Mr. Obama: We Still Love You, But...

Mad Dog is so happy President Obama is not President Romney, President Republican, the T Party President.

That having been said, we have to now get down to business.

As much as  Mad Dog agrees it makes sense to make it more difficult to buy guns, he is under no illusion this will effectively thwart either the madman, or the street thug. 

If trying to restrict the proliferation of guns is like trying to comb hair in a strong wind, that does not mean no attempt at control should be made.  A hat, perhaps.  And then there is the  suggestion by Mr.La Pierre and his co conspirators at the NRA the solution is more guns, guns at every school, guns at every shopping mall, stadium, swimming pool and public place. Of course, Mad Dog is not the first to observe: if guns could make us safe, then America should be the safest country on earth.  Even if it is not likely to work, restricting guns only inconveniences the lunatic fringe gun owners and we do not care about them. A pox on that house of the NRA and their frothing defense of every gun in every situation. Turn the screws on them just to shut them up. Open your mouth again and we will come take away your guns for saying such foolishness.

Let us simply vote against the NRA and move on to  the more important items which ought to be on the President's agenda, which effective legislation can affect:

1. Change the fundamental nature of the Supreme Court without amending the Constitution. Pack that sucker. Two new justices for every 4 year term of each President and allow only the 9 most recent to vote. Let this new court undo Citizen's United, Heller v District of Columbia, Bong Hits for Jesus etc.

2. Forbid strip searching in jails or prisons by whatever means it takes.

3. Press forward with single payer, Medicare for All.

4. Bring the troops home within the next three months from Afghanistan, Germany, Japan and basically every overseas base save, possibly, Korea. Close Gitmo for good measure. Dismantle and downsize the standing Army and Navy. Convert our armed forces to a smaller, Marine/SEAL style highly mobile force designed to intercede with pirates, terrorists and small cells rather than sitting around in bases waiting to fight Russian army divisions.

5. Legislate a dismantling of too-big-to-fail-banks.

6. Prosecute the money lenders who phonied up mortgages  for mortgage backed securities. Send those white collar liars to jail.

7. Launch a campaign now to unseat every single T party Republican in Congress, specifically, one by one, in every state where there is any prospect for success. This means don't waste your time in Alabama, but go after those  in California, Michigan, Ohio who might be vulnerable.

8. Challenge the whole concept of district Gerrymandering, and, ultimately, geographic representation in Congress, as opposed to one vote, one voter.

9. Launch a new stimulus package to repair bridges, roads, internet, hospitals.

10. Use the bully pulpit to attack the Demented Right, point by point. Encourage the enlightened left by strategic visits to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Are you with Mad Dog? 
Do we have a Movement? 

Women and Combat

Today's New York Times has an article about efforts to lower standards soldiers must meet to qualify for combat, in order to allow more women to qualify.  There is always the strong suspicion the "qualifications" for combat soldiers have little to do with today's battlefield. Why should today's soldier need to have upper body strength to do 20 pull ups? Does every combat soldier have to be able to do every combat job? Having said that, Mad Dog has seen, ever since Title IX became law, some women at the gym, on the fields, on the courts, and in the swimming pools who are every bit as powerful as most men, and if the Army and Marines are finding women cannot pass the pull up test or the running tests, Mad Dog would say they are testing the wrong women. 

The one thing Mad Dog hasn't seen addressed is the scenario described by Kayla Williams, where the convoy was moving 12 hours without stopping and the men in the trucks could urinate into bottles, but the women were in agony, and for some reason even a three minute pause was deemed untenable.  So the women had to simply pee in their pants. 
Not having been in combat, or in Desert Storm, Mad Dog has a difficult time imaging how a three minute pee stop in the midst of an 12 hour trip could undermine the success of a military operation, but if the Marines say it is so, Mad Dog will stipulate it may be. In that case, appropriate urine bottle equivalents might be developed for female urination. If they can do it for space travel, why not military travel?

But Mad Dog suspects the refusal to stop had more to do with male Army sadism and an attempt at putting down women than it had to do with military necessity. 

The fact is, Kayla Williams, who did not have her infantryman's combat badge, was riding along in that convoy, carrying a gun, as much a target of hostile fire as any of the men riding with her. She was there to interpret Arabic. They really needed her, but they would not stop to allow her to pee. In fact, in today's asymmetric wars of occupation, there are no front lines and the image of charging up a hill carrying a 50 caliber machine gun and 60 pounds of ammo boxes rarely pertains, as far as Mad Dog knows.  But then again, Mad Dog has never been to Afghanistan.

