It's Time to Get Help
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: September 7, 2009
Maybe the economic stress has been too much. Looking back at the past few
months, it's fair to wonder if the country isn't going through a nervous
breakdown.
The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who
smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis.
People who don't even know that Medicare is a government program have been
trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care.
The administration's most popular anti-recession initiative was a
startlingly creative economic breakthrough known as the cash-for-clunkers
program. Over the weekend (presumably while the president was sleeping,
because this occurred in the wee hours of the morning), White House
officials whispered the official announcement that Van Jones would no longer
be working in the administration.
The White House wishes it had never heard of Mr. Jones, who was hired to be
its point person on green jobs. It turns out that Mr. Jones had used a nasty
anatomical slur to refer to Republicans and once signed a petition
suggesting that George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11
attacks.
There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided
that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president's stimulus package?
No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.
There is not a thing you can come up with that the G.O.P. is for. Sunshine
in the morning? Harry Reid couldn't persuade a single Senate Republican to
vote yes.
Incredibly, the party's poll numbers are going up.
We need therapy. President Obama is planning to address the nation's public
school students today, urging them to work hard and stay in school. The
folks who bray at the moon are outraged. Some of the caterwauling on the
right has likened Mr. Obama to Chairman Mao (and, yes, Hitler), and a fair
number of parents have bought into the imbecilic notion that this is an
effort at socialist or Communist indoctrination.
As one father from Texas put it: "I don't want our schools turned over to
some socialist movement."
The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential
for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak
out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd.
But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political
leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at
loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting
the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
The Obama administration's biggest domestic priority is health care reform.
But the biggest issue confronting ordinary Americans right now - the biggest
by far - is the devastatingly weak employment environment. Politicians talk
about it, but aggressive job-creation efforts are not part of the policy
mix.
Nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed, according to official
statistics. The real numbers are far worse. The unemployment rate for black
Americans is a back-breaking 15.1 percent.
Five million people have been unemployed for more than six months, and the
consensus is that even when the recession ends, the employment landscape
will remain dismal. A full recovery in employment will take years. With
jobless recoveries becoming the norm, there is a real question as to whether
the U.S. economy is capable of providing sufficient employment for all who
want and need to work.
This is an overwhelming crisis that is not being met with anything like the
urgency required.
We've also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young
fighting men and women. Most of us don't want to know. Moreover, we've put
the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second
thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it
undermines much-needed initiatives here at home.
There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It's not
just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil
from coast to coast. It's our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to
pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a
basket case.
The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond
therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We've
forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the
benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship,
the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance.
The first step, of course, is to recognize that we have a problem.
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23439.htm
US Hypocrisy Astonishes the World
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 07, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Americans have lost their
ability for introspection, thereby revealing their astounding hypocrisy to
the world.
US War Secretary Robert Gates has condemned the Associated Press and a
reporter, Julie Jacobson, embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, for taking
and releasing a photo of a US Marine who was wounded in action and died from
his injury.
The photographer was on patrol with the Marines when they came under fire.
She found the courage and presence of mind to do her job. Her reward is to
be condemned by the warmonger Gates as "insensitive." Gates says her
employer, the Associated Press, lacks "judgment and common decency."
The American Legion jumped in and denounced the Associated Press for a
"stunning lack of compassion and common decency."
To stem opposition to its wars, the War Department hides signs of American
casualties from the public. Angry that evidence escaped the censor, the War
Secretary and the American Legion attacked with politically correct jargon:
"insensitive," "offended," and the "anguish," "pain and suffering" inflicted
upon the Marine's family. The War Department sounds like it is preparing a
harassment tort.
Isn't this passing the buck? The Marine lost his life not because of the
Associated Press and a photographer, but because of the war
criminals--Gates, Bush, Cheney, Obama, and the US Congress that supports
wars of naked aggression that serve no American purpose, but which keeps
campaign coffers filled with contributions from the armaments companies.
Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is dead because the US government and a
significant percentage of the US population believe that the US has the
right to invade, bomb, and occupy other peoples who have raised no hand
against us but are demonized with lies and propaganda.
For the American War Secretary it is a photo that is insensitive, not
America's assertion of the right to determine the fate of Afghanistan with
bombs and soldiers.
The exceptional "virtuous nation" does not think it is insensitive for
America's bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces. On September 4, the
day before Gates' outburst over the "insensitive" photo, Agence France
Presse reported from Afghanistan that a US/Nato air strike had killed large
numbers of villagers who had come to get fuel from two tankers that had been
hijacked from negligent and inattentive occupation forces:
" 'Nobody was in one piece. Hands, legs and body parts were scattered
everywhere. Those who were away from the fuel tanker were badly burnt,' said
32-year-old Mohammad Daud, depicting a scene from hell. The burned-out
shells of the tankers, still smoking in marooned wrecks on the riverbank,
were surrounded by the charred-meat remains of villagers from Chahar Dara
district in Kunduz province, near the Tajik border. Dr. Farid Rahid, a
spokesperson in Kabul for the ministry of health, said up to 250 villagers
had been near the tankers when the air strike was called in."
What does the world think of the United States? The American War Secretary
and a US military veterans association think a photo of an injured and dying
American soldier is insensitive, but not the wipeout of an Afghan village
that came to get needed fuel.
The US government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime
when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim. It is a
known fact that the CIA has violated US law and international law with its
assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency
that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be
those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the
CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency's crimes. The CIA has asked the US
Justice (sic) Department to investigate what the CIA alleges is the
"criminal disclosure" of its secret program to murder suspected foreign
terrorist leaders abroad. As we learned from Gitmo, those suspected by
America are overwhelmingly innocent.
The CIA program is so indefensible that when CIA director Leon Panetta found
out about it six months after being in office, he cancelled the program
(assuming those running the program obeyed) and informed Congress.
Yet, the CIA wants the person who revealed its crime to be punished for
revealing secret information. A secret agency this unmoored from moral and
legal standards is a greater threat to our country than are terrorists. Who
knows what false flag operation it will pull off in order to provide
justification and support for its agenda. An agency that is more liability
than benefit should be abolished.
The agency's program of assassinating terrorist leaders is itself fraught
with contradictions and dangers. The hatred created by the US and Israel is
independent of any leader. If one is killed, others take his place. The most
likely outcome of the CIA assassination program is that the agency will be
manipulated by rivals, just as the FBI was used by one mafia family to
eliminate another. In order to establish credibility with groups that they
are attempting to penetrate, CIA agents will be drawn into participating in
violent acts against the US and its allies.
Accusing the truth-teller instead of the evil-doer is the position that the
neoconservatives took against the New York Times when after one year's
delay, which gave George W. Bush time to get reelected, the Times published
the NSA leak that revealed that the Bush administration was committing
felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The
neocons, especially those associated with Commentary magazine, wanted the
New York Times indicted for treason. To the evil neocon mind, anything that
interferes with their diabolical agenda is treason.
This is the way many Americans think. America uber alles! No one counts but
us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring
to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American
hegemony.
The attitude of the "freedom and democracy" US government is that anyone who
complains of illegality or immorality or inhumanity is a traitor. The
Republican Senator Christopher S. Bond is a recent example. Bond got on his
high horse about "irreparable damage" to the CIA from the disclosures of its
criminal activities. Bond wants those "back stabbers" who revealed the CIA's
wrongdoings to be held accountable. Bond is unable to grasp that it is the
criminal activities, not their disclosure, that is the source of the
problem. Obviously, the whistleblower protection act has no support from
Senator Bond, who sees it as just another law to plough under.
This is where the US government stands today: Ignoring and covering up
government crimes is the patriotic thing to do. To reveal the government's
crimes is an act of treason. Many Americans on both sides of the aisle
agree.
Yet, they still think that they are The Virtuous Nation, the exceptional
nation, the salt of the earth.
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