Timothy Gatto

For every right we lose in the United States, for every assault upon the Constitution and for every foreclosure or job lost overseas, the more we hear about “supporting our troops”. I don’t suppose that anyone has figured out how supporting our troops will help us to regain our rights or to get our homes back. The same goes for killing Muslims. How many should we kill in order to make things right at home?

I watch Scott Pelley on CBS every night. No, I don’t watch the show to gain any insight into what’s happening in the World. I watch it to see how the news is slanted towards our foreign policy. Recently I’ve see a few episodes where CBS correspondents have slipped into Syria to report on the fighting there. Scott always starts and finishes with how the Assad regime is killing its own people. To give credit to the correspondents, they just report on the violence these and don’t ascribe blame. That’s Pelley’s job. Watch it a few times and tell me that I’m mistaken. Scott is a whore for the administration. I imagine that is why he got the job.

TV isn’t the only outlet that whores for the administration. The radio and the newspapers do a good job whoring too. If one was to only watch the MSM (and sadly that’s most Americans) you would think that we are doing a pretty good job fighting all of those “evildoers”. The sad fact is that most of the time, we are the “evildoers”. As long as the majority of Americans keep their collective heads in the sand, nothing will change.

I try to point this out in almost every conversation I enter into. My wife of course doesn’t like it. See gives me the “look” when I try to educate people as to what is really going on. It isn’t because she doesn’t think as I do, it’s because she grew up in a home where political thoughts were kept private. It just isn’t good manners to be opinionated. If this were another time, or another country, I might tend to agree with her, but this is America in the 21st Century and we are in an impossible situation.

It won’t be long until we are bombing the crap out of Syria. We might be bombing Iran at the same time. Many Americans think this is a great idea. It doesn’t matter that neither nation has attacked us, that isn’t a prerequisite for warring against another nation. Maybe we’ll see Ahmadinejad getting a machete up his ass like we saw with Gadhafi. That should be good for Obama’s percentage points in the polls.

Romney wants to add 2.1 Trillion Dollars to the defense budget. Think of all the shiny new tanks and missiles we can buy with that. Church going Christians will probably support that. It matters little that we have no real excuse to bomb the crap out of these countries. The Mainstream Media will make up an excuse.

The Supreme Court has also jumped on the bandwagon. They don’t seem to miss an excuse to deprive us of our civil rights. Racial profiling is now OK, unlimited financial contributions by corporations and PAC’s is quite all right (even though us real people may only donate $2,500 dollars) and they seem poised to get rid of Obama’s health care legislation.

What to do?

Well for one thing, we can voice our discontent. Marching with hundreds or thousands of like-minded people won’t accomplish much. The MSM won’t cover the demonstrations. They would rather cover a score of Tea-Partiers hanging Obama in effigy. The only time they cover a demonstration is when it’s in Russia. Our discontent doesn’t seem to matter. Soon, when the military starts rounding up dissidents in neighborhoods across the U.S., these demonstrations will come to an abrupt halt.

One thing that the MSM does cover however is when violence occurs. While I’m not advocating violence, sooner or later it’s bound to happen. They also cover elections. I’m talking about the elections where a nation of over 300 million people are given two people to vote for, a Republican or a Democrat (not that there is much difference between the two). What would really throw them into a quandary is if people stopped voting for the two politically controlled political parties. Could that ever happen?’

If it could ever happen, now is the time. I have yet to talk to ANYONE that is enthusiastic about either candidate. From what I hear, people despise both candidates. This leads me to question how they came to represent their political parties. On the Democratic side, we have a President that holds weekly death meetings to decide which so-called enemy will die from drone strikes. He also presides over a nation that spends 53% of our tax dollars on weapons of war and the military. This guy has caved so many times to the GOP; I wonder why they hate him so much? He has out-Bushed Bush by extending the Patriot Act, implementing the NDAA, and presided over a Congress that makes it a felony to protest on Federal property. He has ratcheted up the War in Afghanistan, gone to war in Sudan and other nations in Africa, encircled China and Russia while he proposes sending the bulk of our Navy and Marines to Asia to encircle China.

While Romney, who changes with the breeze, hasn’t said a goddamn thing about what he will do if he becomes the president. I don’t believe he knows, Karl Rove hasn’t told him yet. He’s going to up the military budget, but beyond that, he’s a freaking dolt.

Where does that leave the American people? Well, you can buy a few more American flags, some yellow ribbons, and work two jobs to get your kids through college so they don’t have to join the military to pay for it. If they come back and they are in one piece, assuming they don’t kill themselves or kill their wives, they can go to college or get unemployment benefits and move in with you. Just remember, don’t ask them what they have done if they were in a combat zone, you don’t want to know.

Perhaps there is an alternative. You can get informed by going outside of the Mainstream Media. The internet is a good place to start. Maybe, just maybe, you can hang in there just long enough to see how you have been lied to for the past few decades. A good place to start is by entering “U.S. Defense Budget compared to World Defense Spending” in a search engine. Another search would be “Rapes in the U.S. Military. Maybe then you could go to “Civil Rights Lost”. Just for chuckles enter “Suicides by Military Members”. The list goes on and on.

The choice is yours. Except for the readers that already know what I’m talking about, the rest of you really need to get up to speed. Great Britain didn’t commit half the crimes against us that our government has committed in the last 20 years, and we fought a revolution over it. If you choose not to do anything, you will deserve anything that happens to you.

There are a few Third Party candidates out there. Rocky Anderson is my choice. Almost everyone says that he doesn’t stand a chance. Quite the self-fulfilling prophecy, don’t you think? If the majority voted for him, he’d win. Of course they don’t tell you that. In conclusion, you can believe what they tell you (just as “they” said that a ramshackle Army couldn’t defeat a world power like Great Britain in the late seventeen hundreds), or you can think for yourself. What a novel idea!

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By Timothy V. Gatto, a retired Army Sergeant and former Chairman of The Liberal Party of America. He can be reached at: timgatto@hotmail.com Read Tim's Book "Complicity to Contempt" and his Novel "Kimchee Days or Stoned Cold Warriors From Oliver Arts and Open Press and available on Amazon and all other online bookstores.