Hag — (Gotta give him credit for calling me by my first name, anyway…)

Moments ago, the Senate voted to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Well, thanks to crusading liberals like Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Robert Gates, and the overwhelming majority of all other Americans supporting such an overdue effort, they did.  And?

When that bill reaches my desk, I will sign it, and this discriminatory law will be repealed.

Whew.  Given your recurring capitulations to the right, I was afraid you might finally make a veto threat, about five too late, but thanks for taking pen in hand.

Gay and lesbian service members — brave Americans who enable our freedoms — will no longer have to hide who they are. The fight for civil rights, a struggle that continues, will no longer include this one.

Yeah, but thanks to you, everyone but the very rich are still well and truly fucked, as well as anybody who gives a rat’s ass about “our freedoms,” but I know you never liked me for my brains in the first place.

This victory belongs to you. Without your commitment, the promise I made as a candidate would have remained just that.

You mean, like all the other ones?

Instead, you helped prove again that no one should underestimate this movement. Every phone call to a senator on the fence, every letter to the editor in a local paper, and every message in a congressional inbox makes it clear to those who would stand in the way of justice: We will not quit.

We?  You’re including yourself in this group?  I hope the Secret Service is about to walk in with a great big silky garment bag, because otherwise, this shtick isn’t going over.

This victory also belongs to Senator Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and our many allies in Congress who refused to let politics get in the way of what was right.

Also?  For your information, like everything else you’ve “accomplished” over the last two years, those two were the ones who stood up for “politics” in the real sense, that is, representing the people who elected them.  You, on the other hand, have squandered your mandate, alienated your base, and made permanent the horrendous policies of your universally despised predecessor, because you’ve chosen “politics” over what was “right,” or even potentially effective, every time, and boy oh boy, did that turn out to be dumb.  (See Shellacking, The….)

Like you, they never gave up, and I want them to know how grateful we are for that commitment.

They haven’t given up yet, which says a lot more about them than you.  Both have been politically damaged, and Pelosi lost her speakership, due to your utter failure to use your bully pulpit and your self-destructive servility to their, and the American people’s,  political enemies.

Will you join me in thanking them by adding your name to Organizing for America’s letter?

No, I’d prefer to thank them personally.

I will make sure these messages are delivered — you can also add a comment about what the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” means to you.

Ah, you’re suddenly allowing comments?  It’s tempting, admittedly.

As Commander in Chief, I fought to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because it weakens our national security and military readiness. It violates the fundamental American principles of equality and fairness.

As Commander in Chief, you could have eradicated the policy in January 2009, if you felt so strongly about it.  You didn’t.

But this victory is also personal.

Really?  This better be good.

I will never know what it feels like to be discriminated against because of my sexual orientation.

But I know my story would not be possible without the sacrifice and struggle of those who came before me — many I will never meet, and can never thank.

Uh, a lot of the people you could thank happen to be (inconveniently) still alive, but you’re already in their spam files, so they’re missing this little missive.

I know this repeal is a crucial step for civil rights, and that it strengthens our military and national security. I know it is the right thing to do….

That may well be, but since you also think that it’s just dandy for our military and our “national security” that we should continue to expand our wars all over the globe and bomb, torture, and kill whomever we please, for whatever (usually secret) reason, I naturally take your opinions with a rather large grain of salt.

Thank you,

Barack

Barack?  Thanks, but I’d prefer to call you Mr. President, if only you’d help me out and act like one.  Otherwise, get thee to the furrier.

You always know somebody’s headed for a deeply satisfying fall when they resort to engaging in a loud, sudden, and stunningly counterfactual rebranding of themselves, seemingly overnight.  Actual behavioral changes are never required for this spectacle, though; it’s supposed to be enough to simply rename shit, searchlights blaring, “Shinola” and call it a day.  At worst, maybe someone on CNN will say, “Some Democrats say it still stinks,” but the question will be forever left hanging when they cut to commercial.  Today Big Food announced that it was changing the name of high fructose corn syrup to “corn sugar.”  Just like that.  It’s not as if it’s no longer the same obesity culprit that has crowded out more healthy and sustainable crops through its relentlessly  finagled monopoly over America’s sweet tooth; the only problem was that the poison formerly known as “high fructose corn syrup” had become saddled with a bad name.  As of today, with its new and improved name, this sinister substance been magically transformed into something so down-home, yet sexy, that one might even wax lyrical over it, just like the Archies.  You are my candy, girl, and you’ve got me wanting you. (I went ahead and picked the Archies for Big Food’s surrogates, rather than, say, the Rolling Stones’ and their more politically delicate “Brown Sugar” for obvious reasons…)

