-Part III-

A Bipartisan American Rebuke

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

“Refugee Blues,” by W.H. Auden.

When I speak of the Democrats and the Republicans, I refer to the elite professional politicians among the ruling class in both parties who reside in Washington, DC. I do not refer to our local and state representatives, who may indeed be sincere and good people trying their best to represent us in our governments, as it is their solemn job and sworn duty to do.

When I speak of the Democrats and the Republicans, I am speaking of our presidents, vice presidents, secretaries of state and defense, and the most prominent senators and congressmen and congresswomen who sit on the Senate’s and House’s most powerful committees and who receive the most traction in our national media and the most funding from our corporations and who are regarded as the people and the powers running our country. All of them reside in the District of Columbia, and my rebuke centers almost wholly on them and on Washington, DC.

Miserable Mongers of Fear
& Wily Peddlers of War

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,
easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which
the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

War Is A Racket, by General Smedley D. Butler.

I include Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry in my rebuke as fervently as I do both George Bushes, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as I include President Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper, and the specter of John Bolton, as I include Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, as I include Eisenhower and Carter.

All of these presidents and prominent politicians among DC’s ruling class, both past and present, have been complicit in not only waging our nation’s imperial wars abroad but complicit in US war crimes and in crimes against humanity. All have also helped to undermine the United States Constitution.

In regard to the US’s decades-long war on Iran, many of these people have played a significant role, from overseeing coups to establishing cold wars in the 20th century to imposing cruel sanctions on the Iranian people and laying the groundwork for a hot war with Iran in the 21st century.

And like many Americans, I am fed up, frustrated, infuriated and repulsed by the lies, propaganda and disinformation that is trafficked by and passed off as news and critical analysis from CNN, MSNBC and NPR, as I am fed up by the same bombastic crud and hateful hyperbole we get from Fox News and the so-called conservative media outlets in our country.

All of these corporate news outlets, whether dubbed liberal or conservative, pander to their respective audiences and participate in the fear-mongering and the war-peddling that is keeping us embattled at home, while reaping so much ruin around the world.

The Fourth Estate is Failing Us

“I thought I’d find a few photographs that were harsh in their depiction of
war and capture some of its cost. Yet, I found virtually none that you wouldn’t
be able to swallow easily with your breakfast. It seems like an institutional
policy to choose pictures that you could hang on your living room wall.
Journalism is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
The Times does neither.”

David Shields, author of War Is Beautiful:
The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict.

As for our national newspapers and print journalism, it has long been established that the New York Times has played a prominent role in selling US wars to the American people, from Vietnam to Iraq, and that the Washington Post, now owned by CEO of Amazon and billionaire, Jeff Bezos, has a close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, an action now seen unequivocally as disastrous, fraudulent, immoral and wrong, perhaps the most detrimental decision in modern American history, the New York Times and the liberal left mainstream media were instrumental in promoting the propaganda of the war-hawks in Washington. Tony Judt’s now famous essay from the London Review of Books, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” speaks to this fact powerfully and poignantly with important implications.

The point of this criticism is to get at an important truth: these wars do not happen by accident. Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once said that “war is what happens when language fails.” But after a decade of reading and writing about war, I feel it is also accurate, and maybe more so, to say, “War is what happens when language succeeds.”

War is not what happens when words fail, war is what happens when words win. When compassion, commonsense, courage and human decency fail, and propaganda and lies prevail. War’s what happens when we lose faith in love and wed our hearts to hate, our lives to fear, our fortunes to greed, and our sacred honor to savagery.

When Propaganda Prevails
& the Influential Abet the Powerful

The US’s wars in the Greater Middle East today have not happened by chance. They have been carefully crafted and cunningly planned over the course of not days and weeks but months, years and even decades. And when the time comes, late in the game, to finally get the American people on board and to sell these fraudulent wars to us, the masters and architects of the wars turn to their bosom friends and business associates, the mainstream corporate media, the once-celebrated fourth estate.

