I WOULD HAVE SAID

YOU WERE CRAZY

Today is July 14th. Bastille Day. This is the day the comon people of France rose up and started guiatining French royalty. One thing you could say for them is that they were taking advantage of the moment. If only liberals in this country could "learn to take advantage of the moment" we would get a whole lot more accomplished. Some would say we are in a liberal's fondest dream, politically. A Republican administration screwed up the economy for probably the next decade to come. We have a massive oil spill by a corrupt foreign oil company that is more of a "bank" they remind us. The opposition has been largely reduced to using empty slogans and racial epithets and have an intellectual IQ of about eighty. We have a democratic president and a congress democratic in both houses. When was the last time all these factors came into alignment? And yet liberals are constantly on the defencive. The opposition is not just conservative. "Conservatives" tend to go for the status quo. They are not even mildly reactionary. They are Extremely reactionary. Though many of them are younger than me they appear to want to go back to a time long before I was born. Indeed the America I myself grew up in was about as far removed from these people as night and day. No - - they would have said you were crazy if you predicted all of these things.

I have a clear memory of many things I was doing twenty years ago and specific dates doing them. There are many personal events in my life if someone had told me would happen in my life on July 15th 1990 I would have said they were crazy. Twenty years ago today nobody would have guessed that a major war would again soon become fashionable. That we would start a war with what was then known as "the fourth biggest army in the world" and would line all of our troops up along the Kweit border poised to attack. I would have said that such a thing would be taking on a World War III scenario. And it was all in a land dispute where our own government said we had no Defense treaty with Kweit. It was that War that put Rush Limbaugh on the map. Boy how he relished that war- - -over - and over again. But I would have also said you were crazy if you said that a woman senator in California would serve eighteen years and become very popular and yet be fighting for her political life facing an ultra right opponet with no government experiance and whose greatest claim was shipping US jobs off to China. If you said we would elect a Black president and then he would be the object of threats and racial epithets, I'd have said you were crazy. I would have said "If we elected a black president we would owe him the allegiance we'd owe any other president. If you would have said that any candidate who ran on a peace platform to oppose an unpopular President who got us into a never ending war, I would have said "Well, that's good". But if that same man once elected abandoned his base entirely and got us into an even bigger, more hopeless was, in an even more distant country- - I would have said you were crazy. If you told me that the democrats took back congress in 2006 - - and then four years later after a successful 2008 election, under a democratic president congress would go republican again, I would have said you were crazy. After all just four years ago we Americans did elect democrats. We must have had a reason to do so at that time. What on earth could have happened in those intervening four years to make everybody change their mind the way they apparently have? The only thing that's changed in those four years are Sarah Palin and the tea baggers? What is it about these people that compels the media to fawn all over them?

Finally we all know that Jesus Christ said, "The meek will inheret the earth". But then if it happened that when war came and wiped out the planet, those people who had caused the war were raptured and went up to Heaven- - leaving the victims, the meek behind- - to inheret this radio-active planet, I would have said you were crazy. But suddenly even this far-fetched notion is seeming closser to reality all the time. Actually I wish the rapture would come Before the next world starts- - and that way those of us who remain on earth would be able to prevent it. There was a roomer a couple weeks ago that an "event" was going to be staged or fabricated in Iran to get us into a precipitous war there. You know how Americans need to be pushed into wars- - be it the Golf of Tomkin, or the Lucitania, or "weapons of mass destruction" or whatever. They see us as cattle who have to be stampeded into action. I don't know what this "event" in Iran is, exactly, but you know it's going to be something that didn't really happen like Saddam Hussein turning off baby incubators. These tea party people, despite all their amazing success still are obviously not "happy". The only time they're truely "happy" is when we're in full scale War.

BRITAIN AND GEORGE BUSH

IN BED WITH QADAFFI

There are problems now with the British Petroleum capping of the oil, as if that were a surprise. This was one sure thing that was supposed to provide a tight “tupper-ware” seal. But they are afraid the shaft is structurally unsound. But they are assured because pressure readings are still good. Just give it a shot of Viagara and call me in the morning. Norway apparently took over their oil wells. And Hartman pointed out that in Florida they sold off a publicly held utility. So instead of having a lot of extra trucks and equipment and employees for an emergency, now when they have a Hurricane they have to get employees from Indiana. Of course if the government just took over everything like Hugo Shavez, it would solve a lot of problems and we could give everybody health care. Now they say British Petroleum lobbied the Parliament in England to free the Lockerbee bomber saying he had three months to live, and now it’s been a year and Parliament is thinking they’ve been had. They say there is a whole background story on Bush’s 180 with Qadafi and also British Petroleum. I guess Libya cut a deal with Exxon to drill on their land and British Petroleum felt left out, so they said “What can we offer you to cut us a deal too?”. And Libya suggested the Lockerbee, Scottland bombing terrorist that brought down Pam Am flight 103 and killed over 200 passengers, many from the United States. I don’t see why the tea party crowd isn’t hanging BP executives in effigy because this is sure a “British invasion”. It British Petroleum doesn’t get that cap on now when a hurricane strikes they’ll have to clear all the equipment out and won’t be able to work on the leak further, and of course the leakage goes on after eighty days and counting. The true magnitude of the problem is unfathomable.