Dear Reader,

Driving back from dropping the kids off at school this morning, I tuned into the radio news and found myself irritated by almost every story. Granted, I may be more crotchety than usual just now, due to the typical holiday stress compounded by an injured Achilles tendon that has been giving me problems on and off for months – and is now “on.”

With my limp, all I need now to complete the picture is a stovepipe hat and a cane to wave at loud children and stray dogs.

Even so, I think my uncharitable attitude about the news is warranted.

For example, first up was a commentary by a well-known liberal that it’s time to reinstate the draft so that every young person is forced to do their “fair share” in fighting the wars that the politicians and military are so quick to start but find so difficult to stop.

The commentator’s thesis is that a draft would make the military-industrial complex more hesitant to start wars. Nice idea, except that the warmongers could care less about the negative consequences – otherwise they wouldn’t start them in the first place. Their kids will, of course, qualify for whatever deferments are built into the draft, so the net result will be the same as it was in Vietnam – a war largely fought by volunteers (75%) and people who didn’t have the means or know-how to slip through loopholes in the draft… or slip across the border into Canada.

But all of that is really irrelevant: the idea that the government should be allowed to enslave anyone and send them off to a war in the prime of their young lives (the average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 19), or force them into any form of national service, is wrong-headed in all respects.

Now, I know that some of you dear readers will disagree, but it’s worth pausing for just a second to reflect on the historical record that Vietnam was a paranoid miscalculation – or, in the words of then Defense Secretary and an architect of the war, Robert McNamara, a “terrible, terrible mistake” (oops, sorry about hundreds of thousands dead) – and Iraq a very bad joke.

I still don’t have any idea what occupying Afghanistan is all about, but it’s certain to end badly – with hundreds of billions of dollars wasted and thousands of lives ruined. For what? Especially considering that when it finally comes to its dismal end, the same women-suppressing, drug-selling, corrupt religious fanatics will be running the place. Care to bet?

And you expect me to believe they’ll get the next war right? Or that it will be worth my kids dying in?

Bah humbug.

The next story up had the reporter enthusiastically cheering on the U.S. government’s civil lawsuit against BP for the Gulf oil spill. Thinking strategically, the government doesn’t seek specific damages but has left the damages sought “wide open” to allow for the effect of inflation between now and when the case is ultimately decided.

Oh, and the civil lawsuit is separate and distinct from the criminal lawsuit the U.S. Attorney General is now preparing and will soon announce.

Now, don’t get me wrong – BP broke it and so should have to pay for it. So why the grumbling?

(a) Any money collected from the lawsuit goes straight to the Treasury, with BP getting no credit for the billions it is paying out directly to the public, and to the government, for the costs related to the spill.

(b) The pending criminal suit is entirely political in nature. Add (a) + (b) = a ratcheting-up of the political risk of operating in U.S. waters to the point where most companies will simply stop working in this productive and domestically important source of oil. Is it any wonder BP is now cozying up to the Russians?

Goodbye jobs, and goodbye any hope of reducing reliance on foreign energy. But it sure feels good to kick BP – ignoring that one direct result is that the company has been forced to sell off a number of its important global petroleum fields to the Chinese in order to feed the U.S. Treasury (and the legion of lawyers required to avoid a complete asset stripping). Which is to say that henceforth, that oil is heading to China, not the U.S.

Then there was the item about the class action lawsuit filed against McDonald’s by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a well-known consumer group unhappy about the toys the company offers in conjunction with its Happy Meals. According to the story, one of the plaintiffs to the suit, a mother of two from Sacramento, was fed up with her children pestering her to go to McDonald’s and so agreed to help the CSPI to sue.

Now, when our kids were small, they loved the (extremely rare) treat of going into a McDonald’s for a Happy Meal and the toy du jour. But we never had a problem telling them “no,” so regularly eating at McDonald’s – or any fast food restaurant, for that matter – was never even the smallest of issues for us. Apparently, not the case for the woman from Sacramento.

Call me a Scrooge if you will, but if our country has become such a nanny state that you can sue a company for offering toys to kids – because you can’t say no – then, well… bah humbug again.

There was more, but those three stories were enough to keep me on a low boil for the ride home.

A nice cup of coffee at hand, the news was all but forgotten by the time I started going through my emails. But my renewed tranquility was soon disrupted by opening an email from steady correspondent Chris L. with links to other recent news stories that quickly returned me to my foul mood – and had me urging my wife to drop everything to finish reviewing the final schematics for the house at La Estancia de Cafayate.

At the risk of casting a cloud over your day, I am going to share a couple of Chris’s links here – the first of which is about an unbelievable case of the police murdering a complete innocent and getting away with it.

The second is of a SWAT team, operating without a search warrant, that broke into the house of the town mayor, shot his pet black Labradors and roughed up him and his mother-in-law – mistakenly, as it turned out. They then tried to pretend they had done nothing wrong. Here’s the link.

Now, no human enterprise is perfect, and the stress of being a policeman in a big city has to be extreme, so it is inevitable that mistakes will be made. But the militarization of our country’s law enforcement – coupled with officialdom’s constant fear-engendering and steady warnings of “High Threat Levels” – are leading this country into a very dark place.

A dark place that Orwell so competently described in 1984.

Casey Dispatch ...