GOD BLESS AMERICA

One of my former friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan, says he "respectfully disagrees" with what I say about the US government's treatment of Bradley Manning. If it were his son--or his grandson--being held illegally for 18 months, tortured, charged with OBEYING the law in making felony offenses public information, public knowledge, I am sure he wouldn't disagree with me.

But at least he answers what I say. Most of my former friends don't answer, or they tell me to shut up.

But I can try to talk about other things. Or maybe I should propose that I will talk about the same things, using different particulars.

The US spends a billion dollars--$1,000,000,000--a day on Obama's wars. We bomb civilians, claiming that they are "Taliban." But the US vice-president says that the Taliban is not the enemy. (By the way, the US createdthe Taliban. The same way it created Ayatolla Khoumini to run Iraq--thank you, Central Intelligence.)

But we spend nothing on schools in the US, and our schools are terrible. We allow families to live in abject poverty--and even Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, works to prevent that! We don't provide medical care for the poor.

And what do the rich Americans do? The millionaire rich look for tax loopholes. The billionaires either sit on their obscene wealth, letting it grow like an anal cancer, or they give bits of it away, or the spend it on self-glory. Most billionaires are in the first category: they just greedily grow their wealth. The second group give away a few billion--or even tens of billions. But of course Warren Buffet could afford to give away fifty billion--$50,000,000,000--and still be obscenely rich. So could Bill Gates.

I teach now at the Universitat des Saarlandes in Germany. Students and a few faculty here, and some Dickens scholars from Britain and the United States, and an Irish diplomat gave $5,000 this month to buy Christmas presents for 500 poor, orphaned, or abandoned children in Moldova. A billion dollars from Mr. Buffet or Mr. Gates would have have made it possible for "Aktion Oliver" to do a lot more!

The billionaire who wants to invest in a new space craft--to replace the shuttle--will do nothing for this world. Why doesn't he give his billions to the poor--in America or elsewhere?

President Obama buys Christmas presents (for his daughters--and his dog) at a discount store. Should we applaud? HELL NO! We should demand that he quit his wars, and give $1,000,000,000 every day to the poor.

Am I being unreasonable? Of course not--except to unreasonable people:honi soit qui mal y pense.

Cordially yours in this charitable season when good Christians nod with pennies at the poor, and offer up their greed to be blessed.

Bert Hornback

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, ON THE BRIGHTER SIDE

I have taught at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, University College Dublin, Bellarmine College in Kentucky, and now for the last four years at Saarland University in Germany. I taught at Michigan for twenty-eight years--and it is now fifty years since I began my teaching career at Notre Dame.

It was been a very interesting fifty years. The invasion of Cuba by the United States--and a total of 28 attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The assassination of John Kennedy. George Wallace running for president in the United States. The assassination of Martin Luther King, then of Robert Kennedy. Vietnam. Richard Nixon. The illegal "Contra" army in Nicaragua. Support for Boris Yeltsin. Reagan's invasion of Grenada. George H. W. (C.I.A.) Bush's invasion of Iraq. Clinton bombing Iraq--just to show that he too could murder people. Then George H. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and Afghanistan. Obama's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. The concentration camp Guantanamo Bay. Torture. And Bradley Manning.

But despite all that, I have been blessed, personally and professionally, with the opportunity to teach. And for most of these fifty years, I have had very good, serious, bright, and thoughtful students to work with. Sometimes I am ashamed to have had such a blessed life. Even during my three years in the Marine Corps, I worked for a good captain, and then a wonderful and courageous colonel--who resigned in protest against the Vietnam war. And during those three years I worked with several hundred young men who were good and thoughtful friends.

Teaching is--to me--something sacred. I'm not a believer in "sin," but if I were I would call going to class unprepared a mortal sin. And to waste students' time talking about worthless things--mere academics--is a serious sin or crime or fault as well.

But for all these years, my students have kept me working hard to be a good teacher, every day. I think that they have been successful, most days. They are responsible for my good days; I am responsible for the bad ones. I hope they haven't been too many. I can think of eleven, these last fifty years. But there are probably more. Maybe a lot more.

When all the bad stuff in the world weighs heavily on me, I think of my students, and of the privilege I have of getting to teach them. And when I come close to despair, thinking I can't change this world, I remember that theycan.

Teaching is a good life. And I am thankful that I am a teacher. The United States defeated me, and I won't teach there any more. But I am teaching in Germany now--this is my fourth year--and I am very, very happy.

Bert Hornback

BRADLEY MANNING

Bradley Manning is a very brave and honorable man: moreso than anybody in the U.S. government or elsewhere in the allegedly "free" United States. The United States is a police state, a rogue state that violates all laws. Bradley Manning stood up to the government, exposed war crimes and lies.

Knowing what he did, Bradley Manning did what he was required to do by both United States Civil Law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Barack Obama, supposedly a smart man and qualified as a lawyer, has already declared Bradley Manning guilty--which demonstrates clearly that the United States is not a country which respects law. (The right of habeas corpus in the United States--guaranteed in its Bill of Rights--has been suspended by both George H. Bush and Obama.)

When this absurd Kangaroo Court has had its day, it will be time to reconvene Nuremberg. It has been restored. And this time the Americans won't be the prosecutors and the judges. This time the Americans will be the prosecuted, and the judged. And the court can send all the convicted Americans to America's own concentration camp at Guantanamo.

All the Americans can offer in their defense is blackmail: they have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world, and that they aren't afraid to use them.

Manuel Noreiga

Manuel Noreiga is being extradited from France to Panama. He was first arrested by the United States, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. The U. S. invaded Panama to get him. At his trial, Noreiga tried to introduce evidence that he had worked for George H. W. Bush when that Bush was head of CIA; this evidence was disallowed--so Noreiga held up a large photograph of himself with Bush, and Bush with his arm around his good drug-running friend.

Maybe Panama should try extraditing George H. W. Bush, too. Nicaragua might also want the former U. S. president. And Cuba? Who was resp[onsioble for those 28 U. S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro?

But back to Panama. It would be a shame to let George H. W. Bush die of old age, without ever having to face justice.

SENATOR RAND PAUL, HERO

People--like me--ridiculed Rand Paul when he ran for the U.S. Senate. He was a young know-nothing, we said. But now he has proved to be freedom's hero--a position ninety-nine other U. S. Senators refused.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan asked for a voice vote that would have turned the U.S. into a full-fledged police state. It would have authorised the U.S. military to capture and incarcerate--for life--any U.S. citizen, without any judicial oversight and without the requirement of charges of the possibility of trial.

A voice vote doesn't record who votes yes and who votes no. And Levin was sure a voice vote would produce an affirmative majority.

Nobody objected but Rand Paul. And his requesting a recorded roll-call vote saved us. The prospect of being known for having voted for the end of the rule of law, for having voted to turn the U.S. into a police state, caused at least ten Senators to change their minds and vote against the measure. Among them, of course, was Senator Carl Levin.

What an extreme of dishonor. What dangerous dishonesty. Senator Levin should resign from the Senate, in shame. And Rand Paul ranks--by this one action--with the greatest of American heroes.

Bert Hornback

OOPS! IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. . .

I probably should look at what the American response to the killing of 24 Pakistani troops--allies--has been. But I don't want to. I don't want to read about or hear "apologies" for a "mistake"--which is a euphemism for "So what?"

A country that exists as far outside the idea of law as the United States does is not to be trusted for anything, anywhere, at any time. Torture, vigilante murders carried out--proudly--in other countries, the concentration camp at Guantanamo, the imprisonment of Bradley Manning: these are the signatures of the United States. And all are violations of what the world has agreed are the standards for civilised conduct on this planet.

Perhaps the rest of the world should pool its resources, and build a huge rocket that could send the United States into outer space. The hole left by its absence would hold enough water to reduce world flood threats, eliminate 65% of the world's carbon emissions, and get rid of most of the world's nuclear weapons. Our planet would be a better, safer, more livable place if most of North America could be sent into exile.

SHOCKING NEWS

It has just been revealed that BRADLEY MANNING is not who we thought he is. He is actually an Arab--which in the United States is officially called an Islamic Terrorist. Looks can be deceiving--and his disguise as a gay young man has misled everybody.

Because the Obama administration has now identified Manning as an Islamic Terrorist--and not an American citizen with constitutional rights--it is now clear that the Obama administration's holding him in solitary confinement since 5 July 2010, and its regular torture of Manning during these last fifteen months, is entirely justified.

Because Manning has been declared an Arab, an Islamic Terrorist, President Obama is now free to order Manning transferred to his illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, where Manning can be tortured all the time. And at Guantanamo, Manning will be a short-timer: he has been in solitary confinement for only 510 days. Most of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been held--and tortured--for more than ten years: 3,650 days minimum!

President Obama promised--that's a big word--to close Guantanamo within a year of assuming office. He hasn't done so. His excuse is that since we have held these men illegally--and tortured them illegally--for more than ten years, they might not like us.

Slavery was rarely so violent as what the United States government now practices. For most of the last sixty years of history, the United States has only tortured, executed, eliminated foreign nationals. But now? Bradley Manning is one of us.

No. I'm wrong. Mr. Obama has declared that he is an Islamic terrorist, and thus Mr. Obama can do anything to him his unconstitutional presidential heart wants to do.

And anyway Bradley Manning gay. And no real Americans are gay. He must be an Arab. A pale-skinned little Arab with blue eyes, a flat nose, and freckles.

God bless America. It needs it. It needs forgiveness, too. We all do, in America.

