Paranoia – The Destroyer, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #347 | @MDWorld
October 28, 2013 Mike Gold 8 Comments
European leaders are still falling over each other in feigned outrage over the latest revelations that the United States of America was – can you believe it – actually spying on them!
And that big yellow ball of heat up there in the sky? It’s called “the sun.” You learn something new every day.
Do I think America should be spying on its allies? Well… there was a time when Britain was sending boatloads of soldiers out here to grab their land back. They burned down the town in which I now live (Norwalkers moved to Ohio in the belief that the Red Coats wouldn’t follow). More recently, Germany had that World War I / World War II thing going on. Japan screwed up Hawaiian tourism for half-a-decade. These days, or at least before Edward Snowden confirmed the truth behind our long-held suspicions, those guys were our friends.
But eternity is a long time, and sides shift. The Soviet Union and the United States were on the same side during both World Wars. After that, not so much. Today… well, that’s where Snowden lives, isn’t it?
I’m not crazy about all this, but international espionage is a force akin to gravity, fueled by paranoia. If we weren’t paranoid, we wouldn’t be spending two-thirds of a trillion dollars each year on “defense.” And that doesn’t count the actual black-budget spying activity that is kept off the books in the name of… security.
At the end of the day, I’m not concerned about the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was “severely shaken” by the revelations or that the European Union is going to pass a “Data Protection Reform Act” that would have the same affect on the American National Security Council as a fart in a blizzard. If they haven’t had their spy operations looking at the United States, and if they weren’t receiving the benefit of American spy operations from time to time, then a severe disservice has been done to the European people.
As the song says, “it starts when you’re always afraid” and we’ve been on a fear-footing ever since Hitler took his dirt nap. We invent reasons to be afraid of the rest of the world as though there aren’t enough real reasons. Then again, we’ve got a two-thirds of a trillion dollar defense budget that needs justification. That’s a whole lot of jobs.
Not that it ruined Barack Obama’s otherwise awesome week. Executive branch incompetence has been off the charts for 13 years now, and no one would be surprised if it continues until the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.
But, please, spare me the self-righteous indignation. Like the rest of Snowden’s revelations, there’s nothing new here. There’s only public confirmation of what we all believe in our heart-of-hearts has been going on since the days of James Fenimore Cooper.
You know. Back when Great Britain was our enemy.
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
George Haberberger
November 1, 2013 - 3:37 pm
And Russ and George cheer for failure. “Hooray for our side” indeed.
Neil, go back through all my posts on this thread, or previous threads. Hell, google my name, (I do use my whole name after all), and find something I’ve posted about the health care act.
If your position was as virtuous as you seem to believe, you wouldn’t have to resort to making unfounded and untrue statements about someone you’re debating.
R. Maheras
November 2, 2013 - 6:56 pm
Neil C. — You crack me up! I don’t HAVE a side. This ACA has been a debacle — from its hurried inception, to its planning, and now its execution. I thought the whole Iraq war thing was screwed up too at a number of levels, but this ugly baby looks like it’s going to surpass even that.
“Cheering,” my ass. If you’d have given me 3 or 4 million bucks, you’d have had a damn fine Web site and a much smoother product launch than this train wreck.
Doug Abramson
November 3, 2013 - 10:30 am
Hurried inception? Developped by a Republican think tank is n the 90’s, discussed for a decade and a half, took the better part of a year to get through Congress, followed by a multi-year roll out. I’m not gonna debate the law with you Russ. Other than agreeing that the website was botched, we won’t see eye to eye on it. You do have an interesting concept of hurried.
R. Maheras
November 3, 2013 - 11:59 am
Not really. Keep in mind that the final Senate version is very different than the original House version. Anyone who looks at the end result can see that it was a rushed hodge-podge — so much so that almost no one had read it before voting on it. I ask you… Who, in their right mind, signs off on a complex contract, costing them enormous sums of money, without reading it? But I’ll wager that, to this very day, only a fraction of the politicians who voted for it ACA have read it. Incredibly stupid, and we’re seeing more of the same with the release of this ACA web site. Democrats are motorious for throwing money at problems with no follow-up or oversight. Republicans, to their discredit, did the same thing with their war in Iraq. Bad management, but good politics. “Look! We care! We spent (fill in the amount here) on this problem!”
George Haberberger
November 4, 2013 - 10:25 am
Subsequently, one of those dastardly bastions of the “liberal” mainstream media — 60 Minutes — ran a mostly erroneous story about why the ACA is bad, because, you know, they love Obama and they’re giving him a free pass because they’re…you know…liberal.
As I posted above on 10/28, “… but now that he is safely ensconced in his second term, criticizing him is easy and amounts to nothing.” That kind of criticism was absent before his reelection.
And speaking of 60 Minutes, the program on October 27 featured a story on Benghazi, revealing how al Qaeda had targeted the US facility and even said as much in an online post. The story of an internet video that the administration insisted was the spontaneous cause of the attack was proved to be a lie, A lie that the administration told to the families of the victims and the voting public one month before the election. And though CBS and 60 Minutes helped maintain that lie a year ago, even now when they appear to be trying to atone, the report still did not mention the names of Obama or Clinton.
Rene
November 6, 2013 - 8:41 am
George –
You see it as a conspiracy of the media to get Obama re-elected. Yet, I remember that the same media was very accepting of everything the Bush administration did or said, particularly in Bush’s first term. I wonder, if you’d say they were also trying to get Bush re-elected?
