Here comes another George (Tenet), hawking his book about the build-up to the second Iraqi war when he was C.I.A. director in the 9/11 era, giving V.P. Cheney his most famous quotation, a claim that the consensus of the intelligence community of the potential for a successful invasion was, to quote Tenet, "a slam dunk." Tenet now claims that the words were taken out of context. (Hey, you're dealing with a Bushite: what else is new?) He now claims that all available intelligence at the time showed that there were no WMD's, there was no Saddam-al Qaida link, there was no nuclear threat, and that sanctions were, to an extent, working. So why the War?
Making the rounds of the talk shows to promote his book, Tenet is armed to the teeth with self-serving, face-saving recollections that are belied by video clips showing his behavior at the time. For example, he claims he had grave misgivings about accepting the Medal of Freedom from the President in a ceremony full of pomp and circumstance, but there he is on the dais, shit-eating grin from ear to ear, gobbling up the moment as if it were fine buluga on those tiny pumpernickel rounds only served at the finest festivities. Worse, who can forget Colin Powell, Bush's dupe, trying to sell the United Nations General Assembly on Saddam's threat to world peace, Tenet sitting right behind him all the while?
No, George, it simply won't do. Instead of doing the right thing -- speaking out to let the American people know that Bush's propaganda campaign about Saddam was a huge lie -- you kept your mouth shut. You accepted the Medal of Freedom in the spirit in which it was given: to buy your silence until the nation had turned 2/3rds against the administration and overwhelmingly demanded bringing home the troops. You sat by and said nothing while 3,400 troops died, to say nothing of the 30,000 or so Iraqi citizens.
If the Christers are right about Hell, Mr. Tenet, there is a very special corner of it waiting for you. With any luck you will first be tried for war crimes. You and Rove and Cheney and, yes, Bush. Move over Milosevic. You have new rivals for infamy.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Tito and Hussein: A Useful Comparison
The year I was born, Josip Broz became Marshal of the confederation of Balkan countries we used to refer to as Yugoslavia. Known as "Tito," he was a Croatian by birth, but during World War II, he joined the Serbian-dominated, communist-allied Partisans. They were opposed to the Quisling-style traitorous state Croatia had become under the nominally Catholic government of Fascists known as the Ustasha. (Led by a bloodthirsty maniac, Anton Pavelic, Croatia welcomed Nazi invaders and engaged in a pogrom against Serbians, Jews, and gypsies. Some say the genocide that ensued claimed upward of a million lives.) After the war, Tito rose to power, first as premier, then as president, and although he was a dedicated communist himself, his defiance of the U.S.S.R. led, eventually, to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform. (It's entirely possible that Tito, unlike some die hard card-carriers in the West, knew that Stalinist Russia had more in common with Nazi Germany than with any utopia envisioned by Marx and Lenin.)
Tito ruled the confederated Balkan states with an iron hand. He was hardly a tyrant, though. Under his leadership, faithful followers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam lived and worshiped side by side in peace and harmony. Although frequently critical of the United States, Tito kept the Soviets distracted and was an unexpected if only de facto ally during the Cold War. When Tito died in 1980, I knew Yugoslavia would disintegrate into chaos, and I was soon proved prescient. (In the 1970's, I had researched Serbo-Croatian relations extensively for a magazine article I did about a Croatian war criminal living in the U.S. with Justice Department complicity.) The rise of Serbian hegemony and subsequent "ethnic cleansing" (a euphemism for genocide) saw takeovers of Bosnia and Croatia, all-out warfare throughout most of the '80's, and the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands, including untold numbers of Muslims. Yet today Milosevic is all but forgotten. We must repeat history when we fail to learn from it.
In some ways, the Second Iraqi War is a repetition of history. For all his evil and anti-democratic ways, Saddam was the only thing between civil war by the two major factions in the Islamic faith: the Sunnis and the Shiites. Saddam is said to have copied his personal Qu'ran from his own blood, but despite the claims of some Neo Con hard liners, the Butcher of Baghdad was a non-sectarian thug whose only allegiance was to the ruling minority party in Iraq, the Baathists. He was shrewd enough to know that imposition of Shari'a on his "subjects" was inimical to the illusion of democracy he wished to perpetuate, and his wars against Iran and Kuwait were not waged for ideological differences but for territorial and economic ambitions.
Yet, so long as he was in power, Saddam protected the Sunni population of Iraq -- and, by extension, the majority of Islam -- from the Shiite revolutionary goals of the Iranians. The latter deeply trouble not only the Saudis but many other countries in the region. The toppling of his regime may have freed the Kurds to live in peace in Northern Iraq and to extend to the majority Shiites rights they'd envied in their Sunni masters, but it provoked a civil war in Iraq that endangers stability in all of the Mideast.
This is precisely what Osama bin Laden wanted, and it has resulted in the Balkanization of Iraq. The stupidity and hard-headedness of the Bush administration has them emulating Cold War East Germany and modern-day Israel in the construction of barriers and walls in hopes of separating the U.S. from Mexico and Sunni Baghdad from their Shiite neighbors. Although the administration labels this "part of the new strategy in Iraq," as if the last-ditch efforts of the "surge" had envisioned it all along, it was only instituted after martyrs blew up part of the legislature's meeting hall within the Green Zone. This sent a double signal to anyone paying attention: not only is the zone of security in Baghdad vulnerable to attack, the surge has only exacerbated the many problems in Iraq. Now-minority Sunnis have already said that they prefer risking Shiite militiamen to being "imprisoned" in their own city -- in a word, ghetto-ized.
After religiously watching a full week of one-hour documentaries on Jihadism on PBS, titled America at a Crossroads, I've come to the conclusion that democracy and Islam are mutually exclusive, which perhaps explains the passivity of Iraq under Saddam, just as it mirrors the fatalistic attitude of the Muslim faith: 'Mshallah is more resignation than blessing. One by one, the Jihadists interviewed said pretty much the same thing, that while democracy emphasizes the freedom of the individual, Islam emphasizes individual submission to Allah. This is at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, opposed to everything Western, everything "liberal" and democratic.
George Bush began lying to the American people long before the notorious "WMD" and "911-al Quaida" propaganda campaign. He lied during the televised debates when he told the electorate that he did not believe in "nation building." When the nuke and terrorist excuses were exposed, Bush switched to the very thing he had eschewed in the campaigning: imposing democracy on people who can't handle it.
What Bush and the Neo Cons don't seem capable of understanding is that Sen. Harry Reid is right: we really have lost the war in Iraq. Although Reid has backtracked in typical Demo fashion, his heart if not mind was in the right place; what he meant, I think, is that the loss is only military in nature. We may have lost the war, but we can still "win" the peace. The solution is entirely political in nature, and the Bush administration seems completely disinterested in finding a political solution. The Bushites now claim that the war in Iraq must be perpetuated to prevent Jihadists from fighting us on our own soil. This is a phoney line since, as intelligence experts already tell us, Jihadist cells including al Quaida and Hezbollah terrorists are already set up in the U.S., biding their time until a propitious time to strike.
What the Bush argument suggests is that the administration had ulterior motives for going to war in the first place. My wise older brother once told me, "America plans to deplete all the oil of foreign countries before we resume development of our own resources." Time has proved him right.
Tito ruled the confederated Balkan states with an iron hand. He was hardly a tyrant, though. Under his leadership, faithful followers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam lived and worshiped side by side in peace and harmony. Although frequently critical of the United States, Tito kept the Soviets distracted and was an unexpected if only de facto ally during the Cold War. When Tito died in 1980, I knew Yugoslavia would disintegrate into chaos, and I was soon proved prescient. (In the 1970's, I had researched Serbo-Croatian relations extensively for a magazine article I did about a Croatian war criminal living in the U.S. with Justice Department complicity.) The rise of Serbian hegemony and subsequent "ethnic cleansing" (a euphemism for genocide) saw takeovers of Bosnia and Croatia, all-out warfare throughout most of the '80's, and the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands, including untold numbers of Muslims. Yet today Milosevic is all but forgotten. We must repeat history when we fail to learn from it.
In some ways, the Second Iraqi War is a repetition of history. For all his evil and anti-democratic ways, Saddam was the only thing between civil war by the two major factions in the Islamic faith: the Sunnis and the Shiites. Saddam is said to have copied his personal Qu'ran from his own blood, but despite the claims of some Neo Con hard liners, the Butcher of Baghdad was a non-sectarian thug whose only allegiance was to the ruling minority party in Iraq, the Baathists. He was shrewd enough to know that imposition of Shari'a on his "subjects" was inimical to the illusion of democracy he wished to perpetuate, and his wars against Iran and Kuwait were not waged for ideological differences but for territorial and economic ambitions.
Yet, so long as he was in power, Saddam protected the Sunni population of Iraq -- and, by extension, the majority of Islam -- from the Shiite revolutionary goals of the Iranians. The latter deeply trouble not only the Saudis but many other countries in the region. The toppling of his regime may have freed the Kurds to live in peace in Northern Iraq and to extend to the majority Shiites rights they'd envied in their Sunni masters, but it provoked a civil war in Iraq that endangers stability in all of the Mideast.
This is precisely what Osama bin Laden wanted, and it has resulted in the Balkanization of Iraq. The stupidity and hard-headedness of the Bush administration has them emulating Cold War East Germany and modern-day Israel in the construction of barriers and walls in hopes of separating the U.S. from Mexico and Sunni Baghdad from their Shiite neighbors. Although the administration labels this "part of the new strategy in Iraq," as if the last-ditch efforts of the "surge" had envisioned it all along, it was only instituted after martyrs blew up part of the legislature's meeting hall within the Green Zone. This sent a double signal to anyone paying attention: not only is the zone of security in Baghdad vulnerable to attack, the surge has only exacerbated the many problems in Iraq. Now-minority Sunnis have already said that they prefer risking Shiite militiamen to being "imprisoned" in their own city -- in a word, ghetto-ized.
After religiously watching a full week of one-hour documentaries on Jihadism on PBS, titled America at a Crossroads, I've come to the conclusion that democracy and Islam are mutually exclusive, which perhaps explains the passivity of Iraq under Saddam, just as it mirrors the fatalistic attitude of the Muslim faith: 'Mshallah is more resignation than blessing. One by one, the Jihadists interviewed said pretty much the same thing, that while democracy emphasizes the freedom of the individual, Islam emphasizes individual submission to Allah. This is at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, opposed to everything Western, everything "liberal" and democratic.
George Bush began lying to the American people long before the notorious "WMD" and "911-al Quaida" propaganda campaign. He lied during the televised debates when he told the electorate that he did not believe in "nation building." When the nuke and terrorist excuses were exposed, Bush switched to the very thing he had eschewed in the campaigning: imposing democracy on people who can't handle it.
What Bush and the Neo Cons don't seem capable of understanding is that Sen. Harry Reid is right: we really have lost the war in Iraq. Although Reid has backtracked in typical Demo fashion, his heart if not mind was in the right place; what he meant, I think, is that the loss is only military in nature. We may have lost the war, but we can still "win" the peace. The solution is entirely political in nature, and the Bush administration seems completely disinterested in finding a political solution. The Bushites now claim that the war in Iraq must be perpetuated to prevent Jihadists from fighting us on our own soil. This is a phoney line since, as intelligence experts already tell us, Jihadist cells including al Quaida and Hezbollah terrorists are already set up in the U.S., biding their time until a propitious time to strike.
What the Bush argument suggests is that the administration had ulterior motives for going to war in the first place. My wise older brother once told me, "America plans to deplete all the oil of foreign countries before we resume development of our own resources." Time has proved him right.
Monday, April 16, 2007
"My Name...ith Alberto Gonzales Gonzales Gonzales"
Yes, yes, I am using the old Bill Dana shtick as well as the B-movie stereotypical actor, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez to characterize the halfwit who currently occupies the office of Attorney-General. Events appear to occur "in unison" these days. Scheduled to go before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about the politicization of the Justice Department, Alberto (VO-5) was said to be having trouble answering questions posed by a mock hearing team when, approximately 24 hours prior to his testimony before Congress, a campus shoot-out in Virginia provided him with the perfect excuse to bow out of the engagement.
Not only that, but just a few days earlier, another case of politicization of public office occurred in North Carolina when that state's highest prosecutor announced that all charges would be dropped against a trio of Duke lacross students charged with the kidnapping and rape of a mentally-imbalanced, drug addicted, topless dancer, a woman who really does merit the description of a "nappy headed ho."
Mike Nifong, the D.A. and Alberto (VO-5) appear to have much in common. Nifong was seeking re-election as D.A. of his county when the Duke fraternity incident went down. Instead of thoroughly investigating the claims of the ho, Nifong used her for his political purposes, taking a tough-on-crime-no-matter-who-the-criminal stance in order to sway the electorate, which may have been thinking the other candidate offered the better of two necessary evils.
Not only did Nifong neglect to interview the alleged victim, he went forward with prosecutorial plans with exculpatory evidence withheld from defense counsel and nothing more to go on than a police report. Nifong also held many press conferences with liberal sprinklings of references to the arrests, characterizing the actually innocent schoolboys as "thugs," &c. , putting them through what one would describe as "a living hell." Alberto (VO-5) may successfully delay the inevitable for a week or two, but Nifong will not escape almost certain disbarment and lawsuits, either civil or criminal or both. Would that we could put Alberto (VO-5) to trial as well!
Not only that, but just a few days earlier, another case of politicization of public office occurred in North Carolina when that state's highest prosecutor announced that all charges would be dropped against a trio of Duke lacross students charged with the kidnapping and rape of a mentally-imbalanced, drug addicted, topless dancer, a woman who really does merit the description of a "nappy headed ho."
Mike Nifong, the D.A. and Alberto (VO-5) appear to have much in common. Nifong was seeking re-election as D.A. of his county when the Duke fraternity incident went down. Instead of thoroughly investigating the claims of the ho, Nifong used her for his political purposes, taking a tough-on-crime-no-matter-who-the-criminal stance in order to sway the electorate, which may have been thinking the other candidate offered the better of two necessary evils.
Not only did Nifong neglect to interview the alleged victim, he went forward with prosecutorial plans with exculpatory evidence withheld from defense counsel and nothing more to go on than a police report. Nifong also held many press conferences with liberal sprinklings of references to the arrests, characterizing the actually innocent schoolboys as "thugs," &c. , putting them through what one would describe as "a living hell." Alberto (VO-5) may successfully delay the inevitable for a week or two, but Nifong will not escape almost certain disbarment and lawsuits, either civil or criminal or both. Would that we could put Alberto (VO-5) to trial as well!
Horns of the (Bush) Dilemma
A shooting rampage today at Virginia Tech saw a lone killer murder 30 students and wound some 21 others. Bush goes to the microphone for a press conference and tells the nation that we can take comfort in a "loving God." Quaere: If he exists and he's a "loving God," why does he allow such bad things to happen to good people. Balderdash and hocum! The current occupant of the White House is a dangerous lunatic, believing as he does in supernatural mumbo jumbo. This logical fallacy was thoroughly examined by J. L. Mackie in his essay in Mind, a University of Sydney journal (Vol. 64, No. 254, 1955), which you can read for yourself at: http://spot.colorado.edu/~kaufmad/courses/Mackie.pdf
Basically, what Mackie argued was that theism is logically (or internally) inconsistent. He posits that the premises that God is omnipotent, omniscent, and totally good and (or yet) evil (nevertheless) exists presents an affront to logic since the two are inconsistent and not capable of harmonization. A good analysis of Mackie's position is James Still's paper, "Argument Against God From Evil," found at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/evil.html
I won't delve into the matter so thoroughly as Still, but he says that Mackie's argument against God suggests two additional premises: (1) that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good being always eliminates evil as far as possible, and that (2) there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do. Again, if there is a God and He is omnipotent, he would have stopped the Korean student from murdering his fellow pupils at Virginia Tech. Each time I argue this position with a theologian, I am told that "God is omnipotent, but He gave Man the power of free will, and that explains the presence of evil."
Still examines this response in light of the writings of Alvin Plantinga, who argues that because we possess freedom of will, we are free to choose "morally significant actions," as Still puts it, and "[s]ome of us spoiled the party by freely choosing the evil rather than the good and these choices are the source of moral evil." Mackie would seem to counter by pointing out that God could just as easily "have chosen to create that one logically-possible world in which everyone who is created choose only the good." As you can see, Mackie, Plantinga, and Still have dived into the deep end of the pool.
So the thought remains: Who is this "loving God"? Due to health concerns, I have been confined to my home for about three weeks, with nothing to do but watch TV. I'd be wealthy if I had a dime for each time a TV reporter or pundit referred to what the Korean student did as "pure evil." The question keeps nagging me. If what he did was evil, why didn't George's "loving God" prevent his doing it?
POSTSCRIPT (04-18-07)
As the "manifesto" mailed to NBC by the Korean now shows, he suffered from paranoia and a persecution complex. What he did was objectively evil, but in his mind, "it was my only option." At that point he certainly fit the narrow definition of insanity in the legal sense, which allows a claim of innocent by reason of madness if it be shown that, because of mental illness or defect, he either did not know the difference between right and wrong, or he was incapable of conforming his behavior to what is required by the law. Pitiable, really.
Basically, what Mackie argued was that theism is logically (or internally) inconsistent. He posits that the premises that God is omnipotent, omniscent, and totally good and (or yet) evil (nevertheless) exists presents an affront to logic since the two are inconsistent and not capable of harmonization. A good analysis of Mackie's position is James Still's paper, "Argument Against God From Evil," found at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/evil.html
I won't delve into the matter so thoroughly as Still, but he says that Mackie's argument against God suggests two additional premises: (1) that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good being always eliminates evil as far as possible, and that (2) there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do. Again, if there is a God and He is omnipotent, he would have stopped the Korean student from murdering his fellow pupils at Virginia Tech. Each time I argue this position with a theologian, I am told that "God is omnipotent, but He gave Man the power of free will, and that explains the presence of evil."
Still examines this response in light of the writings of Alvin Plantinga, who argues that because we possess freedom of will, we are free to choose "morally significant actions," as Still puts it, and "[s]ome of us spoiled the party by freely choosing the evil rather than the good and these choices are the source of moral evil." Mackie would seem to counter by pointing out that God could just as easily "have chosen to create that one logically-possible world in which everyone who is created choose only the good." As you can see, Mackie, Plantinga, and Still have dived into the deep end of the pool.
So the thought remains: Who is this "loving God"? Due to health concerns, I have been confined to my home for about three weeks, with nothing to do but watch TV. I'd be wealthy if I had a dime for each time a TV reporter or pundit referred to what the Korean student did as "pure evil." The question keeps nagging me. If what he did was evil, why didn't George's "loving God" prevent his doing it?
POSTSCRIPT (04-18-07)
As the "manifesto" mailed to NBC by the Korean now shows, he suffered from paranoia and a persecution complex. What he did was objectively evil, but in his mind, "it was my only option." At that point he certainly fit the narrow definition of insanity in the legal sense, which allows a claim of innocent by reason of madness if it be shown that, because of mental illness or defect, he either did not know the difference between right and wrong, or he was incapable of conforming his behavior to what is required by the law. Pitiable, really.
After the Fox
Fox News continues to amaze -- and to discombobulate. Murdoch's fabulous wealth allows extraordinarily thorough coverage of world events, but the slant is so heavily right-wing it gives laugh to the cable network's claims of being "fair and balanced," and its political pundit programs are so blatantly rightist as to merit the claim they're crypto-fascist (a term I first heard from the lips of Gore Vidal in his famous live debate with William F. Buckley at a national party convention). As anyone familiar with the books, I Hate Ann Coulter and The Republican Noise Machine, and the documentary film, Out-Foxed can attest, Fox opinion programming is like a poker game with the cards stacked in favor of Murdoch's fundie-fascist convictions.
One need not consult such studies to reach this conclusion. I did so after spending some time viewing and analyzing three shows: the weeknightly Hannity and Colmes, the Saturday evening Beltway Boys, and the Sunday evening Fox News Sunday, featuring Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, and a panel of "experts" made up of Brit Hume, Mara Liasson, William Kristol, and Juan Williams, respectively. David Brock's Noise Machine put the bee in my bonnet when the author suggested that the token "liberals" featured on such programs (Colmes, Kondracke, and Williams) are either dumb as posts, suckup sycophants, or less than fully palatable. That is, Colmes comes off as a myopic spoil-sport (the kind of guy Nixon V.P. Spiro Agnew once called "a pointy-headed intellectual"), while Kondracke simply sucks up to his more self-assured partner, and Williams is portrayed as a lone (and of color) dissenter pitted against three wise ones.
It's pathetic! If it weren't so transparent, one might actually swallow the "fair and balanced" bit. Sean Hannity's tack when interviewing anyone with centrist/liberal views is to interrupt them the moment they indicate having an opinion at odds with his extreme right wing philosophy, and the producer and director allow him much longer dialogues with such guests than they afford the mealy-mouthed Alan Colmes. The result is this: Colmes comes off as ineffectual and, by comparison, less worthy of belief. One is sometimes led to the conclusion that Hannity would defend Hitler if he were a 21st century Neo-Con. But he's not only blindly allied with the Right, he's completely humorless and so smug he reeks of self-righteousness.
Kondracke plays the Colmes role on Beltway Boys, only less effectively, he seems so enamoured of the more self-righteous Barnes. Although Kondracke once stuck his neck out for gay rights in one show, he almost always quickly backtracks and shifts position when he encounters opposing views from Barnes, who plays an avuncular mentor role. Kondracke is even more insipid than Colmes because he comes off as spineless, and the producer and director see to it that he is never allowed to stray too far from the Neo-Con point of view. Again, pathetic! The technique might be called "seeing to it that the liberal debates with half his mouth tied behind him."
It took me a while to figure out that the presentation of views on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday is much more devious than the simple three-against one lineup (actually four to one considering Wallace's own pro-Neo-Con stance). As Brock and others have noted, Juan Williams is racially handicapped. At the risk of sounding like a cracker bigot, I must say that Williams will be subjected to audience turn-off among those who cannot yet accept the fact that an African-American has sufficient intelligent to warrant hearing. Many viewers if not the whole of the Archie Bunker bunch, will look at the Wallace panel like a crime victim at a police lineup, so amusingly illustrated by an old cartoon familiar to defense attorneys, depicting a dog surveying a sextet of domestic animals: five other dogs and one cat. The victim dog, pointing at the miscreant cat says, "That's the one, officer! That's the one!"
Hume is just as intractably, blindly rightist as Hannity, and he sometimes gets so impatient with the lone liberal (Williams), he loses his cool, as when he lashed out against Rep. John Murtha with a torrent of blatantly ageist ejaculations, the Neo Con anti-elder equivalent of Don Imus's "nappy headed ho's." Mara Liasson might, considering her background at Public Radio, seem a balancing factor on the panel, someone to compliment Williams, but she appears to have been tainted by the attempted takeover of Public Broadcasting by Paul Gigot et al., or perhaps, being the only female on the panel, she suffers from some form of penis envy. In any case, the moment she departs from the right wing line, she is corrected by Kristol, and this nifty technique is a clue to the producer-director secret that I didn't quite grasp until a short time ago.
The modus operandi is deceptively simple. Wallace stacks the deck by going "down the row" from left to right, with Hume always in the first chair, Liasson in the second, Kristol in the third, and Williams last, sitting next to Wallace himself. The first question is almost always, if not always (I miss the show now and then) addressed to Hume, who is the Arch Crypto-Fascist of Fox. He gives his familiar extremist views, leaving an intimidated Liasson to more or less agree, Kristol to take a similar position (sometimes even more extreme), and Williams to half-heartedly disagree. When the next question is addressed to Liasson, she's caught between two extremists and she usually tows the line in answering, with, again, only Williams to voice moderate dissent. By the time a question is addressed to Williams, Brit takes over like a master inquisitor, backed up to an extent by Liasson, and a more sceptical Kristol. Watch it if you don't believe me.
Worse, when Williams says something even marginally liberal, the cameraman is told to cut to Hume, revealing a scowling, scoffing countenance, intermixed with two-shots of Kristol and Williams during the latter's comments. Pay particular attention to the expressions of Kristol at all times. If he is in agreement with someone, he smiles or dead-pans, but when Williams is talking, he smirks as if he thinks the statements unbelievable or unworthy of an intelligent person's consideration. His smirk outdoes that of Bush! (Kristol is also the worst-dressed of the lot. Some of his neckties look as if he bought them in 1960, a sure indication he's a thorough- going anal retentive, he's so tight with his shekels. But, hey, that's an ad hominem remark, isn't it?) It's the smirk that disgusts me.
These are but three of the Fox lineup of unfair and unbalanced bullshit pundit programs. I do not have time to analyze all of them, but I recommend highly the two books and documentary DVD mentioned above. After the Fox, give me Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC, or Real Time with Bill Maher. They don't even pretend to be fair and balanced, but at least they're honest about it.
One need not consult such studies to reach this conclusion. I did so after spending some time viewing and analyzing three shows: the weeknightly Hannity and Colmes, the Saturday evening Beltway Boys, and the Sunday evening Fox News Sunday, featuring Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, and a panel of "experts" made up of Brit Hume, Mara Liasson, William Kristol, and Juan Williams, respectively. David Brock's Noise Machine put the bee in my bonnet when the author suggested that the token "liberals" featured on such programs (Colmes, Kondracke, and Williams) are either dumb as posts, suckup sycophants, or less than fully palatable. That is, Colmes comes off as a myopic spoil-sport (the kind of guy Nixon V.P. Spiro Agnew once called "a pointy-headed intellectual"), while Kondracke simply sucks up to his more self-assured partner, and Williams is portrayed as a lone (and of color) dissenter pitted against three wise ones.
It's pathetic! If it weren't so transparent, one might actually swallow the "fair and balanced" bit. Sean Hannity's tack when interviewing anyone with centrist/liberal views is to interrupt them the moment they indicate having an opinion at odds with his extreme right wing philosophy, and the producer and director allow him much longer dialogues with such guests than they afford the mealy-mouthed Alan Colmes. The result is this: Colmes comes off as ineffectual and, by comparison, less worthy of belief. One is sometimes led to the conclusion that Hannity would defend Hitler if he were a 21st century Neo-Con. But he's not only blindly allied with the Right, he's completely humorless and so smug he reeks of self-righteousness.
Kondracke plays the Colmes role on Beltway Boys, only less effectively, he seems so enamoured of the more self-righteous Barnes. Although Kondracke once stuck his neck out for gay rights in one show, he almost always quickly backtracks and shifts position when he encounters opposing views from Barnes, who plays an avuncular mentor role. Kondracke is even more insipid than Colmes because he comes off as spineless, and the producer and director see to it that he is never allowed to stray too far from the Neo-Con point of view. Again, pathetic! The technique might be called "seeing to it that the liberal debates with half his mouth tied behind him."
It took me a while to figure out that the presentation of views on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday is much more devious than the simple three-against one lineup (actually four to one considering Wallace's own pro-Neo-Con stance). As Brock and others have noted, Juan Williams is racially handicapped. At the risk of sounding like a cracker bigot, I must say that Williams will be subjected to audience turn-off among those who cannot yet accept the fact that an African-American has sufficient intelligent to warrant hearing. Many viewers if not the whole of the Archie Bunker bunch, will look at the Wallace panel like a crime victim at a police lineup, so amusingly illustrated by an old cartoon familiar to defense attorneys, depicting a dog surveying a sextet of domestic animals: five other dogs and one cat. The victim dog, pointing at the miscreant cat says, "That's the one, officer! That's the one!"
Hume is just as intractably, blindly rightist as Hannity, and he sometimes gets so impatient with the lone liberal (Williams), he loses his cool, as when he lashed out against Rep. John Murtha with a torrent of blatantly ageist ejaculations, the Neo Con anti-elder equivalent of Don Imus's "nappy headed ho's." Mara Liasson might, considering her background at Public Radio, seem a balancing factor on the panel, someone to compliment Williams, but she appears to have been tainted by the attempted takeover of Public Broadcasting by Paul Gigot et al., or perhaps, being the only female on the panel, she suffers from some form of penis envy. In any case, the moment she departs from the right wing line, she is corrected by Kristol, and this nifty technique is a clue to the producer-director secret that I didn't quite grasp until a short time ago.
