Surreal: The United States of America - Made for Television

“For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth; action, nor utterance, nor power of speech, to stir men’s blood; I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know.” -Shakespeare (“Julius Caesar”)

The little guy, his hand held protectively by his pretty mother, walked up to where I was signing autographs at one of the hundreds of judo tournaments in which I competed in those days. Before mom could say anything, the little man blurted, “Are you Superman – can you fly?”

I winked at his smiling mom, and said (it’s been a long time ago; I was only reminded of it by my topic for today) something like, no, winning a judo tournament doesn’t mean you’re Superman. To fly, I needed an airplane, too.

But when I’d thought about it, I knew where the little guy was coming from. The martial arts movies, magazines, and related media were already then spewing such incredible nonsense that one assumed then that they did so knowing that no one really believed them. It was like the tabloids, Christ back on earth disguised as an alligator stuff, and those mindless soap operas. In his child’s mind, there was yet no way to tell the truth from fantasy. Little kids, you know, used to have parents, parents who knew the real world, that is, parents who helped with making such distinctions.

No more. Today, in the gossip coffee-klatsch that is our nation and its news and information media, people drive nails with a feather, break automobile leaf springs with a shuto (karate chop), and exploded chickens with ki (projected mental power) all the time. Kung-fu and karate fighters fight streetfights that are the equivalent in energy expended and calories burned of sprinting a twenty-six mile marathon. Utter nonsense, in other words. But that’s not all. In Hollywood, the U.S. Congress, and the Never-Neverland like, a Miss America candidate who weighs a hundred, ten pounds can street-fight three guys capable of playing in an NFL line and knock the snot out of them.

Women, of course, can do anything a man can do. It’s the law, besides.

Utter, as I said, nonsense.

And that’s just the beginning of it all. If it can be said, and made to hang together even in today’s pseudo-logic, it’s possible. No, it’s true. It’s reality. The sweeter it sounds, the more real it is. Politically correct, in other words. No matter how absurd to the reason, if it sounds good, it must be. Everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. No race is more intelligent than the others. No culture is more successful, and – therefore – to be respected than any other. No one – therefore again – should have to compete; to compete, after all, means someone must lose or fail, and we can’t have that – not if we’re all equal and alike. We must find a way to make all the kids in all our schools pass, and magna cum laude, at that or the result will be “hateful” (of course, we can always blame the tests, or the schools, or the teachers when the kids can’t read or do their sums).

Competition and tests are “discriminatory.”

In short, what was once known as common sense, that solid, everyday-experienced and lived contact with reality is as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. People who have never swung a hammer, used a spade or shovel, or mixed and poured cement tell us all about calluses. Worse, perhaps, they advise us on the value of buildings. We call them “appraisers.” Men whose closest experience with fighting is a spat with their wives - and now even more incredibly (formerly, that is), women - advise us on how and when to fight a war. And nobody sees any connection between that and the incredibly stupid way we’re fighting the war in Iraq, or the even stupider way we fell into the morass that it is in the first place.

I’ll tell you what, parenthetically, if I were a member of the Air Force Wing who woke up the other day to learn that their commanding officer was a woman, I’d refuse further service. AWOL – whatever it took. Ridiculous is ridiculous, and everyone who doesn’t know what’s ridiculous when he sees it is damned well not the guy I want flying my wing in a “furball” fight.

And it goes on, and on. It seems, these days, pointless to site common sense as an argument or reason for much of anything. This has become, largely the result of female and effeminate influence resulted from the rise of feminism, a nation ruled by emotions and emotional argument. As I said, the litmus test of everything nowadays is how it feels. As I returned home just now, for instance, a man being interviewed on National Public Radio was arguing that black people are entitled to say things white and other people aren’t. Emotional people, he implied, are entitled to argue using their best attributes (I guess he thinks black people are more emotional than others – and I will leave the obvious implication of that to the reader’s . . . oops – I was about to say “common sense”), so if they say things which would be hateful coming from a white, that’s okay.

Don Imus can’t say what he said, but Jeremiah Wright (the pastor of Barak Obama’s church) can.

And a few minutes later, one of those “analyst” pundits on the Tee and Vee says Wright is hateful, just plain hateful. He should be prevented from saying things like that, and his racist ranting is going to ruin Barak Obama’s run for the presidency.

Well enough. That’s as it should be. After all, hate speech is hate speech. Like Professor Ward Churchill a while ago, the Reverend Wright should lose his position, he should be banished and prevented from any more public speaking, drawn, quartered, and fed to the fishes. His family should be banished to a desert island. And all the customary, madder-than-a-wet-hen rest all those of us he has done such terrible hurt can dream up and devise.

What is even more crucial here is that we rail and rage against this sort of thing as much, as often, and as long as possible. I hope I have done my bit. Curses upon saying hateful things. I hate hate. I have gnashed my teeth, rent my garments, and uttered imprecations upon the miscreants who disturb the peace and quiet of anything.

I condemn and contemn the killing of wolves in Yellowstone and decry cock fighting . . .

Wait a minute – where was I? I may have gotten carried away.