It seems to me that the big media, supposedly “liberal”, is actually inclined to follow the lead of anyone that is in the White House. They listen to whoever is in power, Obama or Bush. And in both cases, they’re a bit more critical when their second term comes.
I don’t believe the media is unbiased, but most biases don’t come from well-orchestrated conspiracies with an obvious endgame. In any case, Liberals are bad at conspiracies. Liberal groups are too fragmented and disloyal for that.
I also thought at the time that most Liberals just accepted that the White House’s version of Benghazi was correct not because they carefully weighed that this version would be most favorable in an election, but because that is just how Liberals think:
“If Muslims do something bad, it must be because we provocked them.” To a Liberal, Muslims are not moral agents, they’re like children with diminished responsibility.
R. Maheras
November 6, 2013 - 9:25 am
On a semi-protest, semi-venting Facebook Web site for federal employees titled, “How I spent my furlough day,” one federal employee asked no one in particular why, given that we spent $380 million on the Obamacare rollout thus far, we just didn’t write a $1 million check to each and every of the 317 million Americans to use on health care as they please.
Good frickin’ question.
George Haberberger
November 7, 2013 - 8:59 am
“To a Liberal, Muslims are not moral agents, they’re like children with diminished responsibility.
That’s a good point and I would go a bit further to say that liberals believe that about lots of groups. Anyone who disagrees with them does so because those groups are just not as intelligent, responsible, far-sighted or empathetic as liberals. That’s their well-known misplaced sense of moral superiority that liberals are alway surprised people have an problem with.
Mike Gold
November 7, 2013 - 12:21 pm
A million bucks for each and every American to spend on health care? What, you want a welfare state? Socialist!
Besides, the younger folks would get screwed. A million 2013 bucks won’t cover ’em through life. And medical inflation would skyrocket.
Maybe William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson had the right idea after all. Turn it into a reality show and it’s all set.
Neil C.
November 7, 2013 - 2:23 pm
As opposed to the real moral superiority you believe conservatives have? I’ve never threatened to beat up someone who disagreed with me politically as opposed to the guy in my building who wanted to fight me when he found out I voted for Obama in 2008.
George Haberberger
November 7, 2013 - 3:26 pm
Neil, you’re back! I presumed you were searching the internet for posts I’d made about the health care act so you could justify your post that I was rooting for its failure. No?? Couldn’t find anything or didn’t bother to look? Either way, I hope it wasn’t your sense of moral superiority that prompted you to make that unfounded claim.
“As opposed to the real moral superiority you believe conservatives have?”
Sigh. Again your telling me what I believe? Please refer to the previous paragraph.
So someone threatened to beat you up because he didn’t like the way you voted? I believe you. No single party has the high moral ground, at least not every member of those parties. Ask Mia Love who was called the house n—-r when she spoke at the Republican convention. Melissa Joan Hart recently revealed that she voted for Romney and said: “I got called every name in the book,” Hart said. “[People wrote] that they hope I die, and that they hope my children are gay, which is somehow supposed to be some sort of punishment. […] The hate was really unbelievable just from that simple tweet. Just by saying I was voting.”
When the Sarah Palin movie, “The Undefeated” was released I posted on AMC Theater’s website that I hoped the theater chain would screen it in St. Louis. The response from all the open-minded liberals was telling. Not only did they not want to see it, they didn’t want anyone to see it and threatened to boycott AMC for carrying it.
That’s the liberal mindset I’m familiar with.
Neil C.
November 8, 2013 - 5:41 am
George,
Work for a living. Sorry I’m not as obsessed with you as you seem to be with me.
R. Maheras
November 8, 2013 - 10:58 am
Neil — Ha — You never lived in blue collar towns like Chicago or Detroit, I take it, where voting Republican could get you your ass kicked, your car keyed, or your business inspected by the city over and over and over again.
George Haberberger
November 8, 2013 - 11:34 am
I’m not obsessed with you because its you. I’m obsessed with people who think they can make assumptions about others based on their own prejudices. If that description fits you, well that’s not my problem. The things I’ve posted here about liberals are about liberals as a group not you specifically. You posted about what I believe based on what you think I believe.
Rene
November 8, 2013 - 1:48 pm
I think there is a greater possibility of personal growth when you’re more concerned about the pitfalls of “your” own side. Because the lessons can then apply to you.
For instance, one thing I truly hate is book burning. And you’d think most people would hate it too, but again and again I’ve seen that people are actually okay with book burning, literal or metaphorical, as long as it’s a tool used by “their” side.
When it was announced that DC was to release a comic book with a Superman story written by Orson Scott Card, people started with the boycotts.
It saddened me a lot. Gays have always been victims of censorship, of enforced invisibility, of pressures to supress their expression. And now people sympathetic to gays used this same dirty tactic. If they had pressured DC to donate the profits from the comic to a gay rights organization, then I’d applaud them.
I’m not, for a moment, supporting Card’s ideas. His ideas about homosexuality are deeply misguided.
R. Maheras
November 12, 2013 - 12:26 pm
Hell, if I boycotted every person or organization who said or did something I disagreed with or thought was stupid, I wouldn’t be able to go to any movies, listen to any music, read any comics or magazines, buy any products, or do much of anything. I’d have stayed single, moved into a shack in the mountains, and become a self-sufficient hermit armed with a hair-trigger shotgun and a bad attitude towards every other human being.
Boycotts… bah, humbug.