Of course, such cynical adoption of manipulative, fake names for things to replace their more honest but no longer flattering real ones could never work so often, nor be tried even more often, in the presence on a sentient media.  Sadly, though, we don’t have that here; if Jon Stewart doesn’t cover it, the rebranders have an even chance of making the new name stick, as we’ve seen with everything from wars to corporate scofflaws.  Does anyone remember that Altria is a tobacco company?  Can anyone name all the many names given to our debacle in Iraq over the years?  The real name of the “Death Tax? Pour a little sugar on me, Baby.

A poll released today shows that despite the ostentatious media outpouring over the awesomeness and unbeatability of the Republicans this fall, what few Republican policies that have been accidentally leaked by this media-averse bunch are about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse.  Though only 45% of people think the health care bill was much, only 32%, most of whom are on Medicare, want to see it repealed.  Less than that want the tax cuts extended if they include those to the rich, and a thin plurality don’t want the 14th Amendment fiddled with, either.  (Ain’t America grand?)  The other expensive Republican mistresses always in need of lavish taxpayer support, the war machine and the pollution/sprawl industries, have been subtly left out of the conversation, for good reason, but I’d like to see a poll about that, too.  Call it what you will, “taking America back,” when actually outlined to real voters, is the last thing anyone but the craziest (and most cynical) want.   But you have to hand it to Republicans; they know no one wants what they’re selling, and they know renaming it might not be enough, so they’re moving to Plan B:   At Least We’re White.

For all the overconfident bluster, the GOP is still unable to level with America and win, and as such must conjure up not just new names for themselves, but for everyone else, too.  Thus, the bland, overcautious Obama Administration must be rebranded every six months, from socialist to communist to fascist to the latest, something called “anti-colonial Kenyan,” with breathtaking speed and the attendant widespread amnesia such speed requires.  Tiny tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, cynically planted by Bush’s deceptive budgeting to take place anyway, are turned into dark attempts at wealth redistribution and class warfare.  (The bad kind…)  Widespread harrumphs from the media and outright guffaws from the left at Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s cheesy cashing-in on 9/11 and the righty noise machine that lives for it have been miraculously transformed into, get this,  an attempt to destroy capitalism, according to “professor” Glenn Beck.  If these guys are riding so high, couldn’t they get somebody better to write their material?

It’s going to take more than a spoonful of sugar to make the GOP’s medicine go down, and they obviously know it.

Now, I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but Karl Rove was right and I was wrong. I’m nostalgic for Bush.  Personally.  Compared to the current crop of righties, Bush was a gentleman, statesman, and since the emergence of Palinmania, even a scholar to boot.  Thanks in part to such certifiably cuckoo halfwits as Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, Andrew Breitbart, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Paul Ryan, and on and on grabbing the ball and running with it,  George W. Bush is almost starting to look like some sort of hippie.  Worse, the crazy direction in which he dragged the country with regard to war, civil liberties, and secrecy have now become normalized under the new administration, leaving the Right to sputter that even all that horrendous horseshit amounts to coddling the terrorists.  Gazing through Overton’s window, the view of ol’ W has gotten much more attractive.

It was clear that big changes had to be made in the new century to make the world safe for Republicanism; years of peace and prosperity had rendered Americans way too uppity, even leading some of them to want to save the planet from boiling and worse, stop spending so much on the military.  Losing wars, crippling deficits, and severe austerity programs would be immediately needed to nip those intolerably misguided notions in the bud, but Bush/Cheney were both too smart and too polite to say so, at least in front of the servants.  Conservatism suddenly became “compassionate,” foreign policy would be “humble,” and even in the fact of the 9/11 terror attacks, no genocide and/or internments would ever get on TV.  ”Islam is a religion of peace,” and all that.  Well, in 2010, Republicans have put away Bush’s bong of Peace and in its place grabbed Bill Kristol’s metaphorical (of course)  M-16 of Empire to do a little “spray and pray,” and the results are predictably disturbing.

