Re: [Peace-discuss] Why America’s gone nuts

[unionyes]

That's interesting !

I thought so called " 9 / 11 Truthers " were suppose to be from the right ?

Until recently, with the attacks by Glen Beck on Van Jones, and anyone who 
had ANY doubts or questions about the Bush appointed 9/11 commision and it's 
final report.

That would include a majority of families of the 9/11 victims, who pushed 
for almost TWO YEARS to finally get an investigation, that the Bush 
administration fought every step of the way !
That would also include a slight majority of ALL Americans ( according to 
polls conducted in 2007 ), and even greater percentage of residents of NYC !

If " 9/11 Truthers " are being attacked by both the " Right " and the so 
called " Left ", then they must be on to at least some inconvienent truth.

David J.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2009 11:39 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Why America’s gone nuts


> It’s not just Glenn Beck: why America’s gone nuts
> From 9/11 ‘Truthers’ on the left to ‘Birthers’ on the right,
> the US has gone mad because those in power refuse to listen to voters
> BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN - SEPTEMBER 17, 2009
>
> Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours, here in 
> America? One expects theatrical lunacy from the radio and TV tub-thumpers 
> like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage - front men for all the 
> usual right-wing causes.
>
> Indeed one expects modulated nuttiness from the better element, 
> particularly those inhabiting the corporate and legislative spheres, but 
> these days insanity is pervasive, spreading through all classes and walks 
> of life.
>
> For years, we have been treated to pinstriped fugitives from the asylum 
> like Pete Peterson urging the nation into ruin by slashing the deficit, 
> but there, in Washington, DC, in their tens of thousands were the sans 
> culottes (pictured above) screaming for fiscal propriety as though they 
> were channelling the ruinous orthodoxies of Montague Norman or Andrew 
> Mellon.
>
> ~Obama’s delusions are far more lethal than those of Glenn Beck’s 
> followers~
>
> Among these Glenn Beck legions a solid fraction were surely one stroke or 
> tumour away from financial ruin, yet are still ready to tear to tiny 
> pieces any advocates of publicly funded health insurance as though they 
> were hawking the Communist Manifesto at a Christian revival meeting.
>
> Many of the Beckspawn are 'Birthers' too, making delusional forays into 
> the supposedly dubious documentation of Barack Obama's delivery in a 
> hospital in Hawaii. Sometimes I think that the White House should knock 
> all these surmises on the head by releasing all relevant documents and 
> testimonies. But, of course, this would merely throw napalm on the flames.
>
> Once, when writing some caustic remarks about the occupants of another 
> ward in the national asylum, the 9/11 Truthers, I suggested that the 
> "missing people" on the plane that hit the Pentagon had been kidnapped at 
> an earlier stage in the operation, and flown to an airbase in Louisiana - 
> the very self-same airbase where George Bush briefly touched down in his 
> erratic flight from Florida on 11/9/2001. George Bush, I wrote, then 
> personally executed the captives.
>
> ~The Republican Party is now entirely populated by mad people~
>
> It was a satirical sally. But I swiftly received serious letters from 
> people outraged by the lack of detail. Where had Bush shot them? With what 
> type of weapon? A summary burst from a machine gun, or a .22 bullet behind 
> the ear?
>
> For all too many on the left, the so-called 9/11 conspiracy is still the 
> magic key. If it can be turned, then history at its present impasse will 
> be unlocked and we can move on. For those on the racist right, aghast at 
> the reality of a black man (actually a half-white, half-black) in the 
> White House, the magic key to reversing this unpleasing development is 
> Obama's allegedly fake Hawaiian birth certificate.
>
> Their suppositions and claims shift, but the essence is always the same: 
> he's alien. He has no right to be president. And, as with the Truthers, 
> the provision of evidence rebutting their claims is merely fuel piled on 
> the bonfire of their insanity. Between Truthers and Birthers there's 
> considerable psychic and forensic overlap.
>
> From the nuttiness of the little people to the madness of Great Ones. 
> President Obama's rhetoric is decorous, but the delusions are just as ripe 
> and far more lethal than those of the Glenn Beck demonstrators under his 
> window.
>
> ~Obama advances ridiculous propositions with nutty aplomb~
>
> How is one supposed to rate the rationality of a person who wins the White 
> House in large measure because of popular outrage at the disastrous war in 
> Iraq and who, then, instantly ratchets up another war in Afghanistan - an 
> enterprise for whose utter futility history both ancient and modern offers 
> copious testimony.
>
> From time to time, one meets a madman in a shopping mall or at a bus stop 
> who approaches one with discreet confidences about his mother the Queen of 
> England, or about the messages beamed through the fillings in his teeth 
> that warn him of CIA surveillance from the plane flying 30,000 feet above 
> his head.
>
> It's an effort of will to remind oneself that this is a person in 
> dishevelled mental condition, and it would be unwise to be drawn into 
> protracted discussion of royal lineage tracked through the Almanach de 
> Gotha or to peer into jaws suddenly opened for one's inspection.
>
> Similarly, with Obama, he advances ridiculous propositions with nutty 
> aplomb, as when he claimed in his speech to Congress last week that his 
> plan was deficit neutral. Why does he expose himself thus to well-merited 
> derision? Is it that Obama simply cannot bear to displease anyone - unless 
> they are far away in places like Afghanistan?
>
> Indeed, the president reached the apex of lunatic effrontery when he 
> caused the assembled legislators to leap to their feet in stormy applause 
> by pledging that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our 
> deficits." These is the same president, these are the same legislators, 
> who are committing billions in red ink for the war in Afghanistan and the 
> continued US presence in Iraq.
>
> True, he's made a twitch into sanity with his cancellation of Bush's 
> commitment for a 'missile defense shield' for the Czech Republic and 
> Poland. But it's a measure of the collective national sanity that 
> right-wingers are seriously criticising this as somehow compromising the 
> security of these two nations, whereas of course 'missile defence' has 
> always been a total fantasy ever since Ronald Reagan put up the Strategic 
> Defence Initiative back in the Eighties - an utterly insane project which 
> now takes up 18 per cent of all US military spending.
>
> The Seventies are back, or so claims People magazine. I can see why. It's 
> nostalgia for the last sane decade in American political life, when people 
> assayed the state of the nation amid the embers of the Sixties and of the 
> Vietnam War and elected politicians who passed some admirable laws.
>
> It seemed America was tottering into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was 
> Reagan who truly credentialled nutdom, setting the national thermostat at 
> max degrees F for fantasy. The Republican Party is now entirely populated 
> by mad people. Walk through the Congress, watch them babble and throw 
> their excrement at the walls. Then survey the 'good' inmates mustered in 
> the Democratic aisles, led by a president who, at least once in the last 
> campaign, invoked Reagan as a positive force. They're less rambunctious 
> but just as lethal, perhaps more so, in their depredations.
>
> People start to go collectively crazy when they know that all the exits 
> from our present state into the world of constructive reason are locked. 
> Just think - a president elected on a huge wave of popular hope, unable to 
> twist a single arm in his own party, unlikely even to pass financial 
> reform amid the greatest wave of public hatred of Wall Street since the 
> 1930s, trying to pass off as health 'reform' a gift to the insurance 
> industry of 30 million new customers, to be required by law to pony up 
> insurance premiums and then be cheated. No wonder people are crazy.
>
> http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/53662,news,its-not-just-glenn-beck-why-americas-gone-nuts-politics-usa-tea-party-obama
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss