American Realistan

A comment posted by reader Dennis Francis on my blog entry Descending Broke Buck Mountain serves as the skeleton for this post. His comments are in italics. Article excerpts are blockquotes.

The falling dollar is great for some.

[T]he big money, the “juice” as street people used to say, comes from squeezing the orange of American society for more work, more production and tax money.

Show me the Republican or Democratic leader who says … “My corporate campaign contributions come from people whose every action is directed at extracting two things from you, my dear voter: Your money and the cheapest possible labor you can be driven to provide. The absolute cheapest possible payment to you for the hours of your life consumed by work, which, depending upon the degree of your delusion, is called either a job or an exciting career.”

The excitement comes from being Just Over Broke all the time.

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When George Orwell wrote 1984, I doubt he ever had a hint as to how completely his portrayal of Big Brother as being everywhere all the time, seeing and hearing everything a person did and said, would become reality.

But Orwell certainly never foresaw how Big Business would become a partner in Big Brother’s surveillance activities, whether voluntarily or by government coersion.

This extraordinary real-life authoritarian evolution leads to another extraordinary event:

I actually agree with positions recently espoused
by Rush Limbaugh and by the John Birch Society!

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What is it about Republicans? Based on the results of a study recently released, I may have a clue to offer.

Anyone who has been paying attention to Republicans over the years discovers that they are very big on imposing the full weight of the law, but only on everyone else. They consider themselves to be immune from the law.

I’m not just talking about the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, although I include them in my premise.

Take the new Defense Secretary nominee, Robert Gates (please!). Thanks to the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Gates could, if confirmed, create a parallel American legal system existing outside the protections of the U.S. Constitution, and would pick the military judges and set the rules for administering the system. Habeus corpus would not exist for anyone, citizen or not, brought before the MCA kangaroo courts, thanks to the short-sightedness of the Republican-dominated, Democrat-abetted Congress.

Yet, would Gates not feel like his rights were violated if prosecuted for his participation in the original October Surprise? Would he not be a war criminal for advocating the bombing of Nicaragua during the Sandinista years had it been carried out? Should he not be for his participation in the Iran-Contra scandal?

But he isn’t the worst of the offenders against traditional American liberty. Nor do I include the Bush Administration - with the exception of Dick Cheney - as among the worst.

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As the father of two sexually mature daughters, the onset of their sexual activity would be of concern to me as it would to any adult. But unlike too many parents, I refused to fall into the trap of just promoting saying “NO!” when sexual activity beckons. Why? Saying “NO!” won’t work with teens and sex any better than it did with Bush and the invasion of Iraq.

I still remember what it was like being that young, in spite of my advanced years, maybe because that part of my life is still more pleasant than some of my later experiences.

But that aside, I still remember the issues involved in deciding when I was going to begin sexual activity. One thing that I also remember is that those girls I knew who did get pregnant early tended to have very religious parents who stuck very closely to the “NO!” paradigm.

One has to wonder why the daughters didn’t listen. Could there have been a better course for the parents to follow?

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