Out To Lunch

A right wing friend of mine had a Glen Beck video for me. It was more of what Glen Beck has been talking about. And that is that there is a socialist conspiracy to wreck the US economy deliberately. In this video the national debt is inflated to ten times its real size and the personal debt of every human being in the country is pegged at over a hundred thousand. There were images of hyper inflation and what happened with Argentina and the Wymar Republic of Germany. And of course after the economy has been wrecked with hyper inflation, then a totalitarian government has to be brought in with standing armies on US soil to managed the panicked and out of control masses. It's right out of something Jim Jones might have shown, except the other extreme. These people really are "Out to Lunch". Glen Beck says he has an explanation for why there is absolutely no indemic inflation now and yet it's going to by his own "calculations" have to be at least 180% before we're all done, if not worse- - this is because "The banks are holding the money but there is no Velocity to the money. And once someone "throws the Master Switch" and the currency is turned on, then we'll see this all happen. Apparently 33% of Republicans believe that President Obama is a racist, and 63% believe that he is a socialist, and that his health care plan is Maoist, Stalinist, Statist, and whatever other word they can come up with. Randy Rhodes believes that republicans actually in the corodors of government don't believe this clap trap themselves, but they feed this propaganda to the masses because they believe they are so stupid they won't investigate any of the alligations but accept the premise whole. There are those Joe the Plumber types out there who are neither plumbers nor earn %250,000 a year, that are concerned they may be the ones to strike it big but when they do the government will conthiscate their money to the tune of eighty percent, another figure that was thrown around. The idea from people I've talked to is that the government is "stealing" from tallented, inovative people out there and killing their work ethic. Of course I thought I heard some republicans say that Obama shouldn't be cutting the sixteen percent of government that he's actually cutting because "there are a lot of good programs in there". Yeah, there is all that pork. Personally I'm open to throwing the other 84% of expenditures open for cutting, and we can start with defense. People forget that all through the Bush years that defense spending was "off budget" and now that we have honest accounting under President Obama, people are upset about how much it all costs.

Of course Republicans even if they agree with you will change their minds if Obama comes out in favor of what they are proposing. For a while under President Clinton we had "pay as you go" meaning if you proposed a program you had to come up with a way to pay for it. But that kind of thinking is out the window now that a democrat is in office. President Obama also he said that he favored a "deficet reduction comission" or whatever to look into causes for the national deficet. But now that the President is for their plan, the Republicans who sponsored the bill to begin with it are now voting against it. John Mc Cain is well known for his reversals in his headlong lurch to the political right. He used to favor extending Medi-Care to those over 55 but now he is against that. (Or was that Joe Lieberman?) They're both so alike it's hard to tell them apart these days. And John Mc Cain said if the top brass of the military came to him and said they were for abolishing "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" that Mc Cain would be all for it then. But now that all of the top officials of departments did just that before congress yesterday, Mc Cain is backing off of his word with the lamest of excuses that "But they never gave congress a chance to express their oppinion", as if Mc Cain was suddenly a lover of the vote of this congress. "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" has got to go because there are too many honorable men of the gay perswasion who have served and died valiently in the military. They shouldn't be stripped of their pension or their honorable discharge put in Jeopardy because they either volentarily or involentarily "come out" and stand up and be counted as among the ranks of the gay population.

Sometimes I think I'd like to recycle stuff I wrote from the second half of the 'nineties for you people. The trouble is first there are certain formatting glitches, but next, I don't think the issues that were important to me then are particularly relavant now to you people. Also on occasion I have dipped into the past either earlier in this decade or in the nineties, when and where I thought I had something relivant to say. Some people's words have a long shelf life and you can dredge their writings up years later and the words are still relavant. Mine are also - in some areas- - but just not in the areas you people would probably be interested in.

The media seems to be getting friendlier to the military. Sixty Minutes was allowed to embed themselves with Green Berets in Afghanistan. So there are a lot of friendly fire shooting incidents. What else is new? The whole idea is to "sell" the idea of continued armed conflict to the people. Now there is some upset over the fact that the US Military is recruiting young freshmen in high school as young as fourteen. There is talk of "mining for youth" and "planting seeds" and "harvesting". Of course you remember that Simpson's episode where they tried to appeal to the most wasted thirteen and fourteen year olds they could find and even they were to smart to fall for their lines. They said, "OK, we'll have to go younger" and you know the movie they showed in grammar school about War being one big glorified Video Game. Hopefully we aren't starting to think along the lines of Communist China where women are encouraged to have more boys because they can be turned into fighting machines. That all of this is happening in the Obama administration I find troubling. Now we are told that it is a virtual certainty that the US will suffer a terrorist attack on our soil within three to six months. I don't know how many more similarities between our country and a fascist state we need to see before the alarm bells go off. I've read the Koran. I was just reviewing it last weekend. And the similarities between it and the Bible are stunning. Clearly whoever wrote the Koran was very familiar with the Bible in the ways the "mind set" of Jehova, or Allah, are presented. Clearly mercy and redemption are taught, even though from the Media you'd think they were all Calvinist or something and believed nobody could change. Perhaps we should make the Koran required reading in schools.

The basic problem of today is that the republicans have been out of power now for over a year but act if they are still running the place. They have appointed themselves supreme moral arbitors of everything that happens in government. Never have I seen the office of President of the United States held up to disrespect and ridicule more than I have with these republicans. Whatever happened to such things as nationalism and patriotism? They don't care about America when it comes to economic regulations - that's for sure. Why can't they be what they always claim to want and that is be bipartizan and work with this President to get needed measures passed? As Dylan says, "Your old road is rappidly fading. Get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand- - ". History will not be kind to this generation of republicans. They are the last gasp of a crop we thought was going extinct a hundred years ago. And out of their own mouths they say that we have had "a hundred years of liberalism". But in point of fact, though the last time the Republicans had what what the democrats just gave up - a sixty vote majority in the US Senate - - it was 1923 and the Republicans have passed a lot of measures and caused an awful lot of obstruction since them. Don't they ever tire of seeing themselves as the party that has to be led into the future kicking and screaming? This whole gay thing with the military is clearly an idea whose time has arrived. And health care is something every other civilized country in the world already has. In many countries in the world, a private for profit insurer of basic health needs would be seen as a criminal act, and they would be thrown in jail. We spend more on health care than the rest of the world and get less for it. And it's these rising health costs that are going to bankrupt medi-care in the years to come. But now I forget - - are the Republicans for medi-care or against it? There are times in the past I've thought the democrats were being negative. But I fail to see a message of "Why it can't be done" or "Why America is destined to fail" - - can ever win at the ballot box. My hunch is that the republicans are going to have a nasty surprise some the day after the November elections, just like they had in 1998. They were counting heavily on winning that year so they could vote Clinton out of office, but one look at the poll results and they had to abandon their well laid plans. I don't think a lot of the American people know what they want. And Randy Rhodes is right. They are incapable of critical thinking. Once they are educated they'll make more enlightened decisions.