What is far more interesting to me concerning the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Professor Ward Churchill, and so many others like the, however, is that much or most of what they said happens to be true. Ah, yes, you say, but Wright is Afro-centrist (did I make that word up just now?). He is biased toward his race and his point of view, and if what he says is on the opposite side of the circle from the teachings of the Christianity he purports to espouse – well, his fellows in the hypocrite community are legion.

“Americans” – the fact that I often feel the need to remind the people of the United States that there are thirty-four other nations in the “Americas” is a facet of the words-only reality in which we now anguish fecklessly – share one characteristic bias more than any other people on the planet. Like their government, they hate the truth when it offends whatever falsehood they happen to cherish or worship. In the words of H.L. Mencken, "The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

H.L. Mencken (who passed away in 1956, years before the feminist revolution and the rhetoric-reality it demanded and spawned), you hadn’t seen anything yet.

But I have seldom seen that observation successfully gainsaid, and here we are again. Nothing is more hateful than the truth. The U.S. of America is a woman who asks her husband or boy friend how her new hair-do looks, or if she’s too fat for this dress, and now that the old bat looks like a cartoon caricature of a woman and is so fat that she requires a motorized cart to haul her overindulgent and corrupt carcass around, it is still hateful for him to recognize aloud the reality of her condition.

Today, Barak Obama goes to Philadelphia, and standing before a row of U.S.A. flags, delivers a large serving of common sense truth. Something the little kid four-year-old I mentioned at the outset would recognize at once. Mom, probably, wouldn’t – but he would. This is truth so thunderously obvious that sixty-four percent (my numbers, based on my own history-based accounting) will recognize it as such. The lunatic fringe, and those paid to appear in the lunatic fringe, will fulminate pro and con. Emotion, remember? Emotion! – Gotta remember the female audience, you know.

And about one-fiftieth of one percent will see it all for the bad, soap-opera, drive-a-nail-with-a-feather martial arts movie, pro wrestling, feminist rhetoric reality that it is.

Well, on second thought, you have a choice (assuming you have the commons sense remaining, that is). You can believe that the Reverend Wright is that stupid, that demented, or that careless, or you can believe he did it on purpose. You can believe that he cares so little for Barak Obama and his campaign for the presidency that he sought to be “divisive” (at a time like this), or you can believe he had another agenda.

Need I say “crazy of crazy like a fox?” Soap opera? Romance novel? Pro wrestling match? Hollywood-staged, made-for-television martial arts fight? Feminist rhetoric?

In this Never-Neverland production, the Dudley Do-Right hero – just when it appears that Snidely Whiplash has delivered the dastardly and fatal blow to Dudley’s plan to rescue the Nell Fenwick nation – has arrived with the antidote anecdote.

What a speech!

But meanwhile, as all this wondrously glamorous, excitingly emotive (there’s the magic ingredient, in case you’re still adrift with Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod), and even tear-jerking (or have we forgotten Hillary’s weepy, Joan of Arc frustrated performance of a few weeks ago), nail-biter is played for us, the reality outside goes on.

While we – those of us vapidly engrossed, and we, who still live in the real world and are fully aware that we have real reason to bite our nails – sit watching or enduring this soap opera, the planet’s fever goes unrestrainedly higher for wont of treatment. The misery and killing we have inflicted and are inflicting in Iraq mounts, while the infection resulted from the self-inflicted wound it represents – I speak figuratively of the seemingly uncontrollable costs there – races toward the heart of the nation’s economy. The border with Mexico remains so porous that hundreds of Mexican criminals, tons of illegal drugs, and all the rest of the execrable Mexican government’s flotsam and jetsam pour into our country. Gasoline for the car is nearing four dollars per, the price of groceries will soon drive most of us to cat food, and that “ain’t the half” of all our real troubles.

But we’re watching a “soap.” Oprah is interviewing the teary-eyed, three hundred pound walrus in chintz who can’t understand why her husband went to another woman. Mr. Clean is about to be bludgeoned with a ringside chair by the Evil Angel, and the Houston Rockets are on a winning streak. Then, too, someone found a Frosted Flake that looks like the outline of Illinois (the remarkable thing is that someone knows how the outline of Illinois looks?), and is selling it for $2,000 dollars.

Hell of a speech, all right! Hell of an election campaign, too. Too bad it has nothing to do with anything out here in the real world.

The Second Amendment and the Abstract, Surreal World of the LIberal & the Law Professor

It was utterly fascinating, a display of bloviating balderdash unequalled even by some of our fearless leader’s latest twaddle (a man talking about maintaining tax cuts and finding ways to assure people who made loans far beyond their means at the same time he demands more funding by federal inflation of a twelve billion dollar a week war sounds like raving to anyone not in the same addled condition as the speaker). The following day, if that weren’t enough, a Democrat Party spokesman delivered a response to the president’s nonsense – more nonsense.

The democrats, too, will decrease taxes!

My god, people, it’s not only incredible that anyone in government would have the colossal, the Brobdingnagian, chutzpah to utter anything so obviously false, so thunderously shouted-down by history, it’s incredible that even a public as “Pearl Harbor – isn’t that a shampoo?” stupid as this one would so much as endure to such insulting, sewer gas, cynicism. The Democrats will cut taxes while they go on funding the indescribably asinine occupation of Iraq.

