You might be
surprised to know that I don’t read the Wall Street Journal regularly.
A friend just sent me Peggy Noonan’s column for Friday,”Playing Frisbee
on a Precipice.” The WSJ generally presents the views of those who run
the empire, and clearly they are worried:
“Both
campaigns, in the closing stretch, seem not fully worthy of the moment.
We are in crisis-a once-in-a-century event, as we now say. And what we
got from the candidates, in this week’s presidential debate, was a
bunch of gummy meanderings-smooth, rounded sentences so full of
focus-grouped inanities that six minutes in viewers entered a kind of
trance in which we almost immediately gave up on trying to wrest
meaning from what was being said and instead focused on mere
impressions. The look of things. The men on the plane, the pseudo-tough
political operatives who surround both candidates, sometimes grouse, in
private, that it’s all symbols now, all mood, all about the visual.
responsibility here. They send their candidates out to speak such thin
gruel, such spat-out porridge, that we are struck dumb, and left
daydreaming about the fact that Mr. Obama’s suits are always slate gray
and never seem to wrinkle, and Mr. McCain tonight seems like a rabbity
forest creature darting amid the hedgerows.
an empire, I agree! There isn’t anyone “up there” who can fix what is
going on with the globalized economy. They won’t stop the “war of
terror” yet Congress approved, and Bush signed a law today that rewards
India for developing nukes. And none of this has anything to do with
elections – the people have no say in it.
“On October 1, the Pentagon, for
the first time ever, dedicated an Army force specifically to NorthCom,
which is in charge of securing not some foreign region but the United
States of America. The unit it assigned is the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, which
has spent three of the last five years in Iraq. It was one of the first
units to get to Baghdad, and it was active in retaking and patrolling
Fallujah. One of its specialties is counterinsurgency. This
marks a change for NorthCom, which was established on October 1, 2002.
Its website still says it ‘has few permanently assigned forces,’ and
that ‘the command is assigned forces whenever necessary to execute
missions, as ordered by the President and the Secretary of Defense.'”
Yes, this is alarming, given the
militarization of the border, militarization of the schools, and the
spectacle of military-like policing in St. Paul last month. Here is ONE MORE CHANCE –before we send it on to the City Councils of Denver and St. Paul — to sign the petition against the abuse of political protest in those cities during the conventions.
Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime