Ian Patterson notes that the air war unleashed on Libya by the Western powers last week coincides very neatly with the 100th anniversary of the first military air strike -- which was launched by a Western power against ... Libya. From The London Review of Books:

The world’s first aerial bombing mission took place 100 years ago, over Libya. It was an attack on Turkish positions in Tripoli. On 1 November 1911, Lieutenant Cavotti of the Italian Air Fleet dropped four two-kilogramme bombs, by hand, over the side of his aeroplane. In the days that followed, several more attacks took place on nearby Arab bases. Some of them, inaugurating a pattern all too familiar in the century since then, fell on a field hospital, at Ain Zara, provoking heated argument in the international press about the ethics of dropping bombs from the air, and what is now known as ‘collateral damage’. (In those days it was called ‘frightfulness’.) The Italians, however, were much cheered by the ‘wonderful moral effect’ of bombing, its capacity to demoralise and panic those on the receiving end.

A hundred years on, as missiles rain down on Gaddafi’s defences and sleeping Libyan soldiers are blasted and burned, we hear claims of a similar kind: the might of the western onslaught will dissipate all support for Gaddafi’s regime and usher in a new golden age for everyone. Just as Shock and Awe were meant to in Iraq. Or bombing and defoliation were meant to in in Vietnam. Or as the London Blitz was meant to break Britain’s spirit. Yet all the evidence suggests that dropping high explosive on places where people live increases their opposition, their solidarity and their resolve. Happy Anniversary.

MAY I SAY—somewhat defensively—that I haven’t cooked red meat in many years? That I haven’t visited a McDonald’s since college? That if you asked me how I like my steak, I’d say I don’t really remember? I’m not a moral abstainer—I’ll eat meat when poor people in distant places offer it to me, especially when they’re proud to do so and I’d be an ass to say no. But in everyday life, for a series of reasons that began with the dietary scruples of the woman I chose to marry, hamburgers just don’t come into play.

I begin this way because I plan to wade into one of the most impassioned fracases now underway on the planet—to meat or not to meat—and I want to establish that I Do Not Have A Cow In This Fight. In recent years vegetarians and vegans have upped their attack on the consumption of animal flesh, pointing out not only that it’s disgusting (read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book) but also a major cause of climate change. The numbers range from 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions to—in one recent study that was quickly discredited—51 percent. Whatever the exact figure, suffice it to say it’s high: there’s the carbon that comes from cutting down the forest to start the farm, and from the fertilizer and diesel fuel it takes to grow the corn, there’s the truck exhaust from shipping cows hither and yon, and most of all the methane that emanates from the cows themselves (95 percent of it from the front end, not the hind, and these millions of feedlot cows would prefer if you used the word eructate in place of belch). This news has led to an almost endless series of statistical calculations: going vegan is 50 percent more effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than switching to a hybrid car, according to a University of Chicago study; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization finds that a half pound of ground beef has the same effect on climate change as driving an SUV ten miles. It has led to a lot of political statements: the British health secretary last fall called on Englishmen to cut their beefeating by dropping at least a sausage a week from their diets, and Paul McCartney has declared that “the biggest change anyone could make in their own lifestyle to help the environment would be to become vegetarian.” It has even led to the marketing of a men’s flip-flop called the Stop Global Warming Toepeeka that’s made along entirely vegan lines.

Industrial livestock production is essentially indefensible—ethically, ecologically, and otherwise. We now use an enormous percentage of our arable land to grow corn that we feed to cows who stand in feedlots and eructate until they are slaughtered in a variety of gross ways and lodge in our ever-larger abdomens. And the fact that the product of this exercise “tastes good” sounds pretty lame as an excuse. There are technofixes—engineering the corn feed so it produces less methane, or giving the cows shots so they eructate less violently. But this type of tailpipe fix only works around the edges, and with the planet warming fast that’s not enough. We should simply stop eating factory-farmed meat, and the effects on climate change would be but one of the many benefits.

Still, even once you’ve made that commitment, there’s a nagging ecological question that’s just now being raised. It goes like this: long before humans had figured out the whole cow thing, nature had its own herds of hoofed ungulates. Big herds of big animals—perhaps 60 million bison ranging across North America, and maybe 100 million antelope. That’s considerably more than the number of cows now resident in these United States. These were noble creatures, but uncouth—eructate hadn’t been coined yet. They really did just belch. So why weren’t they filling the atmosphere with methane? Why wasn’t their manure giving off great quantities of atmosphere-altering gas?

