THE WRECKING BAR OF CRITICISM

Since the financial crisis started many millions have slowly come to the realization that the myths of American prosperity that we hear so much about are just that, myths.  Yet it is difficult to abandon these myths.  


I might imagine I am a middle class person but when do I finally confront the fact that I am a worker too and one who every year gets less and less compensation for the work one can get if it can be gotten at all!


But what about the billionaires and millionaires and the armies of experts that ran this economy into the ground?  They got bailed out in less than a year but we are left twisting in the wind with more and more absurd lies coming out of the mouths of Democrats and Republicans alike.


Yet there is this fairy tale out there that we still try to believe that this is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.  Well it should be but it obviously is not a government for the people.  The various branches of government are almost without exception of the rich, by the rich and for the stinking capitalist system whatever the consequences for the rest of us.


Who makes up these fairy tales, fairy tales about how great the economy is and how wonderful the illusions of the past are?  Who makes that up?


Well, we do and they do too.  Only what about the facts, aren't they at least as important of our favorite myths?


Unfortunately we are bombarded with by the channelers of the silly oppressive myths that make up the totality of our own confusion and disorientation.  We are misled and told to think in terms that make no sense.
Then we are led to believe that some trustworthy expert knows better and we are supposed to retire to the background and become passive acceptors of whatever the so-called experts decide.  There is no magic solution but we all need to start by rejecting the false and oppressive "solutions" of the capitalist experts and the bought and sold politicians.  They are even more brainwashed than we are!


So what is wrong and what is a lie and what is hypocritical.  Those are three questions we can all ask when we hear someone say something or read something.  Those are times to reflect and instead of dancing like a fool or playing mental corpse you should think about what the corporations and big government is trying to stuff in your head.


Think for yourself and pretty soon you will be smarter than you ever imagined!

THE IMPORTANCE OF REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IS MORE OBVIOUS NOW

In a period of obvious social crisis, like the present, the old ways of thinking and explanations for social reality begin to look like rubbish and are discarded. This is true for both the rulers and the ruled. Right now the ruling elites are telling fairy tales about how things are getting better. Soon they will be offering new explanations for widspread poverty and want. The revivification of white supremacy is part of that "new explanation" for the collapse of our beloved capitalist system. You see people trying to blame Jews for the economic collapse as an alternative to pointing out that the capitalist system is inherently unstable and prone to collapse. Then there are those that believe immigrants are the cause of capitalist oppression.
Yes the capitalists have lots of scapegoats for the failures of their economic monopolies. Of course it would help if everyone forgets the happy stories about American prosperity, and who knows how many millions will simply zone out and do that. Only some of them will have aching bellies and may do a little more thinking than if they were
overfed as in the past.

Of course if we remain passive, robot-like and obedient we will simply "forget" those lies we passionately believed in yesterday only to embrace the new lies of the oppressors and their system. Of course, lies are eagerly embraced by many but I hope that most of us will chose to see the truth, look at the facts and believe in those things rather than lies.

Mental slavery is what holds us back as oppressed women, oppressed workers and oppressed citizens of a bought and sold Republic. Lies and deceptions are a big part of Big Brother manipulations whether that be from the State or the Private Sector but the whole twisted way these lies and "facts" are organized by reactionary and conservative ideologies is even more deceptive and serves to make the oppressors look like the good guys. The oppressor is rarely the "good guy". "Good guy" is not the oppressor role. If the oppressor takes whatever resources he can from others and then does something "good" with that stolen wealth then we can see that all the good the oppressor did was based on the labor of others, and "the commons" available to all free citizens.

I think it is just about impossible to separate the oppressor from the web of social relations, the system of social relations that are oppressive. There is a personal and
social or collective aspect to this oppression just as it seems reasonable to think of liberty as the personal aspect of the more collective liberation.

Look at proposed Obamacare legislation, for example. It codifies a web of oppressive social relations where insurance companies, big pharma and other capitalist exploiters can do their best to deny health care to enhance profits and perks for managers and investors. In that sense Obama is an architect of oppression in the area of health and health care.

Consider another example. A person who wants slaves cannot do so without a social system that makes that possible.

