Mar 26

Written by:
3/26/2010 8:45 AM 

As the aftershocks of healthcare deform continue, the truth of the matter seems to have emerged. According to letters from Ralph Nader and Jon Walker, president Obama last year had cut a deal with the insurance industry to prevent a public option. According to these letters, president Obama has lied to us. Let’s say you and I accept as true that unthinkable travesty because I want to pile on some more bad news in order to make a seamless case for my point today. Here’s the pile: One learns in today’s news that the recent loss of bee hives in fact is due to pesticides, that US funded death squads operate in Indonesia, that the Senate is taking recess without funding unemployment insurance, that Colombia’s US funded drug operation is poisoning the fields of peasants who are out of line, and that Alan Simpson has been called up from the political trash heap to whittle away at Medicare and Social Security.

The pile was heating itself up last evening as I watched the “Nature” show on a PBS fundraiser. It was a tribute to hummingbirds. The show ended with giving away hummingbird feeders. Tut, tut, bad for the birds. Par for PBS though. The fundraiser had been preceded by The News Hour in which Margaret Warner interviewed the president of Yemen. Her first question was what was Yemen doing about Al-Qaeda. Not about the country's own problems, oh no, she had to lead off on the war on terror. No surprise, PBS for years has cleaved to the establishment. She went on to ask what Yemen was doing about its corruption. Yemen’s corruption? Tut, tut, senior correspondent, attend this earlier pronouncement by a middle eastern wise man:

Matthew 7:3 : And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Yes the pile was heating itself up, and this morning when it was topped off by Ralph and that other fellow saying that barely out of his first one hundred days the president had lied to us the simplest possible description one could fathom of the current state of the US is that its government is incapable of responsible action. Of course, that rests on those two letters. Or, come to think about it, maybe those letters are redundant, maybe we have known for a long time that PBS is window dressing for an establishment so horrible we cannot believe it so.

(Credit to Stand Up Seattle and to Roger Fulton for netting those two letters.)