The modus operandi is deceptively simple. Wallace stacks the deck by going "down the row" from left to right, with Hume always in the first chair, Liasson in the second, Kristol in the third, and Williams last, sitting next to Wallace himself. The first question is almost always, if not always (I miss the show now and then) addressed to Hume, who is the Arch Crypto-Fascist of Fox. He gives his familiar extremist views, leaving an intimidated Liasson to more or less agree, Kristol to take a similar position (sometimes even more extreme), and Williams to half-heartedly disagree. When the next question is addressed to Liasson, she's caught between two extremists and she usually tows the line in answering, with, again, only Williams to voice moderate dissent. By the time a question is addressed to Williams, Brit takes over like a master inquisitor, backed up to an extent by Liasson, and a more sceptical Kristol. Watch it if you don't believe me.
Worse, when Williams says something even marginally liberal, the cameraman is told to cut to Hume, revealing a scowling, scoffing countenance, intermixed with two-shots of Kristol and Williams during the latter's comments. Pay particular attention to the expressions of Kristol at all times. If he is in agreement with someone, he smiles or dead-pans, but when Williams is talking, he smirks as if he thinks the statements unbelievable or unworthy of an intelligent person's consideration. His smirk outdoes that of Bush! (Kristol is also the worst-dressed of the lot. Some of his neckties look as if he bought them in 1960, a sure indication he's a thorough- going anal retentive, he's so tight with his shekels. But, hey, that's an ad hominem remark, isn't it?) It's the smirk that disgusts me.
These are but three of the Fox lineup of unfair and unbalanced bullshit pundit programs. I do not have time to analyze all of them, but I recommend highly the two books and documentary DVD mentioned above. After the Fox, give me Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC, or Real Time with Bill Maher. They don't even pretend to be fair and balanced, but at least they're honest about it.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
"Jihadists and Bush: Common Ground Redux"
A new documentary on PBS, *America at a Crossroads,* dealing with the origins of Jihadism and especially bin Laden and al Quaeda, features extensive interviews with Lawrence Wright and others, including the remarkably well-informed, extremely articulate former CIA bin Laden unit member Michael Scheuer. It is Scheuer who answers the question I asked in an earlier blog about the commonality of motive and/or unintended consequences of our misguided invasion of Iraq, confirming all my worst suspicions.
Scheuer says that by invading one of the Mideast's secular Islamic states, the U.S. played right into the hands of bin Laden and his Jihadist ideologues. From Zawahairi, bin Laden gleaned that the equivalent of a third world war "ranging from China to Iran to North Africa" would be brought about no later than 2020 c.e., and although our first taste of the bait in Afghanistan "did not go as bin Laden had expected," our misadventure in its southern neighbor -- first on bogus warnings of WMD'S, then on the excuse that without Saddam the world is a better place -- gave bin Laden exactly what he wanted.
In speeches even today, the Neo Cons, led by Cheney, continue to insist that by taking war to the terrorists, we trap terrorism in the lands they're known to occupy. This betrays blatant ignorance (or obfuscation) of the obvious fact that Saddam did not tolerate or encourage terrorists at any time, seeing them as potential enemies by proxy. Terrorists, Saddam believed, would only "bring on the heat." Apparently Cheney takes to heart his predecessor Goebels's advice that a lie told often enough will eventually be clothed as Truth. (Earlier, on one of the Sunday pundit shows, one of the architects of the War, Richard Perle, reiterated that even if the invasion was not carried out as well as hoped, it was worth it. There is a marvelous irony in the news that his "twin," Wolfie, has been exposed as a cronyist looter of the World Bank, apparently employing a personal secretary at a grossly inflated salary because it was the only way the ugly motherfucker could get laid!)
It's a myth that waging the Iraq War will keep terrorists at bay in Muslim nations. Scheuer -- who just happens to identify himself as "a Republican" -- says that it is just a matter of time before al Quaeda strikes again in the U.S. The worst development of all is the nativity of home-grown, al Quaeda-identified cells having no direct links to bin Laden but learning by his example. My prediction is that the next attack on our own soil will be in the nature of a dirty bomb, probably a nuclear device (or devices, set to go off simultaneously in several major cities) that release chemical agents or epidemic diseases into our waters or the air. It is just a matter of time. It may not have been ordered directly by al Quaeda, as was the 9/11 attack, but it will have that group's earmarks all the same. There are copycat cells all over the world.
The PBS documentary resumes next Sunday. It is a harrowing thing to see. It's to be hoped that the Right people watch it, but then they only place value of what they see and hear on Fox.
Scheuer says that by invading one of the Mideast's secular Islamic states, the U.S. played right into the hands of bin Laden and his Jihadist ideologues. From Zawahairi, bin Laden gleaned that the equivalent of a third world war "ranging from China to Iran to North Africa" would be brought about no later than 2020 c.e., and although our first taste of the bait in Afghanistan "did not go as bin Laden had expected," our misadventure in its southern neighbor -- first on bogus warnings of WMD'S, then on the excuse that without Saddam the world is a better place -- gave bin Laden exactly what he wanted.
In speeches even today, the Neo Cons, led by Cheney, continue to insist that by taking war to the terrorists, we trap terrorism in the lands they're known to occupy. This betrays blatant ignorance (or obfuscation) of the obvious fact that Saddam did not tolerate or encourage terrorists at any time, seeing them as potential enemies by proxy. Terrorists, Saddam believed, would only "bring on the heat." Apparently Cheney takes to heart his predecessor Goebels's advice that a lie told often enough will eventually be clothed as Truth. (Earlier, on one of the Sunday pundit shows, one of the architects of the War, Richard Perle, reiterated that even if the invasion was not carried out as well as hoped, it was worth it. There is a marvelous irony in the news that his "twin," Wolfie, has been exposed as a cronyist looter of the World Bank, apparently employing a personal secretary at a grossly inflated salary because it was the only way the ugly motherfucker could get laid!)
It's a myth that waging the Iraq War will keep terrorists at bay in Muslim nations. Scheuer -- who just happens to identify himself as "a Republican" -- says that it is just a matter of time before al Quaeda strikes again in the U.S. The worst development of all is the nativity of home-grown, al Quaeda-identified cells having no direct links to bin Laden but learning by his example. My prediction is that the next attack on our own soil will be in the nature of a dirty bomb, probably a nuclear device (or devices, set to go off simultaneously in several major cities) that release chemical agents or epidemic diseases into our waters or the air. It is just a matter of time. It may not have been ordered directly by al Quaeda, as was the 9/11 attack, but it will have that group's earmarks all the same. There are copycat cells all over the world.
The PBS documentary resumes next Sunday. It is a harrowing thing to see. It's to be hoped that the Right people watch it, but then they only place value of what they see and hear on Fox.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Nuthatch vs. Leahy re: Alberto VO-5
On Meet the Press this morning, Senators Orin Nuthatch and Patrick Leahy debated the current flap about Attorney-General Alberto (VO-5) Gonzales. The subject of political-vs.-performance reasons for the firing of eight U. S. Attorneys came up, Nuthatch so defensive on the topic he almost seemed to go temporarily looney. It's hard to put spin on something as blatantly wrong. At one point, Nuthatch, claiming that none of the firings was politically motivated, insisted that one of the axed lawyers "was a law school professor who had no prosecutorial experience." I expected Leahy to respond with what I was thinking, but he didn't. Alberto VO-5 had -- and still has -- no prosecutorial experience. In fact, some wags point out hes's never tried a case!
I also expected Leahy to bring up the Dominici affair, but the program host had to do that. When Sen. Pete Dominici complained about one of the attorneys who wasn't doing what the senator wanted, Rove and VO-5 sent the lawyer packing. Nuthatch kept insisting that nothing illegal could be proved, and he reiterated the by-now wearisome GOP line, "The U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president." Yes, but the Justice Department is not supposed to be a political organization. I doubt VO-5 is long for this administration now that the Demo attack dogs are on the prowl. The only difference between Pelosi, Conyers, and Leahy and a pack of pit bulls is that sometimes the pit bulls turn loose.
I also expected Leahy to bring up the Dominici affair, but the program host had to do that. When Sen. Pete Dominici complained about one of the attorneys who wasn't doing what the senator wanted, Rove and VO-5 sent the lawyer packing. Nuthatch kept insisting that nothing illegal could be proved, and he reiterated the by-now wearisome GOP line, "The U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president." Yes, but the Justice Department is not supposed to be a political organization. I doubt VO-5 is long for this administration now that the Demo attack dogs are on the prowl. The only difference between Pelosi, Conyers, and Leahy and a pack of pit bulls is that sometimes the pit bulls turn loose.
Friday, March 02, 2007
She's Baaaaaaaaack
Just when you thought it was all right to watch the pundit shows, they're now talking about the comeback of Ann Colder after months of relative obscurity and absence from the talk show scene. The news peg? Her speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., where, in closing remarks about Demo prexy candidate John Edwards, she quipped, "I was going to have a few comments about [him] but it turns out you have to go to rehab if you use the word, 'faggot,' so I -- so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."
In its online report on the speech, *Editor & Publisher* noted that Colder has had similar concerns about the sexual orientation of Bill and Hillary as well as Al Gore. It's beginning to look like all the Colder detractors who claim she is "an obvious lesbian" just may be right. Didn't Freud, in discussing his theory of "projection," point out that people who go about claiming others are gay are really "projecting" their own homosexual orientation, albeit latent, onto others? I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Colder doesn't have a lesbian crush on Hillary. Interestingly, one of her copycats, Michelle Malkin -- the Dragon Lady herself -- dissed Colder for the remarks.
Also interesting is the fact that both Veep Cheney and candidate Rudy Giuliani also spoke at the CPAC event. The former has a lesbian daughter who is partnered and planning a family. The latter once shared a flat in Manhattan with a gay couple since he had nowhere else to stay and he's having to spin his pro-gay social liberal attitude to earn the vote of the crypto-fascist crowd, including CPAC. Seems hypocrisy knows no bounds.
I once advocated stalking Colder at her speeches the better to get close enough and at a moment of distraction to pelt her with cream pies. This won't do now, though, now that she has used the "F" word. I think it's time to put a contract out on her life.
In its online report on the speech, *Editor & Publisher* noted that Colder has had similar concerns about the sexual orientation of Bill and Hillary as well as Al Gore. It's beginning to look like all the Colder detractors who claim she is "an obvious lesbian" just may be right. Didn't Freud, in discussing his theory of "projection," point out that people who go about claiming others are gay are really "projecting" their own homosexual orientation, albeit latent, onto others? I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Colder doesn't have a lesbian crush on Hillary. Interestingly, one of her copycats, Michelle Malkin -- the Dragon Lady herself -- dissed Colder for the remarks.
Also interesting is the fact that both Veep Cheney and candidate Rudy Giuliani also spoke at the CPAC event. The former has a lesbian daughter who is partnered and planning a family. The latter once shared a flat in Manhattan with a gay couple since he had nowhere else to stay and he's having to spin his pro-gay social liberal attitude to earn the vote of the crypto-fascist crowd, including CPAC. Seems hypocrisy knows no bounds.
I once advocated stalking Colder at her speeches the better to get close enough and at a moment of distraction to pelt her with cream pies. This won't do now, though, now that she has used the "F" word. I think it's time to put a contract out on her life.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Casus Belli by Counter-Terrorism
How ironic that within 24 hours of George Bush's speech announcing a change of policy in Iraq (call the 20 thousand "new" troops what you will, a turnover or an escalation), coalition forces in that country bombed an Iranian consulate in the northeaster Iraqi city of Irbil, located quite close to Kurdish-held areas of the trouble-plagued nation. Although Condomliza Reece is certainly correct in her explanation that it has long been known that the Iranian regime has been supplying I.E.D.'s and other materiel to the Shiite militias and other warring Iraqis, why did Bush-Cheney time its first provocation of a casus belli for the day after the "surge" speech?
The Iranians have formally protested, but they're too cagey to be so easily provoked. (It is entirely possible that they believe pan-Muslim -- if not worldwide -- opinion will side with them, perhaps considering the attack as belated revenge for the taking of American hostages in the infamous Tehran embassy raid as the Shah went out and the Ayatollah Koumeni went in.) Historians have already drawn a parallel to the Peloponnesian War. But it should be remembered that a more modern, American incident reveals, at least in retrospect, how easily a casus belli can be whipped up by a nation bent on attacking another.
I speak of the "Tampico Incident," which the Woodrow Wilson regime utilized as an excuse to invade Mexico at Veracruz in order to overthrow a Sadam-like tyrant, Victoriano Huerta, becase Wilson thought it about time that "we teach the Mexcians to elect good men." Wilson demonstrated that if one is simply patient, an opportunity will eventually present itself to manipulate public opinion for support of a misguided (and unjustified) attack on another sovereign state.
The Bush-Wilson parallels are almost striking. On April 20, 1914, Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress in an attempt to obtain blanket approval of actions designed to restore American dignity in the eyes of the world. The papers had been full of the Tampico Incident. Reduced to the few facts contained in Wilson's speech, it boiled down to a misunderstanding borne of a visit to the Gulf port city of Tampico by a U.S. Naval ship, the Dolphin, which sent a long boat ashore at the Iturbide Bridge for supplies. Two sailors were forcibly removed from the boat and taken prisoner (though soon released) by Huerta's troops. At the time of the incident, the usurperous Huerta regime, dominant in southern Mexico, was engaged in a prolonged war with the Constitutionalist, rebel forces of the Division del Norte (led by Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza) and the southeastern followers of Emiliano Zapata. It was no secret that the U.S. supported the Constitutionalists, and it is quite possible that the Tampico troops thought the Dophin's landing a preliminary to international warfare.
