November 2016... tick tock...tick tock

If you are an American living abroad, as I do, you are naturally very conscious of the world's opinion of the USA. The question now sometimes asked directly and often implied is: How can a country of over 300 million people, the richest and most powerful in the history of the world, one that, once upon a time, produced Jefferson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts... even Truman, Eisenhower and LBJ, end up having nothing better to choose from now than Trump and Hillary?

Donald Trump appears like a nightmare product of a poorly digested meal... I find myself much more worried by the masses of people who would support him enthusiastically than by the Donald himself. When he has gone back to his golf courses these people will remain and perhaps, someone more subtle and even more evil than Trump will find many more effective ways to exploit them.

That leaves Hillary

I don't like Hillary Clinton, I never have... or Bill for that matter, although he may have been the most naturally gifted politician ever to sit in the White House, he may have also been the cheesiest too. That odor of ripe Camembert follows the Clintons wherever they go. 

Obama too has been quite a disappointment for me, I agree with Cornell West, that he is a "Rockefeller Republican", having said that, he and his family have had a very beneficial effect on America's image around the world. "Elegant" is the best word to describe Barack and Michelle Obama. As to his "legacy", he will probably be remembered as much for what he hasn't done, like not sending ground troops back to the Middle East, as for achievements like Obamacare, which is pitiful when compared to any European country's public health system.

For me the choice between Trump and Hillary is clear

Hillary Clinton may reek of Camembert, but Trump reeks of sulfur.  

The biggest danger now is that many of the supporters of Bernie Sanders, among whom I am numbered, dislike (loathe) Hillary even more than Trump supporters do and if, as is nearly certain, she is the Democratic candidate, many Sanderistas may either stay home on election day, or go out and vote for a third party candidate or... even vote for Trump.  In sufficient numbers this fugitive vote might end up putting a renegade villain escaped from a Marvel Comic into the White House.

The third-party option is the one that worries me most. Remember: this sort of bickering leading to Ralph Nader's votes in Florida was what brought us George W. Bush... and next to Trump, Dubya, is Joan of Arc. 

The American system has been so constructed as to be very resistant to change and it is a two party system. At this moment the Republican Party seems about to commit suicide and it would be a shame if the Bernie supporters did anything to impede their Trump-led, self-destruction. After the Republicans destroy themselves in November and the Democrats take back both houses of Congress... then would be the time to split the Democratic party to left and right, not now. DS

Why are the Republicans at war with reality?

"None of the major problems facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved by the principles that still dominate the developed countries of the west: unlimited economic growth and technical progress, the ideal of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, electoral democracy. As is evident in the case of the environmental crisis, facing these problems will require in practice regulation by institutions, in theory a revision of both the current political rhetoric and even the more reputable intellectual constructions of liberalism. The question is can this be done within the framework of the rationalist, secularist and civilised tradition of the Enlightenment. As for left vs right, it will plainly remain central in an era which is increasing the gap between haves and have-nots. However, today the danger is that this struggle is being subsumed in the irrationalist mobilisations of ethnic or religious or other group identity." Eric Hobsbawm, historian - Prospect Magazine - March, 2007 

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
Stephen Colbert

Before we really get started we should clarify our terms, things like "liberal" and "reality", because American English is so freighted with euphemisms and constantly changing circumlocutions that it is easy to get lost in the fog. For example, when I was a boy North Korea would have been described as a "red state"... now Texas is.

Let us begin with "liberal".

In American English "liberal", depending on who is saying it can mean anything from mildly progressive to the "Weather Underground"... However liberal's universal or classic, "proper English" meaning is to be favorable to free trade, "laissez faire", economics, low taxes, "right to work" laws and deregulation... that makes Maggie Thatcher a "liberal".

So since we are speaking murky "murkin", by liberal we mean the left. So Stephen Colbert is basically saying that reality has a notably left wing bias. This takes us to "reality".

The reality I will be talking about can be pretty well summed up in two popular and contemporary books: Thomas Picketty's, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" about inequality and Naomi Klein's, "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate", whose title speaks for itself.

