Sep 24 2009
This is original to docudharma.
And so we have another general begging to send more troops to a foreign war. Apparently McCrystal doesn’t think we can finish the job with what we have there. All well and good, I suppose. I can’t imagine many generals not wanting more troops when their war isn’t going swimmingly.
Jul 14 2009
Political sex scandals a nonpartisan affair
“(CNN) — If there’s one thing Democrats and Republicans have in common, it’s sex scandals.
No matter which party the philanderer belongs to, the public wants all the juicy details, as evidenced most recently by the public’s fascination with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s Argentine travels.
“That’s just prurience,” said Sally Quinn, a longtime Washington journalist and columnist. She’s married to former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee. “Sex sells and everybody’s interested in sex, so when there’s a sex scandal, it’s got everything — you’re talking about sex, you’re talking about power, and in a lot of cases, money is involved. You are talking about how the mighty have fallen,” she said.”
Jun 25 2009
Gotta love it that the corporate media is so unified in their outrage over the Iran situation.
Where was their outrage when Israel massacred 1400 civilians in Gaza?
This piece by Margaret Kimberley sums it up in a sad and devastating way:
In December 2008 Israel began what can only be described as a massacre in Gaza. More than 1,400 Gazans were killed so that Israel might inflict collective punishment on a civilian population, a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. They were not even allowed to flee and save their lives, instead even hospitals and ambulances were targets in Israel’s efforts to kill as many Gazans as possible.“The corporate media are quite selective when they decide who deserves our sympathy.”
Just as they prevented civilians from fleeing, the Israeli government did not permit the world’s news organizations to enter Gaza. The American media conducted incomplete coverage of the crisis without even pointing out that the Israeli government prevented them from doing their jobs. They didn’t exhort their readers and viewers to remind Israel that “the world is watching” them. There was no campaign to use Twitter as a tool to protest the killings and defend the Gazans right to live.
The United States Congress did not pass resolutions condemning the Israeli government. Neither Democrats nor Republicans exhorted then president elect Obama to speak out on behalf of the Gazans. Editorial pages did not criticize his silence and tacit approval of a truly horrific human rights violation.
In contrast, congress rushed to condemn the Iranian government, allegedly on behalf of the Iranian people. Their hypocrisy is breath taking. During the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain composed his only little ditty, “Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” in a horrendous disregard for human life. Now he attacks Obama for not speaking out against the government of Iran.
“The U.S. Congress’s hypocrisy is breath taking.”
Throughout 2006 and 2007 both houses of Congress passed resolutions which condemned Iran as a terrorist state and were meant to begin the process of authorizing war. Many of these same house members now claim to care, by a 405 to 1 vote margin, about the people they previously had been willing to kill.
It’s no accident why. It’s not random. The U.S. government has been funding covert operations within Iran to help destabilize Iran’s government.
Congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing Iran’s leadership. This according to a new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.The operations were set out in a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which, by law, must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees. The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from supporting dissident groups to spying on Iran’s nuclear program.
According to Hersh, US Special Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq since last year. These have included seizing members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of so-called “high-value targets” who may be captured or killed.
So this major media orgasm over the protests in Iran are the culmination of what the Covert Ops people hope is a successful overthrow of the Iranian government.
That is why it’s getting so much coverage, and getting things like a 405 – 1 vote of approval by the United States Congress.
Anybody remember the way we tend to treat other protestors?
Anger Mounts After U.S. Troops Kill 13 Iraqi Protesters
Yeah, how dare they protest an illegal invasion of their country? Fuckers.
And do you think anyone in America read about this sort of thing?
“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy …
Where was all the grand twittering then?
And even though in Gaza entire villages were literally wiped off the map, our American “leaders” didn’t say a word. Their support for the war criminals of Israel was unwavering, the reality of the crimes by the Mouthpiece Media kept hidden.
As Margaret Kimberley says:
The corporate media behave in a fashion that requires us to question everything they present to us as fact.
