The Nature of Things

By now, we should be inured to the capacity of the right wingnuts in our country to blame victims for the problems and tragedies they experience. This is most famously done, of course, in regard to poor people. For the self-righteous wingnuts, the poverty of the poor is all their own fault. They are lazy. They are uneducated - because they refuse to be educated. They think the world owes them a living and they should just be able to sit back and collect it, while they get high on alcohol or other drugs. The wingnuts believe that the poor should not receive any help from the rest of us through the government. They are responsible for their own poverty and must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps without any assistance. We see it also in their attitudes toward women and their health care. Rape victims were asking for it. Women seeking abortions must be forced to give birth. Women are not competent to make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies. And, no, they certainl...

The government is today marking the official end of the Iraqi war. The unnecessary war. The war built on a lie and the swaggering hubris of a small group of small men who had never been to war and had no appreciation or understanding of its costs. In this case, the costs were thousands, perhaps more than a million, dead and many thousands more maimed. Lives ruined that can never be recalled or repaired. A country torn down to build up the egos of those small, swaggering men. And through it all, the men who fomented that war could never even give the country they were destroying the respect of calling it by its correct name. To them the country would always be "eye-rack." They taught a generation of young Americans to call the country - the correct name of which is "ear-rock" - by this spurious, insulting name. It's only one example but it bespeaks the attitude of these despicable chickenhawks, and gives an indication of why many people in that part of the world ...