DISASSOCIATED PRESS (DP) – Well, Hell’s Bells if it ain’t time once again for the Texas State Fair, and for everybody’s tummy-tuckin’ favorite, the Fair’s annual Big Tex Choice Awards, a  flat out cattle call for every Backyard Food Engineer from across the country to create and cook up the absolutely sweetest, or spiciest, or saltiest, or sourest, or just plain Strangest Thing On A Stick you ever did see.

All in hopes of winning top honors at the Best Contest at the Biggest Fair in the Biggest State in the Best Country etcetera and etcetera.  

‘Course, the winner of this here thing might just make some real dough out of walking off with the prize.  Hey hey, you just knew the Almighty Dollar was right in there somewhere, dincha?  Winning any of the top honors at the Big Tex Choice Awards could lead to a patent, to product endorsements, to franchise restaurants, to adding "Colonel" and a white suit and a mustache to your name.  It could be better n’ winnin’ the lottery, and that’s a longhorn fact.

The British stand down, and actual departure, from Basra and the southern rump of Iraq means no one friendly to America's military mission is sitting on that mission's several hundred miles of supply lines running up from Kuwait.

If the Shiite militias want those supply routes cut off and shut off, they can do it any day they choose. That would necessitate either an immediate American re-invasion of the south, or a fighting retreat in the direction of,  umm,  somewhere besides Iraq.  Quick.

The 300 million hominids of the USA -- who still charmingly refer to themselves as "We, the People" -- have long since been surpassed and supplanted by America's publicly traded corporations and ultra-rich investors, who are now the genuine citizens of the United States, able to vote with dollars, create votes with dollars, massage votes with dollars, manufacture public support for votes with dollars, write all the legislation to be voted upon, choose America's legislators by means of donating dollars to favored campaigns and, of course, make plenty of dollars out of all of these efforts.

It is a closed system of government of, by and for corporate aims, and those corporate aims are a closed system as well, a system of aiming for short term profits, stablilized monopoly markets, and unregulated access to the resources of "lesser" nations.

What about you and me?

A Baker's mistake gets covered with icing,

A Surgeon's with six feet of clay.

A Carpenter's botch gets plastered and painted,

"Oh, I planned it like that," he will say.

A Chef's snafu will get more sauce --

An Actor will ad lib his line --

But Dubya -- must swing from his own petard.

Any honorable man would resign.

What do other nations see when they look to America?

They see see a national government dominated by Big Business, especially by the petroleum and defense industries, and operated with corporate benefits always first in mind. They see a government that rules, instead of governs.

Instead of managing.

Instead of addressing current or pending problems for the nation, they concern themselves with corporate profitability for the coming quarter, and call it a day.

"Hey, Mr. Weaver!  What brings you down to the back forty?"

"Oh, I heard you pounding posts down here.  Thought I’d better come see if you’re stealin’ my pasture or just my cows."

"You can keep the whole bunch.  That brown one over there wandered up to visit my chickens, so I chased her home and came back to put the fence right.  Did you walk all the way down from your house?"

"Yeah.  I’ve still got some stamina, no matter what you hear."

It is what Jerome a Paris recently called The Reality War.  He’s not alone in his frustration.  The progressive blogosphere says it in a million ways and places every day – that wingnuts don’t listen. Wingnuts don’t budge. They just repeat their catechism of talking points, and keep going.  No manner or amount of facts or flawless logic will lead a wingnut one centimeter closer to functioning on the basis of proven facts, or reacting according to reality.  Nope.  They live in their own world.  They stand impervious to reality, facts, and even to blowback and bitter experience by the bucketful.

And, this is frustrating, depressing, and hopeless as hell to witness and to realize.  It’s like rolling a rock uphill, only to see it land back at the bottom again, every damned time.

You may well conceive a child, and raise her to voting age confirmed in progressive and humanitarian views, faster than you can convert a True Believer to those same views.  Indeed, your newborn child has a serious head start on the adult wingnut.

As in the Japanese game of Go, all efforts in the Middle East by both Israel and America are to 'surround' and thus control someone else's territory.  The goal behind seizing territory varies -- lebensraum for Jewish families, or sovereignty over sweet crude still in the ground. No matter the goal. Capture the turf and you get whatever is of value there. You win by putting region after region under your control.

Seize control of the State, and then tell that State to control its populace.

In real world terms you establish hegemony. You establish puppet states, protectorates, trade partners, client countries who will not wander from your wish list on pain of punishment.

