Nothing is what it seems in our country. And that is the way we operate.

Today’s New York Times is a window into how we operate all over the world and in turn how the world mimics our "value systems".  The stories included in the Times today have hit me in the face for the clarity that they reflect relative to our ability to lie to ourselves on a daily basis concerning virtually anything that we do not want to see.  As a nation, a national family or a culture, we are delusional.

Americans can and do tell themselves that black is white, up is down and bad is good every day.  Let me give you a few examples from today’s NYT.

No wonder we are waging senseless wars for over eight years and still are arguing with each other as to what the mission was, is or even should be! The first article is here. Yesterday Dow Jones reached the 10,000 mark.  But it is not what it seems.

Let me give you a small excerpt from that article here:

"The chasm between the Dow’s stellar performance and the dismal state of the American economy is of historic proportions. The unemployment rate is now at 9.8 percent. Employment as a share of the population is at its lowest level since January 1984. State governments are teetering near bankruptcy. Solvent businesses are seeing their credit lines cut or canceled. Consumer and mortgage lending are both down, while foreclosure filings rose to a record in the third quarter.

And more than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent the financial system and the economy into a tailspin, the Obama administration and Congress have yet to make the promised financial reforms that are essential to ensure that it all doesn’t happen again."

Do you think we could use that money from the General Revenue Fund here at home that we are literally throwing away in western Asia for the benefit of a few thousand people at the top of the War Industry Pyramid? 

I am just asking.  What do you think? Are you tired yet of letting hundreds of millions of dollars a week flow out of your national tax fund to make Dick Cheney types even wealthier? Just a thought.

I am not generally a big fan of David Brooks but today he has written an editorial in the NYT that needs to be read.  It seems that British politicians are actually telling the people that their line of credit is gone, that hard choices now must be made and that further unstable group behavior relative to their national wealth will only make things worse for them. 

Who would have thought?  Should our politicians take a cue from this?  Brooks notably singles out the GOP to take a lesson here.  Now that is a surprise coming from Brooks!  The article is here.  Here is a short excerpt from that article.

"That which can’t continue doesn’t. A nation can spend and spend, pile debt upon debt, but eventually there comes a reality moment when some leader emerges to say enough is enough and when decent people, looking around at themselves and their own best nature, respond by demanding a return to responsibility.

In the United States, we’re not at that moment yet. Private debt is being replaced by public debt. New entitlements are being created, and the money that could be used to ward off fiscal disaster is being used for other things. Here, Democrats still get ahead by promising tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent and Republicans get ahead by promising tax cuts for all and Medicare cuts for none.

But Britain has hit its reality moment. The Brits are ahead of us when it comes to public indebtedness and national irresponsibility. Spending has been out of control for longer and in a more sustained way."

So what do you think fellow American citizens?  Is it time to bring that War Industry boondoggle in western Asia to a close?  Should we cut our losses and bring our sons and daughers and our money home?

In a very unusual article for the NYT, columnist Roger Cohen writes a piece on the perpetually unstable and anxiety ridden national personality of the Israelis and how it infects their very national character and even their individual thought processes.  The piece is here and should be read. 

When it comes to what Cohen says, a man who knows Israel quite well, I think we should listen and learn.  We are headed down the same path of group delusion as Israel has experienced.  Real or not, we are starting to see enemies everywhere.  Israel had the Holocaust to cause this fear.  It was 65 years ago but it was terrifyingly real. We have…..we have ……what exactly do we have to cause this fear in our national psyche?  Why are we seeing enemies everywhere?

Cohen makes it very clear that when a country has no friends, but only varying degrees of enemies, the national psyche is broken.

Here is a piece about the upcoming New Jersey Governor’s race between two candidates who the Jerseyite electorate hates equally.  Neither man seems able to bring forward any ideas that the typical Jersey resident can use in his or her every day life.  Imagine that, American politicians with no new ideas and nothing but party mashuganah to offer the people.  What a shock.

Here is an article that is an odd one.  It seems that British newspapers have reported that in 2008 the Italian Government paid off the Taliban to leave their troops unmolested in areas of Afghanistan where their troops operated.

Here is an  excerpt from that article.

"Citing what it called NATO and Western intelligence sources, the report said that the Italian secret service had made clandestine payments to the Taliban in the Sarobi district east of Kabul, without telling French forces who took over control in mid-2008.

A month later, in the single largest loss to NATO in several years, 10 French soldiers were killed in an ambush, horrifying France and adding to the difficulty of the United States campaign to persuade NATO members to not only sustain but increase their engagement with the war effort.

The report said that in June 2008, before the ambush, the United States ambassador in Rome made a formal diplomatic protest to the Berlusconi government over payments to the Taliban."

That is an interesting way to wage war, would you not say?

In a related article here, an aide to Afghanistan "president" Kharzai says that a run off election between Karzai and the opposition is now inevitable if Afghanis want American help against the Taliban. I would think so.

In another story here in today’s NYT it seems that it is being reported that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and perhaps other Ultra Orthodox Muslim groups are specifically allying themselves with each other to bring down the government of Pakistan.  Is this yet another Inter-Muslim psuedo-religious debacle that we should be prepared to spend billions heading off?  The situation gets a little more complicated than Iraq or Afghanistan because the Pakistanis have nuclear weapons.

So, are you prepared to spend more hundreds of billions on defending Pakistan against itself?  What do you think?

It is time for our politicians to speak to us like adults.  It is time for the typical American to act like an adult and clearly decide one way or another what he or she demands of our government relative to this huge outlay of tax monies to prop up "allied" governments involved in these Wars of the Muslim Reformation. 

Are you willing to let your tax money go to a few thousand American war industry captains who are feeding you daily crap that this somehow or other makes you safer?  Are you willing to stay in the mental straight jacket that these people have placed you within?

Or are you going to demand that you be released and let out of the asylum?

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)