Drawdown 1965
Filed Under Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the last few years there’s been a lot comparisons between the current Iraqi adventure and the Vietnam war, two towering blunders in US foreign policy, not to mention the immeasurable loss of life and the cataclysm in the social conscience of a nation.
Iraq is not Vietnam — or is it?
(Illustration found here).
Noted investigative historian and journalist Gareth Porter takes a look this morning at Jack Kennedy’s attempt to button-up Vietnam in the early 1960s and President-Elect Obama’s near-like pledge to get US GIs out of Iraq.
In an extremely-interesting piece at antiwar.com, Porter outlines the obstacles faced by JFK to get the troops out of Vietnam by 1965 — horribly the very year LBJ escalated the conflict — and those problems centered on the US military itself.
One unnerving aspect is Obama’s keeping Bob Gates as defense secretary.
Porter says that could be the opening salvo:
- But the one historical precedent of a president seeking to get an unwilling military to go along with a presidential troop withdrawal plan suggests that Obama will be unable to implement his plan for Iraq without the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff fully on board.
That is the lesson of President John F. Kennedy’s effort in 1962 and 1963 to get the U.S. military commanders in Vietnam to adopt a plan for withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Vietnam by the end of 1965 — the only other historical case of a president who tried to pursue a timetable for rapid withdrawal of combat troops from a war against the wishes of field commanders.
…
But the little-known story of Kennedy’s timetable for U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam underlines the critical importance to a president of having his two top national security officials on board in order to have any chance of prevailing over the resistance of commanders in the field.
Kennedy was trying to present himself to the national security community as centrist by striking a strong anti-Communist posture in public.
But behind the scenes, he was trying to push through a timetable for withdrawal from Vietnam.
…
Nevertheless the Pacific Command and the commander in Saigon continued to drag their feet on the 1965 deadline.
Like Petraeus and the top commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, in relation to Obama’s plan in 2008, they argued that the proposed rapid timetable for complete withdrawal from Vietnam was too risky.
…
And if he becomes too distracted by his primary concern — the U.S. economy — or is reluctant to have a confrontation with his national security team over the issue, Odierno and Petraeus are likely to drag their heels just as U.S. commanders stonewalled Kennedy over Vietnam.
And, of course, LBJ took the baton and killed thousands with it.
Obama must stand firm — history requires it.
F-k the Bird!
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Musings | Leave a Comment
Mark Twain hit the real bird squarely on the truth’s head:
- “Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians.
Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.“
(Illustration of Wounded Knee found here).
Americana as revisionist history.
Thanksgiving has got to be one of the most horribly-ironic holidays on record.
Stuff your faces you fat-ass somofabitches!
As football, full-blown feasts and fancy napping are the pure chance of a goodly-chunk of US peoples today, there should be some notice of shame.
Not!
Most people nowadays are shamed of their wallets.
Journalism professor Robert Jensen offered this up three years ago and the essay was re-posted this morning on AlterNet.
Some choice morsels:
- One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
…
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims’ first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough.
But it’s also true that by 1637, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders.
The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
…
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians’ land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving “wild beasts” from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
Thomas Jefferson — president No. 3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the “merciless Indian Savages” — was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, “[W]e shall destroy all of them.”
…
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who “settled” the country — and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable — such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States — suddenly the value of history drops precipitously, and one is asked, “Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?”
Read the whole essay, if you dare.
And to Mr. Obama I say, ‘Fuck the Bird,’ the false past is the false American Dream.
‘Success’ In Iraq
Filed Under Musings, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Decider George is like a rotten, aching and throbbing tooth, one of the them backside, big-old molars, one that can’t be worked on or even pulled, sitting there in the headcase, making life even more miserable with each countdown-passing second.
Yesterday, the outgoing commander-in-chief told a crowd of people most-likely destined again for the Islamic front on the Global War on Terror, tiny foreign mishaps the past near-eight years has been nothing-less than glorious — No regrets about invading and destroying occupying Iraq.
In the wake of Barack Obama, Decider George really, really sucks.
(Illustration found here).
The New York Times yesterday:
- Mr. Bush said that success in Iraq — achieved by the 101st Airborne and other units based here (Fort Campbell, Ky.) — would resonate far beyond that country’s borders.