Folks, the war in Iraq is being “funded” by inflation. There is no money to pay for it. “Inflation” – among the most evilly cynical euphemism ever coined - is nothing more or less than a tax. When the menagerie of morons otherwise known as Congress “appropriates” (look the damned word up – it’ll do you good) money to fund George W. Bush’s perfidious boon-doggle, it is raising your taxes! When the government spends money it doesn’t have, and you have to make the I.O.U. good (lord – how many ways do I have to say it?) you are being taxed. Without representation! The federal debt – inflation – is already ten trillion dollars ($10,000,000,000,000)! With the cost of Iraq as planned by John (“Whatever It Takes”) McCain, that figure will reach a number in excess of all the money spent on this nation’s military from 1946 to the end of the Cold War (a little over fifteen trillion dollars).

There isn’t the slightest – not a scintilla of one – chance that the economy of the United States can support that (do the #$%&@*! Numbers!).

But yesterday’s “debate” (get another thing through your heads: we don’t have debates in the U.S. anymore – we have speeches with the opposing sides on the same stage or at the same table) staged by the Heritage Foundation was low theater, comic opera. The topic was that of the Washington, D.C. v. Heller and the Second Amendment matter. The three principals were all touted as experts.

Of course.

The “experts” all – pro and con the right of the individual to keep and bear arms - averred that the U.S. Constitution “grants” certain rights. As one who until not so long go could recite verbatim from start to finish, including all twenty-seven amendments, the U.S. Constitution, and has read as much of the history of the U.S. as any man or woman alive, I would, were I ever to become a contestant in one of these Abbott and Costello affairs, point out that the Constitution does not grant rights. The Constitution recognizes and guarantees certain of the individual’s rights. In fact, it guarantees all of them, whether enumerated in the Constitution or not. It says that the very purpose of government is to protect, defend, and guarantee those rights. It has no authority – it does not claim authority – to grant or limit (infringe, in this specific instance) the god-given rights of every human being.

"Can the liberties of a nation be secure, when we have removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?" --Thomas Jefferson

And here, last night as again and again of late, we have a panel of jackasses discussing rights “granted” by the Constitution.

That, moreover, it happens that the right in question is the most fundamental of all rights, the one right enjoyed by every living thing – the right to defend its life – is more significant than most will have the knowledge required for recognizing it. For the human being, to be deprived of the right to defend one’s life is to be a slave. There is no rational way to dispute that point.

But this coffee-klatch of “experts” seemed totally unaware. It was as though the subject was the monopoly-money object of a child’s board game, a sterile exercise in the hyper-theoretical having nothing to do with the real world and life therein. While I have long wondered at the convolute, twisted, and spastic reasoning of persons debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, the minimalist mental meanderings enunciated in yesterday’s “debate” by, for instance, one Mr. John Payton (who represents the NAACP as amicus curiae in the case) were, for instance, utter balderdash historically: the Second Amendment was aimed at perpetuating slavery (is everything whites do or have done aimed at abuse or belittlement of blacks?).

The argument of yet another of those Harvard Law Professor types – actually, this one is a law professor at Roger Williams University - one Carl Bogus (I’m not making that up; the bogus argument this time was, indeed, a bogus argument) was among the most obtuse, abstracted, and historically detached I’ve ever heard where the subject of gun ownership and the law so related is concerned. Basically – if anything that abstracted and nebulous can be considered to have basis – Bogus argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to “grant” – that word again - the right of the states to create militias.

Bogus also says that people who dislike having to continually defend their right to keep and bear arms have never really wanted the matter decided – it would give them nothing to bitch about, but that is just more of the same irrelevant and immaterial, non sequitur argument that has become de rigueur for the left wing where matters like this are concerned. The argument, of course, seeks by a variation on the logical fallacy known as begging the question to ignore a right existing long before the U.S. Constitution, or any constitution, and to establish a U.S. Constitution and government somehow empowered to grant human rights.

“Tell a lie often enough . . .”

But Bogus’ main assertion has to do with the “question” of the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual or collective right. Scholars, lawyers, and the courts, he argued, have long viewed the Second Amendment as “granting” only a collective right. Well, he’s right about that. As none other than Thomas Jefferson observed, government can only be counted on when it comes to usurpation. It always grows, never diminished.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

But how many times have we heard that “collective right” argument? About, I would guess, as many times as we have heard government swear it will lower taxes. What we haven’t heard – it’s likewise as rare as truth, integrity, and faithfulness in Washington, D.C. - is something I’ve always wondered about; more, it’s something that has always made me doubt the sincerity of all parties to the argument in question. Another of those “nobody is this stupid” cases.

First, let’s suppose that the “well-regulated-militia”-means-no-guns, just-militia folks are right. The Founding Fathers didn’t want the people to have their own guns. Suppose you’re a state governor in the last half of the eighteenth or nineteenth century about to “provide for the common defense” (or didn’t you happen to remember, Mr. Bogus – Roger Williams Law Professor, sir – that that’s what militias were all about; I notice you didn’t once mention that particular clause of the Constitution about which you are so expert).