If it were not for the mainstream media’s often bipartisan work in helping to promote, propagandize and finally sell Washington’s wars to the public, the wars in the Middle East and West Asia and the immense suffering, death and destruction they have wrought upon millions of innocent people may never have been unleashed to begin with.

When I was an English and Journalism major and undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, we were taught that the media in America was the fourth estate and that the ultimate job of the press was to help check the power of the government and to help hold the powerful accountable to the American people. But the truth is that none of the major media corporations in our country today truly serve We the People or work to check our rulers and their often belligerent and barbaric agendas.

In fact, the mainstream media in America, both from the left and the right, often comes together and works bipartisanly to abet the powerful and to promote their militant agendas abroad.

Proud and Self-Avowed
Liars, Cheaters and Stealers

“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. (Laughter.) It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. (Applause.) It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

“Why Diplomacy Matters,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Texas A&M, April 2019.

President Obama was a good actor and a fine liar with a silver tongue; President Trump is a poor actor and a bad liar with a platinum one. Barack Obama spoke politely, played the game to which he was (s)elected to play, and wore the mask of the empire, keeping the face of the beast veiled. Donald Trump speaks savagely, often refuses to play the presidential game, and he declines to wear the mask, preferring to let the beastly face of the empire go naked, unabashed and unveiled. President Obama was a polite apologist of imperialism, President Trump is wantonly unapologetic of US empire.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is a whole other kind of animal. At a panel with Army ROTC cadets in Rudder Auditorium at Texas A&M in April 2019, he boasted outright and openly, with pride, candor and humor in his voice, to breaking his oath from West Point and being trained in the practice of lying, cheating and stealing while he served as Director of the CIA.

The frank declaration, though not utterly unbelievable, is truly remarkable coming in public from the sitting Secretary of State. What is incredible and deeply disturbing is the mainstream media’s bipartisan failure to call out Secretary of State Pompeo by his own avow and challenge him much more vigorously on his recent testimony about the threat of imminent attacks by Iran and the absolute, unequivocal, urgent necessity for the United States to have assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

A Bipartisan Call for Courage and Conviction

“Secretary of State Pompeo. On April 15 at Texas A&M University, before an auditorium full of students, you boasted outright and openly about lying, cheating and stealing while you served as Director of the CIA. Further, you added, smiling, it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. Secretary Pompeo, my question for you today is how do you assure the American people that you are not lying to them now about Iran and about everything to say?”

The question has never come. Why will the mainstream media never ask the Secretary of State this most obvious and vital of questions outright to his face? Asking such a bold and blunt question to such a man as Mike Pompeo indeed requires tremendous courage, conviction and bravery. But if our media truly aspires to serve as the fourth estate and to work on behalf of the American people, they must have the moral mettle to ask the essential and urgent questions of our day, even as We the People must be brave and possess the same courage, conviction and moral certitude to challenge both our media and our leaders in all that they say and do.

At the dawn of 2020, ruthless skepticism is essential. We must question everything. This is not America-bashing. This is true patriotism. This is our civic duty. Skepticism is sane and rational. Critical thinking is natural, it is intelligent, it’s human. It’s American, too.

Partisanship is a Trap Intended to Keep
We the People Divided & Warring with One Another

Mike Pompeo, along with being an unabashed, unapologetic, bald-faced liar by his own avow is the current head of the US State Department and one of the foremost proponents in waging a new war in the Middle East with Iran. Lawrence Wilkerson has also called Mike Pompeo and his life-long friend at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, “Christian fundamentalists from West Point.” Colonel Wilkerson made this bold and blunt claim because it is well-known in Washington that Mike Pompeo, like Mike Pence, believes in the foreign policy of rapture.

That is, the Secretary of State believes that he and the United States are enacting the policies in the Middle East that will literary help to bring about the Biblical end-times, the apocalypse and the rapture of Jesus Christ. This is Mike Pompeo’s personal faith and his public policy as Secretary of State. To say, therefore, that we the people must be skeptical of everything Secretary Pompeo says and does would be a savage understatement.

