End game

Today Greenwald rips the predictable 3-card Monte that is the current Petreus dance. I commented thusly:

Many of us saw this game as a sham from the outset. The very opposition we empowered last November is rewarding us with a textbook display of gullibility and cowardice. Predictable. Predicted.

But if we knew how this was going to play out, I think we have to follow the logical flow chart one more level, and ask ourselves another painful question. We knew we were Cassandras, condemned to see the tragedy but be ignored on our prophesy. So why did we play our part as we did?

We were not played in the sense that we expected anyone else to act differently. But perhaps we were played in the sense that we continued to do what we do -- see and speak the truth -- and thought that, this time, this time, it will make a difference. Like the soldiers in Iraq, we have a powerful psychological need to believe what we are doing is right, and that it matters. But does it? Measured in blood and treasure, it hard to avoid the conclusion that we have accomplished as little as they have. We continue to be right. They (and untold Iraqis) continue to die.

I am deeply depressed by this question. I do not claim to know what the answer is. Trusting the Democratic Party to change things has been proven foolish. As the game has been played during my lifetime, the path of the third party has been utterly counterproductive (though that depends on your perspective -- no Ross Perot, no President Clinton). Taking to the streets seems at best ineffective, a tree falling in a forest where no TV crews will hear it. My playbook is empty.

I fear that a massive attack on Iran is now inevitable. I fear that truths that you discuss here each day are like colors to an increasingly blind nation. And I fear that there is no path back from here -- that, like Iraq, our nation has gone too far down the path of entropy to salvage.

Then I followed another commenter's lead to this (from newly blogrolled Chris Floyd:

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.

The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.

Have a nice day.