“Success will frustrate Iran’s ambitions to dominate the region,” he said. “Success will show millions across the Middle East that a future of liberty and democracy is possible. Success will deny Al Qaeda a safe haven for launching new attacks. Success in Iraq will mean that the American people are more secure at home.”
Mr. Bush said the removal of Saddam Hussein had begun a new era for Iraq.
“Because we acted, the dictator, his sons and their regime are no more,” Mr. Bush said. “More than 25 million Iraqis are free. And a young democracy has taken root where a tyrant once ruled.
Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision then, and it is the right decision today.”
A certain legacy, a profound historical achievement achieved: A willingness, full-hearted willingness, to blubber in extreme-delusional verbiage about reality.
The perplexities of Iraq is beyond the immense — beyond military flesh and hardware, the original financial drain-hole in an era of nothing-but financial drain-holes, and even the perpetual political cauldron created by the illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq, there’s the innocent peoples.
Plain, ordinary, regular-life peoples living plain, ordinary, regular-lives.
Estimates of Iraqi civilian causalities since the invasion have ranged from about 80,000 to 100,000 upwards to 650,000 or more.
A good, overall view of the accounted can be found here.
Another aspect raised this morning by Juan Cole concerned those ordinary folks, based on a recent survey of families across Iraq.
The results ain’t successful:
- About 40% of these households were headed by women, an unusual finding for a patriarchal Arab society.
About two-thirds of these female heads of household are widows, bespeaking the horrific loss of life among Iraqi males during the past five and a half years.
Some 15% of female heads of household are divorced. Given the shortage of men produced by the war, divorcees may not easily be able to find a new mate.
And then there is this odd statistic of 7.5% of female heads of household being single.
The authors of the study interpret them as spinsters.
It is not clear if they are both orphans and spinsters, so that they are living alone, or if they are heading a household of unemployed parents or siblings.
The authors think they are having trouble finding a husband because of all the males killed in the war.
In the US, households headed by women are disproportionately poverty-stricken and it is likely this is true of Iraq in spades.
Nearly half of these families have 6-10 members, while 43% have 1-5.
Two-thirds of these families live on less than $210 per month, but given the size of the families, the average per capita income in this group is $420 per year.
The international poverty line is set at $500 a year, so two-thirds of Iraqis are living in poverty.
The population of the poorest country in the New World, Haiti, has an annual per capita income of $550.
Over two-thirds of families receive no aid from the Iraqi government, even though their needs are clear, and 50% get no aid from NGOs.
Among displaced families, 13% would not return home even if they could, so great is their fear.
Tangle all that with a knowledge the near-or-far future is pretty-much the same, or even worse.
From the Times story:
- The president recalled that a day before Thanksgiving in 2001, he visited Fort Campbell while the nation was still reeling from the shock of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“That November day, I said, ‘Once again, you have a rendezvous with destiny,’ ” Mr. Bush recalled.
“Over the past seven years,” the president said, “folks from this base have done exactly what they were trained to do,” attacking “killers and thugs” in the global fight against terrorism, which he described as “the great ideological struggle of our time.”
Mr. Bush’s upbeat assessment of the two wars made hardly any reference to the problems he will leave to President-elect Barack Obama.
Decider George’s one great success is arrogance-laced bullshitting, which he has no peer.
Huggermugger Transparency Required
Filed Under Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Big Al and Decider George at show-and-tell.
Four years ago near to the day:
- “There’s a lot we don’t know about his actions as White House counsel and his advice to the president,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists. “What we do know is rather discouraging.”
Discouraging was a way-understatement.
(Illustration found here).
Alberto Gonzales went on to the AG post, then got all twisted around in politics, lied, and then lied again, leading him to resign before Congress took his head.
Gonzales turned out to be the most back-biting, political-weasel ever to occupy the AG post.
And the Decider George White House did it all.
This is precise:
- So we wound up with a White House fueled by propaganda and coverup.
It happened after 9/11, when it eventually came out that he ignored a daily briefing entitles “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the US.”
It happened after Hurricane Katrina, when it quickly became clear that Brownie hadn’t done a heckuva job.