Covertly, of course, Bush and Rove never really left the “Southern Strategy” behind;  gay became the New Black, and Christian Dominionists, Randians, barely-reformed white supremacists, and charlatans of every stripe were quietly installed wherever they’d fit, but nobody in the Administration was dumb enough to crow about it.  How quaintly demure; call it the Southern Belle Strategy, (eyelashes batting fetchingly), “Whatever do you mean?”  Well, Mammy would be horrified to find what the “young Misses” of the Republican leadership are up to these days; rather than so wisely having a light snack before the barbeque at Twelve Oaks, they’re “eatin lak a feel han an’ gobblin’ lak a hawg.”

It started subtly; the right-wing media that had spent years marveling at the gardenia-like scent of George Bush’s stinkiest dumps fled in droves when The Decider tried to sell some port operations to the murderous and perfidious Habibs.  They went even more nuts when he uttered the blandest statements about immigration reform, and they  wildly applauded his response to Hurricane Katrina, which if nothing else certainly put the Darkies in their place.    Republican operatives have their flaws, but stupidity is not among them; and they saw, after creating so many so many catastrophes without any political consequences, that not being racist enough was about the only way they could lose their Fox-addled base.  After that, they were off to the races.  Gone was Lee Atwater’s admonition that in order to “out-nigger” somebody, you had to at least use a more delicate term.  Karl Rove’s pie-in-the-sky hope to rope in some of the growing Hispanic vote with cynical appeals to Family Values ended up tossed like an expired can of menudo, and anybody to the left of, say, Ari Fleischer on “The Arab Question” was bound to end up in Gitmo with a broomstick up their ass, as far as the Republican “base” was concerned.  Racism was back, and at least in the amnesiac media, better than ever.

Which brings us to today, where we are in the curious position of looking back at “Smoke ‘em Out” Bush, the Worst President in Modern American History, as paragon of decency and restraint compared to the outright fascism and astonishingly naked eliminationism his disastrous reign unleashed amongst his erstwhile followers.  We’re also seeing a lame and hypocritical attempt by Obama and company, who squandered an overwhelming mandate to “refudiate,” and maybe even try to solve, any of the myriad outrages he committed, preferring instead to pursue wonky and nebulous legislative “victories,” none of which have amounted to a hill of beans.

While it may have once been better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt, in the age of Fox News and its relentlessly repeated Obamaphobia, this maxim no longer holds.  The Republicans are now the party of racism, militarism, and elite thievery, and they no longer care who knows it.

Yeah, Karl, I’m nostalgic.

Troops care for troops.  Veterans care about veterans, and family members care as best they can about those among them who serve, but I’m once again feeling like a dead man walking as reports about the aimless military effort in Afghanistan are filed, along with news this week that government officials have mishandled the remains of many of those killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The United States may be pulling substantial forces out of Iraq,  but analysts have suggested for some time that a residual force of about 50,000 will remain indefinitely.  The much ballyhooed Afghan surge, along with the promise of a showdown with the Taliban, sounds illusory.  There appears to be a falling out between U.S. officials and Hamid Karzai, such that the Afghan leader tends to look more and more these days  like Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States’ pick as first president of the former republic of Vietnam.  Karzai (and perhaps his wise guy brothers) is said to be disillusioned with American leadership in his country and doesn’t think U.S. military tactics are working.  Reports suggest he might want to cut a deal with the Taliban and Pakistan.

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=470

It’s said the American people are tuning out on the current wars.  Yet, thousands and thousands of troops serve.  Some keep getting killed.  There’s no end in sight, and as yet, no draft.  Afghanistan has gone on longer than Vietnam.

