The little guy here, for those too young to remember, is Henery the Chickenhawk. Little Henery always bit off more than he could chew (but, at least, he DID try).

Abraham Lincoln once said that whenever he heard anyone arguing for slavery, he had a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. I feel that way about all the wannabee warriors of the media, the guys clamoring for more in Iraq and sneering at anyone who wants to “Cut and Run.” Is that unbelievable?

Just so you know, here’s a partial list of the “did not serve” tigers:

Sean ("The Great American") Hannity

George Will

Chris Matthews

Bill O'Reilly (hid in England, from what I gather)

Paul Gigot

Bill Bennett

Pat Buchanan

Rush Limbaugh (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst' on his ass!)

Michael Savage (aka Michael Alan Weiner)

Pat Robertson

Michael Medved

Glen Beck

Britt Hume

While I feel nothing but shame concerning the fact that our nation now stoops so low as to send women into combat (even Hitler didn’t do that), another of the notable “chickenhawks” is hatemonger Ann Coulter. Like her cohort here, she loves to see others sent to their maiming or deaths. I can’t help wishing I could see what they so much desire for anyone but themselves visited upon them.

Sean Hannity, though, takes the cake. Recently, he went after former Vice President Al Gore for the latter's supposed failure to live without fossil fuel derived energy, asseverating that Mr. Gore should do what he was “demanding” others to do.

How’s that for oblivious? When do you leave for Iraq or Afghanistan, Mr. Hannity? This morning and for a couple mornings before, I’ve listened to others like “The Great American” lambaste the British Sailors and Marines taken prisoner by the Iranian Navy. Several of these heroes - including New York Post columnist Ralph Peters, National Review Online contributor John Derbyshire, CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck, and syndicated radio host Michael Savage – sneered and smeared the captive women and men.

Savage, whose real name is – get this – Weiner (pronounce it “weaner” or whiner, I don’t care – it’ll fit) , had this to say: “I don't think these people need a Bible. They probably need a condom. By the look of the British sailors, they look like they took them off the back streets of Liverpool. I don't think these people need a Bible. They're lucky they found a job in the navy. I mean, I don't know. You take a look at them -- no wonder they were captured. I don't think they even know they were on a boat.”

Another of the Rambo types said the Brits “wimped out in a matter of days,” and called them “wankers.” Derbyshire “deplored” “. . . the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran." Well, I’ll be damned - I don’t really know what to say. This just about tops anything I’ve ever heard.

“Wanker,” parenthetically, is in British slang, “a detestable person, one who masturbates.” Suffice it to say that the expression seems to fit media commandos like "Savage," Beck, Hannity, and the rest far better than it does their targets. “Cowardice?” That one I don’t have to define. "Cowardice?" - from metrosexual “downtowners” and REMFs the likes of these? Jesus! Time was, that the only problem the soldier in some far-off combat zone had with “Jody” – that's the 4F, draft-deferred Dick Cheney type who’d figured out how to stay at home while you took the heat for your country - was the fear of what he was doing with you wife or girl friend. You might get that “Dear John” letter.

Now it’s this: "Jody" has become the posturing SOB who has figured out not only a way to make himself sound like a hero, he’s got the f------ balls to call real men cowards. Damn! @#$%&$#@!

At any rate, there you have it, girls – the “sensitive” males your feminist sisters back in the sixties so idealized. I quoted John Stuart Mill yesterday: it seems apropos to do it again here:

“A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

With first William Jefferson Clinton, then George Walker Bush, you raised your "metrosexual" male to the office of Commander and Chief of real men. That, probably – in my mind, at least – was the ultimate spit in the face, the outrage to which author Susan Faludi’s “betrayal of the American male” referred. Well, girls, any day now – when the fossil fuel energy runs out and mankind’s societies take a one hundred year back step; when one of those illegal aliens about whom you are so compassionate has you spread-eagled on a dumpster and help must come from another of your “sensitive” wannabe Rambo types – you’ll be reminded of that quote from J.S. Mill.

My grandfather had an expression now that I think of it, the perfect description for your “metrosexual” male. “He wouldn’t,” Grampa said, “make a pimple on a real man’s ass.”

Astonishing in the Orwellian way its monumental deceit is being masked by the nation’s propagandist media, the Abbott and Costello routine by the White House and Congress goes on. While the media-addled public looks on distracted by the farce, the military industrial complex goes on with its latest and most lucrative project and rip-off of the taxpayer and poor, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Never in the field of human political endeavor – with the possible exception of the Sixteenth Amendment or the Cold War - has such a gargantuan, while thunderously obvious, swindle been accomplished. Obviously, the swindler doesn’t want the U.S. to quickly – or, perish the rational thought, soon - withdraw from the war. And, just as obviously, it doesn’t want the U.S. to swiftly win it, either. So – voilá – status quo. Just what we have. Quite, as an old CIA master was wont to call such, an “orchestration.”

My god, people – how stupid can you be?!

Rhetorical question. Obviously, you’re stupid enough to believe that a military able to spend until three hundred million citizens already on the equivalent of history’s biggest taxation treadmill and working themselves to death can’t subdue a country with a population seven percent of that number. You’re stupid enough to believe that the government of a nation smart enough to have gone to the moon, do DNA and stem-cell research, and a hundred-odd similar miracles of science can’t close a border thirteen hundred and fifty miles long.

That last is a no-brainer so obvious, matter of fact, that it’s laughable.

