You and whose army?

It's Memorial Day weekend again in the New South. It's nice to know they've finally accepted a holiday they once loathed. Of course it was Decoration Day until 1967 and after I was grown and had a family. It was as you know, about decorating the graves of Union Soldiers and after the next horror of the Great War, the graves of the 117,465 American dead: a day of solemn reflection.

But by 1967, the year before they changed it to Memorial Day to make it more compatible with our imperialism at the height of the senseless horror in Vietnam, it was about Dad's cremated Hamburgers and Indy; parades and patriotic hoo-ha, but perhaps it's because I now live in the South, it's taken on a new tone. Perhaps too, it's because I live in an area flooded with retired military folks filled with their own importance and those employed by the notorious Military- Industrial Complex -- but my in-box is once again flooded with glorious stories about our glorious military and the glorious things they do. A good part of them are hoaxes and of course there are no mentions of our heroes of My Ly 4 or Abu Ghraib or of the recent glorious heroes who accidentally slaughtered 30 or so civilians using robot planes in air conditioned comfort from halfway around the world.

No, what I get are bogus stories about Marines rescuing babies on 9/11/01 and how it is the Veterans" we owe our freedom of religion, press, speech and the rest of the rights we've had abridged because of the martial spirit of the times -- not the constitution, the courts or the Government of the United States.

Have we forgotten that the biggest enemy of freedom on this continent was the American South? Was anything we can call our own freedom at risk in most of our wars? Andrew Jackson's slaughter and deportation of the Seminoles? the use of Federal troops in slave raids into Florida? The Mexican War? The Spanish American War? The war against Philippine independence? What kind of threat to our freedom of speech necessitated suppressing free elections in Vietnam or the killing of two million civilians? What threat to our freedom of Religion was posed by Iraq? What threat were flower carrying kids in Ohio that they needed to be shot in the back by American troops? Were the troops driving armored vehicles down Chicago's State Street in 1968 there to support our right to assembly or to shut us up?

It' s not that I have any disrespect for veterans, living or dead, but our Constitution wasn't written by the Generals, no foreign power is any threat to it and that we still pay any attention to the Bill of Rights owes as much to the "activist" courts and the ACLU as to anything else. It owes nothing whatever to the Tea Bag flag wavers who hate government power unless it's carrying guns. It owes nothing to Macho flag wavers from John Wayne to Bomb-bomb McCain.

Memorial day has become an encomium not to dead soldiers; an expression not of profound grief. It's not a day when we mourn our losses or of any remembrance of the horror of war and militarism, but to celebrate living veterans, sing praise to the Armed forces and to the glory of war itself. It's a day we now use to decorate ourselves, congratulate ourselves on our military prowess and this in a country that's been fighting all my life but hasn't been on the winning side of a war since 1945. It's a day too often used to obscure the real threats to freedom with red white and blue bunting and it's good to remember that the same folks crowing about military defense of freedom are quite happy to require anyone with tan skin to carry proof of citizenship at all times, quite happy to give the local police the power of Federal Marshals and to forget all about warrants and probable cause. What army is going to protect us against our own smug racism, bigotry and expansionism?

Blackwater

Barack Obama is not trying to set up government death panels as the idiot Palin has told us, but he sure as hell is continuing to employ Blackwater Death Squads. I believe this to be the most dangerous, if not the most sinister development in American history. Comparisons between the state of our union and the collapsing Roman Empire are a dime a dozen, but when mercenaries begin to outnumber regular military, it becomes a threat and when the mercenaries have an objective which includes an evangelist theocracy, when they openly indulge in orgies, child prostitution, murder, destruction of evidence, illegal arms dealing, money laundering, tax evasion and armed mayhem with impunity while arrogantly refusing to allow congress to examine their books -- the threat demands that overused Roman comparison.

Such use of mercenary troops, immune from Congressional oversight and legal obligation, may or may not be unconstitutional, but it is, in my opinion, unconscionable.

