatever his "thing," knows everything he can about it before he begins. He checks his equipment, he trains and practices: he studies - including listen to others who have tried it - until he has reduced the risk as much as possible.

And, unless, he is insane, he is scared. Compare all that with what feminism tells girls like Carlie or Natalee. Before we talk about "rights," let's talk about responsibility. You tell women they have a right to go naked in a roomful of drunken men, I'll tell them it's a bad - probably fatal - idea. Maybe you'll feel all right when the inevitable happens. Maybe you'll be able rationalize the next Carlie Brucia (it's the one that haunts me most) the way "ravenqueen" does (actually, she ignores it). I won't. I'll blame myself because I didn't find a better, more effective, way to say to women what human experience already has.

One thing I need to ask, though: you don't really feel any responsibility at all for all the young women like Dru Sjodin, Joanna Rogers, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, Carlie Brucia, and all the rest? None?

Funny that I do, isn't it?

Anyway, that wasn't my damned subject today, and I forgot to mention that it's only a co-incidence that the Abigail who wrote to me and Abigail Adams (whose quote was the Knight-Errant website's "Quote of the Day" yesterday) have the same name. On the other hand, Abigail Adams happens to have been one of my boyhood admirations, such that I've read everything I ever found about her. "There were giants in the land" in those days - and they weren't all men. I'll bet twenty dollars that I know far more about the history "women's struggle" for rights than you do.

Enough! The discussion demonstrates the manner in which we become sidetracked by matters unworthy of the time. While the nation hurtles toward the worse crises it has ever faced, we debate things as obvious as the difference between man and woman. JESUS!

This morning, Don Imus talks (again) about the way the Veteran's Administration has let down soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. For the last several days, it's been in the news - extracted gingerly, of course, from among more important things like what to do with Anna Nicole Smith's remains (There you are, Abbie - "men" and this sick metrosexual, effeminate society are STILL using that poor woman; but, then, she asked for it, too - didn't she?).

Someone tell me - sociology being silent as it is these days - why it is that anybody who's lived through all the 1985-1998 disclosures concerning IRS, the 9-11 hearings, the lying about the WMDS in Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - and on and on for as long as you want to recite - is surprised.

Tell me - The security team bodyguards protecting you from a recent death threat show up late, fall asleep on duty, steal you blind, clean out the refrigerator and cupboard regularly without replacing anything, get their asses kicked by the neighborhood bullies who vandalize your place right under their noses, and generally act like Keystone Kops - but YOU KEEP THEM? You feel safe?

Tell me how the hell that can be with you. Are you nuts (if this sounds like those young women running around the wrong side of town in their short shorts and halter tops, just ignore it - "co-incidence;" I suppose).

While you're "telling," tell me how it happens that the crusader knights of the nation's fourth estate NEVER seem to notice what is sure as hell the very hallmark of federal government behavior these days. How does the media in the their "analyses" of national events fail to note any series of pompous pratfalls so thunderously obvious?

Your watchdog sleeps most of the time, and spends his waking hours barking at the neighbor's dog, and you not only keep him, you run to the door every time he barks? What the hell is going on?!

The other day, I wrote about Unity08, http://www.unity08.com/ the new internet campaign to restore government to semblance of competence (frankly, I don't believe a nation this corrupt is capable of truly good government; you can't trust a capitalist - sure as hell not the U.S. version). This is important. Put aside the Anna Nicole Smith, who's doing whom in Hollywood, feministic clap-trap garbage-sucking, and wake up.

I promise you that when the proverbial shit hits the fan here in the Land of the Fee, and you don't have the "fee," the pandering press won't be able to get your attention with things like what's going to happen to Anna Nicole's over-used body. Among the things you probably weren't able to pick from the garbage of the media's latest version of the famed "bimbo break-out" - I mentioned the VA hospital mess, didn't I? - was the stock market's dive. Frankly, and as I've been saying for several years now, I think this might be the beginning of the end. You can't - individual or nation - go on bungling like this.

I shake my head in amazement whenever someone - like "FoxNews" Gretchen Carlson this AM - speaks of the Congress "cutting off funding for the troops in Iraq" (notice the careful - carefully scripted, that is - choice of words). Hey, Gretch - How about the way Mr. Bush is cutting off funding for Social Security recipients? I mean, you don't recognize the fact that every time the Bush League grabs more to spend on his Brobdingnagian boondoggle in Iraq, they loot the Social Security fund? Or is the blonde joke personified just the role you play for that "Fair and Balanced" soap opera?

You haven't noticed that every damned year, Congress in both its "party" forms - in this case I mean Democrat and Republican, not male and female - claims it wants to save Social Security, and the public behaves just like the the crowd at the Miss America pageant? What - you're also more interested in your hair and how your legs look than silly stuff like the retirement "benefits" (we paid for it - how is it a "benefit?")? Every year, Keystone Kops on the Potomac does what would get any insurance company in the country put out of business for larceny, and people like you and Fox find something else - Anna Nicole's list of studs, for instance - interesting?

Well, you ARE giving your viewers what they want, that's plain to see. And, of course, I mean the double entendre.

At the time I write this, the total amount stolen from what is cynically called the Social Security "Trust (choke) Fund" is something like $1,600,000,000,000 (one, point six trillion dollars). Did I say "Brobdingnagian?" There is no plan - except George W.s announced plans to cut those "benefits" - to pay anything back. Isn't that cutting off funding, Gretchen? Gretchen?

If all that weren't enough, Gretchen and company seem particularly diffident - speechless, actually - about a story from Seymour Hersh (one of a very few seemingly trustworthy reporters these days). That one has it that the CIA - the White House's hackamore in its mouth, of course - is pulling another Iran-Contra to siphon off funds for operations in Iran. Remember the missing twelve (it seems to be up to twenty-one now) billion? No, maybe not - you were supposed to lose that one in all the Anna Nicole smoke and mirrors - but I trust it was always clear that all that money, most of it supposedly construction funds, didn't just vanish. And since it was in one hundred dollar bills, it's pretty sure it took some real logistical wherewithal to handle and transport it.

Of course, if you believe that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons factories in his garage or the like, you wouldn't have much trouble believing that a couple guys got away with twenty-one billion in hundreds stuffed it in their pants pockets.

Gretchen, Steve, and Brian do, of course. And they report the missing billions, too - the press doing its job. Sure. Kiddies, there's a name for that - "limited hangout" (look it up). You're as dishonest as the people paying you to help with it.

And that's just one - or two, or three; four, is it? - of the disasters being wreaked upon and brought down on us by the incredible bumbling, fumbling, and stealing of our government. Folks, if you think the crap you see on the media is news, you need to pay more attention to the other thespians on the boob tube. The "soaps," for instance. If you don't recognize the latter in the former, you're too far gone to help.

Meanwhile, the rest of us need to get busy with a real chance to change things. Unity08 http://www.unity08.com/ is that chance. A while back, I pointed out that to vote was to take part in what's happening to our country. Truism it may be, but to contribute to, to participate in, a crime is a crime. Now I'm on Fox's side (remember, they said that voting for Democrat Party candidates was aid and comfort to the enemy).

Well, a vote for anyone in Washington. D.C. is treason. It gives aid and comfort to enemies of the United States.

Minorities and Majorities; and Facts - "Stubborn Things"

Well, I seem to have hit a lot of sore spots with my remarks of late concerning certain "inconvenient" facts. I’m reminded of Thomas Huxley’s remark, “Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.”

The reaction (I’ve learned a couple of new epithets of the “witty” flavor) tells you – I’ve known since I was a kid – a lot, too. For instance, when I pointed out that it might be time to consider the contribution to human kind and civilization made by the white, Anglo-Saxon male, I was obviously saying nothing that should have offended anyone who loves the truth. I made no assertions whatever about what would be found, just what ordinary fairness requires. I guess fairness isn’t what some folks are about.

Huxley also said, “The deepest sin of the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” No one does himself or his point of view good when he conceals the truth or when he lies (same thing, in my estimation). Or do we assume that the contest of issues goes to the biggest lie? Should go to the biggest liar? Who benefits from that?

What does it say, really, when the truth becomes politically incorrect?

“Facts,” 2nd U.S. President John Adams said, “are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” There is also, however, no prick that stings more and draws more violent slapping and scratching in reaction than that of the truth.

For the sake of illustrating a point by analogy, let's stay with the question - is it an issue? why? - of the German-ness of the United States. There isn't, for instance, any historical or statistical doubt about the racial, cultural, and ethnic composition of the people who founded, built, and established the United States of America.

http://usa.usembassy.de/germanamericans.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-American


It simply isn't rationally debatable (so why do it, then - what's the point?) According to the 2000 census, there are nearly forty-three million Germans in the United States, at least fifteen percent of the population. Many more have German ancestry, and at least one demographer estimates that seventy-one percent of all native U.S. citizens have names of Germanic origin. The maps at the top here show the areas where German-American citizens are concentrated (shades of red) and where they are the majority (blue).

When you hear the "silent majority" spoken of, the maps are something to think about.

