Jiggedy-Jig

Home again, and catching up.

A great week with Marge, in blessed limbo in Maine. She's taught me how to take vacations, Marge has, and that's yet another great thing I've learned.
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What can he possibly say?

"Our complete undermining of all national support systems is complete!"

At the very time President Bush has prepared for another Presidential veto -- this time for a tentative step toward national health care for children --

-- he's going to bring -- what? Comfort? Succor? Support? What a sham. This Administration seems incapable of building or reconstructing anything -- not even their insane 700 mile wall across our southern border.

The collapse of the bridge, like the abysmal Hurricane Katrina reactions and 'clean up', further evidences the bankruptcy of the 'free market' (which isn't), privatization and for-profit GOP philosophy. Putting ill or underfunded bandaids on superstructures intended to support massive transit and transport is how the highway systems have gimped along for decades now. It's all falling apart, and will continue to, unless a major social rethink goes down.

Too many things -- like maintenance (true maintenance) of roads, bridges, utility systems, health care, etc. -- simply cannot function in the present 'everything privatized, everything for profit' philosophy which pretends there's no role for government when there clearly is a communal need for the common good. I simply cannot grasp the sustained pretense that the GOP stance against government, the very notion of government, has any validity. The core hypocrisy -- by seizing power, they've demonstrated only their own inability to govern -- is somehow ignored or dismissed by those most in need of the very social infrastructure the GOP philosophy has so successfully undermined and imploded, while conflating a reckless (I would say sociopathic) and destructive foreign policy and monstrous national debt. The 'smaller government' shell game has yielded a current Federal government that has grown as intrusive, omnipresent and massive as the irresponsible national debt it has racked up -- and built nothing in doing so.

Taking care of things like roads, bridges, utilities, health care, etc. in an all-encompassing, must-be-for-profit (e.g., privatized) network is a recipe for failure -- as we continue to see.

Taking care of 'things' which are inherently profitless by their very existence is essential, or we have bridges that collapse (despite clear warnings since 1990).

Taking care of people who have nothing or just lost everything is inherently a profitless enterprise, hence unattended to -- and we have the clear failures of Hurricane Katrina rescue, relief and rebuilding.

Taking care of health for all, including those with little or nothing, is either a communal need or it is a health care system destined for utter failure and eventual collapse, while draining those with means until they have no means -- then getting no care, as they can afford nothing more -- as the ongoing health care crisis in the US is proving in spades.

How many more hundreds of thousands, millions of case histories do we need?

The contemporary Republican philosophy is failing, and we see evidence of that failure daily now. Get used to it. Connect the dots.

Some of the implosions are invisible, happening to families and individuals. Others collapses -- the Minneapolis bridge tragedy -- are spectacular, and simply cannot be ignored, though the corporate media lovingly obfuscates any key or core issues relevant to such public collapses (to do otherwise would reveal their own complicity in the erosion of any social support networks; profit uber alle, so profiteer from the calamity of the public disasters, and sweep the private ones well out of public view).

The successful gutting of the FDR New Deal and the LBJ Great Society is complete; we either embrace a new political will and philosophy, and soon, to reverse the ongoing collapse, or suffer the consequences.

When the only Republican candidate approaching a somewhat humanist view -- Ron Paul -- also campaigns for the privatization of one of the few gov't systems still functional that we all depend upon daily -- the post office -- we're down to the brass tacks. I can't support any Republican candidate embracing privatization of working systems, given the clear evidence of the abject and destructive failure of that belief system.

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Things to remember when you see the new barrage of Army/Marine/National Guard commercials inundating the multiplexes and TV:

Here's another grim reminder of the toll of this fucking useless war -- and how much of a replay of lessons unlearned in Vietnam we're experiencing (this case is almost identical to the Vietnam atrocity dramatized in Casualties of War, which should be required viewing for anyone considering a stint in the military, followed by reading up on the current Steve D. Green and company Iraq atrocity).