Bert G. Hornback

COLLEGE ATHLETICS AND HONOR

Joe Paterno? He's just one of the crowd.

I grew up with publicity that called a mean, cruel, vulgar, ignorant man "a builder of men." He was the basketball coach at Western Kentucky, a sort of Penn State of the 1940s and 1950s. He was a disgusting man, and in no way a "coach"--or "a builder of men."

When I was thirteen I was taken to La Guardia airport in New York to meet the plane a country boy, a high school senior from Tennessee, was on. It was awkward when he shook hands with my father and me: He had a suitcase in one hand, and a roll of fifty-dollar bills in the other hand. My father--Western's athletic director and assistant basketball coach--was in New York with the team for the NIT tournament; a "backer" had sent Tom to the tournament, as part of the wooing process. I was given money every day to feed and entertain Tom; my father didn't want him spending Boo's money.

I knew which players at Western went to which local businessmen for their monthly salary, and where they got their free clothes and shoes. And where in Bowling Green they could eat for free. All perks.

When, in the early 1970s Western Kentucky's basketball program was being investigated by the NCAA, my father--at the end of his tenure, then, as athletic director--was called to a meeting with the college president. (The president was an old Western basketball player, my high school basketball coach, a high school principal, the dean of students at Western, and then president.) My father came home and announced proudly that when Dero had told him how worried everybody was about the NCAA investigation, he had responded simply, "My lips are sealed, Mr. President."

I had gone to Notre Dame as an undergraduate. A basketball scholarship freshman--also from Kentucky--was a friend of mine our first year. He told me he had come to Notre Dame because other schools were offering him so much money that his father was scared. (And no, it wasn't Paul Hornung; he played football, and sold hundreds of dollars worth of tickets every home-game Saturday in South Bend.)

I went from Notre Dame to Michigan. In the 1970s I met an inmate in a minimum security federal prison in Michigan. He wrote to me because a former Michigan fullback had recommended me to him. This man was being denied parole mostly because he was a black man from inner-city Cleveland. (I helped him get parole. Two years later he invited me to his wedding; he had a good job in Florida.) The former Michigan fullback had been a great star in Ann Arbor. When he graduated he held the record for the most touchdowns scored by a Wolverine. But he was too small to make it in the NFL. And in the fall after he graduated, he got frustrated with having no weekly wad of money, no free big car, no apartment. And he bought a pistol and walked into a bank, demanding money.

After 28 years at Michigan--which was for most of that time a great university at which I was proud to teach, despite its fraudulent athletics program--I left, to take care of my elderly parents and teach at a small college in Kentucky. One spring night a very expensive fifteen-passenger van belonging to the office of Student Affairs was vandalised. The tires were slashed, the windows broken, the interior destroyed. The next morning my freshman English class wanted to know if I had heard about the incident. I hadn't, but they had, and wanted to tell me about it. As they were relating the story, a not-very-bright boy who was at the college on a baseball scholarship interrupted: "Hey, nobody is supposed to know about that! Coach called a meeting this morning, and told us to keep quiet about it." Everybody knew about the vandalism--but nothing was done about it.

The moral of my story: it's not that the athletes are immoral, or criminal. It's that the coaches and the athletic directors and the university administrators are corrupt. And the Paterno scandal is just another example.

Why not do away with what is called "college athletics." With the money saved, universities could go back to being universities. True, some of the big athletic programs make money--but the money they make goes to athletics, not academics.

Bert Hornback

OCCUPY THE VATICAN

In what must be a preemptive gesture, the current pope has endorsed the "Occupy X" movement. No doubt Jesus would have approved of such a non-violent protest against greed: "Give up all you have," he said, "and follow me."

But the Vatican is the richest corporation in the world. And for the Roman Catholic pope to endorse the "Occupy X" protests is an act of supreme hypocrisy. The Catholic Church is rich enough that it could buy the bankrupt United States of America.

The pope's gesture is pure hypocrisy. Maybe he wants to forestall an "Occupy the Vatican" protest in St. Peter's Square by pretending to support redistribution of wealth.

For all the other sins that Jesus mentions in the Christian gospels, he condemns hypocrisy a dozen times over. And his church--his Catholic church, with all its cathedrals and artworks and gold stuff and fancy vestments and real estate holdings and bank accounts and the banks it owns--is in its pretend Christianity the worst hypocrisy in the world.

Occupy the Vatican!

St. Benedict--this pope has chosen his name--is famous in history for the inauguration of the idea that though individual priests and monks should take vows of poverty as well as vows of chastity and obedience, the church itself could have as much wealth as it could collect. That clever discrimination is part of the "Benedictan Rule." Never mind Jesus and his teachings.

Occupy the Vatican.

Occupy the Vatican.

Bert Hornback

WHY I MAY VOTE FOR RON PAUL

I voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He had stood for and signed a great Civil Rights Bill. He had launched the bid for the Great Society. And he declared "War on Poverty."

But why, we should have asked, go to "War" to get rid of poverty? We didn't ask that. And anyway, in 1964 he ran against an absolute idiot, Barry Goldwater.

(Though we didn't know it, in 1964 we already had the War in Vietnam. In 1962, Paul H. Corscadden started training CIA infiltrators into North Vietnam. Corscadden was later the "CIA delegate"--as he described himself--to the Paris Peace Talks. But then he was suddenly called away, "to assume a sensitive desk in Chile"--whence the attempted murder of Salvador Allende, ordered by Richard Nixon, and then Allende's assassination in 1973.)

I have been more careful with my vote since 1964. But the choice didn't even seem to need carefulness in 2008. How wrong I was. It's not that McCain would have been better than Obama, but that he would have been honest. And I would rather have an honest fool in office than a viciously dishonest and unprincipled man who is supposedly intelligent.

So maybe this next time I will support Ron Paul. He supports Bradley Manning, and points out Obama's dishonesty. Whistle-blowers? Bradley Manning is the most important whistle-blower since Daniel Ellsburg--and Obama has had him in prison for sixteen months: has tortured him for eight of those months: and has declared that Bradley Manning "broke the law."

So: Ron Paul for president! And any of my "liberal" friends who are upset at my support for Ron Paul can maybe think about who they are supporting--and what he stands for.

Obama's illegal wars, his political assassinations, his concentration camp at Guantanamo, Bradley Manning in prison. That's Mr. Obama to date. Quite a record for a supposedly intelligent Harvard lawyer who promised to end Bush's wars, close Guantanamo, and support whistle-blowers and a lawful, transparent democracy.

Bert Hornback

MURDER

The United States has reintroduced its old "assassination" foreign policy. It now has a simpler name: it's "murder."

Does any living American remember when Americans lived by the rule of law? Does anybody in the United States object to assassination?

Americans simply murdered Osama bin Laden. Mr. Obama wouldn't have trusted the World Court to try him, and the United States didn't have legal jurisdiction to try him.

Mr. Obama won't attempt to bring to trial any of his prisoners in the illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo because (a) they have been held--for ten years--illegally; (b) the United States has no authority to try them for anything; and (c) Mr. Obama doesn't trust courts to convict them automatically.

It is appropriate that in his current multi-wars in the middle east, Mr. Obama's preferred murder weapon is the drone. Drones perform surgical killings--a lot like abortions, except that surgical killings sometimes abort the wrong victims.

An unidentifiable android in the Nevada desert programs a drone to kill somebody ten thousand miles away. Or American-fed, American-funded surrogates--a human form of drones--capture, then murder Khadafi.

It's all very simple. AND UTTERLY UNETHICAL, UNLAWFUL, ILLEGAL, CRIMINAL.

God bless America? If there is a God--particularly a Christian God--he or she will DAMN America.

PRIORITIES

Another new Obama war? In Uganda?

But we can't afford long-term health care for elderly Americans.

Priorities? Obama is an idiot. A war-monger. Give me Richard Nixon, or even Lyndon Johnson. Or George the First. Their crimes were petty, compared with Obama's. Even stupid George W Bush--advised by Cheney and Rumsfeld--wasn't as bad as Obama.

How would you like to be the daughters of that man? Growing up, knowing what your father did?

ATTEMPTED MURDER

Iran was planning to murder an Ambassador, the U.S. says.

The U.S. admits to more than 28 attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. It murdered President Diem in South Vietnam when he was no longer useful. Who else? It tried to murder Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Hasn't it just tried to murder President Kadhafi in Libya? Did the U.S. have any right to murder thousands of people in Iraq? What right had the U.S. to murder Osama bin Laden?

Is the U.S. president insane, claiming that Iran has violated the U.N. charter? The U.S. has violated the U.N. charter dozens of times, with its wars and assassinations.

If the U.S. didn't have 12,000 nuclear missiles and a record of being willing to use them, it would be declared a rogue state, and brought before the world court. Slobodan Milosovic is no more a war criminal than George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

I don't support assassination, by Iraq or the U.S. But I find it particularly disgusting for the U.S. to complain about Iran's allegedly uncivilised conduct. The U.S. leads the world in uncivilised conduct.

Oh. I forgot to mention torture. And Bradley Manning.

Bert G. Hornback

Medical "Research"

Does anybody remember when medical research was scientific? These days, any doctor who has access to medical files can claim to be a researcher, by assembling some statistics. Basic science is third cousin twice removed from statistics.

Never mind what causes disease X; if 45% of the people who have disease X ate prunes twice a week, that is supposedly a scientific discovery. So what if 45% of the people who have disease didn'teat prunes at all? Well, according to current medical "science," both statistics rank as scientific discoveries.