Personally, Mad Dog is humbled every morning at the swimming pool, as young women steam by him in the pool, hit the wall with a flip turn which propels them back in the other direction, fifteen meters down the lane and disappear in a cloud of bubbles. Mad Dog may be able to do more pull ups than those women, but Mad Dog would be happy to have them in his foxhole any day.  Mad Dog has been passed in road races by women, has played on hardball teams with women. The women who can compete with the men are exceptional women, but that is what the Army should have.  The few, the proud, the brave, or whatever their slogan is.

It is true, Mad Dog believes, most women cannot compete in certain ways with the strongest men. Watching girls compete in wrestling is the only example Mad Dog can bring to mind which illustrates gender differences, even across the whole spectrum of female athletic prowess. Before puberty, girl wrestlers do just fine, often by using leg power to defeat shoulder power. After puberty, there are simply no women wrestlers who can compete  with the upper 80% of men. They simply do not progress past the first one or two rounds of high school or college tournaments. They can beat the weaker males, but cannot beat stronger, quicker males who are  fueled by testosterone. The question is, is today's  battlefield more like a wrestling match, mano a mano, or it is more like a video game? 

The best women's basketball, football, hockey and rugby teams might defeat weak male teams, but in combat will they be fighting weaker teams? Are any of these assertions, even if true, relevant to the 21st century war?


The Army women Mad Dog has met have, for the most part, are not been physically exceptional.  They tend to be ordinary women with physical power well below the average male. But they may be able to shoot the wings off a fly at 50 yards and they may be great at operating a computer to find an enemy on the other side of the hill. 

There is a certain amount of gung ho rah-rah which the Army claims is essential to killing efficiency. That sort of phony toughness is not seen in the Israeli army, which has had women for years. The Israeli army seems to be a pretty effective killing machine. Mad Dog suspects the Israel army has succeeded by fighting smart rather than by fighting as blow-hard macho men with big chests and broad shoulders. 

Mad Dog realizes  Full Metal Jacket, the movie, is fiction. But is based on Short Timers, a book written by a Marine about his Vietnam tour of duty and his training for it.
Watch the scene where a 100 pound Viet Cong woman with an AK-47 dismembers a mean-green-killing-machine Marine platoon with stealth, marksmanship, determination and courage, and you will see what Mad Dog means.  Of course, as Mad Dog has said, he has never got any closer to real combat than paint ball and the Emergency Room. 

On the other hand, you do not have jump off a cliff to understand the experience and the outcome. What Full Metal Jacket was all about was phony toughness. It depicted, in great detail, the misguided theory underlying the training of combat Marines. The theory goes something like this:  The most effective warrior is a physically intimidating person who will kill on command without hesitation, in face to face combat, after storming across a field and up a hill. The fact is, soldiers today may not do much storming up hills carrying sixty pounds of ammo.  The nature of the battlefield in Afghanistan may be different from Vietnam or WWII.  History is rife with examples of officers insisting on the wrong tactics, based on the last war and getting their men killed. Soldiers died in heaps during the Civil War because officers believed the qualities which won prior wars still applied to 1861.  What the officers had not adjusted to was the rifled barrel and 1861 artillery. 

You need different tactics and different qualities in your soldiers to fight the war involving new weapons and tactics.  

Do we still need Captain America and Rambo to defeat the insurgent with his Improvised Explosive Device? Does today's soldier, carrying a plastic rifle, patroling the dusty streets of some Afghan village need to be able to do 20 pull ups? Or does she need to be able to assess the looks in the eyes of villagers and know when to pull the trigger?

Politically Incorrect Mad Dog: Making Insurance Cover Contraception

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We're not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word. Okay, so she's not a slut. She's "round heeled".^[20]

                                                                                  --Rush Limbaugh on Sandra Fluke

Today's New York Times has an article  about efforts of the Obama administration to address objections of the Catholic church and other religious organizations, to refuse to provide funding for contraception through the health insurance they offer employees.

Mad Dog's initial reaction was the Catholic church, after years of shielding, protecting and virtually prolonging sexual abuse of children by priests has lost any moral authority to comment on the proper stance toward the management of sexual behavior. 
The second thought which percolated up through the Mad Dog's foamy brain, was the Catholic church, (and fundamentalist churches from Baptist to AME) hired employees to staff their hospitals, clean their buildings, maintain their grounds who are not Catholic, not Christian, without  regard to the religion of those employees. All the churches know or care about these employees are the names, social security numbers and pay levels of these people. They have contracts with them and wish to know nothing more. The churches do not attempt to convert these employees to Catholicism or to Baptize these employees. The relationship is one of employer and employee. 