Speaking of which, the news these day is mostly low comedy (hence, I suppose, my having been reminded of Abbott and Costello). A few minutes ago, at reference on the TagWorld Internet site to “The Nigerian 419 Scam,” I cracked up again. The scam, known for literally centuries as “The Spanish Prisoner,” is a confidence trick in which the mark is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of collecting a much larger one. Authors on websites like Wikipedia expressed amazement at the vast numbers of people who are stupid enough to be duped by something so obvious.

No mention, of course, is made of the stock market.

A nation dumb enough to fall for an even older scam, that of Paying Protection Money – “Danegeld,” it was called when Ninth Century Vikings ran it – to a gang of thieves as blatant as the federal government should be surprised when they also fall for “The Spanish Prisoner?” Come on! You don’t see, for instance, the so-called “War on Drugs” as a Protection Racket? Even the average high school class – we did it once, in Del Rio, Texas – can come up with methods whereby the traffic for illicit drugs would be brought to a halt in a year’s time.

“How stupid?” Stupid enough to believe that a government so desirous of protecting the public that it’s willing to spend ten billion dollars a year on marijuana law enforcement is at the same time unwilling to protect its children from the one hundred, twenty a day influx of pedophiles, kidnappers, and sexual predators from Mexico. That’s how stupid.

So the wars go on – and they will go on. And, as the administration now admits, they will go on for generations. Tell me that isn’t the sweetest scam in history. It earns billions for the military industrial complex rich, and all it costs is purchase of the co-operation of a Congressional-Presidential Mutt and Jeff routine, one assuring that the Pentagon employs only enough troops to further assure that fighting – the maiming and killing is incidental – goes on without possibility of “mission accomplished.” Sweet!

And as long as the public, especially the poor who contribute the bodies of their sons and daughters, husband, fathers – and now, even mothers – unlike the rich and those who will reap the benefits - can be suckered by confidence games equivalent in their blatantly obvious character to “The Spanish Prisoner,” “The Pigeon Drop,” and Danegeld, they will continue, too.

As long as the public can be kept ignorant and oblivious of the history wherein the corporate rich bribed and bought the legislation that has brought us to things like the all-volunteer military (show me a better way to assure that someone like Dick Cheney wouldn’t have to embarrass himself with the nuisance of having to obtain draft deferment after deferment), the war will go on.

As long as the public knows nothing of the means by which “Corporate America” corporations acquired the same rights as those of an individual citizen, including Fourteenth Amendment identity, but without the same responsibilities (imagine, among people intelligent enough to be lawyers, how that came about), it will go on.

As long as the nation’s courts are willing to permit the government’s evasion of a ruling on the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution that prevents waging of war by the military’s Commander in Chief (how do you suppose a provision for preventing an evil as obvious as that one – just what’s happened to us in Iraq – came to be circumvented so smoothly?), it will go on.

And, it’ll only take a few dollars spent on trinket medals (you’d think they could at least put precious metals in the damned things, wouldn’t you?), a few more of the Veterans Administration, Walter Reed Building Eighteen Hearing whitewashes, and the meretricious like to keep the public hornswoggled.

I’ve spoken here often about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program to gain control of and used the nation’s news media, and the relentless manner in which the government has striven to manage what amounts to the public consciousness (you really don’t recognize that in today’s news?). History will go much further.

History will note how CIA and military industrial strategists infiltrated and co-opted humanist, feminist, and other extremist groups in order to weaken the society and nation’s thought processes. Children, always the target of totalitarian regimes and dictatorial ideologues, could be disciplined without corporal punishment and cleverly “loving” psychological devices. So we were told – relentlessly. The traditional, two parent, male-dominated family was passé, uncivilized and Neanderthal. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” became a feminist mantra. It also became important to create a new paragon of maleness, the “sensitive” man. So we were told – relentlessly.

With the rise of feminism reasonable in its initial and basic premises, came a bizarre evolution. New terminology – another device and trapping of the propagandist, but totally un-noticed by the public – began its insinuation into the language. Many terms, to say nothing of traditional practices, became “sexist,” and “politically incorrect.” Spitted epithets, especially those like the solecism “male chauvinist pig” were chic. A woman could do anything a man could do, the feminist creed said, even labor and fight. Any actual demonstration of the truth and to the contrary, of course, was sexist and politically correct, then actually became illegal.

I was reminded of J.S. Mill. “A State which dwarfs its men,” he noted, “in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

That about describes it, today – doesn’t it?

Under the new ideologies, the nation’s educational system felt into dysfunctional and convulsing chaos. Unable to discipline children in any manner except by resort to contradictorily convolute processes amounting to organizational bluster or cajolery, teachers devoted entire classroom sessions to simply maintaining order. Soon, even middle school campuses came to resemble prisons more than anything else, with patrolling police and security personnel – including, of course women – everywhere; that while technology like computers, equipment used for sports and anything else imaginable including every kind of toy and plaything conceivable became essential to learning. “Studies” abounded, all purporting speciously and fecklessly to “better education,” and “support our children.” As education and school systems went from one nitwit nostrum to another, students unable to compose a simple sentence, do simple arithmetic, or identify their state’s outline on a map effectively took over administration of their schools.

“School shootings” – incidents wherein students went to school with guns and killed their classmates – became common, all but routine. “Hazing,” incidents wherein students beat, raped, and otherwise brutalized their fellows, abounded, too, and pregnancy among high school, even middle school, girls did, in fact, become routine. It also became illegal to expel the expectant mothers, or otherwise show repugnance for their immorality. Morality, too, became “politically incorrect.”

