Category: War

     On his recent trip to Aushwitz, Newt Gingrich made a spectacular failure of his staged attempt at empathy as he wandered the halls of racial holocaust and worried only about his own wealth and status.

    Using the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to begin an email that attacks our nations first African American President and our first Latin American supreme court nominee is an insult to every American.

    Claiming that appointing a proud minority to a seat of power will undo everything we fought for in the civil war makes me question if Newt knows why we fought the civil war, as well as which side he would prefer fighting for.

    Without noticing it, the GOP has exposed themselves as the party of hatred, fear and lies. Within their own words you can see that the GOP has a Galtian Superiority complex. If there is a Godwin rule for racism it would have given up by now. The GOP is quickly becoming the new Confederate party.

    It is like going to a funeral and hitting on the widow. Going to Aushwitz and disparaging a racial minority on the grounds of reverse racism is like an ex-Nazi soldier going to a temple to blame all the Jews on the decline of the Third Reich. Seriously, the only thing Newt could do to make this look worse would be to steal Jewish owned artwork before he left Germany.

    When faced with the living embodiment of evil Newt could only think of himself. Normal people who are confronted with the face of human evil and the depth of heartless human depravity are often shocked. I guess a leading Republican spokesperson gets kind of used to that sort of thing these days.

    As Newt Gingrich gazed upon the Nazi torture chambers his thought turned towards his own dilema, which seems to be how he can make women, minorities and other social groups easier targets for racist pale skinned bigots and elitist plutocrats.

    When American politicians visit Aushwitz it should be as an exercise in empathy, to do otherwise is to turn such a visit into a photo op. In my mind, no greater insult could be made to the millions of European Jews who were systematically kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler. While posing to take a picture of the roots of evil, Newt Gingrich and the GOP has made themselves out as a group that ether tolerates hatred and evil, or endorses it.

    Torture. Aushwitz.

    I think most sane and decent human beings could agree to being opposed to both.

    Unfortunately, the modern Confederate party of Conservative America is neither decent or sane.

   In my book, any public figure that can write off empathy for the majority of their non millionaire and non Corporate constituents has totally disqualified themselves from any ability to effectively serve the public.

    This is where the GOP stands today. they refuse to serve the public at all. They are totally enthralled to the service of their lords, the private sector and the wealthy individuals, Corporations and Special Interest groups that own their corrupt political party.

    Those who can justify torture can justify anything.

    With Michael Steele, Sarah Palin and other spokespeople, the GOP gets to have their one exception to the new rule. In effect, this exception says that you can join the GOP, but only if you cater solely to the wealthy and no one else. Just as the GOP advocates socialism for the rich and free market capitalism and personal responsibility for everyone else, in the eyes of the GOP empathy is only reserved for war criminals and rich white males. Anything else is Un-American, apparently.

    Going forward, we should remind any voter who is not white, male, heterosexual, christian or wealthy enough exactly where the Confederate party stands on matters of empathy, equality and social justice. We should put the right wing talking points of last week in a time capsule, and we should bring that time capsule out in 2010, 2012, 2014 and on with a little not attached that says “The New Confederate Party”

    The thing about having no empathy is that without empathy you can not have guilt or shame.

    This is just one more reason why the GOP is unfit to run (and wreck) America again.

When last we met, Gentle Reader, it was to work through a series of legal precedents and statute law; the goal of the exercise being to determine if we could or could not define waterboarding as torture.

We have the kind assistance of Professor Jeffrey Addicott, who has provided us with his written testimony from his recent appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and a personal interview, where he walked me through some of his thinking on the matter.

Today we’re going to take a look at the precedent that he has used to reach the conclusion that waterboarding is not torture.

It’s also possible that the analysis may result in the discovery of a bit of common ground…but as I noted in Part One, it’s common ground that neither one of us might have seen coming.

     White people are not allowed to bitch about reverse racism. Period.

    Rich people do not get to complain about being oppressed, either.

    And I do not know which stupidity is more insulting to the intellect, Newt Gingrich twittering about reverse racism and his own wealthy white male people’s plight against oppression while he tours the death chambers of (Oy Gavult) Auschwitz, or using a Martin Luther King Jr quote to begin an e-mail that paints a latino woman as an-anti white racist with a superiority complex.

