It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

UPDATE BELOW: Awesome picture from New York.

Today Occupy Portland was scheduled to meet at 8:00am at the East end of the Steel Bridge, so I went down to take a look.  I walked along the west side waterfront, figuring that would give me the broadest view of what was happening, and alert me to any apparent changes of plans, since I was a little late.  As I approached, the obligatory choppers plied the skies, knots of police hung out in clusters, some with black SUV’s and riot gear and others on bikes, news trucks stood at the ready, and there were even two County Sheriff boats on the river.

One thing was conspicuous in its absence: protesters.  As I approached the bridge, the only indication that an Occupy event was underway was a lone guy on the middle of the bridge, rhythmically thumping a metal washtub and some cowbells.  I asked him what was going on, and he said, in effect, whatever we want to go on.  “You can get arrested, or you can just observe and bear witness,” he said.  “But all I see is cops; is anybody here?”  He smiled and replied, “What does it matter how many people are here?  It could be thousands or just a few hundred; what matters is that they,” gesturing toward the cops, choppers, and boats, “are certainly taking this seriously.”  Hoping his enthusiasm wasn’t unwarranted, I decided to walk to the East side and see what was going on.

Admittedly, I was a little nervous.  Everywhere I looked, clusters of police and their vehicles were massed as though awaiting an insurrection; the bridge, which ordinarily carries not only the railroad on its lower deck but buses, light rail, and vehicular traffic above (and shakes disturbingly in so doing), had been closed to all non-transit traffic, creating a pointless inconvenience for motorists, but maybe that’s the idea.  Good for some “man on the street” TV soundbites about how those danged hippies are preventing upstanding citizens from getting to work.   Who says cops are bad at PR?

Of course, all the riot gear sent a quite different message; no tomfoolery would be tolerated, even though at this point I’d still yet to see any protesters.  Did the cops throw a party and no one came?   Fortunately, as I entered the Transit plaza on the East side of the river, I did see, finally, non-uniformed people, and quite a lot of them.  They’d been herded onto a median between the light rail tracks, ostensibly to allow the trains to pass,  yet trains and buses were still backed up, waiting for a slow-moving police contingent to get off the roadway.  I then concluded that creating traffic snarls were indeed a feature, and not a bug, of the police strategy.

Just as I got there, people began to move forward toward the pedestrian deck of the bridge.  The crowd, probably a little less than a thousand in number, had the familiar feel of a Portland protest, which was why it was so laughable that the police felt the need for such overkill.  Are they really afraid of a bunch of ordinary people, many of whom were AARP members, walking across a bridge?  I noticed a fairly large contingent of union signs and insignias, which pretty much belied the Oregonian’s constant refrain that Occupiers were losing the support of working people.  There were a few homeless, and a few anarchist types, both of who were significant in only how rare they were among the more ordinary majority.

As we slowly snaked down the ramps and onto the bridge, followed by a couple dozen bicycle cops, I was delighted that there would be at least something for the numerous choppers to film, and it did look impressive enough, although not enough to remotely justify the enormous police presence. A young hipster behind me had a bullhorn, which he used to heckle the sheriff’s boats in the river.  “What are you guys doing?” and such.  When he said, “Why don’t you catch a fish?” I couldn’t help but turn around and smile.  That was the mood so many police created, albeit unintentionally: amusement.  Note to cops:  when they’re making fun of you, you’re losing.

I did run into the guy again with the wash basin and cowbells, who was now manning his post and playing with considerably more fervor than before, blessed by an appreciative audience.  As we walked, the bullhorn guy was chatting amicably with the bicycle cops, who were now mingling with those of us at the back.  When we reached the West side, the riot cops and SUV’s had disappeared, probably out of embarrassment.

We assembled in the same plaza where we had assembled prior to the October 6 march, and after some of the requisite chants, the bullhorn was passed from person to person, who told in turn their 99% stories.  A march was presumably planned afterward, but it started raining and I decided to leave.  In the ensuing hours, the Oregonian reports that they went from bank to bank, effectively shutting them down completely without any violence; the querulous banksters had already barricaded themselves in well in advance, behind phalanxes of security guards.  That’s customer service for you; maybe they’ll use the idle time to come up with a new fee to compensate them for their Depends and smelling salts.

Watch for it on your next statement.