In what history will recognize as no mere co-incidence, the U.S. Supreme Court “handed down” – “capitulated,” a law school professor said – Roe v. Wade, probably the most poorly, and speciously reasoned ruling in the court’s history. Within months, the heretofore murder of a child required for immunity from prosecution only that some part of its body remain in the mother during the killing. Many a historian, logician, and legal scholar wondered how long it would take for the newborn to simply have its head smashed under his mother’s foot or against the nearest door.

More and concomitantly, the public’s music, literature, and arts devolved to a degree exalting by comparison even that of primitive savages on the islands of the Pacific. From melody and lyric once deemed respectable by even professors, graduate students and skilled purveyors of the art, music lost all semblance of its elevated forms, becoming stripped of everything but the most primitive rhythm, percussion and chant, the so-called “rap.” Language and literature reached near incomprehensibility, filled with COIK – Clear Only If (already) Known – references and solecistic nonsense. “Romance” novels, drivel appealing to the very lowest feminine mentality, and machismo minimalist “adventure” stories appealing in a similar manner to the increasingly effeminate, “sensitive” male filled bookstores and libraries. A comically clichéd and derisively written mockery of the former, “Naked Came the Stranger,” became a best-seller. Newspaper composition went to the eighth grade level, then sixth. Journalist’s and editors gaffes became regular fare for comedians’ audiences.

The often bizarre and tongue-tied diction of politicians including the nation’s president became likewise a form of entertainment. Political and other oratory devolved to sophomoric levels, more interesting in the comic relief provided from bloviating politicians and political campaigns than in substance or point.

Everywhere, tests scores and job application performance reached levels both frightening and humiliating. Television comedians like Johnny Carson, and, later, Jay Leno, would develop “shticks” intended to demonstrate the appalling stupidity of the new public. In the news almost daily, society demonstrated its “dumbing-down,” and columnists like James Kilpatrick and writers like Steve Allen began pointing out the phenomenon, all to no avail. Ideologues like the feminists, political liberals – the two became identified with one another – and humanists generally would not be deterred, demanding more of the same, and, on account of their new-found political clout, getting it.

It was an eerily familiar time, I can tell you, and not only because I had read Orwell. “In the future,” the Fletcher School wonk told a seminar I intended at the University of Colorado in the late sixties, “government will deceive, confuse, and bewilder the public in order to maintain power.” He cited Nazi German Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels repeatedly in his presentation.

History, watching, saw the bewilderment of the public reach first the level required by the Cold War, then the war in Vietnam, then Desert Storm, now Iraqi Freedom (note the term – newspeak, anyone?). During Korea, a nation still mentally alert, disciplined and law-abiding but tired of war, gritted its teeth and accepted. With Vietnam, the second war waged by a President using a bewildered public to brow-beat the Congress into submission came to a halt when public resentment at their government’s criminal behavior withdrew support and took to the streets.

The federal propagandists’ reaction was a masterpiece and something to see, still another example of the power – especially scientific - of the most massively funded government in history. Phony veterans, both extemporaneous and in government hire for propagandist purposes, were everywhere. The “orchestration” was state of the art and directed by the best behaviorists known to man, psychologists and sociologists who were also the best funded. Never again thereafter would the public dare criticize its military or their Commander in Chief. People who recognized the overtones of Goebbels and Hitler, to say nothing of long passages being uttered almost verbatim by federal spokesmen, were shouted down, threatened, or attacked.

"Of course,” Nazi German Reichsmarschall Herman Goering said at Nuremburg, “the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Anybody recognize that? Lately? “How stupid?” – how stupid can you get?

My fellow citizens, for even one totally unschooled in history, the machinations of government since the military industrial complex corporations’ coup in the late nineteen fifties leaves a trail more evident than that of a buffalo herd across a snowy field. From warning by a Five-Star General President concerning its offing and portent, to one otherwise inexplicable event after another up until the present, there can be no rational doubt. For heaven’s sake, and the sake of your children and grandchildren, wake up! You are being hoodwinked.

Even if you will not do the study required to see that I must be right, at least consider where we are now. To prosecute as we are a war with the purported intent of this one is utterly absurd, ridiculous. There is simply no way that what the administration says it intends to do can be done. None! If we leave Iraq now, there will, indeed, be a vicious civil war. There is a civil war now, a war being fought to the greatest extent and highest intensity the participants are capable; the difference is that our men and women won’t be dying in future operations.

While I hesitate to evince moral questions to a society demonstrating the level of such this one does, I would point out that we do not have the moral right to go on with partial measures. Unless we can stop the daily killing of scores of Iraqis, we have no right to be there. Do we mean, by our determination to stay for “generations,” to cause the killing to go on? How can anyone ascertain that what will ensue when we leave will be worse than what is already occurring, and that it will go on as long as it will, should be stay and proceed as we are?

Can anyone still argue that Saddam Hussein would have killed as many Iraqis as have died since we invaded?

The dead in the event of a withdrawal will be, as they are now, the responsibility of George W. Bush and his military industrial complex masters. That they lied to deceive the nation and its public in order to wage war would relieve the nation and public of responsibility, even ignoring the fact that nothing we can do short of an all-out effort will succeed.

If we are to subdue the country, we must re-invade with six hundred, fifty thousand troops and we must destroy the ability of the parties now killing us and themselves to resist what we intend to do. Included in that is the killing of everyone who resists or may resist. There has never been any other way to do that – never! That the U.S. and its public doesn’t have the stomach for that doesn’t change the fact of what must be done.

