Steve Benen at Maddow Blog on what Huffington Post's lead headline* this morning is calling the next in line of America's "cowboy wars":
The need for such expedited action remains entirely unexplained.
And so if the British people have been allowed a voice in the matter of whether to go to war against Syria and have rejected that option through their parliamentary voice, why are the American people being told, sans consultation, that we're apparently prepped to go to war? When the rationale for this step remains entirely unexplained?
And when we haven't been consulted, given a voice, allowed to talk about our misgivings?
One of the answers to these questions, I fear--to the question of why the nation's top leaders appear eager for perpetual war--is suggested by Chidanand Rajghatta today at Common Dreams: war's good for business. And business is what makes America tick.
Just as Republican president Dwight Eisenhower predicted in 1961, increasingly, what makes American tick is military business, the manufacture, buying, and selling of weapons, and the production of conflicts in which these weapons may be used to spur their manufacture, buying, and selling. As Bruce Gagnon observes (also at Common Dreams), war is now interwoven with the American soul--perpetual war: "We've become a killer nation."
We are addicted to violence. We are a nation in which lethal rhetoric is now mainstream, and streams forth relentlessly on talk radio and television shows with no one raising an eyebrow: deadly rhetoric about how an unarmed black teen shot in cold blood while carrying a bag of candy deserved to be murdered, about how faggots need to die, about how white Christian heterosexuals should stock up on guns to defend themselves against . . . who? Who is persecuting white Christian heterosexuals in America, or subjecting those folks, who own the country, to violence?
We have become a nation in which, in much of the country, it is easier to buy an assault weapon than to vote.
We have become a nation in which widening economic disparities yield a ruling class demonstrably unconcerned about the needs of those "beneath" the elites who run things--demonstrably hostile to the needs of those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Socioeconomic violence is crafted right into the American way of life now, and the same people who practice socioeconomic violence towards the have nots of this nation also benefit largely from the production and sale of weapons, and from perpetual war.
We've become a nation in which it's well-nigh impossible to raise one's voice any longer to deplore who and what we've become, because our government repeatedly demonstrates to us that it will proceed along the path of one cowboy war after another, no matter whom we elect or what we think. For many of us, the hope of the Obama administration vanished the moment we realized that, despite his promises to the contrary, the president did not intend to stand against the Bush administration's pattern of leading the nation to war in the absence of popular affirmation, but intended to replicate that pattern.
To listen exclusively to the morally lobotomized cheerleading of the beltway media and to the corporate elite whose interests the nation's governing structures now exist largely to serve . . . . Where is hope to be found anywhere in these arrangements, I ask myself?
And I hear no answer to that question.
*The article itself has a different title.
