Deanie's Blue Inkblots

Rick Perry's Texas: STATE-SANCTIONED RAPE OF WOMEN

2012-01-11T00:20:54Z

According to a law passed by a Tea-Bagger Texas statehouse and signed as an "emergency measure" by Governor Rick Perry, and mis-presented to the public at the time the bill was passed, along with the 5th Circuit's decision that this procedure CAN proceed even as the law itself is being appealed--women can now be legally raped in the state of Texas if they see a physician about getting an abortion.

By "rape," I mean that the sonogram which is required by this law for all women seeking abortions in the first 10 weeks--which nearly all women now do--is not a "jelly on the belly" procedure, as State Rep. Carol Alvarado pointed out, in which you take off your clothes, put on a flimsy gown, climb up onto a cold table, have some colder jelly smeared on your stomach, and then wait while a technician or doctor rolls the wand around and interprets the picture that appears on the computer screen.

At the time this bill was being debated and passed, the Texas media simply reported that women would be required to get a sonogram if they wanted an abortion. As a Texas woman, I wasn't pleased about that but I wasn't rendered apoplectic the way I was today when I found out that the sonogram which is required is actually a "TRANS-VAGINAL" procedure.

I have had a trans-vaginal sonogram. My gynocologist requested it when, during a pelvic exam and yearly pap smear, she thought she might have encountered a uterine tumor, and we needed to find out for sure. Of course, I agreed. In a trans-vaginal sonogram, first of all, you have to go without urinating for hours in advance so that the image is more clear. This is extremely uncomfortable. It means that you have to show up at the hospital, take off your clothes, put on a flimsy gown, and climb up onto the table while, at the same time, urgently feeling the need to urinate.

Then, they shove that sonogram wand UP YOUR VAGINA and dig it around in there while you try frantically not to pee on the technician. It is painful. It is uncomfortable. It is embarrassing. In my case, I had a male technician, and a female nurse did not accompany him into the sonogram room. Now, I must say that he was incredibly kind and very professional, but it was a STRANGE MAN who was sticking a COLD WAND up into my vagina and poking it around inside of me while he looked at the computerized images on the screen and I ground my teeth to keep from wetting myself.

"The law establishes new ways to shame and humiliate women," said Karen Hildebrand, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood, West Texas," but does nothing to protect women and teens from unintended pregnancies."

Let's say you are a 13 year old girl and you were raped by your uncle. You and your parents agree that an abortion is the best thing for your situation. YOU HAVE TO BE SUBJECTED TO YET ANOTHER FOREIGN OBJECT BEING SHOVED UP YOUR VAGINA--possibly by a strange man.

Even if your reason for getting an abortion is not related to rape or incest--let's say you have been, at one time in your past, a victim of rape yourself. Let's say that, in the attack, the rapist shoved a beer bottle or a broom handle up your vagina as part of the attack. NOW, you are being forced to have a plastic bottle-like object poked into your vagina AGAIN.

As to the matter of cost. DOES THE STATE PAY? I can't find an answer to that question with a cursory Google-search, but if they DON'T, then what do you do if you do not have health insurance?

If you live in the state of Texas, where a full 25% of the public do not have health insurance, the odds are good that, should you be subjected to this medically unnecessary procedure against your will and without your consent (which meets the definition of rape), you will have to pay hundreds of dollars because it is considered an outpatient surgical procedure, since you have to have it done at a hospital.

So...let's say they are triumphant! You decide not to have the abortion. DOES THE STATE OF TEXAS GIVE A FLYING DAMN WHAT HAPPENS TO THAT BABY ONCE IT EXITS YOUR WOMB?

The state of Texas, which insisted that abstinence-only be taught in sex-education classes at the high school and junior high level, has ONE OF THE HIGHEST RATES OF TEEN PREGNANCY IN THE COUNTRY.

It has one of the lowest rates of CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE in the state. It has one of the highest rates of poverty, the highest rates of minimum-wage jobs that do not provide health insurance benefits and do not support a family, and one of the lowest standards of education in the country.

The Republican statehouse that insisted on ramming through this obscenity of a law, also slashed the state's budget for WIC--Women's, Infants, and Children's nutritional programs, food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children, Children's Health Insurance, and Medicaid--all programs which are designed to help pregnant women and young mothers.

Rick Perry was so damned and determined to show that he had balanced the state's budget when he launched his doomed presidential race that he forced through massive budget cuts in areas that could ill afford it, plunging MILLIONS into premature poverty--including many, many mothers of young children.

Most of the jobs he likes to brag were created in his state are minimum-wage jobs, so if a mother wants to support her children and can't find a decent job, she must work two or three minimum-wage jobs to feed her family, and who provides child care? Not the state, which slashed that budget as well.

So, WHAT IF SHE WANTS TO PREVENT AN UNPLANNED PREGNANCY in the first place? Shouldn't that make all those so-called "PRO-LIFERS" happy? Not if she can't afford hundreds for a visit to the OB/GYN and birth control pills or devices. Her only option is to go to Planned Parenthood for her women's reproductive health needs--her pap smears, STD tests, pregnancy tests, birth control, and PRE-NATAL CARE.

But Gov. Perry, aided and abetted by the sanctimonious, self-righteous Republicans in the statehouse, CLOSED PLANNED PARENTHOOD CLINICS all over the state and have vowed to eventually close them all.

It's just a matter of time before these religious zealots close in on various forms of birth control as well as abortions--already, pharmacists who have religious views against birth control do not have to fill prescriptions for birth control pills, and more and more evangelicals are considering birth control itself to be against the laws of God. As one spokesman from the World Congress of Families put it, "American evangelicals have unwittingly traded the Virgin Mary for Margaret Sanger."

REALLY? So, if you take the Pill, you are desecrating the VIRGIN MARY???

At least one evangelical Republican presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, has already vowed that, if elected president, he will outlaw federal funding for birth control, and several of them, including Mitt Romney, have supported various "Personhood" amendments, which state that any effort to prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to a womb wall, such as IUD devices or some birth control pills, are considered on par with abortion and are banned in that state.

One of my Facebook friends described this as "religious persecution." When you think about it, that's exactly what it is. A small minority of far-right evangelical Christians have rammed through an obscene violation of a woman's privacy between herself and her physician in the most intimate of ways, and if allowed to continue, will eventually ban even a woman's right to prevent pregnancy.

Because this law in Texas and other states does not stop with having a wand shoved up a woman's vagina--AGAINST HER WILL AND WITHOUT HER CONSENT--no. The doctor THEN has to force her to listen to his or her description of what he or she is seeing on the computer screen, force her to listen to the heartbeat if there is one, and then, there are scripted remarks he or she is required to say.

Doctors have challenged this in court. God forbid we infringe on a doctor's paternalistic relationship with his or her patient. Lower courts have ruled that they don't have to say what the Republican statehouse demands.

But they still have to DO it. Women, they say, don't have to listen. I'd like to know how that could be. A noisy iphone and earphones, perhaps? She lies there, naked and vulnerable, her legs spread, a technician's hand up her vagina, and somehow she's not supposed to listen to remarks scripted for the guy by Republicans in the state capitol.

So that she can obtain a CONSTITUTIONALLY LEGAL PROCEDURE.

It is an OBSCENITY. It is a VIOLATION. It is STATE-SANCTIONED RAPE.

Women in this state and others who have rammed through or are considering such a measure should RISE UP AND BE HEARD. They should FIGHT BACK. And for the love of God, VOTE.

