In the fourth scene of the first act of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Danish prince muses that no matter how much some have achieved in life, or how well they are thought of, there is, in some men, "some vicious mole of nature in them," (meaning, a small touch of evil), that, no matter how virtuous they may be otherwise,  "oft breaking down the forts of reason...shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault...to his own scandal."

Hamlet, at that time, did not realize that he was speaking of himself, but soon after, when he was shocked by a vision of his dead father's ghost and decided to follow after it, his worried friend Horatio asked, "To what issue will this come?"

And Marcellus, an officer who was accompanying them, responded "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

It seems to me now that those 400-year old words were never more apt than they are right now, in our own country.

When I first read the major investigative report in the New York Times, written by David Barstow and based on some eight thousand pages of documents forced from the secretive grip of the Pentagon by lawsuit, "Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?pagewanted=print

my hands started to shake so badly that I could no longer type.  A visceral, gut-level sickness washed over me, and I had to turn off the computer altogether.

I'd printed up the piece--all 16 pages of it--and read it carefully.  Then I handed it to my moderate-Republican husband and said, "If you read only one thing I print up and hand to you, this is it."

I told him it was about the organized, systematic Pentagon propaganda-for-profit effort to recruit, seduce, and feed talking points to retired generals who had been thoroughly vetted by both Donald Rumsfeld and the White House for their reliability as administration salesmen for the upcoming, and then, ongoing war in Iraq. 

At least 150 of them were then deployed to every major network, cable franchise, and print media imaginable, as objective "media analysts" armed with all the latest happy-talk and/or scare tactics designed to persuade the American people that invading Iraq and then, staying the course, were good things.

Understand--they were supposedly speaking for themselves; this Pentagon cabal was entirely secret--and they would take those talking points, put them into their own words, and present effective arguments for the Pentagon position as if they just happened to see the great good common sense of it.

Understand, too, that THEY ARE STILL DOING IT.  That General Petraeus met with this very group when he came to Washington, D.C. to sell more war to Congress under the euphemistic term, "pause."

The American people--that would be, you and me--were referred to by one of the generals as "strategic targets" and the propaganda effort as, "psyops."

Or, as another called it, "Mind War."

That's right.  It was a strategic psyops operation against the American people, deliberately designed to brainwash us into going along with this travesty of a war, and to keep on going along.

And if that were the extent of it, that would be bad enough.

But it goes much, much farther.

It turns out that most--if not all--these retired generals also happened to sit on boards, consult for, or serve as glorified vice presidents of--defense contractors, who stood to gain billions in no-bid war contracts.

One even admitted that he had to be careful what he said on-air, because he didn't want, "some four-star to yank up the phone and say, 'Kill the contract.'"

It seems that they were far more worried about contracts being killed than American soldiers and Marines.

And if you think I'm being over-dramatic...The article states that there are hundreds of references, but it mentions at least two events; one, in which 14 Marines died in one day, and another, in which criticisms of troop deaths were being detailed in the media due to a lack of decent up-armor on combat-zone vehicles.

In both of those instances--and many, many more--these generals were deliberately deployed to the network talk shows and Sunday op-ed pages as a sort of rapid reaction force to convince the American people not to lose faith in the war effort just because troops were dying.

One Pentagon official was quoted as saying, in reference to the deaths of troops due to shoddy body armor, "I think our analysts--properly armed--can push back in that area."

Properly armed.

How cute.  Clever turn of phrase, there.

And yet, when my son and the Marines in his unit were plunged into the Battle of Fallujah less than a week after Bush was supposedly re-elected (they had to wait outside the city for two months because the administration was afraid that a bloody body-count just before an election might be a bad thing for their boy)--they did so with substandard body armor and old-fashioned Vietnam-era M-16 rifles. 

(When they re-deployed 14 months and many deaths later, they finally had the right equipment.)

He commented to me at the time that the Marines hated the private contractors because, among other reasons, they had all the latest high-tech body armor, "and they had the M-4's with collapsible stocks and these great scopes, while we had our piece-of-crap rifles."

