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Different Times, Same Unwise Ideologies

It is politicians like the new senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, who has been making a name for himself, lately, as one of Congress' leading warmongers, that makes the world as precarious as it is.  Cotton is all but calling for a new war in the Middle East, which is absolute lunacy, and almost criminal for being in the position that he's in.  Iran (the country Cotton most wants to bring a war against), and other countries, particularly Russia, have been calling for global nuclear disarmament.  Regarding nuclear disarmament, the Obama govt. thinks quite otherwise, however, as it busily refurbishes and builds up nuclear weapons more than at any time since the start of the first SALT  treaty (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) despite propaganda by Obama that he wants a world without nuclear weapons.   Naturally, Russia and China are going to react by doing pretty much the same.  It's pretty amazing that a president who made that "denuclearization" statement dire
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Last Chance for Tradition

Hollywood liberals, in partnership with the national liberal intelligentsia, are determined to increase the spoils of victory that they have ridden on for the last quarter century, and, now, they are trying to run up the score by vanquishing the last remnants of social conservatism in America.  If Hollywood wins, America as we have known it since the Era of Theodore Roosevelt, or the Ragtime Era, will forever be lost, and once lost there will be no hope of return.  In this decade, we have reached the tipping point as the national liberal intelligentsia is trying to turn America up side down, hamlet by hamlet, town by town, city by city, and state by state until they capture all the hearts and minds.    Now, they and Hollywood are funneling money into the campaign chest of Adam Smith, hoping to keep out yet another small voice for traditional America, Mark Greene's voice, from reaching the General Election for Congress in the 9th Congressional District of Washingto

Police Bullying in NM

MSNBC-TV showed video today about the New Mexico State Police terrorizing a family over an alleged speeding violation.  The family consisted of a woman and several children.  The police broke windows, fired shots, bullied, threatened, screamed at, and forced the woman and her kids to the ground, but naturally it is the family that is under charges instead of the police that acted unlawfully.  In a different case, in Washington D.C. several weeks ago, police officers fired shots at and killed a woman because her car rammed a barricade and she tried to get away, but they had no idea whether the ramming was intentional or accidental, nor did they care.  They used brute force against her rather than to simply capture and arrest her.  This is barbarism, and these are hardly isolated cases in the U.S.  Not only are top officers and officials of the defense establishment, which systematically brutalizes civilians in foreign adventures, and top officials of the N.S.A., which spies on law-abid

Persecution Follies

The Obama govt.'s heavy-handed prosecution of whistleblowers, or those people who uncover and tell the People about government wrongdoing -- or in the case of Bradley Manning (who released classified, though not top secret, information) about atrocities -- is unprecedented.  In effect, what the government is doing is trying to keep wrongdoing secret by threatening draconian-length prison terms to anybody who dares to let the nation know what's really going on.  Relating to these whistleblowers' uncovering of the truth, the American People are finally seeing the true face of this government and past governments, and it's not always good or righteous. [Originally published on Commoner on 5/18/2013 under a different title; revised on 6/4/2013.]

Civilian Officials' Lies

Ex-President George W. Bush's provocative lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was highlighted on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC report ("Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War"), tonight.  By time this essay is published, readers (especially, in the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones, Alaska and Hawaii) should still be able to see a re-broadcast of the program from the beginning, later on this evening.  It, basically, shows or implies that officials like Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and George Tenet were all lying about Iraq and using the lies as a pretense to lead America into war.  Building on what already has been conventional knowledge, the program showed that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.  As David Corn of Mother Jones magazine said, there have been no consequences for the criminal wrongdoings of these officials, such as being hauled off to the Hague en blanc for l

The Second Damocles Sword

Drones, when they are used as an assassination tool instead of on a real battlefield, are extra-constitutional (not in accordance with the Constitution or international law) and counter-productive, because they likely produce exponentially more terrorists than they smite.  And they kill innocents.  And some deceptive definitions of terrorism and thus irrationally broad wavings of the wand has put our nation deep into an international quagmire.  One day, if drones are not banned by a multi-lateral international convention, many more nations than presently would have these drones, replicating the example that the U.S. has set, and this would exacerbate the problem of these drones on a world wide scale, and that would not be a happy time for the planet, and unfortunately this follows the same pattern as the setting off of the atomic bombs in 1945.  In other words, it seemed wise to some at the time, but in the long run it turned out to be very unwise.  What's going on with drones s

The Broader Quagmire

The war, already the longest in American history, has spread to different theaters in different nations besides Afghanistan, most notably Iraq, and most Americans, unfortunately, pay little attention to it.  It is something that's just there in the national conscious, but  day-by-day or week-by-week coverage in the media is hardly noticeable. Though, we weren't around at the time, you get the feeling that World Wars I & II were covered comprehensively by the media of that time, and every citizen on the home front was paying attention to the reports of the battles.  The problem with these amorphous wars of the 21st century that are being waged in several countries around the world is that the U.S. political and military elite have decided on warring against a broader enemy as opposed to focusing on a narrower enemy as in the aforementioned world wars.  In other words, going to war against practically any militant who detests the U.S. rather than focusing on actual 9/11-type