    The reality is that the GOP prefers minorities who know and act as if they were inferior. The empathy/reverse racism meme simply means that the only empathy allowed is for wealthy people and corporations, and the only racism allowed by the GOP is their own.

    The Republican party has been reduced to projecting the things that it fears will be used against themselves at their enemies. The GOP has failed on every level. They have no ideas and they aren’t even trying to find new ones. Instead, the repackage the same shit we have been force fed for the last 40 years.

    That is until recently, when the GOP and the Corporate Oligarch started taking pages from 1859 Virginia.

    Elitist, fascist and Un-American have been thrown around lately, and even then it is hard to swallow, but this whole Racism meme over Sonia Sotomayor takes the cake.

    The battle plan is divide and conquer. This is class war, after all.    

Kudo’s Barrack, Kudo’s, But Much More Still Needed!

US Doubles Funds for Agent Orange Cleanup

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.

….

The decision to create a cybercommand is a major step beyond the actions taken by the Bush administration, which authorized several computer-based attacks but never resolved the question of how the government would prepare for a new era of warfare fought over digital networks.

~ New York Times

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now-

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now-

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding-

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of the military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

~ William Gibson (Neuromancer)

The United States has never been more powerful than it was on September 12th, 2001. On that day, with the sympathy of the world, we had more true power than all the armies in on Earth combined. Strange to think that as we lay smoldering, bleeding in the ruins of our collective self image as the most powerful nation on Earth, we had in fact grown in power by exponent. This is the strange currency of violence. The wealth of martyrs. And this currency is as tangible as a bar of gold.

Rarely discussed, and little understood, this principle is essential to understanding why the war on terror, and the aspirations of global American hegemony, will fail. It is why all empires fail. It is why terrorism fails.

I have been aware of this idea for years. I’ve been trying to distill it down into a fundamental law. But it is not an easy idea. There are nasty lose ends and apparent exceptions to the rule. But as best as I’ve figured it out, the rule is this:

Whenever you cause harm to another, you empower them.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an individual or a country, bombs or words. The moment you strike, or even strike back, you hand your opponent a gift. The people who attacked us on 911 didn’t weaken the American beast. The unleashed it. And when we responded with bombs in Afghanistan, we didn’t weaken radical Islam, we empowered it, justified it.

Unlike real currency, where every exchange is a tit for tat, the currency of violence creates a new specie on every transaction. It’s as though I hand you a $20 bill, and in exchange you hand me another, different $20 bill that had not previously existed. Except also, unlike real currency, it is not wealth that is created in the exchange, it is more hatred and more violence.

While it may seem that this idea should be resigned to the concerns of some dusty philosophy course somewhere, make no mistake, it’s political implications are as practical as they are profound.

How did Mahatma Gandhi defeat the most powerful Empire in the world without firing a single bullet? The currency of violence.

As I’ve watched the discussion on Guantanamo and torture and Dick Cheney’s speech and Obama’s speech and the advertisement for the arms industry that Memorial Day has become, it hit me that none of our leaders understand the nature of true power.

They speak of America’s strength in the world as something that comes from might. But might used, more often than not, is power spent. Just as the mighty British learned.

We are a militant nation. Our national symbol, the eagle, is a predatory animal. We like to pride ourselves on being able to kick some foreign butt, at least we did until Iraq demonstrated the limits of our prowess.

But Americans desperately need to begin to understand what real strength means and where it comes from. And we have to rise above the reptilian impulse to take the easiest path. The voice for strength through peace should be the Left. But the Left, following the lead of Bill Clinton, has long abandoned enlightenment for political expediency. But such primal expediency at home is anything but expedient abroad.

Obama, at least, pays heed to the idea of strength through peace. But it is an empty gesture as he escalates one war while failing to end another. Empty as bombs kill hundreds of women and children and unmanned drones swoop down on peasant villages.

The idea of strength through peace is not new and did not originate with Gandhi. He just demonstrated a mastery of it that was unprecedented in the modern world.

I’ve been trying to pound into my brain this wisdom as I navigate through my own battles. The currency of violence is fully redeemable in all wars, big and small. It is hard for me to remember that when I lash out at my political foes, when I launch ad hominem attacks and call people names, I am actually giving them something – a gift. The gift of martyrdom.

