Whether or not a person agrees with Morford's analysis--and I tend to agree with it--the important bit comes at the end. "You have but to do the most easy/difficult thing of all: you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice."
I would go one step further: having made your choice, make that choice manifest. Not by writing to Congress, but by doing something in your town or city, something that shows your choice of generosity over greed: work together with others to befriend immigrants and don't worry about their legal status; help the increasing number of indigent and homeless; meet your neighbours in a new way, work to bring Iraqi refugees to America (one Swedish city alone has taken in more Iraqi refugees than has the entire U.S.), visit traumatized veterans and perhaps help to reduce that cause of increasing suicide--do whatever expresses your spirit of generosity. I do believe if each of us begins with a small step, we can help each other keep from drowning of sorrow and perhaps even change the world a little. Of course, if you choose to go for the greed, you're on your own.

i really like the writing in this piece, it is great reading and also touches on an absolute ton of the issues at hand today, including the title's issue.

it is a good question, but there are more.

if the united states is to heal - if that is even possible (we have to accept the possibility that we have dallied to long and left it too late) - there are other questions that not only need to be asked but need to be resolved.

1. is the united states going to continue to allow foreign policy, especially in the middle east, be dictated by the jewish lobby?

i assume we all understand that a large group of the major neo-cons are proud jewish boys, and good for them, but i think it is also apparent that they have more concern for the israeli state than for the american.

2. is the american citizenry willing to allow the corporations to absolutely suck out the last drop of the good red american blood?

the first question i ask gets at how this mess in iraq started, to be fair the israelis wanted the us to go after iran all along, but a few twists and turns aside they are getting their way.

the relentless media campaign to froth you up, provided by the corporations and away we go, spreading democracy from here to eternity.

the second gets at the trend over the last forty or so years of the evolution of the corporation into person hood, then absolution and, finally, righteousness whereby they have all the rights and none of the responsibility.

they screwed you there.

this article asks it's question - which road?

i say resolve these two questions i ask before you get to the article's two. they are the struggle.

iraq is a chapter, not the first and not the last, of the struggle.

Bush plunged us into the darkness with lies, deception, and trickery. A huge number of Americans still believe the lies, and BushCo STILL PUMPS THE LIES with all of their Al-Q talk and Terr'ist this and Terr'ist that. They refuse to acknowledge the HUGE SUFFERING they have inflicted on the innocents of a country that could have keep slowing moving toward a passable secular state given less time than this shit will last. They refuse to acknowledge the huge cost that has been placed on our country, its economy, its place in the world, and its military and the military grunts who could have been used for much more noble ends than to trash all faith that we would use our might with thought.

Bush's mess.

Bush's disgrace.

Bush claimed last night that we can "still win" in Iraq.

I have yet to see ANY idea from ANYONE what "win" exactly means.

Yeah, well -- for a while 'winning' meant fewer car bombs, but car bombs don't even count anymore, so it is indeed hard to keep track of what constitutes victory. I'm assuming that at this stage in the game, 'winning' is defined as provoking Iran into doing something that would unleash hell from the sky on their nuclear installations. 'Winning' could also be the ongoing process of keeping Iraq sufficiently unstable to prevent the extraction of oil, thus maintaining record profits for Bush's BFFs, the Exxons of the world. As long as Exxon continues to break quarterly profit records, we're 'winning'.

I think 'WIN' means to loot the treasury and inslave the population of the U.S. See PNAC.

It was C. G. Jung that said to look in the mirror for the guilty party when things really go bad. Things are really bad.

TO THE DEMS

I have been meaning to write something like this for awhile because of your feckless responses and kowtowing to a president who is out to destroy this country. Why? Because you are cynical and political to an extreme. It is either that or you want to have all the stuff that is on the books now plus a war that you think will help you and without the blame. This is neither humanistic or morally defendable. Petraeus got what he deserves and cutting off funds for this war is the way to go because when it comes to priorities for this occupation it is contractors first and troops last. You can see this from any facts that you look at. So who cares for the troops? Some of you have been doing a lot of talking but nobody has thrown a rock at this glass house of an administration. Leave it to the people thru MoveOn.Org to do the heavy lifting for what you are supposed to be doing. You will not get my vote because you are no better than the repubs. Is there any difference in dictators, if one is a dem. or a repub? The way that you are acting you just want the whole pie for yourselves and forget the people again. I'm 71 and cant help but wonder what of the younger people? Because of your feckless nature it is a bleak future for them. Tony

One of our brilliant Washington D.C. minds was quoted recently referring to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as "the triangle of death." It jogged the memory of the term I learned for that area as a kid in the early 60's - "the Cradle of Civilization." A breathtaking transformation, and a truly evil legacy for BushCo. I pray you are right, Mark, that the worst is over and the healing can soon begin.