Science reduced to statistics is nonsense. Most physicians aren't scientists--but a few physicians who have ambitions beyond their capacities pretend to be scientists, and the medical profession more and more pretends that statistics, not science, can guide medical practice.

Nonsense. Utter nonsense.

Bert Hornback

THE EVIL MEN DO LIVES AFTER THEM

I voted for Mr. Obama. So did enough other people to get him elected. Mr. Obama defeated a stupid but honest man. The Nobel Committee in Oslo agreed with our vote, and awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now he is the world's leading criminal. He has no respect for any laws. He violates the United Nations Charter on torture. He refuses to let United Nations monitors interview Bradley Manning--who has been held without charge for 16 months (a violation of the U.S. Constitution, but Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have both suspended the Constitutional right of Habeas Corpus)--and has already convicted him, by executive declaration: "He broke the law." He has expanded Mr. Bush's offensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to include Pakistan, Syria, and Libya. Will he next attack Mexico?

Now Mr. Obama has murdered an American citizen because he has declared that citizen guilty of terrorist activities. Supposedly, the idea of a bounty of the "head" of an alleged criminal went out in the late nineteenth century, as the United States moved toward civilisation.

Mr. Obama is a dictator. He is the law. Of course, in matters of domestic policy, he doesn't act as a dictator: he is a patsy for the rich. And in exchange, they let him play Nero in the rest of the world.

Have Americans no shame? "My country, right or wrong" has never--ever--been as bad as this. Give us Bush II and Cheney: they were better. Oh, for the good old days of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.

Has there been a worse president than Barak Obama? Ever? Has there ever been a more dangerous man in the White House? Has the United States ever been so dishonorable?

And yet there is no protest. We roused ourselves to protest against Lyndon Johnson's small war against Vietnam. We were indignant enough to force Richard Nixon out of office for minor crimes. And we impeached Bill Clinton for sexual dalliances with a White House intern. But we accept Mr. Obama's lawlessness, his violations of our Constitution and our honor.

Are we--ourselves--as un-American as he is? Have we no honor left?

Bert Hornback

Velveeta

I've just read that Velveeta contains fine strands of wire. I'm shocked. All these years I've thought it was made of pure mucilage and orange food coloring. But then I didn't think American law allowed the president to order the murder of American citizens suspected of crimes. I thought that was forbidden. Stupid me.

Bert Hornback

Does anybody remember when what the USA does to its enemies--Osama Bin Laden and others--was called ASSASSINATION? Or when what now we call "rendition" was known as KIDNAPPING? Or when "enhanced interrogation techniques" were called TORTURE?

How low can we stoop? Why are we the only people in the world who sing our praises?

Rogue state. And our president was going to change all that . . . .

Shame.

And I'm both angry and ashamed.

Bert Hornback

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

Martin Luther King, Jr. was indeed a hero, a great, courageous, noble man. And he more than deserves to be honored.

But the journalists keep praising America, not Dr. King. They write about "Jefferson's Temple" and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument--and even about the FDR memorial. And they write about how wonderful it is to have Dr. King's memorial among those great men--as though he ought to feel honored to be among them.

Jefferson, they say, was the great "philosopher," the noble mind who founded our country. They don't mention his slaves, or his slave children--his own children--whom he sold on the open slave market to buy books. Or his determination that a black person could not be a poet. Washington did free his slaves--but only at his own death.

I like the idea of Dr. King being with Lincoln and FDR. They are good company. Those three were great men--like Dr. King. But why not add a memorial for Eleanor Roosevelt? She was as great an American as her husband. And she was our first black first lady.

The journalists write about looking out from Dr. King's memorial across the basin to Jefferson, and put Dr. King in a line from Jefferson to Lincoln or maybe Washington. I prefer to see it as Dr. King alongside FDR and Lincoln--and Jefferson off on the "other side." Segregated, as it were. Isolated. We have come a long way since Jefferson, and he is best left behind.

Let's celebrate Dr. King for himself and what he did for all of us.

Criminal Behavior Should Be Punished

In a nation of laws, criminal behavior must in some way be punished. Three former employees in the Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, school system, have been charged with embezzling funds from the school system, and have pleaded guilty to felony fraud. A fourth former employee, who knew of the crime but did not report it, has pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony, which is itself a felony crime. In some jurisdictions this crime is called being an accessory after the fact.

The United States government and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office cooperated in this case, prosecuted by the United States Attorney's Office.

Good for us--and good for our government.

But elsewhere, in the world beyond Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, our government has been holding a man who refused to be an accessory after the fact to torture and other felony crimes. His name is Bradley Manning. He has been imprisoned--illegally--for more than a year. Most of that time he has been kept in solitary confinement, and tortured. He has not been charged with a crime, because if the United States government charges Bradley Manning with releasing documents about its own felony crimes, he will claim in his defense that he was doing what United States law requires him to do when he knows that felony crimes have been committed.

How can we do this? We aren't doing it; the officer in charge of this country, who has sworn to uphold this country's laws, is doing it: and we are letting him do it.

Had Bradley Manning not released the documents which he discovered, related to secret felony offenses, he would have become himself a felon.

Barack Obama knows this. He is a Harvard lawyer--and Harvard lawyers know that misprision of a felony is a serious crime. But as officer in charge of the United States government, Obama wants to hide those felony crimes our nation has committed: to cover them up. And that makes Obama a felon, too.

We have lost our constitutionally guaranteed Right of Habeas Corpus; both Obama and his predecessor claim to have "suspended" it. No president, of course, can "suspend" the constitution. Only a dictator can do that.

And for more than a year, now, Obama has held Bradley Manning in prison, illegally. Punitively: though Bradley Manning has not been charged with a crime, Obama has proclaimed publicly that he is guilty: "He broke the law."

Obama has refused to let the United Nations Human Rights lawyers interview Bradley Manning in private.

Misprision of a felony is itself a felony crime under United States civil law, and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

But Obama doesn't care. He is a rogue president. The prima facia evidence of his public conduct indicts him as a criminal for violating the oath he took upon assuming his office. Obama swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States. He has violated that oath, and continues in his arrogance to violate it every day.

Remarkably, so many of my supposed friends agree with him: friends whom I never would have expected to say "My country, right or wrong: but my country." I am ashamed: but not just of them. I am ashamed of me, too. But I am proud of Bradley Manning, and proud of those who support him.

Maybe I will manage to get brave enough to support him more actively myself.

If I don't, I will be morally guilty in the same way that Obama is guilty: of imprisoning, torturing, persecuting a national hero. And I don't want to be what Obama is.

Bert G. Hornback

hyper

I'm seventy-five. I was around during World War II--when the USA pretended that the Nazis were good guys and the Japanese were sub-human evil beings, when black people in the USA were in effect still slaves, and when the USA used its two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My head hurts tonight in a strange way. Maybe I'm old enough to die and get out of here. Not that I don't love humanity, and life itself. But I'm worn out with the USA, and tired from having spent most of my time and energy arguing against what I see as evil.\

But if I am going to die soon, I want to get this said before I go.

For the last few years I have lived in Germany. I teach there: a civilised place, an intelligent and thoughtful and moral people. Maybe the scourge in their past helps them--us, I should like to say--to be moral.

The USA has never accepted any of its shames: its many vicious, murderous shames. Native American genocide. African and African-American slavery (both: the children of African slaves--often, like Thomas Jefferson's children--were African-American, or Afro-European slaves). Nuclear bombs in Japan. And all the USA's manufactured wars of aggression, in Korea, in the 1958 invasion of Lebanon, against Cuba, in Vietnam with lots of napalm, in Grenada, in Iraq with Colin Powell burying live Iraqi kids in the sand with bulldozer-tanks, in Iraq again, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan with murderous drones, in Syria.

And now: sometimes I am outraged by us, or disgusted; sometimes I am just angry, or embarrassed, or perversely amused. But this time I am outrageously pleased.

The good-old-broke USA has spent billions--maybe trillions--of junk dollars designing and testing a 'hypersonic' plane. Not 'supersonic'--beyond the speed of sound--but hyperbolicly 'hypersonic.'

'Superfast' means something like 'most fast,' or 'fastest.' But 'hyperfast' means ' 'over-fast,' or 'too fast.' And wow! This thing was 'hypersonic.'

It was. And on Thursday it ran away from its trackers.

The plane that could travel at 13,000 miles per hour--21,000 kilometers per hour--would have let the USA military drop bombs on its enemies, anywhere in the world, in less than an hour.

On Thursday morning the Pentagon's best team of idiots launched one of these things, testing it.

They only had two of them. The first aborted itself after nine minutes, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. Two hundred thousand homes for poor people sank with it.

The second launch--this Thursday's--lasted thirty-six minutes. And then the thing escaped from the tracking radar: ran away. Where to? Did it go too fast for the radar to follow it? Did it burn up--at more than 2,000 degrees centigrade--in the outer atmosphere? Did it just run off somewhere on its own, maybe to a more civilised planet? Or did it land somewhere'' in Siberia? Antarctica? In an ocean?

It could have landed, of course, in someplace like Washington. An appropriate landing place. As the little girl used to say in the "Katzenjammer Kids" comic strip, "they brought it on themselves."

So: goodnight. If I am here tomorrow, I'll look to see if the USA's 'hypersonic' extravagance cause a sunami somewhere, or just blew up, or maybe found its way home to Washington, or maybe found its way off into outer space. And if I'm not here tomorrow, maybe I'll meet it out there somewhere.

Bert Hornback

Cynthia Tucker on Obama

Three things.