You call up the militia. Good for you. Except these people don’t have any guns. Worse, most assuredly, they don’t know how to use a gun, either. They’ve never been permitted to own one, much less use one.

Assuming – as I trust I am entitled by the circumstances to do – that none of the liberal-minded, anti-gun folks (people like the Roger Williams Law Professor, that is – wouldn’t want to think he’s a hypocrite, now would we?) has every owned or used a gun, let me suggest an analogy more likely to elucidate for you.

Let’s assume you want to put up a building. You’re Amish, for instance, and you want to have a barn-raising. But none of the people you call to for help has any tools. It’s against the law. And, since the folks have never been permitted to own tools, they have never used tools. The crowd you’ve conscripted doesn’t know a hammer from a saw, a brace-and-bit from a flat iron or a rolling pin.

Ever watch a guy who’s never used a hammer try to drive a ten-penny spike? Swing a ten-pound hammer to drive a post? How about a planer to trim a door for fit? How about a plumb line or a carpenter’s square or a level?

Lots of luck with your barn, and your “well-regulated” work crew.

But here we are again. Here we are wandering and groping around in the nebulous, abstract, and vacuous world of those who get their reality from a book, a law library, a television set, or a computer. One thing those who live actually in the real world can always tell immediately is that people like Payton and Bogus do not live in that world. They’re invariably like our feckless leader the other day, holding forth on how he’d really like to have gotten into combat.

I pause to let that sink in.

You think I’m kidding? Have you forgotten that this is the same patrician fop who said he understood how the little people felt? Anyway, here’s the quote: "I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."

The son-in-law who sent me that observes that one Paul Riechhoff, an Afghanistan vet who authored the book “Chasing Ghosts,” was on the television show where that quote played. I’m told – it certainly doesn’t surprise me – that you could see the soldier’s disgust when he observed, “This is just the kind of thing people say who've never served in the military."

And it’s the kind of understanding of a Constitution written by men with their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” on the line a hyper-civilized and pampered, petty intellectual pantywaist like Payton or Bogus would have. People like the lawyer and the professor live in a world made entirely of words – that abstract world I mentioned. To people like these, everything verbally possible is actually possible (remind anyone of Iraq?).

Try – if you have never in your life been in a really dangerous, even lethal, fight, don’t bother - to imagine men like the framers of the Constitution living without guns – or, for that matter, tools of any kind. With hostile savages known then as Indians everywhere, and with all manner of ravening wild animals also about everywhere, imagine any of the Founding Fathers or the men of the time being willing to surrender his weapons, leaving to another his personal safety and that of his family, and choosing to wait for a posse (or “militia”) to be formed.

Discussions – faux debates – like this one are ludicrous - “frivolous” in the coinage and jargon of the lawyer and his courts. To pretend an issue where the right of the individual to defend his life and that of his woman and children is concerned should be seen for what it is – an attempt at the most base, the most contemptuous, and rapacious of all human crimes. Slavery.

For an individual who may not defend himself has been reduced to a state lower than that of an animal – and no one doubts that animals have the right to defend themselves.

The Fantasy World of the U.S. - The Presidential Election, for Instance

As I've remarked here repeatedly, it absolutely flabbergasts me that the people of the United States seem unable to see through a scam as thunderously, cataclysmically obvious as the latest presidential "election" campaign.

Now we have Rush Limbaugh, the Jubilation T. Cornpone of today's political pundits, urging his two clicks to the right of Attila the Hun followers to support Hillary Clinton! Apparently, Limbaugh and his fellow blowhards of talk radio are even more intent than usual upon making the orchestration of this tawdry spectacle that of a soap opera. Ann Coulter, Nancy Grace, and the like weren't enough, we now have - I had to repair quickly to the Internet to find an example of something I find so appallingly devoid of intellectual content that I've never seen one - "As the World Turns" as a model for politics.

The power of feminism to reduce the individual to doll-play is indeed wondrous.

Meanwhile, the nation - like the soap opera IT has become - goes on deteriorating while all the child-minds play house. While the crew and passengers of the ship of fools that is the nation indulge their infantile fantasies, posturing and cavorting through their make-believe roles, those of us who live in the workaday world that keeps one pressed hard against cold, hard, reality, together with those who are actually and personally (not researched and handed them by a propagandist production staff, that is) familiar with telltale history since nineteen forty-eight endeavor with increasing urgency to find something with promise for coping with it all.

On a ship like this one, people who are wise check to see where the life rafts are.

Today I live in a country where daily I either hear on the news or receive news from a friend like that concerning the maniacal murder of a family by a gang of teenage nutcases. Across the border with Mexico a few miles away, a torrent of hardened, murderous, Mexican criminals pours, and this mornings news includes that concerning the intent of prisons in the U.S. to begin releasing domestic - even more, in other words - criminals into the general populace. That's while rabid, invective-hurling "activists" like the woman who appeared last night to call efforts to curb illegal immigration "gestapo tactics" demand open borders. Lou Dobbs and those who want the border controlled are "racists."