In any case, the Huertistas apologized, but the "special ceremony" they conducted, complete with salute to the American flag, did not satisfy Wilson, who quoted Admiral Henry Mayo in his speech and made vague references to Tampico's not being an "isolated" episode but one of "a series of incidents" (shades of W.M.D. and a mythical al-Qaida-Saddam connection!). Wilson had imposed an arms embargo on munitions deliveries to Mexico and, again ironic, at precisely the time of the Tampico incident, a vessel bearing American-made arms, the Ipiranga, was under steam, bound for Veracruz. Interestingly enough, the arms of the Ipiranga had been shipped first to northern Europe, offloaded, then taken aboard another ship for Mexican delivery -- a ruse designed by U.S. multinationals to get around the embargo. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Wilson's response to a "Yea" vote from Congress was to invade Veracruz, with much resulting death to Mexican troops stationed there. Veracruz was the railhead for shipments of arms and ammunition to the capital (the Distrito Federal, i.e. Mexico City), and by seizing it, Wilson and his cabinet assumed they would curtail such importations. The ease with which such good intentions can pave the way to hell is clearly indicated by the fate of the Ipiranga munitions. Upon learning of the landing of the Marine Corps, the Ipiranga simply changed course, landed in Puerto Mexico (a.k.a. Coatzacoalcos, some 150 miles away, as the crow flies). There, the arms were offloaded without complications and sent overland to the capital. Huerta must have delighted in the success of the ruse, especially since he would soon be firing on the Constitutionalists -- supported by the U.S. -- with American-made weapons. No doubt he celebrated the occasion with his usual toast: brandy and marijuana.
Will Bush go before Congress, wrap himself in the flag as did his predecessor, and ask for an extention of hostilities, an expansion of the Mideast Conflict into Iran? Will the U.S. withdraw from Iraq and simultaneously march toward Tehran? Will U.S. Navy warships sail into the Straits of Hormuz in ever-increasing numbers and end up bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in the same manner as the Israelis in Iraq?
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the U.S. is looking for a casus belli to launch an attack on Iran, which is most likely just what their lunatic leader Ahmadinejad wishes. It is well known that a significant portion of Iranians dislike his leadership and long for the secularism and democcratic freedoms of the West. These people, mostly young, will be polarized by a U.S. attack, which, again, is just what the Iranian leadership hopes to bring about. Secretary Rice justifies attacks on Iranians in Iraq as "protection of American troops," but Iran (and perhaps the rest of the Islamic World) may regard it as provocateurism, a form of anti-terrorist terrorism.
The Iranians have formally protested, but they're too cagey to be so easily provoked. (It is entirely possible that they believe pan-Muslim -- if not worldwide -- opinion will side with them, perhaps considering the attack as belated revenge for the taking of American hostages in the infamous Tehran embassy raid as the Shah went out and the Ayatollah Koumeni went in.) Historians have already drawn a parallel to the Peloponnesian War. But it should be remembered that a more modern, American incident reveals, at least in retrospect, how easily a casus belli can be whipped up by a nation bent on attacking another.
I speak of the "Tampico Incident," which the Woodrow Wilson regime utilized as an excuse to invade Mexico at Veracruz in order to overthrow a Sadam-like tyrant, Victoriano Huerta, becase Wilson thought it about time that "we teach the Mexcians to elect good men." Wilson demonstrated that if one is simply patient, an opportunity will eventually present itself to manipulate public opinion for support of a misguided (and unjustified) attack on another sovereign state.
The Bush-Wilson parallels are almost striking. On April 20, 1914, Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress in an attempt to obtain blanket approval of actions designed to restore American dignity in the eyes of the world. The papers had been full of the Tampico Incident. Reduced to the few facts contained in Wilson's speech, it boiled down to a misunderstanding borne of a visit to the Gulf port city of Tampico by a U.S. Naval ship, the Dolphin, which sent a long boat ashore at the Iturbide Bridge for supplies. Two sailors were forcibly removed from the boat and taken prisoner (though soon released) by Huerta's troops. At the time of the incident, the usurperous Huerta regime, dominant in southern Mexico, was engaged in a prolonged war with the Constitutionalist, rebel forces of the Division del Norte (led by Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza) and the southeastern followers of Emiliano Zapata. It was no secret that the U.S. supported the Constitutionalists, and it is quite possible that the Tampico troops thought the Dophin's landing a preliminary to international warfare.
In any case, the Huertistas apologized, but the "special ceremony" they conducted, complete with salute to the American flag, did not satisfy Wilson, who quoted Admiral Henry Mayo in his speech and made vague references to Tampico's not being an "isolated" episode but one of "a series of incidents" (shades of W.M.D. and a mythical al-Qaida-Saddam connection!). Wilson had imposed an arms embargo on munitions deliveries to Mexico and, again ironic, at precisely the time of the Tampico incident, a vessel bearing American-made arms, the Ipiranga, was under steam, bound for Veracruz. Interestingly enough, the arms of the Ipiranga had been shipped first to northern Europe, offloaded, then taken aboard another ship for Mexican delivery -- a ruse designed by U.S. multinationals to get around the embargo. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Wilson's response to a "Yea" vote from Congress was to invade Veracruz, with much resulting death to Mexican troops stationed there. Veracruz was the railhead for shipments of arms and ammunition to the capital (the Distrito Federal, i.e. Mexico City), and by seizing it, Wilson and his cabinet assumed they would curtail such importations. The ease with which such good intentions can pave the way to hell is clearly indicated by the fate of the Ipiranga munitions. Upon learning of the landing of the Marine Corps, the Ipiranga simply changed course, landed in Puerto Mexico (a.k.a. Coatzacoalcos, some 150 miles away, as the crow flies). There, the arms were offloaded without complications and sent overland to the capital. Huerta must have delighted in the success of the ruse, especially since he would soon be firing on the Constitutionalists -- supported by the U.S. -- with American-made weapons. No doubt he celebrated the occasion with his usual toast: brandy and marijuana.
Will Bush go before Congress, wrap himself in the flag as did his predecessor, and ask for an extention of hostilities, an expansion of the Mideast Conflict into Iran? Will the U.S. withdraw from Iraq and simultaneously march toward Tehran? Will U.S. Navy warships sail into the Straits of Hormuz in ever-increasing numbers and end up bombing Iranian nuclear facilities in the same manner as the Israelis in Iraq?
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the U.S. is looking for a casus belli to launch an attack on Iran, which is most likely just what their lunatic leader Ahmadinejad wishes. It is well known that a significant portion of Iranians dislike his leadership and long for the secularism and democcratic freedoms of the West. These people, mostly young, will be polarized by a U.S. attack, which, again, is just what the Iranian leadership hopes to bring about. Secretary Rice justifies attacks on Iranians in Iraq as "protection of American troops," but Iran (and perhaps the rest of the Islamic World) may regard it as provocateurism, a form of anti-terrorist terrorism.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
The Wrong Rev. Phred is at it Again
Our esteemed and beloved man of the cloth, the Rev. Fred Phelps, is in quite a quandary. Locally, the TV news people have announced that his Kansas church group, 100 strong, plans to picket the funeral of a local man killed in Iraq. They would, as in the past, hold up signs saying (I kid you NOT), "GOD LOVES I.E.D.'S." But the graveside picketing might not come to pass, since Fred also wants pickets a-plenty at the Gerald Ford funeral in Michigan. What's a fundamentalist geek to do?
You *do* remember Fred, don't you? The slavering twit who showed up at the funeral for Matthew Shepard after the latter's bashing in Laramie, Wyoming, where Felps's group held up placards claiming that "GOD HATES FAGS!" Actually, if there were a god, he or she would hate Fred Phelps, who, incidentally, has a rap sheet of his own and was disbarred from law practice. (Apparently, it is actually possible to be so nasty you're unfit to be an attorney!)
Interestingly, when, later this evening, CNN interviewed former Sect'y of Defense (under Clinton) William Cohen; following a news story that Gen. John Shallikashvilli has recommended doing away with "don't ask, don't tell," Wolf Blitzer asked what chance there is to get such a policy carted off to the dungheap of American history. And Cohen answered that some high-ranking military people are seriously considering it, if only because the all-volunteer army cannot afford to turn any qualified men and women away. (That's nice, we are not good enough to marry, but we are good enough to be blown to bits by I.E.D.'s in Baghdad.) Owning up to the fact that plenty of gays and lesbians already serve, silently, Cohen suggest that a re-thinking is much in order, and he's not unaware that European armies have never made any distinction between gay and straight troops and have had none of the problems with the integrated policy that are usually predicted here.
But he had a caveat. Cohen says that the decision to do it should come from military leaders, not politicians. If the matter is politicized, he points out, it will inevitably become a wedge issue, just as it did for Clinton. It can only be hoped that Rev. Phred Felps had a massive coronary when he heard this news, for if there is a hell, I am certain he is going to it.
You *do* remember Fred, don't you? The slavering twit who showed up at the funeral for Matthew Shepard after the latter's bashing in Laramie, Wyoming, where Felps's group held up placards claiming that "GOD HATES FAGS!" Actually, if there were a god, he or she would hate Fred Phelps, who, incidentally, has a rap sheet of his own and was disbarred from law practice. (Apparently, it is actually possible to be so nasty you're unfit to be an attorney!)
Interestingly, when, later this evening, CNN interviewed former Sect'y of Defense (under Clinton) William Cohen; following a news story that Gen. John Shallikashvilli has recommended doing away with "don't ask, don't tell," Wolf Blitzer asked what chance there is to get such a policy carted off to the dungheap of American history. And Cohen answered that some high-ranking military people are seriously considering it, if only because the all-volunteer army cannot afford to turn any qualified men and women away. (That's nice, we are not good enough to marry, but we are good enough to be blown to bits by I.E.D.'s in Baghdad.) Owning up to the fact that plenty of gays and lesbians already serve, silently, Cohen suggest that a re-thinking is much in order, and he's not unaware that European armies have never made any distinction between gay and straight troops and have had none of the problems with the integrated policy that are usually predicted here.
But he had a caveat. Cohen says that the decision to do it should come from military leaders, not politicians. If the matter is politicized, he points out, it will inevitably become a wedge issue, just as it did for Clinton. It can only be hoped that Rev. Phred Felps had a massive coronary when he heard this news, for if there is a hell, I am certain he is going to it.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Islamic Jihadists and George Bush: Common Ground?
I somehow missed a New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright titled "The Master Plan." Subtitled, "For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning," the piece appeared in the September 11, 2006 issue of the magazine. In it, Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," basically says that Al Qaeda is defunct, or at least irrelevant, because even though the U.S. failed to capture bin Laden and even, for all practical purposes, abandoned its search, the type of indiscriminate slaughter espoused by Al Qaeda type groups is seen by jihadist ideologues as counter-productive. The jihadists have extended plans for action that cause less collateral damage and destroy the economy of the infidels.
One of these "new theorists," Abu Musab al-Suri, is certainly not "new" to Al Qaeda or bin Laden. In fact, the Syrian-born jihadist has been a member of the organization's "inner council," but he has deeply-held differences with Al Qaeda on how to proceed. He also has a shrewd take on U.S. policies and goals in the region. For example, he claims that the American attack on Afghanistan was, in Wright's words, "not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law" -- Shari'a. Since Suri published his sixteen hundred page book, Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistence, on the Internet in 2004, he already knew about the invasion of Iraq the previous year, so his views don't exactly qualify as prescience, but history has nevertheless born out their truth. In fact, one of the primary flaws even Americans found in the Bush Doctrine was its eagerness to abandon the search for bin Laden and withdraw significant numbers of American troops from Afghanistan for re-deployment in Iraq.
Wright further portrays Suri as viewing the invasion of Iraq as "pos[ing] a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics." In retrospect, this gives lie to the claims of Cheney and the rest of the neo-con team who justified the offensive incursion by claiming a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Our politicians should have known better. (Is Hillary Clinton so ignorant about what is going on in the Mideast, and especially among Islamic peoples? She must be. She voted for the war.)
Another of the jihadist ideologues is Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Palestinian sheikh, who mentored the bloodthirsty, cruel killer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but disagreed with him on such tactics as suicide bombings, like the one in Madrid, in which Zarqawi had a hand. Maqdisi condemned "vengeful acts which terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them" and advised jihadists to steer clear of Iraq. Jihadist involvement in the Iraqi civil war would, in Maqdisi's words, be an "inferno...by God, the biggest catastrophe." To which warning Zarqawi responded that he took orders only from God. And this, as Sam Harris and others have observed, just happens to be the same claim made by George Bush. In a world where everyone and his brother commits slaughter on orders from God, somebody's got to be lying.
Abu Bakr Naji, another jihadist theorist, actually draws sustenance from Western thinkers, including a Yale historian named Paul Kennedy. It seems that Naji has quoted Kennedy in an Al Qaeda website article based in part on the professor's book, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In this 1987 tome, Kennedy observed that imperial overreach leads to the downfall of empires. If the semi-literate Bush had read enough history, he might have revisited Tsar Nicholas and the conditions in imperial Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Nicholas's downfall -- indeed, the end of Tsarist Russia altogether -- was brought about by preemptive, offensive, and above all costly foreign incursions, first in the East, then in Europe. He bankrupted Russia and brought about mass starvation and political unrest, leading ultimately to his undoing. But, no, Bush knows nothing and doesn't want to learn anything either. Early on, commentators fretted over his "total lack of curiosity," but they scarcely could have anticipated Bush's "reading contest" with Karl Rove! When Bush announced he was reading Herman Hesse, I had to laugh. Reading is one thing. Understanding is something else.
Finally, there is Fouad Hussein, who met both Zarqawi and Maqdisi in a Jordanian prison, interviewed them extensively (I mean, what else is there to do?!), and ended up writing what Wright terms a book about Al Qaeda's "apocalyptic agenda." It is indeed scary. The key to Al Qaeda's strategy, Hussein says, is "dragging Iran into conflict with the United States," since
"[e]xtending the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces." In turn, in retaliation, Iran will likely cripple or destroy oil installations in the Persian Gulf, "which would cut off sixty percent of the world's oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies." That scenario seems right out of Doctor Strangelove.