So being a slave holder has a personal aspect. The slave holder is names Jefferson or Jackson and maybe he is a daddy of some of the slaves. So there are these personal aspects. Yet without the Constitution of the United States as immortalized by our founding fathers such slavery and the evil slaveholder would have been impossible, because that document makes slavery part of the nation as conceived by the United States Constitution. So it makes sense to look at the social and the personal, the collective and the individual aspect of things.

Some ideas about how liberty, liberation, oppression and all that work are also critical. That is why a liberation ideology or ideologies are helpful. They help us understand the basis of really existing oppressions and to design ways to achieve an end to these oppressions and the struggle for liberations instead.

A historical perspective is also helpful. How did we get where we are today? Where have we been? Where are we going? I think that we can put together a sort of robust historical materialism for the twenty first century but even if history has no built in progressivism we can hopefully work together to overcome oppressor ideologies and oppressive social relations, design liberated webs os social relations and implement them.

While no illuminating liberation framework should be neglected it seems to this observer that economic relations and the social relations that are based on these economic relations are now an arena of dramatic change. The long trend of proletarianization (for want of a better word) is accelerating with Depression 2.0 and the so-called "middle class" is disappearing at a remarkable rate. Can American workers remain enslaved by bigotry and religious nonsense? I hope not!


Class struggle and class oppression are the key link because class struggle interpenetrates so many aspects of social oppression and liberation.

Of course this observation is salient to this observer especially since the current economic crisis is hitting the United States in a way it has not for many decades. The long decline in the economic well being of the nation and its citizens has reached some sort of breaking point and the new United States will be more obviously a working class nation than most baby boomers could have ever imagined.

After all, my generation was led to believe and ended up believing in the vitality and prosperity of the United States
even if relative poverty still existed in the United States even in the most affluent of times. It was an article of faith that the United States was rich and that it was a middle class nation, now and forever, Amen.

Yet since Nixon went to China the clear trend has been to pit American workers against Chinese and other foreign workers being paid a pittance. Today millions and millions of more Americans are going to be paid nothing because after nearly forty years of bipartisan treason the middle class society of old is rapidly coming apart at the seams and a clearly working class nation is emerging.

Ironically socialism and communism makes more sense for those of us in the United States than ever. That doesn't mean following some rigid model that doesn't fit the remnants of our advanced industrial society. The relative success of Social Security and Medicare should not be understated. In some ways these programs may be models for the world. Clearly we need a just society where there is a place of dignity and useful activity for everyone and the very powerful and corrupt state capitalism we have now is just not filling the bill.

Of course there are not really any new ideas that I am hearing from our bought and sold rulers. It seems that free market fundamentalism remains in the saddle as Obama merrily struggles for the restoration of the status quo ante.

Of course, in the face of collapse and no really new ideas some suggest straight up hard fascism is America's future. I hope Gore Vidal is wrong and we don't end up with a straight up dictator but that is the trend with the militarization of domestic law enforcement and the introduction of the armed forces into domestic law enforcement as well. An American Mussolini or Franco is a potential solution for our fabulous capitalist ruling class. It is up to the rest of us to take away their jobs as rulers and to assume the position of sovereign citizens which they have stolen and reserved only for the themselves.

As for any American Mussolini we should oppose such fascists and defeat them stategically if we cannot prevent the rise of such a tyrant in the first place. Is it already happening? Look at the G2o meeting!

LIBERATION FRAMEWORK CATEGORIES

ABSTINENCE
ACTIVISM/CAMPAIGNING
ABOLITIONISM
ANARCHISMS
ANIMAL LIBERATION
ANTI-IMPERIALISM
ASCETICISM
BOLSHEVISM
COMMUNISMS
CONFUSCIANISM/GOOD CONDUCT
DEMOCRACY, DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION
DHARMA
ECOLIBERATION/SUSTAINABLITY
EDUCATION
EGALITARIANISM
EMPIRE
FASCISM
FREE ENTERPRISE/CAPITALISM
GOVERNMENT
FEMINISMS WOMEN'S LIBERATION
HABITAT PRESERVATION
HEALTH CARE, MEDICINE, MEDICAL SCIENCE
HUMAN RIGHTS
KING- STRONGMAN
LGBT LIBERATION STRUGGLES
LIBERATION THEOLOGIES
PACIFISM
POLITICAL REVOLUTION
POLITICAL PARTIES
PRODUCTION
PUBLIC EDUCATION
PUBLIC HEALTH
REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISMS
SOCIAL CONTRACT
SOCIAL REVOLUTION
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
SELF-HELP
SOCIALISMS
SOCIAL REVOLUTION
TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
UNIONISM
WISDOM
WOBBLIES
WOMEN'S LIBERATION
WORKING CLASS RULE
WORK

WHY STUDY MULTIPLE FRAMEWORKS OF LIBERATION?

