Another young person from my part of the world was killed in Afghanistan this past week – a Marine who grew up a stone’s throw away from where my sisters lived in one of the many small towns that dot the landscape of central New York. He’s the second local K.I.A. in the space of about a month or so, and it’s disgusting. What the hell are these kids dying for? How could we justify (if any justification were required before allowing it to happen) sending them into this hopeless situation, sacrificing life and limb for a cause most people in America wouldn’t give up a meal at Wendy’s to advance? Pundits and politicians never tire of telling us that we’re a nation at war, but it’s not so – we’re a nation whose all-volunteer military is at war, while the rest of us busy ourselves with other matters. This is the trap that empires are liable to fall into. The foreign legion will protect our overseas possessions, while the homeland is bled dry by the cost of underwriting the global projection of military power. Not worth that young person’s life… nor anyone else’s.

Not, may I add, worth the lives of those who inhabit the lands we invade, either. From the perspective of a well-insulated stateside public, they die nameless, sometimes killed by remote control from a command center in the heart of America where faceless technicians murder strangers with the wag of a joystick then drive home for dinner with the family. If there ever was a truer illustration of the moral bankruptcy of empire, I’ve yet to hear about it. War should never be risk free and tidy, particularly for the aggressor. It becomes too attractive an option, as we have seen in recent years particularly. I suppose by allowing us to see the returning coffins of military dead, subject to the consent of the family, the Obama Administration is at least providing some rudimentary means by which Americans may become better acquainted with the notion that we have wars going on, and that those wars are a major problem worthy of their attention.

As I write these lines – not long after beginning this column – news has come through of five more U.S. soldiers killed in Mosul, Iraq. This comes on the heels of a multi-billion dollar supplemental appropriations request from the Administration to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This feels like a perpetual motion policy machine to me. Bush is gone and Obama has climbed into the cockpit, promising to be a better, more thoughtful driver than his predecessor… but it is still this massive killing machine designed to do only one thing. The only thing powerful enough to stop it is, well, us. Only we have to be aware of the fact that it needs stopping. And right now we’re busy with other stuff. As Obama said, you gotta be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let’s take his advice.

Well… what are we waiting for?

luv u,

jp

A few miles from where I live, there’s going to be a demonstration of sorts sometime soon. Our local NPR station did a somewhat incoherent interview with the organizer, an elderly sounding gentleman who said he was bringing together people who represent a broad range of political tendencies, left to right, to protest taxes against the backdrop of Fort Stanwix in Rome, a tourist-oriented recreation of the Revolutionary War era outpost. His contention was that, like the colonists during the revolution, he was encouraging people to take a stand against taxation. Actually, I think the founding fathers took issue with the notion of taxation without representation, but nevermind. This is a very 21st Century type of revolution – a bunch of people gathered at a local tourist trap to complain about something that will be with us as long as we have an organized society. It’s kind of like protesting gravity. Jump as high as you like – eventually, you’ll have to come down.

I wonder if this is what Grover Norquist dreamed of when he was a College Republican (like his pal Jack Abramoff) – that we would adopt an ethos of almost childish self-centeredness. Nobody likes paying taxes, goes the cliche. Nobody likes paying for anything, right? (Wouldn’t it be awesome if everything were free, man?) And do I have to eat my oatmeal, mom? Seriously, in the last 30 years, taxes, like “tough on crime” legislation, gun control (or lack of same), and national defense, has been the stuff of legendary demagoguery. It remains true today, with a somewhat hollower ring. Republicans, for instance, are really only about tax cuts now, while intoning recently-developed concern about rampant deficit spending. These are the same folks who enthusiastically signed on to pirating the treasury during the first Bush term, voting for two major tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that contributed to growing deficits even during what they themselves refer to as relatively prosperous years – tax cuts designed to create far greater costs in the out years (i.e. right now) and which left us in a far weaker position to face down the current economic crisis. That’s the party of fiscal responsibility.

The truth is, they’re not against running deficits – their own alternative budget provides for a $1.7 trillion shortfall. They’ve just against the notion of that borrowed money going to benefit ordinary people in any tangible way. So I have to wonder what that guy who’s picketing Fort Stanwix hopes to achieve, except perhaps a completely dysfunctional government that still runs massive deficits.

