The nutball congressional delegation arrived in Baghdad for a brief guided tour and escaped without incident a couple of days ago with glowing words for the success of Bush’s “new security plan” for Iraq.

The place was “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” said congressman Mike Pence (R-Ind).

I hadn’t realized Indiana had become a militarized zone. The delegation to Baghdad, which included Senator John McCain, visited the Shorja market last Sunday, accompanied by more than a hundred soldiers in armored humvees as attack helicopters hovered overhead. Traffic was redirected away from the area, and sharpshooters were posted on rooftops. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests.

Just a normal outdoor market in Muncie.

You know, we are now so through the looking glass that this sort of mindless shit, rather than being featured and ridiculed on the evening news, is taken into the culture as merely another point of view. The security plan for Baghdad “is working,” said McCain.

The owner of an electrical supply shop, one Ali Jassim Faiyad, spoke for pretty much the rest of the city when he asked New York Times reporter Kirk Semple “What are they talking about?!” The Shoja market has been bombed a dozen times since September, the latest killing at least 61 and leaving many more badly wounded. As Kurt Vonnegut says, and so it goes...

The story actually gets worse.

The delegation was accompanied by General David Petraeus, who bought a small prayer rug worth less than a dollar from sidewalk vendor Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, paid with a twenty dollar bill and told him to keep the change. “They asked about our conditions,” Kadhoury said, “and we told them the situation was bad.”

“Everybody complained to them,” said another vendor. “The area here is very dangerous. They cannot secure it.”

Hey, we knew all this, right? The American adventure in Iraq is so fundamentally wrong, so fundamentally immoral, and has been from its bloody inception, that it seems to me a fair statement that anyone who voted to authorize it in the first place on the strength of George Bush’s transparent lies has pretty much the brains God gave geese. What is so desperately frightening about political life in America these days is that both political parties continue to embrace the warfare state mentality. Sure, McCain is a phony and an idiot. But where is the congressional leadership over widespread criminal acts committed as matters of policy? The Homeland Security apparatus is designed to secure domestic order. The Bill of Rights has in significant ways been effectively repealed. Halliburton has been given a five hundred million dollar contract to construct “detention facilities” and no one in Congress seems very curious about it. The Attorney General, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the country regards the Geneva Convention as “quaint.” The United States seizes people without a warrant and sends them to secret prisons in other countries where they are routinely tortured. What kind of policy is this in a free country?

I know they’ve got us frightened. That’s what 9-11 meant to some people: a spectacular opportunity to scare the holy hell out of a citizenry, to impose various elements of new “domestic security” in the name of “keeping us safe.” But most troubling of all is the plain fact that none of this is keeping anybody safe other than the shareholders at Boeing and Halliburton and ExxonMobil.

On a related note: another Guantanamo prisoner is now confessing to having played a role in several bombings and hijackings, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, supplying steroids to athletes, and the sinking of the Titanic.

The system is working. Just ask John McCain.