UPDATE:  The building on which this image is projected is the VERIZON Building.  Marvel:

For weeks we’ve been hearing about the intolerable costs to taxpayers of the Occupy movement; what we’ve seen though, is that these costs are primarily those of militarized police forces trampling the rights of ordinary citizens for the benefit of business elites.  The “damage” to the park had been previously estimated at $19,000, but today local news said that figure would be “much higher.”  Really?  For sand and grass seed?  Whatever.  The real costs are entirely those of the police state: lost revenues for local businesses bullied into shutting down, enormous amounts of overtime and transport for cops from neighboring cities and counties, and everybody knows tear gas and rubber bullets don’t grow on trees.

In the last Robber Baron era, the one percenters at least had the decency to hire their own goons and pay for their own ammo; today’s coddled elite expect ordinary citizens to pony up for the luxury of being arrested and clubbed.  It’s a pretty sweet deal when you think about it.  In Oakland, Mayor Jean Quan thinks nothing of spending $5 million to bash heads and fill up the jails, in a cash-strapped city that just closed two schools to “save” $2 million.  Here, business interests who just days ago were waxing fanatical about the damage to their suddenly beloved parks, now have offered to donate money and labor to repair them, but pointedly made no mention of the far greater costs of the Mubarak-lite crackdown they demanded, and got.

Last time I checked, ordinary people have no such control over the use of scarce revenues; outlying neigborhoods beset by crime and poverty routinely beg, to little avail, for just a few more patrol cars at night.  Things are different, however, for the entitled elite and their spokespeople at The Oregonian. War, whether at home or abroad, can be spared no expense, while the green eyeshades and sharp pencil suddenly come out when festering social needs are considered, when they’re considered at all.

If the “Free Market” were anything more than a clever slogan for ruthless upward wealth distribution, it would be entirely uncontroversial to propose that those who benefit, quite lavishly, from the suppression of dissent should at least pay for it.  Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank implicitly acknowledged this principle by “donating” a million or so to the NYPD; he may be a thief and a charlatan, but he’s more honest about it than most.

UPDATE:  (4:00pm)

Reinforcements have been brought in from enlightened places like Salem, and the cops are really rolling up with rubber bullets, tear gas, and what not.  Another busload of cops is heading in.  More news later; the protesters are heading right here to Park Ave.

Bowing to the bleatings of The Oregonian and the same dozen or so cranky Dittoheads that fill their letters section, Mayor Sam Adams decided to, well, make a complete ass of himself.  Clearly taking cues from authoritarian Democrats in other cities, he went ahead and announced that Occupy Portland would have to vacate Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, located on either side of the elk statue above.  As elsewhere, Occupy had essentially become “home” to Portland’s legions of homeless youth, with all the disorder that entails, giving the city and the police all the excuse they needed to shut down the camp.  Of course, having an excuse to do something isn’t the same as having the ability, and even with the entire police force on hand, the task proved laughably impossible.

Though the camp had dwindled over the last few days to barely more than a hundred souls huddled in pelting rain by Saturday afternoon, when we arrived about fifteen minutes before the “deadline,” thousands of people filled not just the parks themselves, but the sidewalks on both sides of the surrounding streets.  Aside from a few drunken frat boy types jeering at the “hippies,” the mayor and police were clearly about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse.  It was so glaringly obvious that any attempt to reclaim the parks was doomed to failure, we could have left right then, but stayed because the whole thing was just so much fun.  Though the neighborhood bars were all (foolishly) closed for the evening, relinquishing what would have been land office business in favor of completely unfounded fear, the atmosphere was not unlike Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Clearly relishing playing  Bugs Bunny to Mayor Sam’s Elmer Fudd, we protesters quickly realized we weren’t protesting, but celebrating.  Circling motorists honked and waved their support as a hundred or so cyclists rode lazy circles around the parks on typical Portland tall bikes and fixies; a group of National Lawyers’ Guild representatives chatted and laughed amongst themselves, confident their services were wholly unnecessary, which they were.

Even the weather cooperated; heavy evening rain dwindled to barely a mist, all but inviting the less committed to take a stand with the stalwarts, and certainly diminishing somewhat the grumpiness of the cops.  Though two news choppers hovered uselessly overhead (the cover of trees made aerial shots all but impossible), it was abundantly clear they weren’t going to get any tape that would make it into the news. The “reporter” from the local Fox affiliate, a glamorous young thing in pancake and parka, looked both bored and disappointed, which naturally pleased me no end.

