Faithful Citizenship?How about a similar statement regarding the ethical considerations involved in blowing up little children with cluster bombs in an illegal war of choice? (Oooh. There's that "choice" word again.) Or maybe a statement about what Jesus would have to say about a "Christian nation" that failed to provide adequate healthcare for all of that nation's sick and injured? Or maybe something about Christian congressmen who chop the legs from under the social safety net as they simultaneously trumpet the need for more costly and effective killing machines? Or funding cuts for education that disproportionately punish those children whose only mistake was that of being born to impoverished parents? What about some statements on these?
Faithful citizenship, my ass. This is nothing more than blatant religio-political hypocricy! And they wonder why I left the Church?
Chris Floyd:Every now and then the mask slips, and we see the true face of the system that marshals the world. For an instant, the heavy paint of sober wisdom and moral purpose falls away, and there, suddenly, with jolting clarity, is the snarling rictus of an ape.
Note carefully the change in rhetoric -- the change in target -- from "terrorism" to "insurgency." An "insurgent" is someone who rises up to resist or overthrow a ruling power. George Washington was an insurgent; so was Pol Pot. But a perceived "global insurgency" can only be aimed at a global power. What Rumsfeld is clearly saying is that anyone anywhere who resists the world-spanning will of the American Empire will be subject to "the path of action." That's the blood-and-iron terminology that Bush himself used to describe his policies in the official "National Security Strategy" he issued -- just months before killing more than 10,000 civilians in Iraq.What should you do with such dangerous creatures in a civilized society? Why, put them in a cage, of course.No doubt the definition of "global insurgent" will prove to be every bit as elastic as "terrorist," in a world where Iraqi prisoners -- 70 percent to 90 percent of them completely innocent, according to the Red Cross -- were "Gitmo-ized," treated just like the alleged terrorists in America's lawless Guantanamo concentration camp; a world where even U.S. citizens simply disappear into the maw of military custody, held without charges, indefinitely, on the president's express order. If America controls your country and you don't like it, you're an insurgent. If you're an American who doesn't like to control other countries, you too are an insurgent. And the war against you is "just beginning."
[ As always, lots of good links.]
Brooks notes here how most people tend to identify with one or the other main political party early in life, and tend to stay with that early selection regardless of how their own political views evolve over their lives. He suggests that this may occur because people tend to use their party affiliations as "filters", which they then use to minimize their opponents' positions while simultaneously maximizing their own.
I would tend to agree with Brooks on this, for it does provide an explanation of why so many people who agree with liberal postions refuse to call themselves liberal. It would also explain the stubbornness of Bush's poll numbers. Still, I find it a most curious position for him to take. After all, conservatives such as Brooks tend to minimize the impact of one's social surroundings, stressing instead "personal responsibility". Yet for Brooks' suggestion to actually be true, a high degree of social "conditioning" must be present in one's political affiliation.
Brooks is planning to do several articles on this topic, and, if like this one, they could be interesting. After all, no one says that we can't learn from conservatives; we just don't take our politics from them.
That agenda is to impose Dooh Nibor economics — Robin Hood in reverse. The end result of current policies will be a large-scale transfer of income from the middle class to the very affluent, in which about 80 percent of the population will lose and the bulk of the gains will go to people with incomes of more than $200,000 per year.Imagine that. One more set of numbers they don't want you to know about.I can't back that assertion with official numbers, because under Mr. Bush the Treasury Department has stopped releasing information on the distribution of tax cuts by income level.
