Being a greassroots anything seems to be tough. Now that the last of the grassroots candidates for the United States Senate seat from New Hampshire has ceded the field to lady moneybags, the grassroots voters are going to find it hard to promote a discussion of the really important issues.

Our current Senator has already made it clear that he has no interest in "fixing" health care (that's too hard) and the on-going destruction of Iraq is just fine with him. Like Donald Rumsfeld, the erstwhile Secretary of Defense who orchestrated the invasion and territorial claims on Iraq, the Senator from New Hampshire seems to think that troops are "fungible" (you can always get more of them) and the military hardware that's crashed and burned in the desert was in need of replacement anyway. How else are our military industrialists going to make money, if the "arsenals of Democracy" don't get used up?

Can we expect anything different from the lady moneybags, the former Governor of New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen; from the candidate whom our sitting U.S. Senate DINOs have been promoting for months, regardless of what the voters in a primary might want to decide? Don't count on it. Since the elections of 2008 are likely to be a Democratic blow-out, there's little incentive for candidates to inform themselves about what the people they aim to represent expect. The in loco parentis role is so much more attractive, whether it's mother or father that's supposed to know best.

Frankly, even if Shaheen is ready to join the chorus about bringing the combat troops back home from Iraq, it wouldn't be worth much. Because that's not where the money is.

Don't get me wrong. The troops that are getting slaughtered and maimed in Iraq and being returned to service before they're even properly healed should be at the top of our list of things that need fixing in Washington, D.C. (not to mention that our broken health care system harms them more than anyone else). But, believe it or not, that's the easy part.

Much harder to grapple with, because it's not even being discussed, is the digging in of our Air Force assets in Iraq--all those spy-boys and fly-boys, if you will, who are settling in to become an unendurable irritant to the whole region. If we haven't heard much about the original fourteen enduring bases that were planned as part of the Base Relocation and Closure (BRAC) process, it's not because that scheme has been abandoned. Rather, it's because the number of bases needed in Iraq to accommodate the missile batteries and radar installations and launch facilities being reassigned from Europe, South Korea, and Japan have been reduced to five or six. And, like most of the details having to do with our 750 military bases on foreign soil, what's going on on the bases is classified--i.e. a secret. Not just their budgets, but that they even exist.

Well, actually, that doesn't make much sense, does it? Surely the people in whose midst these bases have been erected, on land from which they suddenly find themselves excluded, know they are there. And the bean counters in the Pentagon must know about how much they cost. The only people who are being excluded from knowing what's actually going on are the American people who are paying for ......what?

What is it that we're paying for? If you think back to the 2000 election, you'll remember the Republican commitment that the United States did not want to be and would not be the world's policeman. A lot of people bought into that and, if they knew about the bases, might have expected that they'd be dismantled. Certainly, nobody in the general public would have thought that more would be needed; much less, taken by force.

Which, in retrospect might suggest the American public was lied to. But that would be a mistake. Because, you see, a policeman is someone who enforces the laws and calls those who break the law to account, after the fact. That's not what our modern United States military is for. Not at all. The United States military establishment has morphed into something else. And from worrying about too much of our industrial output being military hardware, as President Eisenhower warned when he left office, we now have to confront that our industrial and commercial endeavors depend on being backed up by the threat of military intervention to beat out the competition. It's the twenty-first century version of gunboat diplomacy. If you have any doubts, just recollect the "deal" being offered to Iran: "buy enriched uranium from us (USEC and its subsidiaries) or get bombed." It's a threat.

No doubt Senator John McCain knows the score. That's why he can jokingly sing out "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" and talk about the Air Force staying in Iraq for a hundred years, while the Navy patrols the Indian Ocean. He knows it's just a threat to grease the global skids for U.S. enterprise.

Only problem, the global community doesn't seem to be buying it. And it's not just because our forces on the ground in Iraq have been brought to a stalemate by a bunch of shepherds. While the shepherds express their resentment at having to move their flocks so the American fly-boys and spy-boys can play with their toys, Russia and China are activating their strategic bombers and dispatching missiles to the neighbors to warn us off, or call our bluff.

Is the message getting through? It seems not. McCain's allusion to a hundred year American rule in the Middle East sounds bizarre. But if you listen to our Air Force spokesmen going on about their domination of land, sea, air and space and their expansion to the electr! omagnetic sphere we refer to as cyber space, it's clear that the disconnect from ground-based reality is real. They probably don't even know what grassroots are.

While it's beginning to look like fly-over country, the American heartland which politicians and fly-boys alike tend to ignore, is waking up to the fact that they've been overlooked for too long, that's not going to be enough. All of us grassroots people are going to have to look up and bring the dominionists back to earth.

Maybe flying in jet planes is addicting. Maybe it scrambles the brains. I'm sure I don't know since I've never flown. What I do know is that in the last century and this one, as well, the most horrendous destruction has been visited on man and beast from the air. So, if we want peace on earth that's where we're going to have to look for a change. There is no mercy in the bombs and missiles being dispatched by the harriers, predators, helicopters and drones. And the grass does not grow greener in their wake.