Is there a difference? Fascism vs. The National Security State.

Why is America turning Fascist? Because highly influential reactionaries have the enormous resources of the super-rich and the Main Stream Media at their disposal. Thus, it's very revealing to talk to people at a free community meal; many of them are as poor as it gets in America. Yet out of ignorance or spite -maybe a bit of both - they spend a disproportionate amount time and energy attacking people they
consider just beneath, or perhaps slightly ABOVE, their own level of misery. It's so much more common in the wider society to demonize the powerless than to confront the mega-crimes of the billionaire class, and this is reflected in the "rhetoric" propagated by all classes. Such attacks are SO widespread among the poor and wretched themselves! The brainwashing has been incredibly successful; historically speaking, why wouldn't it be, with the all-powerful tools of newspapers, television, right-wing talk radio and now the toxic, tea-bag-grade bloggers? The persistent, often insidious but always omnipresent ultra-conservative messages transmitted through "education," conditioning, even downright brainwashing, do not fall on deaf ears!

I have firsthand experience of the victim-blaming so common in American society. I refer to the scapegoating that occurs every single day; it's practiced by the rich; by all strata of the shrinking "Middle Class;" and indeed, among the poor and downtrodden. This is going to take a while to expound, as there is so much victim-blaming to address. Just take the usual conflicts within the low-income population: I often hear and witness the poor attacking each other verbally and physically, particularly at the free meals I attend. Whether it's "inter-racial" conflict between say, Blacks and Whites or between Whites and Mexicans, this is so pathetically common. Of course, there is probably even more "intra-racial" strife among the lower socio-economic demographic, conflict between Whites vs. Whites, Blacks vs. Blacks, etc. In any case, it often begins like this: Someone "looks at somebody the wrong way." Or sombody mocks someone else for speaking a "foreign language;" soon enough, the insults, threats and often enough fists start flying. It's so much more convenient, you see, to blame ones economic, social-status obsessed, or just plain ethnically bigoted preoccupations on the nearest target of opportunity. Like Caesar said, "Divide and Conquer." And the ruling elite has successfully divided and pitted against itself the "unwashed masses" for millenia.

Badger Harold's commentator is mistaken.

http://badgerherald.com/oped/2011/09/15/inflammatory_politic.php#add

Oh, really, Mr. Lindsay? Bush did nothing to warrant his impeachment? How about starting a thoroughly illegal, "pre-emptive" war of aggression, utilizing a cynical campaign of lies and deception? The Iraq war, that is. You know, the war that has killed, with no good cause, AT LEAST 600,000 Iraqis. The same Iraq War, which, according to Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, will end up costing the US Treasury over Three Trillion dollars:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87801279

Such crimes against humanity and against fiscal sanity easily rank up there with the transgressions of Richard Milhous Nixon, who resigned the office in 1974 rather than face his own all-but-certain impeachment. So, Spencer, you think it's inexcusable to liken George W. Bush to a Nazi: but the fact remains Bush's 2003 attack against Baghdad strongly resembled - to a point - Hitler's 1939 attack against a relatively weak, hapless Poland. In 2002-2003, Bush engaged in a similarly Hitlerian campaign of demonization against Iraq, making it out to be a threat to the US all out of proportion to the facts on the ground. In fact, despite the NON-EXISTENT Weapons of Mass Destruction that Bush cited as justification for "Operation Iraqi Freedom," Iraq actually posed us no threat whasoever. Yet Bush and his Neocon minions lied through their teeth in order to facilitate a protracted war that has ONLY benefited criminally corporate entitites like the (Dick Cheney-connected) Halliburton and Blackwater. Perhaps, in order to get a proper idea of what warrants a chief executive's removal from office, you should read John Nichols' excellent "The Genius of Impeachment," the book was written specifically with George W. Bush's massive crimes in mind:

http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Impeachment-Founders-Cure-Royalism/dp/1595581405

Just what, in your estimation Mr. Lindsay, would it TAKE to warrant impeachment for such war criminals? Need I mention Abu Ghraib as well?

White Man's burden and Manifest Destiny

‎"We have but room for one Language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse."
-Theodore Roosevelt
This, coming from the president of one century ago, is not surprising. But what is currently so tragic is that the United States persisits in such a xenophobic, parochial and counter-productive attitude. This nation would benefit enormously from a sensible recognition that a far larger number of us should be fluent in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and scores of other idioms. We do indeed speak our version of English - Americanese - and it is the preeminent Global tongue... for now. But as every other commentator and her father-in-law never tires of reminding us, we're in a Globalized scenario now. We need to pick up on what the world has to say, and not just in our habitual, half-assed, monolingual way.