We do not have a representive democracy. Congress has become the Soviet Era Politburo, and the there is but one political party, the entrenched corporate interests, of which there are two factions. Our splendidly free press functions as official stenographers, never asking the important questions, but blathering on and on how "manly" W looked in his flight suit.

And the rot runs riot through the blood stream of US politics.

It is my opinion that it is revelations such as these, showing the utter disregard for the law, disregard for accountability, and a "Fuck You" Cheneyesque attitude by our "leaders" that will lead to a rapid crumbling of societal adherence to the laws of the land. We are already seeing it clearly playing out in our financial industry. Neuter the SEC, gut regulation of all kinds, and then go rip people off at will! Charge it to the taxpayers, they're good for it!

After all, if we see all these top government officials and powerful corporate executives committing felonies and getting away with it, why should we plebes have to follow the law? Why pay our taxes? Why not hit and run? Why not knowingly rip someone off on that next plumbing/carpentry/financial assessment job? Chances are you won't be held to account, and if you are, simply cite all the criminal activity happening in the halls of government as your teacher.

Oh wait, I forgot, the two tiers of justice thing......yeah, now I remember....the key to holding society together. Preach adherence to the law, harshly punish crimes by those who aren't connected or super wealthy to make examples of them, and then as gov't leaders and corporate raiders, continue to loot America for everything you can, for as long as you can, to as many as you can.

It is apparent that even THIS kind of stuff won't wake the people up. It is certainly hard to have hope for the future of this country and the future of my kids when I see this shit going on uninvestigated and unpunished, with no real reform of any kind being put in place with teeth to back it up.

Speaking of which, more good news: Just watch the Bill Moyers interview from last night with the former top executive of Public Affairs for Cigna as he reveals the inner workings of how insurance companies have been killing americans for decades via "charm offensives" and other immoral and unethical tactics. I cannot stress enough how brilliant is this 35 minute interview as it totally encapsulates everything that is wrong with the way gov't, corporations, lobbyists, and money work in unison to hurt the American people (link at sig).

Sorry for the long rant, but this is just so damn depressing when I want so much more for this country and its people. As always, Glenn, thank you for putting this great material out there, no matter that it is so difficult to read and digest.

And not to beat a dead horse, but this stuff is the best proof yet that electing better Democrats isn't the right way to approach this. It's like being on a speeding train that has lost its brakes and putting tape over the red "brakes out" indicator. Glenn demonstrates today, and nearly every day, that the system is SO broken, it simply needs to be trashed and we need to start over. How will that be done? Perhaps that is what we need to start spending time discussing.

Factual arguments, however well phrased, don't move people: myths do.

JOHN PILGER: It was a lesson in what historians call "exceptionalism", the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world", was unspeakable. As the great people's historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop's much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city upon a hill", a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a "triumphant joy". The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by "the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained.".http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/09-7

C. PREBLE: "Obama, channeling FDR, explains that the United States leads "the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good." And so we must. "We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people."

[...]

At least one of Senator Obama's leading foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, wants to recapture that interventionist spirit.

"It's going to take a generation or so," she told Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh in an article for the Washington Monthly, "to reclaim American exceptionalism." Power lamented that Americans were "neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers" in the world's problems.

Is that what Barack Obama offers the electorate — to be a more competent meddler? [May 26, 2007] http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8380

GWB: "Tomorrow, when you get back to work, work hard like you always have. But we've been warned. We've been warned there are evil people in this world. We've been warned so vividly," Bush said. "And we'll be alert. Your government is alert. The governors and mayors are alert that evil folks still lurk out there. As I said yesterday, people have declared war on America and they have made a terrible mistake."

"My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers," he said. [Bush vows to rid the world of evil-doers'"] http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/

RICE: "The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside our obligations - legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that's - and by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agencies that they had policy authorization subject to Department of Justice clearance." [5:30-6:00 in the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEED_iviTA]

GG: The IG Report makes very clear that John Yoo's legal opinions authorizing these surveillance programs were not merely wrong, but were something much worse: radically flawed and deliberately inaccurate.

Our national myth--that we are exceptional in all of human history, even into the future--is being enacted by individuals who have convinced themselves that breaking merely human laws is an obligatory expression of faith in a Higher Power, the Big Man Upstairs. The greater the willingness to flaunt society's laws, it is believed, the greater the devotion. So we have radical divine right monarchists in charge of an ostensibly democratic republic of sovereign citizens, competing with each to show their zeal.

Holding our political class accountable, in their minds, would be to undo the work of the Big Man Upstairs. Since our power is divinely ordained, any diminution of it is offensive to the Throne of Heaven: We simply must dominate the world like our god dominates the cosmos.

Calling for investigations, therefore, isn't only Unserious; it's blasphemous heresy, you evil-doers you. Are you trying to get us all killed or sent to Bagram--excuse me, Hell forever?