The contract with Blackwater and its subsidiaries was set to expire in May, however the Obama administration has now decided to temporarily extend it through September, according to The Nation. Barack Obama needs to end this danger immediately. If we cannot raise sufficient troops to maintain our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to get out now, because the presence of heavily armed, privately owned military forces loyal to who knows whom in the United States may be the biggest threat to national survival since the Civil War.

Training the Nazis

“I hate Arabs more than anybody, for the simple fact I’ve served over there and seen how they live, They’re just a backward people. Them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I’m concerned. Their customs, everything to do with the Middle East, is just repugnant to me.”

says Forrest Fogarty. He's an Iraq War veteran and a lifelong Nazi. Despite being covered in Racist and Nazi tattoos and despite having been expelled from High School for overt and unrepentant racism; despite his public support for ridding the US and Europe of non-white races, despite the fact that regulations forbid it, the US military has trained him in weapons and tactics he hopes one day to use in a race war.

Writing in Salon.com, Matt Kennard tells us in Neo-Nazis are in the Army Now that Fogarty left the US Army in 2005 with an honorable discharge and was asked to re-enlist. He is apparently not a unique case and a DHS report outlines how as the military has had to scrape the bottom of the recruitment barrel, issuing waivers for criminal behavior, militant extremist groups have benefitted from the increased hate and frustration - and the government's willingness to train current and potential hate-group members.

It's become very difficult for Americans to criticize the military and the image of our "warrior" heroes fighting for freedom is a sacred icon, as it often becomes when our government has to hide and distract from the lies and distortions and cover-ups behind an unneccesary and probably illegal war, but it seems to me that another of the victims of George Bush's War, along with the Iraqi people, is our military and its reputation. It's bad enough that we've abused their patriotism and dedication, left too many wounded by the side of the road without adequate care and benefits, but have we trained and disciplined another generation of domestic terrorists to carry out a racist, hate-based mission?

Military intelligence

The twenty first century. The military might want to shut it all down; in the name of freedom, of course.

"GPS cell phone service could be used by our adversaries for travel plans, surveillance and targeting,"

said a draft report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). No more maps at gas stations folks, and I had better go back to using a sextant on my boat lest somebody hijacks it and uses it to terrorize the Florida coast.

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,"

Damn those vegetarian devils!

"Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,"

and aren't those Republicans good at it?

"Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool,"

and the same thing goes for postcards and telephones and semaphore signals! Who knows what those boy scouts are talking about? Don't they have training camps or something like that?

"Terrorists may or may not be using voice-changing software but it should be of open source interest that online terrorist and/or terrorist enthusiasts are discussing it,"

said the Generals, and if the price of goats is being discussed in Pakistan, we need to get the flock out of there.

Consider the source

The Army Times can't easily be dismissed as part of the Liberal Elitist press, but guess who is questioning the honesty of John McCain? Flip Flop or Fib? asks staff writer Bradley Penniston today.

Obama promised, according to a McCain statement on Sept 8th, to "slow our development of Future Combat Systems."

Future Combat Systems is a program that is seen as the core of the program to modernize our military in keeping with future requirements.

“This is not a time to slow our development of Future Combat Systems"

said McCain -- the very same McCain who back in July of this year declared to the Washington Post about the Army's FCS program:

" that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed."

So what is this -- a flip flop or a fib? To answer the question, the article quotes the Lexington Institute, a Libertarian think tank, as calling McCain "deceitful."

“McCain’s interpretation of Obama’s position is typical of the way in which the Republicans have twisted Democratic views in order to undercut their opponents and at the same time obscure the past positions of the Republicans,”

Considering the source, this is amazing material. Could it be that the troops have figured out who really supports them? Could it be that John who has never been on the web doesn't realize how easy it is for people to relate his words of today with his words of yesterday? Anyway, to see such no-nonsense criticism in a publication that seems unlikely to support a Democratic candidate against a military "hero" might be seen as a glimmer of hope. If McCain loses the military vote, he may lose the election. If so the question "is there a God" may still remain, but "is there a Democracy" will be answered.