Welcome to the best of the left podcast with clips today from Randy Rhodes, BBC, Countdown

with Keith Alberman, Democracy Now, Mike Molloy, The Young Turks, and The New York Times.

People are oblivious to this war and Bob Herbert at the New York Times wrote an editorial piece,

an op-ed piece today, that it's so breathtaking that you need to hear it. So we're reading it

to you because it's just the truth. Nothing but the truth, so help us all, dear God. It's called

Walla Rock Burns. Americans are shopping Walla Rock Burns. The competing television news images

on the morning after Thanksgiving were of the unspeakable carnage in Satter City, where more than

200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a series of coordinated car bombs and the long lines of cars

filled with holiday shopping zealots that jammed the highway approaches to American malls that

had opened for business at midnight. A Walmart in Union, New Jersey was besieged by customers even

before it opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday. All I can tell you said a Walmart employee is that

they were fired up and ready to spend money. There's something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition

of gleeful Americans with fistful of dollars storming the department store barricades and the slaughter

by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians including old people, children, and babies.

The war was started by the United States, but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal

responsibility for it. Representative Charles Rangel recently proposed that the draft be reinstated

suggesting that politicians would be more reluctant to take the country to war if they understood

that their constituents might be called up to fight. What struck me was not the uniform

opposition to the congressman's proposal. It's long been clear that there's zero sentiment

in favor of the draft in the United States, but the fact that it never provoked even the briefest

discussion of the responsibilities and obligations of ordinary Americans in a time of war while did

here. With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its

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