It is also true, incidentally, that Irish-Americans constitute another 10.8 percent of the U.S. population. Neither can their contribution to the nation and culture that the United States became be questioned. It's a matter of historical record. Fact.

It's also a matter of historical record that the ethos of the United States was that of the people who built her. It was long known as the "protestant work ethic." The term was first coined by Max Weber, a German, in his essay, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." Whereas the people of countries like Spain, Italy and France historically had a more relaxed attitude toward work, the ethic holding that work defined people in turn defined the societies of Northern Europe and the countries where Protestantism was strong - the countries whose people soon comprised the vast majority of U.S. citizens.

It is interesting to note (and maybe a little inflammatory - the truth often stings, like I said) a comparison once made by Albert Camus (I think), that of the Germanic Law and religions as opposed to those of the Mediterranean peoples. In Greek and Mediterranean mythology, a king named Sisyphus was condemned to push a heavy rock up a hill only to have it roll down again each time. For eternity. Strangely, Camus noted, in the Germanic legends, a man similarly struggled all day only to fail - be wounded or killed on the battlefield. Collected from the field and taken to Valhalla by goddesses called Valkyries, he was healed - to return each time to his labors on the battlefield.

To the German, Sisyphus was in heaven. To the Mediterranean peoples, he was in hell. To the German, heaven was a physical place of ideal living and labor; to the Greek, the Roman, or the Arab, it was a spiritual place of ease and comfort.

When I was reared, what might be called "the John Wayne" version of the ethic was considered sine qua non. Nothing else was honorable, or acceptable. "Americans" regarded it as the keystone of national prosperity. So steeped in it was I that for me it was synonymous with the "Yankee Spirit" everyone attributed to themselves and their nation. It was celebrated by everyone, nowhere more than in the paintings of Norman Rockwell and in the movie screen persona of John Wayne. "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do those things to other people, and I expect the same of them" - Wayne's lines in the role of the "Shootist" - was part of it.

It was indisputably masculine - rooted in maleness and a kind of knighthood. A man - it was a title much more than gender, then - was loyal to his country, polite to women, kind to children and animals, and he kept his word. He worked hard, but held wealth in contempt as axiomatic proof of dishonesty and robber tendencies. "Corporate America" wasn't held in high regard, even then.

Recently, I've had some nasty things to say about corporate capitalism, and my remarks have drawn some of the heaviest cannonades of invective ever for this website. "Capitalists" - especially the would-be or wannabe variety - do not tolerate any offense of their religion. They will not permit any of what they see as equivocation, either. All capitalism is good. Capitalism that uses women like pigs and sheep, sells its wives and daughters - even its mothers and grandmothers - is good. Anything short of actually brutal rape, after all, the woman wants. The poor are that way because they choose to be, too. Vae victis (woe to the vanquished). Et cetera.

Sorry, but that is NOT the Protestant Work Ethic of the German. That's the Mediterranean ethic of Arab and the Moor, where kings, sheiks, and royalty still flourish, still enslave as many as they can, and measure their supposed greatness and worth in those terms. It's historian Quigley's Iran-Peru Axis, where patronage and strong-man government has long had the same result.

During my lifetime, lamentably, I've watched as the nation that is the U.S. - Land of the Free - changed its Germanic Sisyphus to the Greek, Mediterranean, Arab one. To work all day for a lifetime has become a definition for hell. One does not work, one has a "career." "Success" is to gain ascendancy over others by any means possible, in order to have them working for you. Slavery, once hated enough to fight and die in civil war over, now is a matter of justification. Peonage is moral. Slavery isn't.

A man in the same conditions as a slave once was - even if he eats less and lives in worse squalor - is no longer a slave, his master no longer a slaver, because he is paid something.

Today's Horatio Alger - remember him? Rags to Riches? - dreams of being a sheik, a king. To labor, to sweat, after all, is unbecoming, even "un-American." No young lady dreams of marrying (were she to do so equally a demeaning thing) a man who earns his living with his muscles or physical skills.

Even the definition of male has changed. The "metrosexuality" of Leonardo diCaprio has supplanted the masculinity of John Wayne. Today's nubile woman dreams of a "sensitive" man, one dominated by his need to give her a life of financially secure ease. Fancying his mind more than his body, she considers his clothes, his car, and his income before his physique. In society, to take a lady's hand nowadays with a calloused one all but invariably signals the end of the "relationship."

Some years ago, parenthetically, a survey I did revealed that seventy-six of one hundred people younger than twenty didn't know what a callus was. Not long ago, a commercial (inadvertently) pointed out that grade-schoolers did not aspire to work - which was "failure."

In short, in the Home of the Brave, where men once demanded only to be left alone to work, the masculine republic has given way to the feminine democracy. One the hallmark of the society, the male spirit of individual independence has given way to the female spirit of social and group dependence. A people who once considered government dependent upon them now depend upon government. Once willing, eager to work, we now look for someone to work for us.

Poet Carl Sandburg's "big, brawling," hard-working nation of the big shoulders is now the chintzy, limp-wristed nation of consumers.

Almost daily now, we are told that illegal aliens are a great benefit to the nation, because they will do work U.S. citizens won't. And who can rationally argue when the same apologists say that corporate capitalists - the U.S. version of the Mediterranean kings, sheiks, patrons, and strong-man rulers - need the workers their kind have always exploited?

Of course, I see these things because I have been watching for a very long time, lived before all the changes started. I know how it was, and see how it is. Time was, in just about every society, ever, that that kind of knowledge was something sought ardently, sometimes even desperately, by the young. No more. Today, the study of history has gone the way of hard work and the callus. Siegfried and Lohengrin are no longer the archetypical male, the hero of legend. The Democratic Capitalism of the Protestant Work Ethic has given way to that of the despotic Mediterranean Ethic.

The Germanic Sisyphus has become the Greek.

The Stupidest Things Ever Said (Haven't Been - Yet)

ON a book shelf near where I type, there's a book entitled "The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said." The book has 220 pages.

On my computer, I have a file entitled S.T.E.S.O.I.T.- Stupidest Things Ever Said On the Internet and Television. Weeding-out for comparison the television stuff and arranging the file in the same format as the book, STESOI - STESOIT without the "T" for television - has 990 entries, on 600 pages. There are things like the guy who responded to my reference to Hans Christian Anderson's "the Emperor's New Clothes" by saying he hadn't seen the movie but George Bush was a tactical genius (or the like - I forget), the woman who snapped when I spoke of the turn of the century that she had better things to do with her time than study "old news" (history), so she - "of course" - didn't know what I was talking about, and the lady who excused her advocacy of guns bans by saying that "self defense never excuses killing somebody."

A fellow named Devonelle (I think he's a guy - how do you tell when it's only an e-mail and it's a name like that?) wanted to know "What difference does a few billion fucking dollars make - really?" And then there was Tom, who sniffed when I prefaced my proof of the existence of god with the observation that the question first required agreement upon the definition of the word "god" that my statement "begs the question." To my query as to how that was, he replied - using four full lines on his Yahoo e-mail - that it was "axiomatic, which means obvious."

Oh, and I'm a "wacked out, stupid fucking neo-con nazi nut case." Geez, Tom – that proves I’m wrong, and believing in god also makes me a conservative? Interesting.

Oh, and then there was the pièce de résistance - the guy who said President Bush wasn't a liar because Saddam Hussein "probably buried all his factories so we wouldn't be able to find them." Asked how he thought that might have been accomplished without notice by all the UN inspectors and U.S. Special Forces Teams there, the U-2 and "no fly zone" enforcing fly-overs, and spy satellite surveillance, he said "they can do a lot of things like that nowadays."

Several persons writing on the Truthout Forum website would also believe that, apparently. That's inasmuch as they also believe (stridently and obstreperously) that the U.S. Government was somehow able to accomplish largely the same kind of stealth when it brought down the World Trade Center by controlled demolition.

"'Splain dat one, Luci!"

That's right. The folks who know the President is lying because nobody could possibly have done something like make weapons of mass destruction without having been detected know that our own government was nevertheless able to conceal from literally tens - probably hundreds - of thousands of people the massive operation necessary to prepare and accomplish controlled demolition of a building many times larger than the biggest building ever previously demolished.

"Sure," says Baby Huey, "that sounds logical."

And, I suppose, these same folks also wonder how we came to have in the nation's highest office a man who says things like:

“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.” (George Orwell, how right you were!)

"I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel." (Huh?)

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." (We've noticed - George, that's as impossible was what you're supposedly trying to do there)

"One has a stronger hand when there's more people playing your same cards." (Reminds one of the Secretary of Education who said the reason our schools are in such trouble is that he "chickens have literally come home to roost" - that would do it, all right)

"Anybody who is in a position to serve this country ought to understand the consequences of words." (Among other things, George - among other things)

"You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war President. No President wants to be a war President, but I am one." (What can you say to that?)

"And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it." (Our President has a lot of trouble with pronoun reference, doesn't he?)

"I think that the vice president is a person reflecting a half-glass-full mentality." (Compliments will get you everywhere, won't they?)