But that's not all. It gets even more nightmarish. In fact, Al Qaeda almost seems to be maneuvering American foreign policy in the Mideast. Hussein predicts that the U.S. and Israel will first rid the region of Hezbollah, then go after Iran on one front and Syria on the other, Syria being "Iran's principal ally in the region...." It seems that Al Qaeda has long wanted to infiltrate Syria, so removal of the Assad regime, "a longtime goal of jihadis," will at long last put them in proximity to Israel. Knowing this, how can the Bush administration continue to ignore those who, like James A. Baker and the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, argue that it's time we involved both Syria and Iran in our discussions of the Iraqi situation. Both nations have vested interests in the outcome of the situation at hand. But, no, Bush stubbornly continues, ostrich-like, to stick his head in the ground and go his own way. He reminds me of the old laundry detergent ad depicting a young man whose mother keeps trying to help him wash his clothes. Frustrated, he says, "Mother! I'd rather do it myself!"
But wait, there's more! Attacks on the Mideastern petroleum industry will continue as the circle of confrontation will expand. Eventually, Al Qaeda will destroy our electronic infrastructure by hacking into government and banking websites and undermining our economy world-wide. By then, secular Arab governments will be under attack or already dismantled, Turkey dealt the same fate as Syria and the final conflict with Israel begun. Such plotting alarms European jihad-watchers; for example, the Dutch, following the jihadist assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, launched exhaustive studies of radical Islamist plans for world domination. One of the Dutch studies, titled "From Dawa to Jihad," classifies radical Islamics to include a "new generation" whose ideology "is alarmingly vague" but includes a facile division of the world into "sons of darkness" and "sons of light."
Jihadists also believe that a fight to the finish between these two groups "is the will of God." Now, the parallel to Bush is complete. Although he may not be a member of the same whacko fundamentalist sect taking the supposed eschatology of The Revelations of John quite literally (unless I am mistaken, former Rep. Tom DeLay belongs to the group), Bush nevertheless espouses a "born-again" or evangelical belief system. Just like this new generation of jihadists, such people believe in the inevitability of the Apocalypse. No matter that sane people think -- i.e. those who do not believe in Santa Claus, much less the elves -- such views are only held by loonies. Unfortunately, we're helpless to stop the march of the monotheists' self-fulfilling prophecies. As Sam Harris has argued in his insightful, brilliant The End of Faith, the world's monotheisms all have ulterior motives for bringing about The Final Conflict. To the Christers, it is the Rapture. To jihadists, it's virgins in Paradise.
Wright concludes with the scariest realization of all: "Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the works of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following...."
Oh? Really? How "inadvertently"?
One of these "new theorists," Abu Musab al-Suri, is certainly not "new" to Al Qaeda or bin Laden. In fact, the Syrian-born jihadist has been a member of the organization's "inner council," but he has deeply-held differences with Al Qaeda on how to proceed. He also has a shrewd take on U.S. policies and goals in the region. For example, he claims that the American attack on Afghanistan was, in Wright's words, "not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law" -- Shari'a. Since Suri published his sixteen hundred page book, Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistence, on the Internet in 2004, he already knew about the invasion of Iraq the previous year, so his views don't exactly qualify as prescience, but history has nevertheless born out their truth. In fact, one of the primary flaws even Americans found in the Bush Doctrine was its eagerness to abandon the search for bin Laden and withdraw significant numbers of American troops from Afghanistan for re-deployment in Iraq.
Wright further portrays Suri as viewing the invasion of Iraq as "pos[ing] a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics." In retrospect, this gives lie to the claims of Cheney and the rest of the neo-con team who justified the offensive incursion by claiming a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Our politicians should have known better. (Is Hillary Clinton so ignorant about what is going on in the Mideast, and especially among Islamic peoples? She must be. She voted for the war.)
Another of the jihadist ideologues is Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Palestinian sheikh, who mentored the bloodthirsty, cruel killer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but disagreed with him on such tactics as suicide bombings, like the one in Madrid, in which Zarqawi had a hand. Maqdisi condemned "vengeful acts which terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them" and advised jihadists to steer clear of Iraq. Jihadist involvement in the Iraqi civil war would, in Maqdisi's words, be an "inferno...by God, the biggest catastrophe." To which warning Zarqawi responded that he took orders only from God. And this, as Sam Harris and others have observed, just happens to be the same claim made by George Bush. In a world where everyone and his brother commits slaughter on orders from God, somebody's got to be lying.
Abu Bakr Naji, another jihadist theorist, actually draws sustenance from Western thinkers, including a Yale historian named Paul Kennedy. It seems that Naji has quoted Kennedy in an Al Qaeda website article based in part on the professor's book, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In this 1987 tome, Kennedy observed that imperial overreach leads to the downfall of empires. If the semi-literate Bush had read enough history, he might have revisited Tsar Nicholas and the conditions in imperial Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Nicholas's downfall -- indeed, the end of Tsarist Russia altogether -- was brought about by preemptive, offensive, and above all costly foreign incursions, first in the East, then in Europe. He bankrupted Russia and brought about mass starvation and political unrest, leading ultimately to his undoing. But, no, Bush knows nothing and doesn't want to learn anything either. Early on, commentators fretted over his "total lack of curiosity," but they scarcely could have anticipated Bush's "reading contest" with Karl Rove! When Bush announced he was reading Herman Hesse, I had to laugh. Reading is one thing. Understanding is something else.
Finally, there is Fouad Hussein, who met both Zarqawi and Maqdisi in a Jordanian prison, interviewed them extensively (I mean, what else is there to do?!), and ended up writing what Wright terms a book about Al Qaeda's "apocalyptic agenda." It is indeed scary. The key to Al Qaeda's strategy, Hussein says, is "dragging Iran into conflict with the United States," since
"[e]xtending the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces." In turn, in retaliation, Iran will likely cripple or destroy oil installations in the Persian Gulf, "which would cut off sixty percent of the world's oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies." That scenario seems right out of Doctor Strangelove.
But that's not all. It gets even more nightmarish. In fact, Al Qaeda almost seems to be maneuvering American foreign policy in the Mideast. Hussein predicts that the U.S. and Israel will first rid the region of Hezbollah, then go after Iran on one front and Syria on the other, Syria being "Iran's principal ally in the region...." It seems that Al Qaeda has long wanted to infiltrate Syria, so removal of the Assad regime, "a longtime goal of jihadis," will at long last put them in proximity to Israel. Knowing this, how can the Bush administration continue to ignore those who, like James A. Baker and the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, argue that it's time we involved both Syria and Iran in our discussions of the Iraqi situation. Both nations have vested interests in the outcome of the situation at hand. But, no, Bush stubbornly continues, ostrich-like, to stick his head in the ground and go his own way. He reminds me of the old laundry detergent ad depicting a young man whose mother keeps trying to help him wash his clothes. Frustrated, he says, "Mother! I'd rather do it myself!"
But wait, there's more! Attacks on the Mideastern petroleum industry will continue as the circle of confrontation will expand. Eventually, Al Qaeda will destroy our electronic infrastructure by hacking into government and banking websites and undermining our economy world-wide. By then, secular Arab governments will be under attack or already dismantled, Turkey dealt the same fate as Syria and the final conflict with Israel begun. Such plotting alarms European jihad-watchers; for example, the Dutch, following the jihadist assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, launched exhaustive studies of radical Islamist plans for world domination. One of the Dutch studies, titled "From Dawa to Jihad," classifies radical Islamics to include a "new generation" whose ideology "is alarmingly vague" but includes a facile division of the world into "sons of darkness" and "sons of light."
Jihadists also believe that a fight to the finish between these two groups "is the will of God." Now, the parallel to Bush is complete. Although he may not be a member of the same whacko fundamentalist sect taking the supposed eschatology of The Revelations of John quite literally (unless I am mistaken, former Rep. Tom DeLay belongs to the group), Bush nevertheless espouses a "born-again" or evangelical belief system. Just like this new generation of jihadists, such people believe in the inevitability of the Apocalypse. No matter that sane people think -- i.e. those who do not believe in Santa Claus, much less the elves -- such views are only held by loonies. Unfortunately, we're helpless to stop the march of the monotheists' self-fulfilling prophecies. As Sam Harris has argued in his insightful, brilliant The End of Faith, the world's monotheisms all have ulterior motives for bringing about The Final Conflict. To the Christers, it is the Rapture. To jihadists, it's virgins in Paradise.
Wright concludes with the scariest realization of all: "Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the works of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following...."
Oh? Really? How "inadvertently"?
Thursday, December 07, 2006
The President's Analyst?
One of the vogue definitions of insanity is repeatedly performing the same task and expecting a different result. George W. Bush needs a psychiatrist. He appears to be the only guy in the world who actually thinks "victory" is possible in Iraq. And he refuses to follow the sage advice of a non-partisan blue ribbon investigatory committee joining those who say that it is time to get out of Iraq. Bush appears to be getting truly desperate, employing an old Vietnam era trick designed to convince the skeptics that the war is winable: the body count.
Standing in front of the joint chiefs in the Pentagon press room, Bush announced that during a ten-week period from October, 2006, until the second week of December, some 5,900 enemy had been killed. He did not say who had killed them -- U.S. troops, Iraqi forces, Shiite militiamen, or Baghdad's pathetic police. This is critical in that without knowing the political alliances of those who died and who, exactly, pulled the trigger, there is no way for us to know whether the feckless Iraqi government played any part soever in the kill. As any trial attorney knows, sometimes a half truth is the worst form of lie.
Worse, body counts proved counterproductive in Vietnam. For one thing, as the My Lai massacre demonstrated, soldiers saddled with a phoney goal of wiping out just so many enemy troops are much more likely to shoot first and find out who's been killed later on. Routinely, collaterals are counted right along with the insurgents and al-Quaida types, just to satisfy the quota. The tendency of Vietnam officers to inflate the figures became almost legendary. Fibbing about the kill was the norm rather than the exception.
It also spawned perhaps the only levity to come from the Vietnam war, the spoofing of the military leadership by merry jesters who'd turn up at sit-in's, peace rallies, and even Renaissance Pleasure Faires. I personally met two of these Dadaist clowns: "Gen. Wastemoreland" and "General Hersheybar," after the commanding officer in Vietnam (Westmoreland) and the chief draft architect (Hershey), respectively. Dressed up like South American dictators bearing so many ribbons and medals you wondered how they walked, they would show up at any gathering where they could expect to boost the morale of the anti-war forces. At first, the latter were mostly dope-smoking longhairs, peaceniks. Later, though, especially after the Kent State "police riot" and, later still, Walter Cronkite's reports on what he'd seen overseas, the numbers included all manner of consciencious citizens. It was a genuine pleasure, and a great honor, to meet these generals poseurs.
But the falsifying of numbers is also redolent in a way of another, earlier ugly episode in our policitical history: the McCarthy era. Will Bush be telling the press tomorrow that, during the same period, "over 6,000 enemy were killed," and, in January, that during the same period "9,000 enemy were killed" -- during the same ten weeks? There's no sure way to "prove" that exactly 5,900 "enemy" were killed, nor do we know, from Bush, who is or is not an "enemy." In the kind of civil war going on now in Iraq, everyone would seem to be an "enemy" under a given set of circumstances.
As for Bush, I say the guy's a certifiable looney. I might advocate having him committed to a mental institution were I not more eager to see Congress bringing articles of impeachment. Among the grounds they might allege, I would certainly include the fact that he has failed to learn the lessons of history, for by such willful ignorance, Bush has condemned the American people to relive it.
Standing in front of the joint chiefs in the Pentagon press room, Bush announced that during a ten-week period from October, 2006, until the second week of December, some 5,900 enemy had been killed. He did not say who had killed them -- U.S. troops, Iraqi forces, Shiite militiamen, or Baghdad's pathetic police. This is critical in that without knowing the political alliances of those who died and who, exactly, pulled the trigger, there is no way for us to know whether the feckless Iraqi government played any part soever in the kill. As any trial attorney knows, sometimes a half truth is the worst form of lie.
Worse, body counts proved counterproductive in Vietnam. For one thing, as the My Lai massacre demonstrated, soldiers saddled with a phoney goal of wiping out just so many enemy troops are much more likely to shoot first and find out who's been killed later on. Routinely, collaterals are counted right along with the insurgents and al-Quaida types, just to satisfy the quota. The tendency of Vietnam officers to inflate the figures became almost legendary. Fibbing about the kill was the norm rather than the exception.
It also spawned perhaps the only levity to come from the Vietnam war, the spoofing of the military leadership by merry jesters who'd turn up at sit-in's, peace rallies, and even Renaissance Pleasure Faires. I personally met two of these Dadaist clowns: "Gen. Wastemoreland" and "General Hersheybar," after the commanding officer in Vietnam (Westmoreland) and the chief draft architect (Hershey), respectively. Dressed up like South American dictators bearing so many ribbons and medals you wondered how they walked, they would show up at any gathering where they could expect to boost the morale of the anti-war forces. At first, the latter were mostly dope-smoking longhairs, peaceniks. Later, though, especially after the Kent State "police riot" and, later still, Walter Cronkite's reports on what he'd seen overseas, the numbers included all manner of consciencious citizens. It was a genuine pleasure, and a great honor, to meet these generals poseurs.
But the falsifying of numbers is also redolent in a way of another, earlier ugly episode in our policitical history: the McCarthy era. Will Bush be telling the press tomorrow that, during the same period, "over 6,000 enemy were killed," and, in January, that during the same period "9,000 enemy were killed" -- during the same ten weeks? There's no sure way to "prove" that exactly 5,900 "enemy" were killed, nor do we know, from Bush, who is or is not an "enemy." In the kind of civil war going on now in Iraq, everyone would seem to be an "enemy" under a given set of circumstances.
As for Bush, I say the guy's a certifiable looney. I might advocate having him committed to a mental institution were I not more eager to see Congress bringing articles of impeachment. Among the grounds they might allege, I would certainly include the fact that he has failed to learn the lessons of history, for by such willful ignorance, Bush has condemned the American people to relive it.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Why?