How little the Catholic church in particular cared about the behavior of its employees is evident in the hiring, protection and on going employment of pedophile priests over decades.

When an employer hires an employee, however, our society now imposes on that relationship a certain level of obligation on the part of the employer. As an employer, Mad Dog was astonished about how much he owed the employee and society by the mere fact he had hired a receptionist to answer a phone and to schedule appointments. 
Mad Dog had  to pay into a state unemployment fund, so if he fired the employee that employee could draw unemployment payments. Mad Dog had to pay into a retirement fund for his employee if he wanted a Self Employment Pension Plan (SEPP). And Mad Dog paid into a state  fund for injured workers, in case his employee should develop carpal tunnel syndrome using the office computer.  Mad Dog thought, "Gee, I just wanted to hire a receptionist--I didn't want to adopt her."

Now, Mad Dog's grandfather was a die hard labor union man. ILGWU was a sacred name in Mad Dog's house, so Mad Dog has a well conditioned response to want to provide for the worker. And Mad Dog realized no matter how good Mad Dog was at his job, without someone to perform the simple (actually not so simple) task of scheduling "customers" his business was doomed. So Mad Dog could not function alone. He could not ride the range as a free agent; he needed other people, and the more he learned how much other people were necessary to his business, the more his obligation toward his employee made sense.  His receptionist solved problems Mad Dog did not know how to solve or have the time to solve--like when the photocopy machine broke or  when the insurance company balked. And his "customers" experienced Mad Dog's office not just during the time they spent with Mad Dog, but from the first moment they spoke with his receptionist. Mad Dog began noticing how his own perception of other organizations was shaped by the intelligence, or lack of it, on the part of the person who answered the phone.

So over time, Mad Dog realized all those obligations for health insurance, unemployment insurance, workman's comp insurance were simply part of what makes a business work, of being connected to other human beings and providing for them.

Mad Dog had one "customer" who struck it rich in real estate but unlike his two partners who retired to hunt country Virginia to live a Downton Abbey life on their country estates, this man continued to go to work every day because he provided jobs for a dozen people and a living for their families. He put his own financial winnings at risk every day by not folding his hand, by staying in the game.

And Mad Dog looks at the Catholic hospital where he worked for years and recalled that hospital employed more people who were not Catholic than were. From the people who scrubbed the floors to the chairmen of various medical departments, most of the workers were not Catholic. 
That Catholic hospital was happy to take the money of non Catholic patients and their insurance companies.  
One meeting continues to inform Mad Dog: some of the priests in the administration of the hospital complained about having to provide care to recent Guatemalan refugees, who had been admitted through the emergency room but had no health insurance. "Why doesn't the government just send them home?" one priest asked.  It was only after a Jewish doctor at the meeting said, "Wait, am I hearing you say you do not want to provide charity care for these poor patients? These Catholic poor? Did I just hear you say, 'Why doesn't the government send these people back to their own country?' You do know there's a war going on down there." 

So the argument that Catholic hospitals provide charity at their hospitals, out of the goodness of their hearts, runs counter to Mad Dog's experience. The Catholic hospital Mad Dog knew was a business, run like a business and treated its patients like customers, sending them to collection, wringing every dime out of them it could. And it regarded its employees as hired drones, charging them for parking, cutting back on their benefits, whenever it could. For the Church to worry about the souls of its workers when it is asked to pay for health insurance which includes the option for contraception sounds like a concern over money rather than dogma.

Having said all this, Mad Dog has got to admit, it does strike him as a violation of the idea of freedom of religion to force the Catholic church, or other churches, to pay for insurance coverage for contraception, when the church is, for whatever reason, opposed to contraception as a matter of dogma.   If the law required funding for abortion by every health insurance policy, how many Americans would say the Catholic church should be forced to pay for that? The fact is, most people, outside of a few (not all) Catholic clerics believe contraception is a good thing, but that belief should not be forced on the intransigent belief of the Catholic who disagrees.

Suppose the federal government required the Church to pay taxes to support the war in Afghanistan? Is the exemption from paying property taxes and other taxes not a part of the separation of church and state?  If the government requires an employer which is a church to pay health insurance, is that not a tax on the church? On the other hand, if the church is running a business, has the church not crossed a line from being a religious institution to an ordinary business?