First, Cynthia Tucker's recent syndicated response to disaster--to "the sky is falling"--is absurd. If the sky is falling--and it is--its doing so doesn't "depend on where you're standing." Six years ago New Orleans was flooded--and no matter where you were standing, yes, New Orleans was flooded. Even people on St. Charles Avenue knew that. Even Ray Nagin hiding in his penthouse knew that. We have lots more examples--but I read Tucker's nonsense in the New Orleans Timers Picayune.

Second, "Obama's first campaign centered around hope." That's nonsense, too. How is it possible for a campaign to "center around" hope? A center is a center, even in these impossible times in this desperately possible place. Tucker is talking nonsense.

Third, Tucker wants Obama to "reignite that spark" of what was, very briefly, hope. But Obama himself snuffed out any "spark" of hope he had given us with the first three of his broken promises: (1) he didn't end our wars of aggression, but multiplied them; (2) he failed to close the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay; and (3) he failed to restore our constitutional right of habeas corpus--and thus has been able to torture Private Bradley Manning in naked solitary confinement at Quantico for twelve months. (Manning's continuing imprisonment--without being charged with a crime, let alone brought to trial--was justified by Obama, of course, by his dictatorial proclamation, "Manning broke the law.")

The only hope I can see that Obama might be expected to ignite would come from his apologising for having been such a terrible, irresponsible, and untrustworthy president thus far, and resigning.

Obama has taught us how utterly hollow hope can be. As a former law professor he is intelligent enough to understand what a terrible lesson he has taught us.

"Can Obama inspire new hope in voters?" Of course he can't. Cynthia Tucker's essay is nonsense. But it does invite us to say the obvious: Obama should resign.

Bert G. Hornback

Europe

EUROPE

Is Europe a success? Of course. Europe is not the euro, or finance. Europe is one of the great cultural experiments or adventures or undertakings in all of what we humans call time.

Americans have long—and loudly—celebrated the alleged “cultural experiment” that brought the United States into existence. But that wasn’t a cultural experiment, except that it was built on annihilating Native Americans, destroying their advanced civilisation, and importing Africans as slaves.

In 1952, the high school debate topic was the success or failure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. My debating partner was a girl named Evalyn Hosterman. Instead of defending NATO—it was, after all, nothing more than a military alliance—we argued that our human future on this planet should be a United Nations future. There is nothing in my life that I am more proud of than our seventeen year-old boldness and idealism.

The United Nations has had very little success, of course, in promoting civilisation, largely because of America’s absolute disagreement with the ideals of the United Nations. I suspect that the whole world knew, in 1947, that the United States would control, direct, and limit the United States. And by 1950, an alternative was being proposed—remarkably, from Britain—which in time would become the European Union.

The European Coal and Steel Union became the European Economic Community, which became the European Community,, and then the European Union. As late as 2005, the liberal National Public Radio in the United States still occasionally referred to the European Union as the “Common Market.” Of course: officially, the United States only understands two things: war, and what is called “economics.”

America thinks the idea of Europe is a failure. But then the United States didn’t understand what the European Economic Community was: couldn’t, because in Amereica, “economics” has to do with money, and the ideal of getting rich. The European Economic Community was two things that the United States couldn’t understand: a community, instead of what the Americans call a competition, and a real economy.

Economics is by definition social, not competitive: since the ancient Greeks created the word, it has to do with how we live together. It is a culture word. And the United States is is neither an economy or a culture. It is a me-first, screw-your-neighbor, win-win-win mock-society.

To be sure, the European Union has its faults: it is by no means perfect. But it is maybe the closest we humans have come to perfection thus far in our history.

Part of my pleasure with being a European is in collecting examples of our successes. Let me give you three small ones.

I teach at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany. Last winter term we had an “Irish Semester” in the English department. In December three students in English and a doctoral student in physics decided to collect Christmas presents for poor children in Dublin. They contacted the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Dublin, who agreed to deliver the presents, and DHL, which volunteered to deliver the presents to Dublin. In six days the students collected, boxed, and wrapped 131 ten-to-twenty euro presents and sent them off. Michael Tighe, our St. Vincent de Paul contact, wrote: “You wonderful kindness made me feel like a real European. Gifts like these are the European Union.”

In June of 2011, Klaus Schappert, the physicist—who is also the founding president of the German Charles Dickens Gesellschaft—decided that this year he wanted to collect 2,000 Christmas presents for orphaned or poor children in Romania. The project is called Action Oliver, after Dickens’s novel. And the project’s chief patron is the current head of the Dickens family, Mark Charles Dickens. I mentioned his project to the Vice-President for Europe at the university, Professor Patricia Oster-Stierle; her response was that of course the whole university should be involved in Action Oliver, and she would strongly recommend it to her colleagues in other German universities. “We are all Europeans!” you know.

And then, in July, I flew back to the United States for a Dickens symposium. I looked at the dinner menu card on my Air France flight. Everyone knows how intensely proud France and the French are of their cuisine. But our menu on Air France 322 from Paris to Boston was an Italian menu. And it was accompanied by a wonderful explanatory note: our meal was “selected by Air France to celebrate its partnering with Alitalia.” (“Partnering” is a generous word: Air France saved Alitalia.)

Our menu included a salad with mozarella cheese, lasagne, a generous portion of ripe Bel Paese, two lovely amaretti biscuits, and a Sicilian lemon tart for dessert. Only the bread and the wine were French.

Europe works. It is a success: a cultural success. We Germans share borders with nine countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Poland. We are very much in Europe. My university is not a German university, but—since its founding in the early 1950s—a European university: we are both the Universität des Saarlandes and the Université des Saarlandes. And given the history of the region, that duality is appropriate.

We have a French-German high school in Saarbrücken, and a popular park that is partly in Germany, and partly in France. And both Deutsch Bahn and SNCF—the German and French national railways—operate the high-speed trains that run from Frankfurt to Saarbrücken to Paris: sometimes you ride the French TGV, sometimes the German ICE.
There is a hill just outside Saarbrücken, overlooking the Saar river and the peaceful, green German and French countryside. It is a park, dedicated to the 12,000 young Frenchmen and the 10,000 young Germans who died there one Thursday afternoon in the 1880s. There is an obelisk memorialising the young Frenchmen who were killed that day, and about twenty yards away a column memorialising the your Germans who were killed. And there is a third monument: a not very large stone cube, surrounded by some light blue gravel. The brass plaque on the top is engraved, simply, “Never Again.”

This is the European Union. This is Europe. And in December, when Klaus Schappert’s Action Oliver sends 2,000 Christmas boxes to children in Romania who have never in their lives received a present, he will have made Europe again a bit larger, a bit more inclusive. And we won’t forget those Irish children, either. They aren’t only Irish; they are Europeans, as far as we are concerned. And that means something: there is an important principle involved.

Europe is not money-based, or power-based. It is based in the ideals of culture and real economics. Starting with little things like Christmas presents for poor children in Dublin and in Rumania, and an Italian dinner on Air France, maybe we will change—

THESE PIPES AREN'T CALLING ME

Of course the pipes that were calling in "Danny Boy" were uilleann pipes, not the pipe organs most of us know. And those uilleann pipes--elbow-powered relatives of the Scottish bag-pipes--were melodic, and they didn't pretend to be orchestras.

The pipe-organ is a completely different thing. Its ambition in modern times--since the late seventeenth century--is a curiously un-musical one. The "Age of Enlightenment" celebrated its white male self as enlightened by reason--though we might say, today, that its founders were but reasonably enlightened.

Among other things, they thought that only European males were enlightened or susceptible to enlightenment. Women had no rights; the African slave trade was in its heyday; Native Americans--despite their marvellous civilisation--were slaughtered as "savages." I'm not sure that Spinoza, Locke, Diderot, and Jefferson considered the Chinese as enlightened or enlightenible. And they seem to have excluded their unbleached brothers in India, with whom they shared both genes and language, from the white male state of, if not yet perfection, at least perfectibility.

The pipe organ rose to prominence in the Age of Enlightenment. It was the most complete "thing" man had ever made. One enlightened white male, with ten fingers and two feet--and a slave to pump the bellows--could replace a whole orchestra.

The ancient Greek word "orchestra" signified the place in the theatre where the chorus danced. In modern use, it is the place where musicians and singers perform in a theatre, or a collective term for the musicians themselves. The London Symphony Orchestra, for example, is made up of a large group of musicians, playing together.

But one glorious organist could play a symphony all by himself. Of course his violins didn't sound like violins, nor did his various horns sound like real horns. His flutes and woodwinds squeaked and squawked. But it made a lot of noise--and one man (with the help of his bellows-slave) could do it all. And when he really wanted to make noise he could unleash an outrageous throbbing and window-rattling bass rat-tat-tat that didn't even pretend to be musical.

What an achievement! It symbolised perfectly the idea of the Age of Enlightenment. It was a celebration of self, of ego, of power, of independence. Or almost so; there was still that bellows-slave who made the great teetotum work.

People flocked to the great cathedrals to hear the organ. Ten fingers, two feet, and one machine. Never mind that the man's "instruments" didn't sound as much like real musical instruments as those of the later one-man-band on the street-corner would sound, but they made more noise. They filled great cathedrals with noise.

The relation of the Age of Enlightenment to the pipe organ is one of arrogance and power. Jonathan Swift's satirical representation of the "enlightened" musicians of Laputa ("whore's land) in book three of Gulliver's Travels was an early (1735) mockery of "enlightenment" in England; he could have had much more fun with competing universal pipe organs for the fabulous Laputans to play.