Shoot ’em up redux. Just down the road, in Binghamton, some lunatic shot up an immigrant services center on Friday, killing as many as 15. Where’d he get the gun? Who cares, right? These mass killings keep happening, and no one even attempts to address the flood of deadly weapons anymore. We’re being held hostage by 2nd Amendment absolutists who rail at any limits as an attempt to take away their firearms. Bullshit. Consider this, friends – the word “gun” never appears in the 2nd Amendment, just arms. If we consider it beyond any limitation, people will claim the right to buy rocket launchers and nuclear bombs before we’re done. Time for some common sense, before someone else dies for nothing.

luv u,

jp

News from the front this week hasn’t been so good. Deadly car bombings in Iraq (a.k.a. “normal land”). Policemen killed in Afghanistan, along with many others (including U.S. military people). Another unmanned drone attack in Pakistan, killing Lord knows who (sometimes the policy – like our weapons – seems to be on autopilot). And in Israel, chilling testimony from Israeli soldiers confirming the worst allegations about their attack on Gaza (euphemistically referred to by our media as a “war”), with stories of arbitrary, even random killings of Palestinian civilians, various acts of gratuitous brutality, a fanatical head chaplain from the settlements urging holy war. Pretty ugly stuff, all in all… though nothing all that surprising for the I.D.F. Despite their claims about “purity of arms”, they have a history of oppressive behavior dating back to the 1948 war. And now it seems likely their next foreign minister will be a patent racist who has toyed with the notion of expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Paging George Mitchell! You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy.

Obama’s message to the Iranians was probably a step in the right direction, but it means little without a palpable change of policy across the region. That means some effort to promote Iraqi independence (from us) and reconstruction (from our assorted ravages), as well as a more speedy withdrawal of troops and military contractors. It also means rethinking the kind of policy that produces more hatred towards America amongst Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. And it means a stop to the uncritical support we have given the Israeli government regardless of how they conduct themselves in the territories they have occupied since June 1967 (i.e. Palestine). Let’s face it – we’ve always been on the wrong side of struggles in the developing world, even when “our side” has won. From the Congo to Southeast Asia, from El Salvador to Chile, from Kabul to Baghdad, and everywhere in between, we’ve engaged in the thoughtless application of military might to political disputes and social upheaval, with invariably disastrous results. When will it stop? When will the sun set on this empire?

As the Israelis have demonstrated through their actions, and as we are demonstrating through our own, occupations have a corrupting influence on the occupier. Now seemingly incapable of facing down even a moderately armed irregular force like Hezbollah, the Israeli military seems best suited to attacking captive civilian populations in areas they already effectively control – civilians who have no effective means of defense. For our own part, we have become so used to the idea of civilian casualties that they are almost never deemed worthy of media coverage unless they occur in the double digits. The fact that we leave crucial life-or-death action to pilotless drones illustrates how profoundly we have separated ourselves from any sense of responsibility to the people subject to our military force. The very experience of war and occupation is now limited to the relatively small number of families whose members volunteer for service, our collective knowledge of its horrors growing more and more remote as the conscripts of 20th Century conflicts grow old and pass away.

Leave us face it: the empire is failing. Instead of tinkering with it, we had best consider how to abandon it before it destroys what’s left of our democracy.

luv u,

jp

When I first heard about the AIG bonuses – I think it was last Saturday – I felt sure there’d be hell to pay, but this is way beyond what I expected. Now that we’ve all been treated to six straight days of red-faced rage, I have to say – this is just fucking surreal. It’s not surprising that people are pissed off, but to see politicians, pundits, and news correspondents gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at the sky is kind of hilarious. What – they’ve never heard of out-sized executive compensation before? Of top-level managers walking away from failed enterprises with a big bundle of cash? Where have they been for the past 25 years? It’s only been happening my entire adult life, practically. Oh sure, I know – AIG took public funds. But plenty of companies with obscenely over-compensated management teams suck off the public feeding tube. Just look at our defense contractors, for chrissake, or Agri-business, fed fat with subsidy. AIG is a dramatic example of something that’s been common practice for a long time, made possible by the very people who are screaming the loudest.

