Death and Starvation Is the American Way:
The Rude Pundit is trying to wrap his mind around the benumbing amount of crisis news swirling around like so many popcorn boxes and used condoms after the carnival has left town. Most obviously, the loss of 16 soldiers in Iraq in one day is just an exclamation point on a week or so of the staggering amount of violence occurring there. And let's not be stupid here about the whole "media only reports the bad news" kind of bullshit. The media reports what makes people watch. Happy guys in mustaches playing checkers on the street does not make for compelling television, even if Brit Hume is reporting it without pants (Ailes calls out down the hall, "Quick, Murdoch's drunk again! He says, 'No pants, by crikey! No pants fer the anchors!'")

Then there's this little tidbit that received little coverage: the number of hungry families in the United States is growing. And there you have this nation's attitude towards the poor in a nutshell: the Congress can, with only showboating debate, quickly pass $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan (although, really, and come on, Afghanistan is the bastard child of the slave mistress of the Massa' U.S.), but 12 million families in the United States worry about having enough money to put food on the table.

The Rude Pundit knows this is a cruel, cruel world. The Rude Pundit knows that awful things happen awfully often. But justice is getting even harder to come by. The domination of rhetoric and debate is so far afield from the concerns of real people, like the soldiers, like the poor (from whom the hungry and the soldiers come) that America as a civilization is quite the little sham. The Rude Pundit is not out of hope. Things turn around, sometimes, usually after it gets worse before it gets better. But who knows if America has the balls for radical change. Because if this were any kind of civilization, by now we'd have rioted and killed an awful lot of leaders and given their sweet, sweet flesh meat to the hungry so the poor would know fullness.