So. No arrogant mock-musical honkings for me, thank you, neither live nor recorded. No arrogant organists drowning out beautiful children's voices singing Christmas carols. No organists playing Bach. No whipped-cream Wurlitzers. I would rather hear farts, screams, automobile engines, and jack-hammers than pipe organs.

And as for the Age of Enlightenment. . .

The United States has raised its debt ceiling to $13,000,000,000,000. That's 13 TRILLION dollars.

The US spends a modest $1,000,000,000--one billion dollars--a day on its current wars. So every three years its war expenses are $1,800,000,000,000--1.8 trillion. How much is the total military budget a year?

And what does the US spend, annually, on health care, education, housing for the poor, environmental repair, foreign aid?

To put it another way? How much money does the US spend on destruction, and how much does it spend on construction?

And how much does the US spend on a worse-than useless counterproductive government? Is there anybody--ANYBODY--in Washington who earns his pay? And of course, they don't need pay at all: they are generously reimbursed by the rich obscenities who own them.

Let's do away with government. Pay off our debt with what we save. Squeeze the "defense industry" out of existence. Individually remove all our money from banks and other financial institutions.

And then, when everything has come to a standstill something like what happened to passenger railroad service in America: then lets abolish the dollar, and start over.

No more rich people. No more hoarders and grossers and grabbers and greeders.

We can declare ourselves a Free Nation: a nation dedicated to Commonwealth, to the "common good." We can declare for the idea of Society, instead of the stupidity of Capitalism.

We can set as our ideal that strongest and safest of virtues, Peace, and refuse the destructive vice called War--or, in the official US euphemism since 1945, Defense. (That's when Roosevelt's "War Department" was re-named the "Defense Deparment." It is the US "Defense Department" that is currently engaged in four, maybe five Offensive Wars, called on the one hand "necessary" and on the other "Wars of Choice." It is warrior Obama's departing Secretary of Defense who called Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and maybe Syria "Wars of Choice.")

The prison that provided the court for the World War II War Crimes trials has been restored. The US put Nazi Germany on trial there. It is now time for the world to put the US on trial there: it is ready for us.

If we don't halt the way we live now, in the United States--if we don't change our whole way of life--we may have to submit to such judgement.

Ah, but no. The United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons with which it daily threatens the whole world. We have used them in the past. We have threatened to use them again, for 66 years now.

But there might be a window of hope yet. Maybe the United States could be persuaded to save itself from bankruptcy by selling all its nuclear weapons to a responsible nation like Germany--for lots of money. Or maybe the Americans could sell them to those utterly trustworthy Penguins on the South Pole.

Penguins are smart: they don't have nuclear weapons, wars. capitalism, or any of those other bad things. The sane world would help them buy America's weapons of destruction--on condition that in the future Americans only destroy each other.

Remember: The family that prays together stays together. Jesus loved sinners--and hated war. God is on America's side--or at least the American God($$$$)is: that's what American coins and dollar bills all say: "In God We Trust."

Is God a nuclear weapon?

Enough. Or too much.

FOR ALL MY OLD FRIENDS

Dear old friends,

We have fallen out, because I am critical of the United States. I'm sorry: but we can't be friends if I have to lie, or keep my mouth shut when my country--it is still my country as much as it is yours--is acting like Nazi Germany.

That's not an exaggeration. And you know it isn't. This country has been fighting wars of aggression--or as the outgoing Secretary of Defense and Obama Toady Medal winner calls them, "wars of choice"--since 1949. Constantly.

We bomb civilians. Remember when Reagan bombed Tripoli because some US soldiers had been murdered in a bar in Germany? But the perpetrators weren't Libyans. Remember Reagan's stupid, lying invasion of Greneda? And when the truth came out, remember how the US press forgot to mention it?

Remember the train full of Bosnian civilians that Clinton bombed--because it happened to be crossing a bridge the we wanted to destroy?

Remember Vietnam--and Johnson's lies about the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember Bush I's lies about the first War Against Iraq? Remember Bush II and his war against Iraq?

And Afghanistan?

Remember Bush's torture camp at Guantanamo Bay? Remember Obama's torture camp at Guantanamo Bay?

You don't have to remember the torture of Bradley manning, or his illegal imprisonment. It's still happening.

And you want me to be quiet? To keep still? To shut up?

I live in Germany now, among honorable people who are ashamed of their ancestors who kept quiet during the Nazi years. I also know many honorable people whose ancestors did not keep quiet during the Nazi years.

Why are so many of you keeping quiet? Why do you acquiesce in the face of the outrages our government commits? What is wrong with you? And it is a wrong, and you know it.

Bert

LOYAL OPPOSITION

I oppose Barack Obama. My list of reasons is short, and specific: he governs in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, as well as international law.

He continues to run an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

He has not erased George W. Bush's suspension of the right of habeas corpus.

And because we have no right of habeas corpus, he can continue to hold Private Bradley Manning in high security custody. He held Manning in solitary confinement and tortured him for a year; it will soon be two years since Manning's arrest. Obama has already declared that Manning is guilty--"He broke the law," Obama said--though he has not been charged with a crime.

Manning can't be charged with a crime, because had he not done what he allegedly did, he would have committed a very serious crime. Knowing what he knew, to keep that knowledge secret--to continue to cover up deeply criminal acts--would have made him an accessory to those capital crimes.

The one person whose order could stop the violence against Bradley Manning is Obama: he could do that with two words, "Release him." He could also close the illegal torture camp at Guantanamo with two words: "Close it." He could restore the right of habeas corpus--so that what he has done to Manning cannot be done again. He could stop his wars, too--in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Sudan. And he could stop Israel's imprisonment of what should be Palestine.

But no. Obama has signed himself onto a list of history's ruthless tyrants. To be sure, George Bush was mean, and a liar. Bill Clinton was bright, but venal. And George W. Bush was stupid. But Barack Obama is worse than any of them. Obama is mentally agile, and he knows a lot; but he is cowardly, dishonest, and vicious, and his actions as president are--according to our Constitution--criminal.

He should be impeached, and brought to trial for his crimes.

Dreamland, USA. 8 July 2011. President Obama began his remarks today by saying ghat he didn't want to upstage the celebration of Independence Day in America, so he had waited until the pollution from the fireworks had cleared to make what he modestly called his historic and heroic announcement. He was accompanied to the podium by Vice-President Biden, Chief Justice Roberts representing the judiciary, and Senator McConnell representing the legislature.

It has been reported by reliable sources inside Vice-President Biden's grin that Chief Justice Roberts' appearance was bought with a promise that new legislation criminalising stupidity on the Supreme Court would be grandfathered, and that Senator McConnell was promised a free Get-Out-Of-Hell card.

Mr. Obama announced that Private Bradley Manning would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and that a small, life-size statue of Manning standing naked in front of his cell at Quantico would be erected (sic.) on the white house lawn.

Mr. Obama called Manning "one of the nation's greatest leaders," and announced his appointment as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In making this appointment, Mr. Obama commented that Manning would "for the first time in the agency's history, bring actual intelligence to the job."

Mr. Obama also said that, in exchange for Manning's acceptance of this important post, he had promised that within ninety days, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay would be closed, all four of the nation's current wars against the Arab world would cease, the illegal U. S. embargo against Cuba would end, and Hugo Chavez would be invited to Washington for reconciliation talks and provided with free medical care.

In closing, Mr. Obama said that he had directed the Attorney General to file criminal charges against all those involved in torturing prisoners, including President George W. Bush and himself.

I Am Bradley Manning

Why don't I hear from anybody about Bradley Manning? Why aren't we ALL writing about Bradley Manning?

He is a 23 year-old soldier. He spilled the beans concerning who all knew about--and ignored--U.S. torture in Guantanamo, and all sorts of other nasty stuff. He spent a year in punitive solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico--half of the time, he was confined naked: as torture. Now he is awaiting charges--finally. But what can they charge him with? Both U.S. civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make hiding a crime a serious offense: in civil jurisdiction it's called being an "accessory before the fact"; under military law, it's called "misprision of a felony." So had Manning NOT made public what he knew, he would have been committing a serious crime.

Mr. Obama said--it's the lawyer in him speaking, the "you are not guilty until proven so" understanding at the base of all U.S. law--that "Bradley Manning has broken the law." Damn you, Mr. Dictator! You can't say that.

But we all sit quiet. Why? Are we stupid? Cowards? Closet vigilantes?

I have lived for seventy-five years, through World War II, and our Korean War; I even participated in our trying to start a war in 1958 by invading Lebanon. I have lived through Lyndon Johnson's lies and the Vietnam War, and the Nixon-Kissinger murders toward the end of that war; through George Bush's lies and his attack on Iraq; through Clinton's three belligerences--in Iraq, Somalia, and Kosovo--and though George W. Bush's stupid Second Iraq War and his war in Afghanistan, and his concentration camp at Guantanamo. And now Obama. He is as bad as Johnson, or Nixon and Kissinger, or the first Bush; worse than Clinton, and even worse than George W. Bush.

Obama is a liar, a coward, and a violent man. I don't doubt that he is an intelligent man; but he is spineless, irresponsible, and completely unprincipled. I find it hard to imagine a worse president--even though I was quite literally afraid of a President McCain.

Court-Martial Bradley Manning? No, let's have Bradley Manning for President.

Bradley Manning for President! I mean it.

Bert Hornback

GOD BLESS THE GREEDY!

The absurdity of rich people's greed describes the United States. We are a liberty-first country, not a society at all. We are united, not socially, but by our greed. Greed is the one great American virtue. And if it sounds odd to hear Greed called a virtue, then you--like me--are unAmerican.