And now, it seems some of the recent fallen slated for burial in the “sacred ground” of Arlington National Cemetery can’t be accounted for.

http://www.salon.com/news/arlington_national_cemetery_investigation/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/06/16/army_says_deputy_spent_millions

James Carroll, a Boston-based author who wrote extensively about the Vietnam War, has a piece up today on the The Daily Beast.  Carroll’s father was an Air Force general, and both of his parents are buried at Arlington.  He says:  “A military force that does not faithfully care for its fallen members is in far worse shape than even its anti-war critics imagine.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-11/the-armys-graveyard-disgrace/?cid=hp:mainpromo3

During my most desolate time, working through the meaning of service in Vietnam – for well over ten years after actually being there – I was very aware that partisans along the divide then wanted to use veterans.  The left led the charge to pillory us, and the right wanted to wrap us in the flag.  I also experienced time and again people appearing in my face, to tell me what I’d gone through and what it meant, even though they had never been there.  And so it goes.

I can relate to Odysseus, and really, it might have been more fun being a mythical Greek king.

But I was not a soldier; I was an Air Force tech who spent a year on a combat flight line in Vietnam and happened to be there for the Tet Offensive.  A year, in and out.  Thanks for the memories.

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=468

My father though spent nearly six years in the Army, from December 1939 to August 1945.  He made master sergeant in the U.S., went to OCS, and then shipped to England as a second lieutenant.  He went through Utah Beach,  and, in addition to Normandy, is credited with taking part in engagements in Northern France, the Rhineland, the Ardennes, and Central Europe.  He was in Bastogne with George Patton’s Third Army, and was among the first Allied troops to open the German border, to see and deal with the Nazi-run death and slave labor camps.  He was awarded a Bronze Star and discharged as a captain.

I had never known the whole story about my father’s actual, detailed service, because he never spoke of it.  He couldn’t.  He drank heavily over many years and lost his family.

In just the last few months I have reconnected with a cousin on my father’s side.  Her father, and another brother besides my father – three of five brothers in all – served in World War II.

I met my cousin recently, along with her father and mother.  My uncle can’t easily get away from the memories of his service either.  It’s what he relies on for conversation.  Three times during my visit he showed me some German binoculars, and told me how a kid in in an Italian port city agreed to swap them for a pack of cigarettes.

These kinds of memories are very strong for people who served, as these men did.

They can kill as well.

Turns out my uncle, my father’s last surviving brother, now 87,  saved my father’s papers, and his daughter gave them to me.

They flesh out all that I suspected about my father’s service, which was very sketchy to me when my mother and I worked on his funeral over thirty years ago.

While preparing for this reunion, to get the whole story and, very likely, to pay final respects to my uncle,  I also spoke to a veteran’s agent in the Massachusetts town where my father grew up and is buried.

I was cross-checking records with the agent, and he confirmed my father’s service record, contained in the state’s database.

Then we talked a bit.  The agent said he knew which cemetery my Dad was in, and said he would be going there over Memorial Day weekend to stick flags into the ground next to veterans’ headstones.

So the picture of my Dad and his service is complete, finally; and this gives me a chance to refresh and restore his image in the family.  He was the real thing.  Whatever anyone might think of war, he did it.  And he paid for it.

I know where my father is buried.  My family knows too.  We’ll take care of it.

Of course, the predetermined Beck/Teabagger memes will have to be used; Socialism, Death Panels, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Government Takeovers, blah, blah, blah.   It would be inconvenient, you’d think then, that the Republican “Road Map,” as it were, presented by the naively direct Wisconsin wingnut Paul Ryan, has a whole lot of socialism in it (for rich people, natch), envisions steadily increasing Medicare cuts which will undoubtedly cause premature deaths, incorporates the worst aspects of both Hitler’s and Wilson’s “Internationalism,” and takes the most popular and enduring “Government Takeover” in US history, Social Security, and hands it over to Wall Street.  You’d be wrong.  For Republicans and their fawning cheerleaders in the media, down is up if Jim DeMint says so and FOX News unsurprisingly agrees.