"By many measures, the worst of it is over."

Hmmm... crazies with their fingers on the Iran triggers... catastrophic climate mutation... the fall TV schedule... not quite over yet...

What a wonderfully well written article, that tells it all about the war in Iraq, as it is and will continue to be.

I would give all I have, to have the privelage of reading this to the entire assembled Conress of the United States.

One paragraph "grabbed" me, a bit more than others, it begins with the words, "Or maybe it's the bodies". ___ Yes indeed, the vets are forever damaged by inhaling nano-paticles of DU and in a few short years will be either permanently disabled or dead. Of course the same fate is due for 'millions' of the people of Iraq, we just very likely won't ever hear that sad story.

I have been criticized by several others here at times for continually bringing up the DU subject. Read that paragraph with a critical eye, about our veterans, those troops are suffering from radiation poisoning. We should also keep in mind, that more than 600,000 vets of the First Gulf War, are now permanently disabled or dead, from inhaling ceramic oxide DU dust. The insidious symptoms of DU contamination are often not pronounced for from three to seven years after exposure.

When one dies from a cancer, no one autopsies the body to determine if radio-activity caused the disease in the first place. The tiny specks of still deadly DU are buried with the victem. DU didn't kill them, it was cancer, or Hodgkins, or Lou Gerhigs disease, or kidney failure, liver failure, or diabetes, etc.___ "DU is hamless"!

Depleted uranium is rather harmless in a solid form, it's like a block of lead only much heavier. When used in a bomb, tank or machine gun shell, it burns when the projectile strikes a target or the explosives in the bomb detonate. DU then burns at a very high temperature, the result is a smoke filled cloud of ceramic oxide, radio-active dust,___ billions of specks of poisonous dust, blowing in the wind. Inhaling only one of the microscopic partilces will insure the "inhalee" of eventual cancer, and or many other serious medical problems. Children with growing body cells and developing immune systems, are much more suseptable to the internal radio-activity.

A nano-particle of DU is one millionth of a meter in diameter, smaller than a grain of pollen. If inhaled, it may enter the lung where cancer is assured, or it may cross the olfactory bulb and go directly to the brain. Once lodged in the brain or lung, the tiny yet deadly speck radiates the cells with over ten thousand times the radiation allowed by a chest x-ray. Unlike an x-ray, the radiation continues forever, cancers form and then metastasis ensues and cancerous cells break off and can travel to any part of the body, to the liver, kidney, bladder, breast, lynph nodes, bone marrow etc. Another cancer factory begins. If the cancer is treatable, the patient may live, if not, the patient dies and no one is ever aware, that the disease began by inhaling a single speck of microscopic, highly radio-active DU dust.

http://www.gulfwarvets.com/du_howkilling.htm

For the average American, Iraq is not nearly as deep in our bones as it should be and perhaps one day will be. http://www.gpln.com/debatingiraq.htm

I have to run, leaving for the east coast for a few days. I'll post another dreary comment before I pack my clean skivvies and sox. My mom often said, "Always wear clean skivvies Kem, you never know when you might get hit by a cement truck and end up in the hospital".

DU has been tested by the thousands of TONS here in the United States on militay bomb ranges. In a single exploded tank shell, having ten pounds of DU, the resulting fire and smoke would distribute over 7 BILLION nano-particles of deadly wind blown dust. ___ Hold our breath. ___ Here is a website for just one of our states and what is happening there.

WWW.protecthawaii.ws/page2.html

That old worldview needs to become extinct before all life on the planet does. But attitudes die hard.