Because, in other words, I want the burglars I've caught in my house removed and arrested, and because they happen to be Mexicans here illegally from Mexico, I am a racist. (Okay, I'm a racist. I still want them out of my house and arrested.)

If, as Bill Cosby used to say, that's not enough to shake up your spinal cord, the current election campaign promises either to elect a quasi-psycho nutcase who will continue not only U.S. occupation of Iraq, but U.S. efforts to dominate the world and bend it to our corporate will, or a quasi-psycho nutcase of the messianic variety intent upon not only bankrupting, but disarming me.

That's in a nation where the president - and by virtue of its utter failure to exert the balance of powers prerogative provided them by the U.S. Constitution (yes, that "old document") - and congress spend nine billion dollars a month on a war returning the nation absolutely nothing, a nation whose political pundits and public alike still profess to see no connection between the war and a deepening recession. That - just incidentally - is while two presidential candidate are promising "programs" that also promise expenditures of almost $800,000,000,000 (eight hundred billion) on social programs people like my wife and I will have to fund, and another promises (in a nation where killing is "abortion," trouble or difficulty is "issues," male is "chauvinist," and fifty more the solecistic like, why don't we say "promisers" instead of "politicians" or "candidates") to go on spending that nine billion a month for a hundred years.

And the cost of filling my car's ten gallon tank this morning was thirty bucks; it'll be forty by the end of the year. The cost of the groceries I buy every morning has increased by ten percent in just a few months, too - all of it thanks to the @#$%! incompetence and fiscal policies of this @#$%&! government!

Does anybody really think I will buy a god-damned house, or invest in anything? In a coast-to-coast and border-to-border economic looney bin like this one? They must be as crazy as the megalomaniacal menagerie that runs this country.

Of course, I've been expecting all this for a long time - twenty-two years, matter of fact. Everything that so pisses the rest of the world off about the United States happened to me 'way back then. I lived, for instance, a personal version of what happened to Cuba, one eerie in its parallel similarity. From economic sanctions and efforts to end my productive life, to libelous and slanderous falsification of records, and outright attempts a murder, I knew first hand the tactics of the plotters of the corporate coup d'etat under which the U.S. languishes.

Why is it so damned, incomprehensibly, hard to see that what the corporations who rule here want in Cuba is the same thing they want in everything they do, the same thing things they want everywhere else in the world, the same things they want from each of their own citizens? Why is the ages-old scenario of the Snidely Whiplash villain and the rich widow so hard to recognize when the principals are nations (one thirty times the size of the other)?

It, like these "As the World Turns" elections, is a thing so blatantly, so thunderously, apparent that the mind boggles at the likewise apparent failure of the nation's public to realize what has happened. Reading still another of the books written by an obviously disgruntled former employee of the government, that of one Michael Scheuer, I can only recall ruefully my own bewilderment at learning the truth about my country. The twenty-two years plus agent of the CIA, also the author of a book originally written under the sobriquet "Anonymous," first warned that we were losing the so-called war on terror. Agreeing with Congressman Ron Paul, a candidate, still, for president, Scheuer was quoted some time ago as having said, "I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly. This war is dangerous to America because it's based, not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic World – because "we're over there," basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate."

That's putting it mildly. Everyone seems to have forgotten what everyone raged about even earlier, Professor Ward Churchill's observation that, the "chickens had come home to roost" on 9-11. The public also seems to have missed the fact that the furor was raised most eminently and Operation MOCKINGBIRD-like by none other than FoxNews, who on September 7, 2007 accused Congressman Paul of "taking marching orders from Al Qaeda," and neither does the brain-dead public remember comedian George Carlin's similar observation, or FoxNews' phony outrage at his remarks. How convenient, that.

Not even those who first plotted Operation MOCKINGBIRD could have foreseen how completely deceived and taken in the U.S. public would be.

Michael Scheuer's premise is that we are losing the "war on terror." More, he warns in his latest book that we are headed toward a war with all of Islam (funny - I said that, in print, months before the the invasion of Iraq - where was Mr. Scheuer then?). He is incontrovertibly right. I disagree with Scheuer, Paul, and the others on one point, however; more, I am totally nonplussed to explain how people otherwise as intelligent can apparently have missed what is even more obvious than the status quo where the phony "war on terror" is concerned. I mean that we are "losing the war" on terrorism because the corporate rulers of the United States want exactly that.

Come on, people! Nobody is so stupid that they conduct wars like we have conducted them since 1945. NOBODY!

What kind of jackass general attacks any enemy while leaving his own rear un-secured? What kind of moron infuriates everyone in his neighborhood by all manner of trespass, trashing, insult, theft of property, arrogation of rights, and more, then leaves all of his own doors unlocked and open? What kind of Tinker-Toy tactician avoids destroying and killing his enemy, attacking him with a force so small that it assures continued resistance; what kind of soldier or army uses weaponry in a manner obviously intended to assure survival of the enemy and in numbers sufficient to do just that? What kind of fool proceeds as we have in Iraq?

This is exactly equivalent to the fighter pilot who attacks an apparent sitting duck target without a wingman and without "checking his six o'clock" - looking to see what's behind him.