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, AND SOMETIMES, THEY CAN RESULT IN YOUR HAVING SOMETHING SHOVED UP YOUR VAGINA AGAINST YOUR WILL AND WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT.

Vote Democratic and stop this madness and mysogeny.

A NIGHT OF DARK INTENT

2011-10-23T23:29:00Z

[Note: This blogpost is quite long, like a lengthy but juicy piece in Vanity Fair. I suggest you bookmark or favorite the piece, read what you can of it, then return when you have more time, unless you've plenty of time now. I guarantee it will be worth the trouble.]

"It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for the rage."

--Robert Frost

When President Obama announced that the "long war in Iraq will be coming to an end by the end of this year," he promised "another season of Homecomings," as all remaining deployed troops would be reunited with their families at some point during the holidays. That would include one of my nephews, who is currently back in-country for a second deployment. This bring to EIGHT, the total number of deployments for my family members to Iraq and Afghanistan--seven of them in Iraq. My son and three of his cousins have all served honorably in combat roles in the Marine Corps, Army, and Army Special Forces, with ranks ranging from Marine corporal to Army major--and that does not count one family member who also did a tour in Afghanistan in the very early months of the conflict, as a brigadier general with Army Special Forces, before he retired.

My son and one nephew--with five deployments between them--have now completed their four-year active-duty commitments to the Marines, as well as their four-year Reserves commitments, and are living busy civilian lives. My other two nephews are making the Army a career. My nephew Mike was deployed with the Marine 3/7 to the Anbar province in April, 2004, when Blackwater private contractors were attacked by a mob in Fallujah, beaten, shot, and set on fire, dragged through the city behind pickup trucks, and finally, hanged from the bridge that soon became known as the Blackwater bridge. His unit fought the insurgents in an attempt to regain control of the city, but took heavy casualties and were called back until the Powers that Be could plan a more coordinated attack and give innocent civilians time to flee the city before the push.

That major battle, the Battle of Fallujah, which took place in November of 2004, included my son in his first deployment with the Marine 3/5. He, his buddies, and thousands of Army and Marine troops were held outside the city for days until after the presidential elections, because President Bush knew there would be massive, bloody American casualties during that horrific battle, and he did not want to risk his chances of getting reelected by having so much bad war news smeared across the TV-news screens every night.

Three days after the elections, he ordered the attack, and my son, his buddies, and so many other sons and some daughters (mostly medical staff) fought block-by-block, street-by-street, house-by-house, and room-by-room for days, taking more casualties in that month than in any other month of the entire war--a bloody number that still stands, seven years later.

My son's unit, the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine--The 3/5 Darkhorse--were awarded more medals for valor and bravery during that battle--including 6 Navy Crosses--than any other military unit in the entire United States armed forces.

The November Battle of Fallujah, (known as the Second Battle of Fallujah by the Marines because of the April battle by my nephew's unit, the 3/7), was detailed in a compelling book, NO TRUE GLORY, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West, a former Marine who humped it with 10,000 troops during those harrowing days, taking the reader from tense command posts to the chaos of battle. Tom Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post war correspondent and author of the seminal book, FIASCO, The American Military Adventure in Iraq, pronounced No True Glory, published in 2006, as the best book on the war in Iraq up to that time.

Truly, this battle, the largest one for Marines since Khe Sanh in Vietnam, dominated every newspaper and news magazine for weeks. We subscribed to Time and Newsweek here at home. When my son was deep in the thick of battle, the new Newsweek landed in our mailbox, depicting three Army soldiers in full combat gear on the cover with the words: The Slog of War: Why Fixing Iraq Will be Harder Than Bush or Kerry Told You--and inside, a two-page photo depicting Marines, with the title, Hell to Pay.

A couple of weeks later, Time arrived, with a close-up of a Marine yelling something to his buddies, and the words: Street Fight: Inside the Battle for Fallujah. Inside, a two-page photo spread of an army unit, and the title, Into the Hot Zone.

The first words of THAT article, by Michael Ware, were "WE'RE NOT GOING TO DIE!" as the platoon takes machine-gun fire.

Although I do come from a military family, there were many things that I did not yet understand while that horrendous battle was taking place in terms of military casualties. My son had explained to me that if the news media reported "soldiers" dead, that it was army. "Marines are always called Marines, never soldiers," he said.

You'd be surprised how much that simple designation helped over two deployments.

I knew that troops were prevented from contacting relatives for 24 hours following a death, in order to give the military time to notify the families. I did not know that, if the news blared that "nine Marines were killed in Fallujah today," it meant that the families had already been notified. Every time a Marine died in Fallujah, during both my son's deployments, I lived in a 24-hour Zone of Agony.

My biggest fear was that the Marines would not be able to find us. When I Google-earth my own address, I cannot tell where my house is on the topographical map. It is remote West Texas ranching country, and unless you've got a sprawling estate or ranch headquarters with several houses and barns, a solitary country house does not stand out, not even one with barns nearby. The instructions we have to give people who visit can be convoluted. I remember, when my nephew Michael was driving home to Dallas for his post-deployment leave from Camp Pendleton and planned to spend a night here--he and his buddies traveled 1100 miles, but had to pull over not two miles away because--for the first time--they were lost.

So this was not a neurotic concern for me--it was real. My worst nightmare was that I would get a phone call from a Marine sergeant who had driven a hundred miles from the airport in a rented car to notify us of our son's death, and had gotten lost, and I would have to give him directions to the house so that he could tell me what I had obviously already figured out. I could not get my city-type friends to understand why this was such a concern to me. They would laugh and say, "They're the Marines! They can find anyone!"

And I would explain how UPS and Fed-Ex were not able to find our house, even with GPS, and often had to phone for directions. Still, no one understood.

No one understood.

There is so much that people who are not living this heart-in-your-throat, I-can't-breathe daily nightmare do not understand.

They don't understand, for example, how you are utterly, completely, TERRIFIED every moment of every day your loved one is in a war zone--especially if he is part of a combat unit. (Women cannot, as yet, serve in combat units. This does not mean that women have not fought--and died--honorably in these wars, but when you refer to a combat or Infantry unit, you say "he.")

They don't understand how you can be pushing a cart down a grocery store aisle, spot a rack of beef jerky, and burst into tears.

They don't understand that you have to ship Christmas gifts in October.

They don't understand how, when you have a child in harm's way, you don't want to hear things like, "Well, at least we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here,"--when you are standing there KNOWING that they, themselves, not only never served, but their healthy kids did not, either. So you don't want to hear their fucking empty useless cliches.

And when it comes to Marines and army Infantry, they REALLY don't understand how it's not like the neat little news broadcasts that depict sprawling bases with Burger Kings, huge mess halls, and tidy air conditioned buildings housing, say, two soldiers at a time, with big banks of phones and computers (if they didn't bring their own laptops), so that they can e-mail or call home almost every day.

Even when not in combat, a Marine like my son and nephew is out on missions for up to three weeks at a time--10 days is average--sleeping in burnt-out buildings or around desert campfires, eating MREs for days on end, going without showers for two weeks or more, and once in a while, passing around a beat-up old SAT phone so that each Marine can call home for maybe two or five minutes--IF the satellite stays positioned long enough. Once every two weeks, they'd get to go spend 24 hours on one of those big bases--long enough for a couple hot meals, a shower, a good nights' sleep, and a 30-minute phone call home, which they would sometimes split with wife or girlfriend and parents.

