BY WILLIAM C. HENRY “We must slash entitlement programs in order to reduce the national debt and restore fiscal sanity to the budget process.” Where have we heard that before? Well, no matter how often or how loudly the 
right wing regurgitates it, it will still be the same excremental lie it has always been. And, yes, you can indeed thank America’s mainstream media, those constitutionally vested stewards of liberty, those incorruptible, inextinguishable lodestars of enlightenment whose number one reason for being is to expose lies and disseminate truth to the American people, for perpetuating the deceit.
Alas, with waning hope that said “see, hear and speak of no evil” major media monkeys will finally turn responsible, here once again in no particular order of hypocritical outrageousness, are four (and, dear god, there are sooooo many more) disgustingly obscene expenditures that for goddamn sure ought to be guillotined from the nation’s budget before a bunch of lazy, incompetent and/or corrupt, sectarian legislative phonies decide to cut so much as a penny from ANY social welfare program big or small:
$100 BILLION annually in federal CORPORATE welfare. That doesn’t count the $100 billion state and local governments kick in yearly on their own. Hypocrisy by any other name would smell as sh*tty.
$170 BILLION annually to maintain somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 totally useless, outmoded, unnecessary, purposeless overseas military bases. I’m not being facetious, folks. No one, and I mean literally NO ONE, on planet earth knows for certain just how many of them there actually are.
$15 BILLION annually on the inane, idiotic, utterly preposterous, criminally negligent, morally repugnant, colossal failure known as the War On Drugs. State and local governments piss away another $25 billion of your tax money on it every year. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Congress.
Oh, and let us never forget that tiny little matter of the $788 BILLION the government flushes down the toilet year after year after year after year on waste and mismanagement including fraud, abuse and duplication. Do you know that if you took those savings and used them to increase the funding of the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (includes investigation of fraud, abuse, etc., with respect to Medicare and Medicaid services among others) you could increase its budget TWO THOUSAND FOLD!
I swear, I don’t know who to despise more, the lying, hypocritical right wing legislators, or the cowardly, amoral major media. The lowlife Republican legislators won’t stop lying, and the cowardly major media lack the moral fortitude to call them on it. All of which leaves the American people to seek truth through lesser but far more integrity prone news outlets like Phawker.com, DailyKos.com, and Alternet.org, to name a few. Fortunately for America’s future, the editors and publishers of disseminators such as these possess the cajones and moral compass to speak up for those who might otherwise fall prey to the tactics of the “big lie” brewers of the 1930’s.
I suspect that Henry A. Wallace had little or no idea just how applicable his words might be to today’s state of affairs when he uttered them back in the 40’s: “The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.” Talk about prophetic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Fed up early stage septuagenarian who has actually been most of there and done most of that. Born and raised in the picturesque Pocono Mountains. Quite well educated. Very lucky to have been born into a well-schooled and somewhat prosperous family. Long divorced. One beautiful, brilliant daughter. Two far above average grandsons. Semi-retired (how does anyone manage to do it completely these days?) and fully-tired of bullshit. Uncle of the Editor-In-Chief.
