“The generals are asking for another 20, maybe 30,000 troops, and when I saw that request the other day saying what we have (in Afghanistan) is not enough I remembered a dream I had a year or so ago, right before Obama came into office,” journalist and commentator Bill Moyers told Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher August 28.

“I was back in the cabinet room of the (Johnson) White House sitting behind the president, who was talking to his military advisors, and they were spread out around the table. And, this was in the dream, seriously. He asked the military advisors and his national security advisors how many troops should I send: 40,000? And, a voice in the back of the room said, ‘Not enough.’ 80,000? A voice from over there said, ‘Not enough.’ 120,000? A voice from over there said, ‘Not enough.’

“The military and the hawks in the administration will always say ‘not enough,’” explained Moyers, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, including two years as Johnson’s press secretary.

Analysts, generals, and pundits have likened the now eight year U.S. conflagration in Afghanistan to the decade plus U.S. involvement in  Vietnam. Ostensibly to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, President Dwight Eisenhower sent “advisors” into Vietnam in the late 1950’s. President John F. Kennedy twice tripled their numbers in the early 1960’s.  Lyndon Johnson, drawing from a huge pool of young American draftees, turned the advisors into combat troops. U.S. troop strength was a half million at its peak in 1968.  After more than a dozen years, billions of dollars, and the death of more than five million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians and 60,000 Americans, the U.S. pulled out of the quagmire of its own making in Southeast Asia in 1975.
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Watching a recent Sunday talk show on health reform legislation, I had a sickening feeling (and intuitive pain in my neck) that once again the people will lose to the corporations. Already reaping financial bonanza, even from Medicare, the health insurance companies, exempt from anti-trust laws, and big Pharma will cement their power, making legislative reform and Medicare/health care for all an even more distant reality. The tide of corporate power rises.

Meaningful health insurance and health care reform slip away as deaths from undiagnosed and untreated illnesses increase and bankruptcies from exorbitant medical bills rise. With more bluster and bravado than belief, I e-mailed a friend, a long-time health care activist, “Distressed, but not discouraged.” As I hit “send, ” what we the people can do to crawl out from our victimized state crystallized.

We can call upon our dreams, our Inner Healer. As PDJ readers know, I’ve experienced this paradigm first-hand.

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