To simplify brutally, "reality" as described by Piketty/Klein means that our planet earth is literally well on its way to being uninhabitable thanks to a tiny group (0.01%) of unimaginably wealthy individuals, who have grown wealthier and wealthier, even as the middle class has withered, an oligarchy who expect to live forever, and live forever very well indeed, probably in some gated community in what is now Antarctica.

"Perhaps it is worth remembering that Noah's Ark was not built to hold everyone, but just the lucky few."
Naomi Klein
 

The growing consciousness of this "reality" is causing many individuals who come from many very different social stratae, races, sexual orientations etc. to grow restless and dissatisfied with the present system and find themselves "at last compelled to face with sober senses (their) real conditions of life, and (their) relations with (their) kind".

In short, it is "us" versus "them".

This restless and dissatisfied state is often referred to, especially by those who deplore it, as "populism"

What does that mean?

Here is a favorable, Midwestern version of populism by Chicago's poet laureate, Carl Sandburg.

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB

I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

So what I am getting at is that those few unimaginably wealthy, now-unregulated, individuals and corporations who finance American politicians, especially Republican/Tea-Party ones, are afraid (terrified, soiling themselves from fear) that "the mob--the crowd--the mass" might just be about to "arrive" and they are willing to do anything, including making the most powerful country on earth ungovernable, in order to avoid that.

I'm sure that you are all too familiar with how this plays, but these two snippets below give the flavor perfectly and the only surprising thing I find in them is their puzzled, "how can they be so silly?" tone.

It’s a scary thought, but here it is: If some red states were to openly defy the authority of President Obama in the exercise of his constitutional duties, would today’s Republican Congress side with him? Or would they honor the insurrection?(...) The word “insurrection” does come to mind. Yet the resistance out West to federal authority has been received in virtual silence on Capitol Hill. It’s almost as if the GOP Congress wanted an uprising against the president. This country has drifted far beyond the rough-and-tumble give-and-take that historically occurs between the parties. It’s one thing to oppose the president’s policies. It’s quite another to refuse to acknowledge presidential authority. Colbert King - Washington Post

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.(...) even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president. It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it. Editorial - New York Times

If Piketty/Klein are right, and I believe they are, the only logical solution that might save our planet's habitability and social peace would be very stiff and omnipresent regulations on the use of energy and very high taxes on top incomes to cushion the effects of a massive reconversion of the economy... You notice I use the word "logical"

To think "logically", people must think calmly and clearly, rationally, so obviously to keep that from happening emotions must be created to keep rational thinking out of the picture. Fear, racism, anger, selfishness, hatred and war all drive out cool, collected thinking, so obviously fear, racism, anger, selfishness, hatred and war have to be promoted at all cost... cost is no problem when the future of the 0.01 percent's fortunes and power are at stake.

For those few who still read history there is nothing new here. After the defeat of WWI, with the  German population impoverished and the recent Russian revolution fresh in their minds the great industrialists of Germany were very "concerned" about the rise of Marxism in their country and took measures to put a stop to it.

By 1919 Krupp was already giving financial aid to one of the reactionary political groups which sowed the seed of the present Nazi ideology. Hugo Stinnes was an early contributor to the Nazi Party (National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei). By 1924 other prominent industrialists and financiers, among them Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolph [sic] Kirdorf, and Kurt von Schroder, were secretly giving substantial sums to the Nazis. In 1931 members of the coalowners' association which Kirdorf headed pledged themselves to pay 50 pfennigs for each ton of' coal sold, the money to go to the organization which Hitler was building. The U.S. Kilgore Committee - "Who Financed Adolf Hitler?"

This all finally led to 4,200,000 Germans being killed in WWII (we are leaving out the 6,000,000 Jews and the 20,000,000 Russians), and of course Germany was a smoking ruin, filled with widows and orphans, but these industrialists like the Krupps and the Thyssens  made money leading up to the war, during the war (using slave labor), and after the war and the Krupps and the Thyssens, for example, are still some of richest families in Germany today. Like Naomi says, the staterooms on Noah's Ark are limited.

Every nation has its own idiosyncrasies, for example Germans wear lederhosen and Americans wear cowboy hats, so I don't imagine we'll be seeing torchlit parades of roman saluting, brown shirts, goosestepping down the broad avenues of Washington, or African-Americans being loaded onto boxcars either, for that matter.