Just to follow up on what Kem Patrick said, DU creates a whole new dimension in destruction. Ordinary explosives detonate at around 500 degrees F.; DU, however, burns at 6,000 degrees F. These incredibly high temperatures cause the other heavy metals in military hardware such as lead, steel, aluminum, titanium, etc. to vaporize into nano particles. Additionally, the total surface area of these micron sized particles is thousands of times greater than that of the original DU warhead. This is a significant factor when each micro particle is emitting Alpha radiation directly into the cells. The combined effect of radiation and heavy metal poisoning, cancer, and genetic damage is on a level of horror beyond that seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The half life of DU is 4.5 billion years.

The Inca Indian culture predicts a time of change between the years of 1996 and 2012. If it is true that the future can inform the past (by what mechanism, I have no idea!) the perhaps we are in the time of change and 'Meeting ourselves again' that was predicted well before the arrival of the Spanish in the New World. Oddly enough, the Mayan calender ends 2012. Perhaps we are entering an 'interesting time', certainly the course of current events cannot endure.

Veteran '66-68

"We" do not need to win in Iraq. "We" never got into this.
This is Bush's war. He started it. Alone.

Now, Bush has LOST this war.

He's lost the war, and that's where it stands.

Bush actually said last night in his speech that we are pretty much going to remain in Iraq because he said the Iraqis would like us to be there. His lies are becoming outrageous. Once again Bush deceives the American people. Did he ever tell us before that we will be there from now on?? He has destroyed Iraq. Now he wants all his capitalist friends to permanently make money off of the resources. How does this serial liar get away with it??

Lying is a despicable, cowardly habit, then if the liar may speak the truth, few believe it.

"It is the nature of any scroundrel to lie".

~~Cicero~~

Mark Morford said:
"you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice."

The citizens of the US have made their choice, and have consistently chosen evil over good, consistently stood by and let the evil continue. We could have chosen George McGovern, we chose Nixon; we could have chosen Nader, we chose Clinton; we could have chosen Nader again, we chose GW Bush; we could have better chosen anyone who hadn't committed a political coup to gain office, but we chose the pretender a second time; we could choose Kucinich in the next election, but we won't, instead we will, as we always have, choose someone who represents what GWB called "the Have-Mores" to continue to exploit the US masses and to support the oppression, killing, and exploitation of other peoples for the greater profit of the Have-Mores.

We choose evil because we are a pathologically lazy, hedonistic, violence-entertained, violence-loving, short-sighted, ignorant people. As Michael Moore once said: "Americans are the stupidest people on the planet." Stupid derives from "stupor," and people that sit by and watch their own rights taken away without protest, who watch their own interests denied, who watch the environment that sustains them being destroyed, who claim allegiance to a god of "peace" while supporting slaughter, are in a stupor.

The only other possible explanation is that we, as a people, are not the stupidest people on the planet after all but merely the most masochistic, sadistic, and evil.

Jonma, Re: "Triangle of Death" in place of "The Cradle of Civilization." Nice point. I thought the same thing some time back. Truly amazing how backwards we've gotten (when we've had so much time to get it all right!)

One can always count on Mark Morford to zero right in on the truth of the matter. What we hear is the death-rattle of an empire in its last throes. Empires are almost always at their most dangerous when in decline.

At least, I sincerely hope that this current fiasco is nothing more or less than patriarchy's last-ditch stand and the sputtering out of White Power. War became obsolete with the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima. Are we finally waking up to that reality?

Morford's article is dead-on right and has some good truths expressed. It's acknowledgement that anybody against Bush has lost, too... Moreover we've all lost, and will continue to lose.

The neoCon agenda has been one enormous, tragic, expensive error that will continue for many, many decades as some, meanwhile, continue to become extremely wealthy.

People are complaining that Bush is "lying" about the war.

Actually, it's more like this:

He's just going on a monopoly controlled state media outlet and giving the kind of propaganda speech that you see given by leaders in countries such as Cuba, or Russia, or China, or Iraq prior to the invasions, when there were giant statues of the then chief of state right hand in the air in the Roman "Ave" salute (the one Bush has been affecting for the last few years as he gets in and out of airforce aircraft going to and from his various private residences and the state mansion in DC).

It's not "lying." That would be more of a personal thing, of a personal nature: It's state controlled media propaganda. The state wants you to believe certain things, like for instance that there is a real democratic process behind the present charade called the 2008 presidential elections.