Many of my oldest friends no longer speak to me because I oppose Greed, and they know that they are greedy. I have never called them greedy, but they know they are. Not like the big-timers, but greedy. And as long as there in anybody else who has more money than they do, they will remain greedy.

Will any of them object to the executives who last year received from $5,000,000 to 54,000,000 in "compensation? How many unemployed people could $54,000,000 provide jobs for? Only 2,000. There are a lot more than 2,000 unemployed people in this country. But if you add up the "compensation" of the 2,000 highest-paid executives-- you get salaries for 200,000 jobless people.

Now, if we tax the wealthof all the greedy Americans who have more than $10,000,000 in real estate, stocks, hide-away bank accounts--tax them at, say, 90%--then we will have changed things enough that maybe America can be called a society.

Oh. Another tax: let's impost a 50% socialtax on the Defense Department's budget. And divide that money up among the nation's poor.

I'm serious. If I were the head of a family that had made such a mess as has been made of what could have been--maybe once was--the American family, I would expect one of my daughters or sons to take over, and implement just such a plan to save us.

Greed is just like cancer: stupid. Cancer keeps eating its host until it kills the host it fed on. And then the cancer dies. Greed suffers from the same damnable stupidity--and it and its practitioners are eating--greeding--this country to death.
The military is what it is because military spending satisfies a lot of our greediest Greeds. Military contractors--ask Dick Cheney--are leaders in the Greed business.

I hope that some day the greedy have to eat all the ugly, soiled, dirty, and worthless money they have hoarded. The rest of us may be dead by then--but we will have died as decent humans. The greedy aren't decent, and they disgrace humanity.
Well, let them try to live on dollar-bill salad.

Bert Hornback

The field is, as they say, wide open. The Democrats are giving the Republicans the presidency--but the Republicans can't find anybody to take it.

President Obama, the incumbent, is of course running backwards, away from the finish line.

The Republicans can't find a respectable candidate to run against the man who can't face that his disastrously erroneous, counter-productive, broken-promises lying term is coming to an end.

Is it possible that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, or Michelle Bachmann could be the next president of the United States? Or course it is--because Barack Obama plans to run for re-election.

His platform will be that he is the president of broken promises.

He promised to close the torture-camp at Guantanamo Bay--and didn't.

He promised to end our illegal and immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--and instead expanded them to include Pakistan--and any other country that might harbor a Taliban (our creation--does anybody remember that?) leader--and now Libya and probably Syria: and of course Iran.

He promised to stop torturing people, and to protect whistle-blowers--and has been torturing Bradley Manning for more than a year for obeying the law.

He was going to provide a real health care bill--but didn't.

He has done nothing good. And his young daughters will grow up to know that their father was a fraud. And black Americans will be ashamed to have him as their representative. And all of us who trusted him will be tempted to cry, "Never again!"

Does the Unites States hate Arabs? and Islam? Or course. Why? Is it just because of the Arab countries' oil? Or is because, since Americans are forbidden by law to hate black people, and have learned that they can't openly hate Jews, they are busy hating Arabs and Muslims--and ignorantly assuming that Arab and Muslim are interchangeable terms? And of course American Jews hate their fellow-Semite Arab brothers.

Along comes America's first black president, who is also sort of a Muslim and an Arab, but a Christian too. And he is very intelligent, but also utterly immoral.

In 2012 Barack Obama is a candidate to be defeated. But which one of the utterly unqualified, incompetent Republicans will be the one to defeat him?

Or will the Democrats get smart, refuse to endorse Obama, and maybe choose Governor Cuomo as their presidential nominee?

Bert Hornback

OBAMA OUTDOES JOHNSON AND BOTH BUSHES

What an amazing arrogance. What obscenity. What shame for all of us who hold United States citizenship.

Our president has announced his intention to murder the new head of Al Qaida. No suggestion of using civilised procedures, like finding him guilty of anything: just a mad, uncivilised determination to murder him.

Sleep well, Mr. Obama. If the world survives you long enough, your daughters will grow up to know that their father was (a) a a gross hypocrite, (b) a lawless hate-monger and murderer, and (c) a man who betrayed millions and millions of good people all over the world who trusted him to be an honorable, thoughtful, just man.

To these charges I put my name.

Bert G. Hornback

"THE OLD FOOL SAID TO PUSH ON"

Robert D. Gates, retiring as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, has complained that the European member-states of NATO are not supporting the U.S. the way they should, financially. Their governments aren't spending enough on "defense"--which used to be called "war."

Gates thinks that the Europeans should all follow the U.S. into bankruptcy. When the U.S. only had two major wars going--in Iraq and Afghanistan--it was spending $1,000,000,000 a day on its wars. That was all money that the U.S. didn't have, of course. Now Mr. Obama has expanded on what Mr. Bush--remember his "mission accomplished" claim?--started but didn't end. We are now at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. And maybe several more countries: Mr. Obama has already proclaimed that he will send troops--or other, non-human drones--anywhere in the world to murder any future would-be Osama bin Laden.

And how will Mr. Obama pay for these wars? He won't. The U.S. will just keep spending money it doesn't have. Murder is expensive: how much did Obama's office say he spent before the U.S. actually caught Osama bin Laden and murdered him? Was it $13,000,000,000?

Osama bin Laden's death was indeed murder: U.S. soldiers illegally operating in another country, shot at close range an unarmed man, and killed him. Who ordered his murder? Mr. Obama. Never mind law.

Mr. Obama--a lawyer--has no respect for law. He held Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for 365 days, torturing him. His justification for this was simple: though Manning had not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of a crime, Mr. Obama justified his treatment by declaring, "he broke the law."

There is no law, it seems--just as there is no money.

And with the U.S. as a part of it, NATO is a farce. And Robert Gates is a fool.

The U.S. should close down its absurd and disgracefully un-American Defense Department, and start spending what little money it has on its poor and its homeless--and on education and health care and paying its debts. Then someday our great, great grandchildren may have a country they can be proud of. And with the U.S. no longer trying to lead the world, their world should be a much safer world--and better, too, and cleaner and healthier and happier.

I suppose Mr. Gates's comments were welcomed by his NATO colleagues with roars of laughter. Or maybe they weren't listening. Maybe they weren't even there.

Does anybody remember the night the Smothers Brothers had Pete Seeger singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the Old Fool Said to Push On"? That was back in 1967. CBS in New York tried to cut the song--and did, but the response to their censorship was so strong that they relented, and aired the show. Seeger sang his song for Lyndon Johnson and his war in Vietnam: "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and the Old Fool Said to Push On."

The CBS station in Detroit, Michigan refused to air the song--and then, to prove that they were correct in censoring it, played the whole song the next night--with the words running across the bottom of the screen so the audience could read as well as hear them--as a feature on the six o'clock news. Of course, the six o'clock news had a much larger audience that the Smothers Brothers did: even conservatives watch the news.

The U.S. is 'way more than "waist deep" now.

ORLANDO!!!!

Orlando is the fifth largest city in Florida, with a population of 240,000 people. It has more than 750 Christian churches. And Orlando actually has a law that make it a crime for anyone to feed the poor in the city.

Three people have recently been arrested for feeding Orlando's poor, in a public park.

Somebody who has long been associated with Christianity and Christian churches once told Christians to feed the poor. More than once: over and over again. And he promised that those who refused to feed the poor would go to Hell.

Has anybody ever mentioned that in any of Orlando's 750 Christian churches?

Isn't there a higher law that trumps Orlando's shameful, disgusting law that makes feeding the poor a criminal act?

Let's all go to Orlando and feed its poor. Isn't that what Jesus would have told us to do?

Bert Hornback

SAVING CHILDREN EVERYWHERE

UNICEF provides nearly a billion US dollars' worth of vaccines each year for more than half of the world's children. Worth supporting? Certainly.

And that's why two of its pharmaceutical suppliers, NOVARTIS AG in Switzerland and MERCK & CO in the United States refuse to allow UNICEF to release the prices they pay to these two giant money-makers.

They don't want competition. They want as much profit as they can get their greedy hands on. Health care? Saving children? Those are foreign words in the offices of JOSEPH JIMINEZ and JURGEN BROKATSKY-GEIGER at NOVARTIS and KENNETH C. FRAZIER and RICHARD T. CLARK at MERCK & CO.

Why not write to them to tell them what you think about them and their companies.

JOSEPH JIMINEZ, Chief Executive Officer
Novartis International AG
CH 4002 Basel
Switzerland

JUERGEN BROTAKOWSKY-GEIGER, Head of Human Resources
Novartis International AG
CH 4002 Basel
Switzerland

KENNETH C. FRAZIER, President and Chief Executive Officer
Merck & Co.
One Merck Drive
P. O. Box 100
Whitehouse Station, New Jersey 08889-0100
USA

RICHARD T. CLARK, Chairman of the Board
Merck & Co.
One Merck Drive
P. O. Box 100
Whitehouse Station, New Jersey 08889-0100
USA

To read more about their shame and about UNICEF's work, go to

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/29/ap/health/main20067144.shtml

Thank you for joining this decent act of protest on behalf of the world's children. And in the meantime, make certain that your doctors don't try to prescribe medicines from NOVARTIS or MERCK for you or anyone else.

Bert Hornback

What's In A Name?

For the last fifty years I have named things: given them personal names to replace their corporate names. It started with cars. My first Volkswagen, in 1961, was named "Dilsey." She is one of William Faulkner's characters, of whom Faulkner says, generalising, "They will endure."

