Gaza

Besides Iraq and Afghanistan on our karmic rap sheet, there's Gaza, where our proxy is doing the dirty work.

Glenn Greenwald has Gaza figured out. According to the latest polls, 71 percent of us -- nearly three out of four Americans -- don't want the U.S. taking sides in the Israel-Palestine War. But almost 100 percent of our politicians, Demolicans and Republicrats both, think Israel should just keep on with what they're doing, which is, as nearly as I can tell, turning the world's largest open-air prison into the world's largest open-air slaughterhouse.

In a democracy, Greenwald wrote yesterday, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose. Yet here we have the exact opposite situation: no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept. Isn't that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent?

Barack Obama included. So he wouldn't want Hamas rockets "falling on the school" where his daughters are enrolled? But if his daughters were killed in an Israeli airstrike, that would be different? Who does this guy think he's kidding?

Greenwald also points out that "overwhelming majorities of Americans have long wanted to withdraw from Iraq was completely dismissed and ignored by our bipartisan political class, which continued to fund the war indefinitely and with no conditions. But at least there, Democratic leaders paid lip service to the idea that they agreed with that position and some Democrats went beyond rhetoric and actually tried to stop or at least limit the war..."

But in the end, they did neither, after promising to do so.

It's clearer than ever that this political class, Republican and Democratic; liberal and conservative, has been bought out. AIPAC, the Israel lobby, is part of the corporate cabal that owns virtually all our politicians. They do not represent us. This is not our country. "Government of the people" is a lie.

Greenwald concluded yesterday by quoting a president who lived back in the day before the U.S. government became a whore. You certainly would recognize his name, since he was the country's first president. In his farewell address he warned us against taking sides in other people's conflicts, saying: (N)othing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.

It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . .
So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.