By Tom Hunter

What vast damage has the United States suffered from revelations from Pfc Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden?

Well for starters we have been found to be not very good to our allies – “come on, everyone spies on their friends”.

Our layers of lies have been found to be redundant.  These are only hurtful to our national pride, kinda like being called out by your mom when she catches you in a bald faced lie.  Poor Snowden – being hounded for leaking front page stories from 2007.

Government is gathering and storing every piece of data that ever existed?  Not a problem – we have checks and balances.  Yes, but that check hasn’t balanced – ever.

While the Tea Baggers have spent all their time trying to burn down Congress, the Executive branch has been only too happy to leap into the breach and take all the powers that they find laying about.

I mean, “as long as you’re not using this I’ll just keep it safe for you” . . . I mean “finders keepers, suckers”.  Without Wikileaks we wouldn’t have seen that video of our helicopter pilot talking himself into killing journalists, pedestrians and children.  “Hey, they shouldn’t bring children to a war”.

Unfortunately, they didn’t bring the children to the war, we brought the war to the children.  Sleep well America, we’ve got many places to conquer before we come for you.  “Your eyelids are heavy, you are growing sleepy, we’ll keep an eye out while you sleep. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”

“Good thing God’s on our side – because otherwise we would be shunned by the world for our crimes of war.”  But since our sins are forgiven as soon as we think of them, we are free to scare the living shit out of humanity and threaten them with extinction on many fronts.  But that is not a big deal because we have decided that science is merely a matter of opinion.  You buy your science and I’ll buy my science.

Who spends the most on science?  The War Departments, of course.

The Tea Baggers and Fox don’t dispute gravity, they just want you to believe that it only works because of a personal god (preferably a golden idol). They do wish you would listen to their arguments about dinosaurs on the Noah boat, virgin birth, and the dangers of women in the workforce And for god’s sake, don’t get them started on Darwin. (Doesn’t he look a lot like Karl Marx?)

None of this is new.  Hearst famously said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war”.  (Or was that Goebbels?)  It seems that the fatter we grow, the more we want to keep the boat from rocking.  History is debatable and deniable. Most of the Wall Street moguls who brought down the economy were sternly told not to do it again on pain of a hundred dollar fine.  But most were already working for Washington and didn’t hear the message.

In other parts of the world – Turkey?, Brazil?  People are starting to ask for more.  Not more stuff, more transparency and more say in what government is and what government is not.  Egypt? Syria? Once people begin to think, it becomes very difficult to put the Genie back in the bottle.  And all this is happening  at great risk.  Risk of death, risk of failure, risk of being co opted by the opposition.  You can fool some of the people most of the time, “but you can’t fool all the people all the time”.

Meanwhile, here in San Diego, we are experiencing a fresh new mayoral leader, while Doug Manchester is backing all the losers he finds fit to print.  Mayor Filner might be a little prickly, but his heart is in the right place and his enemies are well entrenched and well financed.  A hundred years ago they’d all probably go out in the street at noon and duel.  It is such a wonderful sight to see all of the powers that be sputtering and floundering.

They are upset that Filner brought a gun to a knife fight, but they have many many knife fighters and Filner always seems to be fighting alone.