As al-Qaeda, teaming up with Sunni insurgents, have declared all-out war on the Shiites in Iraq, it is time for U.S. troops to come home.

I forget what elder taught me that old redneck maxim from my youth, the one that goes "If'n ya toss a rock inta a pack of yappin mutts, the one hollars loudest be the one ya smacked!"

Speaking of Katrina & New Orleans, check out this great insight from "The State and the Flood," by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama]  http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/flood.html
"Can levees and pumps and disaster management really be privatized? Not only can they be; they must be if we want to avoid ever more apocalypses of this sort.  William Buckley used to poke fun at libertarians and their plans for privatizing garbage collection, but this disaster shows that much more than this ought to be in private hands. It is not a trivial issue; our survival may depend on it."

Say, do you suppose the Dutch floodgates which manage to keep out the Sea, are privatized? Is that why they work so much better than the New Orleans levees?  I think not.  I really, really think not.

I think Rockwell and his fellow believers, including all the folks at the Any Rand Institute, see what they want to see, that they find in all human events what they expect to find, simply because they would decline to see anything else.  My personal wish for them is
that they get to experience at least 10 years of living on the absolute edge of society, without any means to advance, without any means to aid those whom they love, in the midst of a society where affluence and wealth are continually jammed down their throats, and where people like Rockwell and the Any Randers tend to shift the blame to the character of the people involved.

One of the reasons yours truly didn't mind being "fired" from the local Southern Baptist Institute Of Mind Control was that more often than not, someone's demented mindset kept getting in the way of the truth.

How long are the American people going to put up with this?

It is amazing to watch what I view as "my country" disappear into a haze of propaganda, fundamentalist vitriol, and radical economic fundamentalism that equates any tax with theft and finds no government to be the best government (yet claims to eschew anarchy).

I can't help but think about when this process started.  And it did start somewhere.  We may never know for certain exactly where and when, but if we could achieve omniscience for a moment, we'd spot it.

From readings, it seems that the invisible part of this process--the seed money, the initial recruitment of articulate lunatics to play the front men, etc.)--began shortly after the 1964 election in which Goldwater went down in flames.

But the visible part, the part that really began the repositioning of this country from one in which there was at least some effort to act together as a society to one one in which government was inherently and irredeemably bad, while personal greed and blind short term self interest is viewed as the highest calling of mankind, really started with Reagan.

A confrontation this morning between an East Texas church and a New Orleans evacuee centered around a sign out in front of Woodland Hills Baptist Church on Old Jacksonville Road in Tyler, Texas:

The sign reads:
"THE BIG EASY IS THE MODERN DAY SODDOM AND GAMORRAH"

Attempts to sidestep federal accountability for needless deaths of American citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by calling it "the blame game" and pretending it's politics as usual totally miss the point.  Roughly 50 percent of Americans did not vote; however, nearly 100 percent of Americans have seen the photos and crying reporters describing the scores of dead elderly and children on the street.   They are outraged, and their outrage grows daily at an administration whose only expeditious action takes place when it's for political reasons, not to save citizens' lives.

Katrina has come and gone, but her effects will linger for years, and people will remember this disaster, our children will learn about it in history classes, and the economic effects will hurt the US more than we can even begin to fathom.

But what of our grinning commander in chief? What of lacadaisical leader of the free world? Well, he'll have an excuse for his failed presidency.

The entire debacle in New Orleans reveals exactly what is wrong with our would-be-illustrious president:

 He governs as only one who disdains government could; when your major genuine political aim is to shrink the size and role of government, you appoint people based on how well they can help you do that. Witness John Bolton and so many, many others.  Mike Brown, the head of FEMA, not only has virtually no experience for that job, but was FIRED from a prior job with a show horse organization for, as I understand it, running the group so poorly that they kept getting sued.

He favors the whole idea of "winning" more than he does governing.  Winning the election is a game, a contest, with excitement; governing is hard, often boring, and those people with microphones and pads ask so many questions!

He is a child of pampering and privilege, incapable of real understanding of what life is like for the have-nots of the world.  His professed compassion appears to be less than skin deep, a fact which becomes evident to many when he has to respond to situations where anger and defiance can't be trotted out: Cindy Sheehan, the New Orleans flood, etc.

He is a basically simplistic, superficial thinker, who understands anger and revenge far better than any other human motivations and emotions.  If only the hurricane and levee break were living creatures who could be "hunted down" (at least in rhetoric).

Will this be his undoing?  Will people finally understand that there is a crucial role for government in everyday lives, a role that this administration butchers daily?

I don't know for sure.  I think there's a chance that this is the tipping point, but that will depend largely on whether the public as a whole is angry enough to resist the extensive and well-financed propaganda blitz that is likely being planned as I write, which will throw all the far right's ammunition into deflecting the blame elsewhere.  If that fails, look for some action or policy to deflect attention.

The good news is that the media once again seems to be functioning as a watchdog.  At least for the moment.

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