American fascism will, like everything else American, have its own inimitable style, but I would argue that the beginning and perhaps more than the beginning, is unfolding right before our very eyes. DS

Meditations on Republican craziness

At the center of all the nuttiness of today’s Republicans is their bankrollers’ fear of regulation… The ceaseless culture warfare is merely a tactic to simultaneously attract and confuse a sufficient number of the ignorant to enable the “one-percenters” to paralyze the political process.

Examined under this light their behavior is anything but irrational: they have much to fear, because the globalized world is crying out for regulation.

An illustrative example:

Much of today’s instability, even terrorism and the drug trade, is caused by the growing number of “failed states”, many of them rich in valuable commodities, whose elites, instead of reinvesting their profits in developing their countries, literally loot them, taking the money to opaque, offshore tax havens. What governance remains in these wretched lands consists of totally corrupt political jobbers and armed thugs. These areas often become safe havens for terrorist organizations and state cover for international drug cartels.

This dynamic, so blatantly evident in the third world is also at work in the most developed and sophisticated economies, starving the governments of the money necessary to provide essential goods and services to their populations. This may sound extreme, but if George W. Bush had been a serious man, he could have done a lot more for the wellbeing of the American people, as well as world peace, harmony and the defeat of terrorism, if, in lieu of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, he had invaded Switzerland and the Cayman Islands instead.

Solving all the problems that the future has in store will require money and the money is right there under our noses. In short, bringing the oceans of the world’s black money under state control is an essential first step to achieving the general welfare of humanity.

Although with a less picturesque cast of characters, climate change is also an obvious area where the leading states are going to have to cooperate closely to fashion very strict regulations and enforce them with extreme vigilance and severity.

I am convinced that rather than any sincere questioning of the science involved, it is the simple fear of the mere existence of international and state organizations endowed with the power and technical resources necessary to bring world climate change under some sort of rational control that motivate the massive quantities of money spent on questioning the reality of climate change. It is that “rational control” that the one-percent fear and have reason to fear: that and no other is the coming “revolution”. Theirs is a “counter-revolution” before the fact.

An example of the tactics that the “counter-revolution” uses to avoid approaching the issue of common sense regulation: regulating the sale of assault rifles, weapons whose only purpose is enabling a lone individual to kill a large number of human beings in a short space of time.

Now, an active and focused one-percenter can take decisions with his money and the influence that money brings, that can affect the lives of thousands, even millions of his fellow human beings; all his life he lives with the sensation of empowerment just as a fish lives with the sensation of water, he breathes it and swims in it, it is his element, often since birth… just like the fish.

For the average poor slob, probably the only feeling of comparable empowerment available to him in the midst of his general powerlessness is having an AK-47 in his closet with a few banana clips and a couple of thousand rounds of soft-nose bullets… just in case. Threatening that “empowerment” with regulation is a very efficient way of getting him on the same wavelength of the Kochs, Trumps and Romneys of this world.

This is just one example; there are dozens and dozens of others. In the future we might discuss the mental Kama Sutra that allows the supposedly devout Catholic, Paul Ryan, to bed Ayn Rand with Jesus of Nazareth, a blasphemous and perfectly surreal union, which is the proof, if any were needed, of how shameless this counter-revolution is. The “revolution” it counters is, of course, nothing more and nothing less than applied common sense. 

Bottom line: America’s ultra-right and the moneyed individuals that empower them are at war with simple common sense… and from their point of view that makes all kinds of sense. DS

Conservatives or neo-fascists?

David Seaton's News Links

I would think it important to separate this new "conservatism" from the traditional variety. Remember the American vice is to use language to hide meaning. I’ll quote myself from an earlier post:

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate.

Examples? There are many.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, “red” is the color of the left, but in America, the term, “red state”, means one that is right-wing and “blue”, which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call “liberal”, which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing… These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, “conservative”.

The new conservative is, in plain English, in fact, a neo-fascist and the personality traits we observe on the American right these days are those of a fascist.