If you don’t intend to kill, don’t get in a fight with guns. It is just that simple – it has always been that simple!

This isn’t a matter, or tactical situation, uniquely constituted either in its character or its nature. War and control of the conquered is a science as old and well-known as human history. Dozens, scores of direct and valid parallels can be drawn from one’s own experiences. There are no, arcane, complex or esoteric considerations

It is a simple as “your can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

First, some background: months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, I wrote a letter to President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and to the then Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. In it, I pleaded that we not invade Iraq and begin killing thousands – the word I used – of Iraqi “women and kids.” If the United States Government so wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power, I would do it. I pointed out that I was the inventor of many, or most, of the tactics that would be required – something each of the addressees could easily verify – and asked for a reasonable budget, noting that what I asked for would be a small fraction of what invasion would cost. I guaranteed that I would kill Saddam, and - in order to prove I knew what I was talking about - provided a suggested method.

Of course, the letter did not draw response.

This morning, I’m listening to the president’s press conference. While I may have heard during my life – I’m an old dude – more toweringly obvious hypocrisy, I can’t remember when. It’s stupefying – I sit, staring in abject wonderment. The only time this man ever shows anything like male courage is the daring it must take to tell the nation he’s raping that it owes him co-operation. I can’t think, to save me, of anything like it, ever.

Rita always refuses to listen to people she detests, but I insist on it. Sometimes, it’s just to learn to what extreme things have gone with the speaker, and how outrageous they can get. I also think, when they’re opinion is opposed to mine, that the more outrageous their demeanor, behavior or remarks, the more favorable to my point of view it is. Most of the people bright enough – the only ones who count with me – will see the appalling behavior or remark for what it is, and react accordingly. The rest – extreme pro or con – can’t add anything worth effort to the topic of discussion thereof, anyway.

Sometimes, it’s just because they’re hilariously funny. Ann Coulter, for instance, or Rosie O’Donnell. Anybody with so obviously that little intellect who takes themselves so seriously is a blast.

Then, there’s the “jock-sniffers.” That one may need explanation. Most athletes of any stature are familiar with “groupies,” the babes who throw themselves at the latest object of their imagined affection, lust, or whatever. The male equivalent – at least from my point of view – is the wimp who wants to bask in the reflected glow of another guy’s competitive success. He wants to appear or hang out with the object of his adulation, the better to impress others – the “groupies,” sometimes. That kind of guy is the “jock-sniffer.”

This bunch is comprised of guys – guys whose closest brush with combat was a spat with his wife or girl-friend, mind you - who want to sound like a warrior. Here’s a partial list, see it you recognize what I’m talking about (of course, you may be like Rita, and have refused to listen to their blather and bilge):

Sean ("The Great American") Hannity
Bill O’Reilly (hid out in England during the Vietnam War, from what I gather)
Chris Matthews
George Will
Paul Gigot
Bill Bennett
Pat Buchanan
Rush Limbaugh (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst' on his ass!)
Michael Savage (aka Michael Alan Weiner)
Pat Robertson
Michael Medved

And, then, of course, there’s that stalwart of liberty, our fearless leader with five deferments during war time, Dick Cheney. George W. Bush’s “service” during wartime prior to that as Commander in Chief is, of course, well-known. These pillars of patriotism are all for sending others into combat, for keeping them there as “long as it takes,” and for contempt of “cut and run.”

There will be a five minute hiatus from the keyboard while I turn off the radio and Bush’s pious pontificating, and settle my stomach.

No, make that ten minutes. I’ve a stomach strong enough to have eaten snakes and frogs – the latter alive, even – but this guy makes me sick. Through it all, including “Mission Accomplished,” he hasn’t made a mistake. Whew!

But, there you have it. Remember my mention of the movie, the Mask of Zorro, Don Rafael Montero? Re-assuring the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, the old Zorro, Anthony Perkins, says that Montero, a member of the Spanish nobility will never recognize him – “a member of the Spanish nobility will never look directly at a peasant.” In the movie, Montero intends and attempts to simply blast out of existence hundreds of the poor he has used as slaves to mine his gold.

There, as I said, you have it. Mssrs. Bush, Cheney, and the warriors in the Pantheon of the Pusillanimous above believe they are patricians. Far better in the eyes of our maker than we, the plebeians, the peones. If they need to send us to die in their wars, or to have us sicken and die under their pollution of everything we ingest or breathe, how dare we complain or resist? When they have used and are finished with us, who are we to clutter up their beautiful streets, parks, and public buildings.

Oh, they will tell you that they’ve earned the right to use us, and to feel that way. It is after all, by means of their sterling character, mental brilliance, and surpassing skill, they have come to ascendancy over us.

I’d feel sick again, but that’s funny. As I remarked the other day in a “blog”:

“Contrary to indoctrination of yourselves and your children by the government-controlled news media and educational systems, the rich are seldom the big-leaguers they are made out to be. I’ve known dozens of corporate CEOs, for some of the nation’s biggest companies, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t trust them with “executive operating” of a lemonade stand. Most of these guys got where they are by lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, and walking all over their co-workers. They excel, all right – they excel in acquisitive rapacity, greed.

“ . . . I’ve not only broken bread with the Captains of Industry, drunk with them, and covered their butts, I listened. I’ve heard their contempt for everything they profess publicly to believe, from the people they exploit to the system and government that gave them their power. I’ve heard them betray their concupiscent lust – not a few times twisted and depraved – their fascination with fame, and their willingness to prostitute literally anything and anybody for money and power.”

