If your answer is 9.11 ties, you’re wrong. There are no ties to 9.11 and Iraq or Hussein. There are ties to Saudi Arabia but for some reason they were ignored and we’ve still yet to address them from a federal level.
If your answer is WMD, you’re wrong. For the sake of the argument, I’ll concede and say Iraq had WMD. They’ve been found, destroyed, deactivated, moved, etc. by now. If this is why we went there, because of WMD, why are we still there?

Personally, I’m struggling to find an acceptable reason for going to war in Iraq. Not to mention that there probably isn’t one, but we should have known something was up when war wasn’t properly declared. We were too upset about 9.11 to question our Commander in Chief at the time. This is completely understandable. We wanted vengeance for our dead. In retrospect, we can’t say it was right, but it was understandable.

What does this have to do with bread and circuses?

During the 2008 Presidential election, Obama was trumpeting his plans to end the Iraq war. To this day I remain convinced that this is exactly why he won the election. That, and because McCain said he’d stay in Iraq indefinitely. So it is now two years after his campaign and we’ve yet to see any signs of our military leaving Iraq. We’ve had a “declaration” from Obama naming July 2011 as the drawdown date for the Iraq war. But we also have General Petraeus noting that he reserves the right to tell the President it was “too early.” because the drawdown is “conditions based” and evidently there is some sort of benchmark they’re watching.

Well given that nothing has changed from George W Bush to Barrack H Obama over the absolute biggest item from the 2008 Presidential campaigns, surely the voters are upset and the media is reporting on it. Oh silly me, I forgot we’re now back to our apathetic and complacent selves. We’re literally fighting secret wars, permanently harming a new generation of Iraqis, all the while being told that the Iraq war could go on until an unrealized, undeclared goal is met. Oh and remember, the war in Afghanistan is also going well… Given the recent news about Russia supplying Iran’s nuclear program, we’re also hearing the drums of war rumbling as the saber rattling begins.

Ignore all that though. Our media has the “politically active” up in arms about the proposed racists in the conservative group or up in arms about the millions of illegal aliens in the country. More recently, we have the news that a Muslim community center containing a mosque is being built two blocks away from the World Trade Center’s ashes. Some people haven’t learned from the blindness and unquestioning actions our country undertook when going to war in Iraq. Some of us now think it should be illegal for a person to build a community center with a mosque just because their religion is incompatible with the attacks of 9.11 and their vicinity of the World Trade Center. Let me ask you this, do you really want to give the power to the government to allow or disallow a person buying property and building what they want on that property? Do you see any sort of slippery slope here? I digress.

As important as the enforcing of laws and the rights of private property are, we’re missing the point!

This is the modern day circus. In the fall of the Roman Empire, the people were given bread and circuses to distract them from reality. Well guess what folks, this is our circus! The 24 hour news cycle and constant barrage of Internet news and commentary is our circus. We love getting all puffed up and energized and feeling righteous about OUR cause and those in charge of the circus know that. The lines are being drawn between you and the person you have ideological differences with. In the middle of the fuss, while we’re all distracted, trillions of dollars are going from tax payers to corporations. The medical industry, military-industrial complex, the financial industry, they are all laughing their way to the bank.

The quicker you realize the distractions divide you from your fellow citizens, the quicker you can find a common ground in collectively refusing the ruling class to continue it’s fleecing of the people.

Most people, regardless of political philosophy, would agree that constantly taking money from the taxpayer to bailout private companies is bad.

Most people, regardless of political philosophy, would agree that trillion dollar deficits are incredibly detrimental to the country’s future.

Most people, regardless of political philosophy, would agree that the phony paper money system we’ve been tricked into adopting is absolute garbage.

Most people, regardless of political philosophy, would agree that the endless wars, death, and chaos that WE are responsible for needs to come to an end.

Stop with the upholding of the two-party system and the bickering and thinking of your neighbors as philosophical enemies and realize there are very important things that need to be addressed. We all need all the help we can get.

It is here. At some point, I was expecting the government to step up and make service mandatory. The draft was too inflammatory as far as political correctness goes. But “serving your country” in other ways will be construed as patriotic and American. Well here it is.

The sponsor of the bill probably won’t shock you.

Charles Rangel
Democrat – New York

That’s right! The same guy who has lied about owning property abroad to avoid taxation and who is now under investigation for tax fraud amongst other things, he is proposing that if you’re between 18 and 42 years of age, you should be required to “serve” your country in some form or another. Doesn’t that just sound like liberty incarnate. I, for one, would love to serve this guy! He seems like an honorable, moral, freedom loving guy. I’ll serve two years being watchdog of crooked Senators and Congress-critters. How about that?

This is one tax hiking politician. Now he’s also caught dodging taxes from his home state of Massachusetts. Kerry bought a foreign made yacht for $7 million then used Rhode Island’s repealing of the excise tax to save him $70,000 a year. When pressed about the issue, did he stand up and face the question like a man of honor? I’ll let you guess.

Just remember, while jobs are disappearing, and politicians are spending more and more money that’s not theirs (taxing us), that isn’t even ours (via the printing press), and that will be paid back by our children (trillions of new debt has been created by these thieves in D.C.), we should at least be able to hold them to the standard they’re creating via legislation. But as it turns out, Kerry is doing the same thing you would expect a citizen to do when hit with ridiculous amounts of idiotic taxes. He’s hiding and dodging so he doesn’t have to pay them.

So this leads to a questions… What do the D.C. politicians expect the people to do when they start upping the taxes to pay for all the legislation they passed?

Let’s just hope that the truth isn’t ignored.

Here’s a link to the documents in question on the NYT.

Oh my goodness! Did you hear Tiger Woods is cheating on his wife!? Did you see Avatar!? I really like Johnny Depp! Check out my new iPhone!

We are in historic times for some pretty terrible reasons and it seems some people are intoxicated on pop culture society. We’re breaking records for bad things in America and the Oscars are the focus of our attention.

Honestly, when is the last time you saw a body count of our dead soldiers since the conflicts started in the middle east? Do you have any idea the thousands of American families who are torn apart from their loss? What about the estimates that show that over a million civilians are injured in Iraq? You may never face these people are your peers or neighbors but if you have a soul you have to know they’re as much human as you are. And when you did hear a tremendously high number pinned to blood, death, and pain, how much did you feel the pain?

I was watching an interview today where a talk show host asked a former congressman how to fix the corruption in Washington D.C. The answer wasn’t too surprising to me but it went something like this: “I have no idea!” A congressman spending six years eyeball deep in the politics that control the people (as well as condemn them to future debts, war, etc.) says the corruption is destroying the federal government and he has no idea how to fix it. Think about this… Is there truly a fix? All of our history books says empires always fall. No matter how great they were or how gracefully they fall, they always fall. With that in mind, guess what folks? We have a military base in more than 130 countries in the world and we’re worse than broke. Where on the timeline of an empire are we? Our people are glued to frivolous pop culture as our so-called leaders are looting our lives away at record breaking pace. If you were objectively estimating the future of the world, where would America be in 20 years?

America is getting worse yet apathy is growing. Where do these two intersect? Are we on a non-stop train pushing a cure for apathy with a prescription for pain? Do we really need the country to descend into darker and darker times before we even acknowledge a problem and fight for a fix? Is there any other way than wait for the pain to get so bad the it effects the masses enough to break their attention away from American Idol?

That being said, it is strange that so much can be going wrong with America yet the American machine keeps pushing through it. It just keeps going like an NFL running back with defenders riding his back. Just keep in mind that eventually the strongest running backs fall. We’ve got all of history’s lessons to prove that.