Perhaps we should be calling PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION by the term PROGRESSIVE STUDY instead. I am studying these various and sundry liberation frameworks and I hope to share that study with others. Of course my current goal is to overcome my excessive ignorance. There is a lot to learn. So from a personal point of view the overall mission of the PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION blogs is to engage in PROGRESSIVE STUDY. That is to say the blogs are about studying various frameworks of liberation and liberty to see what we can find out by studying these ideas and how they manifest themselves in human activity.

I am making a list of the categories of liberation.

What is remarkable is that there are many categories of liberation. Similarly I hope to look at the various frameworks and how they impact so-called Liberty. So when I am saying Liberation I am usually wrapping Liberty as a fraternal twin
of Liberation.

A single category of frameworks often has a mind boggling diversity. How many progressive socialisms or communisms have been advanced or proposed, as frameworks? Hundreds?

Human Rights frameworks generally seem progressive. Many other ideological orientations and many frameworks focus on human rights qua human rights. Much has been accomplished in this area although liberation is more of a growing opportunity rather than a resolved task. Human Rights frameworks are more legitimized in our society than some other liberation frameworks.

When Malcom X was a revolutionary nationalist, he was also a follower and advocate of a particular liberation theology: ie. the framework provided by the Nation of Islam framework.

Malcom X also was also a supporter of the human rights framework and was quite a supporter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as other internationally sanctioned human rights conventions.

So we can see that in the case of Malcom X, that we can understand his political orientation and development better if we take multiple frameworks of liberation into account. Stereotypically Malcom X may be known as a very militant speaker but his support of human rights conventions and preference for genuine democratic political processes are generally overlooked. I am not aware of Malcom X, as a political leader actually pursuing a violent struggle in any particular situation.

In fact, few progressive individuals or groups are influenced by only one liberation framework. If we look at just one aspect of an individual or group ideology we may fail to appreciate the explanatory and guiding influence of embrace of various liberation framework.

So we can think of a multi-framework analysis of an individual politicians life as a potentially useful way to look at individual and group understandings, orientations and direction of motion. Such analyses can be used to understand past behavior or suggest future activities.

We might even think of mathematizing this idea a bit by assigning a particular liberation framework a sequence of linear equations with each equation describing any particular framework concretion, ie. an equation for each distinctive species. Or should each conceptual configuration for a category be defined by one linear equation? Time to get out the math notebook, yee ha!

WHAT IS THE IDEA OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION ON THIS BLOG?

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION, what does a term like that mean on this blog? Well, I am hopeful that some reader may eventually help me define such a term. I am clearly trying to put diverse ideological frameworks that I am selecting as "progressive" into the a sack labeled progressive. So a number of ideas are tossed into the same bag. I like them, I like to think they are more-or-less progressive frameworks as well.

Many of these frameworks are interrelated, at least I think various liberty and liberation notions are related. So take feminism or women's liberation. That seems like an obvious dimension of progressive thought and practice. It seems that as long as a feminism or women's liberation can help in liberating women from patriarchal oppression who can say it is anything else? Liberation theology or liberation theologies seems like another set of frameworks that are generally progressive. Abolitionism seems like a progressive framework as well, abolishing slavery that is. So we have mentioned three categories of liberation frameworks already and I guess these things, as different as they are seem intuitively similar and we can imagine them overlapping to some degree as well.

Most feminists oppose slavery, they are in that sense supporters of abolitionism, most of us are in some sense. So there you have the intersection of the set of abolitionisms and the set of feminisms. This is a sort of short hand approach, of course, since the various feminisms and abolitionisms may stray from what most of us regard a progressive values or progressive effects.