The mistake, however, is to read all this and to conclude that Republicans are liars, cheaters, criminals and crazies. Mike Pompeo’s affiliation with the GOP is of far less significance than his powerful positions as Director of the CIA and Secretary of State. The point to deduce is that our public officials and elected representatives and supposed leaders are proud and self-avowed liars, cheaters and stealers. Democrats and Republicans have both occupied these prestigious positions in national defense, diplomacy and intelligence.

In 2020, Don’t Vote “Blue No Matter Who,”
Vote Anti-Establishment No Matter What

The criminality being perpetrated in Washington is bipartisan. It is not Democrats or Republicans who are committing crimes and deceiving us all, it is the United States Government. Not the United States of America—the Union, the Confederation of States, the Constitutional Republic, our country— but the District of Columbia, the headquarters of our rogue federal gov’t. This is why criticism of Washington and the federal government is patriotic. We the People are standing up in defense of our country and Constitution and in defense of the natural, fundamental and universal rights of human beings around the world against a violent and lawless, amoral aggressor.

And the bottom line is this: our government has openly lied through their teeth to us. The administrations of both Donald Trump and Barack Obama have been devastating for many Americans in the US and disastrous to the myriad peoples of the Middle East and West Asia. We the American people have been conned by both of these criminal men and their corrupt parties, and the legacies of each have been largely terrible, even lethal.

In 2020, it is time for us to decry, to stand up and speak out against the criminality of all political parties in the United States. In 2020, they’re going to call upon us to “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” But we must be wiser than that, we must be braver than this. In 2020, we must vote anti-establishment no matter what. Only by standing up to the establishment can we redeem our republic and earn our democracy.

Bipartisan Complicity
in US War Crimes

“There is a bias in this town toward war.”

President Barack Obama as quoted by and in conversation with Lawrence Wilkerson, September 2015, Roosevelt Room, Outside the Oval Office in the White House.
The town to which President Obama was referring is, of course, Washington, DC.

Aaron Mate’s interview with Lawrence Wilkerson can be watched at The Grayzone.

President Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Laureate, ran on a platform of ending the US’s wars abroad and bringing our troops home. By the end of his eight years in office, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan had been expanded, troops returned to Iraq, and the US had begun waging new wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Africa and Ukraine. President Obama also played a pivotal role in pioneering the use of drone warfare and in extrajudicial assassination abroad, including the assassination of US citizens. President Trump, with his recent assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, has now taken up the mantle and expanded on the policy of Barack Obama.

During the Obama administration, the US was bombing seven countries. Under the Bush administration, we were bombing five countries. Currently, under President Trump’s administration, we’re bombing seven, eight if you include attacks against Iran. George Bush has left his ruinous legacies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama has left his in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and Somalia. President Trump will now leave his own lethal legacy and violent footprint in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela and Iran.

A comparative table of the countries the US has bombed under each of its three past presidential administrations may be found here. A fact sheet of President Obama’s actions as Commander-in-Chief may be found here. President Trump’s fact sheet is here. All sources are provided by St. Pete for Peace.

The point is simple, and it is this: complicity in US war crimes is bipartisan. Neither party alone is at fault. The US Government is responsible. Washington is to blame, and so are we.

Broken Promises and Purloined Peace

President Trump, like Presidents Bush and Obama before him, ran on a platform of change and a promise to end the US’s wars in the Middle East and to bring our troops home. Like his predecessors, President Trump has failed to do either. But the truth is: no US president in the 21st century, either Democrat or Republican, has brought the change or the peace that the American people yearn for, that We the People demand.

What does this fact mean, and what’re its implications? Does this imply that we’ve been bipartisanly conned by our elected representatives (rulers?), or does it mean that our presidents are not as powerful as we believe and that even the so-called Leader of the Free World has his bosses, his masters, too, and that there are powers and players at work in Washington which we the American public may not always perceive and be privy to?

As Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson’s quote alludes to, and as we shall soon see, the truth and reality may be that it’s both.

Legacies of US War:
Violence, Terror and Slavery

“The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.”

This quote is attributed to George Orwell. In fact, it seems it may be a paraphrase of a
much longer passage about the aim of war in 1984. If the sentence does not appear
word-for-word in the book, the spirit of the sentence is indeed consistent with 1984
and with Orwell’s work.

It’s a hard thing to say aloud and a tough truth to face for many Americans, but the fact is that one of the key legacies of the first African-American president in United States history may be in helping to bring slavery back to Africa. Today, in Libya, as a direct result of the military action taken and the war waged there by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, through the proxy force of NATO, there are now open-air slave markets where human beings, black Africans, migrants and refugees, are literally bought and sold in public markets and trafficked by human traffickers.

The slave markets in Libya are one of the saddest, most horrifying, startling, disturbing and tragic ongoing stories of the unintended, but nonetheless barbaric, savage and obscene, consequences of America’s regime-change wars and decades-long War on Terror in the Greater Middle East. A war of terror that continues to this day in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. A war that Washington would now like to expand into Iran.

We wage these wars to dispose of despots and so-called barbaric dictators. We wage these wars under the bright banners of promoting freedom and democracy the world over. We wage these wars to win hearts and minds and to liberate the oppressed. We wage these wars in the great crusade and noble conquest of fighting terror and ridding the world of terrorism.

Yet, when our campaigns cease and we case the colors and come home to America, a privilege our enemies do not have, we often leave in the terrible wake of our regime-change wars everything we claimed to be fighting: despots, fundamentalism, violence, oppression, war, terror and terrorism. Instead of building free and liberal democracies and a united and liberated populace, grateful for American intervention, we often create failed states, totalitarian regimes, armed insurgencies, oppressive theocracies, radical fundamentalists, human traffickers and terrorist groups, and we too often leave in our destructive wake deeply divided and Balkanized peoples and countries, flooded with refugees, refugees, refugees, the displaced and the dispossessed, who now burn with a fresh ire for the United States.

Like the Forever War,
the Refugee Blues Never Ends

This is another lie and illusion that is often peddled to us by our politicians and pundits alike: that they hate us for our freedom. This is a lie because it’s untrue. First, they do not hate us. My own travels in Pakistan and in parts of the Muslim world, along with a wealth of reading and reflection, has taught me this humbling truth. They do not hate us. They criticize the US and stand against our federal government in Washington because our government will not cease meddling in their domestic affairs and waging deadly wars in their countries. The peoples of the Middle East are not against Americans, they’re against US imperial violence in their homelands.

And for all those who wish that refugees and asylum seekers from West Asia and Central and South America would stop trying to come here to the United States, well, the answer is brutally clear: let us, the United States, stop waging war, issuing sanctions, building military bases and fermenting conflict in their homelands. For the truth is that no one on earth aspires to be a refugee or desires to be an asylum seeker. They are driven to it. And it seems a cruel, cruel jest to wage war, incite coups, and impose sanctions in somebody’s homeland for decades on end and then to deny them asylum and sanctuary from the wars, violence, chaos and economic ruin you have helped to ferment in their native lands.

This is the subject matter that journalist Max Blumenthal explores in depth in his book, The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.

Watching these wars from afar and examining them together, as a whole, we may begin to wonder at the dawn of 2020 whether they were ever intended to build anything, create security and to be won or whether their intent all along was to destroy everything, spawn sectarianism, create chaos and simply be maintained. Perhaps war, like oil, energy, resources, power and control, is absolutely vital to the wealth, maintenance and perpetuation of empire and hegemony.

If this is true then the USA is indeed waging a world-wide Forever War. If this is true then the wars of the United States are indeed moral obscenities. If this is true then the Orwellian world of 1984 is already here.