Ain’t that the truth.
May 29 2009
I apologize for the short and rushed essay, but I just wanted to get this story up as it’s breaking. It might turn into some kind of bigger scandal for McAuliffe because people were convicted, in part, because of the things he apparently ordered them to do.
Feb 04 2009
I’ve got hypocrisy on my mind, thanks to recent developments in the process of appointing officials to the Obama administration. First, Timothy Geithner, appointed to the position of national tax collector in chief, turns out to have failed to pay certain taxes. Then former Sen. Tom Daschle, the nominee to head Health and Human Services, turns out to have failed to pay much more. He wriggles and squirms a while under the spotlight but makes no move to step aside until a third nominee, Nancy Killefer, withdraws on principle over a much smaller sum of unpaid taxes, after which Daschle can’t stick around without looking like an utter tool.
And all this, to hear some speak, reflects badly on the incoming Obama administration, which was supposed to have been better than all this.
Well, yes, it does reflect badly.
But at the same time, it reminds me of a passage from Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age:
Oct 25 2008
This very brief essay that might be about hypocrisy. Or it might be that that McPalin campaign is giving you and me and all the other people who care about Global Warming a raised middle digit. You decide.
These are polar bears:
In May, 2008, before she was a VP candidate, the Great Huntress decided that polar bears shouldn’t be on the endangered species list, where Bushco had put them. The Anchorage Daily News wrote:
The State of Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species, Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday.
She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state’s northern and northwestern coasts.
Palin argued there is not enough evidence to support a listing. Polar bears are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation, she said.
Climate models that predict continued loss of sea ice, the main habitat of polar bears, during summers are unreliable, Palin said.
The announcement drew a strong response from the primary author of the listing petition.
“She’s either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading, and both are unbecoming,” said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Alaska deserves better.”
Put simply, Palin is a hard-core global warming denier:
Q: What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?
A: A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
But you already knew all of that. You’ve already ranted and banged on the table about this and cursed a blue streak at the screens on your television and monitor. This is nothing new.
Then, last night, on Keith, I thought I saw Sarah Palin wearing on her right lapel a polar bear pin. Just like this:
I was paying special attention, because I wanted to see whether she was still wearing the RNC purchased and soon to be donated to charity designer threads. Normally, I don’t pay much attention. Last night I was paying attention because I wanted to see if she had gotten, well, more frumpy. That didn’t happen. To put it mildly, I was surprised by the pin. Maybe I’m easily surprised.
There is no really satisfactory explanation for this. Are they hypocrites of the first degree? Is the McPalin campaign that clueless? Maybe after the last eight years, they think cluelessness, for which they have voted 90% of the time, is a qualification for running the nation. But then I had a darker thought. Maybe she’s wearing the pin to “energize the base,” and it’s a gigantic FU to anyone who cares about the environment.
You choose. Either way, I wish McPalin would be gone.
Aug 21 2008
As if there weren’t already enough examples of John McCain’s dishonesty and hypocrisy, he has delivered another strikingly brazen illustration of just how far he will go to promote himself and to demean his opponent, Barack Obama. And it’s all captured on video:
Brought to you by…
News Corpse, The Internet’s Chronicle Of Media Decay.
Aug 14 2008
The nomination of Senator John (the “Maverick”) McCain has caused a lot of consternation among our nation’s true right-wing heroes who feel he isn’t conservative enough to fill President Bush’s shoes. How can we separate the men from the boys (and the women, and the Hispanics, etc.) in the right-wing movement? The following test is a simple way to do just that — calculate your right-wing IQ and use it to exclude the unwashed masses who are stinking up our Big Tent!
Record your answer for each of the following ten questions. The answers and a grading scale are listed below. No peeking until you have locked in each of your answers. The integrity of true conservatives means the “honor system” should work perfectly fine to score your own test.
Ready to begin?
