Tag: Iran

The boy just can’t seem to stop making an ass of himself, can he?  John McCain, who can’t even tell Iraqi resistance fighters from Iranians, can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and Iran — because as far as he’s concerned, they’re all the same — is criticizing Barack Obama for perceived foreign policy inexperience because the senator supposedly representing Illinois doesn’t see Iran as a threat on the same level as the Soviet Union in its day.

CHICAGO – Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day.

McCain made the attack Monday in Chicago, Obama’s home turf.

“Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess,” McCain said in an appearance at the restaurant industry’s annual meeting.

He was referring to comments Obama made Sunday in Pendleton, Ore.: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, `We’re going to wipe you off the planet.'”

Let’s get something straight here, boy: you can’t even tell one Arab group or nation apart from another.  Where the hell do you get off chastising Obama?  And what, may I ask, leads you to think Iran is as big a threat as the old Soviet Union was?  Come on, I know you’re a liar, but you’re not stupid.  You know as well as anyone else what the National Intelligence Estimate last year declared: that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons; that it abandoned any such attempts in 2003; and that its nuclear ambitions now seem to be geared more toward energy production than weapons.

An honest man might, in attacking his potential opponent over foreign policy naïvety, might have at least taken care to mention the NIE, why he disagreed with it — based on available evidence, and pointed out any rhetorical flubs that might indicate said potential opponent might engage in talks incompetently.  But John McCain is neither honest, or a man.  He is a liar, a subhuman beast trying to pander his way into the White House by terrorizing the American public.

McCain needs to admit he was lying, apologize for having done so, and drop out of the race for the presidency.  These are the only honorable things he can do.  Anything less is unacceptable.

One, America…..morally, financially and militarily. The last pretenses of democracy nearly destroyed as well, depending on the outcome of the next election.

One, Iraq, in just about every way a nation can be destroyed.

Good job George.

You have served your masters well, terrorizing and destabilizing the nation with the second largest remaining oil reserve on the planet, taking it’s oil off the market to help spiral crude to record prices…. AND record obscene profits for the Oil Corporations. Firing the opening shot in the Resource Wars. All while fending off any attempts to address the Climate Crisis that keeps your Masters rolling in money. And you only had to kill a million people to do it! So far.

All while accomplishing the largest transfer of wealth in history from America’s poor and middle class to the upper 1% of the wealthiest Americans. Our Ruling Class.

And turning America from the symbol of human rights and freedom…into a Torture State. That spies on it’s own citizens to terrorize them into passivity.

That’s a hell of a mission you’ve got there in the crotch of your flight suit. Way to screw the entire world for the sole benefit of your peeps, the Ruling Class.  

From Obama’s Website April 27, 2008:

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.

Well, as the pundits talk almost exclusively about the endless Primary Campaign, the Cheney Bush Administration seems determined to start it’s third war:

“…The nation’s top military officer said today that the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action” against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government’s “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq…”

“…Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force…”

There’s more…

For anyone born before 1970 or so, there are certain images that are come to mind whenever the name “Iran” is uttered: stern, bearded men in black robes, angry crowds, graphics depicting blindfolded American citizens with things like “Day 334” stamped over them, Ollie North bravely disgracing his uniform and perjuring himself, John McSame exploring the intersection of 1960s pop music and the idea of raining death from the skies.  In short, the past 30 years haven’t exactly been a model of how nations ought to think of one another.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a last look – a Parthian shot, if you will – at the recent history of Iran.  Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get past some of the more extreme caricatures the Traditional Media has been foisting upon us – and perhaps be able to start formulating a de-Bushified foreign policy that relies less on blustering incompetence and more on genuine historical understanding.

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique that comes in different sizes. This essay is about the Bush size Big Lie. I’ll get around to The Really Big Lie another time. The Bush Big Lie is just a distraction to keep people’s attention away from The Really Big Lie. But it’s big enough in its own right.