I think this is why Bill Moyers is far more dangerous and persuasive than say, Keith Olbermann or other attack dogs of the Left. And why he is rarely, if ever, invited into the corporate media sphere.

Attack is not Moyers style. He induces the scoop from his guest and allows the user to feel their own outrage. This is the opposite of an Olbermann special comment where he is so busy expressing outrage that we aren’t much allowed room for our own.

I’ve been in attack mode for so long that I almost feel like I’ve lost my voice, my claws to say this. But I’m tired of empowering my opponents with hate and hostility.

I do hate. I hate what has been done to my country. I hate the greed and brutality of corporatism. And I hate the actions of man.

But hate is just the bank in which the currency of violence is deposited. I am going to try -try- to stop trying to harm my enemies with vitriol and invective. They already have too much power as it is.

P.S., I also have a new blog. Check it out if you want. Visit often if you like it.

This essay is partly in response to Something The Dog Said’s essay on military commissions – I did not want to hijack the discussion there.

I am both a lawyer with a bit of training in international law and an officer of our armed forces (Switzerland, depository nation of the Geneva Conventions), which colours my view in this matter.

First off, I do not see anything intrinsically wrong with military commissions; the questions I have is:

– What is the objective?

– Who will come before the military commissions?

– Why bother?

I had a first hand view, though very young than, and like the rest of the extended family didn’t realize it, of what War does to those that serve in them, and you then have to extend that to those that live in where they occur.

I won’t go into the details but to say it was an Uncle who was one of my favorites, he was a gifted craftsman but a troubled soul. He was full of life trying to live it that way, than he suddenly snapped! He died alone in the little home he built, more the size of a shed it was supposedly to become, by the lake, shortly before I left Panama and went to ‘Nam. There were a couple of other uncles who showed the results of serving in WWII in other ways as well, and like the book and articles, it was just said “They cam back different then how they left.”. While in ‘Nam I started to understand what he might possibly had been going through, understanding what the rest of the extended family, and his friends, didn’t. And probably still do, as I’m the only one of the recent branch of the family, especially my large immediate family, till a couple of younger distant cousins kids served in Gulf War I, that has served in a combat/occupation theater.

Old man what the hell you gonna kill next

Old timer who you gonna kill next

Hey bartender over here

Two more shots

And two more beers

Sir turn up the TV sound

The war has started on the ground

Just love those laser guided bombs

-Roger Waters (The Bravery of Being out of Range)



Today, Memorial Day we honor our war dead. Some could care less, it’s just another excuse for barbecue, beers, baseball and NASCAR. Little can they be bothered by any concept that men at one time were burned, butchered, gassed, shot, blown into so much bloody fucking hamburger so that they would be free to be mean-spirited, fat, drunk and stupid lemmings. Their silly, meaningless understanding of history is an affront to those who served with honor and paid with all so that they could be goddamned ugly, crude and indolent Americans. With the fascist police state now fully implemented and Lord Obama talking nonsense about “preventative detention” all of those war deaths, even the ones dressed up in the monstrous nonsense of the GOOD WAR have all been in vain and for nothing. The grandchildren of the men who were cut down by German artillery, mines and machine guns as they took Omaha Beach have become that which their ancestors fought against, a nation of Good Germans, willing accomplices who are no better than those who lived downwind of Auschwitz and never once questioned the smell.

In his farewell address to the nation after spending 8 years as president, in 1961 Eisenhower warns of a growing danger.

Eisenhower on the Military Industrial Complex



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

Why would a respected President, set the sights so high, for his successors, and for America, as the dawn of the Television Age, blazed its path, towards an unknown Future?  

A Memorial Day Goal for Bob and Lee Woodruff

“Hey Friends —  Would you give a dollar to someone who risked their life for you?  We are in a big push this weekend to try to get every American to give $1.00 (or better yet $5.25 – to signify the date of Memorial Day) to help our wounded troops. This is what Memorial Day is all about.

“Yesterday by being on CNN and CNBC to talk about it– Bob and I raised $21,000 just from people twittering and going to the website to give.”…………