What It Didn't Do was Worse
Amid important corrections about Carole King's high school and the spelling of a Pixar executive's name, Times editors at last saw fit to mention the paper's coverage of Iraq in the months preceding the war. After a modest round of self-congratulation, the editors venture into darker waters, filled with imaginary chemical and biological weapons reported, in banner type, by the Times. Now it appears the threatening shapes were without substance, hoaxes and illusions foisted upon an otherwise capable, even exemplary staff of doughty professionals who did their utmost to present "an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time."[ Via counterpunch.]Garbage. Here is what was obvious at the time, though not at the Times. The entire discussion of WMD was a canard, a red herring, a decoy, call it what you will. Allow me to refresh the paper's institutional memory: The inspectors, with full access, were finding no evidence of weapons stockpiles or programs; the U.S. intelligence community was dubious of claims put forward with alarming stridency by political appointees; and sources like Chalabi and the INC, the brainchild of lie factories like Rendon and Hill & Knowlton, were likely to churn out more tales of babies thrown from incubators to have their way. All of which was duly reported in the international press.
What did the Times do? In editorial after editorial, report after report, the vaunted newspaper of record framed the Iraq debate as a question of WMD, making its coverage inseparable from Bush administration propaganda. The war was never about WMD. That was obvious to all but the most cravenly stenographic of so-called journalists from the get-go. It was, to name a few, about midterm elections, military bases, crackpot imperialist ideology, Israel, payoffs to cronies, and even, though you'd never, ever guess it from the New York Times, plentiful, cheap oil. But WMD? The Times obliged not only by hanging the window dressing but by supplying fancy material.
About which the May 26 "correction" is dead silent. So let me give the Times something to put in its next mea culpa. The paper was complicit in a war of aggression that led to the death and mutilations of tens of thousands-that bears repeating, the death and mutilation of tens of thousands-mounted for stupefyingly cynical, shortsighted, vicious reasons. Its dogged refusal to stray from the Bush administration script about WMD and admit other explanations for the hell-bent rush to war into mainstream discourse is nothing less than a monumental journalistic disgrace.
What the Times did was bad enough; what it failed to do was perhaps worse. It's past time to see a correction about that.
To launch a Minuteman in those days, one had to "unlock" the missile by dialing in a code -- the equivalent of a safety catch on a handgun. However, Blair reports, the US Strategic Air Command was worried that a bunch of sissy safety features might slow things down. It ordered all locks set to 00000000 -- and in launch checklists, reminded all launch officers like Blair to keep the codes there. "So the 'secret unlock code' during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War," Blair says, "remained constant at 00000000."And there's more ...
A comparison of writing from the Left and writing from the Right.
They've brought America to its knees. They're a ruthless band of fundamentalist religious fanatics that respect no international laws and seem destined to cause only death, misery, and destruction. They strike without warning using stealth, torture, lies, and deception to rain down violence without regard to innocent lives lost. They cynically exploit the World's media. They constantly invoke the name of their God, to justify every cruel act for their holy cause. They'll use and sacrifice innocent believing kids as warriors. Most of the world already hates and fears them, and no country on Earth is safe from their rage or terror.Also contains perhaps the best short answer yet as to why the administration went to war in Iraq:They are the new evil in the World.
So much for the Bush folks. Those al-Qaida guys are no picnic either.
The Republicans apparently made war on Iraq just because they could.
Abu Ghraib is the new Tet offensive. By lying about the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War, the media managed to persuade Americans we were losing the war, which demoralized the nation and caused us to lose the war.Coulter really needs an M-16, a Humvee (no plating, of course), and a one-way ticket to Iraq.
To be fair to Coulter however (while I hold my nose), this idea about Tet is hardly hers. It was this very idea, that we only lost Vietnam because we lost our will, that led to the creation of the Neocons shortly after that war's conclusion. The idea of course is false. We didn't lose Tet, and it wasn't reported that way.
The real problem with Tet was that we had been told for so long how we were winning the war that it should have been impossible for the Tet offenesive to even have been launched. That the Viet Cong alliance was strong enough to launch it immediately put the lie to the earlier reporting, and it was that recognition that caused the drop in public support. In that sense, Abu Ghraib was not Iraq's Tet offensive; Fallujah was.
Anyways, this is a fun article (unless you're dead set against self-flaggelation). There's hardly a sentence in it where Coulter isn't flipping history on it's head. They only thing I can't understand is why the editors don't put it where it belongs -- in the Comics Section.