The Bush Big Lie is everything he’s done and said for the last seven plus years. The biggest part of his lie is the war in Iraq. It’s so obvious on the face of it that he lied us into the war, he lied us into escalating it and he’s lying us into staying there forever while he lies about the great progress we’re always making. The amazing thing about this is that over half of the American people actually know he’s been lying. But hey, what can one person do about it? A significant percentage of Uhmericans still believe that Saddam had WMDs; that he was complicit in 9/11; and that he gave shelter to al-Qaeda. We have some of the most unquestioning, incurious, gullible people on the planet. These Uhmericans think we’re doing the right thing and stopping the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here.

Bush is too dumb to have invented the Big Lie. A European guy came up with that concept in 1925:

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.

Hitler blamed the Jews for being the Big Liars which was a bit of evil genius. He accused his victims of being the crime. Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels attributed the Big Lie to Churchill and the English leadership in 1941:

That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Hmmm. During the war – the Big One – our OSS, precursor to the CIA, came up with a psychological profile of Hitler. They derived yet another example of the Big Lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

I don’t know about the rest of the country but if someone handed me a sheet of paper that had the last blockquote written on it and asked me who I thought might have these qualities I’d have a ready answer. Actually, it would be three people: Cheney, Bush and Rove – the father, the son and the evil spirit of the Big Lie, Bush-sized.

And almost all of America is focussed on the Bush Big Lie while the pickpockets work the crowd. More later.

(All quotes from Wiki – Big Lie)

Shanti.

One would think that a person who has lived through as much history as John McThuselah would know a bit more about it, but as we are all too painfully aware, historical savvy isn’t exactly a wingnut strong suit.  It’s thus sorta-understandable – even as it remains completely unforgivable – that Angry Gramps would be unable to distinguish between Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Persians, or really, anyone east of the Ural Mountains.  To the bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran set, “they” are all the same anyway, so any historical evidence that might indicate an outcome (of say, an invasion) other than their liberators-and-roses predictions can be safely disregarded.

Thankfully, we here in the reality-based community know better.  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for a look at Iran in the 20th century – and hopefully a slightly better explanation for why the US government is not particularly loved in that part of the world than that old patriotic pabulum, “they hate us for our freedoms.”

Reminder more or less that May 1 is the International Worker’s Day and early American labor rights protesters initiated it. It’s an American tradition – not a Communist tradition. And it’s a pagan tradition from the dawn of time.

I hope you all had a great May Day. As I post this it’s still May 1 from the CDT zone westward. For those who saw the original post, you can just skip it or get refreshed. For those who haven’t seen it, it has some interesting background on the history of the day.

Herewith, a recycled essay:

May 1.

A lot of Americans have apparently been brainwashed during their formative years. Especially the crowd over at the site that shall not be named. The vast majority associate the first day of the month of May as a Soviet Communist celebration day. Then again a sizable number of Uhmericans think Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 atrocities. Oh, and the wiretapping started after 9/11 and not like late February or early March of 2001.

May first was a holiday before there was a May. It’s a cross-quarter day. That means it falls about halfway between a solstice and an equinox. Back before keyboards, laser mice and high-speed internet connections people used to notice these things. The only thing that emitted light, besides fire, was in the sky. You can check out the sky anytime. Just click here. Cool, huh? And you didn’t have to let go of your mouse to do it.

So back in the days of stone knives and bearskins, and I’m not talking about the Star Trek episode where Spock and McCoy have to build a time-machine thingie with 1930s tech, or even the dark ages of eight bit processors, RAM limits of 65536 bytes and machine code, I’m talking real stone and real bear. Hell, sabre-tooth tiger and wooly mammoth times. Back when chipped flint was high-tech. In the time of neo-pagans (not to be confused with the neopaganists of today).

Together with the solstices and equinoxes (Yule, Ostara, Midsummer, and Mabon), these form the eight solar holidays in the neopagan wheel of the year. They are often celebrated on the evening before the listed date, since traditionally the new day was considered to begin at sunset rather than at midnight.

Festival name Date Sun’s Position

Samhain 1 Nov (alt. 5-10 Nov) ? 15° ?

Imbolc 2 Feb (alt. 2-7 Feb) ? 15° ?

Beltane 1 May (alt. 4-10 May) ? 15° ?

