It is time for an American paradigm shift to take hold.

We must stop thinking about aligning our hopes with Democrats and Republicans and Independents and start thinking about electing those who are willing to "horse trade" for effective government and throwing out those who are simply grandstanding in order to increase the size of their campaign war chest for the next election.

High drama and thirty second sound bits on television have now replaced the hard, mundane, often boring and deliberate work of good policy-making in Washington. We have to kill that tendency in ourselves to want drama over government.

We simply cannot have the ship of state flounder and as veterans it is up to us to get the engines running again.

We have to start moving through the water again, the wolf pack is beginning to circle this ship of state. The sharks in the water all over the world can smell our blood.

I refuse to be a crewman on a ship of state that is "underway, making no way". It is an invitation to disaster and we will be run over and sink to the bottom if this lasts much longer.

As veterans we must lead the way and leave rigid ideology behind in our political decision making processes. Look at what it has brought to us.

Here is an article that speaks to my point entitled Enthusiasm for Palin, and Echoes of 2008 Divide . Is this what we want as a nation?

And here is yet another example of the success of a media personality who has decided to make money by stoking the flames of political tensions, not for the greater good, but apparently for an expanding personal financial empire.

The article is entitled Glenn Beck Stakes Out a More Activist Role in Politics , and it is a fine read on how America has trivialized its politics to the point of caricature. Is this what we need in this time of crisis?

Do we want this? Do we need this? We have almost 19% real unemployment here in this country now…how does he help with that with his polarized politics?

Does it make sense in this time of economic turmoil and real hardship in the USA for us to be choosing sides in a culture war instead of getting people back to work?

The very health of our national and international economic life relative to the global trade demands a clean slate and pragmatic, utilitarian thinking. We don’t have that here.

No one but a veteran understands how quickly reality can fall apart. It can happen in minutes, most of us have seen that.

We are heading into an ambush here. We need to stop it. We need clear and decisive thinking on all levels of public issue decision making.

We veterans are going to have to act now and pull this country together and we can only do that by facilitating pragmatic, workable, utilitarian political and economic decision making that ensures that the largest number of our citizens are protected in the swiftest and most streamlined ways.

We must put the high drama on hold for a few decades in order to iron out our problems.

Our brand of politics is now so unworkable that all we have is armed camps in Congress, not working politicians. We did not elect them for high drama, we elected them to get the people’s business done. We now must make them pay for not doing so. We have to start electing pragmatists, it is that simple.

It is time for us to step forward and demand that honest, American "horse trading" take hold in Congress and the work of the people start to move forward.

Enough is enough.

Our duty as veterans is to demand accountability from our government at all times.  Your weekly emails to your representatives in government would do that.

Now onto the news.

First up we have this article, As Afghans Resist Taliban, U.S. Spurs Rise of Militias , in which we are apparently willing to support previously unengaged segments of the Afghan population who have just recently (the past few weeks?) indicated a willingness to engage elements of the Afghan Taliban in combat.

I don’t know about this.

This is supporting a group of thugs who are engaged in fighting a group that is opposed to us that we have named "The Taliban". I am not even sure that I know what that phrase "Taliban" is supposed to mean anymore, it is thrown around by the press much too easily.

Who are they really?

Why are they opposing us?

Are we occupiers in their country because we have waged illegal and unnecessary war?

If so, then they should resist us! Would not we resist them if the shoe were on the other foot?

Of course we would.

Their big crime seems to have been that a group we have named the Taliban gave Al Qaeda and OBL refuge in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. We have always claimed that Al Qaeda had training camps in Afghanistan in which OBL and his Al Qaeda group were trained.

But the Taliban has training camps all over the Middle East. We have known that for years. Why did we choose Afghanistan to invade? We need to search this out. Something does not smell right here.

That is becoming more obvious every day now.  Who gains in U.S. society by continuing this senseless fight?  When we know that, we have our answer as to who started these wars.