Those lengthier phone calls were my only signal that we had 24 hours of time where we did not have to worry, because our son was alive and relatively safe. We would sleep better then, too.

People don't understand that you learn to love your son's buddies through the stories he's told, even if you have never met them, so that when one dies, you are as devastated as if you'd lost a family member, and you grieve.

People don't understand about the condolence letters. When a Marine dies from your child's unit, many of the other Marine's family members write condolence letters to his family, either a wife and kids or set of parents. You write these letters to someone you will likely never meet, and you try to think of something to say that is not a shallow, empty slogan like, "He died for his country," or "his death was noble"--you know, the stuff you'd hear the president say in his many photo-op speeches about war.

You'd write the letters while your own heart was not just grieving for that lost boy, but shredded with fear for your own, who was still in harm's way. You'd write the letters knowing that you could be the next one to receive condolence letters yourself.

Every morning I would go out back if the weather was nice, or in my living room, and do Yoga in an attempt to control my stress, but all through the workout, tears would stream down my face.

Some family members chose to deal with their son's deployment to battle by not watching any news or discussing anything about the war. But my reasoning was that, if I blanked out the war from my knowledge, then when he got home, he would be that much lonelier because he would know that he could not discuss with me the things that had happened to him. I wanted him to always feel that he could talk to me about whatever he needed to whenever he needed to do it, without being worried that he had to protect me from anything.

So I absorbed war news like a sponge--anything and everything I could get my hands on--newspaper and magazine articles, blogposts, books, TV broadcasts and documentaries. I discussed it at length with my brother-in-law, the general--impressing him, I think, with my knowledge. I found other Marine moms and dads I could gather with online, huddling over the computer or phone on bad days, seeking news of where the boys might be and what they might be doing.

My son knew that this was my way, but when he called home from war, we did not discuss the war very often, because that is not why a soldier or Marine calls home. They call home to hear funny stories about family and friends, or to hear news of pets or, if they have them, their children, or common, everyday LITTLE things from a world so very far from their own. They call home so that, for a few minutes, they can close their eyes, hear a warm, loving voice on the other end of the line, and be safe at home.

So, when I had to go see a cardiologist to see if something might be wrong, (because, as I pointed out earlier, I couldn't breathe--turns out it was just stress and fear, not heart trouble), we didn't tell our son. And when his granddad was hospitalized, we kept that from him too. There was nothing he could do about either of those worries, and he did not need the distractions. Thinking of other things can get a Marine killed.

So many things can get a Marine killed. Every day that he was not secure on-base, my son and nephews were getting shot at or blown up. When they were not doing that, they were going up in helicopters or driving in Humvees that were getting shot at or blown up.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

The Mills family has had one family member or another in Iraq or Afghanistan virtually every year in the past ten--skipping a year now and then, for more war-training.

My son was in his final week of deployment in 2005, when his superiors seemed to find it necessary to inform the guys that his unit was being REdeployed, back to Iraq, seven or eight months after they got home from THIS deployment. They didn't even let the guys have the unmitigated joy of going home, because they knew the whole time that they would be going back. In the intervening months, what did they do? They trained for war out in the Mojave desert.

My son said that one night, camping in a tent in the Mojave during a training exercise, he had a terrible nightmare that the camp was being overrun by insurgents. He leapt to his feet and grabbed his rifle--but it was not loaded--then he flung open the tent flaps to find...the desert. It was disorienting, disturbing, and damnable, because they redeployed in January of 2006, back to Fallujah.

It doe not get any easier, these repeat deployments. Not for the troops and certainly not for the families. The old terrors return. You hug him tightly at the airport with your heart cracking wide open because you are so afraid that it will be the last time you ever see him. He reaches the top of the airport escalator on the way to security, and turns and gives you a big brave smile and a hearty wave, and you wave back, and then when he turns away, you burst into sobs, and you cannot stop crying for hours. For days, really.

Every time he calls home, you think it might be the last time you ever hear his voice.

Every time a Marine in his unit dies, you are frantic with grief and sorrow and terror. You struggle to write condolence letters even as you try and think what to say to him when he calls and even as you know there is NOTHING you can say, not to him, and not to his buddy's mama.

My son's second deployment was even worse than the first. "It wasn't a matter of IF someone would get blown up," he told me later, "or WHEN. It was a matter of WHO."

Every single day, they went out on patrol, and SOMEBODY got blown up or shot by snipers. My son loaded buddies onto Medevac helicopters missing limbs or bandaged up; he attended memorial services for those who were going home in body bags, telling me, "Our company commander," (that would be a young captain probably not yet out of his twenties), "would kiss them on the forehead, then zip 'em up and ship 'em home."

Then one day, it was my son's turn. The improvised explosive device hidden in the road blew up under the Humvee he was driving, tearing out part of the front end and sending him staggering to his knees. He was medevacced out of the combat zone, checked over in a base hospital, pronounced a rough-tough-real-stuff Marine, then flown back to his unit.

A couple of days later, a sniper shot Dustin's good buddy, Lance Corporal Rex Page, in the head as he ran up onto a roof, with Dustin two steps behind. Cpl. Page died soon after.

At some point...somewhere along the line...I lost my mind.

Just a little bit, mind you. Nobody had to commit me or anything, though I'm sure they wondered from time to time. I was able to function (barely). But the relentless stress, grief, fear, and worry drove me off of some mental ledge somewhere, and I went into freefall.

There aren't a whole lot of Marines in West Texas. They are a seagoing branch of the military, and all their bases are on coasts. So, there aren't a whole lot of fellow Marine families. And in a rural area 100 miles from a mall, there aren't ANY therapists around to listen to descriptions of your nightly nightmares and daily obsessions--not that they would have understood.

I know a Marine dad whose son served with mine who IS a psychologist, working at a clinic, and he said that even though his colleagues were all exceedingly kind, and all willing to help, "There is no one who could possibly understand what this is like," he told me, "unless they have been through it."

We decided, during one lengthy phone call while our sons were in a Very Bad Place, that obsessive thoughts, nightmares, insomnia, irritability, depression, hair-trigger temper, and catastrophizing were NORMAL behaviors for those with family members deployed to war.

He had just told me a tale of how, when his son's platoon was camped in an abandoned building, his son had gotten jolted awake from a sound sleep when the building came under heavy fire. He had had raced to the roof, clad only in boxer shorts, flip-flops, and his helmet, to engage the enemy.

It was a brave, foolish thing to do, but it is the kind of thing brave, foolish young men DO in war. We laughed, we two parents, because what else could we do? When you are terrified, that is one thing you do to keep from crying all the time--you laugh. And so we laughed.

In all those years--from 2002, when George W. Bush started talking up the Iraq war at fund-raisers, (who sells a war at fund-raisers unless, of course, they view that war as political; as the perfect campaign slogan) of all places--to 2011, when Barack Obama called an end to the madness--there was only one thing I could do.

I could write.

It is a terrible thing, to find that a war you oppose with every cell and fiber of your body and soul, could be the very instrument of the death of your own beloved child.

Dustin, like his nephew Mike and so many thousands of idealistic young people, enlisted following 9/11. Because Dustin was so close to college graduation, the Marines held a slot open for him and waited for him to complete his studies. The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon had shaken him deeply. (His uncle, the brigadier general, was working at the Pentagon that day, and one of his cousins was a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown in Washington, D.C., and had raced to help remove bodies from the burnt-out wreckage of the building, not knowing if his dad was among the number or not.)