And the whole idea of any health insurance plan paying for contraception is pretty new. For the most part,  health insurance plans have not covered over the counter medications (which birth control pills could be)  or treatments which are elective, i.e., not required to treat an illness. It is true, health insurance covered treatments for illnesses caused by behavior employers condemn: smoking related lung disease has to be covered, but until recently, health insurance did not cover nicotine gum, or Chantix or methadone, or any drug used to treat smoking or alcohol or heroin addiction. The attitude was, you have chosen to behave in a way of which we disapprove, and it's on you to find your way out of that bad behavior. We are not going to pay for costs related to that behavior.  We may pay for the consequences of that behavior, but we will not pay for the behavior or its treatment.

To bring it to reducto ad absurdum, one might argue health insurance ought to pay for alcoholic drinks or cigarettes or heroin in patients addicted to these substances who would suffer severe withdrawal should they stop. 

Avoiding unwanted pregnancy is a social good and government should support that, but there are other ways of supporting that--supporting Planned Parenthood, making free or low cost contraceptives available through pharmacies, grocery stores, liquor stores. But requiring Catholic employers to pay for a health insurance program which includes contraception or abortion coverage is a stretch. The strongest argument for making the Catholic hospital pay for contraception is the hospital is a non-religious business, run by the hospital as a business and it cannot impose its beliefs on its employees.  The strongest counter argument is that no business should be required to support what it considers bad behavior--but then what do you do with a Catholic hospital which refuses to cover the homosexual partner of an employee?

Behind Every Great Fortune is a Crime

There are many issues which animate the passions of the the good citizens of New Hampshire--gun control or the lack of it, a state income tax, or the lack of it, abortion, immigration--but the most fundamental issue of all, and the one on which I suspect President Obama actually won the election, is that of economic distribution of wealth, or, as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and every Republican would say, "Class warfare."

Republicans made great bushels of hay quoting Mr. Obama's remark that he intended to "redistribute" the wealth, which confirmed Rush Limbaugh's deeply held belief that Mr. Obama is Karl Marx, reincarnated.  As self contained and controlled as Mr. Obama is, this was an unfortunate lapse, even if, especially if it reflected his real opinion. It was not politic.

The idea of taking from the rich to give to the poor does not evoke images of Robin Hood in this state, it evokes images of theft from the hard working "successful" and giving to the undeserving poor.

Luckily, for Mr. Obama, the Republicans are so tightly sewn into the pockets of the really, really rich, they could not even bring themselves to answer Mr. Obama's taunts that the Republicans refuse to make billionaires "pay their fair share."  They insisted no share is a fair share to pay in taxes, especially if you are rich and successful, and higher tax rates on the rich was "class warfare" and "punishing success."

You would not catch a Republican quoting Balzac,  "Behind every fortune is a crime."

Mr. Obama will not be able to do anything about Fisher Island in Florida, where the very rich isolate themselves from the hoi polloi, or any of the other similar, if not quite so upscale islands like Bald Head Island, NC, Kiawa Island, Fisher's Island, New York, the Hamptons, Long Island, any of a long list of islands of wealth and privilege where the rich can be rich without feeling guilty.

Here in New England, the high school graduates who worked for decades in the trades, mastered crafts, learned computers on the job still do reasonably well. They consider themselves middle class, have a "camp" on a lake and can afford to go on vacation and eat out in restaurants occasionally. They can splurge on a Red Sox game, where they spend a week's pay paying for the salaries of millionaire ball players and owners. 

As Cesar said, "Give them bread and circus." 

That's what we've got in New Hampshire.  Workers who are only occasionally restive, who are happy to have a job, and who do not believe in unions, who love their guns, their delusion of "freedom" and cannot see the evils in a system which gives the top 1% that 43% of the pie shown above, while the 80% of Americans squeeze into that bottom red slice of the pie.  If I am reading my New Hampshire neighbors correctly, they have worked hard all their lives. They get up in the morning, go to work, solve problems, do no complain about being given more work than they had the day before, and that work ethic is so ingrained in them, they assume if someone is richer, it must be because they worked and are still working harder. Of course, having also been with those rich bosses, my take is they work far less hard than these good New Hampshire folk--the bosses just scheme harder and love the game of intrigue. But in terms of productive work, actually building those built in bookcases, re wiring the kitchen, rebuilding the bathroom, the boss class hasn't a clue. They are at work making deals in rooms with original art on the wall and polished wood desks.  But that all may be just the Phantom's ignorance showing.