In this article, A Terror Suspect With Feet in East and West , we learn that a half-Pakistani – half American terrorist who had lived in my home town of Philadelphia for years as a young man is the leader of a cell of fundamentalist Muslims who are waging terror war in Denmark. This article gives the full flavor of these sorts of characters.

They are more psychotics than they are warriors. This is starting to become more evident after the Major Nidal Hasan incident at Fort Hood.  They have been unstable all of their lives.  We are beginning to see that now.

These people rarely have a full deck of cards at the table.  We are talking about very violent and un-anchored human personalities that are using the rising tide of Muslim fundamentalism in the emerging world to act out on their own serious mental health pathologies.

They are very much, as my father would often point out, "rebels without a cause". They seem to be simply looking for a reason to act on their own psychotic hatreds.

Are these people terrorists with a political agenda or psychotics with the typical charisma these people have in order to wage hatred on a world that they find oppressive for mental health reasons?

Even a casual read of this article will show how disturbed this "terrorist" is, you don’t need to be a psychiatrist to see that. What does this teach us about the "Taliban"? Anything? What does it teach us about our approach to them? 

Is this a matter for the armed forces or for Interpol and its allied armies of CSI and criminal profilers and psychiatric assistants in identifying and tracking down psychopaths who have latched onto violent fundamentalist Islam in order to act on their twisted psyches?

The 9/11 hijackers were all marginalized psuedo-Muslims who had lived lives of ill repute in their youths who seemed to have been seeking some sort of Islamic redemption by their actions as make-pretend jihadists.  This is not new information, we have known this for quite some time. 

That is a criminal apprehension issue, not a defense issue.  Is it possible that we have been deliberately waylaid into a national defense plan of action for what is essentially serial murders in the name of some whacky form of fundamentalist fervor?

Let me ask you a question that I want you to think about.

Is it possible that our "leaders" in the war industries and the energy cartels and the emerging markets knew all along that these fundamentalist Muslim erstwhile Crusaders were more psychotics than they were warriors?

Is it possible that the whole mythic tale of an army of fundamentalists waiting to attack us was fabricated in order to allow the injection of U.S. Armed Forces personnel exactly into regions in western Asia where these American robber barons would want them?

The back story here seems to be that U.S. "leaders" in the energy industries and in American banking have wanted a pipeline that is still non-existant from the rich oil fields of Turkmenistan to be built down into the Gulf of Arabia.

Only the presence of the U.S. Armed Forces in the region could assure that. Hmmmm! So what do you think? Have we been bamboozled ? 

Was 9/11 used by our own oligarchs to get our troops stationed in western Asia for the sake of their portfolios?  Were our people in uniform and other assigned government personnel in the diplomatic and intelligence communities killed and mentally broken and maimed for life for the sake of the oligarchs?

What is your take on this?

In this article entitled Who Fears a Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky? , we read of the plight of a former super wealthy Russian oil oligarch who has been imprisoned for years now accused of stealing from his own company, and thus, the Russian people. Could this happen here?

In this article , Survey of Pakistan’s Young Predicts ‘Disaster’ if Their Needs Aren’t Addressed , we learn that the young of Pakistan are disillusioned with their government and slowly getting more violent. Great.

In this article, In Turkey, Trial Casts Wide Net of Mistrust ,  we learn that our only NATO ally with a Muslim population, Turkey, is slowly being radicalized by an underground movement of fundamentalist Muslims that want more power.

Turkey was at one time the only real secular Muslim nation in the world. That is apparently ending. We must ask ourselves, why?

In this Op Ed piece Thomas Friedman has some good thoughts about America and the 21st Century. I cannot give you a better gift today than this piece entitled Advice From Grandma .

In this Op Ed piece entitled Who Created Major Hasan? , Robert Wright gives us left wing and right wing views of the War on Terrorism. Neither fits reality.

And finally, to show how deadly serious political polarization in America can be, we have this quote from the On This Day section of the Times.

"On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. Suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States."