Dustin wanted to step up, do his part to serve and protect this great nation. "I think I'd rather be one of the protectors," he told us, "than one of the ones who needs protecting."

He thought he would be chasing terrorists through the mountains of Afghanistan, not fighting insurgents in the streets of Fallujah.

I didn't think that the Taliban should be allowed a safe haven to continue to train terrorists in Afghanistan indefinitely, so military action in that country seemed sensible to me. I am not the kind of peace activist that is opposed to all wars, everywhere, for any reason whatsoever. Those who did not fight the Nazis, for example, were eventually taken over by them.

Sometimes ya gotta fight.

But Iraq was a whole other matter, and I was vehemently opposed to what I considered a war that was ill-conceived, ill-planned, and illegal. I was appalled at the haphazard way troops were flung into that conflict poorly armed and armored, with no exit strategy or end game in sight, chasing after ghosts based on nonexistent evidence made up out of whole cloth to be served up to the media swathed in the flag.

I deeply resented the strict media control, the wholesale co-opting of all news outlet by trading access for propaganda--I'll give you an interview with Dick Cheney if you write a friendly piece; but if you write anything we don't like, we'll cut off all access altogether, for the duration. Even the New York Times fell for it--a real coup for the liars in the White House.

I hated the way the war-dead were hidden from the public.

But more than anything else, what drove me wild was the cunning and deliberate way that anyone who dared speak out against any of Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney's plans were branded traitors, or at the very least, people who did not love their country, were not patriots, were not "true" Americans, and were worthy of nothing but scorn, derision, and mockery--not to mention full-on hatred.

When Max Cleland--MAX CLELAND--was driven from office by being portrayed as unAmerican, a man who'd left half his body in Vietnam, I was outraged beyond my ability to express. When people at the 2004 Republican convention sported mocking "Purple-Heart Band-Aids" and called into question John Kerry's heroic service, I was apoplectic.

At first, before we had access to high-speed Internet service, and our dial-up was so notoriously slow, I wrote journal entries, one of which I posted years later on my blog, about the night before our son deployed to war, called, "This is Why They Call It Leave."

I was tormented by my anti-war feelings when so many in my family were fighting in that same war. I was warned by just about every conservative on my e-mail list that even just THINKING those thoughts about the war in Iraq was hurting my son.

My son was a 26-year old grown-up. He knew how I felt about the war but he also knew that I loved and respected him and was deeply proud of him. He and his nephews were well acquainted with the weekly funny cards they got from me, along with Care packages and letters. They knew how I felt about things but for the most part, I kept my views to myself because when you get deployed to a war, you don't get much choice in the matter. There was nothing they could do about their tours in Iraq, so they didn't need any preaching from me. The closest I would ever come to mentioning politics was to say in a card that I was praying for them and then tease, "Let's see if God listens to the prayers of a Democrat."

But I fretted enough about it to track down the late, very great, Col. David Hackworth, or "Hack," as he was known, who was the most-decorated soldier of the Vietnam war and who worked tirelessly on behalf of soldiers and Marines in every war. Hack smelled a rat with the Iraq war, and was outraged when he heard Rumsfeld tell a poorly-armored soldier, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had."

I found Col. Hackworth and asked him, point-blank, if it was possible to "love the warrior but hate the war."

He told me ABSOLUTELY it was possible, and that furthermore, most of the soldiers and Marines he'd talked to hated the war also and wanted out. They could not speak about their feelings on the war while they were in uniform, without risking getting into trouble with the brass, so Hack became their voice until his untimely death from cancer just a few weeks after our e-mail exchange.

But that one e-mail gave me courage. Hack helped me see that you could do both: you could support your loved one in the fight, and you could fight to end it at the same time.

It gave me someplace to put the rage.

Last April, a series of wildfires came across our ranch property, burning up everything in sight except for our home, which was spared because my husband fought back the flames by hand. Sometimes, I think of the rage that swept over me during the worst of the war years as a fire that consumed me.

Many times, one person or another would say I was "obsessed" by the war--but NEVER, not ONCE, did anyone from a military family say that to me. We were ALL obsessed, because that is what war does to a family--it consumes it. Either a troop is deployed or training for the next deployment, or preparing to deploy soon, or coming down from a deployment.

The whole family deploys, in that sense. When you're not living in fear, you are living in dread.

And when you see the commander-in-chief and his minions spreading happy-talk about how great the war is going while, at the same time, seeing up-close, first-hand, what your loved one is going through that puts the LIE to the happy-talk claims...it DOES something to you.

Deep inside, on some fundamental, spiritual, soul-level, it CHANGES you.

There wasn't a lot I could do about it early on, but during my son's first deployment, my computer died. We had already cannibalized parts from other computers--three different times--and this time, it was DEAD. When my son found out about it, he called me from Iraq and said, "Mom, I'm going to buy you a computer with some of my combat pay when I get home. You wait until then. I want to get you something really nice." I sputtered and argued, of course, but he held firm. For the next four months, I used my husband's laptop when he was home, on an e-mail basis only.

We learned to go to gettyimages.com and look up our son's unit, down to the Lima Company designation, and then we could find war photographers who were embedded with 3/5 Lima. In this digital age, they would post dozens of photos every day as they moved with the unit through the streets of Fallujah. That gave us a bird's-eye view--for better or worse--of what our son was doing in Iraq. Every day we pored over the pictures, looking for a glimpse of him. Most of the time, we would think we'd found him, only to discover later that we were wrong.

I'd go to news sources, read what I could find, print them up, and put the articles in files for him to see later.

I sent Dustin three disposable cameras also, and he'd carry one around with him in his pants pocket. Whenever he could, he'd yank out the camera and take a snapshot. Weeks later, he'd wrap up the cameras in brown paper and send them home. I'd get them developed, keep one copy of prints, and send another to him. Some of his photos could have been printed in Time or Newsweek. I know, because sometimes, I'd be looking at almost identical prints--one in a newsmagazine, one in my hand.

Like the one of a building door upcoming--he was maybe three troops behind the one going in, and spray-painted in red on the side of the building were the words: DEAD BODY INSIDE, with a long arrow pointed at the doorway my son was about to enter.

The pictures were grim, sobering. He never sent home pictures of dead bodies or anything, but what he did send home was war at its rawest--the destruction, the suffering, the silliness. Before he came back, I bought a very fine leather photo album and had a brass plate made with his battalion, company, and platoon designation and the dates and place engraved on it, and presented it to him as a gift on his return. To this day, it is one of Dustin's most prized possessions, one he does not share readily with anyone but a select few.

In other words, you don't get to see those pictures unless you appreciate the seriousness of them. War is not a video game, or a movie, or a TV show, or a 3-minute newscast. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that displays mankind at his very worst and at his very best; and once you have beheld the reality of it, you are never again the same. Never. If you are not the sort of person to linger over the photos, asking him to explain what this is or who that is or to tell you the story behind each one, then you are not worthy of seeing them.

I've seen him show the scrapbook to one cousin, but not another, this friend but not that one. Only someone who has been through this either first-hand, or with a loved one, can possibly understand why that is.

When my brother-in-law was out for a visit, following his retirement from the Special Forces, and Dustin was still in the Marines but had left his special photo album at home, I showed it to the general. He lingered over each and every page, not saying anything, not asking anything. I knew that I didn't need to explain things to him, anyway.

Then, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, "These guys...They always did everything I ever asked them to."