After an hour or so, more people were still arriving, so we felt like it was safe to slip away; this morning when I woke up the first thing I heard was choppers (don’t those things ever run out of gas?) and I knew that #Occupy’s victory was as complete as was Mayor Adams’ humiliation.  The Oregonian glumly confirmed it.  Well, boo f*cking hoo.  Yes, the grass looked like hell, but democracy survived to fight another day.

Lots of people don’t realize that the little town of Lewiston, Idaho, is a seaport, partly because it seems impossible that a spot hundreds of miles inland that no one’s ever heard of could be so.  Such skepticism is entirely warranted; Lewiston wasn’t, in fact a port until the completion of four taxpayer-funded dams on the formerly wild and salmon-filled Snake River in 1975.  The river has now been reduced to a slackwater barge canal, and driven four salmon runs to the brink of extinction in the process.  Salmon and trout that once spawned in the upper reaches of the Snake now must negotiate almost a dozen dams to get there, and as you’d imagine, few make it.  And by few, I mean there have been years you could count them on one hand.

Much hand-wringing, if little common sense, has been devoted to this rapid, human-caused extinction.  Fish have been loaded onto trucks and dumped below the dams, water levels have been tinkered with during runs, and the Oregonian even won a Pulitzer Prize (!) for shamelessly touting the mighty port of Lewiston as the gateway to the Global Economic Future in a silly but unusually expensive series called, “The French Fry Connection.”  The gist of the series, in a nutshell, was that them Chinamen love Idaho taters and envy America’s resulting obesity, so we’re all gonna git rich, or something.  In this case, there isn’t just one elephant in the room being aggressively ignored; it’s a regular Barnum and Bailey extravaganza:  the umpteen millions blown by the Army Corps of Engineers on the dams themselves, a bunch of Columbia Basin farmers who now feel divinely entitled to free water and cheap shipping, a resurgent barge-building industry in Portland, and the hardy citizens of Lewiston (and their neighbors in Clarkston, get it?), who evidently harbor the deluded aspiration of being the next Hong Kong.  From the Port of Lewsiton website:

Port of Lewiston Vessel Schedule

**Last Receiving**

As you can see, the taxpayer-financed, habitat destroying “port” isn’t exactly busy; more boats come to any local fishing dock in a day than in this two-month period.  Despite the cheery slogan at the top of the Port’s site, “It Pays to Have a Port,” it obviously doesn’t pay much.  Still, a combination of bureaucratic inertia, an unwillingness to admit mistakes, and the massive expense of removing the dams makes Lewiston’s ludicrous ambitions a seemingly irreversible reality.

You see, dams like the Lower Granite Dam, pictured above, are now treated as historic treasures that must not be compromised, although they are of such little value that the Corps couldn’t even be bothered to think up good names for them. Ice Harbor.  Lower Monumental.  Little Goose.  Really?  We are constantly told that the dams provide enough electricity to “power a city the size of Seattle,” but no such cities exist in that underpopulated, sere landscape, and much of the power is therefore used to operate the locks and pump underpriced water from the river to a few hundred Columbia Basin farmers.  All of whom, you may be assured, listen to Rush Limbaugh daily and are  thus fanatically opposed to such wanton government handouts, at least for others.

Fortunately one Portland-based Federal Judge, James Redden, has doggedly kept the pro-extinction forces on the run by, well, pointing out that we still do, despite conservatives’ efforts, have a law about this sort of thing called the Endangered Species Act, of which driving four species into extinction in fifteen years quite clearly runs afoul.  Since the first of his many anti-dam rulings, billions of dollars have been spent on “mitigation,” which loosely translates into “swallowing the spider to catch the fly,” to no avail, all the while further reducing the dams’ already dubious economic advantages.

In these times of Austerity, it’s unlikely in the extreme that the Federal Government will step up to the plate and undo the incalculable harm this boondoggle has caused, and since anadromous fish like trout and salmon aren’t known for their lavish campaign contributions, Redden’s efforts aren’t likely to save the fish.  But future historians will undoubtedly see this as yet another giant unforced error by self-interested know-nothings.  It does get hard to keep track of them all.