"And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life's moving on, that they're able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table." (George, that's exactly how we feel . . . maybe; well, we guess - probably)

"The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope -- an ideology of hate -- excuse me --with an ideology of hope." (Oh, boy - what did he say?)

"Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." (But George, the question didn't mention IRS at all . . .)

And so on. If you're laughing (you think this is FUNNY?), you might want to consider that today's Internet chatrooms, forums, and blogs are replete with the same kind of thing. Here are a couple, lest you think I jest.

http://www.useless-knowledge.com/
http://www.truthout.org/


Another site, featuring some interesting reasoning and science is:

http://www.proudtobecanadian.ca/index/writergroup/

An interesting headline there, for instance, is "Anna Nicole Smiths (sic) death blamed on global warming." As is all but invariably the case when I write to ask pointed questions having to do with subject matter - in this case meteorology, the Coriolis Effect or Force, formula for oceanic to atmospheric carbon dioxide transfer, and the like - I get either no response whatever (the case in this instance) or a swiftly hunted up and plagiarized dissertation the polemicist has just obtained from the Internet.

Like one character arguing for the conspiracy theory having to do with the Word Trade Center disaster and controlled demolition, they are caught by a computer program used by teachers everywhere for that very purpose. For whatever-his-moniker was, the impossible mathematical probability of his having picked literally hundreds of identical words, arranged in the identical order, as the original author was decisive. Pick a subject in the news, then peruse the internet forums and do the same, you'll get the same results.

Interestingly, too, pick a subject NOT in the news, anything otherwise esoteric, then ask the same people. Not a clue. Make it as dirt simple, mundane and commonly known elsewhere on the globe, as you like. Nothing. Point? The public here in "America" gets its opinions not from their minds, but from the media (their other mind). Until they've heard their favorite political pundit - or, presumably, otherwise - they HAVE no opinion. Usually, they knew utterly nothing about the matter before it became news.

Journalism, inflicted by both print and electronic media, isn't better. You wonder whose mind it is they listen to. As I've asked before here, how does a columnist come up with the same Conservative or Liberal viewpoint on every issue. Isn't one very definite possibility obviously so? Yeah, the government.

It's interesting, too that the higher one goes in the hierarchy of news analysts and pundits, the more uniform - not only having to do with left or right politically, but having to do with what might be called supervisory control - "reporting" and "opinion" becomes. At the local level, things journalistic get pretty comical, for instance. "Children who have been artificially inseminated ought to have the right to know," a bloviating editorial in a Texas newspaper trumpets. Another demands a state-funded study to learn "why so many people in South Texas are born with half a brain" (what I want to know personally is how the otherwise unfortunate so often get elected president). Discourse, reporting, and debate on television is so riddled with so much of the same as to be useless for anything except derisive laughter.

But it's interesting that one finds that sort of thing, specifically, more often the lower down the pecking-order of the media one gets. What, only the national-level news media can write a good, and circumspect, sentence? Or is someone proof-reading - or censoring - more carefully. Or dictatorially.

Can anyone imagine finding a verbal pratfall like the "half a brain" quote in Stalinist-era Pravda? How about a Chinese newspaper during the time of Mao?

Mention of Stalin and Mao, however, reminds me that sometimes the polemicists and pundits aren't so funny. Have a look at these websites, then read the argument there.

The issue having to do with ownership of firearms is a representative example of any here in the Land of Free Speech. A visitor from another planet (or, unfortunately, country) would quickly make an assessment of the public's ability to solve problems or control their destinies by way of discourse and reason. Anyone who looks at the sites above, then does the research necessary to get an informed opinion must at once begin to wonder why proponents of gun control and legislation to that end find it either supportive of their dyslogistic point of view or their public reputation - at least among honest and honorable people - to lie. Obviously, they are not interested in informed debate, and not willing to let anyone decide intelligently for himself. Whether this is due political methodology or the responsible for it is a chicken or the egg question.

Before reading the various websites and blogs, you would do well to look up and understand the classic fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. Pick any debate today, you'll hear it argued again and again, ad nauseam. Here's one site:

http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/irrelev.htm

Once you know a "beside the point" argument, proceed:

http://www.goodbyeguns.org/
http://www.bradycenter.org/
http://www.stophandgunviolence.com/ (Read this one, then look up the statistics)
http://www.vahv.org/
http://www.spectacle.org/295/guns.html
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment02/ (Read the cases, then read the claims made elsewhere about them.)
http://www.guncite.com/journals/dowrkba.html (Copyright © 1982 Oklahoma City University Law Review.)
http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?ID=841 (Number of state laws referring to the issue.)

The other side of the issue, for one reason or the other (ulterior motives are possible, even likely, in an debate here), is as diametrically opposed in method as it is in viewpoint. Read the websites supportive of "the right to bear arms," then - once you've done the necessary research - count the prevarications. You'll see something very interesting.

I make no further comment. The conclusions are yours (let's see if you can, free of bias, do that).

Neither is self-deception and aggrandizement, sophist paralysis by analysis, the drive for power and political control of others, together with dysphasia and solecism, malaprop, and tangled rhetoric the only example of our nationally stupefied state. Tired almost to death of the bloviating B.S. and balderdash being foisted on the U.S. media by so-called analysts and pundits, those "nationally-recognized authorities" we hear from so often - to say nothing of what seems to be tens of thousands of politically-oriented "bloggers" who obviously know damned little or nothing about the "issue" they're yapping about - I considered briefly issuing a challenge here: "Let's debate. Let's see how the drivel you're peddling stands up to mathematical, scientific, and logical analysis."

I've changed my mind. It wouldn't accomplish anything. As a grandfather once said, "The only one who argues with a jackass is a jackass."

But I'm still going to peruse the blogs, the forums and what have you, picking out gems like those I've already written about here. In a kind of gallows humor manner, it's good for laughs (by the way, I've quite a collection of Bushisms from the George W. branch of the Bush League; maybe I'll start publishing them. Meanwhile, here are a few sites with a collection:
http://www.hud.gov/news/speeches/presremarks.cfm
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm
http://www.slate.com/id/76886/

Then, too, daddy George H.W. Bush was no slouch in the foot-in-mouth department, either. Check these:

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnyquotes/a/georgehwbushism.htm

The Media Matters http://mediamatters.org/ e-mails me dozens of example of fractured reasoning, goofy pronouncements, and outright falsehood of the calculated and deliberate kind from journalists, pundits, analysts, and the like. Mention of Media Matters, incidentally, sometimes drives FoxNews - especially Bill O'Reilly - to nearly incoherent diatribe. As I say here often, I watch Fox almost religiously, solely for study in order to stay abreast of the state-of-the-art where Bush League propaganda methods are concerned.

Rita, more emotional, can't stand to see Sean Hannity go on breathing and leaves the room. I don't know why she doesn't see the humor. Femaleness, I guess.

Anyway, I propose to begin a much more intensive perusal of the blogs. More, I intend to challenge the nation's political pundits. It's time someone did, and on grounds more varied than simply the lies and inconsistent statements noted by Media Matters. Much of this yields truth to mathematical, scientific, and logical examination. Much of "it's a matter of opinion" ISN'T a matter of opinion - it's mathematically, scientifically, and logically false.

Of course, most "Americans" - smugly corrupted and decadent as they are - don't care what the reality of their latest pet "issue" is (for examples of that particular syndrome, go to Archives here, find "ravenqueen," "vivi." "eyeswideopen," "amoeba," "TJ," and others).

But there are those who do. "Have gun, will travel," and these days, to do the one, you have to do the other. It's a very intellectual - cerebral, even - country.

A History Lesson-More of Those "Inconvenient Truths"

This will elicit the blizzard of billingsgate and bullshit otherwise that any perceived assault upon any sacred cow always does, but it’s also what I’ve been doing since I was a kid – sixty years ago. I suppose it’s because I believe most people are like Sir Winston Churchill once said of himself - always ready to learn, but not always willing to be taught. More, I’ve always thought that to take someone’s part was one thing; to teach him to take his own part was quite another.

That’s especially in the knowledge that he might one day use his lesson to compete with his one-time teacher - you.

The “cow” is the way we repair inexorably these days to politics in order to decide all things, even science, physics, and what is reality in what has become as a result a nation of legislated and litigated psychosis. I’ve already incurred the wrath of the femininazi; today, I cape the bull that is homosexuality, together with “gay” marriage and all the peculiar psychology and sociology related and resulted from it.

As it did with the historically sudden demand of society’s distaff side for “liberation,” society has decided with equally sudden and ill-considered haste to embrace the aberrant ideation and behavior that has to do with homosexuality. In a manner similar to that being demanded today by corporate interests where global warming is concerned, society has decided in the manner of schoolboys once to grab its nose and, totally uncaring, unconcerned, and oblivious to what may lie below the surface of the waters, dive in headlong.

Diagnosed with a malady of uncertain identity or effect, doctor and patient have decided to “wait and see what happens.” Thanks, but no thanks.