You have to believe the people in control in our nation are that stupid, or you have to believe they have an ulterior motive. Now what might that be? Well, while you're "checking your six," I suggest you "check your Cuba," too. Check the methods by which we collect taxes and Internal Revenue Service. Check the history of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (the latest there is the story of the mobile homes - the poisonous mobile homes - provided by FEMA to survivors). See if you can imagine the people of Iraq being treated like that - publicly and without media cover-up, I mean (it would definitely not be okay for the world to know, should we begin treating the people of Iraq like we treat our own citizens).

You could also - as you could have when it happened all these years ago - check the history of how the "Nation of Laws" dealt with U.S. citizen Hal von Luebbert.

But, of course, you didn't. You like your news in soap opera, action adventure form. You like your truth in Hollywood, made-for-television, "special effects," form. If a Tomb Raider, G.I. Jane movie heroine can knock the snot out of candidates for World's Strongest Man, pro-football interior lineman types, and the Neanderthal Man like, why shouldn't they do the same in military-style combat? Why shouldn't Hillary be president (who cares if, when that phone rings at three in the morning, she has a good cry before she does anything?).

But if you really think you can stand a straight dose of the truth concerning how we've come to be in a situation as surreal, and as asinine at how we come to be in Iraq, check, for instance, the commentary by readers appended to martial arts movies on YouTube. Consider that ninety-five percent of the expert wannabe warriors there have never been in a real fight - organized, street, military, or otherwise - in their lives.

Amusing, huh? Next, consider what these authorities say, and what they would appear to be. Compare them with the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O'Reilly', the Sean Hannitys, and the honor roll at the bottom of the page here, too. Note the bravado, the frequency of the insult equivalent to the middle finger salute from a passing car. While you're smiling, or laughing, stop to realize that these are at least to some degree representative of their gender, their society, and their nation. Now, for good measure, go back and review the history of our invasion of Iraq - see if you can still wonder how we came to be there, and why - having discovered that the wingman of the guy we flew obliviously up behind with intent to blow him out of the sky is perched right behind us at with his thumb poised over the firing button - that we're still there.

Next - oh, no; we are definitely not finished - consider how we have come to be ruled by women and by feminist "issues." How have we let our schools be taken over by the students (you really see no connection? - well, now there's another explanation for how that guy came to be perched on our "six" with his thumb poised over the firing button)? How did we come to accept anything as utterly, stupidly, schizoid - divorced from reality - as the Tomb Raider chick, G.I. Jane, and women in combat?

Maybe the same way we came to accept "Hillary for president?"

Finally (not really, but this is getting longer than I intended), how did we come to be so damned stupid, so gullibly so, as to believe this is a real election? Who, for instance, would have believed two - even three - years ago that the Republican Party could survive George W. Bush and his pratfalling blowhard warrior wannabe president (if you didn't find George's type there on YouTube, you're either one of the kind or you didn't bother to read the commentary). Well, see what you think now. Rush Limbaugh would otherwise - were this all real, that is - have a point. When the Democrat Party has made a total caricature, bad-guy-in-a-pro wrestling match ass of itself, the industrial military complex corporations and their Operation MOCKINGBIRD media will have accomplished another "impossible."

They will both have their man in the White House and the nation believing "the system works" - it was a real election. All the morons who are now clamoring and lining up to vote will go home to face soaring prices ("a hundred years" at nine billion a month - and if you think it will remain there for a hundred years, you really are "out of it"), a war with Islam - with, mind you, open borders (wouldn't want to be called "racist" now, would we?), and the growing probability of being murdered by the kids in the neighborhood on a lark (or, of course, your own kid being beaten to death or raped by his fellow savages). That's if the hundreds of rapists, murderers, white slavers, kidnappers, drug lords' servants, MS-13 marauders, and Typhoid Marys pouring over the border with Mexico don't get you first.

Aren't you tickled to know that we've become so enlightened that a woman can run for president? Good for you – you’re not a sexist (hand me the map, Rita – I think when the shit hits the fan, if we can get to the mountains, we’ll be able to get to Canada and British Columbia . . .).

The Fantasy World of the U.S. - Elections, for Instance.

As I've remarked here repeatedly, it absolutely flabbergasts me that the people of the United States seem unable to see through a scam as thunderously, cataclysmically obvious as the latest presidential "election" campaign.

Now we have Rush Limbaugh, the Jubilation T. Cornpone of today's political pundits, urging his two clicks to the right of Attila the Hun followers to support Hillary Clinton! Apparently, Limbaugh and his fellow blowhards of talk radio are even more intent than usual upon making the orchestration of this tawdry spectacle that of a soap opera. Ann Coulter, Nancy Grace, and the like weren't enough, we now have - I had to repair quickly to the Internet to find an example of something I find so appallingly devoid of intellectual content that I've never seen one - "As the World Turns" as a model for politics.

The power of feminism to reduce the individual to doll-play is indeed wondrous.