Am I missing something? Why are we still debating whether to "stay the course" or "cut and run"? Koffee Annan says that the U.S. cannot win in Iraq, nor can we leave. I say we should leave before we lose...more U.S. troops. We are clearly caught in the middle of a fight-to-the-finish religious civil war, Sunnis against Shias. We dare not arrest Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but he's using Irani money and materiel to wage war on the Sunnis. In short, he's nothing but a terrorist. The situation is even more absurd when one considers the helplessness (or refusal) of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to end Shia militia violence and/or arrest al-Sadr. Maliki knows that his fragile coalition government (which is really a Shiite government with a few Sunnis and Kurds around to pick up the crumbs) could never survive a crack-down on the Shia clergy. Dissolution of the coalition would be the price to pay for getting rid of al-Sadr. It's ridiculous for military leaders, pundits, and pols to go on saying the situation is not yet a civil war when every indication is otherwise. I understand that the Shias are now claiming that the Sunni insurgents are backed by the U.S., understandable given the background of Shia-U.S. relations, and especially the Shia majority of Iran. With that kind of mistrust rampant in the majority of Iraqis, the idea that our presence is still welcome there is just plain stupid. The notion that leaving now will admit defeat and weaken us world-wide is simply ridiculous. When all of the phony, data-mined, cherry-picked "justifications" for going into Iraq turned out to be bogus, the administration claimed that regime change was sufficient reason to invade. OK, been there, done that. It's only a short time now before Saddam is hung. Now, let's get the fuck out. Who gives a damn whether the Sunnis and Shias slaughter each other? I'd rather redeploy the troops to the Sudan and stop the "ethnic cleansing" (read: genocide) in Darfur than try to help a bunch of ragheads whose religion is repugnant to me and who show no signs of being deserving of anything akin to democracy. Saddam may have slaughtered a lot of Shias and Kurds, but at least he kept order. Like Mussolini, he kept the trains running on time.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
P.S. The Real John McCain
A while back, noting that Sen. John McCain made a commencement speech at Larry Faultwell's so-called "university," and pointing out that, earlier, he had denounced Faultwell for his crypto-Nazi sentiments, I suggested that this was an instance of McCain showing his true colors -- those of a colossal hypocrite. I kept wondering why no one -- at least, none of the pundits -- brought this to McCain's attention, confronting him on the flip-flop, which was so obviously made to curry favor in the ranks of the religious (and bigoted) right. When I wrote the blog, I had to cast about for a paraphrase of exactly how McCain had put it. He had linked Faultwell, Robber'sson, and one or two other Jesus freak loonies together and characterized their behavior as downright anti-American. This morning, however, McCain appeared on Meet the Press, and, finally, someone confronted his hypocritical turn, Tim Russert. Russert reminded us of what it was McCain had said about Faultwell &c. -- that they were "agents of intolerance." And he pointed out that McCain had flip-flopped when he made his appearance on stage with Faultwell. McCain's lame-ass answer: "He came by my office in Washington and wanted to make amends." Yeah, sure.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Rudeness & Punditure, or Why I Love to Hate Ann Colder
Right off, I will confess that there is no way I can write a blog dealing with Ms. Ann Colder without injection of ad hominem remarks. The exposé of plagiarisms in her latest asinine attempt to be amusing at liberals' expense, Godless, has produced a bonanza of bellicose blogging designed to point up her foolishness and, at long last, her journalistic dishonesty. In response to an article about Colder's plagiarism, appearing online at the Raw Story site, a reader who signs on as "goingsnake," wrote (tongue obviously planted firmly in cheek), "[A]nn [C]oulter is a man, right? [O]r a transvestite or maybe an alien from like Jupiter. [H]e has a great [A]dam's apple, dog ugly though." My sentiments exactly! But I wouldn't denigrate drag queens or extraterrestrials by such a comparison. (In case you wish to read Raw Story's take on the Colder plagiarism flap, check it out: www.rawstory.com -- really informative stuff.)
Yes! Of course, it is possible for some of us to think Colder ugly and mannish. In fact, when she appeared on the cover of a national news magazine, sitting with boney legs splayed out to the bottom corners of the page, she looked like nothing so much as an anorexic transsexual (although I wouldn't want to denigrate those folks, either!). Part of my philosophy holds that beauty really is skin deep, which means that if you cannot admit that Ms. Colder is ugly as puke, you're probably a neocon ideologue who thinks George II is the Second Coming and, as Ms. Colder has actually suggested, all liberals should be sent to concentration camps and eventually exterminated. (Yeah, I know, she didn't say exactly that, except in so many other words, but I demand the right to fight fire with fire. As the primary tool most commonly used by right wing pundits is the Big Lie -- they got it from Joe Goebbels who knew that if you bullshit people long enough and often enough, they forget what was really true -- I demand the right, as a Flaming Liberal, to tell a few whoppers of my own.)
Initially, though, I confess. In all honesty, I think Colder is ugly as spit. No, not one of those mucusy little bits of expectorant, but a big gob of oyster-like, sidewalk goo you'd avoid stepping on even if it meant jumping into the street in front of a speeding truck. Ann is plug ugly. She's as putrid as poop. She tries, though. When she goes on the talk shows (fewer of them lately, I note), she keeps using her long falling wig as a prop, wiping it out of her eyes, the better to reveal what she obviously believes to be a sort of classic beauty: high cheekbones, a long rather than round face, puckered liptation, Revlon blush, Clairol mop, and so forth. (You didn't really think that was Colder's own hair, did you?! I'll even wager it was fellow right wing pundit Fucker Harlson who put her onto the wigmakers. I hear he's bald as a post.)
Her demeanor constantly reminds the viewer with any insight into fallacious argument and compassion for one's fellows that Colder is a Cunt. She has gotten to the point where, politician-like, she avoids answering difficult questions by mid-sentence changes of subject and silly little snappish swipes at her detractors designed to demean them by implying that they're not worthy of expressing an opinion about her, much less world affairs. Someone should strap her down to an "old sparky" chair (complete with wrist shackles), administer a hefty, mailine injection of LSD, and play a droning tape of "Sister Ray" with a new vocal track: Bill Clinton repeatedly barking: "Opinions are like assholes, Ann: everyone has one."
What astonished me was that after the bruhaha over her observation, in Godless, that the 9/11 widows of police and firemen were "harpies" meeting with Hilary for personal gain (and had been on the verge of dissolving their marriages before the Twin Towers attack), almost all, if not all, GOP and neocon ideologue talk show guests refused to condemn Colder for this latest instance of her insouciant evil mentation. They claimed that Colder was only speaking the truth, because the heroes' widows really had met with liberals. My Webster's defines "harpy" as a "relentless, greedy, or grasping person." My, my, Ann, this sounds more like YOU! YOU make your living by being a lying, vicious, perverted, total Cunt.
She actually pretends to relish going to college campuses to speak and being attacked, sometimes only by hissing and booing; other times, by attempts to paste her ugly mug with banana- or coconut cream pies. On the talk shows, she simply laughs off these incidents of "liberal" stupidity, but five will get you twenty she's had no end of hate letters, life-threatenign phone calls, and close shaves (oops, you should pardon the pun) involving a bit more than whipped cream or meringue in the face. In fact, I would be even more astonished to learn that the woman has no full-time bodyguards. After all, an assailant could break one of those skinny, ugly legs with the fingers and thumbs of one hand.
Initially, though, I confess. In all honesty, I think Colder is ugly as spit. No, not one of those mucusy little bits of expectorant, but a big gob of oyster-like, sidewalk goo you'd avoid stepping on even if it meant jumping into the street in front of a speeding truck. Ann is plug ugly. She's as putrid as poop. She tries, though. When she goes on the talk shows (fewer of them lately, I note), she keeps using her long falling wig as a prop, wiping it out of her eyes, the better to reveal what she obviously believes to be a sort of classic beauty: high cheekbones, a long rather than round face, puckered liptation, Revlon blush, Clairol mop, and so forth. (You didn't really think that was Colder's own hair, did you?! I'll even wager it was fellow right wing pundit Fucker Harlson who put her onto the wigmakers. I hear he's bald as a post.)
Her demeanor constantly reminds the viewer with any insight into fallacious argument and compassion for one's fellows that Colder is a Cunt. She has gotten to the point where, politician-like, she avoids answering difficult questions by mid-sentence changes of subject and silly little snappish swipes at her detractors designed to demean them by implying that they're not worthy of expressing an opinion about her, much less world affairs. Someone should strap her down to an "old sparky" chair (complete with wrist shackles), administer a hefty, mailine injection of LSD, and play a droning tape of "Sister Ray" with a new vocal track: Bill Clinton repeatedly barking: "Opinions are like assholes, Ann: everyone has one."
What astonished me was that after the bruhaha over her observation, in Godless, that the 9/11 widows of police and firemen were "harpies" meeting with Hilary for personal gain (and had been on the verge of dissolving their marriages before the Twin Towers attack), almost all, if not all, GOP and neocon ideologue talk show guests refused to condemn Colder for this latest instance of her insouciant evil mentation. They claimed that Colder was only speaking the truth, because the heroes' widows really had met with liberals. My Webster's defines "harpy" as a "relentless, greedy, or grasping person." My, my, Ann, this sounds more like YOU! YOU make your living by being a lying, vicious, perverted, total Cunt.
She actually pretends to relish going to college campuses to speak and being attacked, sometimes only by hissing and booing; other times, by attempts to paste her ugly mug with banana- or coconut cream pies. On the talk shows, she simply laughs off these incidents of "liberal" stupidity, but five will get you twenty she's had no end of hate letters, life-threatenign phone calls, and close shaves (oops, you should pardon the pun) involving a bit more than whipped cream or meringue in the face. In fact, I would be even more astonished to learn that the woman has no full-time bodyguards. After all, an assailant could break one of those skinny, ugly legs with the fingers and thumbs of one hand.
Hannibal Lecter, where are you now that we need you?
As for the plagiarism itself, the allegations surfaced in a New York Post piece by a plagiarism expert, John Barrie, who employed some sort of computer software to run checks on works suspect of, well, er, uh, borrowing from others. Called "iThenticate," the program can dig up instances of literary theft faster than a speeding bullet. As it happened, the software revealed that, among other things, Colder lifted verbatum "a list of adult stem cell treatments from a Right to Life website," says Ron Brynaert of Raw Story. Several other publications and many bloggersites jumped on the bandwagon and faster than Colder could pop a hormone pill (you didn't think those tits were real did you?), and now, Brynaert says, Colder's press syndication distributor, U.P.S. (a Rev. Son Hung Poon organization, it should be pointed out) promised to "look into" the charges.
Again, as Brynaert notes, Colder's publisher, Crown, responded to the allegations by claiming that, "as an experienced author and attorney, Ms. Colder knows when attribution is appropriate...." That's interesting. Since when did the populace put any faith in anything an attorney says? The old joke asks, "How do you know when an attorney is lying?" and the usual answer is: "when she's opening her mouth." As Rude One of http://rudepundit.blogsport.com/ observes, the claim of Colder's people that Godless has extensive endnotes is besides the point. "To say that her endnotes prove her innocence is not unlike saying that the guy next door went his whole life without killing anyone until he blew a brain gasket and went on a ten-state hobo-stabbing spree...." The endnotes take up 19 pages and include hundreds of attributions. Rude One points out that "The entire book has page after page of uncited material, no matter how much [Colder] actually cites stuff elsewhere." It's certainly ingenuous -- silly, really -- to claim that extensive footnotes prove lack of cribbing.
Colder's crew obviously believes that holding their ground in the current climate of neo-fascist aggrandizement and appeasement will soon put the boiling controversy on a cold back burner. They may be right. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole affair is that some bloggers, anti-Colder pundits, and news hounds appear to be missing a very important point. Not only does the crypto-fascist neocon far right wing religious bigot bunch spread filth and lies, they engage in endless hypocrisy. One does not need to be a Korzybski to uncover all of the semantic fallacies in a work by such as Colder, or to see that she is hardly above employment of double standards.
Take for example the following Colder rip-off from the Illinois Right to Life website. In the seventh chapter of her latest tome, Colder says that the "Church of Liberalism" devotes itself to a "war on science" that prompts liberals to lie about stem cell research, saying that "...the science...is working," when Colder-IRL know that it is not. She claims that the reason liberals perpetuate this lie is "to elevant [a] science that has produced nothing." Perhaps she has not heard the latest medical news about how stem cell applications promise victory over spinal cord injuries! But that inconsistency pales, too, upon consideration of the truly bogus junk science promulgated by Ronald Reagan and mythologized rhapsodically by the GOP and especially their military-industrial complex campaign contributors in the entire post-Reagan era -- the missile-thwarting technology nicknamed (probably faceciously, or so Fred Barnyard claims on The Beltway Boys) "Star Wars." For years now, this cabal has insisted that the technology works, although every non-lobbying scientist insists that Star Wars is only a ruse, an unworkable folly. The tests have been so fraught with failure that almost all the other TV pundits admit that the system could not be counted upon if and when Dim Dumb-Ill shoots off intercontinental bowel movements from North Korea. Even if he did have the ability to arm his ICBM's with nuclear or other mass-destructive warheads, our Star Wars technology could not stop Dim from turning the West Coast into toast. Whew! Glad I no longer live in L.A.!
I only hope that the boiling controversy over Colder's lies and larcenies does not overshadow discussion of her use of a common tool of the cabal: repeated insistence that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander -- or vice-versa. That is, it is OK for the Colders of this world to condemn one science as unworkable but ignore overwhelming evidence that a science they favor, despite its proven unworkability, is perfectly good and can justify the waste of a gazillion dollars.
When all is said and done, I still believe Colder is an ugly Cunt.(1)
(1) I apologize to all the ladies out there if they are offended by this word. It has ancient and honorable origins; in fact, it most likely has its etymological foundation in the worship of an Oriental Great Goddess "known as Cunti, or Kunda, the Yoni of the Universe," as George Ridley Scott says in his Phallic Worship. (For some interesting insight and comment, see http://blogmark.mg.co.za/index.php?q=node/4789.) I only refer to women as cunts when they're being shits or doing anything deserving of the epithet. I also refer to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a nigger. Honi soi qui mal y pense!
Friday, July 07, 2006
Dim and Diane: An Afterword
The pace of geopolitical developments makes one giddy. The consensus of the political pundits, even those inclined to denigrate if not demonize Dubya, is that the only way out of the current crisis between Dim Dumb-Ill and the U.S. is for China to intervene. Unfortunately, China is disinclined, in part because North Korea is a trading partner, and in part, as was pointed out by right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, because the fall of Dim and his slavish subjects could lead to a mad dash of refugees into a country already vastly overpopulated. And before we accept the answer that "the U.S. is a trading partner, too," Sino-American relations should be a bit more closely examined.
