America, Narcoleptic Pit Bull
Once the (tarnished) beacon of peace and democracy, now just another global flamethrower
by Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Violence, as we seem to forget in some sort of collective denial, begets violence. Intolerance breeds intolerance. And war begets war. It self-perpetuates, feeds on itself, sucking and teething on the blood and exploded limbs and the punctured hearts of the dead, growing in the soil of hate and ignorance and my-God-can-beat-up-your-God.

At this moment in American history, we are surrounded, infiltrated, soaked to the bone with warmongers and fear dealers and hate poppers. The GOP has been positively masterful in cultivating a culture of intolerance and disgust and Taliban-like fanaticism, instilling a brilliant kind of poisonous fear into middle 'Merka that equates gays with terrorists and terrorists with the Middle East and the Middle East with the Devil and the Devil with liberals and liberals with, well, gays. Isn't that clever?

We are, right now, the biggest brute in the sandbox, taunting everyone to a fight and drawing the world more and more into our bilious screw-you, kill-'em-all attitude, even as we suffer cultural asthma and our national infrastructure crumbles and our hospitals fail and school systems collapse and our coffers are bled dry by the most corrupt and irresponsible federal administration in your lifetime.

Now, we are the world's unstable, drooling pit bull, lying and torturing and wiretapping our way to "victory." And no, our downturn is not the fault of Sept. 11. It is not the fault of terrorism. But it is almost directly a result of our reaction to terrorism, BushCo's leveraging of the most heartbreaking event in our recent history and turning it into a vile excuse to burn all bridges and turn our playground into a hostile war-thick free-for-all.

..... haven't we had just about enough of that?

Full story here.