Not To Worry About The Social Fabric

Marriage equality legislation, legalizing gay marriage, passed the IL Senate 34-21 today, with one no vote being my state senator Kirk Dillard. Senator Dillard cast, by his own expression, a principled vote on the basis of his belief that marriage can only consist of one man and one woman. He also advised when I queried him, that gay marriage, having such a drastic impact on the social fabric, should only be decided by referendum of all voters. Of course, Senator Dillard is merely trotting out the specious arguments of white state legislators in the deep South decades ago that God ordained a black should not marry a white, regardless of opposite gender. Those folks also passed the moral buck by arguing that only a popular referendum should allow something so pernicious to the social fabric as interracial marriage. It wouldn't be hard to guess how that vote would go considering that few blacks were even allowed to vote down south, much less be able to marry interracially.

Dillard's vote, besides being so 19th century when it comes to human enlightenment, shows how little he knows about the gay community. He apparently doesn't realize that gays would do nothing to harm fabric.

Cheney's next speech should be from prisoner's dock

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, admitted torturer and likely war criminal, sure has audacity. Instead of lying low, content to quietly enjoy his millions made from promoting endless senseless war, he's out there pounding away at the Obama administration's national security policies. Speaking to Wyoming Republicans February 9, Cheney chirped that Obama's foreign policy is "dismal" and he's appointed "second rate people", referring to Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, who is decidedly not of the war mongering Cheney mindset. Cheney especially lamented Obama's proposed defense cuts and that Obama is "establishing limitations...on future presidents." In Cheney's demented, criminal mind, he wants no limitations on the ability of future presidents to launch, like he maneuvered George W. Bush into, murderous, pre-emptive wars.

We still need an investigation of the Bush-Cheney Iraq war policies so we can hear Cheney's next, and hopefully last speech, from the prisoner's dock of his war crimes trial

Drone buildup following American tradition

One of the sadder defenses supporting Uncle Sam's targeted assassination program, including obliterating any American suspected of pallin' around with al Qaeda, is that expanded use of bomb spitting drones reduces military casualties. It's sorta like using robots on the assembly line; no chance of injury or death to an employee and no backtalk or desertion either.

The problem with this tact is that it assumes we're actually in a war that needs to be fought and the folks were blasting to kingdom come deserve to die. Well, we'll never really know because the Commander In Chief is cop, judge, jury, Supreme Court and executioner, isn't he? The folks in the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) sure don't care since its their sophisticated weaponry that gets all those innocents killed for nothing and keeps the profits pouring into their blood soaked coffers.

Least we think this is a new trend, one must go back 64 years, to 1949, when Uncle Joe Stalin detonated his first nuke, just 4 years after we used our first two, needlessly incinerating a couple of hundred thousand Japanese, simply to show Uncle Joe we could, and that he'd better cooperate with us. Stalin would not be bluffed so he accelerated his own nuke program and utterly befuddled President Truman who was told the Soviets were 20 years or more away from a nuke.

Not content with a post war defensive drawdown that hurt the bottom line, the MIC came up with a brilliant marketing campaign for their war toys. They jumped into the great debate after WWII about the need to phase out atom bombs least their growth set off a world wide nuclear arms race. Of course, the MIC took the opposite view: forget peaceful use of he Atom; just build thousands of nukes to maintain American worldwide hegemony, which, after WWII was at its peak. They closed the deal with the argument that we can drastically reduce military casualties and our overall defense budget simply by relying on the Bomb. Much of America opposed this madness including the public, Congress, scientists and the intellectual community. But the prospect of minimized casualties in the great campaign to control the world was too tempting for the Truman Administration and they sided with the MIC. Instead of civilian control of atomic energy, we began building nukes like, well drones, and set off the arms race that brought Russia into the nuclear club shortly thereafter. Truman left office in 1953 with 1,000 nukes ready to fire and his successor, Ike, tallied 21,000 more when he turned over the Presidency to JKF in 1961.  

And here we are today, ignoring the immoral, criminal, murderous use of drones with no oversight whatsoever, all in the name of waging endless warfare on imagined enemies without having to spill American blood. Why not? We're just following a good ol' American tradition.