It happened in the Gonzales investigation, the Valerie Plame scandal, the FISA scandal, after Dick Cheney shot some poor guy in the face, torture, corruption, on and on and on.
Bush and Cheney treated the White House as a hiding place and every move they made was treated like a state secret.
The idea of “executive privilege” was stretched to absurdity. Secret emails, secret memos, secret conversations, secret wiretaps, secret prisons with secret prisoners, etc.
Transparency was apparently a dirty word for this White House.
If you needed to know it, they’d hold a press conference.
Otherwise, you can shut the hell up and stop asking questions. What, do you think this is some sort of democracy or something?
And it’s getting worse.
And it’s still Dufus Dick.
According to Washington Monthly:
- A growing body of investigative reporting and memoirs by Bush White House insiders-turned-dissenters suggests that most of the administration’s most controversial national security decisions—on wiretapping, the Iraq War, and renditions—originated in the Office of the Vice President, hashed out by Cheney, vice presidential counsel David Addington, and aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Cheney’s papers are the Amazon rain forest of Bush administration records: they are of immense importance to the big picture, and there is a real risk that they will be lost before we know exactly what’s in there.
If there is one overarching priority between now and January 20, it is to surround Cheney’s office with every possible legal barrier to removing so much as a Post-it Note from the premises.
…
When Obama takes the reins in January, he will inherit the same bureaucratic apparatus Bush used, and with it the records of how he used it.
This is the best opportunity for the new president to shine a light on the past eight years with the stroke of a pen.
He should direct the government’s inspectors general to undertake exhaustive, top-to-bottom audits of the classified documents their agencies have produced under Bush, declassifying and releasing everything for which secrecy isn’t of demonstrable national security interest.
One specific trove of documents is a priority: the records of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The OLC is the executive branch’s legal sounding board—the president asks its staff whether something he or she wants to do is legal, and the OLC sends back an opinion explaining why or why not.
OLC lawyers are in an unusual position, halfway between attorneys and judges.
They give advice to the president, but that legal interpretation has a heft that gives government officials who follow it a degree of immunity—”what is effectively an advance pardon for actions taken at the edges of vague criminal laws,” Jack Goldsmith, the head of the OLC from 2003 to 2004, wrote in his 2007 book The Terror Presidency. “It is one of the most momentous and dangerous powers in the government: the power to dispense get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
Mr. President-Elect, open the books!
‘Very Pleased’
Filed Under Musings, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Delusion is the child of ‘What, Me Worry?’
Especially if one doesn’t like homework and just goes with a gut instinct.
In a pre-recorded interview broadcast Sunday on a Japanese television network, Decider George blubbered through his lying, delusional teeth he was very pleased with how the Iraqi war has been handled and how wonderful the country has become the last five years.
Despite the slaughter.
(Illustration found here).
In the TV interview:
- Saddam was an enemy of the United States and a lot of people thought he had weapons of mass destruction, Bush said, adding “remarkable” progress had been made in Iraq since the late dictator was toppled in 2003.
“People have been able to take their troops out of Iraq because Iraq is becoming successful. I’m very pleased with what is taking place there now,” he said, adding there still is “a lot of work” to be done.
Successful at what?
Suicide bombings? Like the one yesterday at the entrance to Baghdad’s Green Zone or the killings countrywide.
Or even the horror of rape rolling across Iraq and into Jordan.
Or even back in the good, old US of A and shortchanging the benefits for families of killed GIs.
Decider George — We will be “very pleased” when your ass is gone!
Quit! Now!
Filed Under Musings, Politics | 1 Comment
Decider George has become worse than useless.
The little shithead is in Peru this weekend waxing “a little nostalgic” for the hallucinogenic heady days of shock and awe, mission accomplished, and ‘bring ‘em on’ — certainly not for the reality of those episodes of horror.
Events seem to have accelerated the past few weeks.
Terror on Wall Street can indeed trigger a quickening pulse, and combined with a shitload of other problems, can sometimes make one feel as if there’s been a glitch, or a freakish breakdown in the space-time continuum, and we’ve all about to be sucked into the ether.
Right now is the ultimate moment to grab the near-literal bull by the horns, mount a plan.