That would be the M-4s and body armor paid for by billion-dollar contracts that warmongering retired generals were pushing on TV and newspapers, which also served to make some of them very very rich--way beyond military-grade pay scales.

And if THAT were the worst of it, that would be pretty damn bad.

But there's more.

A few of the generals admitted privately, and in venues which would not necessarily result in more money for them, that they could see that the war effort was going very very wrong, that the war was a bloody mess, and that there didn't seem to be much of a way out of it.

They even believed that the whole WMD flap was bogus.

In other words, more than a few of those Pentagon Puppets KNEW FULL WELL that the things they were saying on FOX news or CNN or ABC or MSNBC or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal--were lies.

They knew it.

And yet, they continued to peddle those lies.

And if one or two, here or there, spoke truth--even just a tiny SMIDGEON of it--then the high-priced PR firm who'd been hired by the Pentagon for hundreds of thousands of dollars and was monitering every single appearance by every single mouthpiece--would report almost instantly to the Pentagon Powers and IMMEDIATELY, that general would be back on his retirement pay.

Fired, for daring to speak truth.

And of course, when you get your access cut off at the mother's teat, your contractor can't suck the milk anymore, and so...they'd get fired from there, too.

When I handed the article to my husband, I said that there was one crucial point that the article had not pointed out.

And that is that the networks all own stock in the private war-contracting businesses.

(The networks which, by the way, pretended not to notice horrifyingly GLARING conflicts of interest in its war analysts.)

My husband read half the article, then set it aside, and went outside, where he plunged himself into hard man-type country work for several hours. 

He never finished the article.

I think I know why.

This man is a decorated combat vet.  He is the father of a combat vet.  His brother was shot up and left for dead by the VC in Vietnam while working with special forces.  His other brother did actually retire at the rank of Brigadier General from the U.S. Army Special Forces.  (Though I'm proud to report that he's had nothing to do with private contractors or mouthpiece-work since his retirement, and turned down several very lucrative opportunities to do so.)  We have active-duty military nephews spread out all over the globe right now--one in Iraq.

So...knowing that men who once wore that uniform had prostituted themselves at the expense of fine young men like he was and our son and nephews are, had upset this man in his deepest core.

At twilight, I went out back to sit with him in the shade.  He said quietly, "They have to believe that their friends are dying for a reason.  Their sacrifices have to count for SOMETHING."

I nodded.

"If it's any consolation," I said, "it seems from what I read that the men with solid combat or infantry backgrounds soon left, when they realized what they were being asked to do, and at what cost."

We agreed that it's much easier to sell war when you have not, yourself, ever buried buddies or been shot at.  And many of the generals in the Pentagon fit that description.

He thought a moment.

"If, as you say, the networks own stock in the private contractors, and so have no real interest in ending the war...Then what can we do?

"WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO?"

It was an anguished cry from the soul of a good man who stepped up and fought when asked to do so, who sent his son into battle, and whose sense of outrage over this is almost beyond his ability to articulate.

I did not hesitate in my answer.

"We have to vote Democratic in this next election," I said firmly. 

It is our only hope to end this travesty.  John McCain has already promised to drag this thing out as long as there are enough bodies to throw in front of the cannon.  Only a Democrat can weed out the corruption that has riddled our government from the Oval Office all the way down to the local newspaper.  And it could take two full terms to get even halfway there, but it's a start.

I am not a fool.  I understand that war is always going to be with us.  And when you come from a military family--especially in this all-volunteer time--you accept that because that is what a military is for.

But you also know, more than anyone can even begin to understand, the terrible, terrible cost of that war, not just in blood and treasure, but in the psychic soul of our nation.

Military families believe that their precious loved ones stand ready to serve whenever, wherever, and however they are asked by their commander-in-chief.  You have no choice but to trust that that civilian leadership would never ask for such a sacrifice unless they honestly felt it was absolutely necessary.

We now know that this White House began planning to invade Iraq almost from the moment they took office.  9/11 gave them an excuse and an unprecedented ability to sell and scare the populace into going along.