It’s a pretty hollow pantomime, I’m sure, for most people. We’ve all been watching this feeding frenzy for decades now as our own incomes have stagnated or declined. These hubris-driven bonuses are just a parting shot – a little flourish on the longest and most profound looting of our nation’s treasure in its 233-year history. Since the start of the 1980s, business has called the shots and the wealthy have further enriched themselves at the expense of working people and the poor. What was good for Wall Street was good for the country, and it didn’t matter how convoluted and abstruse their methods became – if they moved the needle in the right direction, it was all good. We’ve just been subjected to a systematic fraud that’s measurable in the tens of trillions of dollars, and far from excoriating the beneficiaries, our political leadership and mainstream press have largely facilitated and celebrated their excess.

Sure, AIG cut themselves checks. But they also passed something like $13 billion to Goldman Sachs to cover outstanding contracts. I heard a G.S. spokesperson say that they would not have been substantially affected by the loss of AIG, but that they took the payout to protect the interests – get this – of the American people, who had bailed Goldman out and were, therefore, shareholders of the extremely well-connected investment bank. (Insert laugh track here.) When you view this in the broader context not only of massive bonuses (more than a billion to executives of bailed-out Citibank) and ongoing payouts via the Federal Reserve, but of the stuff that doesn’t get talked about at all, like the missing $50 billion or more in Iraq reconstruction funds (remember the pallets of cash?) and the other assorted wild commitments of public funds initiated by the previous administration, AIG is small potatoes. It also provides a good opportunity for the thieves to yell “thief”, if only for a few days.

We’ve got a massive problem here, folks – one that’s causing upwards of 650,000 people to lose their jobs every month. We didn’t get here overnight. If we’re unprepared, it’s because the sluggards who run this country – Republicans and Democrats – have been asleep at the switch for too long. Wake up time.

luv u,

jp

I’ve been hearing the bleatings of ex-Bush administration officials and other assorted “conservatives” (i.e. statist reactionaries) on the airwaves lamely attempting to reframe the history of the past eight years, now that it is safely past (and fading from the collective memory). You got your Ari Fleischers, your Frank Gaffneys… a whole rogue’s gallery of familiar mugs, bandaging up what is without question the most sorry record in recent presidential history. This would be amazing if we lived in a sane world – as it is, it’s just kind of laughable. Obama (which is to say, we) should be grateful that Bush rid the world of Saddam Hussein. W.t.f. – grateful for what? Saddam wasn’t even a credible threat to Iraqi Kurdistan, let alone the United States. Is the world a better place without him? Not really. Not that Saddam made it any better, but simply because of the fact that it hasn’t gotten any better since his passing. So even by the standards of the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, this claim doesn’t work. Too many liberals fall into the trap of voicing pavlovian agreement that we are better off without that tin pot Iraqi dictator. I say, demonstrate how, exactly.

Don’t say we’re safer, because we’re not. We’ve destroyed Iraq as a functioning nation, killed about a million of its people, and driven millions more into exile. Aside from the untold (by the mainstream media) misery that has meant for Iraqis, that is a formula for disaster for the rest of us. Now we can expect payback from an entire generation of Iraqis and, more generally, people in the Muslim world who sympathize with their plight. We’ve killed their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. … and we will certainly hear from them again. So… are Iraqis better off? Decidedly not, after the experience of the last six years – far more deadly and destructive than Saddam’s worst pogroms (many of which were carried out with our support, it bears remembering).

What about the “Bush kept us safe after 9/11” argument? Well… setting aside the fact that the time to keep us safe would have been before the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil ever, not after, this defense is pretty thin, too. More Americans have died since 9/11 than on that dreadful day, thanks to Bush’s elective wars, so I guess it depends on just who Ari Fleischer means when he says “us”. This claim is mostly based on the specious assumption that the Bush team stopped terrorist attacks, but if they had uncovered any actual operational terror attempts, they certainly would have broadcast their success over and over again, judging by the extent to which they bloviated over those kids from Buffalo who went to Afghanistan, or Jose Padilla who thought about maybe building a bomb, or those guys who fantasized about blowing up the Sears tower. It’s a little hard to swallow that the Bush boys would have kept the lid on actual open-and-shut terror cases they’d foiled when they made so much hay over these lame examples. And, of course, there are many objective measures that place the threat of terror attacks at a much higher level than before the invasion of Iraq.