(Illustration found here).
While Decider George is gasping for air, pissin’ and moanin’ about nothing, fading like shit-stink fog, President-Elect Obama is already on the throttle with a seemingly a fairly nifty speech today calling for a major jobs program.
However, the main thrust for the absolute-right-now are the last few words in Obama’s speech: “It is time to act. As the next President of the United States, I will. Thank you.”
The gap of some two months is what we’re talking about.
Gail Collins , an op-ed columnist with the New York Times, popped out a pretty-good idea yesterday: Time for Decider George to hit the road with a Thanksgiving holiday resignation.
- Seriously. We have an economy that’s crashing and a vacuum at the top.
Bush — who is currently on a trip to Peru to meet with Asian leaders who no longer care what he thinks — hasn’t got the clout, or possibly even the energy, to do anything useful.
His most recent contribution to resolving the fiscal crisis was lecturing representatives of the world’s most important economies on the glories of free-market capitalism.
Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible.
Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush.
In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.)
Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20.
Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.
…
Can I see a show of hands? How many people want George W. out and Barack in?
And Collins said it’s been tried before when Senator J. William Fulbright suggested Harry Truman leave early — Truman called him “Halfbright” for the rest of his life.
Read Collins’ piece here.
And Obama’s quick elevation to president would halt, or at least slow down Decider George’s final lethal thrust into the heart of US peoples — a lunge which would fester for generations.
In another Times editorial set for Sunday:
- As the sun sets on the Bush administration, the survival rite known as burrowing is under way. Burrowing is when favored political appointees are transformed into civil servants and granted instant tenure on the federal payroll.
There is, of course, nothing new in this cynical practice.
Dozens of political loyalists were burrowed in the final months of the Clinton administration.
But the score of Bush burrowers who have so far come to light bring with them the worst pro-industry, anti-regulatory biases that have made this administration such a disaster.
At the Interior Department, six senior managers were brazenly burrowed as a package.
One of the protected appointees was earlier criticized by the agency’s inspector general for overriding career experts in the field to deliver a posh grazing agreement to a Wyoming rancher.
Another has survived in a management position affording clout to continue the scandalous mining industry bias of the Bush years.
…
It’s encouraging that the president-elect recognizes that to make the changes he’s promising — and deliver a government that will protect and help its citizens — he will need energized, rather than alienated, federal workers.
His aides will have to circumvent or dump any Bush burrowers intent on sabotaging that effort.
So, Decider George?
Don’t let the door smack you in the ass on the way-freakin’-out!
Ice Tea with History
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
A reunion of history sipping ice tea and savoring the memories.
Journalism became a celebrity job in the mid 1970s, surging upward an already-emerging elite, near-aristocratic class of news people, from the copy desk, reporters, editors, to the executive suites, and this mechanism of modern media received its biggest boost from a “two-bit burglary.”
(Illustration found here).
A special occasion.
From the Santa Rosa, CA local newspaper the Press Democrat:
- Iced tea accompanied a historic moment in Santa Rosa this past weekend when famed Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein came by to see and thank their secret source, 95-year-old Mark “Deep Throat” Felt.
The two-hour visit at Felt’s home was an especially big deal to Bernstein.
He had never before met Felt, the FBI’s former No. 2 man and one-time heir apparent to J. Edgar Hoover.
Back in the early 1970s, when Felt furtively and bravely helped guide two young Washington Post reporters onto a trail of corruption that led to Richard Nixon’s White House, it was always Woodward who rendezvoused in the shadows with his highly placed source.
For Joan Felt, who lives with her father and his attendant, Yara Tikoilakeba, in a house off Guerneville and Marlow roads, it was potent and enthralling to sit in her own living room with her dad and the storied Woodward-Bernstein.
“They were just so gracious and so loving,” Joan said. “They really thanked Dad for his contributions.”
Felt’s memory is not so good nowadays.
- Woodward told reporters afterward that the visit with Felt “was like a family reunion. He’s 95. He’s full of dignity and grace. He doesn’t have a memory, really. But there was a connection we made.”
Bernstein said it was quite clear to him that Mark Felt “had moments of clarity.
