corrente

It was my turn with the tractor this weekend and today, so I’ve been out getting ready to plant while it’s dry enough to do so. (Me and five other neighbors went in together and bought a tractor none of us could afford by ourselves and so we take turns. Damn commies.) Anyway, I been busy from dawn to dusk and to bed with a book and a bottle after that (Lysander Spooner followed by a few pages from the Dept. of Ag’s 1930’s book Living on a Few Acres). So today I finish up and pass on the tractor, I turn on the computer, whose home page is Yahoo!, and what do I find to greet me?

• U.S. attack in Iraq kills 100 insurgents• Afghan clash kills two Marines, 23 rebels• Reid offers Dems' support on Bush nominee

I’m going back to my no-news mode. On the foreign affairs front, I was immediately reminded of the lopsided body counts of Vietnam, wherein it seemed that as long as “we” were killing far more of “them” than they were of “us,” “we” were “winning.” (Of course, the counts on “them” were vastly inflated, and didn’t include South Vietnamese, but that’s another story.) On the domestic front, I see someone performed a spinectomy on the Dems again. Who is this Frankenstein, and why does he keep operating on the Dems? Where’s his lab?

I’m reminded of a passage from the letter that Lysander Spooner wrote to Grover Cleveland in 1886:

Your idea of the real character of the government is plainly this: The lawmakers are to assume absolute and irresponsible "control" of all the financial resources, all the legislative, judicial, and executive powers, of the government, and employ them all for the promotion of such schemes of plunder and ambition as they may select from all those that may be submitted to them for their approval; that they are to keep "the halls of national legislation" wide open for the admission of all persons having such schemes to offer; and that they are to grant monopolies, privileges, loans, and bounties to all such of these schemes as they can make subserve their own individual interests and ambitions, and reject or "postpone" all others. And that there is to be no limit to their operations of this kind, except their fear of exciting rebellion and resistance on the part of the plundered classes.

Why, oh, why, do I read the news? Nothing has changed in 119 years. Except the GOP. They’ve gotten worse. And the opposition more spineless.