The tinny Victrola of terrorism is of course going to be cranked up anew, to play scratchy recordings of 2002-2003 and somehow claim that we’re not clobbering the Constitution fast enough, not torturing people with sufficient eagerness, and not invading enough countries to Keep America Safe.  This angle may be dropped later because in early rollouts it only fooled Richard Cohen, a feat akin to convincing Tom Friedman that Lexuses are preferable to olive trees.  You heard it here at CHNN first, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the terror well will finally be recognized (by the voters, not the media…) as having run inconveniently dry in a country with 10% unemployment and an economy still collapsing.  Please make a note of it, Rudy.

Of course, the real power behind the GOP, money, has already set the stage, and as such one can expect a lot more unnatural couplings between square pegs and round holes to ensue.  The way to “create jobs” is to abandon environmental regulation, any vestigial remains of progressive taxation, and give more tax-free money to worthless heirs and heiresses.  Neither remarkably nor evidently as a joke, the strikingly unattractive and almost as untalented version of Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes, has a new book out, not entitled “I Got Mine, Fuck You,” but might as well have been, to emphasize these not very new ideas.  Frank Luntz has almost just absentmindedly trotted out the same old anti-government crap that was so successful in perpetuating our third-world health statistics for another decade or three, to stop desperately needed banking reform,  but will people really fall for the notion that Wall Street banks that every day continue to rob Americans blind ought not be regulated?  That’s some pretty heavy lifting, even for the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

As they always do when they’re in a pickle, the GOP is making a lot of noise about teh ghey, this time about the long-overdue abandonment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy so ridiculous on its face that I have trouble believing it’s been the law of the land for almost eighteen years, and touting the purported “uprising” against marriage equality, financed by a bunch of wealthy churches whose primary concern is avoiding reality, even when it drops on their curiously adorned heads.  But time has shown that since the cynical 2004 “victories” that resulted from gay-bashing have only driven more younger voters away from the GOP, and even if John McCain doesn’t listen to Cindy and Megan, America does, and has.

They think, of course, that they have a new big thing in the Teabaggers, which is the first sign of actual non-astroturf political activity on the right since Tomothy McVeigh, and they understandably don’t want to waste a development like that .  Sarah Palin surely didn’t…  she got half a wardrobe’s worth of Teabagger dough for mouthing vaguely intelligible Randian Haiku in Nashville, just tonight, so I’ll bet she’ll be wearing something extra pretty for the occasion.  Still, given that even some of the craziest Republicans, Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, finally slinked away from the teabaggers, realizing they were already so bought and paid for by Wall Street and the real corporate Death Panelists in the Health “industry” that they might not have much in common with the teabaggers after all. Rotten vegetables are notoriously unflattering to the complexion.   Naturally, they both disingenuously blamed the annoying “big government” intrusion of pesky “ethics” laws for their fortuitous absences from a crowd that in the end, evidently didn’t “share their values.”

No wonder Sarah Palin quit her part-time day job; this evolution-denier can gaily fleece her (socially) Darwinistic inferiors for all they’re worth and not be unduly shackled by silly old “big government” ethics.  The Republican Party, not so much.  The policies they have chosen and continue to fight for are the exact ones that caused and will only merrily perpetuate the very pain the Teabaggers are feeling, and their overconfident claim to Teabagger loyalty is already wearing alarmingly thin, given that their craven, almost Cheneyesque money-grubbing went on lurid display at about week three of their “revolution’s” existence.

I have previously criticized the Democrats for running against Bush, after  all this time and so many of their own failures, but the only thing stupider than that would be the Republicans running as “Bush, Only More So.”  I can’t decide which one I want to lose more.  Let the (h/t Jon Stewart) “thinnest kid at fat camp” win.

Also.