Now, up front, I have all but no interest in the sexual practices of adults other than myself. Like whatever others eat, drink, or live with and in, I just don’t give a damn. But nothing ever stays at that nowadays, does it? Not only is the government at every keyhole with its ear, every window with its eye, invading every inner sanctum of privacy imaginable, we are forced not only to condone, but to have our noses rubbed in, every new what-the-hell-made-them-think-of-THAT, shit-wallowing behavior conceivable by the mischievously ever-questing mind of man.

Among the rights that have somehow been relegated to secondary, even tertiary, status – the rights of normal people, in other words – we find the once sacrosanct right of free association. There was a time, for instance, when your penchant, proclivity, salve and balm for the soul need to use invective and foul-mouthed speech, was something to which I didn’t have to be subjected. You might choose to spit on the floor, even blow your nose there when and while you dine, but I didn’t have to tolerate it. No more, it seems. Watching current trends, can anyone doubt that soon convicted pedophiles and pedo-rapists may get together as a lobby and demand legislation making it illegal to discriminate against them when they apply for work as a teacher?

Their cause, after all, would require only the political construction by political means of one more new reality. “Pedophilia is natural,” it might go – “it’s been with us forever.” Just, in other words (there will be those who don’t “get my drift”) borrow the campaigning rhetoric of homosexual “America” and substitute the appropriate words

Don’t laugh: illegal aliens are already so numerous – and therefore politically powerful – that they have become a force in the “nation of laws.” So empowered, making demands under the very legal system and laws they are violating, they resemble feminism and the manner with which it availed itself of the world, society, and circumstances built by the male in order to vilify him.

In the world of politically-created reality, chutzpah has now become law.

And, as I’ve been saying, that’s not all there is to it. These are not insignificant matters, not where there implications for society and species are concerned. The social tinkering begun in the sixties with feminism and its minimalist followers represents a fearsome gamble. For example – still another – of what I mean, consider that of my car loan. No, I’m not kidding – mathematical models are powerful ones, powerful in that they are conclusive – no debate possible.

The other night, I found reason to wonder concerning the car loan lender’s statement of the account. The formula for compound interest and number of remaining payments on my now four and a half year old loan isn’t all that tough – I’ve done it literally hundreds of times on something like three dozen cars, now – but this time I kept getting a strange result. Unless it’s the taxpayer paying Halliburton for it, four hundred eighty thousand dollars still to pay on a Toyota Corolla is pretty obviously incorrect.

What the hell was I doing? Switching from the new calculator I was using to my old faithful one, I punched in the numbers some more. Still goofy. WHAT? Well, the calculator-literate probably know already: those damned parenthesis – one little punch of a button – can make a hell of a mess of even something this simple. When I realized, the resulting number was perfect - $1633.25. Five more payments.

But you don’t care about that. The point is that with any complex system or equation – like life, society, and life in society – a little, bitty, seemingly insignificant effect anywhere can have a great, bit, fatal one elsewhere. A butterfly flipping its wings in Borneo causes a hurricane in the Atlantic, so to speak - “The Butterfly Effect,” some call it.

The societal Butterfly Effective of feminism on our nation is everywhere evident nowadays. On account of that particular politically-created reality I now have to live in the same world with the kids reared in those one-parent families we heard so much about back there in the days of Helen Reddy, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Whatever-the-Hell-Her-Name-Was. Those “single-parent family” kids are the same half-witted little animals who now roam the streets like dingo dogs, terrorize schools, teachers, and one another, and suck drugs like kids once sucked cherry soda. The ravening little lunatics who walk into schools and start shooting, rake houses with gunfire as they dive by, and beat the homeless to death with clubs and what-have-you, just for the hell of it, I mean.

“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was a pretty stupid idea, even for the kind of morons we heard to recite the ludicrous litanies of feminism back there in the benighted sixties. We went down that darkened street, pedal to the metal and no headlights, didn’t we? But now that the crash in the form of today’s feral dog youth has come, where are all the social tinkerers - now that it’s time to own up?

So now, likewise a couple of decades into the new societal “revolution” that is homosexuality, we have “gay marriage.” People born or otherwise deformed mentally and/or emotionally are demanding their “rights.” More power to you, as far as that goes. If you want to legalize your illness or defect, thus all but insuring that society will ignore any opportunity for research – stem cells, for instance – into correcting it, fine. I don’t care.

If you want to live in a state equivalent to having a taste for tree bark, lawn grass, or camel dung or choosing to take your nourishment only by enema or needle, good for you. Wear a bone in your nose, chant inanely like a psychotic parrot, and leap up and down like a rabid rabbit when you recreate if you want to, I don’t care. You get your sexual kicks by backing up to the exhaust pipe on a car if that’s what turns you on – any of it - but for all your single-minded, self-interested and self-indulgent, civil rights activist fervor, that’s not all there is to this.

There’s also an ideal called personal responsibility. Like the U.S. Constitution in the mind of our Attorney General, it’s an old and archaic ideal, but like that “old document,” responsibility or the lack of it today has its effect – maybe the Butterfly Effect – on the future.

People like Mary Cheney, the vice-president’s daughter, may want to by-pass the usual manner of conceiving life, but that also happens to be where the rest of us have a right to draw the line. How do Mary and her – “partner,” is it? - know that the kid they want to bring up in Strangeville, state of Never-Never-Before know that the result won’t be a Frankenstein Monster?

Politics what it is, we may let the liberal side of society ACLU most of the child-molesters out into their happy hunting ground without damage to future society, but I don’t think so. There are simple and immutable laws of nature and physics to answer here, and no amount of political power and determination can change them. The Flat Earth Society folks can get themselves a lobbyist and buy legislation, or buy a judge and get law declaring the world flat and making it a crime to say or act otherwise, but the world and most of its people will still behave as though the planet they occupy is round.

You may never have thought of it, but to believe that the world flat was for centuries like putting a strait-jacket on the mind of man.

You might, parenthetically, also do well to consider the implications of the fact that the ancient Greeks not only knew the Earth to be round, but that it was moving around the sun. Eratostenes of Cyrene, 275-194 B.C., actually measured accurately the circumference of the Earth. It was religious and political correctness that for centuries kept the rest of the world in the enforced ignorance of the Dark Ages.

I mentioned the “global warming is just natural” people. Shear genius – like a guy who got the shits some time back, a little while after he starts drinking water from the new well, but he’s going to kept drinking the same water and see what happens. You can’t save people like that, but you’re a fool if you live like them.

You probably know how I see corollaries in everything, and there are several here. Time was, that a lot of things that have become matters for thought didn’t make any real difference. That was, for one thing, back there when there were less than a billion of us on the planet. There are more than eight billion now. If you really think that makes no difference, I hope you’re not in charge of anything that has to do with me.

Another of those ACLU liberties that means license has to do with race. It’s the law that we are all equal. But because the society’s law says so doesn’t mean a thing to the laws of nature. Of late, a young black woman has been appearing on the Paula Zahn show. Lauren Lake is one of the duo of black women who recently condemned a senator for saying that Barak Obama was “articulate.” “Condescending,” the women asseverated. Full of herself and what must seem to her to be the newly found power of political correctness, Ms. Lake pipes the litanies of black liberation like a canary sings its song. Her eager glee with her politically-derived prerogative fairly exudes from the television set.

She is also totally oblivious. I would, as a matter of fact, be willing to bet that she would be unable to name even twenty – make that five - of the societal forces that have brought her to political ascendancy. In fact, she couldn’t, even if she knew. She would rather swallow a toad than say aloud what is - unless you have a bag over your head or the ideological equivalent - mountainously obvious.

As I pointed out here some time ago, the contribution of just the white male to everything the United States of America is has been absolutely critical.

But so intent upon inflicting upon the nation the supposed guilt derived of the memory of slavery are people like Ms. Lake that the obvious is unspeakable. I also remarked recently that I intended to vote for Hillary Clinton. We need, I said, to settle the “issues” once and for all. I’ve decided to hope the same for black people. I hope they get everything they demand. I wish they could be put in charge tomorrow.

This isn’t, after all, like global warming. The same people who built the U.S. can probably – in theory, at least – rebuild it once the inevitable happens. Africa, as I noted, is incontrovertible the way it is because of Africans, Mexico the way it is because of Mexicans, and the U.S. today the way it is because of what we’ve become. History is also a scoreboard, and the numbers there are inexorable.

“What you are thunders so loudly, I can’t hear what you say to the contrary.”

There’s even more. My own value judgments on the subject are neutral – they have to be, because I don’t know – but it is very apparent that the human race is changing color. People of non-European descent, in other words, have a much higher birth rate than people of European descent. As is the incontrovertible fact where the nation is concerned, civilization owes by far most of its scientific knowledge and progress to the white race. Sure, we – I mean we humans – have taken some steps backward, and done some pretty stupid things, but there’s no denying that we have come a very long way with our civilization. Just as people pouring into the United States built by the white, German and Anglo-Saxon (males) peoples need to stop and think concerning whether they want to turn the nation into whatever it was that they came here to flee, the species itself needs to consider where it came from.

The farther backward you can look, you know, the farther forward you are likely to see.

