This is America? No. This is Amerika.

In today’s New York Times we get glimpses of the police state that we have become rearing its ugly head out from underneath the warm covers of citizen nonchalance that has come to signify America’s civic laziness in the last fifty years. The price in our personal liberty that we are about to pay for this disconnection between ourselves and our government will be huge.

This situation is dangerous and speaks to our desire to let "the government" do whatever it wants. What we have in place of government is a national circus. The days when we saw ourselves as government are long gone. If we continue down this road we will be in Amerikan Kamps staring out from behind barbed wire before we know it. The stories are mundane and average in their impact and that is why they are so frightening.

The first article, an Op Ed piece by Paul Krugman entitled A Dangerous Dysfunction, shows us how easily the Amerikan Reich Wing has completely taken over the Republican Party and essentially turned it into an arm of the Old Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln must be spinning in his grave.

Krugman shows quite plainly that the Southerners who control the GOP do not in any way wish to govern or even cooperate with those who do wish to govern. What they have done is clearly allowed obstructionist views to infiltrate the Party to the point where governing the people cannot be done.

Let me state this plainly.

This is treason or something very close to it. A the very least, the clowns are completely in control of the circus.

If a major American political party does not wish to govern and it has lobbied to get itself into a position to do so, then it is a fifth column operation. It is subverting American government and denying the will of the people. Read this, you won’t believe it.

Here is an excerpt:

Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.

First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an attempt to delay action on health care."

These people are extreme Christian fundamentalist nut-jobs that the Christ would not recognize as his own. They have no sense of an obligation to the larger community and no willingness to see those who do not agree with them as valid citizens of the same nation in which they live. They are separatists. They need to be controlled.

These anti-governance criminals have gotten out of hand and believe only in bringing good government to a halt at all costs, regardless of who gets hurt. This hovers close to criminal obstructionist activity. If they do not wish to govern, they need to step down. They are acting like modern Confederates. This is an outrage.

But these are the same people that unhesitantly support war in western Asia. What in the hell are they using for a moral or political paradigm? What planet are they living on? How do they view their responsibilities as Americans to the rest of us?

The second piece we will look at today is an editorial entitled The 76 Million Food Victims . In this article we learn that Big Agriculture will not follow the rules relative to government oversight of their propensity to place an overabundance of contanminants in the American food supply.

Once again, we see Big Money doing whatever the hell it wants to do, and we pay for it with our health. The Patricians triumph again at the expense of the Plebes. Aren’t you getting tired of reading different versions of this same story day after day?

The third piece is an editorial entitled Combating Prisoner Abuse which will open your eyes as to how we treat our own domestic criminal offenders. It is as bad as we treat those from overseas whom we see as terrorists or potential terrorists. We have now arrived as a police state.

Here is an excerpt:

"When Mississippi inmates sued their prison, charging that they had been sodomized by a staff member, the claim was thrown out. Under a harsh federal law, inmates must show that they suffered a "physical injury" to prevail in a suit challenging cruel prison conditions. A federal district court ruled in 2006 that the alleged sexual assault did not constitute physical injury.

Congress included the physical injury requirement in the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which it passed in 1996 to deter inmates from bringing frivolous lawsuits. What the law has done instead is insulate prisons from a large number of very worthy lawsuits, and allow abusive and cruel mistreatment of inmates to go unpunished.

Legislation introduced by Representative Robert Scott, Democrat of Virginia, would undo the worst parts of that law. Most important, his legislation, the Prison Abuse Remedies Act, would remove the physical injury requirement. Prisons across the country have used this requirement to dismiss suits challenging all kinds of outrageous treatment: strip-searching of female prisoners by male guards; revealing to other inmates that a prisoner was H.I.V.-positive; forcing an inmate to stand naked for 10 hours.

Mr. Scott’s bill would allow prisoners to prevail under the same conditions as plaintiffs in other kinds of civil rights cases. It would also make important changes in the 1996 law’s "exhaustion" requirement, which forces inmates to bring their complaints to the prison’s own grievance system before they can sue. A carefully drawn exhaustion requirement could help resolve problems locally, and avoid unnecessary litigation. But the one in the current law lets prisons put up procedural hurdles that make it difficult or impossible for prisoners to navigate the bureaucracy and get their complaints heard in court."

How in the name of all that is reasonable can we expect to "export" democracy to tribal areas overseas when we do not even have it here?

We are all caught up in arguing about whether or not we should spend $30 billion dollars to wage "liberation" war in western Asia when we are allowing mass sodomy of our criminal offenders in a nationwide prison system that is medieval in its environment and unconstitutional in its organizational behavior against incarcerated citizens?

We cannot agree on waging war when Big Money is contaminating our food supply at will and defying government oversight?

We are arguing about the righteousness of our "cause" overseas when our minority political party is every bit as obstructionist and dangerous as the organized Sunnis in Iraq?

What a mess. This is America? No, this is Amerika. And as long as veterans stay uninvolved, this horror will stay that way.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)