Please call 212-NEW-YORK (212-639-9675), and tell Mayor Bloomberg not to interfere with Occupy Wall Street tomorrow. Residents of New York City can call 311.  (H/T DailyKos)

UPDATE: (Friday) Occupy Wall Street will remain in Zuccotti Park.

Admittedly, it’s happened a little later than I expected, but it appears that over the next few days, the purported “liberals” who run the country have decided to go all Mubarak on our asses, and clear out this “Occupy” rabble once and for all.  Just days ago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was prepared to let OWS stay “indefinitely;” today he says the park just needs a good scrubbing.  Of course, the park in question is itself the product of just the sort of crony capitalism OWS deplores: out of some typically shady real estate deal where developers get to transfer air rights and receive other zoning variances for, generously, providing an adjacent sliver of green space, but still get to “own” it, Zuccotti Park turns out to have a well-connected landlord, and it obviously isn’t the people of New York.  All they had to do was send Bloomberg a sternly worded letter, and he folded like a Hamptons deck chair.

Here in Portland, the Oregonian has now decided that one week of protest was plenty; as usual, taking the opposite view of most of their readers.   Like in New York, they cite traffic and “no camping” ordinances, but really they’re channeling the same forces who just rolled Bloomberg, on a bit smaller scale.  Fortunately, we Portlanders are blessed with lame duck Mayor Sam Adams, who, finally free of fundraising pressures and understandably hurrying to paper over his rather skeezy reputation on Google before his term runs out, is standing firm with the Occupiers.  (I did, however, notice a lot of cute teenagers there, right across the street from his office, so maybe he has ulterior motives….)

The Mayor of Boston solemnly announced that “civil disobedience doesn’t work here,” which would certainly have come as a surprise to the original Tea Partiers, and, not to be outdone, Gov. Hickenlooper of Colorado has similarly declared that this whole protesting thing had worn out its brief and chilly welcome in his town, too.  In Washington, George Will all but cackled maniacally in a more than usually deranged column about how these hippies were going to be the death of the Democrats, just like in 1968, without realizing that things have changed a bit since then, thanks in no small part to the destructive policies promoted by useful idiots like himself.  You see, there was a secure middle class in 1968, and union members, pilots, public servants, and other working people could afford to quibble with the protesters over matters of style and culture, and be thus split politically by the oligarchic right.  No more.

Just in the weeks surrounding the OWS protests, the two supposedly warring political parties managed to agree that the Keystone XL pipeline should be built, more of the Arctic should be sacrificed to drilling, Ozone standards should remain higher than those proposed by Bush, trade “deals” should be passed with sweatshop and even union-murdering countries, the military budget must not be touched, and global conglomerates should be allowed to “repatriate” their ill-gotten billions at almost no tax.  As icing on the cake, the biggest banks announced unprecedented new fees on their long-suffering customers, and peanut butter prices will go up %30 due to global warming-caused drought and crop losses.  You can see why CNN felt the need to hire Erin Burnett.  You can also see why the 1% are getting jumpy.  This is their endgame, but since we all know that they aren’t such good players, they’re relying on crooked refs to win.

Why not?  It’s worked so far.

The trouble is that the wealthy don’t fit the stereotypes: They aren’t all pampered CEOs, hotshot investment bankers, pop stars and athletes. Many own small and medium-sized companies. Half the wealth of the richest 1 percent consists of stakes in these firms. That’s double their holdings of stocks, bonds and mutual funds, according to figures compiled by economist Edward Wolff of New York University. Reid would pay for Obama’s jobs plan by taxing the people who are supposed to create jobs. Does that make sense?

Oops.  Turned out to be a gutter ball, and worse, one that looks suspiciously like John Boehner’s orange head.  Of course, the statistics reek of bogusness, but guys like Samuelson aren’t really trying all that hard anymore.  They write columns straight off the wingnut ticker tape, where “job creators” are the answer, whatever the question. Less than 3% of actual “small businesses” are taxed at the top rate, and Samuelson knows this, but what the hell?  It’s worked so far….

The backlash against the rich is the start of debate, not the end. Are the rich to be punished for succeeding or merely asked to pay their “fair” share? Who is wealthy or who’s just well-off? Is $250,000 a reasonable cutoff for couples, as Obama once indicated, or has that been repudiated? If taxes do rise, what approach would best preserve incentives for hard work, investment and risk-taking? Are Obama’s assaults on wealthy business leaders just deserts (sic) or political cheap shots? However measured, the rich are besieged; the attacks almost certainly will intensify.

