Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

The president's travel plans to attend the opening of the Beijing Games have made human rights advocates angry.  What about Guantanamo?

Sam Haselby of Cambridge, Massachusetts in the same June 30 New York Times had this to say:

"Yes, the instigators of the American War in Iraq were also a small elite, but the rest of the comparison does not hold, with a few notable exceptions.  Those who agitated for the Iraq War avoided military service and have made rather than pledged their fortunes from this war."

In Bob Herbert's New York Times column on July 5 he quoted former U.S. Senator David Boren, who is now president of the University of Oklahoma, in his book "Letter to America", wherein Boren stated the following:

"The country we love is in trouble.  In truth, we are in grave danger of declining as a nation.  If we do not act quickly, that decline will become dramatic."

Bob Herbert went on to say:

"You know that matters have gotten out of hand when, as we learned this week, American instructors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave classes on torture techniques used by the Communists to extract false testimony from American prisoners during the Korean War."

Herbert went on to explain:

"There are signs galore of the nation's turn for the worse.  We are fighting a debilitating war in Iraq without any idea of how to pay for it - or how to end it.  No one has any real idea about how to cope with the devastating energy crisis, or how to turn the economy around."

Then Herbert explained precisely where U.S. funding is going:

"We can build spectacular new stadiums for football and baseball teams (the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants and the Jets are all getting ready to move into staggeringly expensive new homes) but we can't rebuild New Orleans or reconstruct the World Trade Center site destroyed almost seven years ago."

All of this is taking place while 2 ½ million homes are in foreclosure.  Richard Brookhiser, author of "What Would the Founders do?" commented on Cullen Murphy's book, "Are we Rome:  The Fall of Empire and the Fate of America", stating the following:

"America's founders used Rome as a model and a warning; they wanted us to become an empire, as Rome had without losing free government as Rome did."

As unemployment skyrockets and the inflated prices of gas, food, education and hospitals as well as life saving prescriptions, the American public is brought to the shocking reality we now have stagflation.  The economy is stagnant, inflation is soaring.

The cost of living is hurting.  Jobs and entire manufacturing companies were sent to other countries, where labor is cheap and workers' rights are often non-existent.

With 45 million in the U.S.A. without health care and Medicare doctors' fees cut 10%, one might ask where U.S. tax money is going.

The money is going to fight the Iraq War launched by a series of lies and assorted scare tactics in Alan Greenspan's book, "The Age of Turbulence", in which he mentions oil as being a reason and justification for the Iraq War.

It was the Reagan Republican administration that had the U.S. launch a war in Afghanistan, placing the most extreme Muslims in power.

Now the U.S. is back at war in Afghanistan to remove the very Talaban we fought to place in power.  Could it be that it had anything to do with the fact that the valuable oil pipelines running across Afghanistan to the sea where ships could carry the oil weren't being guarded carefully enough?

On July 5 in a New York Times Letter to the Editors, Tama Zorin of Brookline, Massachusetts wrote the following under the caption "Torture and Us":

"My fellow patriots, all of you who love this country, right or left, liberal or conservative, how do we make reparations, shoulder blame and find redemption for the acts in which we are complicit?  How do we hold ourselves and those who acted in our name accountable?

"We need a national forum for this discussion because we cannot cover the mirror in mourning; we need to look into it and see our national shame."