It is simply a fact of history, for instance, that until the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon idea of “Menschenrechte” – human rights - equality as stated and enshrined in the Constitution of the U.S., the history of mankind was that of one man or a few conquering and enslaving as many of his fellows as possible. Slaveholders were former slaves, and vice versa. The supposed divine right of kings, tyrants, and their secular equivalents - the right of might, in other words - governed and was enshrined in religion everywhere.

Like I say, we’ve come a long way. The future of mankind and its civilization is also a genetic one. Our species may - almost certainly will – evolve into another. We need to think about, and discuss intelligently – in a manner other than that of people like Lauren Lake, I mean – what that may mean.

It may be of some comfort to everyone I seem to depreciate here that the make-up of the human race having to do with what we like to call “race” is ephemeral in terms of species ontogeny. It is a logically inescapable consequence of evolution that all of the races or the characteristics that distinguish them apparent today will change to the point that they become indistinguishable. Unfortunately - especially if we persist in the condition we’re found in at present - that probably means we will simply find other forms of “race” with which to preserve prejudice, bigotry, and all the hateful rest.

What mankind needs most urgently to consider is what the “no child left behind” form of political correctness would – will? – mean, were it to be the rule used to guide all of human progress and evolution. Do we swap Mother Nature’s “Survival of the Fittest” rule for “No One Left Behind?” Jeffersonian Democracy for African tribalism?

A corollary - one having to do with concerns more immediate than those of the evolutionary vicissitudes having to do with human genetics - has to do with economics. The world can no longer tolerate the infantile competition that is capitalism, and – like the United States - is turning toward socialism in its several forms. The process is likewise one of evolution and it is as implacably inexorable. The forces operating there are also obvious, the most obvious being the simple fact that the capitalist is running out of planet and environment to “capitalize.” What remains, of course, is people.

But people, unlike the Earth and its substance, think and emote. All capitalism, in whatever form, begins with and takes its sustenance from colonialism in some form. Something, someone is exploited. A river, and ocean, a forest or a mountain doesn’t care. It gives until it has nothing more to give. People are often like that, too, of course, but they are aware – and just as awareness has decided much of human progress, it will also provide the determinate vector where economic evolution is concerned. The choice again is between ruling and deciding our circumstances or letting them rule and decide for us.

Of course, it may be that we will do the latter, and that may mean a pause in human kind’s progress, even a retrograde movement. That’s happened before, and it may not be up to us; nevertheless, I would rather think that what happens is in spite of what we did, rather than on its account.

There are many, many more “issues” – all of them having to do with great problems facing our kind and its progeny. None, however, is more crucial in my judgment than what has happened to our one, great evolved strength as homo sapiens, that of communicative discourse. In fact, solutions to all the problems I have been discussing here inevitably depend upon it; and much of the bitterness and rancor associated with those same issues has also been exacerbated immensely by the devolution of our ability to reason and debate effectively and therefore productively. Something to which I’ve had reference here before, the utterly appalling state of our societal forensics and logic processes now leads us from one inextricable mess to another. I can’t help saying “Iraq.” It’s the archetype.

As an aside, I might add that I find the subject to be one particularly galling. It’s one thing to be a victim of circumstance, it’s another to be one out of shear stupidity. It’s even worse when you saw it all coming, couldn’t convince your peers to get out of the way, and now have to pay the price with them. It’s the reason I write these essays.

The subject of the public’s crippled discourse, its root causes, and the like are to voluminous for this essay, so I’ll continue it at a later time. For now, I’ll just make the observation that many of the issues whose debate have us at a historical standstill, in a kind of political paralysis by asinine over-analysis and in real danger of serious retrograde movement societally and nationally, could be assuaged, even cured, by a real effort to “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”

It might, moreover, mean “ask not what you can do for your race.” Or “for your gender,” “your religion,” or whatever.

And it may even be that what you’re sacrificing for is “your species.” Or “your planet.”

Of course, that was John Kennedy. I also paraphrase the indomitably lucid Sir Winston Churchill: If you will not do what is right when you can do it with comparatively little effort, if you will not try when your success is likely and not very expensive, you may come to the moment when you have to try with all the odds against you and only a small chance of success. There may be even a worse case: you may have to try when there is no hope of success, because it is better to die than live with the result of your refusal to act.

You know, you see, even if you think about it only a little, that it’s going to come to that eventually. That’s the lesson of history.

Wow—Another exposé: First, Anna Nicole, and Now the VA!

Guess what? The media has discovered that our veterans are getting sorry-ass care. Wow – more Britney Spears (shorn hair on sale for a million dollars), Princess Diana, Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, Anna Nicole Smith, Nancy Grace-Greta van Susteren "missing-woman-of-the-week“. . . news.”

Does anybody imagine that anyone listening from outside the county has any doubt about what really motivates the U.S., foreign policy or otherwise? How meretricious, greed-minimalist miserable can you get? Keep watching; we’ll top it next week - bet on it.

The fact of the matter is that the truth of Veteran’s Administration mistreatment and abuse of U.S. vets was all in the book I first published seven years ago, so don’t say I didn’t tell you so. It was in 1989, doing a Knight Errant operation for a disabled soldier, that I first penetrated the inner sanctums of the Veteran’s Administration. Even when I found evidence that the benefits of thousands of veterans were being systematically stolen by bureaucrats there, and sought assistance from people like U.S. Congressmen and Senators Joel Hefley and Hank Brown of Colorado, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, Senator David Pryor of Arkansas, and others, no one paid the slightest attention.

When, moreover, I forwarded proof, not only to the lawmakers, but to all the major media, even people like Geraldo Rivera, programs like 60 Minutes, Twenty-Twenty, and the like, I got similar response. I even wrote to Soldier of Fortune Magazine. Same result. Gee whiz.

As I type this, Ted Koppel is on NPR, telling about thirty-five years ago and a “Potemkin Village” scene foisted then upon the Richard Nixon delegation to China by the “Red Chinese.

The story of one disabled soldier and the VA is excerpted here from my book, first published in 2000, and goes like this:


Richard Benton was one of what seems to have been dozens, even hundreds, of men subjected by the CIA to the RHIC-EDOM RHIC-EIOCI – “Radio-Hypnotic, Inter-Cerebral-Electronic Implantation of Controlled Ideation” - programs funded by the Congress in HR 15090. Generally, the government’s victims were people the plenipotentiary always considers expendable, people like the prisoners, drunks, addicts, and prostitutes who became Guinea pigs in the vile MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, and MKNAOMI experiments. Sometimes, though, they used another group society always considers expendable, soldiers. Richard was a soldier.

The primary effort of the experiments was to develop methods similar to that celebrated in the move entitled The Manchurian Candidate. Whether it was successful where Richard is concerned may yet remain to be seen. As it is, Sergeant Benton, a bronze star recipient in Vietnam, was discharged as unfit for further service, his diagnosis that of “atypical psychosis.” Richard, of course, wasn’t alone. A man named Hadley Washington – another soldier - also underwent similar treatment, so similar that there can be little doubt as to its purpose. Both men believed – the latter has passed away – that they were subjected to ECT, Electro-Convulsive Therapy. That’s strange, because in both cases, the original cause for their having been admitted to treatment was listed as appendicitis.

When Benton had been in the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital for thirteen months, hospital records – more about those in a minute – show that he received medication unlike anything any doctor I could find would have associated with either appendicitis or electro-convulsive therapy.
More significant, perhaps, was the fact that when I initially – with written authorization from Sergeant Benton – requested the records, the Army denied ever having had Richard for a patient. Through repeated phone calls, they continued their denials. Walter Reed Hospital’s denials continued even after I had recovered the records by means surreptitious and made them available to a U.S. Senator, Hank Brown of Colorado.


I met Sergeant First Class W.R. Benton after he happened to hear me being interviewed on radio one night. Once having talked to with him and learned that the decorated and totally disabled Vietnam vet was getting “benefits” totaling $320 a month, I took the customary, this-is-the-U.S.-and-the-system-works measures. What happened?

If you thought “nothing,” you’re not only getting ahead of my story, you may have dealt with the U.S. government before. Six months into it all, I sought legal assistance from attorneys, too, among them a man referred to me as the “best VA attorney in Colorado.” Guess what happened? Yeah. “Nada,” as I said in my book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” “zip, zilch, bupkis.”

Undaunted, as the old cliché goes, and already engaged then in covert operations against several agencies of the criminal conspiracy that functions as government in the Nation of Laws, I did my “thing.” Confronted with Army hospitals denying any record of Benton’s treatment, I ninja-finessed a stack of records, then took them to the office of first Congressman Joel Hefley, then Senator Hank Brown.

It wasn’t until I added parts of the congressional record of the CIA MKULTRA stuff, though, that government paid even the slightest attention to my “ankle-biter” – a reference to yours truly obtained from one of my surveillance microphones - efforts. Then, “attention” went from zero to sixty – that being several attempts at mayhem attempts – with the acceleration of a scalded dog.

That’s all beside the point here, actually – suffice it to say that I had thrown a skunk into a federal chicken coop. Sergeant First Class W.R. Benton, you see, was had been a cryptographer at the Pentagon.