He didn't mean the Marines, of course, but he meant ALL of them, all the men and women who fight in all the wars that generals send them to fight. My brother-in-law had commanded many fine young men like my son and his two, and we both knew that there are no politics when your heart is bursting with pride and worry for them.

Later that year, one of his two boys would be deployed to the deadly Diyala province as part of George W. Bush's so-called "surge." His son, a company commander for an army Stryker brigade at the time, would have to tell his men two weeks after they arrived in-country that their deployment had already been extended by three months. During the 15 months he was in Iraq, he lost many brave young men, a sorrowful fact he struggles with to this day.

Dustin's first deployment was an eye-opener of political manipulation versus reality. He and his buddies would stumble into the base mess hall after a typical two-week mission, filthy, dusty, bloody, and exhausted, and would stand dumbstruck, gazing up at the television tuned to Fox News, and hear all about how well the war was going that they had just been fighting.

"It was lies," he told me. "All lies. We had no business being in that country. They lied about why we had to go in, and I bought it. But there were no weapons of mass destruction. Nothing they had told us turned out to be true."

He came home consumed by his own rage, bought me a brand-new Hewlitt-Packard desktop computer with all the bells and whistles, and said, "I want you to use your gifts to speak out. I want you to do everything you can from your end to bring this war to an end. I don't want to die in Iraq, and I don't want any more of my buddies to die there."

I told him I was worried that, since I wrote under my own name, I might get him into trouble by protesting the war. He said, "You let me worry about that. I don't care what they do to me."

That spring, we finally got a satellite Internet connection, and I started blogging, first at Blue Inkblots, a free Blogspot site, and then at Deanie's Blue Inkblots, at a paid website.

Some of the blogposts were intensely personal, like this one from June of 2006: "3 a.m. Phone Calls Home from War: It's Not Just Politics." That was the night Dustin called clearly distraught, but uncommunicative. He just wanted to hear from home. I found out later that Rex had died that day.

In others, like this one from April of 2006: "Military Mutiny: 'I Will Never Trust Them Again'," I would rage, saying, "I am the mother of a Marine Corps fighting man, and I will call out my outrage, I will speak truth to power, I will be counted, I WILL NOT BE SILENT...I will be a word-warrior for the real warriors, I will fight for the fighters...until the politicians who pulled off the greatest scam in this country's military history are not only drummed out of office...but properly burn in hell."

With high-speed Internet I was able to read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the U.K. Guardian, the Military Times every day, as well as peruse major websites, some of which were just getting started, like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post. I came to know the best war correspondents by name--those who embedded with combat troops and risked their lives every day to bullet and bomb--and to watch for their articles, which I printed up and filed. I watched for their inevitable books and bought them as soon as they came out.

More than anything else, I was looking for something GOOD, something that would match the happy-talk, because I thought if I could find something good, some development that would make it all worthwhile, it would help me not be so afraid.

But there was nothing.

I would print up my posts and file them, putting the most recent posts in front of the last ones. In the end, I had file drawers full of printed up and torn-out articles from news publications, and 1,000 pages of blogposts on the war in Iraq.

One Thousand. Pages.

Sometimes my posts were tied to current events and recent developments. Sometimes I would compile a dozen or so articles on one particular subject regarding the war and post on that. Sometimes I would refute the happy-talk or some lies out of the administration or from the latest Right-wing viral e-mail with the TRUTH, backed by facts.

Sometimes, I would reference literature, as I did in what was possibly my best--certainly my most recirculated--blogpost, from May of 2007, "A Black Matter for the King That Led Them To It," in which I quoted Shakespeare's King Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1:

"But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place'--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poorly behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared there are few die well in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection."

In that piece, I talked about the reality of what troops must deal with when, say, a Humvee gets flipped and set on fire by a roadside bomb, saying, "For all the patriotic flag-waving and yellow-ribbon magneting, there is nothing particularly patriotic or romantic about death in combat."

I talked about the heavy price being paid by men and women "barely out of his or her teens."

I blogged about the use and abuse of troops, the "back-door draft," and other dirty tricks being played on them to force them to war when they did not want to go again and should not have had to, the arbitrary lengthening of deployments, the "Russian Roulette" those who sent them back and back and back again played with their lives and the terrible toll it takes on them.

I blogged about military families and the stress these policies had on them, the skyrocketing divorce rate, suicide rates, drug and alcohol abuse rates, child abuse rates, and post-deployment deaths by such means as motorcycle wrecks.

I blogged about how oblivious most of the American public was, how the United States was not at war--only 1% of Americans were actually at war. The rest had been mesmerized by video games, cable TV, and a commander-in-chief who basically wanted everyone to forget about the war unless he could use it as a campaign ad photo-op background.

I blogged about the outrageous, insensitive remarks made to the press by Right-wing politicians and their enablers, like the time Laura Bush had said, "No one has suffered more" over the Iraq war than she and W had. In the April 2007 post, "Oh,Give Me a F**king Break, Laura Bush," I reeled out the reality of maimed and disabled veterans trapped at Walter Reed, or family members taking care of their traumatic brain-injured soldier or Marine, or mothers staring empty-eyed as the tri-corner flag was placed in their arms at the funeral of their son or daughter.

I also took on the Left-Wing peace activists who seemed to have no compassion or even the slightest understanding of what it meant to serve in the military, as in two posts I wrote in April of 2007, "Let's All Blame the Troops for the Mess They're In," in which I explained WHY so many men and women enlist (to get help with their education--not because they think it would be fun to kill people), and "Just Because You're Born in This Country Doesn't Mean You Deserve It's Privileges," in which I talked about why military families are proud of their service, even if others don't understand.

I blogged about speaking out against the war, whether you were military or not, and how my blog had been blocked on military bases in Europe, but how, "They'll Have to Shut Me Down to Shut Me Up."

Over on TPM Cafe, with Talking Points Memo, I copied over my Blue Inkblots blogs and I also wrote just for them, things like, "Our Voices Have Been Lost," and "I Write."

My posts were always well-sourced, but they never left the personal. It was my aim to show that the POLITICAL can be PERSONAL, and how every vote counts.

In "Homecoming," which I did exclusively at TPM Cafe, I talked about the reality of post-deployment leaves, and how I once stood outside my son's bedroom door in the pre-dawn one morning and listened to him cry out in his sleep from nightmares, trying to decide whether it would be better to go in and wake him or leave him to his demons.

I talked about the poignant midnight right before he went back to Pendleton, when we sat out under the stars, and he told me heartbreaking things he had seen--the worst things. I remember how honored I felt, as if I'd been given a sacred trust. To this day, I have told no one what my son said to me that night, nor will I ever. I am so grateful that he felt secure enough that he could talk about it to me, and I will never betray that trust.

Years later, one of Dustin's Marine buddies told me that reading my blog, "It felt like you were my voice," he said. "Like you were speaking for me. You said things that I either couldn't say, or I didn't know HOW to say." He talked about the strength he'd drawn from the blogposts, how he'd forwarded them on to his family.

Nothing anyone has ever said to me about my work has ever meant more.

In my blog, when I wasn't talking to military families or on their behalf, I was taking on pundits and politicians. I raged and fought to get out the truth.

But through it all, I felt hopeless, powerless, helpless, driven nearly mad with frustration.

