Flotsam

How is it that nothing ever happens? There is the Gannon/Guckert scandal -nothing. There is the Rove/Libby scandal - nothing. There is the Sybel Edmonds scandal - nothing. The DeLay scandal - nothing. There is he Enron scandal - nothing. There is the Halliburton war profiteering scandal - nothing. There is the torture scandal - nothing. What on earth is wrong with our country? There is also the greatest scandal of all - Iraq - and again, nothing. Not only are the neocons and Bush/Cheney insisting we "stay the course," even though it can promise nothing but more disaster, the Democratic leadership is even more warmongering than the Republicans. We need more troops in Iraq, they claim, not fewer. Under the circumstances this is so bizarre as to call for some kind of mental test for these lunatics. Make no mistake, we are in big trouble in this country. When both major political parties are insisting on going in the precise opposite direction from public opinion this means BIG TROUBLE! Where is a strong and charismatic anti-war candidate?

Even under enormous pressure from the U.S. the Iraqis are unable to agree on a constitution. Why should that surprise anyone? And what kind of constitution will they have being pressured by the U.S. not only to meet an unrealistic and arbitrary deadline but also to do what we tell them to do? This is a group picked by the U.S. to draft a constitution, given the outlines of what it should look like, and told to "make it snappy." Democracy at work. What a bunch of utter crap. I'm sorry, but you have to admire the Iraqis for not just slavishly following the U.S. dictates.

And now we have the clever Sharon using the pull-out from Gaza to steal even more Palestinian land on the West Bank. He is going to "sacrifice" (they are all getting huge compensations for leaving) 8000 Israeli settlers in Gaza to incorporate some 40,000 new Iraqi settlers illegally on the West Bank. And he is asking the U.S. to provide some two billion dollars to pay for this farce - two billion you can bet he will get. No wonder the Arabs hate us for our "freedoms." Freedom to steal, kill, rape and pillage at will.

On top of all the other problems we have as a result of Bush/Cheney and the neocons there is the question of Iran. You can hear the drumbeats of war already. The same lies they told us about Iraq. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling," they're going to make a bomb, we have to nuke them first, blah, blah, blah. First of all they have every right to do what they are doing at the moment. They are violating no rules. And they are said by those who presumably know such things, they are ten years from having a bomb. But what if they even did have a bomb? Do you think they would immediately drop such a bomb on Israel, knowing they would be immediately obliterated from the face of the earth? Furthermore, why shouldn't they have a bomb? Pakistan has some. India has some. Israel has many. China and Russia have many. Britain and France have many. And the U.S. has more than all the others combined. So we are going to tell Iran they can't have one? "Do as I say, not as I do?" Apparently they think the Iranians are as childlike as they are.

Until the coming grass roots upheaval takes place we can only pin our hopes on Cindy Sheehan and Patrick Fitzgerald. If I were a praying person I'd say pray. But all I can offer is hope, hope that seems to grow dimmer with each passing day. The neocons are insane and their insanity increasingly seeps into our body politic.

"But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike."

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is...