The answer, so far as we can tell, is both interesting and potentially radical in its implications. These old-school ungulates weren’t all that different in their plumbing—they were methane factories with legs too. But they used those legs for something. They didn’t stand still in feedlots waiting for corn, and they didn’t stand still in big western federal allotments overgrazing the same tender grass. They didn’t stand still at all. Maybe they would have enjoyed stationary life, but like teenagers in a small town, they were continually moved along by their own version of the police: wolves. And big cats. And eventually Indians. By predators.

As they moved, they kept eating grass and dropping manure. Or, as soil scientists would put it, they grazed the same perennials once or twice a year to “convert aboveground biomass to dung and urine.” Then dung beetles buried the results in the soil, nurturing the grass to grow back. These grasslands covered places that don’t get much rain—the Southwest and the Plains, Australia, Africa, much of Asia. And all that grass-land sequestered stupendous amounts of carbon and methane from out of the atmosphere—recent preliminary research indicates that methane-loving bacteria in healthy soils will sequester more of the gas in a day than cows supported by the same area will emit in a year.

We’re flat out of predators in most parts of the world, and it’s hard to imagine, in the short time that we have to deal with climate change, ending the eating of meat and returning the herds of buffalo and packs of wolves to all the necessary spots. It’s marginally easier to imagine mimicking those systems with cows. The key technology here is the single-strand electric fence—you move your herd or your flock once or twice a day from one small pasture to the next, forcing them to eat everything that’s growing there but moving them along before they graze all the good stuff down to bare ground. Now their manure isn’t a problem that fills a cesspool, but a key part of making the system work. Done right, some studies suggest, this method of raising cattle could put much of the atmosphere’s oversupply of greenhouse gases back in the soil inside half a century. That means shifting from feedlot farming to rotational grazing is one of the few changes we could make that’s on the same scale as the problem of global warming. It won’t do away with the need for radically cutting emissions, but it could help get the car exhaust you emitted back in high school out of the atmosphere.

Oh, and grass-fed beef is apparently much better for you—full of Omega 3s, like sardines that moo. Better yet, it’s going to be more expensive, because you can’t automate the process the same way you can feedlot agriculture. You need the guy to move the fence every afternoon. (That’s why about a billion of our fellow humans currently make their livings as herders of one kind or another—some of them use slingshots, or dogs, or shepherd’s crooks, or horses instead of electric fence, but the principle is the same.) More expensive, in this case, as in many others, is good; we’d end up eating meat the way most of the world does— as a condiment, a flavor, an ingredient, not an entrée.

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.

If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.

The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.

The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.

Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.

But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.

After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.

Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon?

Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.)

Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing.

So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing.

Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.

Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.

The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.

Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.

The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.

The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.

The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.

We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”

The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.

The propagandists for globalism are the natural outgrowth of this image-based and culturally illiterate world. They speak about economic and political theory in empty clichés. They cater to our subliminal and irrational desires. They select a few facts and isolated data and use them to dismiss historical, economic, political and cultural realities. They tell us what we want to believe about ourselves. They assure us that we are exceptional as individuals and as a nation. They champion our ignorance as knowledge. They tell us that there is no reason to investigate other ways of organizing and governing our society. Our way of life is the best. Capitalism has made us great. They peddle the self-delusional dream of inevitable human progress. They assure us we will be saved by science, technology and rationality and that humanity is moving inexorably forward.

In my last piece, "Trading Places: A Tale of Two Countries," I used a plethora of statistics to make a comparison between the United States and Sweden. The point was to use those little evil pests called facts to point out to the fools on the right that while they are correct about American exceptionalism, it doesn’t play out quite the way they think.

America is, in fact, exceptionally bad when it comes to any of a whole host of measures, such as health, longevity, economic equality, crime, pollution, etc. Over there in Sweden, on the other hand, the application of socialist ideas has turned out slightly differently than what those nice conservatives in America would have you believe. The ‘disaster’ of European socialism has led Europeans, especially Swedes, to kick America’s ass on basically any measure of quality of life one can imagine.

Uh-oh.

That whole fact thing that we in “the reality-based community” rely upon for intelligent analysis and policy prescription is almost always a disaster for regressives. You know, sorta like, “Iraq has WMD, therefore we should invade, and it will be a great war, fast, easy, cheap, and it will bring democracy to the Middle East (even though all our other policies there are about preventing it at all costs, but pay no attention to that).” That kinda thing. When that little riff smacked up against the ugly reality-based community known as the real world, it, uh – how shall we say it? – didn’t fare so very well. Nor did the insistence that radical tax cuts for the rich would boom the economy and simultaneously actually increase revenues to the federal treasury. Oops. Now the very same people who made that promise are screaming about how we have to slash spending on health and education to make up for the massive debt that was produced when their fantasies met reality. Then there’s global warming...