And then, for Christmas of 2006, my sister gave me a copy of The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama. Like everyone else with a thinking mind, I had been blown away by his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. But as I read the book, I found myself underlining whole pages. Never in my life had I felt so in sync with a politician--I loved everything he said, whether it was about pragmatic politics and the necessity of compromise, or taking on sacred cows even in his own party, or the specifics of what he had in mind for education, health care, the environment, and so on--I would find myself with tears tracking slowly down my cheeks; that was how deeply affected I was by what I was reading.

I had known that he had spoken out against the Iraq war, all the way back in 2002, but I had never seen or read the speech in its entirety. So I looked it up, and what I read changed my life. I had printed up the speech, and I didn't even realize that I was underlining every line in it.

It was as if this man had crawled into my soul and was speaking with my voice.

By the time I got to the end, I was sobbing, face in hands, full-out breakdown time.

I well remembered the political climate of 2002, how anyone who dared to speak out against the Iraq war was destroyed politically. It had taken BALLS to do what he did. Guts I'd never seen in a politician.

I bought a copy of Dreams from My Father, and in the reading, came to know that this man had done the soul-work necessary to know himself well--something George W. Bush would never do.

I waited eagerly for Senator Obama to declare his candidacy, and when he did, I was one of the first few HUNDRED to sign up to donate money every single month to his presidential campaign--all the way back in February of 2007.

From that point on, I knew that the only way to REALLY have any hope whatsoever to bring the Iraq war to an end was to put this man in the White House. Other than the cartoon-character candidate, Ron Paul, NO ONE was talking about ending the Iraq war in early 2007.

At the time, Barack Obama was 30 points behind Hillary Clinton. Nobody took him seriously. She had been anointed queen and nobody cared about the skinny young upstart black guy from Chicago.

I did, though. I followed every speech and policy paper he did on everything from international relations to health care to education to the economy. I printed them up, read them, filed them. I paid particularly close attention to his speeches on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I can tell you now that, pulling those speeches out of the file folders, rereading them--HE HAS KEPT EVERY DAMN PROMISE HE MADE REGARDING BOTH WARS. If you don't believe it, then you weren't paying attention, or maybe you just heard what you wanted to hear, but he has done everything he said he would do, and he has done it in the time he said he would do it.

Although I continued to blog about the war and the returning troops and their problems, as well as things which affected them, such as the fight for the new G.I. Bill, I blogged tirelessly for Barack Obama, in Blue Inkblots, TPM Cafe, and on the Huffington Post as part of their "Off the Bus" program.

I stood in the rain down in Austin, Texas (five hours from here), for, oh, something like five hours, so I could be on the rope line after the candidate Obama gave his speech there. I was covering the event for HuffPo, but I did not go with the press up on stage, though I was invited. I wanted to be in the crowd, I wanted to feel their energy. When he came down off that stage, the crowd surged forth with such power that I wondered if I might get trampled.

Fighting to put Barack Obama in the White House was the most empowering thing I ever did. My whole family supported him

People loved to make fun about Obama's promise of HOPE. Oh, how they mocked and derided him--his opponents, from Hillary to Sarah, certainly, but also pundits and pontificators and even those in his own party who just didn't see it happening.

But I am here to tell you that it was not funny to ME. To this Marine mom, Barack Obama offered the first HOPE I'd had since the war began. I trusted him. I believed in him.

The night he was elected, my phone rang off the wall--husband, son, daughter, friends, people from all over the country called to say how wonderful it was, but I could not stop crying.

I cried for three days.

I'd be going about my housework, tears sliding down my cheeks. They were happy tears, to be sure, but they were real.

The FIRST DAY Obama was in office, he directed the Pentagon to come up with a plan that would withdraw 100,000 troops from Iraq in 16 months.

Pentagon generals, scornful of another Democratic president who had not served, and disconnected from the enlisted men and junior officers in the field who had supported their new commander-in-chief, thought they could push the new guy around. They leaked out documents to select press, with the distinct impression of stirring things up, making him look inept and inexperienced, like someone who needed to pay attention to his generals.

Perhaps they were also accustomed to his predecessor, who had big crushes on people like Gen. Petraeus, and who romped around them like a happy lap dog, giving them whatever they wanted since Rumsfeld had ignored them the first six years.

But they underestimated their new boss. In a show of respect, HE went to see THEM at the Pentagon, but once there, he made it clear: These were their orders, and they were to execute them, and he intended to see no more childish leaks in the media.

By the time 16 months had passed, the president had overseen the withdrawal of 100,000 troops from Iraq, including every single Marine.

At that time, he promised to withdraw the rest of the troops by the end of 2011.

The campaign to support Senator Barack Obama for a year and a half until his election, and every day since, was for me a watershed in my life. For years I had raged and raged, burning like a fire that was consuming every aspect of my life. I felt so trapped and hopeless and filled with frustration at what I saw the previous administration doing, not just to that country, but to the men and women who served our country with such pride and courage.

Time after time after time I saw the deployments of close family members into that hellhole, and endured their dangerous absences with daily prayers and an anvil on my chest.

I couldn't breathe.

In one of his speeches, the then-candidate Obama spoke about how one woman had approached him at an event and said that her nephew was deployed to Iraq and, "I can't breathe."

He said he thought of that woman every day.

It wasn't me, but it could have been, and just knowing that he was thinking about us all, and working to end this travesty brings tears to my eyes, still, to this day.

On Friday, President Obama announced that he would keep his promise, and he would bring home all the troops from Iraq, (including my nephew), before the end of the holiday season, and that soon, we would begin to draw down in Afghanistan, as well. As he said, "The tide of war is receding."

What this means for me is that I will continue to blog on behalf of the military and veterans as they transition to a peacetime nation and, for many, the challenges of civilian life.

And I will continue to fight, with every breath in my body, to see to it that President Barack Obama is reelected for a second term.

This man kept his word. He gave hope and peace of mind to a terrified, rage-filled Marine mom. He did it in a sensible, practical way that provides the best security to the retreating American troops as well as to the Iraqi people.

I'm not blogging as much as I once did, obviously. Facebook and Twitter enable me to do the same kind of networking in a more efficient manner. I'll keep doing it, though, as the campaign fight heats up, the rhetoric grows more inflamed, and sparks fly.

I'm very much aware that this blogpost is ridiculously overlong, that some of my readers had to bookmark or favorite it and read it in installments. This does not bother me.

This was a story I had to tell.

To my son, Dustin, and nephew Mike, semper fidelis, Marines. I thank God for every moment of every day you are safe and happy.

And to my two nephews who still serve and fight, God bless you and keep you. Aunt Deanie never forgets you or your sacrifices.

To those who have stayed with me, reading my blogposts over the years--particularly those who have also sent loved ones off to fight--I can never thank you enough for your support, your laughter, your tears, and your love. Some of you still have sons in the fight, some saw them safely out of the service. God bless them all, our brave warriors.

To those who served in an earlier time and who have read and supported my work, I thank you all for your service and your courage.

And to my husband and daughter, who suffered through the worst of my crazy-time but never once withdrew your support and love, you are my heart and soul.

We made it, didn't we?

OBAMA GETS HIS MOJO BACK

2011-09-25T22:41:43Z

Before I say a word, I want you to take three minutes out of your life and watch this clip, because it shows more eloquently than I could ever say, the truth for anyone who doubts this president is on fire.

Now, in case some of you are just too damned impatient to sit through a 3-min clip, then read a few of these words:

“With patient and firm determination, I’m going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on. I expect all of you to march with me, and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes, shake it off, stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying, we are going to press on, we’ve got work to do.”