Basically, much of the Washington establishment has decided that, despite the deficits they howled maniacally about two minutes ago, a few more wars should be immediately undertaken, minus any help from gay and lesbian service members, of course, and paid for by the elimination of Medicare and Social Security.  Well, that would be nice indeed, and who could complain, but isn’t two lost wars enough?  These things do run up, just like the credit card bills they are, and consumers can only watch one war at a time on their notorious flat screens (that they’re still paying off at usurious interest) and wonder that the Administration that told them a few days ago that the  government had to “tighten its belt” just like everyone else also still seems open to an extra war or so.  Sarah Palin runs around regurgitating gobbledlygook about “common sense,” but somehow common sense is never understood as reticence about starting wars; common sense means something about old people working until death, which minus Medicare, will at least be sooner.   Common sense also seems to mean that ordinary people are willing to sacrifice their futures and a decent life at home for a never-ending parade of Imperial ventures abroad, which only further aggrandizes its proponents as it exacerbates the shocking disparities in wealth and power Americans have come to accept as the “Free Market.”  In what free market, pray tell, would everybody be shopping for Predators and SAMmies?

With all the wars, war provocateurs like the CIA and NSA, weapons, and other police state bloat (excluding the equally disturbing and lavish militarization of local law enforcement) we’ll easily spend a trillion in one, ONE, year on wars even if we don’t start any more of them, which seems at this point unlikely.  This leads me to the inescapable question for which I have no ready answer:  as a people, as a society, what the fuck is wrong with us?  We step over homeless in the streets, we watch neighborhoods deteriorate under waves of foreclosures, and yet we gape in amazement and envy rather than anger and demands for justice at the astonishingly small cadre of people who have so obviously robbed us all blind.  The Republicans offer them tax cuts, and the Democratic Administration appoints them to its economic team, and lo and behold, a lot of people on both left and right end up unnervingly angry.  The answer?  Let’s have another war; if you can’t find a job, I hear Blackwater’s a pretty good place to work.

Admittedly, if those were my policies and record, I’d probably punt like that, too, and have done so routinely in nightmares from which I’ve awakened in a pool of sweat.   If I were Obama, I’d probably have Palin envy by now, and if I were a Democratic congressperson, I’d be as nervous as a whore in church.  The only thing the Dems have going for them at this point is the Republicans, and they’re stupidly tossing that overboard to get their war on, or at least let their righty fringe do so.

CHNN NEWS FLASH:  People do not want to hear about any more wars, declared or undeclared, nuclear or no, until the current two stop costing trillions.  Media, please make a note of it.

At first I was inclined to dismiss this TruthOut post Friday that claimed Madison Avenue geniuses through using the latest brain research could get to my reptilian brain core so that corporations and politicians could use these modern sales techniques to influence my buying and voting patterns. Not my independent brain I told myself. I long ago gave up adoring stuff and with all the political insights I have gained through the Internet, there was no way that “using MRIs, EEGs, and other brain-scan technology to craft irresistible media messages designed to shift buying habits, political beliefs, and voting patterns” would work with me.

After checking out a petition effort by TruthOut and World Business Academy to build popular opposition to the unethical practice of neuromarketing manipulation, I decided they may be right even with someone as well informed as me. They are calling upon Congress to hold hearings to investigate the commercial and political uses of neuromarketing so the public can learn which companies and political candidates are using neuromarketing research to manipulate consumers’ and voters’ choices. “We call upon all companies to take the Ethical Marketing Pledge not to use neuromarketing or other unethical marketing practices, knowing that the World Business Academy will maintain a public list of those companies who volunteer to sign the pledge.”

I remembered some of the kitchen gadgets I bought through late night ads stuffed in a box somewhere in the basement along with two hard plastic arches (ouch!). Or how helpless I feel when dealing with car salesmen who I know never lose any money in their deals even in the worst economic times. Then it struck me. Almost all the politicians are car salesmen just like Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Their antics and pitches are reptilian. Yet it works on a lot of people and probably me. See, I still won’t admit it works on me.

Director, producer and screenwriter William Friedkin then gave me the image of our elected officials that fits the pimp-whore status they now own. He proposed in a HuffPo post Saturday, “that every elected politician, state and federal, instead of going on hunting trips in Wyoming, appearing on So You Think You Can Dance or hiking in the Adirondacks, be required to spend a given amount of time before an election sitting in a window, perhaps in Georgetown with its little one and two story shops, with a sign around their necks proclaiming how much it will cost for their vote, be it on health care, corporate bailouts, cap-and-trade, whatever…”

The word legislator or representative does not do justice to the congress critters we have now. They are salesmen, sorry salesperson just doesn’t work for me. I’ll use seller for a gender neutral word. “My seller just asked me for more money and promised that he would keep those damn terrorists off all planes because he has a bill of goods that he just put together to persuade his fellow sellers to back.”