Jun 03 2008
I don’t know how many folks here have actually met racist bigots who happen to be a color other than pale. I’m fucking surrounded by them out here in Asia.
When I don’t have to contend with the governor of Tokyo prating on about the threat posed by ‘dangerous Chinese or Koreans’, I get to deal with the everyday regional bigotry of ‘what’s wrong with Osaka people and their appalling manners.’
Travel south to Australia and we’ve got all kinds of ‘white pride’ clowns. And I’d be remiss if didn’t mention that native Canadians populate Canadian jails, welfare rolls and mortuaries in numbers that can not be defended or explained as anything other than racism made manifest. So much as you might like to think Americans are exceptional, bigotry knows no bounds.
Pandering to bigots is fine old political tradition and when folks are caught on camera ‘hating the other’ as George Allen was, then it seems to me that sensible folks ought to stand up quick and scream blue murder, not stick a finger in the wind to see how the whole mess may play out.
If I heard that the wife of the nominee has evidently been caught on camera pandering to bigots I’d want that shit blasted on the front pages, not swept under the rug. And like it or not, the candidate for change keeps some extremely slimy company.
Ayers, Wright, and Rezko didn’t get pulled out of a hat. Obama hung with these pricks and relied on them to fuel his political career. Ayers provided key support early on. Rezko bundled cash and Wright helped win a guy with a white mom a firm place in an African-American church. Big-time support and bonds. It’s only in the last year that Michelle and Barack started cutting them loose.
If there is a tape showing Michelle Obama spewing racist trash inside Trinity Church why aren’t Dems screaming to see it? If the tape doesn’t exist, why are bots like slinkerwink posting sanitized transcripts of the non-existant tape on MyDD?
Larry Johnson has been banging the drum about that tape for weeks. Like most I figured to give Michelle the benefit of the doubt, not that she or the Obama folks extend that sort of respect to others very often.
Booman and slinkerwink, both Obama fans, pushed the sanitized version of the tape I was willing to ignore. If Booman and slinkerwink are blowing smoke about the tape, Booman and slinkerwink are the ones folks should be ripping.
Booman and slinkerwink have pushed the tape into our debate. Dems should be demanding the Obama campaign produce the tape, not cowering under the bed hoping there’s no truth to the story. Michelle and Barack Obama have built a political dynamo by making friends with some pretty un-savory people and if Michelle is on tape raving about “Whitey” she deserves to be called on it. Let’s see the version of the tape Booman is referencing.
Obama has his hand on a big cash tap.
No wonder.
May 28 2008
Buchenwald, Shmuchenwald, Auschwitz.. Vat’s da difference? Looking to make some new friends among Holocaust survivors? Lie about your support for groups and individuals hostile to Israel. Claim your great grand-daddy liberated one of them heinous Nazi death camps. Which camp? Who cares?
Pandering to Jewish voters on Memorial Day. Wow! Talk about breathing fresh air into old politics! Getting Buchenwald and Auschwitz mixed up shows just how much the Holocaust actually means to Obama. The folks involved in the liberation of Nazi death camps do deserve immense credit. Folks trying to exploit that sacrifice and then bungling it? Not so much.
Family war stories get murky in the re-telling. But if a candidate is going to grandstand on the national stage on the graves of the greatest crimes of the modern age, and make a great big fucking deal about how important it is we all remember the horror and how it happened, the mouthpiece might at least get his fucking facts straight.
Obama’s problem is that many believe Obama couldn’t give a shit about Israel, Holocaust survivors, women, the poor in America, or anything but getting elected. How unfair! Especially when Obama has dedicated his whole life, not to national service or working with the poor in other countries, as he preaches others should do, but building the Obama brand: Change you can believe in Inc.
Obama has written two inspirational books about Himself, in which potential investors/devotees can examine all the un-varnished details as he Himself describes Himself without a hint of self-aggrandizement or dishonesty. The whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me, Me.
