January 21st will be an odd day in the United States. We’ll honor Martin Luther King Jr. and bestow another 4-year regime on the man who, in his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech said that Martin Luther King Jr. had been wrong — that those who follow his example “stand idle in the face of threats.”

With the passing of George McGovern, remember he was a man who wanted America “to turn away from cursing and hatred and war to the blessings of hope and brotherhood and love.” It is a sentiment men have entered political office understanding yet ignored. Instead, they have turned coward when it came time to act upon this kind of very human idealism. They have governed as empty suits. They have become submissive to the constraints of the system, even when tacitly acknowledging these constraints are what plunges the country into deeper ruin.

Fifty-one years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his final, prescient warning about the rising power of the military industrial complex. More than half a century later, we find ourselves in a political system which has ignored Eisenhower’s sound advice as the influence of the war industry on our society reaches a crescendo. Nowhere is this “disastrous rise of misplaced power” more apparent than in the debate about the Pentagon budget taking place in Washington, D.C.

Rania Khalek, a blogger and independent journalist who writes for AlterNet, published two major WikiLeaks stories that garnered a lot of attention—”5 WikiLeaks Hits of 2011 That are Turning the World on Its Head—And That the Media are Ignoring” and “5 WikiLeaks Revelations Exposing the Rapidly Growing Corporatism Dominating American Diplomacy Abroad.” She’s recently been writing about the militarization of police and the ever-expanding surveillance state in America. [*Follow her on Twitter at @rania_ak.]

David Sirota has written a wonderful new book with an expansive Theory of Our Zeitgeist: that the toxic 1980s — as well as our current culture’s funhouse-mirror view of that warped decade — are still poisoning our country. His powerful argument will be familiar to Firepups: the adulation of Ronald Reagan, along with our renewed taxcut fetish, admiration of greed, and mainstreaming of militarism have ruined any chance of restoring balance to our nation’s income inequity and spoiled our planet’s chance for peace, harmony and (possibly) survival.

Give the power to take away rights to the Secretary of Defense…you mean the name isn’t Orwellian enough?

I guess the idea of bombing people is a real knee slapper for the “serious” people.

Andrew J. Bacevich has emerged in the early years of this century as the country’s most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire. He has addressed this issue with unprecedented intensity for an academic. With the appearance of Washington Rules, he has produced six books addressing illuminating these themes in the span of a single decade, writing three major books American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits of Power (2008), and editing two other volumes, The Imperial Tense (2003) and The Long War (2006).