How many of you really believe in the reality of these made for T.V. cardboard candidates paraded before you by the Democratic and Republican parties. It's pure fiction.

For instance, take Hillary Clinton's candidacy...Why isn't Gore running again? Why isn't Kerry running again?

The point is this: It's unreal. It defies gravity, natural priorities: It's propaganda.

It's not lying: That would be specific. No this is the creation of a fictional reality.

It points to a condition of dictatorship.

The question we need to ask is more like this:

How entrenched is the current dictatorship?
And...
Who really runs this rust bucket? One person alone, a group, someone we know of or someone or a group behind them.

Most likely, there are some group dynamics behind this situation. Most likely, it's largely smoke and mirrors, rewards and lots of fear mingled with comfort levels that need to be maintained.

But, almost certainly it's money...big chunks of money, large family and industrial fortunes, old monied institutions with revolving chairmanships and lifetime employees and contributors.

This is the meaning of "conservatism". It is the preservation and growing of huge amounts of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Follow the money and you'll find the people behind all of this. It's really quite easy.

Thank you, Mark Morford, for bringing it all back home.
Who ARE we as a nation? Can we evolve into a co-operative nation that works at a peaceful world, instead of just killing and drilling?

Your sentiments sound a hell of a lot like those of Dennis Kucinich.

We need this kind of leadership now.

Isn't it nice that we talk to ourselves and all agree? And isn't it sad that we talk to ourselves because there's no real point in talking to the people who supposedly represent us? "Write your Congressman" is the mantra, but you might as well throw messages in a bottle into the ocean. My Congressman is Kit Bond, well-known Bush brownnoser. We have a Republican Party that is evil personified and a Democrat Party that is wishy-washy personified. And a president who apparently would rather lie than tell the truth, although considering the starkness of the truth it's no wonder.
One of the commentators said he was 71. Well, I'm 73, have lived through a bunch of administrations, including some pretty nasty ones, but this Bush bunch trumps them all. Anyone who reads the nation's history knows there always have been scoundrels and downright evil humans in positions of power and we've survived and thrived despite them. I'm not so sure this time around. There are too many assaults on the democratic ideal and too little passion to stop them.
Will we improve under a new president? I doubt it. I suspect the voters will grit their teeth and pick someone like Roughshod Rudy because they don't want to vote for a woman or an African American. And, oh, boy! won't we have fun then!

The above discussion points to this idea:

The capital accrued by various clans and organizations (frequently ideological in nature, including religious groups), has taken on a life of its own.

In fact, the people may change, but the situation remains amazingly similar. The great God of Greed sits astride this human pyramid of power. The people in power are besotted with greed, it animates their thinking and lust for total control over society, over all of the economy.

With the greed comes fear and anger, like attendant little demons or greek gods, nipping at the heals of the great fat god of greed. This is the god the great moral god of the conservatives.

These are people who believe that worship of capital and preservation of capital creates stability in their existence, making them immune to sickness, age and death.

Of course, it does nothing of the sort. They are just as sickly '(often more so), aged (almost always) and close to death as everyone else. Hence, the rage... We've seen this rage now for over 7 years.

You see the rage of the worshippers of the God of Greed like a Rushmore of little demons splashed on a cheesey Hollywood summer movie poster every time a new country is singled out for bombing, partition and pillage.

We see the angry aligned profiles of our Lone Rangers and Tantos, ready to fire their silver bullets into the offending crowd of happily un-rich, but joyously struggling humanity.

The god of greed is a hungry god. He (well perhaps he is a she?) is never satisfied with what is at his table. He wants what is at the next table.

The god of greed eats everything, especially people. Gobbles up property, people, children, Constitutions, art forms, museums and cultural monuments, businesses, communities, nations, people, oceans full of fish, whole species of animals...

The god of greed has taken over soul of the USA.

When Americans look in the mirror in the morning: The Great God of Greed stares back into their eyes.

Years ago, the Dalai Lama was asked what was wrong with the world, and why his noble people and culture were being unneccessarily and wantonly genocided.

I thought he would say something angry against the perpetrators, denouncing their rapine, and speak out against specific culprits or as we now like to say "evil" people.

But no. He said just this:

"I think it is greed."