Come on! Have a good, intense look at Dick Cheney and tell me this is a paragon of male virtue and masculinity.

The truth is that the rich send the poor to die in their wars and anywhere else things are dangerous. As Rose O’Donnell (this nut case thinks someone - the government, actually - blasted the World Trade Center) said the other day, “Google it” – Google how many rich kids are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, how many sons and daughters of senators, congressmen and congresswomen, or offspring of the Captains of Industry.

While you’re Googling and considering, consider how concerned our patricians really are for “. . . insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.” Consider the President’s protestations that he is concerned that should we leave Iraq, “the enemy will follow us home.” Consider the border with Mexico, in that context. How do you protect your house by leaving the back door – or all the doors, for that matter – standing ajar?

I suppose you’d say, were you George W. Bush, Dick Cheney - or Don Rafael Montero, “Why, just kill all the neighbors.” It's the solution of the "nobility" to problems like that.

Is that what we’re planning? Damn – it scares you, doesn’t it? It’d scare you more, had you been where I have. As some of you may know, I was made homeless after IRS broke up my business and marriage in 1978, and took effective steps to assure that I could never be employed again. In 1985, when I had recovered and started over, they did it all over again, this time driving my teenage son to three attempts at suicide. As the result, once I'd been reduced to having to pick up women and live with them until they tired of me, I fought back with planted mikes in IRS and other government offices - a couple of congressmen and a senator.

I'm not homeless anymore, obviously and for, I think, what must be obvious reasons.

The experience, both as has to do with life on the streets – actually, I went to the wilderness, once the war had become a shooting one – and the microphone “bugs” in federal offices, I learned even more of the truth of things than what I’ve already mentioned.

I’ve learned that things are always the way they are because the people of the United States either care enough to change them or they don’t. Either way, they are the way they are because we made them that way. We make things the way they are when we don’t care far more often than otherwise. Usually, that’s because we’re like Don Rafael. We don’t look directly at it. Take the border, for instance. Ask yourself why no one – not even Lou Dobbs and the like – has told you that more than a hundred twenty kidnappers, pedophiles and sexual predators cross that border illegally every day?

“‘Spain dat to me, Luci!” (Anybody remember “I Love Luci?” Ricky Ricardo?)

And while you’re ‘splainin’, tell me why the nation that will spend a trillion dollars on Iraq and the domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty of its people – that’s rich, poor, even the ones killing our soldiers – won’t spend more than peanuts on its own homeless. Or, since we seem to hold our own destitute in such “don’t look at them” contempt, why it is that you won’t send at least a reasonable part of that to people like victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

The truth is, my country, you are a pack of sickening hypocrites like the man you chose to occupy your highest office. You offer, when cornered, all the same bloviating bullshit your “jock-sniffer” media heroes offer. The “Pantheon of the Pusillanimous” I had reference to above is there because they’re popular, you know – and the extended meaning of that is as obvious as you are to the world.

There’s one more thing, in closing, the War Powers Act words your “leader” used in luring a willing Congress:

“These military operations have been carefully planned to accomplish our goals with the minimum loss of life among coalition military forces and to innocent civilians. It is not possible to know at this time either the duration of active combat operations or the scope or duration of the deployment of U.S. Armed Forces necessary to accomplish our goals fully.”

Put that with “Shock and Awe,” with “Mission Accomplished,” and the “jock-sniffer” patriotism of Sean Hannity and the rest. Put it with your “. . . insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.”

Out here in the real world, the street, we don’t believe a word you say.

I suppose it’ll be all right if I first point out here that I’m a strong son of a bitch, a guy who stood up to everything the government of the most powerful and ruthless nation on the planet could throw at him.

But I cry sometimes. It isn’t often, and when I do, it’s almost always a song that does it. Whitney Houston or Dolly Parton singing “I Will Always Love You” does it every time. I heard the song again on TagWorld – I can never resist playing it – and I’m sitting here blinking to see as I type this.

You see, of everything they took from me, none was like, not even close, to Karen. Words always fail me when it comes to her, and this won’t be an exception. When I search for words, strange enough I always come to another girl. Beverly.

Beverly was my high school sweetheart, my first wife, and she died when we were twenty-three. A poet, perhaps, could describe pain like that, but I can’t. It was years, long, agonizing ones, before the memory of that sweet face and person didn’t erase my mind and awareness of everything around. I’m strong, like I said - disciplined by a German nobleman grandfather to a level you couldn’t possibly understand – and that didn’t happen often, either. The song then was “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

Losing Karen was, I think, even worse. Our marriage pounded by IRS and the United States, my wife tormented daily by telephone calls from federal revenuers pretending to be all manner of creditor, she found sanctuary with another man, one with the kind of principles that would let him take advantage of my – and her - plight. You won’t understand sufficiently if I don’t also point out that I didn’t owe the government taxes or anything else, a fact determined years later in court. You probably need also to know that for some reason Karen and her paramour took particular delight in tormenting me with their relationship, flaunting their illicit affair – we were still married and his wife was in a hospital, dying of cancer – publicly.

And I acted very badly. Stalked continuously, almost relentlessly, by both the man and members of his family, I did everything I could to retaliate. The one honorable thing I managed was restraining myself when he forced me off the road with his car and attacked me with blows and kicks. Even then, I might have lost my head, done what the government was apparently hoping for, and given in to murderous rage.

