SITREP - Things for a Thoughtless Nation to Think About.

The word comes that the sleaze of politicians on the Potomac has cravenly capitulated to Wall Street and all the lobbyists for big business, passing the seven hundred billion dollar ($700,000,000,000) legislative “bailout” package for them. This is as clearly unconstitutional as anything that has ever happened in the nation’s history, being a classic case of unlawful expenditure of tax monies. It is the biggest single swindle of the taxpayer since the swindle that was creation of the Federal Reserve itself.

This is more, even, than it appears to be where the fate of the nation is concerned, however. It remains to be seen how many citizens will call their lawyers in order to file a federal suit to stop this raid on their finances. Every citizen affected by this, the Congress latest attempt at destruction of his life, has the legal standing to bring suit. More, every citizen has the power and standing to file a pro se lawsuit in federal court, and at the cost of purchase of a couple of books from Nolo Press, http://www.nolo.com/index.cfm, he can learn how to file the necessary papers.

It’s interesting that while this swindle will cost every U.S. family in excess of twelve thousand dollars, tax money stolen and spent illegally, and while anyone, were their twelve thousand dollar car destroyed by someone in government would sue, few or none will sue concerning this “bailout” theft of his money. Neither are seven hundred billion dollars nationally, or twelve thousand dollars family-wise, the only costs of this. Statistical analysis (my own) based on other similar actions – financing of things like the “War on Terror,” for instance – reveals that the total cost of the “bailout” to the individual citizen will be upwards of thirty thousand dollars.

Federal Inflation, as I explained in recent essays here, costs the wage-earner far more than the amount the government borrows. Borrowed money not only means interest, you know, it means costs magnified many times as the “funny” money circulates through the economy.

Failure of the nations’ citizens to react with more than sheep-like bleating will tell historians everything they need to know about reasons for the decline and fall of the United States of America.

My own, pro se, lawsuit will be filed soon.

The ludicrous Palin-Biden “debate” – there goes the meaning and sense of another word – is, mercifully, history. Only one thing could be learned from that celebration of half (or quarter) truth, outright falsehood and political posturing, of course – the simple fact that of why we are a nation in decline.

Biden, the male on stage, was obliged by the logically weird rules of our society to say nothing that in any way attacked or might otherwise offend Palin, the female on stage. The same society that a couple of decades ago insisted that women were fit for combat, able to do anything a man could do there, and, moreover insists still that she is the equal of a man in all and every respect, demands here that a candidate running for vice-president or president treat a woman as though she might be seriously injured by a word – or facial expression.

Palin, of course, will “win” this “debate” if she somehow manages to characteristically glittering generality and non sequitur her way to the end of the tawdry affair without double-talking herself into tongue-tied lingual convulsions. Or wetting – “having issues” in - her panties.

Since boyhood, regarding that last, I have detested jargonized, C.O.I.A.K (clear only if already known), solecistic language. But I fear bias. In fact, I am absolutely terrified of biased thought and behavior. That’s because there are few human conditions more crippling, both of the individual and the group. There are no biases more pernicious vicious and destructive than the religious and ideological-political variety, a kind of bias that results in the group equivalent of muscular dystrophy in the individual. This political campaign, last night’s “debate” an archetypical example, has been the most thunderous example of the spastic fecklessness to which mindless ideological and political bias leads.

Everything that is said is suspect and useless as effective communication. There is simply no need to ask what anyone ideologically and/or politically involved will say: simply learn with which ideology or political party he is identified, and you know what he will say. For the media to ask any of its parroting pundits, for instance, who “won” the “debate” makes for a rhetorical question only. For a nation asking for useful explanations, for data and material by which to make decisions or gauge the depth of the trouble we’re obviously in, the “leaders” and “experts” provide pontificating, bloviating, and vapid generalities so broad as to be continental. Or galactic.

That’s when they’re not lying outright (of course, bias is a lie internalized; and a lie is bias publicized).

Even more infuriatingly frustrating is the now publicized – long since - fact that the language we speak has been so bowdlerized, sanitized, politically corrected, castrated, and otherwise mangled as to become damned near useless for meaningful communication. Add that fact of today’s discourse to conversation with a public now largely comprised of people whose attention span is too short to internalize more than one or two – and, mind you, very simple – sentences, and you have a recreation of the Biblical Tower of Babel.

Of them all – another Mersenne number, it seems – no solecistic and/or jargonized torture of the language has resulted in a much spastic paralysis of ideas as the execrable Malapropism “issues.” Here, the only relief is comic, like Katie Couric recently telling a nationwide audience of her “issues in bed.” Or the nitwit on CNN another day talking about male “sexual issues.” And, of course, if these paragons of the marginal intellect we choose for public office these days are “on” for an hour, the hyper-hackneyed term “issues” will be repeated until the audience develops a psychological facial tic at every re-iteration. More, women and old men will promise to “fight” for this and that, recalling interminably how he or she has “fought” for this and that interminably.

Aaaargh!

If any of these pontificating popinjays were given any problem – no, not “issue;” problem – in the real word, there would never be a solution. That’s even more the case should race, gender, religion, or the like be a factor. There are simply too many words one dare not utter, too many subjects that may not be discussed.

Joe Biden may not ask Sarah Palin if she believes any of the fundamentalist Christian things she says she believes!

Barak Obama, a candidate for president of the United States, refuses to prove with a verifiable birth certificate that he is a legal citizen of the United States! What is more, no one may ask him that question on television, in the land of the free press.

I may not say “nappy-headed hoe” (or whatever the hell the word was), I may not say that someone (was it Barak Obama, and did his running mate for the presidency say it?) is articulate, honest, and whatever the hell else it was, because if I do that I have insulted everyone like him, and I may not object to the guy who is burglarizing my house or camped on my patio if he is a Mexican because my complaint means I’m racist.

If I recognize that a male human has been designed by evolution to impregnate, care for, and defend a female human being because she is . . . well, female and intended by nature to be impregnated, I am a “sexist,” and I will probably lose my job and means of livelihood – to say nothing of risk my life. We can’t, in short discuss race, even if the problem is race. We can’t discuss gender, even if the problem is gender. We can’t discuss religion, even if the problem is religion.

We can’t solve certain problems because it is against the law or otherwise societally forbidden to discuss them. What does that tell you about certain of our problems? What does that tell you about the state of our nation and its government?

We are about to accept as a candidate for the highest office in the nation on the same basis and for the same reason that we have imprisoned literally hundreds, even thousands, of men for rape they didn’t commit – because we are forbidden to question her claims and statements.

Think about it.