Lughnasadh 1 Aug (alt. 3-10 Aug) ? 15° ?

There are Christian and secular holidays that correspond roughly with each of these four, and some argue that historically they originated as adaptations of the pagan holidays, although the matter is not agreed upon. The corresponding holidays are:

   * St.Brigids Day (1 Feb), Groundhog Day (2 Feb), and Candlemas (2 or 15 Feb)

   * Walpurgis Night (30 Apr) and May Day (1 May)

   * Lammas (1 Aug)

   * Halloween (31 Oct), All Saints (1 Nov), and All Souls’ Day (2 Nov)

Groundhog Day is celebrated in North America. It is said that if a groundhog comes out of his hole on 2 February and sees his shadow (that is, if the weather is good), there will be six more weeks of winter. February 2nd marks the end of the short days of winter. Because average temperatures lag behind day length by several weeks, it is (hopefully) the beginning of the end of winter cold.

It’s been Groundhog Day in Iraq for five years now. But who’s counting?

There’s more:

According to the latest wire reports, the verdict is in: even (and perhaps especially) he who would be the next Bush doesn’t know crap about Iran.  This is unfortunate; one would think the disastrous invasion of Mesopotamia would’ve reminded us that we’re talking about a region of the world that breaks empires as a matter of course.

Tonight’s historiorant seeks to address just one of the lessons that needn’t have cost us 4000+ of our own soldiers’ lives to learn: that failing to accurately assess an enemy’s capabilities frequently plays a major role in victories and defeats in Southwest Asia.  Marcus Licinius Crassus didn’t appreciate that fact, nor did Hulagu Khan centuries later.  Join in the Cave of the Moonbat, and we’ll see if we can’t help to educate our misguided Republican brethren before they foist yet another hotheaded dumbass upon the American citizenry – and hopefully forestall our getting enmeshed in yet another Carrhae, Ain Jalut, or Chaldiran.

The original posting is on DocuDharma, 4 Apr 2008.

This is a simple proposal to not go to work for one day. If we do it individually and on random days, it matters not at all. If we do it together on one day by the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, it will matter. The more who join, the more it will matter. United we stand, divided we fail to get their sufficient attention.

The theme of the strike is best expressed by the immortal words of Paddy Chayefsky. As the character Howard Beale in his screenplay Network proclaimed loudly:

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

The purpose of the strike is whatever goal each individual has in mind. Whatever it is that is making you mad as hell, be it the War in Iraq, the price of fuel, inflation, wage stagnation, the collapse of the housing market, the bailout of subprime lenders, credit reporting agencies, health insurance companies, Big Business, Big Oil, Big Government, unaffordable prescription prices, lack of access to decent health care, pollution, Global Warming, mountain-top strip mining, human rights, torture, the prison nation, the assault on the Constitution, government agencies that don’t do their job, or the corruption of our government at all levels – pick one or more, none at all, or make up your own and do not go to work or class on Thursday May 1, 2008.

Call in sick, take a vacation day, just don’t show up. Cut class. Most of all cut class. One day is all that’s being asked. Give one day to yourself. Use just one day out of your life to make whatever statement it is that you want the government and the corporate bosses to hear. Wear a T-shirt, carry a sign, gather in a public place, sleep in, go to the beach, take a hike, read a book, play with your children. Make your protest be your own issue, whatever frustrates you the most. Everyone in this country is mad at some aspect of what is being done to their lives by the impersonal manipulation and abuse of their well-being by forces beyond their control. Forces of deaf and blind institutions that have lost any sense of common humanity. Take one day back from them. Just one day. Together. All of us.

Massive, non-violent, peaceful protests get the attention of the MSM, the Government and the Corporate community. Make your voice heard by making your presence at work or school absent. One day. All of us, joined together. Just one simple little eight hour shift of one day of classes. One day to proclaim, for yourself:

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

(Please cross-post, link and forward this proposal as much as you can. This protest needs no organizers, no leaders, no one specific cause. If you can’t bring yourself to take just one day to make your voice heard then maybe you’ll find someone who will.)