Politics today is selling stuff because our economy is now based on selling stuff rather than making stuff and then the Wall Streeters and bankers take the stuff they make or steal from Middle Streeters so they can gamble and make more stuff to buy stuff they really don’t need. George Carlin is either laughing or crying (or both) if his spirit still exists somewhere. It’s really not a laughing matter on what our reptilian desire for stuff has done to our nation and the world.

I learned in raising three sons and now assisting with the education of three grandsons and 14 years teaching children and youth in the inner-city that they can be among the best teachers. Look at what the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof in his column Sunday wants us to learn from a 14-year-old teen.

Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

If we want to stop the sellers from ruining everything, we need to convince those who vote that they are being sold a bill of goods by the sellers that is hurting them and the future of all children and grandchildren. All of us need to rethink what is and what isn’t important in life and base our political decisions on community and love, not sales pitches and dramatic scenarios written by sellers in Congress or ad brainstormers who are trapped in a broken system that compels them to act our these pimp-whore dramas while striving and failing to maintain their integrity.

I watched this video William Timberman posted here Saturday and see the essence of life: food, music, friends, family, community and love. I commented then, “Granted the Italians love opera, but what human, except those scarred by war, power and violence, wouldn’t want the former and dump the latter. The essence of our current political challenge, is finding ways to help selfish, guarded, cold hearts turn into compassionate warm ones. Easy to write, still not impossible to do. We have to change enough minds to gain majority vote power in elections which could greatly reduce the power of the Corporate Communists. Or as DCLaw1 put it, stop the “engineering of our society by business and industry into a state of passive consumption and political near-powerlessness.”

So using the advanced sections of our brains, let’s take advantage of our people power by stuffing stuff and the sellers who don’t represent us before we are nothing but gadgets stuffed in some forgotten box somewhere.

Bruce Levine a clinical psychologist in his latest book Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy asked a question that has been on Hag’s and my mind a lot lately, Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

The M$M and Internet are full each day of examples of craziness in many areas of American life, especially government and politics that I either didn’t know existed or has been recently exposed due to massive American depression and a crescendo of crisis brought on by multiple disastrous political decisions and broken systems.

I have not read Levine’s book since I only became aware of it yesterday by reading his post in CounterPunch, Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free? I found the article because I spend eight or more hours every day perusing hundreds of articles/posts putting together a Daily News email I send to over 300 fellow Dems in my Chicago area suburbs and friends around the country. I initiated it so that our very busy and dedicated Dem political candidates will know what truths and falsehoods are being published. My News contains 150-200 Internet links on articles/posts covering town, city, county, state, national and international politics.

I can find the time to do this because I am retired and through my 28 years in military public affairs and a subsequent career in social service in inner-city Chicago, I have developed skills that can be put to productive use. These skills and amazing experiences also help me serve on county committees and canvass my neighborhood as a precinct committeeman.

Far too many Americans have as Levine implies in the question opening his CounterPunch article, become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them.

People far smarter and better informed than I, have provided multiple reasons for this rampant mental illness. According to reviewers of Levine’s book he: offers timely insights about the social and cultural causes of demoralization…in this, the Dark Age of the pharmaceutical-military-industrial complex, Levine has given a much needed wake-up call that challenges each of us to find our own antidote, in the healing aspects of integrity, nature, self-transcendence, and community; this well-conceived and researched book illuminates the general malaise tinting the canvas of our lives and validates the background of unhappiness inherent in our contemporary lifestyles—a background often mislabeled as pathological and an epidemic we are all trying to survive; this well-written and insightful book locates depression where it should be situated—in the dehumanization of American culture and the corporatization of psychological health and well-being.