“He recognized some things,” he said. “It was a private visit — a closing of the circle. We are both very glad we did it. It was evident he was glad.”
The ‘storied Woodward-Bernstein‘ changed the face of journalism forever as their own personal stars rose high over the established firmament.
Of course, just about everyone knows of the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Watergate complex in DC, a small, insignificant event at the time — the New York Times ran its story on page 30 — but the stalwart Washington Post reporters dogged the information to its conclusion, which screamed that the media can indeed upset the cart of government.
The story wasn’t hurt by the culture-event of the mid-70s, the public goings-on at the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities — the Watergate hearings — where the drama of Dick Nixon’s crowd played itself out before the world.
And the storied Bernstein and Woodward?
The Washington Post snagged a Pulitzer Prize, the boys quickly banged-out All the President’s Men, detailing how the Post stories came about and the rest is media history.
Two years after the book came the movie with Bob Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein and the rocket was launched.
Many young reporters all over America began to fancy themselves as Hoffman playing Bernstein — chain-smoking, intense, digging for the journalistic nuggets, which could lead to riches.
Woodward stayed at the Post and for the next 30 years cranked out a number of tomes on all kinds of subjects and people, a list is available here and has grown into a kind of media-establishment guy.
Bernstein, meanwhile, hit the road running.
He partied hardy, dating the likes of Bianca Jagger, Martha Stewart and Elizabeth Taylor (according to Wikipedia) and even arrested for drunk driving, and became the subject of an ex-wife’s Heartburn.
Nowadays, he’s an editor at Vanity Fair. Bernstein left the Post in 1977, and worked for ABC News, where he broke the story of America’s secret backing of the Afghan Mujahadeen.
He has also written for Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, among many others.
Both Bernstein and Woodward have lived lives they could not have imagined in early spring 1972.
And what about the above mentioned Mr. Felt, who remained cloaked only in the cloak of “Deep Throat” for three decades and was known only as the voice of actor Hal Holbrook?
A whistleblower of the century that propelled the young Post reporters and journalism in general into the realm of knighthood is 95-years-old, a telling sign for anybody.
Without Felt there would be no Watergate, no Nixon resignation and no celebrity journalism.
Ice tea for history.
Conundrum: Word!
Filed Under Media, Musings, Politics | Leave a Comment
Even here in the far reaches of northern California, life appears as a dilemma.
If one ponders the entangled proceedings bursting at the seams, many questions arise in which the answer lies within the question itself, where the reply means more than the words — A horse goes into a bar, bartender asks, ‘Why the long face?’
A wonder becomes a search for the where-to-all in which is portrayed as the nowadays.
As a liquor-store clerk, I get requests a lot from customers about particular whiskies or beers or wines — would we happen to have this certain item in stock?
Usually it’s some off-the-wall scotch that’s being sought, however, as there’s a shitload of them sonofbitches, and although we’ve a good-sized selection, most of the time, the customer is forced to leave empty-handed, a bit crestfallen.
This past week a lady came in and asked for a wine called ‘Conundrum.’
After figuring out the proper spelling, our way-out-dated computer/inventory list showed indeed at least the store had at one time carried that particular label — alas, she also went away crestfallen.
Just after she’d gone, I passed our little news rack and spied a headline blaring out at me from the local daily; one of the words in the head was ‘conundrum,’ although I didn’t really get the context, coincidence of such an odd occurrence tipped my already wobbly brain.
(Illustration of The Enigma by Gustave Doré found here).
Of a word I cannot pronounce out loud — it looks hard — what does ‘conundrum’ actually mean?
There is indeed a wine ‘Conundrum,’ details found here, which relies on meaning to explain a blend of five grapes that are “quite unlike.”
The definition of conundrum is “a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun. A paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma.”
A tongue-twisting, mind-stretching kind of thing — an enigma bundled tightly within a mystery, reflecting a face of perplexity.
Last summer, yahoo.com posed the question of what does ‘conundrom’ mean?
Some responses:
Isn’t it a type of housing development?
It is a brain-teaser.
What you wear when you have sex.
A self-referential puzzle.
It’s a problem that some jacka$$ decided to make a fancy word for problem just to confuse us even more.