Similarly an abolitionist may or may not be a feminist or for womens liberation. Historically we have seen that some who opposed chattel slavery were also very patriarchal. Feminism and abolitionism don't necessarily overlap.

Liberation theologies. They may or may not be feminist in nature. I think of some of the liberation theologies in the Americas and it is difficult to imagine any of them justifying slavery. Liberation theologies often seems to advance the freedom and liberation of women.

Ed Hayes Promised a National Convention and is Delivering a Worksohop

WHAT NATIONAL CONFERENCE?
Minutemen scale back to local workshop!

MCDC; MINUTEMAN GROUPS IN A NUTSHELL
MCDC Minuteman Local Workshop Planned


Minuteman Civil Defense Corp (MCDC) will charge fees for a local workshop after scaling back its plans for February 1st and 2nd Kansas City, Missouri.

The first day is at the historic Uptown Theater and is purportedly open to the public. The second day, they hope to carry on at a secret location. MCDC claims they have security concerns but they have not really been challenged to explain what they are.

This doesn't mean that the event is likely to be anything like the often announced “first only national convention”. Dos Mundos recently referred to the event as a “regional conference” suggesting that expectations are way down. National MCDC refers to the event as a “regional retreat”.

When you think about it, it is something of a retreat. Once and still advertised as a national conference the MCDC event is going to be even smaller than imagined. Yet, somehow even Hispanic media take MCDC claims at face value. A little journalism reveals that they really hype their predictions. So the once ballyhooed national convention was, and still is uncritically reported as going to happen by the local media.

Once Dos Mundos reported there would be an MCDC national convention. They and other journalists should be asking, “Where is the national conference now?” It may not be the the most important or sexy story but it is still the story, a story of faltering efforts and lower expectations. This story of faltering efforts also has the merit of conforming to the facts.

The workshop personnel listed suggests more of a local workshop with the national MinutemanHQ staff pulling triple duty as attendees, trainers and speakers. After firing a dozen or more chapter heads back in the Spring of 2007 Chris Simcox has had a relatively low profile. Simcox has had trouble speaking at a dozen or so public venues across the nation due to protests. He also continues to be engaged in a long term vendetta with his rival and former minuteman ally Jim Gilchrist. Gilchrist organizes under the name www.minutemanproject.com .
[This local KCMO workshop can be seen as an effort by Simcox to rally those MCDC folks who have not defected to the Gilchrist minuteman faction.]

Of course we have no firm idea as to how many folks might be sympathetic to this MCDC event. While anti-immigrant fervor may be a majority view in some isolated areas of the nation I think we can agree that the MCDC view is actually a minority view even within the Anglo or white community.

Only something like twenty five percent of all Americans are disturbed about the current immigration situation. About the same percent are thrilled to have
the kind of immigration we have today. Yet politicians and the corporate media seem to be relatively prone to exaggerate the amount of support anti-immigrant activists have. Of course there are enough unhappy folk to makes fertile ground for groups like MCDC. Groups like MCDC have simple solutions and even simpler explanations for the difficult problems in a stunningly complex and interdependent world.

EDUCATION ABOUT THE STRUGGLE IN JENA

Who are the teachers and who are the students in the struggle for liberation? The struggle in Jena suggests that citizens are the educators, that even those designated as students have done
a great deal of teaching by marching in Jena for the overthrow of the police-judiciary apparatus that now weighs upon our nation like a boulder of shame.

Without the struggle of citizens, antiracist citizens, the media monopolies would have simply chosen to continue their perpetual blindness to white supremacy in America. So even the brainwashers, the primary miseducators the CNNS, THE FOX OUTLETS, AND ALL THE OTHER MEDIA MONOPOLY had to pay attention even though it is their job to do just the opposite, look away from racial injustice and focus on say a perpetual news-soap opera like OJ1 or now OJ2.

So while it is true that a certain amount of lecturing or reading and writing and discussion is certainly essential to education there must also be struggle, the struggle of knowledge against ignorance, of justice against injustice and of the oppressed against the oppressor.

Liberating ideas must be arrayed against oppressor ideas. A liberation system must be deployed to contend with the oppressor system.