State of the Union: Laura Bush and special guest Ahmed Chalabi
[Chalabi is directly behind the First Lady (clapping)]
See the rest of the Chalabi Photo Gallery at The Liberal Conspiracy.
All the standard stuff. Nadar offers the best:
"There are antiwar Democrats who will fume and still vote for Kerry," Mr. Nader said, adding: "I don't think Democrats should give their candidate a pass on the war. If Democrats are so freaked out by Bush that they are, like, 'Do anything you want, John, we'll support you,' well, as I told him in our meeting, he's not going to be left with a mandate."
"He's listening to Shrum," said Mr. Nader, referring to Mr. Kerry's senior political adviser, Bob Shrum. "He's listening to all the cautious advisers. They are saying don't cater to these antiwar people, they have nowhere to go. They are going to vote for you. You know the old game."Conventional wisdon, of course. DLC-style. The same crap that lost the Dems the last two elections.
While I've been away from writing for a while (personal problems), I haven't been away from the rumblings on the Left, and they are not quiet. For the time being, Bush is self-destructing, and that is the only reason Kerry is getting a pass. But come September, he'd better start singing, because id he doesn't, there will be nowhere for us to go ... on Election Day, that is. We'll just stay home.
'Taleban insurgency'Now, let me get this straight. "The remnents"? "One of the biggest losses for American forces"? Impressive "remnents", I'd say.The deaths represent one of the biggest losses for American forces since they began operations in Afghanistan more than two years ago.
The attacks have been blamed on remnants of the former Taleban regime.
One interesting item from it that I hadn't run into before comes from La Voz de Aztlan (who has been following this closely). The article in question there has a short background soundtrack from the Berg video in which someone seems to be saying in English(!), "How will it be done?" [Note: If you want to save this audio clip, look for "berg2.wav" in your Internet Temporay Storage.]
Chris Floyd:"Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going." -- William Shakespeare, "Macbeth"
In January 2002, official White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales warned George W. Bush that he faced the possibility of execution under the U.S. War Crimes Act for the "new interrogation procedures" and other "flexible measures" he had authorized for the "war on terror," Newsweek reports.What's more, Bush and his warlords knew they were constructing a blatantly criminal operation; why else dig up legal dodges to shield the top conspirators from prosecution? Lower down, of course, it's a different story.However, because Gonzales regarded himself as the consigliere for the Bush crime family and not a public servant sworn to uphold the Constitution, instead of denouncing Bush's policy of state terrorism -- torture, kidnapping, indefinite detention, hostage-taking, assassination and aggressive war -- Gonzales urged Bush to abandon the international Geneva Conventions and use weasel words to cover up his deliberate violations of U.S. law.
This dereliction of duty comes as no surprise. ...
[ As always, lots of good links.]
Al Gore is on FIRE!Audio Link [MP3, 13 MB]
This is an hour of absolutely must listen Gore!
Curteousy of White Rose Society
& Mark Levine's RadioInsideScoop
Read Along
Curteousy of The Randi Rhodes Show
New York Times:
An Outraged Gore (Kerry, Take Note)
Letters to the Editor on the Gore speech
There has been a semi-secret government initiative to add digital signatures to various digital consumer products. Photocopiers and digital cameras store an encrypted signature to identify the unit that made the video. This digitial signature is totally inique to each device and is more unique than a fingerprint.Today new pictures were released of prison torture at Abu Ghraib prison. But not just still pictures. Today video was released showing prisoners being tortured by Americans. Aparently Kodak film experts are Kodak Park in Rochester New York have compared the digital watermarks of the turture video and the beheading video and have determined that one of the cameras used in the Nick Berg beheading is THE SAME CAMERA that took the prison torture video.
If this turns out to be true then there is NO DOUBT that Berg was killed by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison.
The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
But now we know.Wonderful. Just fucking wonderful."Everything that you're discussing is information you're not supposed to have," barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.