That last guy had it nailed.
As one watches this economy slowly, still yet, slowly grind to a metal-piercing stop, the word ‘conundrum’ brings the entire picture into clear focus: In clarity, the picture is out of focus, even when adjusting some optical device, the images are still indistinct, although a peep-hole prism allows some narrative, some perception of movement, figures, but no overall plot, meaningless with French-movie ambitions for mystery, terror and fright — The answer is not the question.
One set of shapes absolutely, near-positive clear, however: Jacka$$
Yesterday, three such creatures golden-parachuted into DC seeking conundrum funds.
From ABC News:
- The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler may have told Congress that they will likely go out of business without a bailout yet that has not stopped them from traveling in style, not even First Class is good enough.
All three CEOs — Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler — exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM’s $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.
And this from the Wall Street Journal on the Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke visit to the House Financial Services Committee, also on Wednesday:
- Both Democrats and Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee were pointedly critical about the implementation of the rescue plan passed by Congress in October.
Lawmakers focused on Mr. Paulson’s announcement last week that Treasury wouldn’t use the TARP to purchase bad assets — the rescue plan’s original intent — as well as the administration’s vacillations about which firms are eligible and how the program will be conducted.
“Changing too quickly, without adequately explaining why you’ve changed or what you’re going to do next, risks sending mixed signals to a marketplace that is in dire need of certainty and a sense of direction,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the panel’s top Republican.
Although factors leading to this current catastrophic financial/economic/environment/military/deeply-personal situation has been in place for generations, the end meltdown appeared extremely-fast, which can be accounted somewhat to the rapid-movement, blink-of-an-eye flow of information.
The spiral down will be fairly rapid from here.
Contradictory statements that may nonetheless be true, the paradox now facing the so-called global village, a name ironic with the spread of disaster.
Humankind is involved within an epistemic paradox: The “Surprise Test.”
- “A teacher announces that there will be a surprise test next week.
A student objects that this is impossible: The class meets on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
If the test is given on Friday, then on Thursday I would be able to predict that the test is on Friday. It would not be a surprise.
Can the test be given on Wednesday? No, because on Tuesday I would know that the test will not be on Friday (thanks to the previous reasoning) and know that the test was not on Monday (thanks to memory).
Therefore, on Tuesday I could foresee that the test will be on Wednesday. A test on Wednesday would not be a surprise.
Could the surprise test be on Monday? On Sunday, the previous two eliminations would be available to me.
Consequently, I would know that the test must be on Monday. So a Monday test would also fail to be a surprise.
Therefore, it is impossible for there to be a surprise test.”
So, there it is?
Corruption Is As Corruption Does
Filed Under Musings, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Villainy from a master.
Corruption is Decider George’s real middle name — along with a nasty form of depravity named Karl Rove — and this innate form of life has spilled over into Iraq, an original corrupt state, where pocketing US cash has become a habit.
In a war started with lies, the only recourse would be to continue the corruption of truth, the old fox and the hen-house routine only in billions of dollars.
Not long after ‘shock and awe,’ the new US protectorate managed to loose $12 billion, some of it delivered out the tailgate of a pick-up truck.
(Illustration found here).
And from Radio Free Europe this morning:
- Iraq has charged more than 300 officials with corruption this year and courts handed down 86 convictions, its corruption watchdog has said, as a nation awash in oil money fought back against graft.
Iraq is perceived as being the world’s third most corrupt country, with only failed state Somalia and Myanmar’s military junta below it, according to the Transparency International index measuring perceptions of graft in 180 nations.
Last June, a BBC investigation revealed near $23 billion has been lost or otherwise, in so many words, mishandled or stolen by US contractors doing business in Iraq, which doesn’t include the nearly 200,000 weapons — pistols, AK-47s, to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades — discovered to be unaccounted for, or simply, just “missing.”
Not only has Decider George’s Iraqi adventure a failure, but it’s made a terrible problem worse, opening boils of corruption, creating an even-more easy environment for graft, which can lead to bankrolling insurgents, or engender a kind of ironic blow back — Blackwater, the private pro-protector provider, is being investigated for smuggling weapons into Iraq by secreting them in dog food, placing the weapons “on the inside of pallets next to the dog food bags to prevent corrupt foreign customs agents and shipping workers from stealing them.”