I might have, that is, had I not learned of my son’s attempts at suicide, and gone to get him - to do whatever it would take to save him. I did that, and he recovered. But it cost me the last of everything the United States would take from me, take just because they can.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve heard it ad nauseam. “Unbelievable!” I’ve heard it and I know that it’s just the American version of the “German excuse” (after the war in Europe, Germans would tell interrogators, Ich habe nicht davon gewusst – I didn’t know anything about it).

It just happens that everything I’m saying is the truth, and among everything I lost were the only things I ever really wanted.

You see, to understand, you must know even further that I never in my life ever wanted anything more than simply to be a husband and father. In youth and as enamored of sports heroes as any boy, I would go to the anniversaries section of the newspaper even before the sports page, in order to read about the champions there. I would study the faces and expressions of the couples, even their clothes. I wanted to learn what it was about them that made them so successful at living. And loving.

Oh, yeah – I suppose that’s “unbelievable,” too. It just happens that it’s also the truth. Both of my parent’s parents were married for more than fifty years. I thought they were superhuman. Sometimes, these days, I wonder if they weren’t.

But I wasn’t man enough to accomplish anything of what I wanted most. Oh, I made staggering amounts of money – one million, seven hundred sixty-seven thousand, two hundred thirty nine dollars and seventeen cents in a single month, once – owned cars and planes, traveled, and did everything the very rich do. I rose to the top of my profession. My favorite sport, too.

And it cost me everything I really wanted. Internal Revenue Service and the lust for power and wealth of the military industrial corporations they serve wasn’t satisfied with having destroyed my businesses and marriages – not even with having taken steps to assure that I would never be gainfully employed again. Uh-uh. They wanted to silence me – for ever, if possible.

When relentless harassment – stops (more than a hundred in a few years) by police and law enforcement incited with falsified records and reporting, burglaries, run-down attacks (six) with motor vehicles, muggings, and more – had made it clear that I must, I broke off all contact with my family. “Conspiracy,” for instance, is the easiest crime possible to prove; prove one member of any group guilty of anything, you will have proved conspiracy by all to any jury today.

This, I had already learned, is a nation vicious as only capitalism – greed exalted to the highest possible degree – can make it. I knew it was only a matter of time before IRS took the war on my family to the next level.

So a song written by Dolly Parton says the rest:

“If I should stay
I would only be in your way.
So I'll go but I know
I'll think of you
Every step of the way.

“And I will always love you.
I will always love you.
You my darling you . . .

“Bittersweet memories,
That is all I'm taking with me.
So goodbye, please don't cry.
We both know I'm not what you need.

“I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have
All you've dreamed of.
And I wish for you joy
And happiness.
But above all this,
I wish you love.”

And when I hear it . . . Well, I’m not a poet.

That's Al Capp's General Bullmoose - you know, "What's good for Bullmoose is good for America"?

Well, gosh – here we go again. Another of the great minds agrees with stumbling, mumbling, Neanderthal me. This one says his piece in language so close to the language I used when I said it long before – three years in this case, but usually more recently – that my friends all think these guys are reading my website. Rita, my wife, will never be convinced otherwise.

Actually, it may indeed be coincidence. Most of this stuff isn’t rocket science (which, even if it were, I’d still get right), you know, and – since it’s still just logic and math – unbiased people have to get the same answers. Two and two are four, whether you’re adding or multiplying, in any language. It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re Democrat or Republican, either.

Yes, I know you THINK it does, but it doesn’t.

The latest example of what I’m talking about is today’s story that Comptroller General of the U.S. David M. Walker is warning us of “looming disaster for America's economy if an effort isn't made to control spending.”

Well, now. General Walker heads the Government Accountability Office (talk about your oxymorons), the supposedly independent, nonpartisan Congressional watchdog that evaluates the spending of American tax dollars and advises Congress on improving government programs. I don’t know how they manage to say stuff like that with a straight face - I always expect a punch line right after something like “independent, nonpartisan” - but it IS the kind of thing they always say.

Anyway, Walker says the “decision-makers” – his terminology, again; I couldn’t say that with a straight face, either (the words “decision-maker” always makes me think of Iraq and how we got into that mess) – “suffer from tunnel vision and myopia.”

Stop right there. It sounds like he’s on our side, doesn’t it? “Independent?” “Non-partisans?” DAMN – you haven’t been paying attention!

I thought by now you’d recognize a CIA-style “limited hangout” when you saw it; guess not. Walker says that “getting the budget under control could even require steep tax increases if action isn't taken now.” NOW do you get it?

What’s this, the latest “limited hangout” about? Yes, Mordecai, it’s about justifying more tax raises and concomitant impoverishment of even more people.

But this guy is good – with the rhetoric, anyway. Among the Goebbels-ian deceit he puts into his talk is this little gem. Asked during the course of these U.S. Senate hearings about President Bush’s cost estimates for sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq this year, Walker said. “It is unclear what much of the $5.6 billion is to be spent on."

Yeah, we noticed that, too – and it didn’t take a Ph.D. in accounting, either.

At any rate, the news story emanating from the hearings had the Comptroller saying that since the year 2000, America's total social insurance commitments and other fiscal obligations have increased to $50 trillion from $20 trillion, a number representing four times the nation's total economic output.

Book-keepers like Walker don’t deal in exponential growth, apparently, because my numbers come out closer to sixty-five trillion. He probably, I suspect, didn’t add all the illegal aliens we’ll be adding to the Social Security rolls before the Bush League leaves office. Throw in the time it will take the dithering Congress to come to realization and do something, you have the whole twenty million aliens drawing Social Security.

