The Propagandization of America

For as long as I've been around, I have frequently written that the American people are among the most propagandized of all in the world.

Here is one fellow's experience with America's corporate media, which supports my belief.

Here's one of the reasons why he is in this predicament.

How You Look At It 2: Electric Boogaloo

See Al's post below. And note that most of these programs are NOT "aid to the poor"; they're entitlement programs that benefit mostly the middle class.But they're NOT a bunch of lazy, government-teat-sucking yobbos, no!

God, I love this country.

I Guess it's How You Look at It?

State of Illinois legislators are fuming because the stricter rules they have put in place for proving Medicare eligibility have been rejected by the Feds. Their legislators say it is necessary to prevent fraud and to lessen the burden on an already overloaded budget.

State Representative Patti Bellock, a Republican who helped craft the reform package, didn't mince words when describing how overloaded she believed the state's Medicaid rolls are.

"Fifty percent of all births in Illinois (are) on Medicaid," Bellock said, according to ISN. "One out of every three children in Illinois is on Medicaid, and one out of every five Illinoisans is on Medicaid."

Is Rep Bellock's "non-minced words" directed at the people receiving Medicare benefits, or at the state of the society in Illinois that results in these large portions of the population having to fall back on public assistance to receive medical care? Add the 2008-2009 uninsured to the numbers she is quoting, and roughly 35% of her state's population is either uninsured or on publicly assisted insurance. And, if you wade through that Kaiser data, you will find that 58% of the uninsured are employed full time, as are 54% of the Medicaid beneficiaries. We are talking about working people. I Guess it's How You Look at It?

Note that Rep Bellock does not seem to be expressing concern that 1/3 of the children in her state are from families that cannot afford "private health insurance", and that perhaps that's an indicator of other deprivations suffered by the young in her state. I Guess it's How You Look at It?

So, is it about "budget issues", or people? It sure as hell isn't about "those people getting jobs and getting off the welfare rolls, as only 55% of the population has employer sponsored coverage, and if you factor out government employees, the private sector is not doing anything truly significant to give access to health care benefits to the population. I Guess it's How You Look at It?

Does the US spend double the per capita amount of other nations for health care, or do we charge double? Indeed, if you look at it from a charges basis, we charge 3 to 4 times more for most medical treatments and supplies than anywhere else in the world, yet our most common health indicators are lower. I Guess it's How You Look at It?

What leaves me cold, is that the generally expressed viewpoint tends to judge poorly those who must rely on public assistance for the cost of their medical services, yet the data shows that on a societal level, we have priced health care out of the reach of a significant portion of the population. I Guess it's How You Look at It?

Sadly, the sub-texts in the medical insurance debate seem to make it sound as if a small, lazy, segment of the population is over burdening the public coffers. I would offer that a large, bloated, greedy insurance and medical care provider industry is slowly, but surely bleeding everybody's coffers. I Guess it's How You Look at It?

US Recognizes Libyan Rebels . . .

Ya'll know my view on this . . . Why did we handle it so badly?

Or no surprise at all given the current state of US strategic thought . . . if this is any indication . . .

Harlan Ullman writes:

. . . For most of history, war was a contest between more or less like military forces. Defeating the enemy usually meant defeating his armies as a precondition for victory. Of course, insurgencies were as old as war. And, of course, insurgencies had relatively fixed geographic boundaries that, after the Duke of Wellington's brilliant peninsula campaign during the Napoleonic Wars, became known as guerrilla or small wars.

The American way of war remains firepower intensive. We won World War II, with the Soviet army, literally blowing away the Wehrmacht with our superior firepower.

As technology improved dramatically, so did mobility and maneuver. The Iraqi military was shattered twice by this onslaught first in 1991 and then a dozen years later. And the initial and stunning success in Afghanistan in late 2001 demonstrated the effectiveness of this technology in support of Northern Alliance ground forces in routing the Taliban, at least for the moment.

Unfortunately, Clausewitz's genius has been partially trumped by a critical question: How do even amazingly capable military forces defeat an adversary who lacks an army and uses insurgent, terrorist tactics, metastasized by a radical ideology in which suicide is a preferred weapon while possessing global reach manifested by the September 11th and other attacks against the U.S. and European allies? . . .

With all due respects to the father of "Shock and Awe", I think his history is a ways off. Perhaps some wars between Western armies have been between "more or less like military forces", but the wars between Western and non-Western (and there have been plenty of these) have been by definition "asymmetric".

The British and their little wars, the US in the Philippines and much later in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan . . . but we could go back to Clausewitz's time as well and find the same thing. Napoleon went into Spain and Russia with the best army in the world at that time and was defeated in the end by decidedly second-rate forces. Even the Wehrmacht in WWII easily defeated the Yugoslav army in the spring of 1941 only to be faced later with Partisans who continued on the fight. Ullman's view of WWII is flawed. Sure the Red Army ground the Germans down, but at a terrible cost, perhaps five men for every German soldier they put out of action. Could our successes in Western Europe in 1944-45 have been achieved without this great blood letting, the recourse to "grand attrition" on the part of the Russians?

The invention of gunpowder allowed for distance between combatants, war was no longer necessarily up close and personal. Any additional technological improvements have not quantitatively changed that fact. War and killing have had a remote quality for some time. Is there much difference in this regard between "Big Bertha" in 1918 and the Creech Air Force Base drones of today? We're talking about an improvement of targeting perhaps, but not really a new way of war.

War remains subordinate to politics since it is politics which gives birth to war. The recent failures are all explainable in Clausewitzian terms, which is an uncomfortable fact for people like Mr. Ullman who would rather ignore the current political realities . . . and assume that we have blundered in to some new era of warfare. Sorry, but it has all to do with politics and we ignore that basic human fact at our own peril.