Meanwhile, the nation - like the soap opera IT has become - goes on deteriorating while all the child-minds play house. While the crew and passengers of the ship of fools that is the nation indulge their infantile fantasies, posturing and cavorting through their make-believe roles, those of us who live in the workaday world that keeps one pressed hard against cold, hard, reality, together with those who are actually and personally (not researched and handed them by a propagandist production staff, that is) familiar with telltale history since nineteen forty-eight endeavor with increasing urgency to find something with promise for coping with it all.

On a ship like this one, people who are wise check to see where the life rafts are.

Today I live in a country where daily I either hear on the news or receive news from a friend like that concerning the maniacal murder of a family by a gang of teenage nutcases. Across the border with Mexico a few miles away, a torrent of hardened, murderous, Mexican criminals pours, and this mornings news includes that concerning the intent of prisons in the U.S. to begin releasing domestic - even more, in other words - criminals into the general populace. That's while rabid, invective-hurling "activists" like the woman who appeared last night to call efforts to curb illegal immigration "gestapo tactics" demand open borders. Lou Dobbs and those who want the border controlled are "racists."

Because, in other words, I want the burglars I've caught in my house removed and arrested, and because they happen to be Mexicans here illegally from Mexico, I am a racist. (Okay, I'm a racist. I still want them out of my house and arrested.)

If, as Bill Cosby used to say, that's not enough to shake up your spinal cord, the current election campaign promises either to elect a quasi-psycho nutcase who will continue not only U.S. occupation of Iraq, but U.S. efforts to dominate the world and bend it to our corporate will, or a quasi-psycho nutcase of the messianic variety intent upon not only bankrupting, but disarming me.

That's in a nation where the president - and by virtue of its utter failure to exert the balance of powers prerogative provided them by the U.S. Constitution (yes, that "old document") - and congress spend nine billion dollars a month on a war returning the nation absolutely nothing, a nation whose political pundits and public alike still profess to see no connection between the war and a deepening recession. That - just incidentally - is while two presidential candidate are promising "programs" that also promise expenditures of almost $800,000,000,000 (eight hundred billion) on social programs people like my wife and I will have to fund, and another promises (in a nation where killing is "abortion," trouble or difficulty is "issues," male is "chauvinist," and fifty more the solecistic like, why don't we say "promisers" instead of "politicians" or "candidates") to go on spending that nine billion a month for a hundred years.

And the cost of filling my car's ten gallon tank this morning was thirty bucks; it'll be forty by the end of the year. The cost of the groceries I buy every morning has increased by ten percent in just a few months, too - all of it thanks to the @#$%! incompetence and fiscal policies of this @#$%&! government!

Does anybody really think I will buy a god-damned house, or invest in anything? In a coast-to-coast and border-to-border economic looney bin like this one? They must be as crazy as the megalomaniacal menagerie that runs this country.

Of course, I've been expecting all this for a long time - twenty-two years, matter of fact. Everything that so pisses the rest of the world off about the United States happened to me 'way back then. I lived, for instance, a personal version of what happened to Cuba, one eerie in its parallel similarity. From economic sanctions and efforts to end my productive life, to libelous and slanderous falsification of records, and outright attempts a murder, I knew first hand the tactics of the plotters of the corporate coup d'etat under which the U.S. languishes.

Why is it so damned, incomprehensibly, hard to see that what the corporations who rule here want in Cuba is the same thing they want in everything they do, the same thing things they want everywhere else in the world, the same things they want from each of their own citizens? Why is the ages-old scenario of the Snidely Whiplash villain and the rich widow so hard to recognize when the principals are nations (one thirty times the size of the other)?

It, like these "As the World Turns" elections, is a thing so blatantly, so thunderously, apparent that the mind boggles at the likewise apparent failure of the nation's public to realize what has happened. Reading still another of the books written by an obviously disgruntled former employee of the government, that of one Michael Scheuer, I can only recall ruefully my own bewilderment at learning the truth about my country. The twenty-two years plus agent of the CIA, also the author of a book originally written under the sobriquet "Anonymous," first warned that we were losing the so-called war on terror. Agreeing with Congressman Ron Paul, a candidate, still, for president, Scheuer was quoted some time ago as having said, "I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly. This war is dangerous to America because it's based, not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic World – because "we're over there," basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate."

That's putting it mildly. Everyone seems to have forgotten what everyone raged about even earlier, Professor Ward Churchill's observation that, the "chickens had come home to roost" on 9-11. The public also seems to have missed the fact that the furor was raised most eminently and Operation MOCKINGBIRD-like by none other than FoxNews, who on September 7, 2007 accused Congressman Paul of "taking marching orders from Al Qaeda," and neither does the brain-dead public remember comedian George Carlin's similar observation, or FoxNews' phony outrage at his remarks. How convenient, that.

Not even those who first plotted Operation MOCKINGBIRD could have foreseen how completely deceived and taken in the U.S. public would be.

Michael Scheuer's premise is that we are losing the "war on terror." More, he warns in his latest book that we are headed toward a war with all of Islam (funny - I said that, in print, months before the the invasion of Iraq - where was Mr. Scheuer then?). He is incontrovertibly right. I disagree with Scheuer, Paul, and the others on one point, however; more, I am totally nonplussed to explain how people otherwise as intelligent can apparently have missed what is even more obvious than the status quo where the phony "war on terror" is concerned. I mean that we are "losing the war" on terrorism because the corporate rulers of the United States want exactly that.