Wait a minute! If I put that into the mix – at the rate illegal immigration from Mexico is pouring in – the number comes closer to 71 trillion (70,666,000,000,000, matter of fact). According to the “Comp General,” rising national health care costs are the greatest culprit, and if that doesn’t tell you our government intends to make all of us who’ve been working all our lives to provide for our own retirement pay for the Mexicans, too, nothing will. It might tell you about social programs in general, matter of fact.

I’m afraid it’s Tubesville, folks – as in “down the tubes.” Now that you have a celebrity wonk telling you, you’ll maybe forgive me for my “I told you so” here and years ago. You might consider the fact, though, that my friends and I have been planning for it all for several years now, knowing damned well what is coming.

Actually, Walker holds out hope (don’t forget, of course, this is CIA-style “limited hangout” – they figure you’ve got more to give) by saying that we could save the country by cutting federal spending by sixty percent or by doubling federal taxation.

Well, we know for certain what chances are for that first one, so that leaves the second. He said tax revenues should be more than 18.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product, but below 25 percent.

Incidentally, I’d have liked to be at those hearings, because nothing here adds up. Nothing! Have a look at that “sixty percent or doubling taxation.” And twenty-five percent of GDP is about 3.25 trillion. Even at today’s prices and without projecting for inflation and the like, the taxation Walker is talking about won’t so much as cover, once they’ve grown to welfare size, the “anchor babies” of the twenty million Mexicans who are already here illegally. Pie in the sky, anyone?

And did I say “Tubesville?” Yeah, I think I did.

I told you this was “limited hangout.” As we used to say in the scatological jargon of the military, BOSEHIC – “Bend Over and Spread ‘Em, Here It Comes.” To know how right I am, and have been for a long time now, you’d have to have some idea as to what a trillion dollars is. I haven’t the space here to do what our wondrous public schools education doesn’t seem to have bothered to do for you, but suffice it to say that the entire Gross Domestic Product – that’s the total market value of all the goods and services produced within the borders of a nation during a specified period (wages + rents + profits + interests + adjustments for dividends, corporate income taxes, and corporate profits) – is less than thirteen trillion.

When I noted that my friends and I have been planning for years now, expecting this, I might have added that I, personally, saw it coming even earlier. That has a great deal to do with my defensive eaves-dropping on the government, but it also has to do with my avocationally passionate study of history. The wars we fought in Korea, Vietnam, and two in Iraq are not the only wars “Americans” are fighting. There’s one in its own way even more brutal where the poor and middle class are concerned. That war is the class war, the all-but-always vicious assault being waged by the rich in order to become even richer. Greed, history taught me, is an addiction that makes all the other addictions pale by comparison. Look around, as I’m wont to say.

The U.S. class war has now reached proportions to which few historians – none, that I can find – have ever dreamed. By fraudulent finesse – usually, in the form of lobbying Congress and the state legislatures - and deceit protected by the legislation so obtained, without so much as getting their hands dirty, let alone firing a shot, the richest five percent of “Americans” have increased exponentially since 2000 their wealth and power.

The remaining ninety-five percent of the population has on the other hand seen their income and opportunity plummet. Eavesdrop in the halls of Congress for a half hour and you’ll know why.

Only a few years ago, incidentally, and curious about the trend made inexorable by the mere fact of Internal Revenue Service – it’s purpose, you know is to redistribute the nation’s wealth; either they’re doing it or they’re a near total failure – I compiled these figures: the approximately (I don’t have the same research capabilities as, for instance, the news media has) five hundred billionaires in the world have an income equal to that of the poorest fifty percent of the people here. These five hundred have wealth equal to that of approximately three billion human beings. Finally, the exploding wealth of the greed-obsessed means that sometime in the year 2,012, 6.9769 X108 (.00000006.9767) of the world’s people will have income equal to the rest.

I leave it to the reader to calculate what will happen then. As Thomas Jefferson once observed, “. . . man is the only animal which devours his own kind; I can think of no milder term to apply to the general prey of the rich upon the poor."

Neither is there any room for doubt about why the United States' plebian five percent are slaves to the patrician ninety-five percent. The losers are, pure and simple, so because they do not have access to their supposed representatives in Washington, D.C. They don’t have access to the courts, either. The cost of both is far beyond their means, kept there, of course, by their opponents in the class war.

Oh, yeah – I hear it every time I bring it up. It’s the anthem of people like FoxNews host Bill O’Reilly. The rich are rich because they deserve it, because they’re smarter, because they’re more talented, because they work harder. What Bullshit! I’ve known them, eaten with them, drunk with them, and protected their soft asses. The truth is – and if you can’t see that by watching what happens when one gets too big for his breeches and buys his way to public office, you’re too far gone to save – that I wouldn’t trust most of these clowns with my checking account, let alone my finances or life. Certainly not with the nation’s finances or life.

O’Reilly, incidentally, with his bosom buddy, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, often and blatantly encourage – in the case of O’Reilly, even demand - that the rich wield their economic power to control the news media and public’s information, that in order to keep the poor ignorant of what's going on. You need more proof of the effect of CIA Operation Mockingbird? Consider the assault independent and un-funded by government public radio and television networks are under.

Contrary to indoctrination of yourselves and your children by the government-controlled news media and educational systems, the rich are seldom the big-leaguers they are made out to be. I’ve known dozens of corporate CEOs, for some of the nation’s biggest companies, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t trust them with “executive operating” of a lemonade stand. Most of these guys got where they are by lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, and walking all over their co-workers. They excel, all right – they excel in acquisitive rapacity, greed.