But, as I say, I digress. It is also a fact more relevant to the subject that I had begun having Benton wear a “wire” during his interviews with “counselors” at the Veteran’s Administration. The tapes, all sent to all the people I have mentioned here already, uncovered and recorded threats and brow-beating, contemptuous and insulting treatment, and incontrovertible evidence of both VA employee involvement in the attempts at assault on me, but grossly illegal surveillance and wiretapping.

This was 1989, let’s be reminded. 9-11 and the War on Terror began in 2001. Do you suppose the VA had gone to the FISA court? Maybe President Reagan has made one of those “signing statements” we’re hearing so much about?

Anyway, guess what happened. If you thought “nothing,” you’re not only getting ahead of the story, you know more about the media than most. But the VA reacted with the fury suggested by the muggings and other behavior typical of our federal protectors; then, however, the hearing that everyone – initially including Congressman Hefley and Senator Brown’s offices, the VA attorney, and the VA itself - said was impossible was suddenly “granted.”

The letter, incidentally said, “audience is granted.” Audience – does that maybe tell you something about the VA’s attitude where soldiers are concerned?

I would be remiss here, were I to fail to point out that Sergeant Benton’s appeal for full benefits had been rejected on account of his having failed to fill out properly or file on time the paperwork required by the administration. His disability, we should recall, was “atypical psychosis.”

Having at first been denied the apparent privilege of representing Sgt. Benton at hearings, the government inadvertently (apparently) provided me with a two-birds-with-one-stone kill when it conceded that as a retired Army officer I was by VA law permitted to do so. The Army had long – still does, until recently – deny that I am even so much as a veteran (during application for Social Security benefits and the fight that particular involvement with government entailed, the Department of the Army “conceded” – “for purposes of social security and veteran’s benefits” – that I “had military service.”).

The truth – however the nation’s propagandizing media would have us all believe – is that, like each and every one of the federal agencies of government I infiltrated, the Veteran’s Administration is rotten to the proverbial core. This is the United States of America, let us not forget, the bastion of Brobdingnagian Capitalism.

As Johanna, the heroine of my novel, says, “You can never trust a yanqui capitalist – everything is for sale.”

Military Industrialist Capitalism and the 1,000 Yard Stare

Does anybody remember the famous picture from Word War Two—"The Thousand Yard Stare?" It always reminded me of the way the rich treat the poor. It's the latter, of course, who always pay the price of being rich; no, I didn't say get rich—I said pay the price. This "Thousand Yard Stare" is from our country's latest Little Big Horn, Iraq. Another kid paying the price of somebody else's riches. That's the fundamental meaning of "capitalism," let's not forget.

For an example, and just by way of reminder, here's something from Jim Hightower's site, www.Alternet.org

"'Since leaving Halliburton to become George Bush's vice-president, I've severed all of my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind.' --Former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 2003."

Since 2001, on the other hand, this is what Halliburton has paid Mr. Cheney.

2001: $205,298

2002: $162,392

2003: $178,437

2004: $194,852

2005: $211,465

Halliburton's "cash bonus" paid to Vice-President Cheney just before he took office was $1.4 million. His "retirement package," given to him in 2000 (after FIVE years as CEO was $20 million. According to Slate magazine, President George W. Bush has a net worth of around nine to twenty-six million.

We might recall that during the Vietnam War, Mr. Cheney asked for and got five deferments, the better to assure that he would never have that "thousand yard stare." President Bush, scion of a multi-millionaire family, of course, ducked the war by learning to fly jets for the Texas National Guard. No danger of the "stare" for him, either.

As FoxNews Bill O'Reilly is wont to say, "If you're poor, you're gonna get hammered."

And, when somebody threatens the rich and what they live for, you'll get a uniform, and a rifle; and, soon thereafter, probably, that "thousand yard stare." The following, by request from two guys named "Don and Carl in Iraq," is a reprise of my essay of Sept. 16, 2005. I like it, too, because it deals with yet another of “America’s” myths:

"Poverty as Viewed by the United States"

"In the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega, the old Zorro, is instructing the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, concerning a party they will attend in disguise. Raphael Montero, the story’s villain, will not recognize his old enemy de la Vega, Hopkins, says, because a member of the Spanish nobility 'would never look directly at a servant.'

"A few months ago, I happened during a trip to read the 'Letters to the Editor' section of the San Angelo, Texas newspaper. A lady wrote indignantly that the poor in the United States had, “house, cars, even televisions sets.” Poverty in the United States, she said, was different from poverty elsewhere. A couple of days ago, referring to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, another American Hidalgo, this one a columnist, expressed the same opinion. It frankly fascinates me.

"You see, it is like so many other things in our benighted nation. We live – evidently (and I mean the evidence is, not that this is a mere figment of imagination) – in a state of virtual reality. For nearly ten years, the victim of IRS and mercilessly relentless federal government criminality, I was one of those poor our ivory tower talks about. I lived off the wilderness, often digging squaw root and other tuberous plants for food. I hunted and fished, planted gardens on public lands and in forests. I also walked into pizza parlors, to avail myself of the tables’ left-over slices of pizza. I gleaned coins in the parking lots of the malls, where the wealthy people lose carelessly enough money to provide someone like I was a meal.

"I did not have a television set. I did not have a car (I walked or rode a bicycle everywhere I went). I lived either in a tent or an old RV (1971 Ford), a gift from a friend.

"And I lived among the nation’s poor. There, I met engineers, lawyers, a doctor of medicine, an aerospace technician (Ph.D. degreed), farmers, auto mechanics, several ex-professional athletes (one who once made more than a million dollars a year), and one ex-showgirl. I met, and occasionally cared for, dozens of children. Several stray dogs, too. None had a television set, none a car, none a roof to sleep under. All were primarily concerned with their next meal.

"Oh, I also met a lot of drunks, alcoholics who simply couldn’t save themselves from the “couple of quarts” they desperately needed. I met druggies, too, pushers and pimps, a few outright thieves. I met dozens of people just out of jail, people who knew damned well there was no way to get by outside of crime. I knew what they meant. Having been pretty pissed off, I was very, very close to crime a number of times myself.

"I discussed the ethics of poverty a number of times, with some very bright people. All poor. When you can’t get an honest job, it’s a crime not to have housing, and the only way to get money is to find or steal it, ethics takes on a whole new meaning.

"I also discussed poverty with capitalism’s ivory tower. And the rich (not always the same people). When you have three cars, live in a house with six bedrooms, vacation in San Moritz, and jet to San Francisco from Texas in order to have fresh lobster, ethics also has another meaning. When you’ve commissioned the construction of your own $17,000,000,000 island (built by dredging up the ocean floor) in the Philippines or off the coast of Dubai (in the shape of a palm tree, no less, so everyone can have ocean-front property), and your income is $1,000 a second, ethics has still another meaning. In fact, you need to have few ethics at all. “Poor” doesn’t really have a meaning. You don’t see it, because you never have. You’ve never looked.

"One of the conversations I had with the rich was with a retired Air Force officer, a graduate of West Point. Another, almost identical in topic to the one I had with the officer, was with the owner of a National Basketball Association franchise. Drawn out on the subject of whether I could steal a million dollars and get away with it, I gave each of the men ten ways to succeed. Both professed astonishment, but agreed that I was right. I could get out of poverty, and be a millionaire, in less than a year. I would only have to pay what every other rich man pays. It goes without saying that, for me, the price was too high (it wasn’t for one of the gentlemen, incidentally – he used one of my ideas to “earn” just under six million dollars).

"Ethics is not only a different thing to different people, it varies a great deal with the nature of the test given it.

"Poverty in the U.S. and nearly everywhere else is the natural result of what is now known as capitalism. There isn’t any logical or rational doubt about that, something demonstrable by a simple mental experiment model. If there are twenty people at the table, and one or two eat all the food, the rest eat nothing. The fact of there being only so much food and so many people is an obvious one, too. That’s when the table is just a table; when it’s a planet, the obvious may not be so obvious, but it’s nevertheless an inexorable fact.

"And, of course, the ethics must change. Capitalism was once referred to as the Law of the Jungle, but with riches, ethics becomes a matter of mere justification. The poor must be their own victims, not those of the rich. The rich not only seek comfort for the body, they seek comfort for the mind, too. The legerdemain is simple, easy, a matter of rhetoric alone.

"But they mustn’t look at you. Oh, they can be near you every day, walk by on the street so close you could reach out and touch them. They speak to you, even eat and drink, sometimes, with you. They might even give you something. Money, even.

"But they don’t look at you. Not really. The truth – and reality - might explode in their faces."

I might add here that when I wrote that, several people wrote regarding their own imagined nobility to quote Thomas Jefferson. “There is a natural aristocracy among men,” they asserted defiantly, “the grounds of which are virtue and talent.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that none of these folks remembered that the 3rd President of the United States was chronically in debt, and, in fact, died in debt. This was, mind you, the same man about whom another U.S. President, John Kennedy, once said to a group of Nobel Prize laureates, "This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

My detractors – for the obvious reasons, not caring - wouldn’t know, either, that Jefferson was described by a contemporary as “. . . a gentleman of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.” Thomas Jefferson also was able to read and speak a number of languages, including Arabic and Gaelic.