The Lie and Illusion of Partisanship
& the Great Danger of Political Parties

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic
into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting
measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension,
is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.” 

John Adams in a Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780.

The human heart, at its best, is a moral lion of courage. We, human beings, at our finest are moral lions. Yet our rulers and overlords are a pack of human hyenas who would tear us limb from limb and run us through their brickkiln just to taste the hot slaughter in their teeth and to tear off and post our lion head on the papered walls in their plush chambers and opulent antechambers high up in their white towers atop Capitol Hill.

My point is this, friends: partisanship in our country is a lie and an illusion. And my two cents is this: do not believe the lie.

Let us not fall prey to partisanship and to party politics. The rot is not in either one of our political parties alone. Both parties are equally corrupt. The Republican Party has no soul, but neither does the Democratic Party. Democrats and Republicans are both liars, criminals, swindlers, cheats and warmongers of equal repugnance and disrepute. And both parties, particularly when it comes to US foreign policy and militancy in the Middle East and around the globe, are far, far more in sync than they would have us believe.

Plumbing the Rot,
Draining the Real Swamp
& Fighting the Alligator

The rot is not in the parties; the rot is in our federal government and in a fraudulent and failing political system in the District of Columbia. The rot is in our mainstream corporate media that peddles their propaganda and that serves as blind stenographers for the state. The rot, and the great danger, is in party politics. Though there may be two political parties in our country, they’re increasingly interchangeable, and there is a single ruling class elite and one agenda in Washington, DC. Both parties have long been caught in the rabid jaws of the great American alligator. War.

In short: the rot is bipartisan. The problem is in American partisan politics. And it is the degrading and distracting lie and illusion of partisanship that We the People must eviscerate and guard our Republic against. As John Adams warned long ago, party politics and partisanship may be the greatest danger and evil we face as a country today.

Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist, argues similarly about the danger political parties pose to democracy in her 1943 treatise, “On The Abolition of All Political Parties.” In 2020, we’d be wise to take note and to heed the warnings of our learned forebears.

Owned:
Or the Big Club

“If you want real change, change that means something, then mobilize,
mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two political parties but to rise up and
destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.”

“Scum vs. Scum,” by Chris Hedges,
American Journalist, Activist & Author.

And why does the media persist in its peddling and propagandizing?

Because like our professional politicians they are paid handsomely for their unscrupulous work and because they are sponsored, funded, run and literally owned by the same handful of corporations, multinationals, lobbyists, weapons manufacturers, big businesses and minuscule corporate boards of ludicrously rich elites who own our politicians and so-called representatives in DC and who run our so-called free and democratic, sovereign republic.

As the great George Carlin said: “It’s all a big club, and we ain’t in it, folks.”

We the People of the United States of America are not at enmity with one another. Our enemy is our own federal government headquartered in the District of Columbia. Our enemy is not the Democratic or the Republican parties. Our enemy is the Corporate Party, and our war is with the Empire.

This remains another hard truth to hear for many Americans and a tough thing to say out loud. But the reality and the fact is this: the United States is an empire. Our federal government heads an empire. Our nation was founded as a constitutional republic and a republic is what we were intended to be. But a Constitutional Republic is not what we have become today.

Empire on the Mind

“This self-image of the US as a republic is consoling, but it is also costly.
Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies and around the
military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a
dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire
have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and
experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.”

Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire:
A Short History of the Greater United States. 

The Empire of the United States, which spans much of the world, but whose headquarters resides in Washington, DC, has hijacked the Republic of these united states of America. The Empire in DC is not our country. The Republic is. The breadth of land that lies between/in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans is our country, from the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters, from California to the New York Island, from Alaska and Hawaii to Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, Johnston Atoll, Wake Island, Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Kingman Reef, Navassa Island, Guantanamo Bay and American Samoa. We the American people are the country.