What is the difference

If a person is born into a well to do, stable family, where the parents respect and perhaps even love each other and treat the child kindly and his/her exposure to traditional religion is benign. He/she is likely to accept the family’s traditions and values unquestioningly.

From that point his/her attitude will be one of prudence, of not spoiling  (for him/her and his/her family) a good thing… and his/her attitude toward the less fortunate than himself/herself may even be benevolent and paternalistic and be expressed in contributions to charity and other good works.

What we are seeing in the Republicans now, has little or nothing to do with that kind of conservatism. We are looking at exasperated, paranoiac, xenophobic, racist nastiness, in short a fascistic mentality of crippled personalities in reaction to changing mores and a failing economy. DS

Why are the Republicans so weird?

David Seaton's News Links

This blog post, by the excellent Thomas Edsall, makes some very interesting points about the make-up of the Republican electorate. In the GOP’s South Carolina primary, 98% of those who voted were white: this in a state where nearly 28% of the population is black. Republican voters are also relatively old: 72% in South Carolina were over the age of 45. Could it be that some of the panic and anger among Republican voters is because they fear that “their” country is slipping away from them. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

For someone who came to consciousness of the difference between Democrats and Republicans in the age of Eisenhower, the current metamorphosis of the GOP into the party of cranks and grinches and Gingriches is dismaying.

When I was a boy the Republicans that lived around me were mostly pallid, though vigorous, high church Episcopalians, solid, smug types who struggled mightily with golf and sedately clipped stock coupons. As to the younger ones, crew cuts and white bucks, energetically embalmed in stifling, Pat Booney squareness come immediately to mind.

Certainly a Mormon, no matter how enamored of money, and conventional in every other way, would have been an outlier in the extremely Republican, Chicago North Shore of my youth... Not to imagine the likes of the indescribably corrupt and lewd Newt Gingrich or a Rick Santorum that would have Joseph Ratzinger vetting the US Constitution.

I cannot think of a better bellwether of America's malaise then that of the party of the formerly priggish, self-contented, self-righteous, self-satisfied, conventional and sensible becoming the party of the paranoiac, the exasperated and the kooky. DS

When is a conservative not a conservative?

David Seaton's News Links

At a Tea Party rally in Troy, Michigan, the GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said this: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!" To rapturous applause, Santorum went on: "There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate him." And then, the kicker: "I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image." The audience, mostly older folks in working-class garb, laughed with Santorum. Rolling Stone

The decline in marriage rates has been steepest for the least educated, especially men, and smallest for college graduates, especially women. College graduates, the highest earners, are more likely today to be married than are Americans with less education — 69% for adults with a college degree versus 56% for those who are not a college graduate. Pew Research Center

Several studies suggest that while college-educated dual-earner families have high marital quality, lower-income dual-earner couples have been experiencing heightened marital distress. Infidelity, drug abuse, depression, and domestic violence can happen anywhere, but they are especially common among couples facing economic distress. More than two-thirds of the low-income mothers studied by Duke University's Linda Burton and her research team, for example, had been victims of serious domestic violence and sexual abuse.(...) Strengthening people's economic prospects and developing more living-wage jobs is essential to reducing the economic instability that exacerbates relationship problems, and doing that would probably increase marriage rates among low-income and low-education individuals. Stephanie Coontz

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate. 

Examples? There are many.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, "red" is the color of the left, but in America, the term, "red state", means one that is right-wing and "blue", which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call "liberal", which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing... These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, "conservative".

Like most conservatives the world over, American conservatives are very strong in the defense of "family values": marriage, two-parent families, with mothers as care-givers, "standing by their man". For a traditional conservative the family is the core of all social relations, the keystone of individual and national life.

However, as we can see from the snippets that top this page, there is a powerful contradiction between low taxes for the rich, deregulated globalization and the possibility for people with only high school education, or less, to raise children in a stable environment... even with both parents working at two jobs... if they can find work.

To give just one small example: such measures as the deregulation of store-opening hours, where many parents, single parents or married couples, gay or straight,  have to work late into the night or on weekends, even Sundays, leaving many children alone after school or in their free time, with no one to help them with their homework, cook them a hot meal or give them a cuddle when they are sad, tuck them at bedtime and listen to their prayers or instill "values" conservative or otherwise in them. And this is not a minority we are talking about, for as Thomas Geoghegan wrote in The Nation, "only 27 percent of adults have a bachelor's degree, and there are not enough jobs for them".