Suppose that early last year, when President Bush retreated to his prayer closet to commune with the Lord, the Almighty had given the Somewhat Less Mighty the straight dope on Iraq. Such a conversation might have sounded something like this."W, I'm not going to beat around the burning bush: You're headed for a Texas-sized disaster. First off, I know you won't believe this even coming from Me, but you'll never guess who's right about Iraq: Hans Blix! That's right -- all that stuff about how the U.N. inspections process is working, and just needs more time to get the job done? It's actually true.
re's another shocker: Saddam has already gotten rid of his weapons of mass destruction. He's being intransigent not because he's hiding weapons, but because he thinks he can't afford to lose face by caving in to foreign threats. This is a huge miscalculation on his part, but hey -- he doesn't have the benefit of My advice. You do, so listen up.
you invade Iraq, you're going to win the easiest of military victories. The Iraqi army is a fraud. At this point, Iraq barely poses a threat to its neighbors, let alone to America. That's the good news. But it's also the bad news.
"I know it's tempting to knock over an evil dictator who has a fake army and imaginary weapons of mass destruction. After all, Karl Rove is whispering that your approval rating will go through the roof, and that, as an extra added bonus, it's also the right thing to do. How often does that happen anyway -- that the politically expedient course also happens to be the morally right one? Not very often, let me tell you what.
"And it's not happening here, either. Invading Iraq is going to be a foreign policy fiasco. Remember, there are no WMDs, so you're going to have to invent another justification for the war after the fact. Your advisers will come up with a doozy: liberating Iraq from the contemporary equivalent of Hitler, so as to turn it into a model democracy, thereby creating an entirely new historical dynamic that will eventually transform the entire Middle East into a stable, peaceful region.
"Sounds downright Messianic, doesn't it? But wait, I haven't even gotten to the best part. They're going to try to convince you that all this can be done on the economy plan. There will be no need to bring back the draft, or even raise taxes: Since Iraq can be conquered with a relatively small military force, all you'll have to do is shock and awe the Iraqis with a few thousand smart bombs, pull down some statues of Saddam on live network television, and presto: You're on the road to world historical transformation at bargain basement prices!
"If all this sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. W, we've known each other for quite awhile now, and if there's one thing I've tried to get into your head it's that doing the right thing is never cheap or easy.
"Doing the right thing in Iraq might mean continuing the often frustrating work of containing and undermining Saddam's regime through the U.N. sanctions and inspections process. Or it might mean undertaking the sort of massive military and economic project that would have a real chance of transforming the region -- a project that would require real sacrifices on the part of the average American voter.
"I'm not going to tell you which path to take. But I will tell you this: What your advisers are planning won't work. And one last thing: Remind your friend Karl for me that the road to Hell is paved with focus group poll data."
Chris Floyd:Matters of great moment are suddenly in the air all around us: stark evidence of war crimes by the leaders of the West; the growing certainty of a humiliating geopolitical defeat inflicted on the world's greatest power; terrorism and torture as the mirrored emblems of the age, a deadly double helix giving rise to a hideous global reality.That's how they operate, these cheap hoods. Like Saddam, like Osama, they mouth great pieties, they strut and preen on the world's stage. But underneath they're still nothing but witless, murdering, money-grubbing goons.It's tempting in such times to inflate the image of those in the forefront of events, painting them, for good or ill, in the colors of legend: bold, outsize figures, Great Ones playing dice with nations, characters whose roiling depths -- tragic, evil or heroic -- transcend the puny limits of the common herd. Although on rare occasions this viewpoint might hold true, the squalid history of our ill-cobbled species provides endless examples to the contrary.
And they don't come any more squalid than the crew now steering the American boat straight into the shoals of disaster. For despite all the grandiose political rhetoric and world-historical perturbations emanating from the Bush Regime's imperial project, we should never lose sight of one simple fact: Deep down, these guys are nothing but cheap hoods, two-bit chiselers hustling for loot, thug-brained goons with no more grandeur about them than the meanest pack of Mafia knee-breakers. ...
[ As always, lots of good links.]