Informant38

Scattered thoughts whose pertinence is made somewhat moot by the lateness of the hour:

Graph the development and use of pesticides on tobacco crops and compare with the graph of cancers attributable to tobacco use.
As far as I know no one's talked about this as a plausible contributor, but also as far as I know tobacco isn't considered a food crop, and the regulation of pesticides on non-food crops is, and especially was in the 1950's and 60's, pretty lax. Smoking pesticides can't be good for you.
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Keeping in mind that men a lot like Dick Cheney and his cohort are running the domestic meat production industries, keeping in mind that chemical regulation of fat-accumulation in market meat animals - hormones etc. administered in large doses to speed weight gain - is a primary tool for profit-making in those industries, keeping in mind the total disregard for the common weal in and by those men and industries - is it unreasonable to question whether the epidemic of obesity in Americans may be at least in some part attributable to the ingestion of chemical residues carried in domestic factory-farmed meat?
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George Bush is now in the center of the target for responsibility for Iraq; and as Matt Stoller said the other day on C-SPAN, no one knows why we went there and did all that damage. It's the question, and it's going unanswered, at least publicly.
Leaving Iraq, now, without an answer to that question is not what you'd call a noble gesture, though it may be the only moral one available.
The problem is how neatly it fits - Bush: crazy, stupid, wrong, incompetent, gone.
How frantically the contest is spun as Democrats v. Republicans, as though all those Democrats didn't vote to invade, didn't vote to burn the Constitution, as if the ones who didn't weren't vilified and accused of treason.
Look how neatly the country's ready to move from bewilderment at the treachery of these present actors to the next batch,without much actually changing. The Patriot Act's not going to be repealed, Iraq's not going to be set back on its feet anytime soon.
The results remain and, if we're going to suggest Bush was used - which we are in fact suggesting, loudly - the next puppet "steps up" to fix things, though of course not to the point where Iraq has a strong independent economy with no American influence, and certainly we aren't going to fix Iraq to the point where it's a strong military presence in the Middle East again.
So if the idea all along was a two-fold scam - to break the country, militarily and economically, and to get access to Iraq's western oil fields - then it's an accomplished mission, and the next phase would be a "meet the new boss" gambit. A change of uniform and language, but business as usual.