They also set up secret groups within the White House and the Pentagon to cook intelligence, spin truth and concoct lies, and push the war in Iraq exactly like an advertising campaign.

At no point did ANY of them give a flying damn about the sacred "troops" they so loved to parade around with. 

Soldiers and Marines are, by definition, idealists.  They earnestly believe that this is the greatest country in the world; the flag is sacred; and that the duty to protect that country is a precious one.  Stand up a bunch of battle-hardened hard-core troops and play some corny song like the Ballad of the Green Berets, and watch tears seep slowly down their rugged cheeks.

This is what makes this all the more sickening and reprehensible.  To take that idealism and twist it for personal gain--even though some of those young men and women could die for it--is beyond my ability to find words.

And for a man to do it even as he himself had proudly worn that uniform is positively reptilian.

Hamlet speaks about "some vicious mole" that can corrupt someone whose achievements are otherwise stellar.

I think that many of the men who first signed on to this project did so because they believed that the Vietnam war would have been won if only the American media hadn't turned against the war.

I'm not saying that I agree with that in any way, shape, form, or fashion, but THEY believed it.  In the beginning, most of them must have believed that this war was necessary and that what they were doing for the Pentagon was noble and right.

But as time wore on, and they began to see that what they were being fed was just patently untrue, as more and more men and women died--and yet, with each appearance, they came to think twice, not about TRUTH, but about PROFIT--fearful that saying the wrong thing would cut off their access to Pentagon access and therefore cost them their lucrative defense contractor jobs...With each appearance or op-ed, when they KNEW that what they were saying was bullshit, and yet continued to do so...

Well, something truly rotten began to spread throughout what should be one of our most noble and unselfish traditions--military honor.

Something truly rotten began to eat away at not just our core values as a nation, but the very governance of it.

And with every heedless glance of network executives and editorial staff who knew that the statements made on-air on in op-eds were patent propaganda, tainted by HUGE conflicts of interest...the very First Amendment foundation of our nation was threatened.

I watched the three broadcast networks on Sunday.

There was not a single mention of the Times article on any of the Sunday morning shows, or on any of the news broadcasts.

This morning, Monday, I read the Washington Post and New York Times and Boston Globe, thinking that surely most every op-ed would rise up in outrage, but of those three, only one, the Post, mentioned it at all, and that was in Howard Kurtz's regular column.

No editorials.

No op-eds.

Instead, there were yet more pieces on whether a flag lapel pin could cost Barack Obama votes.

A media-made grassfire over NOTHING, when right at their fingertips and in their faces, corruption of the worst magnitude.

There is indeed something rotten in the state of Denmark. 

I am a combat mom and wife, and I wouldn't wear a flag in my lapel either.  Not when men who were most supposed to revere it, chose instead, to trample it underfoot in the mad stampede for corporate blood-money, and the first-amendment institution put into place to stop their blind greed turned away instead, hid the flag-draped caskets from public eye, and kept secret their own war profiteering.

Democrats can squabble all they want to over Hillary or Obama, but if I hear ANYONE threaten to vote for a continuation of this immoral war by casting a protest ballot for John McCain because their candidate didn't get the nomination, I will hold up the broken images of 4,038 dead Americans, tens of thousands wounded men and women, and HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF PRIVATE WAR-PROFITEERING DOLLARS, and tell them that four years from the day they cast that vote, there will likely be 3,000 or more DEAD because they chose to pitch a little temper fit rather than stop to think about what that vote would really mean.

Don't be a part of the rottenness.

Vote Democratic in November, I don't give a damn who's on the ballot.

It is the ONLY thing we can do.

And in case you are wondering, my husband, son, and possibly one Marine nephew that I know of all intend to vote Democratic.  They support Barack Obama, but as my son told a right-wing friend of his who was surprised to hear that choice from a Marine:

"I'm voting for whoever will keep me from having to go back to Iraq.  And right now my friend, that appears to be a Democrat."