Time to Get Out the Map

It drives me slightly crazy every time I listen to Amy Goodman, Thom Hartmann, or any other “reasonable” voice from the left. It also happens when I read Paul Krugman, Matt Taibbi, or even Noam Chomsky. It’s not what they say … it’s what they leave out. It seems almost everybody on “The Left” is playing a nation-wide game of Let’s Pretend. It’s starting to get on my nerves. It makes me want to say, Let’s play a game. Instead of calling it Let’s Pretend … we’ll call it Let’s Not Pretend. Let’s stop pretending we don’t know what we know. And then … do something.

This might sound a tad simplistic but here we go:

In order to get to where we want to go … we have to know where we are … we have to know where we started to see how much progress, or lack of it, we’ve made. If you want to drive from San Francisco to New York, and after a couple of days find yourself in Tijuana, Mexico drinking a Corona … you’d realize that if you followed the current Southern route you’d end up far from The Big Apple doing the penguin dance in Patagonia. You could pretend that you were still going in the right direction but hopefully your denial would be completely gone by the time you came to the Panama canal.

It’s denial that’s fueling our collective game of Let’s Pretend. I don’t know what’s going to happen if we keep playing it. But one thing is certain … our situation is not going to stay the same … it’s not going to get better all by itself … it’s only going to get worse. And we don’t know is how much worse is it going to get.

Here’s where we started … here’s what we know:

Ten years ago The Supreme Court of the United States invalidated the presidential election process and installed George W. Bush as president. Two years later voter suppression and rigged voting machines gave the Republican Party majorities in the House and Senate. Two years after that voter suppression and rigged voting machines stole the presidential election again.

If we truly believe The Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the land … instead of a goddamned piece of paper … we would act … differently. We’re not supposed to pretend that we have had a legitimate form of government for the last ten years. We’re not supposed to pretend that the criminal policies of the Bush Crime Family magically stopped the moment Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office.

What did the Bush Crime Syndicate do after it seized control of the country? They started two wars of aggression, killed over a million people, legitimized torture and murder, and engineered the largest transfer of wealth in history from poor and middle class Americans to the richest people in the country.

Barack Obama and his administration have done absolutely nothing to hold anyone in the previous administration accountable for anything. We know that our military has tortured innocent people to death. It’s been in all the papers and documentaries have been made alerting us to the facts.

Regardless of anything Obama has ever said about withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan the truth looks something like this:

There have been no reports of any dismantling, or plans to dismantle the five “enduring bases” in Iraq and there is an ongoing effort to expand the already record-breaking Embassy to accommodate the additional hundreds of administrators above the original 1,000 projected US officials there.

Last Summer the NY Times reported, “The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits … are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.“

With that kind of money still on the table I don’t think we’ll be packing our bags any time soon.

Barack Obama, and the majority of Democrats, have continued every single hideous policy initiated by The Bush Regime. When it came to keeping both wars on track and finishing the biggest financial rip-off in history, Obama bowed to the Corporatocracy’s will.

It makes no difference whatsoever if Obama went along with this because a gun was pointed to his head or if he willfully joined in. The end result is the same. The gang that took power ten years ago is still calling the shots.

It’s not like fascism … it is fascism. There is no need to try to find the appropriate simile. We’ve made it … we’ve arrived.

We have to stop pretending we can negotiate with the criminal regime that rules this country. We have to stop pretending that protesting against the junta is a viable option. 42 years ago anti-war protesters saw a glimmer of the power of the state at the Democratic convention in Chicago. 18 months later in Ohio students were killed. The State plays for keeps. We have to stop pretending that they don’t.

There is no solution.

We either leave or adapt.

The two big difference between Nazi Germany and present day America are these:

The Nazis ran death camps “in house.” Our torture camps, our secret US prisons, are spread out around the globe. According to the Red Cross, the regime at Guantanamo causes psychological suffering that has driven inmates mad, with scores of suicide attempts, with three inmates killing themselves in 2006.

The Allied forces in World War II stopped the Nazi regime by reducing German cities to rubble. The rest of the world has not united to stop the U.S. .. yet.

Ever since it was obvious that there was going to be a black man in the White House, the MainStream Media has tolerated and never exposed the outrageous lies and scare tactics of FOX News. FOX News hosts regularly demonize and foment violence against anyone or anything progressive. They place the blame for the problems that beset this country on liberals. Glenn Beck has clearly told his followers who the enemy is.

Us.

In January 2010, Public Policy Polling reported that Fox News was the most trusted television news channel in the country.

Every television and radio news program broadcast since December 12, 2000, and in every newspaper published since that date, should have been begun with a recap of how The Supreme Court illegally placed George W. Bush in the presidency and demanded the impeachment of Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas as well as the speedy removal from office of George Bush and his entire administration.

But … it didn’t happen and we all know what has happened in the 10 short years since a criminal organization took over the country.

I’ve read that some Jews didn’t leave Germany because they owned pianos. We should learn from that and get rid of everything we don’t need on Ebay.

The next civil war will be everywhere.

Time to Get Out the Map Nov 16, 2010