And it is the US Empire that in January 2020 is waging a new war on Iran. It is the US Empire that has been perpetually at war since September 2001, and in fact even far long before that. Some argue that the United States has been an empire from the beginning. Donald Trump did not create the US Empire, as neither did Barack Obama, but both criminal men have served as puppets, pawns and recent CEOs of the Empire.

Both are imperial stooges in a Game-of-Thrones-like global contest for hegemony and world domination and control of resources, power and the planet that perhaps they themselves do not fully understand. That’s why I don’t hate President Trump and why I didn’t hate President Obama. I pity them. Like us, they’ve been pawned and played for fools in their own ways, too. We believe that the President of the United States is the leader of the free world and the most powerful man on the planet. He is neither.

The President of the United States, though powerful indeed, is ultimately a puppet, a figurehead, a pawn. That is why We the American People must first and foremost always oppose not the president, who comes and goes, but the US Empire, which forever rolls and rages on, permanently there, perpetually barreling our country, faster and faster, toward its ultimate self-destruction and suicide.

The Growing Independent Media
Movement in America

To learn more about the United States Empire today, check out the work being down by Abby Martin at The Empire Files, Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone, Will Griffin at The Peace Report, and Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams at The Liberty Report.

Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges, and Major Danny Sjursen at Truthdig also frequently write and speak about US empire, rabid militarism, corporate capitalism and totalitarianism from a bipartisan perspective that is refreshing, rational and well-informed, as does Kim Iversen. For my Army friends, Major Danny Sjursen and Sergeant Henri Henrikson also host Fortress On A Hill Podcast, which examines American militarism and discusses the issues and experiences of veterans. For my literary-minded friends, Open Source Radio with Christopher Lydon is an enlightened source for arts, ideas and politics.

If you prefer a comedic take on your American imperial politics, check out The Jimmy Dore Show. For poetic commentary on empire and politics, tune into Benny Wills work. For geopolitics and the Middle East, Jake Morphonios of Blackstone Intelligence Network remains one of the best sources, though his channel has been decimated by YouTube. For suppressed histories and what the media won’t tell you, ReallyGraceful is your girl. Finally, for the current events of the day, and for takes on news stories you won’t hear from the mainstream corporate media, check out Ryan Cristian and his work at The Last American Vagabond.

Each of these journalists are part of a growing movement of independent media and investigate journalism in America. All of them work primarily on the web and are using social media to its highest potential, in ways that are both informed and inspiring. In addition to them, there is a lot of fine, fine work out there about war and empire and untold truths in the world today. We must simply wake up, free our minds from fear and tune into it.

In the new decade ahead, our conscience must be our conviction as American citizens. We must be well-informed, intelligent and enlightened. Knowledge is our strength, ignorance our weakness.

Of the People, by the People, for the People

“And that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

The Info War raging in our country wants to obliterate our inherent critical intelligence, crush our natural curiosity and quell our human sense of wonder. The wagers of the Info War want to kill our empathy and eradicate our compassion for others, dumb down our brains, poison our hearts with hate and sicken them with fear.

In short: the media wants to own (enslave) our minds. We must not let them succeed. They are miserable mongers of fear and wily peddlers of war, like our rulers in DC, and they are all complicit, Democrats and Republicans, Neocons and Neoliberals, alike. No one president or political party alone is responsible for our problems, but together they are all part of the problem. And one of the primary problems is partisanship.

In conclusion: it is a government of the people, by the people, for the people that We the People must work together to reestablish and reaffirm today, at the dawn of this new decade.

The electorate cannot save us. Only We the People can salvage our country. Only we can save ourselves. But first, we must put an end to partisanship in America.

Part IV of An Open Letter
to My Fellow Americans

Keep Reading Here

“The Forever War on Iran,” part IV of this essay and open letter, has been published. You can read it here. If you missed Part II, “Breaking Through the Blues,” you may read Part II here.

Thank you for reading and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project. If you’re new to the Long West, you may learn more about the project and the author here.

Here’s to hoping for peace between partisans in 2020. Peace, and best wishes to all.