And the bit about fifty-odd straight months of growth followed by an unprecedented financial meltdown? Well… Madoff could make that claim. Maybe Bush should get 150 years in prison, eh?

luv u,

jp

This week there was a summit on health care reform. Last week was about the president’s big, expensive budget. Through it all, and the concurrent crises unfolding in banking, unemployment, and investments, I keep hearing the specter of socialism raised by nervous acolytes of the imaginary purist free enterprise system we supposedly have now. Nationalize the banks? We can’t go there – that would be socialism! Single payer health coverage? Forget it, comrade – no socialized medicine here in the good old U.S. of A. Even though the Obama administration is nowhere near either of these propositions (alas), it seems as though the prospect of government doing anything remotely useful to the population it’s supposed to serve always brings on this overblown rhetoric about sacrificing our principles, destroying our way of life, etc. Though I hate to use his name (because MSNBC and others have been doing so incessantly for the last week), Rush Limbaugh (that great hulking hippo of hate) represents the rightward bookend of this tendency, calling for the president to fail in his quest to bring about the new International right here in America.

Yeah, well, all I can say is, keep your 4X golf shirt on, fat boy – your golden microphone is safe, trust me. Obama is like Roosevelt in the sense that he is setting himself up to be the man who saved capitalism from itself. FDR did the same. In an era when labor was mobilized and workers had little left to lose, this nation was ripe for the kind of social revolution right wingers still obsess about – the kind that was happening all around the world. It might have been a left-socialist transformation or a fascist one (in times of extreme economic hardship, either can take hold). Roosevelt basically shoveled out the coal dust from the furnace of free enterprise and stoked it with public funds. He helped workers get a stake in the economy through job programs and labor-friendly legislation. He helped give poor and working class older people the promise of some measure of dignity in retirement for the first time ever. Those millions of workers that might have brought about a revolution were able to take an important seat at the table of national economic power. Small wonder they re-elected FDR to office three times.

Economic conservatives and money-bag corporate types, listen: This is what Obama is attempting to do right now, fool! He’s going to save your freaking bacon. Leave us face it – you drove the bus into a ditch, pure and simple, just as surely as your boy Bush crashed and burned on Iraq. This is not the time to complain about how much the tow truck is going to cost. Just sit there, play with your freaking PDAs, and maybe people will forget that you’re the fuckers who got us into this mess in the first place. Personally, I think it’s a mistake to let people off the hook this easily. Our banks may be falling to pieces, but there seems to be an awful lot of rich bankers around still. We should consider relieving them of some of the wealth they garnered over the last 20-30 years, when most of us were losing ground. We should make it a little more uncomfortable for the extremely wealthy, and a little harder to carry their ill-gotten gains someplace more congenial.

But, hell – not to worry. Obama’s going to save your sorry asses, just like FDR did. That’s fine. Just do us all a favor along the way, okay? A little less yap, if you please.

luv u,

jp

See any good speeches this week? In point of fact, I did watch Obama’s all the way through, though I didn’t bother with Jindal’s response, and now I’m kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I’ve seen were pretty hilarious. I’m not sure where they were going with that entrance… it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part – an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there’s the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea… especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from “Disneyland” to Las Vegas. Interesting side note – the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it’s all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit… but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they’ve apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe “The Plumber” their headliners, they’re going to need more substance.

There are times when I think Americans, in spite of their news media, will be able to get their minds around the fact that this economic crisis is serious and needs addressing in ways that go beyond merely cutting taxes and interest rates. I’m not certain they grasp the seriousness of some of the other problems we face, not wholly unrelated to economics. The Iraq war is certainly front and center in this category. Through the tireless efforts of politicians, commentators, and news reporters (the kind who pass along lightly altered press releases to their copy editors), we have been given to understand that things are a whole lot better in Iraq now, and that aside from an explosion here and there, it’s really a very normal place. This is pretty sad. It’s like the smoldering remains of a house we burned down – the fire may be out, but the house is still destroyed. Hundreds of thousands have been killed there, millions displaced. This is a severely traumatized society that may never recover, and we can’t simply act as though our work is done there and our “mistakes” can merely be forgotten.