Ah, before there were “job creators,” there were the “successful” being “punished.” And my, how this punishment seems to have taken its toll on the poor dears. Ensconced in one or the other of their several gated compounds, these shrinking violets feel “besieged,” as Samuelson so sympathetically puts it, and worse, they’re threatening, for the umpteenth time, to go Galt on us if we don’t leave them alone.  These are the things that keep Samuelson awake at night. They should.

It seems that war profiteer and Pentagon shill Barry McCaffrey slithered into Little Beirut the other day, to talk about some things near and dear to his heart, like, well, war profits, and their indefinite continuation.  The Oregonian’s jaw-droppingly credulous and fawning interview  with this flagrant criminal contained some of the most blatantly authoritarian and imperially dismissive things I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying something.  All were transmitted without comment or correction, natch, by veteran Oregonian reporter Mike Francis.

Entitled, somewhat misleadingly, “Barry McCaffrey Speaks in Portland on PTSD, Mexican Drug Cartels, and Homeland Security” (a more appropriate headline would have been, “McCaffrey Seeks to Continue Cashing In On Climate of Fear He Helped Create”), the article contains so little news I would have learned more reading a three-year-old Pottery Barn catalog.  It’s considered “news” that what McCaffrey had to say about the first, most tedious subject, PTSD, when asked whether PTSD was “hard to diagnose” by the reporter, who would obviously believe anything, McCaffrey said the following:
A: It is. When you’re looking at somebody with physical injuries that are immense and sometimes TBI, which you can’t see, … That’s a population where PTSD is just another diagnosis. I mean it’s there. It’s automatic.

Kids coming out of combat, with multiple combat tours, have been under stress, they do act a little crazy. It takes them a little time to acclimatize.

But for some number, whether it’s for underlying mental health, pre-existing drug and alcohol abuse or other factors, some of them exhibit longer-term disorder. And therein lies the problem.

So PTSD a little bit tricky and in the middle of all it are some of the most awful phonies I have ever encountered in my life. It is beyond belief. I personally have run into professional PTSD patients. Just shameful beyond belief.

Spoken like the purest of chickenhawks; indifferent if not hostile to the needs of those their relentless warmongering has mauled, killed or driven insane, McCaffrey is ashamed, not of himself, but his victims.  Rather than being horrified to hear such an astonishingly callous remark from from such a transparent slimeball, Francis timidly continues:
Q: It certainly obscures the real issue for the rest of us.

A: Absolutely. I want the VA to focus on the devastated veteran population I want to go through acute care and then chronic care. And where we’ve got long-term injuries, have an appropriate therapy program. But basically, people get better.

The best soldier I ever saw, he was a platoon sergeant at age 21, has never recovered from the war because he’s never found anything else at that level of excitement and value and importance.

American soldiers exposed to intense combat, generally speaking aren’t damaged by it. They’re made more powerful.

Now, upon hearing such arrogant, sociopathic claptrap, this is where you’d normally expect the reporter to fall off his chair, but this guy clearly wants to be David Gregory when he grows up. By now greedily eating out of McCaffrey’s bloodstained paw, he says this, and I’m not making this up:
Q: Oregon isn’t an active duty state, although we’ve had guys go multiple times. But our state National Guard has a higher-than-average toll of suicide. About half of those were people who never deployed. So I’m mystified by that. And I also wonder how meaningful it is to say they’re military suicides when they’re basically drilling once a month.

A: One of my friends is Dr. Sally Satel. One of her big deals as a psychiatrist is don’t ever set somebody up to think they’re permanently impaired. You don’t ever tell them that, for God’s sakes.

The Army to some extent has gone utterly sensitive on suicide. We’ve linked it in some ways, perhaps unintentionally, to soldiers being the victims of a war.

(A doctor at Walter Reed told me) “It doesn’t really matter to us if you’re a National Guard soldier and you’ve never deployed, you came in with a drug and alcohol problem, you came in with underlying health disorders, but we’ve got you now and you’re exhibiting symptoms of distress, we’ve got to listen to you and try to make you better.” What we don’t want to do is say it’s related in some way to this war, because, in many cases, it isn’t.

