Walking the Talk, Part II

For nearly 4 years about half of the USA has been successfully hoodwinked by well organized rhetoric surrounding "national security" and the infamous "war on terrorism". They have willingly given up traditional rights believing this was the only way to protect us against the "tearists" ("the government must know what's right!". Can you say "1930s Germany?"). They have willingly spent hundreds of billions of dollars invading a country which posed absolutely no threat to the US, and turned a blind eye to the death and misery visited upon its innocent citizens in their name. And they cheered approvingly as the US government turned upon traditional allies simply because their leaders tried to help a friend see that they were going down the wrong path.

This half gladly supported these and other dangerous and immoral policies because they believed two things would result: First, Iraq would become a stable democracy whose influence would spread through the region. This would be done with minimal cost (paid for by Iraqi oil revenues) and minimal loss of US soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians. Second, we would be safer at home.

The half of us who knew from the beginning that this smokescreen was pure criminal folly watched in shock and horror as the other half voted twice in support of this.

A portion of the dark side will always blindly support W's policies, unless reality suddenly invades their ideological trance (such as losing a loved one in Iraq). But something is gradually happening with the rest. For months now the horror and disaster that is Iraq has begun to dawn on more people. $200B+, 2,000 US soldiers and 100K innocent civilian deaths later Iraq is as or more deadly and chaotic than it ever was. People are beginning to realize that happy talk from the Ws does not jibe with the reality on the ground in Iraq. And homeland security? Well, witness the third world situation the developed in the good ole' US of A last week as the federal government remained virtually paralyzed last week for 4 days after hurricane Katrina after it laid waste the gulf coastal areas of Mississippi, leaving thousands to suffer and die with no hope.

This inexcusable failure to respond (indeed the poorest response to a national tragedy in recent history), plus the recent revelation that they have also been dismantling the Army Corps' levee reinforcement program for southwestern Louisiana could not better demonstrate what the Ws have been up to despite their assurances to the contrary: the dismantling and mismanagement of programs and agencies which provide necessary services to real people (like FEMA, which is a skeleton of its former self). And the cynical response since demonstrates that we can expect continue to expect the engineered decline in social and humanitarian to continue for the foreseeable future.