American Realistan

I’ve been getting mail from my regulars for the last week or so, and I haven’t been able to respond due to a change in the SMTP policies of my ISP. What this means in clear American language is that I can receive emails, I just can’t send them.

This has me a bit suspicious, in that the stated claim for the instigation of the tighter email transmission policies is to reduce the amount of spam being disseminated, and yet spam - for me at least - isn’t much of a problem. I got a few as we all have, but it hasn’t dominated my inbox.

Rest assured, dear Regulars, that I will - as soon as my real-world occupation ceases its monopoly on my time - make arrangements be become responsive again.

I just wish that was the limit of the communication problems I face. I fear there is more.
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By the middle of next month, the Bush administration will have to present evidence that the so-called Surge is working in order to retain Congressional funding for continued operations. There should be little doubt that this report, to be given to the Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, will be largely a fabrication.

The reality of the situation is represented by an article, posted by Truthdig, written by a US government contractor about to depart for good from Iraq. Truthdig editors post that they know the identity of this contractor, but for reasons that should be clear to anyone who harbors the slightest suspicion of the motives of the Bush cabal, they choose not to reveal it.

After all - what’s sauce for the propagander should also be for the goose!

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At the beginning of the secession of the slave-owning states over the election of Abraham Lincoln, The Valley Spirit of Franklin County, Virginia published one of the most honest contemporary admissions that the pending internecine strife was in part about race:

“The Democratic Party maintain that our government was formed by white men to be controlled by white men for the prosperity and happiness of their race.”

Just because the South lost the Civil War doesn’t mean that this attitude had changed - not in the slightest. As New Republic assistant editor Clay Risen wrote in the Boston Globe on March 5, 2006:

“For almost 100 years, a coterie of white elites had controlled the South by leveraging racial antagonisms and legal discrimination to ensure white solidarity behind the Democratic Party. Southern historians argue that the initial shift to the right was led by older whites in a backlash against [Lyndon] Johnson’s civil rights efforts. [Johnson] forfeited the region to the Republicans by signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Legend has it that as he put down his pen Johnson told an aide, “We have lost the South for a generation.

“[I]t’s hard to ignore the decades of subtle and not-so-subtle efforts by Republican presidential tickets to court white racism…. According to the conventional wisdom, … white voters were soon gobbled up by Nixon’s racially coded “Southern strategy.”

The modern version of racism doesn’t concern the emancipation of the black race, but the political and economic exploitation of the brown race.

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Guardian columnist Max Hastings writes:

“The US and its allies do not play by the rules they impose on others. Higher standards are expected from a sovereign state than a terrorist organisation. Somehow, though surely not under this US President, this is what we must regain.”

If survivors fear Japan has forgotten the lessons of Hiroshima, have not the American people also? Are we to relive those horrible times again and make George Santayana a prophet?

Are you so enamored of the reams of propaganda that justify nuking Japanese cities during WWII that you are willing to allow the same excuse to be used again, in some current or future war, and do nothing to prevent the use of atomic weapons today?

If so, I hope you are near Ground Zero when a Bomb goes off. Then maybe your ghost can explain to the rest of us what a fabulous experience that was for you as you turned to ash in a flash.

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Today’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis brought back the memory of a warning issued by someone who should know against the decayed condition of American roads, bridges, and waterways.

In a previous incarnation, I looked at this issue, which Trish over at Pensito Review blamed on Bush’s tax cuts. (Once all of the neo-anderthals have rushed over to their keyboards to defend The Deciderer, I’ll resume.)

Sure, this assertion could be dismissed as mere liberal fulmination by those who don’t want to admit that Dubya’s Terror War For Oil led to unnecessary American deaths. But they should listen to one of their own desired economic class.

Back on March 30, 2006, UPS CEO Mike Eskew addressed the Houston Forum. During his talk, Eskew referred to the 2005 report card issued by American Society of Civil Engineers:

“… let’s put it this way: if your kids brought home report cards like this, someone would be grounded…
… aviation system got a D+; navigable waterways a D-; roads a D, and rails a C-.”

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