Then I named refrigerators, stoves, vacuum cleaners, furnaces, typewriters. I named them as you would pet dogs and cats and gerbils, and then they were significantly--by that signifying name--my property, and I was responsible for them.

(I had a television set once, briefly. I wasn't hooked up to get any stations, and it went to its grave nameless the afternoon that I buried it in the back yard.)

Two years ago I named my current car "Fitz." He's a little Honda Fit--or Jazz, as he would be identified, corporately, in Europe. But I've now changed his name.

On a small label, I copied the name of a young American soldier who has been killed so we can have cheap oil. And I glued it onto the car. Every time I buy a tank of gas now I add the name of another young soldier or marine who died so we can have cheap oil. I put the names on the back fender, around the gas cap.

But I can't keep up. Since 2003, two American soldiers have been killed a day, on average, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't keep up, let alone catch up. 6,036 young Americans have died fighting for cheap oil as of 26 May, 2011. How many more from other countries? And how many tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians--who (to us) don't even have names?

Maybe I should start calling my little car by its names. Maybe I should make myself think of it by its many names. And maybe if a number of us could find some way to remind ourselves of what we are doing when we buy our gasoline, we would learn, together, in a moment of outraged awareness and sympathy, to say somehow an effective, absolute NO to our war for cheap oil.

I AM BRADLEY MANNING--REALLY!

We are all Bradley Manning: sure. If the government can ignore his constitutional rights by imprisoning him for a full year without charging him with a crime, and can torture him every day for a year in violation of international law, none of us is safe.

So why don't we all change our names--to Bradley Manning. We can do so, legally, in our local communities and with our employers. And of course, we will all have to apply for new Social Security cards, because of our new names. And we will have to notify the Internal Revenue Service.

And we will need new passports, and new driving licenses. And new voter registrations.

And new names on our bank accounts and credit cards.

And then, when this sleazy, law-dodging, two-faced government tries to charge Bradley Manning with disclosing their crimes, they will have thousands of us, all claiming to be Bradley Manning, to arraign.

And we will all insist on being arraigned. And we will all plead not guilty. And we will all demand trial by jury. And we will accept the government's dismissing of all charges ONLY if the dismissal applies to ALL Bradley Mannings.

And all of us will reserve the right to file charges against the United States government and Barack Obama for felony crimes against the United States Constitution.

And then? If we want to, we can reclaim our old names easily enough. But many of us, surely, will want to retain our new names, and in honor of our hero continue to be known as Bradley Manning.

Bert Hornback, a.k.a. Bradley Manning

I AM BRADLEY MANNING

"I Am Bradley Manning." You can say that, too. Just click http://iam.bradleymanning.org.

Until President Obama apologises, publicly, for having said "Bradeley Manning broke the law," we all all--like it or not--Bradley Manning.

With no "Habeas Corpus"--thanks to the Bush Obama denial of our constitutional right to such protection--and Obama determining guilt before and instead of trial, ALL AMERICANS are in danger. And our government is the source of that danger.

As things stand right now, Obama--who has declared that "Bradley Manning broke the law"--can declare any of us guilty of anything. And since he has suspended the U. S. constitution and imprisoned Bradley Manning for ONE FULL YEAR without charging him with a crime, he can do that to any of us. And he can keep us there indefinitely.

For one full year Bradley Manning has been illegally confined--and until two weeks ago, tortured every day by President Obama. The United States has illegally confined two hundred prisoners at Guantanamo Bay--most of them for ten years now, and most of them presumably tortured: including one prisoner arrested (for throwing a rock at a U. S. Marine) when he was fourteen years old, who is now twenty-four years old.

I don't understand how we can be so quiet about this. Is it that we don't care--or that we are cowards?

I AM BRADLEY MANNING. SO ARE YOU. INDEED: EVERYBODY IN THE UNITED STATES IS BRADLEY MANNING--EXCEPT FOR THE MAN WHO HAS IMPRISONED HIM: THE MAN WHO HAS DECLARED THAT "BRADLEY MANNING BROKE THE LAW."

Our president's daughters are Bradley Manning. And so is his wife. We are all Bradley Manning. We should all acknowledge--and claim--our identity, publicly. We should answer to no name except "Bradley Manning."

Does your driving license identify you as "Bradley Manning? Your passport? Will you vote, next time, as "Bradley Manning"? Is the name on your mailbox "Bradley Manning"? Do you sign your checks, your letters, "Bradley Manning"? You should.

Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning

priorities

A nation that spends three trillion dollars trying to kill one man, but has no money to pay school librarians, is an idiocracy.

How utterly stupid can the United States be? A president who is supposedly intelligent continues for more than two years to spend a billion dollars a day on his wars--just like his stupid predecessor did. But just like Bush's United States, Obama's America can't pay for health care for its citizens, or police its streets, or feed and house its poor. And now, in California, it can't afford librarians in its schools.

But the president has at least one, maybe two new wars against Muslims. Remember how he wanted to stop our wars?

Why is the United States at war against Muslims?

Well, we can no longer lynch Black people legally in the United States.

And we have already murdered most of the Native Americans: there aren't enough of them left to make a war any fun.

And we can't openly hate the Chinese because China owns most of America's debt.

We could maybe hate people from India--but they don't hate back very well.

So we hate Muslims. They aren't as easy to spot as Blacks, or Orientals, or people from India. But they can be identified--by their names, and their beards, and the way they dress.

We now have five wars going on against Muslims: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Syria. What about Libya? Or Palestine--a proxy war, being fought by our allies (or our masters) the Israelis? Seven wars? And more?

Of course, us white, peace-loving, Onward-Christian-Soldiers crusaders have been busy trying to murder all the Muslims, ever since the twelfth century in the era named after (blessed are the peacemakers) the World's Greatest Warrior, Jesus Christ.

But let's be serious. It will better if schools don't have librarians: better still if the schools don't have books. Children need to be protected from both information and knowledge.

With Liberty and Justice For All

I don't know where to start: there are so many shames to deplore and complain about. I will take the one which has at least a small element of good in its most recent news.

A small element. Bradley Manning is no longer being held in solitary confinement in Quantico, and no longer being tortured. A year of such was enough? Bush Obama has done away with the Constitutional right of "habeas corpus," so he could keep Mr. Manning for a year without bringing any charges against him. That, of course, is what Bush Obama is doing at Guantanamo Bay, and has been doing there for more than nine years: since he was just plain Bush.

But nobody cares. Most of my former friends condone such. I can't understand them. Or maybe I just pretended, for many years, that they were decent, thoughtful, honorable people, because I wanted us to be friends. No more. I can't do that any more.

Bradley Manning is now being held at Fort Leavenworth. He is actually allowed to wear clothes now. (Are all the U.S. Marines at Quantico sexual perverts? Not gay, but perverted?)

But Obama has announced that "Manning broke the law." Well, I guess I am glad lawyer Obama said that: because as he must know--being lawyer Obama--he has now fatally prejudiced any attempt to bring Mr. Manning to trial on any charges.

Lawyer Obama knows, of course, that Mr. Manning upheld the law. Both U.S. civil law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make "misprision of a felony"--the hiding of a known felony offense--itself a felony offense.

The war crimes that Mr. Manning exposed, through Wikileaks, were felony offenses. He had a duty--a legal duty--to expose them.

The real criminals in this serious case are (a) George W. Bush; (b) his underlings who actually committed the war crimes--torture, illegal imprisonment; and (c) Obama who has continued the torture and illegal imprisonment at Guantanamo and the year's worth of illegal detention and torture of Mr. Manning.

The chambers at Nuremberg have been completely refurbished. It's time they be used again. This time, the prosecutors can't be Americans--because Americans must be the ones on trial.

And to those of you who might read this--who once were my friends--I hope you can find your way toward honor again. You are welcome to despise me, but please don't be either determinedly stupid or mean.

POT-AND-KETTLE DIPLOMACY

U. S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton says that the U. S. must stop the arbitrary detention of prisoners not charged with crimes, and must stop torturing prisoners.

That's surprising and most welcome good news.

It would mean her boss, President Obama, would have to close his (yes, his) concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, and release all those detainees who have been incarcerated in cages there these last ten years--though none of them has been charged with a crime.

It would also mean that the U.S. would have to stop the daily, round-the-clock torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning at Quantico, and either bring charges against him or release him--and give him the honors and medals he deserved for his brave and heroic actions..

Ah, but damn it, she said that Syria had to stop arbitrary detention and torture. Not the U.S. The U.S. is above the law--because it has thousands of nuclear weapons. And it is above the law because it is so far in debt that if it collapses, the whole world is in a mess. Both the U.S. missiles and the U.S. debt are threats.

So the U.S. continues to be a rogue state, and hypocrisy continues to be its national pastime.

Bert Hornback

What are we doing? What we are doing.

Three workers in Nebraska have experienced an "unplanned radiation exposure." I assume this means that sometimes workers experience "PLANNED radiation exposure."

No doubt members of the military cause "unplanned civilian casualties" with their guns and bombs. And "planned casualties"? I am sure our troops experience "unplanned casualties" of their own--and I wonder, given our generals' vulgar attitude toward suffering and death, if our troops don't experience "planned casualties" as well.

Every time we kill human beings in our wars--in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Libya--those human beings, once dead, as declared to be enemies. That, of course, makes sense: we are the good guys, and perversely, in our absurd moral system,good guys kill bad guys.

I know that many Americans--many of my friends and former friends--will object to what I have said: not because they deny it or disagree with it, but because they don't want it said.

