I enjoy Jim Tailor's posts. As a left leaning radical Smurf, I find his posts refreshing in that they are coming from a person of true intelligence, and not from someone who just plays at being perceived by their forum peers as intelligent in obscure internet chat forums.

The problem as I see it with the current incarnation of the "liberal Democrats" (ahem!) in the US, is the pandering to the cult of patriotism, especially when their pandering so thinly veils their smoldering contempt for the cult of patriotism's recent meteoric rise and ascendancy. Now, I believe global capitalism and the military industrial complex are well deserving of our contempt. As is the Bush administration. As was the Clinton administration.

But there is no good reason whatsoevr for any thinking individual to be patriotic, or buy into the patriotism cult, as it is all nationalist plutocrat propaganda anyway. So why can't we be honest about that, instead of rallying around the John Kerrys and Big Mick's of the world in a phony attempt to convince people that we, the left, are patriotic too? That's how we end up with these absurd patriot pissing contests.

I mean, I just can't manage to wrap my head around the delusional idea that Big Mick holds, that he was in Vietnam to "defend American free speech". That isn't why he was in Vietnam. He was in Vietnam for many of the same reasons US troops are now in Iraq, Afganistan, et al. And that is to pacify a nation our current band of merry plutocrats have made part of their global reach strategy. Military service in Vietnam, like military service in Iraq and Afganistan, doesn't have anything to do with "defending American freedom".

You see, that is the sort of pandering lies the left keeps telling itself these days. That if you can't beat the patriotism cult of plutocrats, you must appear to join them. Which all those Kerry voters did this time. Begrudgingly. To atone for tilting towards Nader in 2000. Predictably, the Chicken Little strategy didn't work out for them!

I rather like the idea of building one's own military industrial complex though. However, if a genius like Leonardo could only get the plans on the drawing board, how would I, a mental midget by comparison, fare?