The primary cause of suicide in young soldiers is alcohol abuse, away from home, frequently tied to rejection by significant other and access to guns. And that drives our rate up.

THE ARMY HAS GONE UTTERLY SENSITIVE ON SUICIDE.  Yep, he said that, and the hapless lackey of a reporter was evidently so befuddled that he decided he’d better switch, but quick, to drugs and Mexicans before the men in white coats showed up to haul away his interviewee.  So he did, and after typing obediently that this paragon of virtue thinks we also need to militarize the border and throw lots more people in jail, Francis did manage to peep out a tiny question about stopping the drug war, a shocking affront to which the ever-loquacious McCaffrey babbled thusly:
A: The legalization argument amuses me. Usually it’s an intellectual argument that on cursory examination falls apart. Nobody in their right minds wants to legalize drugs. It absolutely doesn’t work……

Part of it is we know that if you make substances less available, and then more expensive, and if you stigmatize them by saying it’s criminal to sell them, drug use goes down. That’s the deal.

Not in the real world, of course, but I digress.  The fact that tawdry exemplars of corruption and amorality like Barry McCaffrey are running around loose saying such errant, self-serving nonsense and are treated as credible by ass-kissing reporters like this one is the cause of all of our problems.  Must be that Francis is hoping for an interview with Dick Cheney when he comes to town; he does have a book out and all, and like McCaffrey, loves those war profits, too.  This interview was quite an audition. 

Today’s example from The Oregonian is typical.  Vice President Joe Biden, in a Labor Day speech, declared that Republicans want to end Medicare, which or course they do, and all voted to do so just a few months ago.  The Ryan plan Biden quite specifically referenced would, for nakedly political purposes, exempt those Fox watchers 55 and over, so the VP did helpfully (and honestly) add, “in ten years.” Still, this wasn’t enough of a qualifier for Politifact.  The fact that Medicare is, by definition, a single payer, low overhead system of the sort enjoyed in the rest of the civilized world, while Ryan’s plan is more of the same waste-ridden, corrupt and ineffective thing we’ve got that costs twice as much with worse results, is never mentioned.  Worse, PolitiFact mendaciously adds, either out of ignorance or malice, that payouts under Ryan’s plan would “increase over time.”  Which they technically would, but, crucially, at the rate of general inflation, not at the rather more exponential rate of health care inflation, rendering a successful, universal, and guaranteed program a useless, probably means-tested, drop in the bucket in just a few decades.  It’s a Frank Luntz lie, and a well-crafted one, that calling something “Medicare” when it’s transparently no such thing, is OK as long as you’re still calling mailing out that same check to seniors to cover ever-rising premiums from the bloated, cutthroat insurance industry “Medicare.”  Given that logic, a rusting, stripped 1973 El Camino sitting on blocks outside a trailer, and a shiny late model Toyota Camry are both “cars,” to PolitiFact at least, so anybody who begs to differ must therefore be lying.  Behold:

Our ruling: (Which will be quite different from that of a sentient human)

Biden says Ryan’s plan “eliminates Medicare” in 10 years. In stating it that way in front of campaign donors, he strays from the “as we know it” qualifier even the president has used.

The bottom line is that all seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal, and the program’s budget would increase every year. The plan would reduce the growth in Medicare spending but not wipe out that spending. And current beneficiaries and those currently 55 and over would not be affected by the changes. It changes Medicare, dramatically, but does not eliminate it.

We rate Biden’s statement False.

Really?  Would that David Gregory or any other addlepated Villager would hold, say, Dick Cheney, to such an exacting standard of truth, and do so with such gusto.  Their whole argument is pure bullshit, and yet they’re sticking to it against all evidence and repeated statements by virtually all of the leading, teabagging Republicans, most of whom have relatively openly advocated abolishing the program entirely.  It’s as though the incessant moving of Overton’s Window that has been gradually accomplished by the far right through just this subterfuge  in recent years has completely passed these intrepid fact-finders by; had they a pulse they would know that Republicans have been gunning for Medicare since its inception and it’s clear that they’re finally moving in for the kill.  Anything that dares to call itself PolitiFact should be rightly embarrassed, and laughed out of town, when the Republicans inevitably do abolish Medicare, but they won’t be, you can bet.  After all, no one could have predicted….