The Value of TomDispatch.com

Tom Engelhardt, the creator of the blog TomDispatch.com, continues to publish the very best of essays on the threat of American Imperialism.

Here's the latest, this one by Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University. Tom observes that it's about "Giving up on victory, but not war".

The final paragraph is especially important in its shining a bright light on the shadows of massive corruption in American politics, including our current politicians, of all stripes, and at all levels, from the highest to the lowest.

In my opinion, the Pentagon has become the fourth branch of government, after the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court. It's the military part of the military/industrial complex which President Eisenhower warned us about in the late 1950's.

It's become almost trite, even naive, to say, "Follow the money", as Deep Throat observed, yet it's still the clue to the Elephant in the Room nobody wants to acknowledge; the rampant corruption in our politics. When we complain about Hamid Karzai's corrupt government it's the pot calling the kettle black. It might be compared to the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, fighting among its own families, the Americans versus the Sicilians.

The depressing thing is that the Neocons' unending war, somewhere, all the time, has become the modern American way of life; volunteer soldiers and mercenaries trying out the toys dreamed up and manufactured by the Industrial part of the Military/Industrial Complex, and financed by the other half of that complex, the Pentagon's so-called Defense Department; the label which redefines "euphemism".

One can only hope that investigative journalism like what Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post gave us last week, will arouse the ire of the American public enough to worry bought and paid for politicians that they could lose their jobs if the public were to get on a roll.

That's not likely unless we institute a military draft like we had during the Vietnam War. Then the entire populace became worked up by the reality that families were being torn up by the dead and the disabled against their will.

Today, the Neocons, the Cosa Nostra of our Military/Industrial Complex, would use their vast lobbying money to buy off politicians who might be inclined to vote for a draft, because they don't want to wake that sleeping dog which is the American voter.

There ought to be a sign over the entrance to the Capitol Building in D.C., like that over the entrance to Hell. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Still, hope springs eternal.

Leanderthal
Surviving Member of a Homo
Sapien species long assumed
to be extinct.