This is Hell

Reading coverage of Alan Greenspan's book, wherein he pulls an Eisenhower as he heads out the door, alerting his countrymen to the duplicity of US foreign policy, I add Greenspan's name to the list of learned, sophisticated, ambitious men and women who will end their careers, in some form, tarnished, defeated or shamed while serving in the Bush-Cheney outfit. Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzales. Note that the uber White Man, Donald Rumsfeld, runs for the hills with nary an insight or comment to explain away any of it. Harriet Miers. Petreus. Even hacks like Robert Novak descend to the level of Super Hack in pursuit of a corner of Cheney's ass to bury their nose in.

Some of these are decent men and women who squandered their energies, careers and reputations, believing they were serving their country. When I studied politics at George Washington University in the late '70s, they taught us that the men who would make the best public servants were opting out of the process, post-Watergate. The people who would make the best Presidents, Congressmen and Senators want nothing to do with the process.

This country is in the worst condition I have ever seen. We are faced with problems that will destroy both this country and the world's environment if we stay the course that the GOP has piloted since 1980. A course that rapes the land, plunges our nation deeper into debt, crushes any hope of real and effective oversight of industry by government regulators, maintains a permanent underclass in our ranks and abroad, denies health care, denies education, prosecutes and imprisons the powerless, kills American men and women needlessly in a trumped-up war, allows fanatical US Christian conservatives to demand a war for oil, rebukes honest and empirically substantiated scientific discoveries and kills innocent Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of the Bush family's sick agenda in the Middle East.

This course must be altered, and drastically so, or we will see the twilight of our great country in my lifetime. More importantly, it can be altered in the next election if we are rational. Brave and rational. We must take risks in the name of American democracy. Risk that someone with a new idea might really be on to something. That is why this is Hell. The answers are there. But our leaders are ignoring them. At times, they are not only ignoring them, they are hiding them from us, willfully and maliciously.