Coming from Levine’s fellow psychologists and psychiatrists, that’s really scary evaluations of American voter minds today. Levine cites as proof of this illness the fact that 47 million Americans are without health insurance, job losses are horrendous, polls show the majority of Americans are opposed to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet there is no outpouring of millions of citizens on the streets of Washington protesting these betrayals. He says these Americans are like any abused victim who allow abusers to, “shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.”

Like any effective psychologist, Levine offers a solution. “When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don’t set them free. What sets them free is morale. What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.”

For my own county DuPage, I have joined thousands of Dems who are fed up with long-term Repug rule and we are well on the way of turning a once very red county blue. Friday night Democratic Governor Quinn who spoke at our Holiday fundraiser recognized the rapid political change that has happened in a county his father lived in for half a century. At our 07 fundraiser I attended just after joining the effort, only 72 people attended with no state officials joining us. Friday night we had almost 300 there and the room was full of state candidates.

As I reflected on the great evening on my drive home, I told myself the wonderful people I have met who have open minds and think like I do is what has kept my positive attitude alive while daily reading the depressing horror stories of just how broken our country is. A country which is now almost totally owned by imperial, corporate titans who are bent on destroying our middle class and dominating all politics and thinking.

I have also become part of an amazing group of Internet friends, that includes Hag, who met through Greenwald’s UT blog who have provided an abundance of insight and truth and also kept me from sinking into the depths of depression.

Levine is absolutely right. My morale is high because instead of bitching at the TV, I took my wife’s advice and got off my ass and did something productive or else I would have had to “just shut up!”

Take a look at our county website and the people that keep buoying me up. If you can find the time, I highly recommend getting involved and enjoying small victories that in time can lead to larger victories. Victories that may well mean in time we have to take to the streets by the millions.

Dems and liberals who are not suffering from depression are not achieving larger victories even though they are working very hard because of diffusion of effort. The number of emails I receive daily from wonderful organizations who are pursuing a single issue is amazing. Our corporate abusers like it that way. As long as we don’t come together on an overriding issue, we are almost powerless and can’t get millions on Washington’s streets.

I spoke with a fellow township officer Friday night who recognized this problem. She has been very active in promoting green awareness and our township goals. She said, I have to change my course and put my efforts into doing something about our political system that allows money to control our government. “If we don’t attack our broken systems, how can we expect to really get something meaningful done?”

Of course, it wasn’t ordinary Americans that came up with this genius idea, unless you consider Tom Friedman ordinary; all along we’d been taught that our “defense” dollars went toward preventing violent confrontation, as the deceptive name for them implied.  Of course, it turned out that our defense dollars really did nothing except to create violence, and peskily, not always the kind we like, as we found out on Sept. 11, 2001.  But as is often the case, failure created opportunity, which was pretty necessary at the time because all evidence pointed to the glaringly obvious notion that our lavish military spending was clearly to blame for that disaster, so those whose lifestyles couldn’t be maintained without the most extravagant military spending on earth had to swing into action.  The people, benighted pansies that they were, needed war to become glamorous again, and this time the media wasn’t going to be asking any impertinent questions that might sully that goal. (Given the fact that the our media outlets have since lost whatever vestigial credibility, not to mention viability, they retained before this decision, you have to wonder whether they’re all owned by defense contractors and/or cult leaders….)

In short, the eager acquiescence of the media and the gradual but effective brainwashing of the citizenry came home to roost seven long years ago, when George Bush, the dumbest and least trustworthy President the country has ever had, could go on TV and announce a second war and everybody thought it was a great idea, although its goals were as phony and its end just as predictably disastrous as the last.  Bush was a terrible president in many ways, but as far as selling suicidal wars, he will go down in history as a champ….  Not only isn’t he blamed for his idiocy, but he is exalted for it, as Obama’s embrace of said idiocy shows.

What Bush did back then was worse than legitimizing war; what he did was de-legitimize peace, and although a lot of people will undoubtedly get rich off that change, democracy died in that awful winter of 2002-2003, as Obama’s shameful capitulation yesterday made all too clear.

War is all we have left, but thank heaven that old “Vietnam Syndrome’ has been well and truly vanquished.  Otherwise people would get unpleasantly uppity.