Walk around any of the Vanderbilt mansions, whether at Newport, Rhode Island, or in North Carolina or in the Adirondacks, or any of the dozens of places where Vanderbilts built estates which make Downton Abbey look like a tar paper shack.  If your gut reaction is, "Oh, how beautiful," rather than "Oh, how shameful," then you are part of the problem.

Guns for Christmas: Peace and Joy in America

Peace on Earth. Good Will to Men

Oh, Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Under your tree a real gun

The Family That Shoots Together

She knows what guns are for

Mixed Messages?

 “Talk to your parents about how much you like shooting. Who knows?  Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!”
--Advertisement in Junior Shooters magazine

You cannot make this stuff up.    Mad Dog could not find the actual image of the ad in Junior Shooters, to his great regret.  He is sure it looks all Norman Rockwell and the kid in it, whoever it is, has freckles.  And a cow lick. And a smile which could throw a light bright enough to illuminate the road from Hampton Beach to Osh Kosh.

The Road Kill T shirt thing has Mad Dog a little confused. Why this would be in a gun magazine is not clear. And the girl looks happy, positively ecstatic even, to be wearing her Road Kill T shirt. Does she want some man with a gun to make her road kill? There is some psycho dynamic operating here, and Mad Dog knows he is missing it. Someone help Mad Dog here.

Mad Dog loved Kayla Williams's book, and its title. Ms. Williams was in the Army, forward deployed, carried a gun all the time, and knew how to use it and knew what it could do, and would not want to find one under her Christmas tree, Mad Dog would bet.  When you first put on your white uniform or your scrubs in medical school, it's something of a rush. That lasts until you get vomited on, defecated on, urinated on, and soaked with spraying blood. Then you cannot get out of that stuff fast enough. It acquires a different meaning, when reality sets in.

Mad Dog suspects carrying a gun in Iraq was something like that.

An AR-15 under the tree, celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Peace.

Only in America.

Charles M. Blow 

2012 Election map for Obama/Biden

You know how on election night you look at that map of the United States and you think, wow the Republicans have got the whole country wrapped up--there's just so much RED on that screen?  But, of course, most of what the Republicans control is just empty desert, prairie, or swamp--aren't many people actually living in those red states, those massive states like Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and the Dakotas, pretty empty spaces there. 

So, the Republicans must have awaken on November 7 and said the same thing to themselves--if only we could win elections by geography, by land mass rather than by people. 

So, here's what they came up with:  Rather than awarding electoral votes to the presidential candidate who has the most people voting for him, we'll award the state to the candidate with the most Congressional districts voting for him.

That way Mr. Obama would have lost Michigan, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. In all those states, Mr. Obama won precious few districts but he won the popular vote.
So, let's just count districts.

The breakdown looks like this:
Michigan:  (16 electoral votes) Obama won only 5/14 districts but won the popular vote by 449,313. 
Ohio:  (18 votes) Obama won 4/16 districts but won the popular vote by 166,241
Virginia:  (13 votes) Obama won 4/11 districts but won the popular vote by 149,298
Wisconsin: (10 votes) Obama won 3/8 districts but won the popular vote by 213,419.

How could he lose so many districts but win each of these states in popular votes actually cast? The districts he did win were heavily populated cities; the districts he lost had mostly cows or birds but few people living there.

So, the Republicans have come up with a new plan. Don't count people any more. Count districts. That's much more fair, don't you think? No, don't think. That's part of the problem, part of why we keep losing these elections.

Charles Blow, who writes a political column for the New York Times, which is very heavy on numbers and charts and graphs lays all this out, and concludes, in his very understated way, the Republicans are trying to "chip away" at democracy by this sort of manipulation of the electoral college.

Chip away? 

Our Constitution, when it apportioned representation for Congressional seats granted so many seats for each voting white male in each state, and also gave credit to each state for 3/5 of a person to account for the "other persons,"  you know, slaves. 

So, there is precedent for this sort of funky counting in our Constitution.

"Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

It is the genius of the Republican party, having failed at voter intimidation, trying to prevent people from casting ballots this last time around--which only got them a legion of really angry people waiting on line for 6 hours in Florida to vote against them--so now they figure, not necessary. We can simply stop counting people and start counting something else. Square miles, maybe.  Land mass. Cows. Sheep. Give us credit for 3/5 of all the sheep owned by Republicans and throw in the Congressional districts we Gerrymandered and, well, why bother to vote at all? Just give us the election from now on. We won't bother you. We'll just go back into our gated communities on off shore islands, not pay taxes but we will buy stocks and just leave us in control of the government so we can cut taxes and keep up defense spending, because, you know, we know what's best for you.

