Many worried that a hysterical reaction to the Fort Hood Massacre will make things worse. Unfortunately, most who commented to cool things down, look like they don’t take the deaths seriously, even seem to be making excuses for Nidal Hasan. By claiming he might have PTSD that therapists can something get a little of by listening too long to their patients.

Those who didn’t like Frank Rich in the NY Times should be spread around. It was a surprise to me that prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal phoned in a surprisingly persuasive article as well, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/opinion/15rich.h... http://www.phillyimc.org/en/carnage-fort-hood-texas

We hear complaints about the Republican Party turning to extremism and Obama supposedly being on either a leftist extremist or and an in-between bungler. But in Europe some have well thought out extreme positions without smearing each other up.

Lately in this country most politics is pouring perfume on what you like and bad tastes and odors on what you don’t. In NY a pro-choice Republican had to face phony ads that looked like she put out, shrilling overstating her positions. Instead of noting that it made the Democrat win, I wish some would call for the dirty trickster to be punished or at least fined.

It looks like bin Laden, Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, and the people at the Washington Times and Fox News might have got their way, a world at war, but there may be still time for Obama and sober folks to help us get along with each other instead.

Unless we admit we lost the war, the bad news can only get worse. There are different degrees of defeat. Delaying signing a peace treaty could mean US troops leaving from on top of the US embassy (like in Vietnam) or even a total collapse far worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union after it bankrupted itself partly by the Afghanistan War. General Stanley McChrystal's grim blunt assessment that we would lose unless he got 40,000 new troops in a hurry in order to starve off a relatively quick defeat, in no way expressed any optimism that we would win in the end even with more troops. I would like to reinterpret his statement as implying that we should leave rather quickly rather than face a possibility of a last minute panicky retreat like in Vietnam.

The war is treated as a separate issue from health care, but anger and worry over the war deflates Obama's momentum for health care reform.

With Obama, Americans are becoming more in a state of flux in our beliefs of what America’s place in the world should be. There have been two views of America’s place in the world: One view is that America has been a great hope for mankind, another view is that the US has been screwing things up ever since the British colonists first attacked the Indians and brought the first slave to these shores. Circumstance is involved: World War II, most think America was a savior; Iraq, most think we only made things worse. Some say America the land of the free and the brave spread the light of freedom, around the world, while others say Amerika the devil is robbing the world with its evil Imperialism. Some say Bush represented Amerika the Devil while Obama represents America the good. But one can’t hide from the fact that Obama’s and Bush’s Afghanistan policies are quite similar.

PS, The conclusion at the end of this article will be that discussing the issue of world government might help us solve local issues like health care reform.