This seemed innocuous enough. I couldn't see the connection back then, over a decade ago.

Greed just didn't seem like enough of a reason or power.

Ah, but today, when we look at the Iraq war, at the war profiteering, at great fat god of greed reaching out for helpless civilian victims in foreign countries, in order to take control of minerals, stock markets, national industries and utilities...When you see children and families bombed in apartment buildings because of rage generated by the god of greed who is being asked simply to pay a little higher wage or share some small portion of ill begotten wealth...

Then I begin to understand the Dalai Lama's simple and accurate diagnosis of the disease, of the deadly sin that is the most powerful virus now threatening the continued existence of the human race and all other species on the planet.

It's the God of Greed.

The people now in charge are overcome by the Greed God. Their hellish visages are proof of the progress of the disease.

The congress and all branches of the government and most of industry is filled with these unhealthy folks.

What's the cure?

By the way:

"We" do not need to win in Iraq. "We" never got into this.
This is Bush's war. He started it. Alone.

Now, Bush has LOST this war.

He's lost the war, and that's where it stands.

One last thing:

"Greed kills."

Mark Morford should be syndicated in every newspaper in America.

But he's too "left coast", too mystical, too much a damn good dot connector.

God Bless you Mark - truth teller

Icons of American Greed:

I invite other posters to create a list.

1.
2.
3.

"Well, I'm 73, have lived through a bunch of administrations, including some pretty nasty ones, but this Bush bunch trumps them all."

Relatives of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, asked whether the country was in worse shape at the time of the executions or now, universal say that the Bush regime is far worse.

""Write your Congressman" is the mantra, but you might as well throw messages in a bottle into the ocean. "

When I wrote to my congressman, one of the freshman Dissemblecrats, about the necessity of impeachment, I received back the answer that the congressman took his responsibilities very seriously and IF ANY EVIDENCE OF ANY IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE WERE TO TURN UP IN THE COURSE OF A CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION, why, then he would be glad to vote for impeachment.

I went to the website of a local paper today. The Rocky Mtn News here in Denver. The one article on the speech was just an article where a reporter watched the speech with two brain-dead war supporters who just gushed about how Bush's speech made reassured them and made them feel wonderful about their support of the war.

A newspaper in Germany in 1938 couldn't have done it better.

Check it out here.... http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5697913,00.html

And note that while one link on the page does go to an article on the Dem response, there's not a hint of any 'reporting' that might actually check some facts.

Your congressperson is safe because any congressional investigations that might turn up any improprieties is blocked by Pelosi. People like John Conyers definitely have had their marching orders all year long to only investigate issues that might embarrass the Republicans, but to stay far away from any investigations that might lead to impeachable offenses.

The reply you got seems like a decent answer until you step back and see the bigger game played by the Dem leadership to protect Bush and Cheney and to make sure they serve out their term .... just like Reid and Pelosi promised would happen months before the last elections. Thus he can give that answer safe in the knowledge that he'll never have to follow through on it.

BRAVO! Well said! (But "pule"? "blindered"? Yipes! Still, style and rage were never better mated.) You couldn't be more right: our Iraq crime was an unprovoked attack and occupation, no more or less, and the blood-and-treasure sacrifice is irredeemable. Yet you err, Mark. This "massive historic blunder" is a howling success. Just ask Dick Cheney or any of his friends at Halliburton. Ask Blackwater or any of the 180,000 "independent contractors" running roughshod over the folks there and getting extravagantly paid to do it. (Where do you suppose our half-trillion has gone?) Ask any "Great Gamer," like Kissinger or Zbig Brzezinski. The point (besides fleecing us again) is to keep the Mid-East "cauldronized" so no one has a moment to think rationally about opposing U.S. interests--commercially, militarily, morally or in any category you can name--and see how well we've done it! As for the New Day Dawning you conjure, not, amigo, unless we summon it harder than we're doing. I'm running as a Democrat for congress from the First District (Oregon border to Sacramento City Limit), to raise heck with the cowards and criminals who've taken over my party. You're writing powerful stuff (and most of this cri de coeur is dead on). That's the sort of summoning it takes. More! More! The abstraction referred to as "the American People" is slow to wake, but when it does, big stuff happens, including, maybe, the morning you sense is coming. I'm betting on it.