TAKE OFF YOUR BEDROOM SLIPPERS, PUT ON YOUR MARCHING SHOES, SHAKE IT OFF, STOP COMPLAINING...WE ARE GOING TO PRESS ON, WE'VE GOT WORK TO DO.

Them's fightin' words, bubba.

And that ain't all.

In this speech before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama's call to arms rang with the cadence and rhythms of an old-time preacher-man, and believe me, he was not preaching to the choir. Liberals have long complained that Obama was catering too much, going too far to compromise, giving too much to the Righ-Wing lunatics that have taken over the Republican asylum.

After giving some examples of "bad kind of crazy," such as Republicans demanding that the poor and Middle Class pay more taxes while the rich go free (sometimes, literally--G.E. paid NO income tax last year)--Obama spoke for a minute on what he called "the good kind of crazy":

“Throughout our history, change has often come slowly. Progress often takes time,” he said. “It’s never easy. And I never promised easy. Easy has never been promised to us. But we have had faith. We’ve had that good kind of crazy that says, ‘You can’t stop marching.’”

I NEVER PROMISED EASY.

This is true. If you go over speech after speech the president has given, both before he was elected, and since, particularly when speaking to his supporters, he has repeated often the refrain that we inherited a tsunami of economic ruin from his predecessor, and it will take time to dig our way out of it. He's also always been honest with his supporters--from back in the day when the biggest dragon to slay was Hillary Clinton's primary-fight juggernaut--that it would not be easy for any of us.

And Lord knows he was right on that score.

This is not the first speech the president has given of late that leaves scorch marks on the ears of his listeners. He signaled the New Obama at the speech he gave to a joint session of Congress on the American Jobs Act, in which he repeated the refrain, "Pass this Jobs Bill" 16 times, and the word "jobs" some 45 times.

In this speech, he called upon Congress to set aside petty partisan political differences--what he called, "the political circus," and come together for the greater good:

"As we stand at this crossroads of history, the eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us – watching to see what we do with this moment; waiting for us to lead.

"Those of us gathered here tonight have been called to govern in extraordinary times. It is a tremendous burden, but also a great privilege – one that has been entrusted to few generations of Americans. For in our hands lies the ability to shape our world for good or for ill.

"I know that it is easy to lose sight of this truth – to become cynical and doubtful; consumed with the petty and the trivial.

"But in my life, I have also learned that hope is found in unlikely places; that inspiration often comes not from those with the most power or celebrity, but from the dreams and aspirations of Americans who are anything but ordinary."

Almost immediately, Obama supporters--both loyal standbys and disgruntled former fans--knew that this speech was not just flowery words, but a departure from his previous tone and method, as pointed out by Jonathan Capeheart in the Washington Post:

"[H]e sold it hard. The refrain, “Pass this jobs bill,” went from being a repeated line in a speech to a hammer over the head of Congress."

And he didn't just stop with the speech. The very next day, the president hit the ground running, going straight to areas not only hardest-hit by Bush's Great Recession--but were represented by some of his most powerful rivals in the Republican House and Senate.

As Jonathan Cohn points out in the New Republic, it's not just that the president is hitting economically vulnerable areas sensitive to Republican manipulations, and it's not just that he keeps repeating, "Pass this Jobs Bill" at every stop, and repeating key elements of the speech he gave to Congress--it's also that when he talks about such things as putting on your "marching shoes," he is reaching out over the heads of most casual listeners and straight into the hearts of his supporters, reminding them that he cannot do this alone.

He needs our help, and he needs the help of all Americans who think this plan is a good one, and it turns out, a whopping majority do.--74% to 21% according to some polls, and even 56% in the most Conservative-run polling.

As Cohn says, we can do our part to help:

"The only hope for getting something through Congress -- or making an effective political statement, if the Republicans block action – is to apply pressure."

This is all well and good, Liberals say, but what took him so long? Liberals have done a great deal of moaning and groaning over the fact that the president has not sounded this tone sooner.

As usual, they are not looking at the Big Picture. I could explain it, but I'll let Jonathan Capeheart of the Washington Post have another shot:

"[H]e did try to follow through on his promise to do things differently. He tried hard to work with congressional Republicans. As a gesture of good faith, Obama far too often made concessions to the GOP before getting to the negotiating table. Moves that enraged his base, especially when he got nothing in return. As many have noted, he tried over and over again to be the reasonable guy at the table, the adult in the room. And it got him — and the country — nowhere."

So WHY DO IT AT ALL? howl the Liberal faction of the Democratic Party.

Because he HAD to. President Obama is not the president of the Democratic Party, as much as Michael Moore and others like him want him to be--they often complain that he didn't do what George W. Bush OF ALL PEOPLE did when he came into office.

Remember that, Libs? How he came in after the U.S. Supreme Court selected him president and behaved as if he had some kind of sweeping mandate to impose Right-Wing Rule on the country? Remember how he used executive orders to erase and/or ignore parts of laws that he didn't like--more than any other president? Remember how he used it to ram through the tax cuts for the wealthy that have added more than a trillion bucks to the national debt? Remember how he immediately overturned anything of Clinton's he didn't like--such as birth control being included in women's health care in Third World countries we were helping?

Let's not even START on how he finessed two wars, among other delights.

I felt like a prisoner of war during those years, like some kind of hostage being held in an unfriendly country. I was horrified at every single thing that administration did. I felt helpless and hopeless and filled with rage--and it was the very boneheadedness of the Bush administration and their flat-out refusal to admit that there was anything whatsoever going wrong with their Big Glorious War in Iraq that ushered in the Democratic takeover of the House and Senate in 2006.

Remember THAT?

So. Now you think President Obama should behave in just that way. Imagine how HALF THE COUNTRY would feel if he did?

He HAD TO TRY.

No one could have anticipated that the Republican Party would set as their primary agenda, spending four years doing everything in their power to get rid of Barack Obama. They have shown, time and again, that they do not care about this country or what happens to her people--all they care about is Stopping Obama.

Now, he could have whined and complained every time he was in front of the cameras about how mean the Republicans were being, or as Cohn pointed out, he could do his damndest to at least try to find some kind of middle ground.

SOMEBODY had to be the adult!

These great battles are being played out in a country-wide tableau--not just on Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann but everywhere.

And the American people are watching. If they did not GET IT before as to just what the GOP Teapublicans were trying to do, it came through loud and clear during the debt ceiling fight. It made no difference whether you had heard the term before or had a clue as to what the hell it meant, but one thing did reverberate from that crises: THE REPUBLICANS WERE WILLING TO ALLOW EVEN THE MILITARY GO WITHOUT PAY IN ORDER TO MAKE THEIR PARTISAN POLITICAL POINT.

This provided the president just the public scenario he needed--not just to permit himself to show the anger he's tried to keep in check for more than two years--but to go over the heads of Congress and straight to the hearts of the American people with his message--and they are listening.

Cohn says:

"After the Democrats lost control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections, emboldened Republicans blocked Obama at every turn, even on measures the GOP once supported. The heart-stopping fight to raise the debt ceiling — and the inability of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to garner support in his caucus for the “grand bargain” he was cobbling together with the president — marked the end of Obama 1.0."

In spite of what some pundits would have you believe, what you see in Obama now is not a cynical ploy to rev up his disgruntled base. If he has proven one thing time and again, he has proven that he is president of ALL the people, and he knows that these obstructionist tactics of the Right-Wing lunatics who've taken over the Republican asylum are hurting EVERYONE in this country, not just HIM.