For all his legendary genius and the tremendous contribution he made to his country and mankind, Jefferson was not a capitalist success, at least not in the minds of the people of whom he once remarked, “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” It was also Thomas Jefferson who said, "Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; I can think of no milder term to apply to the general prey of the rich on the poor." The readers who choose to justify their attitude toward the poor with the words of our 3rd President would have gotten little support from him in that, it seems. It was Jefferson, after all, who said in his valedictory that he was proud to leave office no better off financially than when he acceded to it.

Having been both the capitalist's idea of success and failure, I always stop for a moment when confronted by a member of that particular religion to reflect on the shallowness of thought it betrays. The idea that people’s capitalistic success is indicative of their great worth as people is, in fact, logically absurd – an example of what H.G. Wells once termed “a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and to humbug themselves and one another for the general good.”

Wells, of course, lived long before the advent of today's professional athletes – men who play children’s games for pay – and “earn” millions. The apologist for capitalism must – does, in fact - argue that Thomas Jefferson was a man of less value to society and nation than, say, Kobe Bryant or Shaquille O’Neal. Or Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Ricky Martin (the only examples someone like me, of course, can think of on the spur of the moment where that particular kind of abject failure is concerned).

There’s more to it, even, than that. The United States may well be in its death throes as a nation—hoist, to paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet, on its own petard. The “petard,” of course, is runaway capitalism – the religion of greed.

“Where a man’s treasure is, there will his heart be also,” scripture says. Not many people think further than that. In my book, “Jonatha’s Truth,” Johanna the heroine, notes, “You can never trust a capitalist – everything is for sale.”

“Americans”, nevertheless, never seem to realize that a nation of people who will sell anything cannot endure for long against any kind of serious enemy. You wouldn’t have to think much to see why that is true, especially were you to consider people like Robert Hanssen, the FBI traitor, or Aldrich Ames, the CIA turncoat—or literally thousands more (a recent statistical analysis by a RAND corporation-like federal think-tank suggests that at any given time as many as 30,000 people are selling as many of the nation’s 15,600,000 official secrets to any enemy who will pay for them).

Think about that. Look around you. You don’t relate the staggering amount of pornography—that’s women who will sell themselves for the right amount of money and men who will so use women for pay—with a nation where “everything is for sale?” How about a corporate nation who knowingly and aggressively sold cigarettes? Or alcohol to minors?

Interesting, too, isn’t it, that no one reciting those statistical facts ever notes the explosive growth of the music and entertainment industry, growth almost entirely due corporate willingness to exploit children and their unsophisticated tastes? Need I add the fact of industry literally willing to lay waste the planet and its ecosystem for profit?

Try this: In my book, “Letters to Aaron,” I recall the morning a van (the eight or ten passenger kind) “blew” a stoplight and rammed me as I crossed a street in a protected crosswalk. Hurled sixty-one feet and ten feet into the air by impact, I landed on the street to be hit again by the same van. It left eighty-four feet of skid marks. The aftermath was fascinating, and a warning microcosm of a society in denial, virtual reality created by ideology.


I pause parenthetically to say again, “THINK!”

"An old man (I have gray hair, and wore a jacket – you couldn’t see the muscles) has been hit in a crosswalk by a vehicle that was speeding and ignored a stop light. As he lies on the street, one of the men in the van attacks him viciously, smashing the vehicle’s door into his face, then proceeding to kick him in the stomach several times. Desperately (that’s admitted, I was scared), the old grabs his assailant, pulls him down into the judo hold (one of my own invention). Struggling against the grip that he realizes could break his neck, the assailant punches the old man in the groin several times. What do you think quickly gathering, and gaping, passersby do?

"Well, working at the time on my van, I was on the way to an auto parts story, and dressed in old, dirty clothes. I was also a frequently seen sight in the area, riding my bike and carrying on it groceries in small bags. There is little doubt (I was stopped several times and searched while leaving a nearby H.E.B. grocery) that denizens considered me a bum. The man above me, the one beating hell out of me so far as anyone can see (it’s highly unlikely that any recognized my hold on the man as anything potentially lethal) was well dressed, and had just stepped from a brand new Dodge van."
I pause again, to point out that this next line is also from the story. The line? "So you tell me what happened. It’s your country.”

"Fortunately, an ambulance called by personnel at an auto parts store also nearby arrived in only minutes. In the intervening time, I had pleaded again and again with people standing over my assailant and me to “get the names of witnesses.” No one did. When police arrived at the hospital emergency room where I was taken, I was questioned closely about what I was doing in the area. Days later, when I obtained a police report, I learned that no charges had been filed (as a matter of fact, I also learned that the name of the driver had obviously – for me, that is - been falsified)."This, I wrote in the essay I recited in part at the outset here, describing the van-crosswalk “accident”:

“Uh-uh. When you’re poor, no one looks at you. If Katrina changes that, I’ll be amazed. So should you. No matter what the media and your president tell you, the United States is not only NOT the Land of the Free, it is a nation of hypocrites.”

Realizing that I wrote my essay shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans may also give you pause to think.

There are today in the United States as many as (as with everything here, political and factional interest and ideation result everywhere in equivocation and dispute where the subject is concerned) forty million people who live in poverty or near it. The gulfs between rich and poor grow relentlessly, due far more these days to special legislation bought and paid for by lobbyists for the rich than to any other factor.

The question in these times has no longer to do with whether we will be sold out, or by whom, but to whom. Iraq? Afghanistan? Iran? Mexico? China?

I haven't asked "my" question for a while, so let me ask it again here: why is it that the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still getting a tiny percentage of the money and assistance otherwise that the people of Baghdad are getting? Why are our own veterans of war, many of whom have been neglected for literally decades, still sucking off the hind tit, while the citizens of Iraq - including the men in their diffident military - get all the best medical care, therapy, and consideration otherwise?

With all the working class wage earners and poor being asked to "stay the course" and all the rest in Iraq and Afghanistan, why is it that government—the military industrial corporations and the like—asks the wealthy and privileged to contribute nothing? Why, specifically, should corporations like Halliburton continue to make staggering profits off the war, while the poor are required to sacrifice themselves and theirs?

WHY? Because as a U.S. Marine General, Smedley Butler, once said, "War is a racket." A capitalist racket.

How's YOUR "Morale?"

Anna Nicole Smith. There, we’ve got that out of the @$%&$#! way. And, I hope, Princess Diana. And Chandra Levy. And Laci Peterson. And Natalee Holloway.

Well, I DO know that the Super Bowl is over, but there’s always—anyway it seems so—pro basketball. Kobe What’s-His-Name and Shaq are still stuffing balls furiously through a hoop, aren't they?. Somebody must be about to set some kind of record for something. The excitement is . . . bearable. Very, very bearable.

In, of course, lesser news, we have now lost three thousand, nine hundred and ten (3,910) soldiers and “civilian contractor” military in Iraq, five hundred and twenty nine (529) in Afghanistan. Thirty eight thousand, five hundred thirty eight (38,538) of our soldiers have been wounded. Johns Hopkins says—actually, nobody in the U.S. counts (not that important)—Six hundred, fifty-five thousand (650,000) Iraqis are dead, and I guess only god knows how many wounded and maimed for life. In Iraq, they’ll probably die soon, too. Not, of course, that it’s all that important to you.

You want to know whose sperm beat all the rest up Anna Nicole’s love canal, right?

Well, if you’re lucky, Nancy Grace will soon have all the names of the contenders; and, of course, she’ll read the list for a couple of weeks. So will Greta Van Susteren. Then there’s Bill O’Reilly, and you probably know the names of a couple more. I don’t watch that much TV, these days.

In even lesser news—not really anything new, really—the U.S. Congress goes on bungling and dithering. Obviously, they’re not all that eager to get in the way of Mr. Bush and his killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re posturing and primping— they're calling it "debate" on that “resolution” to censure—and they’ll get around to really doing something one of these days. Like I said, it’s just not that important.

Then there’s news from the southern border—thousands, maybe tens of thousands (nobody’s counting there, either)—of Mexican and South American criminals of every make, model, and description pouring into the country, bringing with them half or more of the diseases known to man.

And, of course, the Congress is dithering about all that, too. Not that important.

If you try to sneak a plant or some fruit into the U.S., of course, they’ll fine hell out of you, and of course, we’re spending millions to prevent stray cattle from sneaking across the river. Not a damned one makes it, either. That’s important (figure that one out).

That’s about it – unless Nancy Grace’s list of possible daddies for Anna Nicole’s kid includes a couple congressmen (and, things being what they are in Washington, it sounds like the odds in favor of that are pretty good, doesn’t it?).

When I say you make me sick, my country, there will perhaps be a few who know why and forgive me.

As I said, I don’t watch TV much. Well, actually, I’ve been watching the dogfights series on the history channel. That’s interesting. It’s interesting in that the other night, it was confided that because the Japanese had a fighter, the KI-84 Hayate (never good at foreign languages, we called it “Frank”) was considerably better than our fighters, including the P-47 and the P-51, the brass-hat military kept it to themselves. It’s still hard to find out what our kill ratio was vis a vis the Hayate (it means gale or hurricane).