Come on, people! Nobody is so stupid that they conduct wars like we have conducted them since 1945. NOBODY!

What kind of jackass general attacks any enemy while leaving his own rear un-secured? What kind of moron infuriates everyone in his neighborhood by all manner of trespass, trashing, insult, theft of property, arrogation of rights, and more, then leaves all of his own doors unlocked and open? What kind of Tinker-Toy tactician avoids destroying and killing his enemy, attacking him with a force so small that it assures continued resistance; what kind of soldier or army uses weaponry in a manner obviously intended to assure survival of the enemy and in numbers sufficient to do just that? What kind of fool proceeds as we have in Iraq?

This is exactly equivalent to the fighter pilot who attacks an apparent sitting duck target without a wingman and without "checking his six o'clock" - looking to see what's behind him.

You have to believe the people in control in our nation are that stupid, or you have to believe they have an ulterior motive. Now what might that be? Well, while you're "checking your six," I suggest you "check your Cuba," too. Check the methods by which we collect taxes and Internal Revenue Service. Check the history of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (the latest there is the story of the mobile homes - the poisonous mobile homes - provided by FEMA to survivors). See if you can imagine the people of Iraq being treated like that - publicly and without media cover-up, I mean (it would definitely not be okay for the world to know, should we begin treating the people of Iraq like we treat our own citizens).

You could also - as you could have when it happened all these years ago - check the history of how the "Nation of Laws" dealt with U.S. citizen Hal von Luebbert.

But, of course, you didn't. You like your news in soap opera, action adventure form. You like your truth in Hollywood, made-for-television, "special effects," form. If a Tomb Raider, G.I. Jane movie heroine can knock the snot out of candidates for World's Strongest Man, pro-football interior lineman types, and the Neanderthal Man like, why shouldn't they do the same in military-style combat? Why shouldn't Hillary be president (who cares if, when that phone rings at three in the morning, she has a good cry before she does anything?).

But if you really think you can stand a straight dose of the truth concerning how we've come to be in a situation as surreal, and as asinine at how we come to be in Iraq, check, for instance, the commentary by readers appended to martial arts movies on YouTube. Consider that ninety-five percent of the expert wannabe warriors there have never been in a real fight - organized, street, military, or otherwise - in their lives.

Amusing, huh? Next, consider what these authorities say, and what they would appear to be. Compare them with the Rush Limbaughs, the Bill O'Reilly', the Sean Hannitys, and the honor roll at the bottom of the page here, too. Note the bravado, the frequency of the insult equivalent to the middle finger salute from a passing car. While you're smiling, or laughing, stop to realize that these are at least to some degree representative of their gender, their society, and their nation. Now, for good measure, go back and review the history of our invasion of Iraq - see if you can still wonder how we came to be there, and why - having discovered that the wingman of the guy we flew obliviously up behind with intent to blow him out of the sky is perched right behind us at with his thumb poised over the firing button - that we're still there.

Next - oh, no; we are definitely not finished - consider how we have come to be ruled by women and by feminist "issues." How have we let our schools be taken over by the students (you really see no connection? - well, now there's another explanation for how that guy came to be perched on our "six" with his thumb poised over the firing button)? How did we come to accept anything as utterly, stupidly, schizoid - divorced from reality - as the Tomb Raider chick, G.I. Jane, and women in combat?

Maybe the same way we came to accept "Hillary for president?"

Finally (not really, but this is getting longer than I intended), how did we come to be so damned stupid, so gullibly so, as to believe this is a real election? Who, for instance, would have believed two - even three - years ago that the Republican Party could survive George W. Bush and his pratfalling blowhard warrior wannabe president (if you didn't find George's type there on YouTube, you're either one of the kind or you didn't bother to read the commentary). Well, see what you think now. Rush Limbaugh would otherwise - were this all real, that is - have a point. When the Democrat Party has made a total caricature, bad-guy-in-a-pro wrestling match ass of itself, the industrial military complex corporations and their Operation MOCKINGBIRD media will have accomplished another "impossible."

They will both have their man in the White House and the nation believing "the system works" - it was a real election. All the morons who are now clamoring and lining up to vote will go home to face soaring prices ("a hundred years" at nine billion a month - and if you think it will remain there for a hundred years, you really are "out of it"), a war with Islam - with, mind you, open borders (wouldn't want to be called "racist" now, would we?), and the growing probability of being murdered by the kids in the neighborhood on a lark (or, of course, your own kid being beaten to death or raped by his fellow savages). That's if the hundreds of rapists, murderers, white slavers, kidnappers, drug lords' servants, MS-13 marauders, and Typhoid Marys pouring over the border with Mexico don't get you first.

Aren't you tickled to know that we've become so enlightened that a woman can run for president? Good for you – you’re not a sexist (hand me the map, Rita – I think when the shit hits the fan, if we can get to the mountains, we’ll be able to get to Canada and British Columbia . . .).