Genocide: Made by U. S. A. in Iraq

Certainly one of the pillars of understanding the world today and the challenges we face in every corner of the globe is to see genocide for what it is. So when the United States and Great Britain united to invade Iraq they claimed it was for freedom. So I ask, "What freedom do the 1.2 million Iraqis that have died as a result of the invasion and conquest have?" What freedoms do the Iraqi peoples have today? They so rarely have electricity, running water, the necessities of life. Perhaps the Kurds are doing better but when has American foreign policy failed to betray them?

Of course it is more complicated than to say that the United States has never done a good thing.
Americans tend to have thin skins when it comes to looking at the bloody facts of American history. So let's not go bonkers when we point out that killing 1.2 million people is not harmless error, it is a crime of vast proportions.

How will we deal with this crime and will anything or anyone be able to stop a similar human sacrifice of vast proporitons in Iran. Raining death from the sky is more America's style anyway. I guess they'll just bomb Iran and possibly try to terrorize the world with nuclear weapons once again. I can just imagine the Bush-Cheney clique and other neocons plotting a nuclear lesson to the hitherto less than enthusiastic nations if the world.

But back to the point. Kill a million people and we're going to call it genocide. How many Americans are aware of genocide in American history. How many Americans are in denial of this genocide? How many Americans like this genocide?

Lesson: Genocide has been a characteristic of human groups at various times in history and perhaps prehistory. Today genocide is taking place in places like Darfur, Sudan and Iraq. In the one case the United States decries the genocide. In Iraq, however, the United States government, at least, is not owning up to the fact that it has killed more than a million Iraqi's since "liberating" (ie. invading) the country in 2003.

We need to take off the blinders as Dr. Ben Spock said and look at what the United States is actually doing. In Iraq its doing a certain kind of genocide. How will we deal with this crime,
this ongoing crime? Certainly we should not pretend that the United States is helping the people of Iraq by making this particular bloodbath.






AlterNet
Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 17, 2007, Printed on September 17, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62728/

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.

The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.

These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century -- the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community" has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions, there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism -- the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.

But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally -- we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage." It's also factually incorrect -- as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.

Like the earlier study in the Lancet -- one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results -- this new research is already being dismissed out of hand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on several studies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, has had trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):

[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year, which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.

1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000 -- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around. Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.

If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having an illicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.

With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraq war will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/62728/

Education or miseducation?

What is the legacy being bequethed to us by the man who claimed that he wants to be known as "the education President"? It is certainly not an enhancement of the United States educational system at any level. Indeed, while literally blithering about "education" he has not only undermined Primary, Seconday and Higher Education but also engages in a politics of deception and misdirection characteristic of a political manipulator rather than that of an educator.

Like Reagan G. W. says what he is told to say. Unlike Reagan he isn't particularly good at saying it. Only when he goes into the mode of a mediocre Baptist minister does he sound at all in his element. Millions have nonetheless listened and swooned!

I don't know how many times I have seen folks on television refer to this playboy turned President as a "godly man". He seems to have gotten the vote of just about every hard-core sinner turned "recovering alcoholic", "recovering coke dealer", "recovering wife beater", and so on and so forth... a much esteemed group of Christians who are just as eager to enunciate their formal allegience to the will of God as they were once eager to use drugs, engage in violence, graft, and commit just about any reprehensible act under the sun. G. W. captured this self-satisfied hypocrisy when upon deciding that he had won the Presidential election in 2000 he strutted about how modest and humble he was about the whole thing. The Cheshire Cat grin was writ large on his face the whole self-effacing time he said he was modest and humble. Hum
bug!

The man's almost legendary inability to speak anyone's English would be forgiven if he was actually trying to say something of merit. Instead he not only crucifies the language but insults all about him by continuously reciting lies that have been drummed into him during his seemingly endless "vacations" at Crawford, Texas. The miseducator himself must be miseducated and he is manipulated much as a "Manchurian Candidate" especially since he has no intrinsic interest in virtually anything he is saying, unless it pertains, of course, to his comic book version of fundamentalist Chrisitianity.

The nation and the world are in great peril as a consequence of the fact that there is a dunderhead in the White House.