Clapping hands, singing about Satan and the sin of lying with another man, accusing the ‘woman’ of using her female tricks to win sympathy, standing on the graves of the dead to win a few more votes, this is truly change you can believe in.
Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, William Ayers, Michelle Obama, Donnie McClurkin, Mary-Mary, Bernadine Dohrn, it don’t matter who said what or when; none of these folks in any way speaks for the Obama whose grand-daddy liberated Auschwitz/Buchenwald/ America.
After Obama ascends: No more politics of division, or hate, or cynicism. Any connection between Obama and McClurkin, Ayers, Wright, Michelle Obama et al is purely coincidental. Their actions and statements in no way reflect the deeply-held views of the candidate whose heart brims only with love and hope for all, especially on this special day for all the Jew folks who died in those death camps way-off in Germany/Poland wherever it was; and who, each and everyone of them, owe their liberty to me, my family and my grand-daddy. Whatever.
Don’t forget to vote and God Bless America!
May 25 2008
Sunday Times Only Bill Clinton can save the Democratic party? That’s what the Obama camp is claiming, according to the Sunday Times. No wonder Obama is trying to scale back the attacks on Hillary and Bill:
If anybody can put their arms around the party and say we need to be together, it is Bill Clinton,” a senior Obama aide said.
“He’s brilliant, he has got heart and he cares deeply about the country. It’s tricky because of his position as Hillary’s spouse, but his involvement is very important to us.
“Bill Clinton will give permission to Hillary supporters to come into our camp and become one party. He is critical to this effort.”
Racially offensive Bill Clinton? I can just imagine how the Obama campaign will spin this: ‘Bill Clinton has done so much to destroy the Democratic Party over the last two decades, first as the only two-term Dem President in memory and second for providing economic stability and growth, that Bill fucking owes Dems big!
Historic McCarthyism? One big reason I dumped Dems is succinctly detailed by a seasoned observor of US politics.
The massed ranks of male pundits gleefully pronounced that Clinton had lost the battle with Obama immediately after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, despite past precedents that strong second-place candidates (like Ronald Reagan in his first, ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 1976; like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown) continue their campaigns until the end of the primary season and, in most cases, all the way to the party convention.
None of these male candidates had a premature political obituary written in the way that Hillary Clinton’s has been, or was subjected to such righteous outrage over refusing to quiesce and withdraw obediently from what, in this case, has always been a knife-edge race. Nor was any of them anything like as close to his rivals as Clinton now is to Obama.
…The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka “Hildebeast” and “Hitlery”) from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever.
Hillary Clinton: Sociopath? I’ll add the necessary qualifier that I’ve found almost all real-life supporters of Obama to be extremely civil. These same folks are also of the opinion that HRC and her husband are driven by ambition and have engaged in the worst form of politics.
The Obama campaign has succeeded in convincing many of its most ardent supporters that Bill and Hillary Clinton are destructive, divisive forces in the Democratic Party. The Sunday Times, however, claims that the Obama campaign is hailing Bill Clinton as the one individual who can bring the Democratic party together.
I’m glad to be rooting for the non-Dem. I suspect the ‘Hillary is sticking around until Obama is assassinated’ media campaign will drive all but the Obama bots and a few die-hard Dems straight into the arms of the non-Republican John McCain.
Who could have imagined?
May 08 2008
The death toll and suffering in Burma continues to rise in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis (Urdu for daffodil). The situation is dire.
Aid has barely trickled into one of the world’s most isolated and impoverished countries, although experts feared it would be too little to cope with the aftermath of Nargis, which left up to 100,000 feared dead and one million homeless.Witnesses saw little evidence of a relief effort under way in the hard-hit Irrawaddy delta region.
“We’ll starve to death, if nothing is sent to us,” said Zaw Win, a 32-year-old fisherman who waded through floating corpses to find a boat for the two-hour journey to Bogalay, a town where the government said 10,000 people were killed.
“We need food, water, clothes and shelter,” he told a Reuters reporter.