So, obviously it is our über-capitalist economy, the one American conservatives wish to further deregulate, that is literally destroying the American family, not gay marriage or abortion.

Again, this toxic mixture of social intolerance and destructive deregulation is not a universal "conservative" phenomenon. In Germany,  both the German Catholic and Protestant churches join with the labor unions to keep most businesses closed on most evenings and shut totally on Sundays. Progressives and traditional conservatives overlap harmoniously on this issue there. 

At bottom America's biggest problem is that it doesn't make sense anymore. DS

A reminder for gloating Republicans

Alfred E. Newman from Hell

David Seaton's News Links

There seem to be a lot of Republicans walking around with familiar smirks on their faces today.

This is entirely premature.

I know that Americans are famous for their short memories and  even shorter attention spans, but only one year has passed since a great affliction  and a daily humiliation was extirpated from our "hearts and minds".

I made this video over three years ago and I am reviving it in case there are any Republicans who think that people are going to soon forget what they have inflicted on the country and mankind. DS

What exactly makes a horse race?

David Seaton's News Links
The "photo finish" above expresses all the excitement of horse racing. One horse is beating another by "a nose".

This excitement generates cash.

A tight race, with an exciting finish that brings the fans to their feet is what horse racing is all about.

The excitement and the doubt about which horse is going to win stimulates betting and fills the race course with regular, paying customers.

For those who organize horse races a photo finish like the one above is the preferred result in every single race. If the results of horse races were preordained, no one would ever broadcast them and no one would ever write about them in the newspapers. Therefore preordained horse race winners would generate no advertising revenues.

Since, unavoidably, some horses are much faster than others, something must be done to "even the odds": a horse racing term if ever there was one.

The track official in charge of doing this is called the "handicapper" and his profession is called "handicapping".

Many readers may have only heard the term, "handicapped" as the politically incorrect version of "physically challenged", the politically correct version takes longer to say, but actually means the same thing as the incorrect version.

In the handicapper's ideal race all the horses would cross the finish line at exactly the same time. To make this happen he "physically challenges" or "handicaps" them by putting lead weights in the faster horses's saddles to make them run more slowly. This is why you see pictures of the tiny jockeys being weighed along with their saddles before the race; to ensure that the total weight that was calculated by the official handicapper is what finally goes on the horse at the starting gate.

The prospective wagerer out to "have a flutter", seeing the handicappers handiwork thinks, "'Flying Dog Food' is by far the best horse today, he's won every race he's ever been entered in, but he's never carried this much weight before and besides, last night it rained and the track will be slow" and thus the punter takes more interest in the race... and maybe bets against 'Flying Dog Food". More action and more commissions for the bookies, excitement, photo finishes, money... Horse racing.

Which brings us to the coming election.

Professor Immanuel Wallerstein encapsulates most, if not all, of the present commentary when he writes:

Barack Obama(...) is going to sweep the elections with a large majority of the Electoral College and a considerable increase in Democratic strength in both houses of the Congress. (...) If one analyzes the situation in detail, state by state, the only state that voted Democratic in 2004 in which McCain seems to be competitive today is Michigan. The states that Bush won in 2004 in which Obama is competitive are numerous - Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, and maybe Nevada, North Carolina, and Montana. He's even doing well enough in Mississippi that Republicans will have to invest money and time campaigning there. If Obama won all the competitive states except Michigan, he'd have 310-333 electoral votes. He needs 270.

Not much of a race at this point, is it? All over but the shouting, don't you think? Wake me up when it's over, no?

If you compare the present race between Obama and McCain to Obama and Hillary's battle to the wire, or even McCain's home stretch gallop out of the crowded Republican pack, it all looks pretty boring, doesn't it? ... And it's only June! Finished before it began.

Think of how many people were glued to their TVs as Hillary battled on, how many advertisements those people had to sit through to hear all the pundit's expert drivel... The Obama vs. McCain race is not going to sell much stuff is it?