Mitch Clogg
Mendocino, CA
mitchc@mcn.org
Candidate for U.S. Congress
California First Congressional District

zoya: "I sincerely hope that this current fiasco is nothing more or less than patriarchy's last-ditch stand and the sputtering out of White Power."

Sputtering out of White Power? What Whites are you talking about? Not the poor whites where I'm from. You're utilizing racism to mis-diagnose the true culprit: moneyed interests (many of whom still happen to be of Euro-ancestry, but quickly that's changing). White-ness is not responsible for Bush. Many non-whites voted for him, and we could construe that they tipped the scale in his favor! But that'd be silly. No, widespread ignorance and fear did it, and we're still surrounded by it. Probably, we'll always be surrounded by it.

Mark Monford is trying to reason that the war is unprofitable, "a waste of time," a "waste of life," a "waste of money," a "waste of American flesh", farther down the line a "waste of Iraqi flesh,"...

He's appealing to our sense of horror at the waste, the loss of our tax dollars.

What is really going on?

Americans are only interested in the expansion of the economy. Americans pay tax dollars in order to fund the expansion of the economy. No one expects any of that money to invested in infrastructure or public works, schools or transportation, or free higher education, or even free public health.

No the money is given to the central bank to be given to corporations and rich individuals who are then supposed to expand our economy.

These folks chose to take the money abroad and put it directly in private accounts, and to invest in killing and imprisoning people in a protection racket scheme called "The War On Terrorism." The "War on Terrorism" is a money laundering scheme perpetrated by the American government, including all three branches.

This is a not waste of money, nor is it a waste of time.

It's pure profit.

And the reason Americans go along with it is because the American dream says that you might become a lottery winner in this pyramid scheme. Each American believes that he or she can become a winner in this system.

Iraqi's on the other hand do not believe this.

They do not think the war is a waste either.

They believe that the war is very profitable for Americans.

They do not believe that Iraqi's can in any way profit from America's shock and awe doomsday politics.

And so, they are spending their time and money getting guns and bombs to throw the Americans out.

The American people have set up their entire economy on wars such as this, and so they will continue as long as there are willing soldiers (also earning money at it) and mercenaries, and weapons to continue.

Monford is telling us to quit becuase there is no profit.

He too believes like I do, that greed is the great god that makes America tick.

Haliburton, oil corporations, and military contractors are doing fine, thank you very much. The Iraqi civil conflicts are going gangbusters, making it easier for US troops to eventually clear out the country. When there's no people left, there will be no one to share the oil profits with, no one to pay reparations to (and these would be astronomical). The aim is to kill or scare off all the potential was crime plaintiffs. If the victims aren't around, no one can be charged, right? Just like the Holocaust, the US appears committed to finishing off its crimes. The US congress are behaving like Daleks. We will exterminate. If they withdraw, they must have been in the wrong. They can't admit that. Besides, there's a whole nation of oil to win.

Where I differ from Monford is among other things here at this point:

Solving greed thinking by appealing to profit consciousness will not work.

The diseased individual has to see the correlation between greed and death as with other bad habits such as alcohol, cigarettes or drugs.

A greed diseased America, the big obesely fat America we now know will have to realize that greed is a delusion that cannot be satisfied. It is a diseased state of mind and body.

When this settles in to the national psyche, and that might never happen, things could start to improve.

Three last words.

"A Depression is coming".

Oops, four words.

Hey mustbefree,

Save a little of that bloodlust for the Repugs. We wouldn't be in this shit heap if it wasn't for pondscum Repugs.

Jvance,
What exactly would be the point in writing a congressman? People on this blog know the futility of doing such a thing. Congressmen for the most part have shown us where they stand. For the most part, the ones we thought were actually concerned have had demonstrators arrested (Conyers/Sheehan). If you really believe they listen to you, then write away, but when you get your form letter in the mail signed, "Thank you for your concern," maybe you'll realize that the only letters they actually read themselves are the ones with $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

I would like to believe that the prevailing world view of violence, power and greed was dying and that better world is coming. I would really like to think that was true. Unfortunately I don't. Sure, there are many good and even enlightened people but those who dream of the "hundredth monkey," the "paradigm shift" and the "Age of Aquarius" are delusional. What it's going to take to get us beyond this darkness is a militant class consciousness unified in a struggle to crush the deadly tyranny of a corrupt and monstrous system. That may happen if (or when) the economy collapses but as long as people are enslaved to the cycle of jobs and consumerism and as long as that holds out, I fear that nothing will change.

