DARKNESS FALLS ACROSS THE LAND...

...as Alito is sure to get confirmed. I emailed and called my senators, Lott and Cochran, but their vote was a foregone conclusion before Alito was even nominated.

And I posted a few days ago about my hope that Bush will discover who leaked "the Program" so we could all know who our newest national hero is. Turns out at least one of the leakers has now come forward voluntarily--that guy is a fuckin' badass. And his name is Russell Tice.

Now if only more people in the Bush administration would get some nuts like Tice, we could bring G.W. down.

I Ran So Far Away...

And then of course, everyone's scolding Iran again. Tsk, tsk, tsk! Not that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, but hypocrisy is worse. Let's remind ourselves once again that the U.S. is the only country in the history of the world to have used nuclear weapons against another country. And let's also remind ourselves that for every embassy hostage crisis, there's an installation of a monarch or an invitation into an evil triumvirate.

But no, our media will just blather on and on about how all these tinpot tyrants are such a serious threat to what they have to say is "the greatest country in the world," i.e., the U.S. For fuck's sake, we spend more money than any other country in the world on defense--in fact, soon we will be spening more than every country in the world combined, and we still feel that fucking Iran is a threat to us?

When will this madness end? The U.S. is the threat, for crying out loud. That's how the rest of the world sees it, anyway.

But really, we truly are living in a culture of fear, of give me convenience or give me death! If any country in the world has no reason to be afraid of or feel threatened by another country, it should be the U.S. Has all the money that has gone to "defense" over the years at the expense of social programs not been enough? Now they have to scare us into giving up our civil liberties, too?

Here's a sample of a letter from my hometown newspaper today:

I also support the Bush administration's decision to wiretap whatever/whenever,
foreign or domestic, any and all correspondence considered to be necessary for
national security.

Any abuse of this practice will be picked up immediately by the media and made public. So, Mr. Regl, this wire-tapping measure does not scare me in the slightest.

However, Islamic terrorists do.

What a good little culture warrior this guy is! He knows without a doubt that "it can't happen here!" We're too free--I mean, it's not as if American citizens can be held for three years without charge or anything! He has complete confidence in the media and their adversarial, brave reportage! And he completely trusts the public to be outraged if there are abuses! WHAT THE FUCK!


Why don't these people get it? Just like with the Soviet Union, the "threat" is mostly imagined (al Qaeda-real threat, Iraq-fake threat, Iran-fake threat)--we are fed fear every day so that the military-industrial complex can justify its existence--i.e., on defense contractor GE's MSNBC this evening, Chris Matthews was talking about the threat of Iran. If we're not afraid anymore, we might tell those guys to take a hike and give back some of that money.

In other, simpler, more famous words--"war is a racket." Here's one more quote from that book:

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.