Plenty of Tea-Baggers, for example, depend upon Social Security and Medicare and/or Veterans benefits to survive. They can bark at him and howl at the moon all they want to, but if the candidates they support take over this government, the security they count on will disappear, and the corporations really will take over the country.

You have to understand--this isn't just a fight to re-elect President Obama. This isn't about reaching out to his "base" and garnering more votes.

This is a struggle--a life-and-death STRUGGLE--for the soul of America.

Again and again in his speeches, from the beginning of his presidency, Obama has said that these hateful policies that bleed the poor at the behest of the rich "are not who we are as Americans."

Again and again, he has pointed out that although America is a land known for rugged individualism--it is also a country known for working together, collectively, to achieve great things, not just for this country and her people, but for the whole world.

It was Americans who rebuilt Europe after World War II, through the Marshall Plan.

It was Americans who stopped the genocide in the Balkans.

I could go on and on but I hope you see my point here--we come together for glorious things like putting a man on the moon or whipping the Nazis--but we also come together as a great nation to hold one another up and to see to it that our poor and struggling are not kicked to the curb as they are in so many Third World countries.

That's not who we are.

The Republican debates, on the other hand, have drawn a clear picture of the Tea Bagger America they support, and it is an ugly place.

And I'm not talking about the candidates who are running--a field of crazies if I ever saw one--I am talking about the crowds who support them. There are three well-known examples, but just in case you live in a cave and have somehow missed this glaring evidence of the kind of soul America would have under a President Perry or a President Bachmann, here are three--a new one practically every week:

At the first Republican debate, the moderators pointed out that under Governor Rick Perry's reign in the state of Texas, some 234 inmates have been put to death--more than ALL THE OTHER STATES COMBINED. While Perry preened, the crowd cheered wildly. Never mind that the Innocence Project has overseen the release of dozens of Death Row inmates across the country who were wrongly convicted, or even that Perry himself not only oversaw the execution of a man who was almost assuredly innocent, but then hurried to squelch and cover up the resulting investigation into the wrongful death. To the Tea Bagger crowd at the debates, Perry was a hero.

A week later, a debate moderator asked the potential Republican candidate, Ron Paul, if he would allow a 30-year old man in a coma to die if he was without health insurance. Before Mr. Paul could even respond, the crowd began to cheer, and a couple of loud voices cried out, "Yeah!" and "Let him die!"

What was not mentioned at that point, since apparently the debate moderator, Wolf Blitzer, didn't know, was that Ron Paul's own former campaign manager had died of cancer without health insurance, while still in his 40's, leaving his wife and children destitute. The Paul campaign had had a fund-raiser for the man, to help with the staggering medical bills.

But the real topper came in the last Republican debate, in which a video was shown of an American soldier who was, at the time, deployed to Iraq, who admitted on-camera that he was gay, and asked if HE should be kicked out of the military for that, even as he served his country in combat in a foreign land.

As candidate Rick Santorum rambled through his incoherent response, the crowd BOOED THE SOLDIER and then, cheered the nonsensical remarks of Mr. Santorum, which included statements along the line that "sex doesn't belong in the military"--a fact which should come as a surprise to the men and women service members who are married to one another.

These are the same people, by the way, who trashed the honorable record of Senator John Kerry in the 2004 campaign and viciously attacked ANYONE who even so much as QUESTIONED the Bushian justifications for the Iraq war because they were not "supporting the troops."

So...we're only supposed to support those troops who we approve of?

As Ana Marie Cox points out in the U.K. Guardian, these disturbing--and disgusting--examples of the Teapublican crowd mentality reveal something far deeper and darker about this struggle for the soul of America:

"What the hell is happening out there? Polls show that Republican voters aren't that excited about their candidates. Then is the exuberance that would be applied to an individual campaign spilling out into indiscriminate exclamations over policy? If so, how come we can't get more vocalising on behalf of the party's less ugly philosophies: three cheers for reducing the corporate income tax! When I say "state", you say "rights!"
[...]

"But what should concern the GOP is how their audiences' reactions distort platforms and campaigns. A 2007 study showed that cheering influenced positively – and measurably – a viewing audience's perception of a candidate's performance. If the campaigns proceed and profit from these unruly, even uncivilised outbreaks, the party will get pulled further and further from the core of its appeal to moderates, which used to be that Republicans are the people who will let you be."

Yes, the GOP SHOULD be concerned by those things, but they are not.

They pandered to the Tea Bagger vote in 2010 and now, they seem to have allowed a small handful of freshmen House members--the lowest politicians on the totem pole in normal times--take over the entire government, signing pledges to unelected Right-Wing pontificators that they honor ahead of their own oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States--and ahead of their own constituents. (Believe me, none of these guys won by landslides, and most will only serve one term.)

So, because of this cockeyed insanity on the part of the party in opposition to the President, the entire country is being held hostage to the most extremist of views on things which affect all of us.

The president had to show the country that he was willing to do whatever it took to do his job, keep the government running, and work with the crazies--and in return, they took this country to the very brink of economic catastrophe.

THIS woke people up. THIS made them realize that this is not what government is supposed to be. Over and over again, polling showed that the American people wanted even their elected Right-Wingers to compromise in order to keep government functioning, and over and over again, the wishes of the majority of the American people were IGNORED in favor of the insanity that now reigns in the Republican party.

THIS is when the president stepped up. THIS is when he said, "ENOUGH."

THIS is when he got his mojo back.

He is fighting for all of us, you see, not just his Party "base." He is fighting for the soul of this nation. He knows we are better than this. We are not the kind of people to allow a young man to die just to prove a partisan political point, or to boo a soldier who is fighting for his country in a foreign land. We are not the kind of people to slavishly sacrifice the Better Good of millions of people in order to satisfy the greed a few hundred of the wealthiest Americans.

As Paul Begala wrote so eloquently in Newsweek/The Daily Beast, there are many things about the United States government that perform splendidly, that we all rely on each and every day.

So, the president knows that he is fighting for all of us--and it's working.

As David Axelrod explained in a memo to supporters:

"According to a CNN poll released on Wednesday, a plurality of Americans approve of the President’s jobs plan. Two thirds believe we should cut taxes for the middle class and rebuild America’s roads and bridges. Three quarters believe we need to put our teachers and first responders back to work. More Americans trust the President to handle the economy than Congressional Republicans by a margin of 9 points."

So the American people are solidly behind their president--even as Republicans dig themselves in deeper, refusing even to sign on to disaster relief until huge cuts are made in programs that are popular to Democrats--and threatening, for the third time this year, to shut the government down over their recalcitrance.

The American people know this is not right. They know that only a small sliver of the populace supports these draconian tactics. They know the president has bent over backwards to work with these people, to no avail.

And they know that he is fighting for them. And so should we be, too. The man needs SOMEBODY to have his back against the constant, relentless onslaught of criticism from the opposition party:

"I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on. I expect all of you to march with me, and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes, shake it off, stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying, we are going to press on, we’ve got work to do.”

THIS is the struggle for the soul of the American people. Who are we, as a nation and as a people? Who do we want to represent us on the world stage? Who do we want to know is working for us, each and every day, from the White House?

At this point, it makes little difference who the Republicans nominate. They have already demonstrated their character and beliefs. They will let people suffer and die and will boo men and women in uniform if it means they can protect the rich and give religious zealots the final say in how our country is governed.

This is not who we are. Barack Obama knows that. He's got his mojo back, and so do we, my friends. So do we.