(11 AM – promoted by TheMomCat)
Almost nobody in America ever heard of Rosa Brooks except her enemies. She was very big news for Republicans (and only Republicans) when our brand-new President Barack Obama hired her for a job that ceased to exist when she resigned as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy last week, and doesn’t that title make you dizzy!
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy! Appointed by the Drone-King Obama, Commander in Chief of an evil little prison on Guantanamo Bay and an unknown number of similar operations all over the world, like our “Detention Facility” in Parwan Province, which Rosa Brooks visited in January 2011 along with Marine Col. William Lietzau, who is currently Chief Warden of the Global War on Terror, and into whose office Rosa Brooks’ portfolio as defender of the rule of law has been unceremoniously dumped.
So now Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy Lietzau also oversees the Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy for the Department of Defense, and what could be more legal and humane than the indefinite detention of an always indefinite number of Muslim gentlemen who have never been and will never be charged with any crime?
This odious transformation transpired in almost total silence and indifference, even inside the Beltway, but only two years ago Fox News was screaming!
RADICALS RUN WILD!
RADICAL LEFTIST ROSA BROOKS NOW OPERATING INSIDE THE PENTAGON!
Bring back Joe McCarthy from the dead! Only HUAC can save us now!
But just how far far left is the “radical leftist” Rosa Brooks? Here’s a sample:
Before 9/11 “al-Qaida was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. Today, thanks to U.S. policies, Al-Qaida has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001. Our ham-handed detention and interrogation tactics and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq have alienated vast swathes of the Islamic world, fueling extremism and anti-Americanism.”
So it’s easy to see why Rosa Brooks makes right-wing chicken-hawks like Bill O’Reilly see red, and if her dead-on analysis of the War on Terror wasn’t already bad enough, she even fights back!
When researchers at Indiana University calculated that O’Reilly indulges in “8.88 name-calling incidents per minute” every minute he’s on the air, Dr. Brooks celebrated this “achievement” in the L.A. Times.
Well, color me crazy, but I think we need to give the guy a little credit here. Do you think it’s easy to engage in name-calling every 6.8 seconds? To match O’Reilly’s performance, I would have to insult people 35.52 times in the course of this column. That’s a pace I just can’t hope to maintain, unless I cheat.
So hats off to Bill O’Reilly, that shameless, deceitful, irresponsible, propagandizing right-wing bully!
And my hat’s off to former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Rosa Brooks, that brilliant, funny, dedicated advocate and activist for human dignity and the rule of law.
26 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
I would admire Rosa Brooks, too. I admire an individual who sticks to his or her principles!
One way or another, whether let go, life made unbearable enough to not want to stay, or whatever, notice how we’ve been steadily losing progressive voices, or anyone deemed to have opposing views from newly established policies in our government.
Dawn Johnsen never even made it in, after months and months later, after Obama’s appointment of her.
Elizabeth Warren? The mockery that has been allowed to go on this fine and qualified individual is unbelievable and what will be the final outcome? Bold Progressives have a Petition to President Obama assign a recess appointment of her here.
adequately enough toward our so-called government of the past ten plus years.
All the posturing that goes on by each Party, the “fighting” and “obstructionism” that goes on constantly by our Congress is a joke on the American people, in my view. I think it’s mostly an act by actors and a waste of our tax dollars period! Why do I say that? Well, I could be wrong — but I think these AH’s pretty much have the outcome already planned out — at least it certainly seems so.
Eric Cantor walks out of budget talks! Why? Gawd-forbid, there should be taxation on the filthy rich individuals and corporations who don’t pay taxes at all — with their earnings well protected in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere — he was non-plussed that consideration of tax hikes (hikes?) for the rich individuals and corporations should even be a consideration. He wants it ALL taken out on our backs, i.e., Social Security, Medicare, Education, and an endless array of programs meant to better our society.
But, on point, ALL of this despicable garbage as Americans, and others all around the world are STARVING and have no jobs — while our government plays out its “stage” and engages the world in its global purpose!
And it’s not just the government; corporations do the same.
Open and honest communications always get punished.
…if you create enough agencies, commissions, departments, committees, panels, and so forth — populated with a sufficient number of assistant, under, deputy, sub-deputy, secretary semi-operatives, and give it/them a mind-boggling name…
You can cause even Bill Oh’Really to become either delusional or completely rational!
I don’t know which.
You guys decide.
Some other “fathers”
The “father” of raygunomics now writes for the Alex Jones set.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…
The “father” of Star Wars’s website.
http://thepatriots.us/
Cathrine Austin Fitts of the Bush administration.
I shall prompt you to do the almighty Google
Fitts+swine flu+eugenics or any combination thereof
hope in anything happening on the progressive side. Let me explain just a little. My general theme is that in order to achieve power those of us who are on the left need to organize in a fairly disciplined way. I don’t think that is possible. Most of us are in the midst of personal changes and personal affairs–how could we march in lock-step like the right seems able to do? They are highly responsive to authoritarian organization which can be very disciplined. The left is the experimental part of society that has been marginalized by not only the right but the center as well (IMHO).
What is left for the left? More or less the prescription offered us by Chris Hedges–small scale organizes. I see it going in the direction of decentralized eco-villages, cohousing, cooperatives of various kinds, collectives, forming businesses and non-profits etc. as step one. Step two is to organize those disparate elements under some nascent ideological set-up. Can be very simple like, we believe that future generations should be considered when we choose how to live and the perennial virtues articulated by humanists as well as religious traditions. Our mainstream culture has strayed so far from that and that is what we need to articulate with one voice. It is not that we have a particular program on say Afghanistan or health-care but that we articulate a need to have some core humanist values that value human beings and the environment. But we have to start with strengthening and organizing ourselves.
The right set out to change the world through an ideology of selfishness, exploitation and war of all against all (the Hobbesian view of life). They succeeded very well because they were highly focused in undermining not just individual programs but the whole idea that there is a commonweal.
Sorry if I sound harsh but I’ve lost my patience for dealing with individual day-to-day issues without an overarching vision on how we get from here to there. In the end, it just sounds like complaining. Yeah, these fuckers are nasty–but that’s what oligarchs do–they try to enslave others particularly if they (the oligarchs) lost all sense of morality. They mean to destroy civil society as we know it and institute a neo-feudal order and we had better wake up. The Constitutions has been shredded, rule of law is gradually being displaced by arbitrary decrees, war, in the fullest full-spectrum sense, is the primary export of the USA and that’s the reality. Saying “it’s not fair” or “it’s wrong” is irrelevant. Individual incidents should be noted but we need to move on.