A Neo-Memorial Day

Here are this retired Navy veteran's thoughts on Memorial Day.

We suffer under a regime that gives a glad hand to America's veterans as it exploits and abuses them to support their hidden agenda.

Though its vision of a U.S. global dominance enforced by military power is a proven failure by any coherent measure of effectiveness, the American neoconservative movement refuses to concede the obvious. America's armed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced more instability in the world than existed prior to them. America's standing and prestige in the world have all but vanished.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ronald Reagan called on America to become the "shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere." George Herbert Walker Bush encouraged America to become a "kinder, gentler nation" and to use its strength as "a force for good."

Those were wonderful, inspirational sentiments. It's too bad that neoconservatism, as embodied in the young Mister Bush's administration, has turned our nation into one of history's greatest bullies. What's worse is that neoconservative policies and strategies have done profound damage to all of America's instruments of national power.

Our military might, on which we spend more that the defense budgets of the rest of the world combined, has been demonstrably ineffective at achieving America's foreign policy aims. We are, at present, engaged in a "generational war" that has no end in sight with an enemy that has no army, no navy, no air force, and no military budget whatsoever.

Our economic clout is now rivaled by the European Union and China. There's a very real possibility that the euro and or the yen may replace the U.S. dollar as the world's currency standard.

Our information environment is an Orwellian quagmire. Domestic and foreign consumers alike can no longer trust any information that comes from the U.S. government, and our so-called "free press" has become--wittingly or not--a hapless echo chamber for the propaganda of Karl Rove and his henchmen.

Our diplomacy defies the very definition of the word itself. We're presently attempting to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions through uncooperative proxies who have more to lose than gain by going along with our desires.

It's in this context that I'm particularly sickened by the public proclamations of young Mister Bush and his echo chamberlains who are using this Memorial Day as an opportunity to promote their delusional, sinister agenda.

Buy our war or we'll shoot this dog.

If Bush had wanted to give America a genuine message, he wouldn't have delivered his Memorial Day speech before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He would have given it in front of the Monument to the AWOL Texas Air National Guardsman.

Which would, in fact, have been the White House.