Uh-uh, save it! I’ve not only broken bread with the Captains of Industry, drunk with them, and covered their butts, I listened. I’ve heard their contempt for everything they profess publicly to believe, from the people they exploit to the system and government that gave them their power. I’ve heard them betray their concupiscent lust – not a few times twisted and depraved – their fascination with fame, and their willingness to prostitute literally anything and anybody for money and power.

How else do you explain the individual who makes a hundred and fifty times what an employee of his company makes, then cheats to get even more (how many Enrons have been in the news of late, huh?)?

There’s a better question, too. How is it that we can elect these same people to high office, then wonder when the government and nation comes to be in the shape it is? It’s like putting the town drunk in charge of the liquor, then wondering where it all went. There’s no reasonable doubt about why we’re in the shape we’re in as a nation, why we’re in Iraq, or any the rest of our troubles. NONE!

Some things, as I said, are just numbers – book-keeping. Numbers add and subtract the same no matter who’s doing them. George W. Bush created wholesale the economic hardship we’ve come to by orchestrating horrendous debt. “Orchestrating.” What else do you call cynical tax cuts intended to benefit the richest five percent I speak of here (in fact, the richest one percent got as much as forty percent of his tax forbearances). Add to that the societally insane war in Iraq, where no one has benefited (unless you consider military industrial complex corporations like Halliburton).

The day before our Comptroller General testified, the news channels were telling us that the administration and its prat-falling generals say we’ll be in Iraq, “for generations.” We’ve spent there nearly $600,000,000,000 – six hundred billion dollars, thus far. How much did Mr. Walker say tax revenues will have to be?

Had you any money left after the taxes you’ll be paying, you should buy Halliburton – that way, you’ll be paying one hand with the other.

‘Splain to me, Luci, how it is that Mr. Bush – planning it all without error as he does everything else - could justify tax cuts to corporations whose annual incomes already average in the billions. I can’t imagine it, but I have no doubt whatever that he’d try. The man seems to have no shame (he’s of the patrician class, don’t forget).

Which brings us back to the Comptroller General and the latest “limited hangout” by the rich and federal. Just as it is in real warfare, deception is the critical weapon in class warfare. Do you really believe, when a wonk like this begins to wring his hands about the “state of the union,” that he really gives a shit? First off, David M. Walker works for the federal government, a government owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military industrial complex corporations. He knows, as does every blathering bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. what would happen were he to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

And you know, too. Compare what will happen, now that he’s said as much as he has, with the current global warming debate. Go out on the highway: See anybody slowing down in order to burn less fuel and put less hydro-carbons in the air? Sure you do. Private debt in the U.S. isn’t in the dozens of trillions (excluding the federal, it’s almost forty trillion, now) because the public is so self-disciplined, self-controlled, and moderate. Here’s a site that should be entertaining. http://mwhodges.home.att.net/nat-debt/debt-nat.htm

In order to take back control of our country – which is to say win the class war - we need first to take back control of ourselves and our own lives. When we can’t be used as cannon fodder like slaves, we’ll know we’ve done that. That's for just one thing; there are many more “things.” Suffice it to say that to take governing power back again means that the people have to take the weapons of class war out of their enemy’s hands. Only when one corporate lobbyist doesn’t have more power than the voters of several states (or more) have can that be done.

Fifteen years ago, I took power over me and my affairs back from the rich. I stopped using their system, both economic and legal. I went to the wilderness, lived entirely off the land, and I rode a bicycle. It isn’t necessary, however, that the public flee to the wilderness. The experience taught me how powerless the government can be made. Government in the United States is a kind of “pigeon drop” swindle, wherein the dupe must be a participant in order to be defrauded. Simply refusing to take part in the electoral process, for instance, would send a message that would shake the patrician royalty to their boots. They have the French Revolution seared into their memories, you know. It’s part of every Patrician’s education; and it is his worst nightmare. Society has its absolutes, too.

“This country with its institutions,” as Abraham Lincoln observed, “belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

That’s why the first time the super rich in the guise of the military industrial complex’s new CIA risked betraying their coup d’etat was the program of deceit by propaganda known as Operation Mockingbird. The only way to fight a bull as powerful as a nation’s people is with a cape – the cape of deception. It has worked magnificently. In the words of the poet Markham writing about the French Revolution, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox,” the people of the United States have been reduced to the pitiable level of the peasant who was the object of Markham's poem. Using state-of-the-art propaganda and opinion-control devices more effective and powerful, even, than those of the “Inner Party” of another writer, George Orwell, the “American” public is kept living in a reality only virtual, believing contradictory nonsense their grandparents would have scoffed at angrily.

To restore the Land of the Free, the people must wake up, wake up to the fact that they have the power to rule their lives any time they decide to recover it. The way to re-take our nation is refusal to be deceived. We need to take back the free press. Contradictory nonsense like that of the last few days – the Comptroller General’s “revelation,” the specious global warming “debate,” and the odiously dissimulating like repeated again and again – amounts to nothing more than a demonstration of the pitiable, docile and subservient state to which the public and its poor have been brought.

This, in short, is nothing more than the latest newspeak and doublethink from the ruling military industrial complex plutocracy. Nothing but a stunned, stolid, and stupefied “Man with a Hoe” would believe this claptrap, but it permits the rich to control his money and his very life.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."