Boom!

There it is...

We’re still living in a world warped by the fakery of [Boy George] and Cheney.

We’re still shattered because W. and Condi Rice ignored that intelligence report titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” [Georgie] was too busy mountain biking to pay attention.

** If our leaders could trick us into the Iraq misadventure, how [can] we trust government again? ***

Until Americans as a whole address our crimes, misdemeanors, ethical lapses and the on-the-ground-across-the-globe consequences of our actions during the Bush-Cheney-Obama war years, we're gonna be spinning our wheels as a people.  

Who are we anymore?, when we've finally put down our political-warrior class of old neo-cons, and are beginning to remake America anew, peopled with the refugees and immigrants of New America, compliments of the failed warrior planning and intelligence actions...

A lot of people are profiting off this division.  Are you helping to encourage it, putting your own personal interests over the needs of our country as a whole?

Are you with us, we wonder of each other, willing to sacrifice to put America first, or are you only out for you and yours?  That's never been the American way...  

Powell even failed to follow the Powell doctrine, which shunned attenuated wars in which our national security interests were not at stake....

He let Dick Cheney goad him into making the phony case for war at the United Nations; Cheney mocked Powell, asking if he was afraid to jeopardize his soaring popularity ratings, treating him like a flower child. And somehow, Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.

The demonic Cheney and the war-loving neocons in his posse — the ones in the Pentagon were ridiculed by Powell as a “Gestapo office” — needed an unimpeachable frontman. Once they began leeching Powell’s integrity, there was no way that they weren’t going to drain him dry...

As much and as quickly as our American values and traditions are changing, incorporating the caste-think and socialism modes that have proven to fail elsewhere -- in other nations -- America will continue to decline in power.

But if we remember our roots -- "innocent until proven guilty";  "all men are created equal (in the eyes of God and the law)";  "community over caste";  "equal opportunity not equal outcomes guaranteed" and most importantly, the value of true Independence for men, and women alike, who are strong enough to pay the price and seize such -- I think we've got a fighting chance still...

For what it's worth.

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ADDED:  Pete and Repeat were out fishing on Pete's boat.  Pete fell out.  Who remained? ... "Pete and Repeat were out fishing on Pete's boat..."  A classic, I tell you!  An uncrackable classic, don't let 'em fool ya...  ("or even talk down to-ya! ... So go to hell if what you're thinking is not right, stay alive!")

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Tuesday, October 19

Stories like these about Colin Powell are cutesy...

@carolynryan

“The signal is green to cross Broad Street!” the recording of Powell’s voice declared, helping people safely get to the other side of the busy road.

But we should never forget the good general's real legacy to America:

As a First black man, he got roped into using his reputation, experience and credentials to advocate for a false war that was unnecessary and illegal under international standards.  America had no true justification for invading Iraq and slaughtering -- yes, slaughtering -- so many innocent lives.  Children, elders, most of them brown and black, and poor by Western standards.

 The Establishment used this First black man -- much as the war machine churned up and spit out Barack Obama and his pajama-clad crew years later when they told us they could turn it off... -- to sell its wars of choice.  

Colin Powell, with his natural blackface and Condoleeza Rice* as the photogenic tall and willowy Barbie accompanying his uniformed Ken --  successfully made the cross-over into White Establishment society, as so many young Black strivers today, blessed especially with mixed-race looks and loose affirmative-action educations, are also doing...

In the end, we won't remember Colin Powell for his boyscout-helping-elders cross the street voice, though kudos for the editors looking for flattering tales that have yet to be told about our great general...

In time, of course, Powell's name will be lumped in with the Evil Trio of History, as an assorted player with the White men like Wolfowitz (sp?), McCain, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush the Boy.  He will remembered not only for remaking the Middle East, and flooding the world with refugees, but for crashing the United States economy by undertaking wars that the country was not prepared to pay for...

But the lives. Oh my God, the lives America took... The numbers, the blood, the browned and blackened bodies.  The lost potential...  As a nation, we need to acknowledge what was done by our military in our name before we can rightly and justly move on politically as a country hissing now with civil-war battles of our own...

The weakness of America's military decisions showed itself very soon in the American invasion, in that the Iraqi people we were allegedly helping to liberate did not even have the strength -- physically as a group -- to pull down the symbolic statues of their own leaders they allegedly were so keen to overthrow in their revolution.  It was all a basically a lie. = An American war of choice...  

And a poor choice, at that.

The American military had to be paid to do that for them too.  Use our military equipment to tear down the statues of their leaders.  Sad. 

The Iraqis were not ready, physically, militarily or with the fight-might -- the will, to pull down statues and overthrow their own actual leaders in the flesh (US soldiers were paid to do that for them too), much less to create another government structure to replace the one they had been living under before the United States invaded, hyped up by Colin Powell's deadly testimony...

The Iraq war of choice was led on paper by Bush the Boy (but really by Veep Cheney and his Big Business haliburton connections...) and is still being paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Many of us still out here understood from the start, back at the turn of this century^ -- unlike the experienced genius military go-along-to-get-along mind of Colin Powell *sarcasm off* -- that the United States had no business invading or attacking the oilfields and museums of a sovereign nation, as much as one might have hated the heavy-handed tactics of their internal leaders.

The American media still in power didn't much learn from the war years.

The politicians think there will be no reckoning, that the damage inflicted was all in the past, that the war is now over because we said it is...  But actions have consequences, like leaders have legacies.  Colin Powell, in his heart, was a good man.  But he is a cautionary example to African-American immigrants today coming up in America:  stick to what you know, not who you know.  Stand on your own two feet, and never sign on with an organization that will pay you well, but harm your integrity.

It's too late for Colin Powell to re-live his life and correct his course knowing what he knows now.  But... surely the man himself, the great general, would be embarrassed by those touting his cross-the-street help, instead of insisting that a complete portrayal of his work, even as a patronized black man as all the early Firsts are..., contain a detailed description of where he went wrong trusting the White Establishment who ultimately played him, used up his reputation for their own goals, and killed so many darker innocents in his once-solid country's name...