Howard "Buck" McKeon: The Friendly Face of Unending War

Howard "Buck" McKeon, Republican Representative from California has a starring role in Jill LePore's New Yorker article about how the United States got itself into a state of unending war.

This is a very lucid article, which uses publicly available information to reveal just how our system works.

But first, a word about Buck. Mad Dog does not know how he came by that name. It wasn't because he was a Buck private, because he never served in the military. He did follow do the now familiar road of starting at Brigham Young University, leaving to go on Mormon mission, then marrying and starting his family which grew to six children, started a business, went back to college and got his degree, started a business which went bankrupt, which in Republican circles seems to be a rite of passage to the next inevitable step in life--bank president. 

I suppose banks must like to appoint people who have gone through bankruptcy to be their presidents, because, well, they've been there; they have all the experience they'll ever need.

And then, from bank president to nominee of the Republican Party to go to Washington to fight spending, except defense spending. You wouldn't want to cut defense spending if you represent McKeon's district, which has an Army fort, an Air Force base, a naval weapons station, and a Marine mountain warfare training site. 

McKeon, who is strongly pro life, pro gun is also strongly pro war. His district depends on it. He added language to the 2012 defense authorization act to give the President, even a Democratic president, the right wage little wars or big wars as he sees fit. McKeon has never met a war he did not like.

The rationale for wars is now, "we'd rather fight them in the streets of ...(insert name) than in the streets of New York." Or "deny the terrorists sanctuaries." Which is wonderful for a Congressional district like McKeon's California 25th, because it means anywhere you can find a nest of terrorists, and you can find them in a myriad of places from Afghanistan to North Africa, to sub Saharan Africa to East Africa to West Africa, to Indonesia to Berlin, Germany, well, you can fund a nice war to go flush out those rats.

It's steady work. 

In the 1950's, the rationale for a defense budget which amounted to 50% of government spending was the world wide Communist conspiracy.  It justified hundreds of American military bases all around the world, 55,000 troops in Germany, 35,000 in Japan, 10,000 in Italy, not to mention Korea.  No other country in the world has any bases to speak of outside their own territory. 

Once communism fell, the attack on the World Trade Center was used to justify "rooting out" the terrorists, denying them sanctuaries, i.e., sending American troops and weapons all over the world, because, after all, that's where the terrorists are. They hide out all over the world. Whatever country you feel like invading--terrorists.

Andrew Bacevich has decried this new American mindset of unbridled militarism. We aspire to be the policeman for the world.  The cheering section for this state of perpetual war is comprised of rightwing loudmouths (Limbaugh, Beck--fill in the blank), neo con opinion page columnists--Yes, Dr. Krauthammer, we are talking about you--retired generals who find work in foundations or political office, Jerry Falwell, Tom Clancy and assorted other people who make good money pedaling the idea of killing bad guys.  They speak of honor, glory, duty, God, country, but none of them, except the generals, have ever served in uniform, or experienced a shot fired in anger at them.

In Vietnam, the military industrial complex was sustained by the fantasy that the USA needed to fight communism in the rice paddies. Once Vietnam fell, all the dominoes would fall one after another. We had to stop them there or witness our own collapse. Of course, we lost Vietnam and nothing like that happened. Now, we trade with Vietnam and buy cell phones and clothes made by those rabid commies who threatened to destroy us.

Afghanistan had a certain cachet--there were some nasty fellows who lopped off the heads of teachers who dared teach girls, and Osma Bin Laden, reputed mastermind of  the 9/11 attack, was hanging out there in some cave, or so we were told. Actually, he may have been in Pakistan, our sort of ally.  So, 10 years later we are still trying to deny bad guys sanctuaries. 

But as soon as we wop the ground hog on the head in one part of the lawn, another pops up from another part, and now we've got 'em in Algeria, Malawi, Somalia, who knows where else?

It keeps the men and women who volunteer for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force employed--and make no mistake about it, we have a mercenary force now. None of those people would be there if they could get  paid better doing any other job they might expect to get. And it's wonderful for business in the 25th district and right here in Portsmouth at the Navy Yard and at a hundred small factories making things for the war machine.

After 9/11 Jim Lehrer asked the salient question: "Why do they hate us so?"

Those wild eyed fanatics from the Middle East simply did not see us the way we see ourselves. Look at Mr. McKeon. Does he not look like a nice man? Father of six, husband, pillar of the church. 

But read Jill LePore's portrait of the war making machine which America has become and you might be able to see us through different eyes.