Shooting down everything

Guardian journalist George Monbiot has penned another incisive article. This time he writes of the missile defense system that was restarted by Reagan, the man who, according to a pet phrase of those who pollute US media with child-like formulas for understanding the world, 'won the cold war.' How anyone could have won a war that, as continued US government spending on missile defense shows, still seems to require hundreds of billions of dollars to be waged, is no small mystery. The system, which apparently has not a chance in hell of ever working, seems to amount to a singular ambition: shoot down everything that is evil. However, since this ambition, while perhaps comforting if placed within the narrow confines of right-wing political discourse based on irrational fear and illusory solutions, would amount, for reasons that Monbiot explains, to that of shooting down everything and bankrupting the US government in the process, one wonders why opposition to it is never aired in US media. But that is almost like asking why favorable results from the Cuban olympists are never featured by US media covering the athletic events in Beijing. It remains beyond the pale of the thinkable.