I could go on and on here. There is a very real pattern, which twenty minutes of watching Glenn Beck would immediately reveal to anyone who didn’t already know better. Regressives hide from reality. It’s that simple. Nor is it a mystery why. Facts don’t support the policies they’ve already ferociously embraced before – not after – they’ve done their ‘analysis’, policies they cling to so strongly because they either benefit them personally or assuage their rampant fears. That’s how it works, and that’s why this country is in the disastrous state that it’s in. We’ve been following so-called conservative policies for thirty years now (yes, very much including those periods in which Democrats were in the White House and ruled Congress). These policies are astonishingly destructive, which is why regressives have to pretend when it comes to reality, and which is why they almost always do, more so in this current era of Bachmann-Palin overdrive than ever.

I mention all this because a couple of folks reacted to the blizzard of comparative facts in my last piece in the usual regressive way: through obfuscation, distortion and deceit. No surprise there. One particular response caught my eye, however, and nearly knocked me off my chair. A couple of folks noted that, yes, America does poorly on all these statistics compared to other countries, but only if you count minorities. If you compare American whites only, they argue, then the US does much better.

Excuse me?!?! What’s that?!?! Did you really just say that?!?!

It’s hard to imagine all the ways in which this is nonsensical. More to the point, it’s difficult to determine whether at the end of the day it is characterized more by its unmitigated stupidity or its sheer offensiveness.

Why? Let’s start with the most benign criticism we might imagine, which is that – Hello! – other countries have minorities too. There are lots of folks who could be dropped from Sweden’s or France’s or Germany’s population if we are in the business of cherry-picking statistics. Of course, if on the other hand you’re just desperately trying to win a debate that otherwise makes you look stupid, then you would only cherry-pick on one side of the comparison.

Second, where in the world do nice, shiny white folks get off making a point like this, anyhow? Have they forgotten that there’s the small matter of how American minorities wound up in the condition they’re in to consider? You don’t suppose that, say, four centuries of white-imposed slavery and Jim Crow might have had anything to do with that, do you? I mean, I’m just thinking out loud here, and I know it might just be a really big coincidence and all, but just the same...

Third, what does race have to do with statistics that compare the health care systems, or the degree of government corruption, or the percentage of women in parliament, or the propensity to go to war, or carbon emissions, or the number of hours worked per week, or worker safety, or any number of other measures? The answer, of course, is nothing. At all. None of those factors would be changed by omitting one portion of American society from the comparison, and all of them reveal how exceptional the US is – exceptionally backward, that is.

But, finally, and most egregiously, what the hell is up with this concept of comparing only part of a country, anyhow? Are blacks and Hispanics somehow less American in the eyes of regressives? Do they somehow not count for as much? I think we all pretty much know the real answers to those questions, right-wing protestations that conservatives aren’t racist notwithstanding.

But let’s just go with their concept, shall we? Just for fun. What if there was one part of America that was dragging down the rest of us? Shouldn’t we exclude them from the country, or at the very least treat them with the contempt they so fully deserve for polluting the otherwise unblemished exceptionalism of our nation? Aren’t regressives really right about this? Shouldn’t we ditch these losers, so the rest of us can shine like we deserve to?

For example, let’s talk about health. What if I told you that a 21-factor health index statistic revealed that the following states are the ten most healthy in America, in order: Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Maine, Iowa, Utah, Hawaii, Nebraska and Connecticut? Now what if I told you that the following states are the ten least healthy on that same ranked list: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Nevada, New Mexico, Mississippi, and worst of all, Louisiana?

Might you notice anything interesting in that pattern? For instance, that almost all of the most healthy states are blue states – including Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Connecticut, four of the bluest states in the union? Or that Vermont and Massachusetts, the healthiest and third healthiest states in America, respectively, have the most socialized health care systems in the country? Or perhaps you’d find it remarkable that among the ten least healthy states in the country there are no blue states and just two purple ones. Indeed, with the exception of Utah, that list includes all our most conservative states, places like Texas and Mississippi and South Carolina. They’re as red as they come.

So, how about it, my regressive friends? Are you still on board for the idea of dropping the national detritus off the list in order to boost America’s statistics and restore its rightful comparative place? Think how much better we’d look compared to the Europeans if we just ditched the Terrible Ten listed above! What do you say?

Sorry, could you speak a bit louder? I’m not quite hearing your response...

Oh well, no worries. You’ll have plenty of other opportunities. We’re just getting started.

Let’s look at some other measures of heath, for example. How about obesity? Here are the ten fattest states, in order: Mississippi, West Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and Missouri. Not exactly paragons of liberalism, are they? No, for that you’d have to look to the list of the least obese states, which are: Hawaii, Utah, Florida, Montana, Arizona, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and best of all, Colorado. Most of these are, of course, blue states.