A real money loser, something that the media have to cover, but nobody much wants to watch.

Think how much more money everybody concerned would make if the two candidates raced neck and neck, through the summer and into the fall.

This race is begging to be handicapped.

A photo finish is the desired result. A cliff hanger all the way down to the wire with everybody glued to their TV sets till the break of dawn on election night... sitting through all those ads.

Remember, in handicapping, the fastest horse has to carry the heaviest weights.

Barack Obama has peaked way too soon. His superiority is beginning to bore. It looks more like a coronation than a race.

Or more like Jesus' Palm Sunday ride into Jerusalem on a donkey than the Kentucky Derby.

Without any particular malice aforethought the media is going to begin to pick Obama's story apart, just to keep the public's attention from drifting off. They really have nothing better to do.

They have to make a new story out of this.

In the next weeks we are going to see if Obama has what horse racing fans call "heart" or "class". DS

Notes for a blog piece

David Seaton's News Links
In following the presidential nominating campaign I am struck once again by how entertaining, full bodied and variegated the US right and ultra-right are, and how decaffeinated, watered down and mealymouthed those that pass for the American left are.

What a cast of characters the Republicans have! From libertarian eccentrics like Ron Paul right through to neofascist Rudy Giuliani, stirred in with folksy, guitar strumming, creationist, Mike Huckabee who sounds like the one-eyed Mullah Omar if he were reworked by Walt Disney.

In short they have a genuine culture. From center-right to far out, wacky right... no holds barred, in your face, what you see is what you get, pure reactionaries... A real spectrum, in fact a veritable monkey's ass of a party.

While, at the same time the American left is the sin that dare not speak its name.

Because don't kid yourself, neither Hillary or Obama would even qualify for the rightwing of the British Labor Party. On the continent they might just make it as Christian Democrats, but just barely... Anything like a sober, Swedish Social Democrat would be treated like Hugo Chávez on LSD with genital herpes by the US media.

It looks like the USA is heading into a nasty recession that is going to cause great pain to the "little guy": where even the middle class is going to discover that they have been shafted and there is no political organization prepared to pick up that ball and run with it. We can see that by the way a congress voted in to end the Iraq war just lies there.

Somebody (nobody but the American people) has to put together a grass roots movement to change all of this because the two party system is never going to deliver anything but more right wing (choose noun), because that is where the juice and the sincerity and the culture are.

Who could ever be the American Gandhi? DS

Patience for Iraq war waning, say congressional leaders

The patient ones

David Seaton's News Links
It is hard to read this article from "The Examiner" without wanting to scream obscenities and punch walls. These are the men and women who voted for the war talking. They have opened the gates of hell, pushed the people of Iraq through them and now they are "impatient" and would like to shut the gates and walk away. What is most sickening and unforgivable is the sanctimonious tone used... They probably say this stuff after one of those Washington "prayer breakfasts".

Of course the Americans should get out of Iraq, they should never have been there in the first place... but the United States should be paying war reparations to the people of Iraq for the next 50 years, at least, and the people who organized this war should be put on trial and imprisoned. DS

Patience for Iraq war waning, say leaders - The Examiner

Abstract: Four years into the Iraq war, all sides in the bitter debate agree that President Bush’s “troop surge” plan represents the final drop of American patience for the war. If Iraqis fail to control the violence, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, “The American taxpayer has a reasonable expectation that we will bring our people home.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has steadfastly supported the mission, said Republicans’ patience is nearly exhausted, too. “This is the last chance for the Iraqis,” the Kentucky Republican said in an interview with The Examiner. “The last chance for them to step up and demonstrate that they can do their part to save their country.”(...) Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott said(...) “At some point, you got to say to them, ‘Congratulations, Saddam is dead,’ ” Lott said. “We brought Baghdad under control. You folks got to decide whether you just want to kill each other forever or have a real government and peace and freedom and democracy.”(...) Anyway, Democrats say, Republicans send the same message to insurgents and Iraqis as timetables do when they say that their patience will run dry in months rather than years. “That may be,” Lott replied. “But at some point, they have to take control themselves.” READ IT ALL(barf bags not provided)