Let's Get Real

In what bizarre universe does Dancing with the Stars qualify as “reality TV” or any other definition of reality? And how did a disgraced former congressman end up cavorting in outlandish outfits as a participant in such a travesty? Indicted for illegal campaign-finance dealings, Tom DeLay apparently couldn’t stand being out of the limelight despite having dishonored his time in office.

But the antics of dubious stars are something way far apart from the reality average folks face in lives fraught with anxiety about health care, jobs, and fears about our foreign engagements. The president is being pressured now to make decisions about Afghanistan by the very people who were so deadly wrong in the past. Supposedly “the surge” worked in Iraq, as John McCain and others keep insisting. Yet that nation remains unstable with a government that isn’t inclusive, has not established centralized power to deal with the distribution of oil revenues, has no reliable police or military forces, to name just a few of the problems that still beset the country.

And NBC correspondent, Richard Engel, who has spent years in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, cautions that Iraq and Afghanistan are not in any case mirror images of each other. He acknowledges that additional troops may reinforce our military positions, but Afghanis tend to see us as occupiers working with and propping up a corrupt government without improving the lot of the general population in any significant way.

Nevertheless, the neo-con approach is abroad in the land again. Wednesday morning, on Washington Journal, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, repeated the familiar Republican refrain that his party has always been strong on national defense as if the Democratic Party had failed in that regard and as if that explained what has been done in Afghanistan or will be done in the future. McKeon’s soft-pedaling of the well-documented corruption in the Karzai government and a recent tainted election wasn’t convincing and talked around the real issues there.

Elsewhere, a Jim DeMint contingent left for Honduras in support of a regime that overthrew its elected government, despite the fact that the administration does not recognize the new leadership. DeMint says the coup was justified according to the terms of the Honduran constitution and, besides, the previous government was left-leaning so a right-wing takeover is all to the good isn’t it? Wasn’t that the same rationale Nixon employed in countenancing the overthrow of Allende in Chile, a leader too leftist for Nixon’s taste? But the notorious Pinochet dictatorship that followed was hardly a tribute to US involvement there. One can only imagine the outrage Republicans would express if Democrats traveled to congratulate a government condemned by Washington.

In another odd deviation Oklahoma’s Republican Senator James Inhofe plans to attend the climate summit in Copenhagen to press his view that climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon and that global warming is a “hoax.” There are lots of dopey people around the globe who dispute the preponderance of scientific data pertaining to everything from evolution to climate, but why is it that public statements by some of our elected officials make us appear unenlightened and just plain stupid? Does Inhofe have a seat at the table as it were or will he just skulk around accosting delegates? Will he also express his feelings about homosexuals, religion and foreign policy to ensure that leaders from other countries will find reason to question our intellectual bona fides?

When the teabaggers Jim DeMint, Glenn Beck and others in our midst repeat their slogan ‘let’s take back America’ what do they really mean? Who ever said they had the right to claim this country for their own in the first place? We are diminished as a nation by those who put business interests above the needs of ordinary Americans and health care in the hands of insurance-company bean counters and who speak so confidently on subjects about which they are largely uninformed. A true grass roots movement will require its proponents to confront the false prophets among us and persuade the rest of the country by telling the truth and actually making sense.

Until sanity returns to our political life, our society will suffer at the hands of those who seek only to further their personal ambition and to promote a narrow vision as if they spoke for an entire nation.  Their arrogance creates for many a mind-altering condition that inspires thoughtless advocacy of what amounts to nothing more than right-wing propaganda. Time for a reality check.