To begin with, just exactly what can the U.S. use to persuade China into intervening, into putting pressure on its neighbor to the Southeast? Those who reply, "Why, a warning of trade sanctions, of course!" take the position that China needs the U.S. to function, to stay fully operative, but it's a two-way street; to mix metaphors, a double edged sworn. Initiation of trade sanctions cannot stay unilateral for long. I don't know about you, but the last time I was in Wal-Mart, about 70% of the goods had "Made in China" stamped on the stickers. Fact is, Wal-Mart has earned a rep for putting a lot of American manufacturers out of business because its purchase of Chinese goods keeps U.S. companies from being competitive. And if the Chinese can make acceptable products for less, perhaps their U.S. competition should fade into bankruptcy. Those of us who regularly shop at Wal-Mart know that the Chinese brands are not only acceptable, they're a whole lot cheaper.
It almost goes without saying, too, that the U.S. cannot stand a trade war with China for an even more important reason. China is a major financier of our trillion-dollar deficit, which means, in effect, that they're helping, indirectly, to finance the Iraqi War. Helping to finance the Iraqi War makes the Veep's "blind" trust Halliburton stock go up and increases the sales of Humvees. We've already seen what the yuan can do on the international oil market. China imports few commodities that other nations indifferent if not hostile to the U.S. cannot supply, mainly, machinery and equipment, plastics, iron, steel, and various chemicals. Don't look now, but they've been very chummy with their neighbor to the northeast can supply most if not all of those goods, and the Chinese have already become a major player in the oil game. In fact, it's safe to say that our $3.00-a-gallon petroleum got that expensive, in part, because of competition from the Chinese. China has the fourth-largest economy in the world.
My hunch is that the U.S. would utterly lose any trade war with China. It's like a Mafia loan-shark or bookie "calling in the chits." Beijing says to Shrub: "Fock you!, give us our money. NOW!" China votes against us in Security Council resolutions almost routinely. Take their reluctance to assist us with attempts to isolate Iran. Why would the Chinese want to alienate a twerp like Ahmadinezhad and his mullah puppetmasters when they're importing Irani oil and gas? (For that matter, Iran and North Korea are cosy trading partners, too. If only to diehard conspiracy buffs, it's beginning to look like these countries are set to lock the U.S. in a vise!)
Years ago, circa 1980, I saw Texas pickups driving around with an ironic -- and prophetic -- bumper sticker. At the time, the redneck nation was making a big whoop-de-do about how Yankee snobs were sucking up cowboy oil. The high cost of energy was planted firmly on the shoulders of Northeasterners, whose long, cold winters sent heating oil prices skyrocketing. The cowboy bumper sticker read, "Let's Turn Off Their Oil and Freeze 'Em All to Death!" Not only the silliest, most geocentric sentiment imaginable, but one certain to come back to roost and haunt the clods who made the boast since it failed to take into account that our energy problems are universal. They're every American's problem. I must be a diehard conspiracy buff myself because I believe that we invaded Iraq not only to guarantee its sale of cheap oil, but because we wanted to establish a foothold in the Mideast, nation-hopping, as it were, with Afghanistan giving us an initial staging area, leading to a jump into Iraq, then a move on Iran.
I don't think we should be as worried about the lack of full U.N. Security Council support for our position on North Korea as we should wake up to the fact that the leadership of most other nations is hardly so naive as to miss the implications of such bullying. The greatest failure of the administration of King George II is its inability to lie its way out of a wet paper bag. None -- let me repeat, NONE -- of the reasons Dubya has given us to justify the Iraqi invasion bears out factually or withstands the cold light of truth. It should not be necessary to, and I don't want to bore the reader with, the litany of justifications for the unprovoked attack. The neocons continue to perpetuate all of the myths -- from Saddam's harboring al-Qaida terrorists, to plans for going nuclear (as if the WMD controversy wasn't resolved two or three years ago!), but none of it will wash. It's all b.s. Right wing neocons really do look like Nazis when they practice ol' Joe Goebbels's favorite trick: telling a lie often enough people no longer remember the truth.
The fact of the matter is, once the world powers tire of U.S. bullying and big stick political machinations, they're bound to unite to smite us. In a certain sense, we have become the new Nazis. And if we aren't careful, the nations with oil will cut ours off and freeze US all to death.
To begin with, just exactly what can the U.S. use to persuade China into intervening, into putting pressure on its neighbor to the Southeast? Those who reply, "Why, a warning of trade sanctions, of course!" take the position that China needs the U.S. to function, to stay fully operative, but it's a two-way street; to mix metaphors, a double edged sworn. Initiation of trade sanctions cannot stay unilateral for long. I don't know about you, but the last time I was in Wal-Mart, about 70% of the goods had "Made in China" stamped on the stickers. Fact is, Wal-Mart has earned a rep for putting a lot of American manufacturers out of business because its purchase of Chinese goods keeps U.S. companies from being competitive. And if the Chinese can make acceptable products for less, perhaps their U.S. competition should fade into bankruptcy. Those of us who regularly shop at Wal-Mart know that the Chinese brands are not only acceptable, they're a whole lot cheaper.
It almost goes without saying, too, that the U.S. cannot stand a trade war with China for an even more important reason. China is a major financier of our trillion-dollar deficit, which means, in effect, that they're helping, indirectly, to finance the Iraqi War. Helping to finance the Iraqi War makes the Veep's "blind" trust Halliburton stock go up and increases the sales of Humvees. We've already seen what the yuan can do on the international oil market. China imports few commodities that other nations indifferent if not hostile to the U.S. cannot supply, mainly, machinery and equipment, plastics, iron, steel, and various chemicals. Don't look now, but they've been very chummy with their neighbor to the northeast can supply most if not all of those goods, and the Chinese have already become a major player in the oil game. In fact, it's safe to say that our $3.00-a-gallon petroleum got that expensive, in part, because of competition from the Chinese. China has the fourth-largest economy in the world.
My hunch is that the U.S. would utterly lose any trade war with China. It's like a Mafia loan-shark or bookie "calling in the chits." Beijing says to Shrub: "Fock you!, give us our money. NOW!" China votes against us in Security Council resolutions almost routinely. Take their reluctance to assist us with attempts to isolate Iran. Why would the Chinese want to alienate a twerp like Ahmadinezhad and his mullah puppetmasters when they're importing Irani oil and gas? (For that matter, Iran and North Korea are cosy trading partners, too. If only to diehard conspiracy buffs, it's beginning to look like these countries are set to lock the U.S. in a vise!)
Years ago, circa 1980, I saw Texas pickups driving around with an ironic -- and prophetic -- bumper sticker. At the time, the redneck nation was making a big whoop-de-do about how Yankee snobs were sucking up cowboy oil. The high cost of energy was planted firmly on the shoulders of Northeasterners, whose long, cold winters sent heating oil prices skyrocketing. The cowboy bumper sticker read, "Let's Turn Off Their Oil and Freeze 'Em All to Death!" Not only the silliest, most geocentric sentiment imaginable, but one certain to come back to roost and haunt the clods who made the boast since it failed to take into account that our energy problems are universal. They're every American's problem. I must be a diehard conspiracy buff myself because I believe that we invaded Iraq not only to guarantee its sale of cheap oil, but because we wanted to establish a foothold in the Mideast, nation-hopping, as it were, with Afghanistan giving us an initial staging area, leading to a jump into Iraq, then a move on Iran.
I don't think we should be as worried about the lack of full U.N. Security Council support for our position on North Korea as we should wake up to the fact that the leadership of most other nations is hardly so naive as to miss the implications of such bullying. The greatest failure of the administration of King George II is its inability to lie its way out of a wet paper bag. None -- let me repeat, NONE -- of the reasons Dubya has given us to justify the Iraqi invasion bears out factually or withstands the cold light of truth. It should not be necessary to, and I don't want to bore the reader with, the litany of justifications for the unprovoked attack. The neocons continue to perpetuate all of the myths -- from Saddam's harboring al-Qaida terrorists, to plans for going nuclear (as if the WMD controversy wasn't resolved two or three years ago!), but none of it will wash. It's all b.s. Right wing neocons really do look like Nazis when they practice ol' Joe Goebbels's favorite trick: telling a lie often enough people no longer remember the truth.
The fact of the matter is, once the world powers tire of U.S. bullying and big stick political machinations, they're bound to unite to smite us. In a certain sense, we have become the new Nazis. And if we aren't careful, the nations with oil will cut ours off and freeze US all to death.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Dim and Diane: The Odd Couple
Now that the North Koreans have used the occasion of our nation's celebration of independence to rattle the sabres and fire off seven defective I.C.B.M.'s (intercontinental bowel movements), we witness strange bedfellows crawling out of the Murphy bed woodwork, as witness California Senator Diane Finegrind (D-Cal.), with her insistence that the U.S. should agree to direct talks with the representatives of North Korea's lunatic dictator Dim Dumb-Ill (S. -- for Stalinist -- Pyongyang). For once, I side with the opposing view of Dubya and the GOP, that only resumption of the six-nation talks exclusively represented by Pacific Rim and Russian diplomats, is acceptable, direct talks being a kind of reward for the posturing and provocations of Dim, carried out without question by his millions of blind, brainwashed followers, who think him a God ("Dear Leader").
Finegrind is an idiot and doesn't know her history. England and, to an extent, the U.S., tried to appease Adolf Hitler in the 1930's to the result that they did just what Dim Dumb-Ill has done to the six nations: violate their solemn word. The Germans invaded eastern Europe and the North Koreans, after promising to curtail uranium enrichment proceedings, simply racheted up the threat to obtain more concessions. Giving into Dim now is tantamount to throwing in the appeasement towel. Shrub, and his U.N. man, John Bolton, refuse to kowtow to Dim's demands, feeling that giving in to North Korea at this point would only encourage additional threats later on. Holding direct, bilateral talks at this point is rather like paying off a blackmailer. You can't be assured he won't come around again with new demands.
And although the U.S. leadership would like us to believe that it has the man- and firepower to keep on the negotiating table an armed attack on this "axis of evil," North Korea probably has the largest standing army in the world and could attack, say, Japan, or, more likely, South Korea, its prosperous peninsular neighbor, which would certainly draw us into an apocalyptic scenario. There is a relatively narrow window of advantage (if it can be called that): the interim between these failed missile tests and North Korea's actual ability to deliver nuclear warheads. Nevertheless, insisting that Dim and Crew deal only with the six powers in talks just makes sense. The most obvious reason is that South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, et al., are neighbors. They have the most to lose.
Since when does the U.S. respond to the threats of terrorists? We never caved in to the demands of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar al-Qaddafi, or Hafez al-Assad (unless you count the criminal activities of Lt.-Col. Oliver North's arms-for-hostages exchange as such), we have consistently given terrorist rulers the peeled banana. And if anyone doubts Dim Dumb-Ill's qualifications for the title of "terrorist," I recommend the www.slate.com article by Brendan I. Koerner, "What Kind of Terrorism Does North Korea Sponsor?" (Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.) He claims that the North Koreans (1) sold weapons to separatist groups, (2) did an arms deal with the Moto Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, (3) bombed a (South) Korean Air Lines flight, (4) attempted to assassinate a South Korean president, (5) killed of a South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok, and (6) gave comfort and shelter to exiled Japanese terrorist groups like the Communist League-Red Army Faction, and so forth.
Add to this the growing intelligence revealing how North Korea treats its own. Literally millions have died of starvation and forced labor in Dim's gulags. Some Dim apologists like to claim he's "crazy like a fox" and is actually a shrewd and savvy leader, but in my opinion, he's just plain nuts -- and I 'm not even taking into account his having a perennial bad hair day. We know that this nitwit had secret agents kidnap movie stars and film crews from places like China so that he could feed his ego by indulgence in a favorite pastime: motion pictures. (He boasts the biggest film library, presumably on VHS or DVD, but maybe in 35mm. prints, as he can afford them, anywhere in the world. He is said to be particularly partial to James Bond movies and such slasher fare as the Hallowe'en franchise.) And if we're to believe www.newsmax.com, Dimmy Boy drinks a lot, regularly injects himself with pain killers, and stages banquets with an "Entourage of Delight" -- disco dancers ordered to strip nude and provide a floorshow for his banquet guests. (Although the dictator allows his guests to "look," they are not permitted to touch the dancers, "for these are my children.")
The NewsMax story is based on a published account by the tyrant's personal chef of 13 years, a Japanese named Kenji Fujimoto, who claims that Dim indulges in such pricey delicacies as Iranian caviar and sips such expensive imported liquors as Johnny Walker scotch, noting that an estimated 2.8 million of his subjects starved during a single three-year famine. (Apparently, this claim has been authenticated by the BBC, which produced a documentary about Dim.) It seems that the North Korean military built up rice reserves on Dim's orders even as hordes of peasants were withering into skeletal non-existence.
The worst aspect of the situation is the notorious unpredictability of the man. No one knows what he will do next, or even what outrages he is capable of. But for a twit like Findgrind to suggest that we humor this fool in an attempt to resolve the "missile crisis" is misguided at best...and insane at worst.
Finegrind is an idiot and doesn't know her history. England and, to an extent, the U.S., tried to appease Adolf Hitler in the 1930's to the result that they did just what Dim Dumb-Ill has done to the six nations: violate their solemn word. The Germans invaded eastern Europe and the North Koreans, after promising to curtail uranium enrichment proceedings, simply racheted up the threat to obtain more concessions. Giving into Dim now is tantamount to throwing in the appeasement towel. Shrub, and his U.N. man, John Bolton, refuse to kowtow to Dim's demands, feeling that giving in to North Korea at this point would only encourage additional threats later on. Holding direct, bilateral talks at this point is rather like paying off a blackmailer. You can't be assured he won't come around again with new demands.