DEAR MR. OBAMA

Here's a letter for the U.S. President, for whom I quite happily and enthusiastically voted three years ago. I was betrayed, of course. Mr. Obama is a liar. He ran dishonestly. I am disgusted. If you think I am unfair to him, tell me how I am such.

Bert Hornback

Mr. Obama,

You have betrayed all the Americans who voted for you.

You promised to close the U. S. concentration camp at Guantanamo. Instead--in violation of everything that this country has ever stood for, and what you promised us--you say that some of the men illegally incarcerated there for ten years will be kept there for the rest of their lives. Why? Because though we can't charge them with any crime, we have tortured them for so long that they no doubt hate us.

You promised to end the George Bush torture regeime. Instead, you allow it to continue--and you add to it the outrageous World War II style torture of Bradley Manning at Quantico. That young man is a hero, a noble human being: and you are evil in trying to drive him crazy so you can keep him locked up for the rest of his life. You know that you can't try him in court: his defense will be that he obeyed both U. S. law and U. S. Military law in exposing your administration's felony offenses.

If I could, I would change places with Bradley Manning. And I would shout every day until I was hoarse about you and your agents' crimes. I would demand to be brought to trial--and you would have to murder me, Mr. Obama, to shut me up.

Do you ever think what your daughters will think of their father when they grow up? He was a liar, a coward, a criminal, a torturer, a murderer. Is that what you want them to think of their father? Are you the man Michelle Obama married? Are you the man so many millions of people voted for?

Unless you change. Mr. President--unless you recover what was once, I believe, your decency--when you die, your epitaph will read,

Here lies Barack Obama,
Who betrayed Millions of Decent People
All over the World
With Lies and Bombs and Torture
And brought Horrendous Disgrace upon his Nation.
The Civilised World
despises him.

Both Lyndon Johnson--who lied about the Gulf of Tonkin--and Richard Nixon--who was a criminal, who was responsible for Kent State and the bombing of Cambodia--will be remembered as better presidents and as better human beings than you.

How can yopu pretend to be decent? How can a man responsible for torture sit down to watch a basketball game with "friends? How can a man who kills as many people as you do, every day, spend a recreational evening?

I live in Germany at the present time. When you were elected president, Germans were elated. Everywhere. People I didn't know stopped me, shook my hand, hugged me.
Now, however, my friends say, "What happened?" "America is an awful place." "I am sorry for you--and sorry for all of us."

And when, these last few days, your bombers rumble overhead at night here, people who honored the United States for its role in ending World War II spit on the idea of the United States today.

The restoration of the trial chambers at Nuremberg has recently been completed. They are ready and available for war crimes trials. Soon George Bush, his cronies, and Barak Obama may well stand in the dock there together.

Is that what you planned for yourself?

Are you a coward, or simply a dishonest man? Or are you the aggressive criminal--violating our country's laws and traditions, violating our United Nations obligations, insulting humanity--that your actions make you out to be?

Sincerely yours,

Bert Hornback

P.S. I post this as "It Says Here" because the Obama Administration--in the best Fascist fashion--wants to "communicate" with us, but will not allow us to answer, to talk back.

BANKRUPTCY

The biggest bankrupt in the world's long history is, naturally, the United States of America. But because the United States has thousands of nuclear weapons and a proven readiness to use them, it is allowed to continue borrowing money from the rest of the world.

The United States uses its nuclear weapons to blackmail the rest of the world into continuing to lend it money.

Mr. Obama pretends to want to curb spending to avoid an American implosion. A dollar saved here, two dollars there. If he would (1) END HIS WARS, and (2) disband his military forces and (3)cancel all military spending programs and (4) dissolve the so-called Defense Department, he could not only balance his budget, but even wipe out most of America's debt within ten years.

He could do that, and at the same time provide real jobs for all those in the military, all those civilians who run the military, and all those who would become unemployed by our shutting down the defense industry.

The new jobs those million-plus people would have would be honest, productive jobs: jobs that build homes and schools, grow food and restore land, and learn useful skills and trades. Their labor, in time, would give us clean water and clean air again--as well as clean consciences. Many of those men and women would become teachers, and our disastrous public schools would start educating our children.

We could begin to remake our failed society--and as we did so we would re-learn the civilised, social virtue called freedom, and abandon our stupid, selfish insistence on liberty.

"Liberty" is a word which looks out for self. It has never pretended to be wise. It is a do-your-own-thing word, a word for pursuing individual desires. It's the same word as "libido."

"Freedom" is a very different word. Its close relatives, linguistically, are "free" and "friend." If we are free, we are free together.

If we are truly free, we won't have homeless people, or hungry people. We won't have a dysfunctional school system. If we are free, we will have universal health care.

Pursuing liberty, we pursue profit, and individual wealth. Pursuing freedom, we pursue that other, social ideal called "commonwealth."

"Wealth" is a good word: literally. Its root is in the word "well." It has been in use for more than a thousand years in Germanic and English languages. It means both happy and good--and both "happy" and "good" are social words, too: their roots are in words for gathering.

Maybe Mr. Obama should get a good dictionary. Maybe we should all get good dictionaries, and find out what our founding fathers--humanly and nationally--once proposed to us as a way of life.

And while we are rediscovering what is good, we may also discover something else that we all should know: something that every history lesson teaches us, as soon as our todays turn to yesterdays. Good is good. But war? It isn't only bad; it is worse. War is an early form of the word "worse."

Let's change our world. Let's ask Mr. Obama to start changing it right now, by ending his wars--and making things worse. Then we can start being good instead of greedy, social instead of selfish, and free.

And then--maybe even soon--we won't be bankrupt any more, wither monetarily or morally.

MULTI-CULTURALISM

Mr. Sarkozy says multi-culturalism is a failure. French Muslims praying in the street is proof. Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu est MON dieu! So the Christian dictator of France has spoken.

There is no room in Mr. Sarkozy's world, I suppose, for a united Ireland. Or a united Cyprus. Or civilised existence within and among the Balkan states. Can black people and white people live together? What if Jews took to praying on Mr. Sarkozy's streets? Should China and India throw out their Christians?

Mr. Sarkozy probably wants Germany and France to go back to fighting. Maybe he wants to have another Thursday afternoon war on the hillside at Spicheren, and kill 10,000 German boys and 12,000 French kids in six bloody hours.

At Spicheren, overlooking the river Saar, there are two late nineteenth-century monuments: one to the 10,000 Germans who died that day in that place, the other--forty meters away--to the 12,000 French soldiers killed there. In between these two is a third monument: a modern one, erected by the European Union. Its plaque says, simply, "Never Again."

Europe should budget generously for the building of a wall around Mr. Sarkozy's version of France. All of Europe's unemployed--including those in Mr. Sarkozy's France--can be put to work on the job. That will solve two problems: our European unemployment problem--which is economic--and our problem with Mr. Sarkozy's France--which is moral.

EGYPT

Our dear ally in the struggle to prevent democracy in the Middle East has fallen. Repression, U.S. style detention, torture: these have been the trademarks of Hosni Mubarak's long dictatorship. But he has been America's ally: as in earlier days were Generalissimo Franco in Spain, President Salazar in Portugal, President Batista in Cuba, the Shah of Iran, President Marcos in the Philippines. With Mubarak gone, maybe the only American-supported dictatorship left is that in Saudi Arabia: which has never even pretended to be "democratic."

The Obama government's response to the crisis in Egypt proves once again the absolute bankruptcy of United States foreign policy. Through its constant abuse of the word "democracy" the United States has made of it an obscene joke: even at home. Disregard for "democracy" at home gave the United States the presidency of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama was actually elected, democratically. But his use of the word is so badly tainted, so corrupt, that in terms of foreign policy we really are no better off: the United States is still trying to impose its will on other countries--by force.

Mr. Obama's outgoing press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says "Iran's government fears the will of the people." Mr. Gibbs never said that about Hosni Babarak's government.
And no American president or press secretary has ever said such about any of the dictatorships that the United States has supported. Democracy? The United States is no friend to democracy anywhere: even at home. The United States is run for and by the rich.

BLESSED ARE THE. . . .

President Obama has attended the Christian prayer breakfast. And he says that his faith is part of his strength, or something like that.

No doubt he prays "Blessed are the Peacemakers" every morning as he spends another billion dollars bombing people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Is there a special prayer for people who run concentration camps? Is there a special prayer he says to absolve himself of guilt for the imprisonment and torture of Bradley Manning?

Does he have a biblical reference to justify his acceptance of American greed as a way of life?

There is so much about our way of life that is absolutely opposed to what Jesus taught. And Jesus condemned hypocrites twenty times for every time he mentioned any other sin. But Christianity in the United States is utterly hypocritical.

I wonder if any of the Christians at the prayer breakfast thought about giving the food that was served to the hungry and the poor? Or as the left, maybe giving their coats to some poor people who don't have coats? Or . . . .

Bert Hornback

FACING UP TO NICENESS

I have been noticing, of late, all the snarling, glowering, tough-guy faces on cars--especually on American cars. On some of the big European cars,too. Waiting at traffic lights, they seem to say CHALLENGE and AGGRESSION.

Wouldn't the world be better off--maybe just a little, but better, still--if our cars didn't seem to want to be violent?

I suspect that a man who drove a car with big pink and white rabbit's ears might might find it harder to be a competitive driver. A car whose grill smiled might not try to squeeze other drivers changing lanes. A driver whose car looked like it was wearing big round classes might feel meek or shy even. A golden retriever? A happy young collie? Maybe a goose?

Why not?