Rampant Silliness

Couple “dumpster diving” to
enjoy intimate moment, robbed
of shoes, jewelry and wallet.

Really now, can things here in USA get any sillier? I mean, we’ve now gone beyond stupid, and have reached a point that can only be described as silly. And things grow even sillier day by day. Think of our reactions to virtually any problem you can think of at the moment. Let’s begin with health care, as that silliness took front and center today with the release of the Baucus health care plan, the result of months of discussion and supposed compromise that was to produce some bipartisan support. Neither Democrats or Republicans support it. It is not clear why Republicans don’t, as it is exactly the kind of plan the health care Insurance and Pharmaceutical giants wrote and is nothing less that just a gift to their corporate profits. This is a bill so bad you can smell it from here in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. I won’t go into details as they are too horrible even to contemplate. So why is this silly? Because we knew damn well this was going to happen and we waited for months to allow it to happen. Baucus has received somewhere in the vicinity of three million dollars from the health care giants. We knew that, but allowed him to chair a committee anyway. He produced for them just what they wanted. Nay, even more than they wanted. Thus we taxpayers paid for his endeavors, knowing full well what would happen would not even remotely be close to what we desired, a bill so ridiculously transparent as to be dead on arrival. This was a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. There is a name for people who put up with this stuff… suckers!

Related to this silliness is the silliness of the health care reform movement in general. Most everyone knows, or should certainly know by now, that a single-payer system would be the easiest, most efficient, least expensive, and most desirable form of health care we could have, Medicare for all. However, such a system has not even been seriously considered. Having given away even any consideration of this before the negotiations even started (on the claim that it would be impossible and too disruptive), there was talk of a public option that would keep the Insurance giants honest. But this, too, may well be on the chopping block (it doesn’t even appear in the Baucus plan). Health care reform without a public option (or some reasonable functional equivalent) is no change at all. No one seems to know what will emerge from all the negotiations in the House and Senate, but fussing around for months about something that is both important and fairly clear-cut, and having to put up with Republican fascist tactics is, I fear, more and just plain silly.

For even greater silliness consider the argument over racism. Republicans and others (I guess there are others of some kind) have brought their racism right out in plain sight. Looking at their signs and their behavior towards Obama there is absolutely no doubt about their racism. And yet they have the gall to stand there and tell us it is not racism, that they are merely protesting Obama’s health care reform. This is absurd. It’s like saying, who are you going to trust, us, or your lying eyes. It’s mean, it’s even vicious, it’s obvious, it’s right there in plain sight, it’s stupid and un-American. What is silly about it is that we even pay attention to this minority of racist hatemongers. They can never be convinced otherwise, they should simply be ignored and bypassed by the vast majority who still have some claim to sanity.

Of course there is nothing sillier than our policy in the Middle East. I would have to say that our policy in Afghanistan (if we even have one) must be seen as sillier than our policies on Iraq and Iran, but these latter certainly no not want for lack of silliness. Our “war” in Afghanistan will enter its ninth year next month, far longer than WW II. What do we have to show for it, nothing, nothing at all. If anything we have made things progressively worse. Virtually everyone has admitted that we cannot win anything militarily in Afghanistan, rightly described as the graveyard of empires. We seem to be fighting the Taliban, for reasons that are a mystery to me. The Taliban are a local problem, interested in problems within their own country. They are no threat to us. The excuse that they harbor al-Qaida is silly. They once offered to turn him over to us, but Dick the Slimy turned them down. The claim that we know where he is, but we can’t get him, is even sillier. Now there is serious talk about sending even more troops to Afghanistan, even though it is obvious that the more troops we send, the more the Taliban and al-Qaida recruit to fight against them. We know this. But we do it anyway. If that is not silly, what is?

Iran, perhaps. Our approach to Iran is sillier. We are still threatening to attack Iran militarily if they won’t do our bidding, actually, not our bidding, the bidding of the Israelis. Iran, we believe (because the Israelis tell us so) is trying to develop a nuclear bomb. There is, as far as I know, no evidence of this. They deny it and the International Inspectors find no evidence of it. The idea seems to be that if Iran gets a nuclear bomb they will be a threat to Israel and to us. Like, the Iranians are crazy, and will immediately attack the rest of the world with their one or two nuclear bombs. Iran is a threat to Israel only in the sense they would be able to defend themselves from a nuclear armed Israel, Pakistan, India, and the United States. This paranoia about Iran is silly. Perhaps there will be talks, perhaps they will lead somewhere, but given our closed attitude towards them, perhaps nothing will come of it. So then we can have another “war,” kill thousands more, displace millions more, create more misery than can be imagined, all because of Israeli imaginary scenarios that are basically silly. Their demand that we should attack them, or help attack them, is even sillier. That we would actually do it is even sillier than Glenn Beck.

Then there are the obscene bank bail-outs, the failure to investigate and prosecute our known war criminals, our complete subservience to corporate interests, our failure to do something about don’t ask, don’t tell, our…, our…,our, our pretending we are an empire while we are rapidly going bankrupt, our failure to face up to global warming,…our, oh, to hell with it all. We seem to have settled upon a permanent silly season. It probably won’t last long, because we won’t either. In the meantime, don’t forget to watch Monday Night Football and always dry carefully between your toes. Cheers.

LKBIQ:
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Sir Winston Churchill

TILT:
According to Michael Moore, 40 million Americans read only at a 4th or 5th grade level, and even more cannot comprehend what they do read.