The US recognizes Libyan rebels . . .

Discuss . . .

Untruth or Consequences

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment
to an insane world
--R. D. Laing

We are here to awaken from
our illusion of separateness
--Thich Nhat Hanh

Insanity is the only sane reaction
to an insane society
--Thomas Szasz
__________________

How to maintain sanity in a insane world? Can we maintain sanity only by accepting insanity as our daily ration of reality?

An example is the current brinksmanship over a few trillion dollars and the debt ceiling, as though our existence hinged upon this amount. We languish while a recent Brown University study estimates the final bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures at $3.7 to 4,4 trillion (and the fat lady is not gonna sing anytime soon.)

Buried in yesterday's Wall Street Journal was a comment that NATO will continue bombing Libya because Muammer Qadaffi has no legitimacy. Did Qadaffi ever have legitimacy in this or any other arena? If then, why not know?

Page Two explains that Afghan President Karzai quickly appointed another half-brother, Shah Wali, to replace the government post vacated by his now dead half-brother Ahmed Wali (Karzai Appoints Brother in Kandahar). It seems the endless supply of Wallys will secure the Karzai's control of the Kandahar region. Now that is democracy in action; thank you, America!

So, we are bombing the hell out of Libya because its leader lacks legitimacy, while concomitantly supporting the illegitimacy of one of the most corrupt governments on the face of the earth. In one scenario we kill to oppose illegitimacy; in another, we kill to support it.

Why do Americans grind their teeth over the debt cap while having no difficulty throwing away $trillions in foreign shit holes?

Where is the sanity? After taking my meds and settling into my Ikea Poang chair, the idea hit Ranger like a ton of bricks: "What's the big deal?" It was not exactly a Thich Nanh Hanh moment, but it was clarity nonetheless. So some drug-dealing, nepotistic person is getting one over on all of us taxpaying U.S. citizens paying for a hypocritical, insane war. What do I care, except that we are back to $trillions spent and a whole lot of people fucked up in the process, which in my book is a good approximation of national insanity.

Didn't we do a similar tango here in Florida in the 2000 Presidential lotto? In our version, Governor Jeb Bush handed the presidency to his brother George W. Bush. Again, what is the big deal? A lot of sound and fury, but the result is a foregone conclusion. How can we criticize the Karzai cabal (Kabul) when the U.S. uses the same playbook?

Even here amongst my esteemed fellows, we discuss strategy, logic and leadership as though they are present for duty in the National Command Authority. Perhaps those are not logical assumptions.

Insanity may be a coping strategy in America today.

[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar]

Forgotten Dates in Military History: The Doha Dash, 11 JUL 1991

Clif's Notes Version; malfunctioning vehicle heater cooks off ammunition in an M992 ammunition carrier that then sets off a series of massive secondary explosions that effectively destroy a hell of a lot of 11ACR's AFVs - a total of 102 vehicles including 4 M1A1's. The toll was orders of magnitude higher than combat losses in the just-concluded Second Gulf War.
Read about it here.

My son once asked my why soldiers marched around and did everything together like robots. I explained that in the old days soldiers fought that way. That the rule of thumb is that the closest weapon is the most dangerous, and that the man beside you - even though he was on "your side" - was closer than the closest enemy. So the soldiers learned to handle their weapons like that to keep from shooting each other.He didn't get it.(h/t to John Cole at Balloon Juice, one of the veterans of the Dash)

One Rule to Rule Them All, One Rule to Bind Them

I find this depressing to a degree:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday appeared to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq as part of the war against al-Qaeda, an argument controversially made by the Bush administration but refuted by President Obama and many Democrats. Panetta made his remarks during his his inaugural visit to Iraq as Pentagon chief. “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” Panetta told the troops. “And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”

I suppose you could make the case that the reason that "you guys are here" is because the Bush/Cheney Gang thought that 9/11 made a dandy excuse to do a little foreign adventuring.

But can we just stop fucking repeating this goddamn canard?We went into Iraq because we wanted - or at least a group of people who were at the controls of the U.S. government at the time wanted - to go into Iraq. No, there were no "weapons of mass destruction". No, there was no "Saddam-Osama Connection". We invaded for the same reason that Germany invaded France in 1870, that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, that every invader has invaded since Cain whacked Abel out in the tules; because the Other had something we wanted (or something we didn't like) and we had the military power to do something about that.

This goddamn lie just doesn't seem to want to lie down and die and certainly it is important for the national-greatness/PNAC wing of the GOP that it doesn't. But Panetta is supposed to be Obama's man. And Obama was elected - to the degree that anyone voted for him who had qualms about the man himself - because he was supposed to represent the antithesis of the idiots who rammed our national dick into the Middle Eastern meatgrinder because Osama was holding the handle and taunting us; "Hee hee, betcha you Yankees are too pussy to come and stick it to me!" For his new SecDef to be repeating this damn lie...well...damn.

The thing is - I accept that there is a case to be made for invading Iraq and elsewhere in the world to... (fill in the blank here; try and end the cycle of fucked-up despotism that is endemic to that sorry region, exert U.S. power, protect Israel, secure strategic resources such as petroleum or the passage of transportation chokepoints such as Suez or the Sunda Strait).

I disagree with the logic used to make that case; I think it's weak and foolish and based on an entire series of misconceptions, outright delusions and magical thinking. But there's at least an arguable case to be made for the notion.

But "9/11"?

Horseshit.

And worse - horseshit that we now KNOW is horseshit, was designed as horseshit to avoid having to argue the harder case above, and to hear the supposed partisan of an Administration that sold itself to the U.S. public as accepting that the "9/11 = invasion of Iraq" rhetoric WAS horseshit is just goddamn depressing and another reminder that regardless of who rules in Washington the Washington Rules rule them all.