There was a particularly good article on Iraqi refugees in last week’s Nation Magazine. The author talked to families in Jordan and Syria about their experiences, and the stories are pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter’s school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.

We need to leave Iraq, probably faster and more completely than Obama wants to. But we also have to address the septic problem of all of these battered people exiled in penury. And we have to start yesterday.

luv u,

jp

President Obama is committing another 17,000 soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, we learned this week. Characterized even by liberals as “the good war” some time back, our occupation of that sorry place has begun its eighth year. That’s reaching Iran/Iraq war duration, and lord knows that conflict went on way too long. Only 18% of Afghans are in favor of this escalation, along with 34% of Americans (predictably higher, since we’re not the ones being surged upon). So why the hell are we still in Afghanistan, anyway? I’ve heard a lot of arguments, but none seem all that convincing, frankly – no more so than the ones I heard back when Bush decided post 9/11 to descend upon the basket case his predecessors left behind years earlier, after bankrolling fanatics like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and their terror-league allies for a decade or more. In 2001, Bush Jr. traded one set of war lords for another. What’s Obama’s plan?

I think before we as an imperial nation (don’t fight it – that’s what we are) can make that decision, we need to get used to the notion that we have no right to be there in the first place, and that occupying that country does not make us safer. Yes, yes… Osama Bin Laden lived there when 9/11 took place, but the essential planning and preparation for that hideous crime occurred not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in Germany and the United States. To this day, our government still doesn’t understand the nature of these decentralized terror groups. Our C.I.A. brags about killing senior leadership and decapitating the organization, as if Al Qaeda were organized like General Motors. It’s not. Preventing 9/11-type attacks is going to take something other than an endless supply of drone-fired missiles. For one thing, it will require more creative thinking at home with respect to prevention. Those fuckers used our own ramshackle air transportation system and our own lax building standards against us on that fateful day. My guess is that they’ll try to do the same again – identify a weakness and drive a metaphorical (or not) truck bomb through it. Just the other day, I heard the owner of nuclear power plants in my part of New York State complaining about NRC requirements for hardening new reactors against plane-crash attacks. Then there’s food safety. Yikes.

There is also the supply side of the equation to consider. We’ve got to stop making more terrorists. The Iraq war has created four million refugees – more than two million of them are stuck in squalid quarters in Jordan and Syria. Most will never see their homes again, since their neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. That mass of dispossessed people provides fertile ground for future extremist attacks against us and anyone allied with us. They and the millions of Palestinians still rotting in refugee camps are understandably angry with the Middle East order we worked so hard to build. I’m not talking about the fantasy Middle East George Bush used to wax poetic about – I mean the actual one we’ve invested in over the past sixty years, through our deep involvement in regional affairs, our support for despotic regimes, our bankrolling of Israeli expansionism in the West Bank and adventures in Lebanon. For so many, we have been the enemy for many years – Bush merely sealed the deal. What we do from this point forward is crucial to any chance for peace in this already bloody century.

The best way to be safe is not to incentivize violence against yourself. Sending more troops, more drones, and more bombs is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

luv u,

jp

Not sure how I got through last week’s rant without some mention of the elections in Iraq, fledgling democracy under our protective and nurturing (right) wing. Though the official results may not be in for some time, the winner appears to be Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa party, at the expense of the more religious Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an exile group formed in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war, now enjoying close ties to both Washington and Tehran). Probably the most interesting thing about these provincial elections – something underreported in the U.S. press – is the degree to which this was a vote for an end to the U.S. occupation. The status of forces agreement that Maliki negotiated with Bush late last year pretty strongly rejects any enduring U.S. presence on Iraqi soil – no permanent bases, etc. If that agreement is acted on as drafted, we’ll be out in a matter of months. Bush essentially signed what he termed a “cut and run” pact, and Maliki is seeing some of the benefit of that. He’s also benefiting from the reduction in violence and his preference for maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity. But it can be seen as yet another referendum on Bush. Good grief.