In the year 2050, after petroleum became too rare and valuable to be legally burned anywhere on Earth, China, the American Union, the European Union, India and Russia looked back with satisfaction at how well they had handled the great Drawdown of Middle Eastern petro products.

Avoiding world war through a series of permitted localized wars, the ownership of the petroleum was always kept away from the Middle Eastern masses, and placed in the control of appointed local oligarchs instead.

The strategy was to view the nations of the Middle East as a collection of leaky buckets. The oil would inevitably flow, out of one bucket or another everyone knew, and so it was of no concern if this bucket or that one needed to be broken or kicked over now and again to keep the handle in approved hands. It would fill up again, and the oil would get to all the proper places in time. It was a matter of maintaining reliable local management.

My, my but the White House is in full spin about the Saddam hanging, where the only things that went well were the trap an' the rope.

Saddam was physically out of American custody for less than the twenty minutes it took to walk him down the hall in the basement of the prison and hang him. His body was immediately reclaimed by our armed MP's, whisked away before the Dawa Dawgs -- who were singing and dancing by then -- could whip out their pocket knives and trouser snakes an' what else to, umm, make their mark upon the occasion.

The Owners of our Ownership Society are those persons who own actual shares in America's corporations. These legal entities, who are considered Super Persons under American law, increasingly own all the physical and financial assets of the country, and face fewer and fewer consequences for operating them without regard for the common good.

These legal entities are increasingly international in nature and financing and operations. They have no more loyalty to any one country or currency than they do to raw numbers on a spreadsheet.

These Owners are increasingly recognizable as America's foreign lenders -- the Saudis, the Japanese banks, the Chinese and Asian banks. More and more of the physical and financial assets of America belong to them -- every day -- than belong to Americans. It's all legal and correct. They bought them up fair and square with solid money. That isn't the issue.

A lot of stove-piping of wrong and false flag intel was created or corraled by Cheney's Crew, and foisted upon the nation via the right wing media organs. Even the Pentagon and CIA had to eat some of the shit sandwich and then go tell the nation it was real good stuff.

They resented it then. They still very much resent it.

As a business executive, he's a public pickpocket. This man who literally could not find oil in Texas went on to find his true talents lie in the swindling of the unwashed multitudes. His pappy and his brother Neil surely showed him the ropes, and he's been at it ever since.

Dubya's Daddy's posse also steered Junior towards the filching of the public purse, if only to spare their own wallets the recurring expense of bailing young Master Frogblaster out of his latest corporate collapse.

One method is Upgrade. The original Roman tecnique. Offer the conquered populace such benefits in exchange for joining your empire that they willingly accept you while these benefits last, while these 'upgrades' are being delivered.

The other method is ethnic cleansing. Lebensraum. Remove, terrorize, imprison, enslave and kill the natives to the point where you may proceed in civilized safety and comfort.

Which is that our Congress actually did it. That this bi-cameral legislative body did indeed pass the Torture R Us Bill, and within a comfortable margin.  They brought down the US Constitution with one shot.

Gentle Reader, if there is a singularity at the core of this great American experiment, and at the core of all Western jurisprudence, if there is a soul at the heart of all Western civilization since the Dark Ages, it is the concept of habeas corpus -- that no human being can be deprived of their liberty without soon facing their accusers, soon seeing the evidence against them, and soon standing trial before a jury of their peers.  That is our true Rock of Ages, and our Congress just threw it out.

This is a war to Whack-A-Mole
To shove some shit back in its hole
This is a war to cancel the American Dream
A war that will continue 'til we cancel this regime

This is the war that never ends
Yes it goes on and on, my friend
Some people started fighting it a long time ago
And now they keep on fighting it because it's all they know

Most importantly, the Nuremberg Principles established that for all nations, whether they became signatories to the Principles or no, there is no excusing these crimes by any individual of any nation by means of claims that they were 'just following orders,' or by virtue of being a government official or head of state, or by claims of not knowing that it was a war crime, or of not being capable of stopping such crimes. No such excuses are allowed under international law.

That's the Dollar System. That's the way the world works.  It's an American monopoly, and it belongs entirely to the wealthiest five percent of Americans.  The Dollar System is what lets our elites run up an insane $8.3 trillion national debt, and keep right on printing green paper money as if it were real.  It's taken for real, all over the world, day after day, so what's the difference?  A worldwide infrastructure of globalized capital and corporations and livelihoods and nations and civilization rests on the Dollar System. Lo, it is sacred above all else.