Very sober Mark. I truly feel your pain, and mine.

I see no reason to give this piece any plaudits or hosannas. It is riddled with deliberate inaccuracies and falsities, all geared to make Americans feel "better" about the abhorrent situation in Iraq.

First of all, the invasion of Iraq was not a "mistake," nor is it a "debacle" from the point of view of the people who initiated it. For them, everything is right on schedule. The complete destruction of Iraq, and any sovereignty it might claim to possess, was always the ultimate goal.

Secondly, this American warmongering has been a consistent factor on the world stage for the past 50 years. Iraq is absolutely nothing new, although it has reached a new level of in-your-face "unsavoryness," if that's a word. If Momford were truthful, he would elaborate on how America truly has no "innocent" past to go back to. There is no mythical time when it stood as the "light of the world."

The same evils -- subversion of elected governments, covert assassinations, stealing natural resources from poorer countries -- have been coming out of Washington for decades, even under so-called pacifists like Carter.

Americans absolutely refuse to be honest about things like this, but seeing such lies from a so-called "liberal" writer brings the point home all the more forcefully.

I could go on and on, but what really got me was the repeating of the base and abhorrent lie that "tens of thousands" of Iraqis have been killed. Try upping that number by about a million, and you'll be much closer to the truth. I'm sure Momford knows this, but for the sake of writing a puff piece, under the guise of criticizing the current administration, he reinforces as many right-wing lies as possible.

Articles like this -- designed to make Americans feel "better" about their own horrid history -- show how absolutely morally bankrupt the country is, and has been for a long, long time.

Why Blame Bush?

The unprecedented atrocities by this arrogant zealot and his henchmen, include stolen elections, disastrous war on our environment through manipulation of science, intimidation of congress with unprecedented character assassinations (ie branding a triple amputee Viet Vet for supporting an inquiry into the causes of 9/11), a grossly misguided war, & the list goes on.

Blame falls mainly on the apathetic populace who voted for Bush, and then stood by while his team inflected more damage on our republic, and the world, than any administration in our history.

I want each and every one of you to fess up to how much OIL you use everyday.

How much gas do YOU use driving around?

How much energy do YOU use in running your home, your work, your toys?

How much energy is used to make and distribute the products YOU consume?

How much waste do YOU generate?

All of these things require the OIL that we are fighting over, that grease that keeps the capitalist machine running, that creates the lifestyle we've become accustomed to and take totally for granted. Look in the mirror, look within, look around, it starts with a conscious choice and diligent effort to change your consumption habits. First take person responsibility, then point the finger.

Saddam Hussein said that "The Americans will commit suicide at the gates of Baghdad", and they have and will.

I don't support the war-never have- so I certainly can't support those who are fighting it. There can never be "victory" in an agressive war. The American troops are fighting for nothing. The Iraqis are fighting a defensive war against the occupiers. The Iraqis are fighting for something-freedom.

XI PEOPLE, I respectfully disagree with many of your rather one sided comments. The one I will address, to keep it brief, is your lengthy tirade about the author writing "tens of thousands" instead of a million, or perhaps near a million. If you are a literary critic, that would be your rather picky opinion. But most would not pick at a writers style or "voice". I got the message, "tens of thousands" could be more than a million in my opinion. Just take 10 times 10 and add in the 000s. One dead innocent human is one too many. Finally, I garnered NO pleasure or felt "better" from reading the very well written paper. On the contrary, I was once again shamed of what our government has done to us and our country.

ROBERT. I do believe you wrote the KEY words that amplified the rest of your critical views of all of "US". If you are an American citizen, I do hope you mentally included 'yourself' in the guilt trip. You wrote, "STOLEN ELECTIONS", which I at least did not condone or have anythng to do with. ___ Did You?

my vote seems to have never counted...ive never voted for a bush or anything resembling one...face it..the elections have always been rigged and freedom an illusion...

Tell me, what good is choice if the majority can not prevail.