This week, of course, was the election in Israel. Not sure what to say about a poll that puts the party founded by Ariel Sharon a narrow first, the one headed by Bibi Netanyahu second, and the one whose standard bearer is an overt racist (Avigdor Lieberman) third. Not that there was a major party peace option here – the attack on Gaza that killed 1,300 Palestinians was prosecuted by the leader of fourth-place Labor, Israel’s traditional center-left party. One is tempted to cry, as V.S. Naipaul did in a very different context, a million mutinies now! How is it that a nation of smart people can give themselves such abysmal leadership? For chrissake, Lieberman is essentially the lynchpin of the next Israeli government, with emphasis on the term “lynch”. He has advocated “execution” and transfer for Israeli Arabs, and ran on a promise to make them swear a loyalty oath. (Reminds me of that bizarre loyalty oath crusade in Catch-22, where you would have to sign one before entering the mess hall, getting your chow, sitting down at your table, etc., etc.) Where is this headed?

Of course, we have our own little problems here. I’ve heard our beloved secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, stating the new administration’s policy that we will not speak with Hamas unless they 1) renounce violence, 2) recognize Israel’s right to exist, and 3) abide by all past agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian authority. Sounds great… except that we consistently fail to ask the same of Israel. They have never renounced violence – quite the opposite, to the point where it has eroded their national character in a very sorry fashion. They have never recognized the Palestinian’s right to exist within any reasonable borders – like the 22% of historic Palestine that is not in Israel proper. Not satisfied with nearly 4/5 of a loaf, they have continued to build settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank in violation of all agreements with the Palestinians, through good times and bad. When will they abide by those agreements?

Anyway… then there’s Dennis Blair, our new director of national intelligence, and a former liaison to the murderous Indonesian government during some of its worst actions in East Timor. Read Allan Nairn’s postings on Blair to learn how he provided cover for some pretty heinous crimes back during the Clinton administration. This is change? Note to Obama: change this menace the hell out.

luv u,

jp

The Obama administration and members of congress of both parties are still sparring over the stimulus package as I write these words. Now, I’ve mostly heard from Republicans on the topic this week (because I listen to NPR), and they seem determined to characterize everything in the bill that is not a tax cut as “wasteful spending,” as “pork,” etc. Not sure they quite grasp the concept of Keynesian stimulus in this context at least. That’s the general impression I’m getting. They are philosophically welded to tax cuts – specifically, capital gains tax cuts and those that benefit the wealthy disproportionately. That’s all they ever talk about, practically. And though more than a third (now, 42%) of the stim package is just that, they’re still squawking. Their idea of “compromise” is having the other side sign on to their program. Once would hope that’s not going to happen, but with the Democrats, anything is possible (though Obama does seem to be showing a little spine on this issue lately).

Still, it’s a little frustrating to hear almost exclusively from the Republicans on this question… especially when it was their ideas that brought us to this crisis in the first place. I guess it’s back to Clinton rules again, where the opposition sets the agenda and the news media just rolls along with the current. The press is like this enormous beast with a thousand mouths and one eye. It peers through a microscope at one item – like Tom Daschle dropping out – and the mouths all start flapping away. So even though Obama goes on every major news program to talk about the financial crisis, the portion you hear is his response to the Daschle thing. They’re still obsessing about it days later (Jim Lehrer probed David Axelrod about it just Friday night), pausing only to comment on how Obama seems unable to get his message across on the stimulus package. Meanwhile, another 600,000 have lost their jobs.

Of course, this feigned outrage over Keynesian stimulus is just plain absurd. The Republicans practice it all the time, enthusiastically. They brag about it. It’s called the military budget. That baby is packed full of all kinds of high ticket items that are utterly useless, but that are nonetheless produced in Congressional districts all across the country. Essential stuff like Virginia-class submarines (about $2 billion a piece), F-22 raptors ($300 million plus a piece), and, of course, everyone’s favorite endless boondoggle, “missile defense”, which really should be named “defense contractor defense”, because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. These great Republican defenders of the public purse vote for these projects time and time again, sluicing billions of dollars into the sink hole that is military procurement, while all other human needs are neglected… including those of our military personnel!

So the next time you see one of these sorry-looking Senators stride up to the rostrum and wave the draft stimulus package around in the air, just think about all those Virginia class submarines we’ll be sending into the Hindu Kush next spring. Your tax dollars hard at work.

luv u,

jp