Then, too, the series has disclosed (actually, I knew, but now I have a different interest), that the Russian-built MIG-15 was better than our jets over Korea, including the F-86 Sabrejet. Soviet pilots shot down over 1,300 UN aircraft of all types while losing only 345 of their own. 16 Soviet pilots made ace, with the top scorer being Yevgeni Pepelyaev with 23 kills. Against U.S. jets, the Soviets shot down two for every one they lost. O-o-o-o-ps!

Now, the interesting part of that is that our media consistently reported throughout that particular “intervention” and until only recently that our pilots were shooting down MIGs at the rate of fifteen to one. The truth is that we were sustaining heavy losses, statistics being doctored every way possible. When, for instance, a U.S. jet crash-landed or was found to be damaged beyond repair after combat, we found a way to write it off as wear and tear or the like.

Back home, we were also being told repeatedly that the F-86 was the better airplane, while everyone over MIG Alley knew better. The Soviet pilots were so good against our B-29s, in fact, that we first switched from day to night bombing, then stopped bombing with B-29s altogether. Too many losses.

That state of affairs, strangely enough, continued right into the Vietnam War. There, the folks back home were told, our pilots were scoring at a five to one ratio. The truth was that we were losing two fighters for each one we shot down. Oddly enough – unless you’re moi – the disparate numbers were this time attributed not to “wear and tear,” but to losses inflicted by SAM missiles. When the situation had gotten so bad – we were being out-turn-and-burned by thirty year old MIG-17s – that a fighter school, Top Gun, was established.

We started teaching our pilots to fight, in other words. We were also told that once our guys went to school, the ratio of losses to kills improved remarkably. I happen to know better, and a look at the records now published by both sides is not the only reason. I did covert operations of my own against the propagandists, as you may recall.

Neither has history been kind to U.S. military operations otherwise. Now, of course, we’ve been told about troops who broke and ran in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The Mayaguez Incident, Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue hostages in Iran, and dozens of incidents during the war in Vietnam are matters of record – now.

In the Mayaguez Incident, 14 Marines were killed, two Navy corpsmen were killed, and two Air Force crewmen were killed. Counting 23 airmen killed during preparations for the raid, 41 U.S. servicemen lost their lives. Thirty-five Marines and 6 airmen were wounded. Three hundred, twenty troops participated. Not only were three U.S. Marines left behind on an island after the battle, two of whom were subsequently executed by the Khmer Rouge while in captivity. Nevertheless, the Marine Corps has yet to admit that the three Marines were left behind on the island, and none of the three men has received any posthumous award for their heroism in defending the flank of the Marine position during the disastrously planned attack.

If that weren’t enough, the merchant crew whose seizure at sea prompted a US attack had, unbeknownst to the US Marines, the whole time been released in good health before the Marines attacked. Another of those “Oopses.”

Operation Eagle Claw, originally Operation Evening Light—U.S. military operations are invariably given vaingloriously macho names (Operation Urgent Fury, Just Cause, Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom are just some)—was a United States military operation to rescue 53 hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran on April 24, 1980.

The “Op” was, in the words of one U.S. Navy Seal advisor, a “goatfuck.” When an unforeseen(!!!!) sandstorm caused two of eight helicopters to get lost, and a third helicopter pilot seized the opportunity provided him by a faulty rotor blade sensor to chickened out, the mission was aborted. Unfortunately, a large part of the mission force was already at Desert One, the operation assembly point in Iran. “High and dry,” you might say.

After having decided to abort the mission, a helicopter somehow (haste has been suggested) lost control while evacuating the landing site and crashed into a C-130 transport. In the ensuing explosions and fire, eight US servicemen were killed. During the evacuation, six helicopters were left behind and intact (maybe “haste” wasn’t too far off?).

The six helicopters now serve with the Iranian Navy.

In their efforts to “haul ass,” aircrews not only left behind classified plans that identified a number of CIA operatives in Iran, but one special forces trooper who had infiltrated in order to do reconnaissance prior to the mission was obliged to escape Iran by walking out. Dick Meadows was a hell of a trooper.

In October, 1983, on the premise that college medical students there needed rescue after a coup by a leftist Deputy Prime Minister, the U.S. invaded the island of Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury turned out to be what one member of the high command termed “a learning experience.”

A former Seal I happen to know called it “another U.S. clusterfuck.”

Most likely undertaken in order to divert attention from President Reagan’s decision to “cut and run” (sound familiar?) from Lebanon after the suicide bomber attack that killed 242 U.S. Marines there, the initial invasion involved 1,900 troops, including Army Rangers, Marines and Navy Seals, and was to remain still another example of similar US interventions, right down to the un-necessary losses. In less than three days, 19 US servicemen were killed and 116 wounded—as many as thirty percent of whom were victims of friendly fire, miserable planning, and asinine organization.

In point of lugubrious fact, almost everything that could go wrong with Operation Urgent Fury did. A Navy SEAL reconnaissance mission floundered in heavy seas and four drowned. The SEAL mission was a total failure. Airborne troops missed their drop zones when their lead C-130 got lost. Ranger units unable to communicate with each other directly had to transmit messages by way of Air Force communications. Once on the ground, the troops couldn’t find the students they were supposed to rescue.

When Rangers who originally expected to land at the island’s airfield discovered that their prospective enemy had set up runway obstacles, they decided to jump from 500 feet altitude. Like the SEALS, many, if not all of the Rangers wore double loads of gear, and were obliged to refit for the assault in the aircraft and on their way to the DZ. When the Air Force refused to conduct the mass parachute drop requested by the Rangers, a squabble ensued – during the operation(!).

Think that’s bad? At one point, Cuban machine-gunners pinned down SEALs assaulting the Grenadan Governor-General’s mansion. Two American gunships were flying overhead, but thanks to more ingenious planning and co-ordination, the men on the ground were unable to communicate directly with the planes. As a result, a SEAL placed a long distance phone call from the mansion to Fort Bragg, N.C and requested fire support. Miraculously, he got it.

For a time, it looked as though wounded would have to wait for evacuation— because the Navy wouldn’t let the Army helicopter pilots land on U.S. Navy ships!

(“Not qualified!”)

And so on. The fact is that the U.S. came damned close to a major defeat due to poor planning typical of senior officers. Maybe a bloviating media pundit said it best: “The Americans overcame poor planning and overwhelmed the defenders with mass, speed and firepower.”

Yeah, right . . .

Bad? Operation Just Cause was worse, an example of planning so bad you’d inevitably think I was lying were I to recite it all. So, I’ll just mention this: The Americans lost 18 soldiers, four SEALs and two Marines killed in action and 325 wounded. The argument will go on for a while yet (like the air wars in Korea and otherwise, the truth only comes out after everyone involved has gone mas allá) concerning how many Panamanians we killed. A former U.S. Commission of Inquiry, an independent one headed by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, estimated that there were more than three thousand Panamanian civilian casualties.

Like I said in the instance of Iraq, they’re not important, anyway. “We’d have killed more if we’d tried” (remember SecDef Rumsfeld’s “humanity” spiel?).

Are you wondering who the Anna Nicole Smith was back when we “Just Caused” Panama and Manuel Noriega?

As in the case of Grenada and others, we’ll hear the truth after a while – quite a while. Just to give you insight, though, the Pentagon started off with an estimate of fourteen. That grew to two hundred, then to three hundred. A year or so ago, I saw another estimate, five hundred. We’re getting there.

And the cause was just. Manuel Noriega, whom we were after and brought back here for trial, got out of jail just the other day. Don’t ask me how you legally try the head of another state here in the U.S. What makes you think the law makes any difference? George Herbert Walker Bush, the president then – history does repeat itself, it seems – probably issued one of those “signing letter.” The law is for other people, not guys named Bush. Makes you wonder why we went through all that monkey business with Saddam, doesn’t it? Why one guy here, and another guy there?

Anyway, there you have it – what we said at the time, what we said much later, and what the facts actually were. When you corner anyone responsible for all that lying, he will invariably tell you it was for your own good. The nation and the soldier’s morale. Check with FoxNews, any night. Not long ago, the time before the elections, the White House’s lead propagandists were insinuating—Hannity came right out and argued it—that voting for Democratic Party candidates would be damaging for our troops morale.

The truth is bad for morale. Sure. Now, nevertheless, the question is—the history of our government’s veracity during any of these undeclared wars having been what it is—what in hell is it that makes you believe anything you’re being told now about Iraq and Afghanistan is the truth?

“Our military is doing magnificently.” “Our equipment is superior, and we’re kicking ass.” Like I said, check with FoxNews, any night. Our planning has been meticulous and unerring, too. Hell’s bells, there for a long time, our President couldn’t remember having made any mistakes (“mission accomplished”). Now, when you’ve gone back and read about the Hayate and the P-51s, the MIGs and the Sabrejets, the Mayaguez and the Kmer Rouge, and so on, think about Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I repeat - how much of the truth do you think we’re getting? And how’s your morale?