And although the U.S. leadership would like us to believe that it has the man- and firepower to keep on the negotiating table an armed attack on this "axis of evil," North Korea probably has the largest standing army in the world and could attack, say, Japan, or, more likely, South Korea, its prosperous peninsular neighbor, which would certainly draw us into an apocalyptic scenario. There is a relatively narrow window of advantage (if it can be called that): the interim between these failed missile tests and North Korea's actual ability to deliver nuclear warheads. Nevertheless, insisting that Dim and Crew deal only with the six powers in talks just makes sense. The most obvious reason is that South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, et al., are neighbors. They have the most to lose.
Since when does the U.S. respond to the threats of terrorists? We never caved in to the demands of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar al-Qaddafi, or Hafez al-Assad (unless you count the criminal activities of Lt.-Col. Oliver North's arms-for-hostages exchange as such), we have consistently given terrorist rulers the peeled banana. And if anyone doubts Dim Dumb-Ill's qualifications for the title of "terrorist," I recommend the www.slate.com article by Brendan I. Koerner, "What Kind of Terrorism Does North Korea Sponsor?" (Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.) He claims that the North Koreans (1) sold weapons to separatist groups, (2) did an arms deal with the Moto Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, (3) bombed a (South) Korean Air Lines flight, (4) attempted to assassinate a South Korean president, (5) killed of a South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok, and (6) gave comfort and shelter to exiled Japanese terrorist groups like the Communist League-Red Army Faction, and so forth.
Add to this the growing intelligence revealing how North Korea treats its own. Literally millions have died of starvation and forced labor in Dim's gulags. Some Dim apologists like to claim he's "crazy like a fox" and is actually a shrewd and savvy leader, but in my opinion, he's just plain nuts -- and I 'm not even taking into account his having a perennial bad hair day. We know that this nitwit had secret agents kidnap movie stars and film crews from places like China so that he could feed his ego by indulgence in a favorite pastime: motion pictures. (He boasts the biggest film library, presumably on VHS or DVD, but maybe in 35mm. prints, as he can afford them, anywhere in the world. He is said to be particularly partial to James Bond movies and such slasher fare as the Hallowe'en franchise.) And if we're to believe www.newsmax.com, Dimmy Boy drinks a lot, regularly injects himself with pain killers, and stages banquets with an "Entourage of Delight" -- disco dancers ordered to strip nude and provide a floorshow for his banquet guests. (Although the dictator allows his guests to "look," they are not permitted to touch the dancers, "for these are my children.")
The NewsMax story is based on a published account by the tyrant's personal chef of 13 years, a Japanese named Kenji Fujimoto, who claims that Dim indulges in such pricey delicacies as Iranian caviar and sips such expensive imported liquors as Johnny Walker scotch, noting that an estimated 2.8 million of his subjects starved during a single three-year famine. (Apparently, this claim has been authenticated by the BBC, which produced a documentary about Dim.) It seems that the North Korean military built up rice reserves on Dim's orders even as hordes of peasants were withering into skeletal non-existence.
The worst aspect of the situation is the notorious unpredictability of the man. No one knows what he will do next, or even what outrages he is capable of. But for a twit like Findgrind to suggest that we humor this fool in an attempt to resolve the "missile crisis" is misguided at best...and insane at worst.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Will the Real John McCain Please Stand Up?
I am beginning to think that the reason McCain has been guarded in his criticism of the Bush administration is not just that he is towing the party line; it's that he's not that much different from Bush. Both of them are liars, phoneys, and hypocrites. During a speech some time ago, he virtually lambasted Pat Robber's Son and Jerry Faultwell as dangerous lunatics whose pronouncements were an affront to mainstream America. Now, he goes to Faultwell's "university" and gives a speech.
No wonder the New School commencement class hissed, boo'ed, and gave McCain their fannies. He doesn't stand for anything but the so-called principles Bush embraces. Meaning that there will be almost no change if McCain is elected. He, too, will have to mollycoddle the Far Right bigot bull moose loonies who are down on everything from abortion to stem cell research. (At least one GOP stalwart has already declared that the party will NEVER support a Pro Choice candidate.) McCain, then, will have to put a lie to every middle of the road principle he has espoused.
Sure, pandering is hardly the exclusive domain of the GOP; in fact, Dems do it more blatantly, if anything. But McCain seemed a breath of fresh air when he jumped on religious fundamentalists beford turning 180 degrees to seemingly embrace their lunacy. I once thought that if the Dems put up a knee-jerk liberal with ideas a little left of Lenin, I might vote for McCain if he's running on the Republican ticket, but no more. The Dems can run anyone now -- maybe even a yellow dog -- and I will pull their lever. McCain is a phoney hypocritical twerp.
No wonder the New School commencement class hissed, boo'ed, and gave McCain their fannies. He doesn't stand for anything but the so-called principles Bush embraces. Meaning that there will be almost no change if McCain is elected. He, too, will have to mollycoddle the Far Right bigot bull moose loonies who are down on everything from abortion to stem cell research. (At least one GOP stalwart has already declared that the party will NEVER support a Pro Choice candidate.) McCain, then, will have to put a lie to every middle of the road principle he has espoused.
Sure, pandering is hardly the exclusive domain of the GOP; in fact, Dems do it more blatantly, if anything. But McCain seemed a breath of fresh air when he jumped on religious fundamentalists beford turning 180 degrees to seemingly embrace their lunacy. I once thought that if the Dems put up a knee-jerk liberal with ideas a little left of Lenin, I might vote for McCain if he's running on the Republican ticket, but no more. The Dems can run anyone now -- maybe even a yellow dog -- and I will pull their lever. McCain is a phoney hypocritical twerp.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Bush's Big Gamble
Dubya's oval office primetime speech on immigration reform was his best, ever. Mindful, one assumes, of Lincoln's famous observation that you can fool some folks part of the time, some folks all of the time, but never all the folks all of the time, George II craftily used a carrot and stick approach that allows National Guardsmen to be stationed on the Mexican border at least temporarily, while about 6,000 new customs officers are trained, a provision certain to please the conservatives in hopes they'll go along with the "guest worker" program that will, eventually, legitimate the 11 to 12 million illegals currently living and working in the US. Bush has learned the old adage that politics is the art of compromise, and the fact that there are far right elements resolutely refusing to pass any bill with an "amnesty" program suggests that the Prez is on the right track.
His form of "amnesty" -- it isn't even fair to call it that -- calls for illegals standing in line behind those who are here legally and working on green cards and, ultimately, nationalization, as well as payment of penalties/taxes, making a good faith effort to learn some English, and other demands quite unlike the program set up by Ronald Reagan earlier. Hardliners will continue to insist that amnesty by any other name is still amnesty, but the Bush administration points out that a country founded and developed by immigrants has no business rounding up 11 million people and deporting them wholesale. Bush was so passionate about it, it seemed to me that it was the first and only evidence of his campaign promise/slogan, "compassionate conservatism." Even Karl Rove strode over to the congressional office building to implore votes in favor of the reform proposal.
Unfortunately, the agenda falls short of tackling what I personally feel to be the Number One roadblock -- and it's not on a highway across the Rio Grande. Like drug legislation designed to fight the importation of controlled substances from places like Mexico -- which fails because we spend little or nothing to reduce the demand (e.g. treatment programs) -- illegal immigration mainly exists and grows because there are too many employers here (including major corporations) willing to look the other way when hiring, sometimes with the excuse, "Well, he showed me a Social Security card," a piece of identification so easily forged it might have been dummied up by a blind man. Enforce the permissive hiring laws and word might get around in places like Mexico that the job market is so poor in the US, one might as well stay home.
Conservatives always argue that illegals are taking jobs away from Americans, but liberals -- and Vincente Fox -- insist that Mexican workers come to the US to take jobs we Americans are unwilling to do. This almost always leads to a chicken-egg argument. Do the Mexicans take the jobs because their standard of living is low, allowing them to work for minimum wage (or less!). or have the salaries for like employment dropped to take advantage of the "slave wages"? Labor leaders gripe about illegal immigration lowering the wages of the American worker, but would the employer be able to stay afloat at all without the illegals?
In my posts to egroups devoted to such topics, I have pointed out that a reduced illegals labor force would inevitably increase the cost of goods and some services. I asked fellow members, "Would *you* pick onions, potatoes, or other ground produce bent over all day with a tool guaranteed to give you carpal tunnel syndrome?" It's a rhetorical question but an increasingly important one. All indications are that the spiraling cost of gasoline at the pump is being passed on to the consumer by retailers who utilize the transportation industry (almost everything we buy!), which translates to the most dreaded word in the language: inflation. In turn, inflation is bad for the 401-K. Seems to me, it is the wrong time be reforming immigration. For what most employers are paying the illegals, most American workers could not live, especially when a five-ounce ground sirloin patty selling in a butcher shop here yesterday at 75 cents was going for 79 cents today.
His form of "amnesty" -- it isn't even fair to call it that -- calls for illegals standing in line behind those who are here legally and working on green cards and, ultimately, nationalization, as well as payment of penalties/taxes, making a good faith effort to learn some English, and other demands quite unlike the program set up by Ronald Reagan earlier. Hardliners will continue to insist that amnesty by any other name is still amnesty, but the Bush administration points out that a country founded and developed by immigrants has no business rounding up 11 million people and deporting them wholesale. Bush was so passionate about it, it seemed to me that it was the first and only evidence of his campaign promise/slogan, "compassionate conservatism." Even Karl Rove strode over to the congressional office building to implore votes in favor of the reform proposal.
Unfortunately, the agenda falls short of tackling what I personally feel to be the Number One roadblock -- and it's not on a highway across the Rio Grande. Like drug legislation designed to fight the importation of controlled substances from places like Mexico -- which fails because we spend little or nothing to reduce the demand (e.g. treatment programs) -- illegal immigration mainly exists and grows because there are too many employers here (including major corporations) willing to look the other way when hiring, sometimes with the excuse, "Well, he showed me a Social Security card," a piece of identification so easily forged it might have been dummied up by a blind man. Enforce the permissive hiring laws and word might get around in places like Mexico that the job market is so poor in the US, one might as well stay home.
Conservatives always argue that illegals are taking jobs away from Americans, but liberals -- and Vincente Fox -- insist that Mexican workers come to the US to take jobs we Americans are unwilling to do. This almost always leads to a chicken-egg argument. Do the Mexicans take the jobs because their standard of living is low, allowing them to work for minimum wage (or less!). or have the salaries for like employment dropped to take advantage of the "slave wages"? Labor leaders gripe about illegal immigration lowering the wages of the American worker, but would the employer be able to stay afloat at all without the illegals?
In my posts to egroups devoted to such topics, I have pointed out that a reduced illegals labor force would inevitably increase the cost of goods and some services. I asked fellow members, "Would *you* pick onions, potatoes, or other ground produce bent over all day with a tool guaranteed to give you carpal tunnel syndrome?" It's a rhetorical question but an increasingly important one. All indications are that the spiraling cost of gasoline at the pump is being passed on to the consumer by retailers who utilize the transportation industry (almost everything we buy!), which translates to the most dreaded word in the language: inflation. In turn, inflation is bad for the 401-K. Seems to me, it is the wrong time be reforming immigration. For what most employers are paying the illegals, most American workers could not live, especially when a five-ounce ground sirloin patty selling in a butcher shop here yesterday at 75 cents was going for 79 cents today.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
A One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding
Fist and Factotum are at it again -- that is, Senators Bill Fist and Rick Factotum. They were the prime movers behind the silly, ultimately insidious bill to give all Americans a one-time hundred dollar "rebate" equivalent to about nine months of gasoline taxes. That was their response to voter complaints that the major oil companies are gouging and that the government should pass a windfall profits tax, hold hearings on overreaching by Exxon et al., and come up with some sort of plan to deal with the damage being done by three dollar gas at the pumps of America.
Why should anyone be surprised to learn that this plan had "linkage"? Yep, as the wire services explained, "Frist (sic), last week linked the $100 rebate to an energy-relief package that included...a call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal the Senate frequently rejects." Boy, does all this SMELL, and not just of "sweet" crude. It stinks of nothing less than bribery. That's right. Approve the "rebate" and the Senate gets to award special interests (read: big oil) with more than a windfall, a veritable motherlode of black gold. In all likelihood, Fist has Exxon et al. in his blind trust of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and what about Kerr-McGee, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Whose blind trust is going to swell in the wake of passage of the proposed rape of Alaskan wildlife? Why, none other than Prick Chaney.
Surprisingly, the new majority leader (no stranger to K Street type graft him), John Boehner, made reference to the Fist plan as "insulting." He didn't clarify that remark so far as I know, but presumably he saw the tit for tat for what it was: a brazen attempt to get the American tax-payer predisposed to the same shenanigans practiced by their elected officials. Exchange of rebates for environment-busting oil exploration is precisely the sort of thing Jack Abramoff was up to. At least some Republicans are smart enough, and sensitive enough, to recognize a scam when they see it. Boehner was expected to be just as corrupt as Tom Relay, but he's a lot smarter it seems.
Why should anyone be surprised to learn that this plan had "linkage"? Yep, as the wire services explained, "Frist (sic), last week linked the $100 rebate to an energy-relief package that included...a call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal the Senate frequently rejects." Boy, does all this SMELL, and not just of "sweet" crude. It stinks of nothing less than bribery. That's right. Approve the "rebate" and the Senate gets to award special interests (read: big oil) with more than a windfall, a veritable motherlode of black gold. In all likelihood, Fist has Exxon et al. in his blind trust of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and what about Kerr-McGee, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Whose blind trust is going to swell in the wake of passage of the proposed rape of Alaskan wildlife? Why, none other than Prick Chaney.
Surprisingly, the new majority leader (no stranger to K Street type graft him), John Boehner, made reference to the Fist plan as "insulting." He didn't clarify that remark so far as I know, but presumably he saw the tit for tat for what it was: a brazen attempt to get the American tax-payer predisposed to the same shenanigans practiced by their elected officials. Exchange of rebates for environment-busting oil exploration is precisely the sort of thing Jack Abramoff was up to. At least some Republicans are smart enough, and sensitive enough, to recognize a scam when they see it. Boehner was expected to be just as corrupt as Tom Relay, but he's a lot smarter it seems.
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