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Political Decency, America's Masters, and the "Traitor" Edward Snowden

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Message Rafe Pilgrim
Americans choose -- one way or another -- the kind of government we get, whether by refusing our attention, defaulting to ignorance, or in embracing charlatans indentured to the cabal of greed and lust for power now in charge -- or by opening our eyes, grasping the reality, and braving the risks, difficulties and hard work required to actually gain and maintain the ideals of our earliest schooling.
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There is a dimension to all this that requires further  examination.  Per example, I have an idealistic liberal friend who has run for Congress twice, each time exhibiting his abundance of decency, intelligence, goodwill and political courage, and each time losing.  I have little doubt that he will feel compelled to run again, and, lamentably, lose again.
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I submit to my friend the need to come to grips with the reality that it is futile to swat at the gnats of our local and state electoral partisanistas.  How to win?  There are two ways:  the most favorable odds being to sell out to the machine of one or the other of the both corruptly indentured major parties, with the alternative being to take a third independent and quite likely unsuccessful course upon a platform of honesty, decency and capability -- and lots of luck with that! 
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Then again, Bernie Sanders somehow made it, and I'm thinking that perhaps Elizabeth Warren made it with a degree of decency intact despite the somewhat reluctant embrace of a major party -- but that course will still require yet more tracking.
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With it all, I respect and admire my friend's efforts, but would offer the following in addressing the broader arena of American contemporary politics and one recently specific issue --
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We must first grasp that it's corrupt at the Top, the "Top" being a necessary label we contrive to refer to the anonymous cabal of the individually nameless that el Presidente serves, be he George the Demented or Barack the Pontificator, aided and abetted by a cast of 535 congressionals and thousands of agency apparatchiks.
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There is only one Top, its sole purpose being to fertilize its own craving for personal lucre and insatiable lust for power, with political partisanship being the device it employs to divide, disable and conquer the American people by the charade of contesting political parties.  The Top simply uses money -- and occasionally such as assassination in the case of the rare hopelessly aberrant -- to control the process to their benefit, including their highly rewarding cut of our costs of war. 
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The Top enticed, for instance, Obama to reject government election funds of lesser amounts in the hundreds-of-millions by providing him a billion plus dollars (the rough order of magnitude we know about) in "private" funds,"  i.e. he was bought, it being imbecilic to conceive that such a sum is awarded beyond any thought of recompense, that is in services to be rendered.
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The Top (not totally of American composition) wins regardless of which way the voting goes.  The Top tee-hees at both Republican and Democrat pretensions of difference, it making no difference nowadays which side "wins."  Note for instance the bi-partisan congressional condemnation of Edward Snowden, whose "treasonous crime" was to advise the American people -- Wow!  Now there's a concept! -- that they were being spied upon by their (?) own government, at bizarrely their own usurious highly secret expense, while each their own congressionals offered that this aided the "enemies of America." 
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Ah yes, one can indeed suppose -- for a variety of reasons, many not external -- that across the past thirty or so years the ranks of those enemies have indeed been swelling, but can anyone possessing a brain larger than that of a gnat actually believe that the intelligence services of both Russia and China, for instance, were unaware, that is they did not have their own most capable sources within such massive NSA and CIA programs? 
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But Snowden is different -- he is the American people's source.   He is to be embraced, blessed and heeded if we are actually interested -- not in the sham  of  the greed and power lusting oligarchy now implanted, but -- in the fullness of Ben Franklin's advisory:  "A republic, if you can keep it."
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Rafe Pilgrim, after "a life largely wasted on hard honest work," found himself a jungle of turkey oak, scrub pine and giant palmettos up a dirt road running east of Crystal River, Florida, which neither school busses nor the U.S. Postal Service dare (more...)
 
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