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

[John W.]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 5:37 PM, LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at advancenet.net>wrote:

>  The title makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make – namely that
> once upon a time, America was not nuts.  I content that it always has been
> nuts since its beginning; only the obviousness of the insanity come to the
> surface from time to time – we just happen to be here at the right time to
> see it in its full bloom.
>
I think also that with television and the internet, we "moderns" are
inundated as never before with evidence of America's nuttiness.




>  *From:* peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net [mailto:
> peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] *On Behalf Of *Ricky Baldwin
> *Sent:* Sunday, September 20, 2009 11:09 AM
> *To:* unionyes; E. Wayne Johnson
> *Cc:* Peace-discuss List
>
> *Subject:* Re: [Peace-discuss] Why America’s gone nuts
>
>
>
> None of this even comes close to proving anything, least of all the
> question of who US authorities may have arrested under what specious
> pretenses in the paranoid aftermath of the attacks.  These are all
> questions, not answers, of course.
>
> And the violence of the ruling class is standard practice for them, and
> hence suggests nothing in particular.
>
> But I maintain that we already know all we need to know without such
> olympian leaps of faith as the "9/11 truthers" suggest.  That is, the Bush
> Administration violated international law and basic ethical principle in
> launching its attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrowing their
> governments, and occupying their land for the past 8 or 5 years.  Obama was
> elected by people who wanted a reversal of that policy, but that has not
> happened.  Quite the contrary.  Now, it is up to us - most particularly US
> citizens - to do something about it.
>
> Ricky
>
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
>
> --- On *Sat, 9/19/09, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>* wrote:
>
>
> From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Why America’s gone nuts
> To: "unionyes" <unionyes at ameritech.net>
> Cc: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
> Date: Saturday, September 19, 2009, 8:16 AM
>
> Some conspiracy theories are nutty, some are satirical, some are hoaxes.
>
> There are several Questions about 9-11 that seem to demand an Answer.
> Among those:
>
> Scientists documented thermite/thermate (not termites) and metal globules
> in the dust from the WTC collapse and published
> their data in a refereed journal.  That is not exactly nuttiness.
>
> The collapse of building 7 was not addressed at all in the 9-11 report.
>
> Four hours after the attack, the FBI arrested five Israelis who had been
> filming the smoking skyline from the roof of a white van in the parking lot
> of an apartment building, for "puzzling behavior".
>
> Where is the airplane wreckage and mess at the Pentagon?
>
> The violence of the response from the Ruling Class seems to suggest a
> cover-up.
>
>
>
> On 9/19/2009 7:45 AM, unionyes wrote:
> > 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 <http://mc/compose?to=galliher@illinois.edu>>
> > To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net<http://mc/compose?to=peace-discuss@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
>
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