Is Halloween Redundant?

Is Halloween redundant? A harmless bit of fluff when compared to the real-world scenarios we face every day with this cabal from Hell driving things…

. Think about it. Life is scary enough as it is. We don't need a specific holiday to remind us about how scary our lives have become.

If you want to talk scary, you need to go no further than think about the crowd inside the Beltway. These guys with their macho tactics and finger on the button of a nuclear Armegeddon are enough to keep me under the bed for the next four years sucking my thumb.

Having been involved with NORAD and knowing how quickly this country can respond to any nuclear challenge, I cannot help but wonder if we would have been as thoughtful and as analytical as the Russians when they discovered a whole bunch of “unknowns” popping up on their radars. In that case, reason prevailed. Would the same thing be true if the shoe were on the other foot? What if it were Cheney or Rumsfeld who spotted the blips on the radar? Would we be knee deep in missile warfare at this point? This is especially worrisome considering their patterns of action first and thought later. …

And if that by itself weren’t bad enough, thanks to our wonderful leaders, we have to contend with people all over the world who don't like us. I suppose it could have been worse. Pat Robertson could have been appointed to coordinate our next war which he seems to want to start with Venezuela immediately. . Or perhaps Bill Bennett, the loudmouth conservative who doesn’t know enough to keep his trap shut, could be appointed as head of public relations for minorities and Gays in the US of A. . And that's only for starters!

If you start out with the premise that we have some real”looney-tunes” out there who don't have a clue about what's going on in the world, then you have plenty of reason to want to move to some isolated cave somewhere.

I mean if these guys running things really cared, would they have left 640 metric tons of enriched uranium on the open market for a year before they decided that maybe it was a good idea to do something about it before it fell into terrorists’ hands? Too bad, in the time they attended to important things like going on vacation and pushing through a raft of tax breaks for the rich, over 300 of those metric tons disappeared. Considering that it doesn’t take much to make a dirty bomb, that adds to my worries. But don’t worry, Bush has an anti-missile shield in the works that will help deter enemies with intercontinental missiles. Only it doesn’t work yet after pouring hundreds of billions into it…. And there is no enemy, outside of Russia, who has that kind of capability at this point…

But we don’t even have to reach that far. What is our preparedness on mundane things like the flue for example?

Yesterday, our Washington gurus revealed that we barely have enough medicine to innoculate the staff for the upcoming flu epidemic much less the population. The specter of hundreds of thousands dying a painful death because we didn’t have enough vaccine is horrible enough to think about. But to think buying vaccine was something that we didn’t act on, we’ll that’s something else again. If you recall, we didn’t buy enough vaccine last year either and some of us took a pass on inoculating ourselves so that the old-timers could get theirs. This is the first time in memory that there wasn’t enough vaccine to go around.

If you’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on their negligence, think about the deadly toxins that were dispensed in envelopes to progressives and liberals through the post office system a couple of years ago.. With all of the FBI agents assigned to that case, you think we could have come up with something. But I haven’t heard anything, have you? That means that the guilty guy is still out there processing his little gifts for the appropriate occasion.

Is there a pattern emerging here? If you look at everything that’s happened, we should not be surprised that our soldiers don’t have the appropriate armor or that we can’t seem to get our act together long enough to keep people from dying in storms.
If it doesn’t produce profits for private interests, it seems to be of little concern to this mean spirited cabal of self-interested plutocrats. Our present condition simply reflects the neglect and disconnect of our leaders. In Katrina, it translated into not enough food, water and medicine. And people are still being found dead because FEMA and the other agencies didn’t make a real effort to get into New Orleans after the storm.

Do we even want to go there considering what a failure it was on the government's part despite the long warning. Imagine, even though the 'Corps of Engineers and others advised the government that under the present conditions the levees wouldn't hold up under a category three storm, our government chose to ignore the warnings. After all, it was a blue state and the more saved, the more Democratic votes that would be counted. Therefore, not the best outcome for Republican investment even though the money belongs to us, the taxpayers.

Now, with the president losing in the polls, Frist being investigated, DeLay facing charges that could put him away for awhile and the VP's Chief of Staff under the gun for revealing sources, it looks like the government's Blitzkrieg is grinding to a timely halt! But why worry? They’ve already given out their no-bid contracts to all of their friends and a 200 billion dollar windfall is a nice way to go out. For the rest of us, we're going to stay medicated or inebriated until the next election. Hell, we might even think of Trick or Treat as a break from the nutty world we’ve inherited from the self-serving lunatics running things. And look it as an opportunity to let our hair down and have some fun again before we return to our normal paranoia.


les Aaron