Well, maybe we should look at infant mortality rates, that key indicator in measuring the quality of health in any given polity. Those American states with the worst scores are: Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, West Virginia, Delaware, Missouri and Arkansas. On the other hand, those states who do best on this measure are: Utah, Alaska, California, Minnesota, Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and New York. Louisiana’s infant mortality rate is 10.3 per 1000 live births. New York’s is less than half that, at 4.0.

Is anyone beginning to see a pattern here?

How about crime? These ten states had the highest per capita incidence of violent crime in 2006: South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico and Michigan. On the other hand, the safest states were: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Rhode Island, Utah, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, and best of all, Maine. These lists are a bit more mixed than others we’ve seen, but there is still a clear tendency for the red states to be more violent. Should we drop them from America?

But surely the conservative parts of America do better economically, right? No doubt fiscal conservatism has raised the standard of living in red states, while the blue states are dragging down the US average, eh? Here are the ten states in America with the highest median family income: New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Alaska, Hawaii, Minnesota, Virginia and Illinois. With the exception of purple Maryland and Virginia and red Alaska, they are all blue states. And, since Alaska gets such a huge chunk of its income from federal government and oil giveaways, it shouldn’t even be on the list. On the other hand, here are the ten poorest states in America: North Carolina, Idaho, Alabama, Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas and bottom-feeder Mississippi. See a pattern, anyone? There’s not a single liberal state on that list. Mississippi, with a median family income of $39,319, is only slightly better than half as rich as New Jersey, at $73,973.

Same is true of bankruptcies. Those states with the highest per capita number of filings include: Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Michigan, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. Those with the lowest are: Wyoming, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, California, Maine, Alaska and best of all Hawaii. Once again, it is mainly Regressiveland that is dragging down the United States.

These figures are even clearer if we look at poverty. If you want to go somewhere in America where the poverty rate is really high, here are your choices: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, Alabama, South Carolina and Oklahoma. On the other hand, those states sporting the lowest poverty rates are: Delaware, Iowa, Virginia, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota, Alaska, Connecticut, and best of all, New Hampshire. It’s an extremely clear pattern. The conservative states are the poorest. In Mississippi, 21.6 percent of people are living below the poverty line (no wonder Governor Haley Barbour is running for president with that proud record), while in New Hampshire it’s about a third of that amount, at 7.6 percent.

Education is no different. Here are the ten states in America with lowest percentage of folks having a high school diploma or better: Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, California, Rhode Island, North Carolina, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and least educated of all, Texas. On the other hand, these states do best on that same measure: Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, New Hampshire, Vermont, Alaska, Iowa and Washington.

How about per capita occupational fatalities? Wyoming has the worst record, followed by Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, South Dakota, Mississippi, New Mexico and Alabama. The safest ten states for workers are: Maryland, Arizona, New York, California, Michigan, Maine, Delaware, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and on top, Rhode Island.

Or divorce rates? They are highest in Nevada, Arkansas, Alabama, Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi. On the other hand, those states with the lowest rates are: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Illinois, Massachusetts and Georgia.

The pattern repeats itself over and over, with respect to almost any indicator of social welfare or standard of living one cares to examine. The upshot is simple: You do not want to live in red states. You will be poorer, fatter, less safe, less healthy, less married and less educated if you do.

In fact, about the only thing red states are better at is going to church. The ten states with the highest percentage of children attending religious services each week are: Mississippi, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Nebraska. On the other hand, these states have the lowest rates on that same measure: Connecticut, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Nevada, Washington, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and lowest of all, Vermont.

Hmmm. That’s interesting. It would almost appear that god doesn’t love conservatives very much. And imagine how badly she’d treat them if they weren’t so busy praying to her every week!

Oh well, that’s a subject for another essay.

But what we can say to our conservative friends right now is that, for once, they were correct (in addition to being right) about something. Well, sorta, anyhow. Yes, they were spot on in noting that there is a segment of America dragging the country down, and ruining its otherwise exemplary exceptionalism.

So, okay, fair enough. Credit where credit is due. Perhaps we can all agree with the folks on the right that America would be better off without these deadbeats diluting our national greatness, even though some of us used to think we’re all one country in it together and we should support each other.

Okay, okay, I concur. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s cut bait. Let’s restore America’s greatness by ditching the precise group of people dragging the rest of us down.

Writing in 2009, Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described James' role in this particularly notorious incident:

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired Col. Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a US prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming, near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women's panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort "to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown." As he recounts in his memoir, "Fixing Hell," Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He "opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason ..."

Although he claims to eventually find "good reason" to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.