first off, i think the whole "hating america" business has already been dispensed with above, so there's not alot of point in going into or through it again.
but underneath it, there's something that i find kinda alarming, this notion that seems to still be abroad in the land of the President. its a kind of bizarre-o television-based royalism which collapses everything that happens back onto projections based on the person of the Leader. The best analysis of this is still j.g. ballard's little story "the secret history of world war 3"---i looked for a copy of the whole thing to post, but only found a snippet. but you get the idea:
Quote:
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During the next few weeks, thanks to the miracle of modern radio-telemetry, the nation’s TV screens became a scoreboard registering every detail of the President’s physical and mental functions. His brave, if tremulous heartbeat drew its trace along the lower edge of the screen, while above it newscasters expanded on his daily physical routines, on the 28 feet he had walked in the rose garden, the calory count of his modest lunches, the results of his latest brain-scan, read-outs of his kidney, liver and lung function. In addition, there was a daunting sequence of personality and IQ tests, all designed to assure the American public that the man at the helm of the free world was more than equal to the daunting tasks that faced him across the Oval Office desk. For all practical purposes, as I tried to explain to Susan, the President was scarcely more than a corpse wired for sound … To complete the identification of President, audience and TV screen - a consummation of which his physical advisers had dreamed for so long - the White House staff arranged for further layers of information to be transmitted. Soon a third of the nation’s TV screens was occupied by print-outs of heartbeat, blood pressure and EEG readings.
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the basic story goes: after this kind of television-driven obsession with the minutae of the physical functioning of the Leader is fully in place, people dutifully go along with it such that, in the story, world war 3 occurs and no-one notices through the thick veil of infotainment about bodily functions....television-driven identification with the Leader could not possibly be less democratic. it traffics in a collective inability to distinguish between television image and reality. and there's an entire reactionary politics that keys on imaginary versions of the Leader, which wants to see certain types of actions following immediately and directly from the Person of the Leader and which comes up with a riot of counter-narratives to "explain" why such actions do not happen.
it's delerium, really.
& if this sort of stuff had no traction, i can imagine finding it to be funny, in the way i find it funny that folk who watch sitcoms think they have more friends on average then those who do not watch sitcoms do.
as for afghanistan, i find it entirely insane that attempting to gather information adequate for making an informed choice or choices about which way to proceed is interpreted as a Problem.
whether afghanistan ever represented a rational response to 9/11/2001 is debatable...but this is not the kind of thread that is amenable to having that discussion.
what's sure is that the campaign in afghanistan has had no clear objective since it was started by the bush people.
one of the many things obama has done that i do not support is the continuation of the action in afghanistan as if it was a legitimate centerpiece of a legitimate thing called "the war on terror" or whatever it's called these days.
what's also clear is that alot of people have died and continue to die in a context the primary characteristic of which is incoherence.
but it's been like this from the start.
clearly it's obama's fault. because after all, it was obama who got the united states involved in afghanistan in 2002.
as for the rest of the rant...i don't see how it holds together logically, pan.
but i rarely see how these things do hold together logically.