Comment on Ted Rall's Sociopathy

My friends have had a rambling discussion about Ted Rall's latest piece.  I often find both very good and bad points in Rall's work, and this week is no exception, though IMO (and not everyone else in my group) he gets the facts correctly, it's just his sociopathic attitude which wrecks the whole essay.

Starting from a friends comment:

> Yes. And Rall was trying to diminish its significance and excuse it.

I wrote:

Yes.  However, the leading portion which makes it sound like mere "angry hooligans smashing windows"  isn't referring to the USA, it's referring to an actual coup in Kyrgrystan.  He actually doesn't say much about our coup, except to diminish his concern for it.  He uses a sociopathic tone (like what's that famous sitcom) to say this (which is one of the two paragraphs I'd edit out...it shows nothing but his sociopathy):

"So, please excuse me if I don't shed geysers of tears over the traumas endured by the pampered, lobbyist-fattened members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate while idiots wearing horned Viking masks desecrated the hallowed hallways of the Capitol."

Even if you don't see the clear sociopathy in his wishing ill on all our constitutional representatives, it ignores the trauma endured by the majority of the rest of the US population if not the world who would prefer to see the continuation of Constitutional republican government in the USA, as opposed to a white supremacist fascist tyranny.  (I don't recall Rall ever noticing white privilege or supremacy, though sort of positioning himself as farther left than the Democratic Party.  He's sort of like Orwell not noticing Fascism.)  

Here's the second paragraph which shows clear sociopathy:

"It would be nice, however, for the members of Congress who finance and arm the rampaging mobs that illegally overthrow the sovereign governments of other countries to take it on the chin when the same thing kind of, sort of, almost happens to them."

No, taking it on the chin is now what our members of Congress should do.  That would accomplish nothing.  What they should do is first hole the people responsible for our coup accountable.  And they should stop financing coups elsewhere.  Furthermore, our coup was not "blowback" from US misdeeds elsewhere, as the claimed poetic justice suggests, so much as "inback" from the internal contradictions in the compromises made to establish a a partly slave owning and land conquering republic, further gamed and cultivated by opportunistic Republicans (in particular) since Nixon, a possibly greater factor than bad neoliberal economic policy, though both contribute.  There should be no illusions that a Fascist Dictator will reduce militarism and imperialism, the reverse has endlessly been proven true.

The Military Industrial Complex cannot fail or be failed, it can only be transformed piecemeal into what we actually need, a National Green Infrastructure Development process.  Conscious (and knee jerk) choices were made after WWII to sustain the US economy with Defense rather than Domestic spending.  That is the fundamental mistake which must be undone, by reducing Military expenditures and simultaneously replacing them with Green Development expenditures.  Not replacing cannot be done...the economy collapses.

And once the MIC is transformed, then there is no more need for the Imperium to justify it.

That's the roadmap.  Not nirvana from fascist insurrections, which can never be more than momentary.