The US War Machine

In an excellent article, "Don't Let the Dogs Out! Don't Bomb Iran!" which can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/12/3803/, Joyce Marcel writes, “I truly believe that Bush has ruined our country. He’s ruined our future…”

RichM sees it a little differently and left this cogent and provocative comment in response to Marcel's article: "It’s easy to sympathize with this view emotionally, but actually, it’s not really Bush who’s ruined our country — regardless of whether or not he finishes off what’s left of “The American Experiment” by bombing Iran. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. Bush is the natural & inevitable product of the true nature of US society; he’s a perfect reflection of it. Long before the thuggish mediocre Bush stole the presidency, US society had become a war machine. Internally, the mass of the population had become entirely divorced from any role in influencing policy, and politics was reduced to infighting between competing corporate elites, with the public interest playing virtually no role.

"Bush is not the cause of the US decline; he is rather a proof of it, and a manifestation of it. It was inevitable that the vicious greedy thugs behind him would choose an ignorant sociopath like him, with a famous last name, to function as their frontman. When you think about it, he’s really perfect for the job — a headstrong sadist convinced of his own magnificence, & thus contemptuous of, and unreachable by, any kind of dissenting opinion."

Seems to me the truth is large enough to encompass both points of view: Bush and Company is a whopper of a destructive force, both at home and abroad, and, despite some sincere opposition, American society is pretty much going along with it. Certainly Congress and the Supreme Court are. BushCo does seem largely representative of mainstream America, particularly those aspects comprising the US war machine, which, as RichM points out, is what American society has become. Sad, sad, sad.