A good smuggling operation can be sorely hampered by corruption.
However, what’s one to do about it?
According to the New York Times yesterday:
- The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is systematically dismissing Iraqi oversight officials, who were installed to fight corruption in Iraqi ministries by order of the American occupation administration, which had hoped to bring Western standards of accountability to the notoriously opaque and graft-ridden bureaucracy here.
…
One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.
…
Mr. Maliki’s stance on oversight was most vividly illustrated by his long-running feud with Judge Rathi al-Rathi, the former head of the Commission on Public Integrity, an oversight agency created by the Coalition Provisional Authority.
After Mr. Rathi’s corruption investigations repeatedly embarrassed the Maliki government, the prime minister’s office supported corruption charges against Mr. Rathi himself.Mr. Rathi’s backers considered the charges to be trumped-up.
Ultimately, Mr. Rathi was forced out and fled Iraq in the summer of 2007, saying he had received numerous threats to his life.
He was recently granted asylum in the United States, said Chris King, a former United States Embassy official who was a senior adviser to the integrity commission.
Nuri learned from one of the best.
Decider George’s administration might be one of the most corrupt — in fact, he’s the fourth ranked most corrupt, behind Ulysses Grant, Warren Harding and Dick Nixon, according to mostcorrupt.com, although Rolling Stone tapped him the “Worse President in History” two years ago.
The last near-eight years has been termed corruption on steroids, from Jack Abramoff and Alberto Gonzales to torture lies, or just plain lying or just plain old incompetence.
All this leading to a mounting pressure on President-Elect Obama to investigate all kinds of bad shit from the Bush White House.
And Decider George’s Rovian influence might end up biting him on the ass.
Time last Friday:
- Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years of controversy at the Bush Justice Department.
Now new documents highlight alleged misconduct by the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney and other prosecutors in the case, including what appears to be extensive and unusual contact between the prosecution and the jury.
Forrest Gump’s mama used to say, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’
Osama as Political Patsy?
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In full Arabic transliteration his name is Usāmah bin Muḥammad bin`Awaḍ bin Lādin.
In the West, however, in English-language mass media, it’s simply Osama.
The original bad boy of modern times.
The US military has been fighting and killing thousands of people all over the globe in the past decade searching for the reported mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, among other dastardly deeds.
Or has Osama been used as a kind of poster child to reinforce the infamous Global War on Terror?
(Illustration found here).
Juan Cole in his daily-must-see blog Informed Comment makes note this morning of a forthcoming French documentary which says Decider George and his minions want Osama alive and at large in order to justify the horribly-failed GWOT.
What an ugly, disgusting thought, but nowhere shocking or disturbing.
According to Cole, “The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so.”
Cole displays the translated text.
Some snippets:
- Facing the facts in this Usamah film is a bitter and disturbing experience and will make you nervous and wish that what it is that you are watching is just a baseless rumour, or a figment of Hollywood’s imagination.
But it is not.
The pictures are real and you are facing a debate in documentary form.
The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin-Ladin and the Al-Qa’idah terrorist network.
George Bush, with his “war on terror” project, has transformed the middle east and Afghanistan into an inflamed bomb ready to explode, but has not found out anything about his beloved lost Usamah Bin-Ladin so far.
What is seen, and the film also emphases this, is that all these slogans, this fighting and killing are a game, a painful and prolonged game whose end even the players do not know and which is running out of control.
Apparently, it is a game of cat and mouse, just like “Tom and Jerry”, the famous cartoon.
But it is a reality that the stubborn one from Texas does not want to catch the mouse — unlike credulous Tom — and that the long-bearded Wahhabi Arab does not want to hide — unlike the intelligent and roaming Jerry.
Their prolonged game has made not only the audiences tired but has also transformed the playground into a big pool of blood.
Decider George and his entire administration should be held accountable for the horror only he has not only created, but allowed to continue just to keep the blood flowing.
Osama, or Usamah, or whatever, can only be laughing his ass way, way off.
‘Balls’
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Insights into the little dust up in the Caucasus region last summer keeps coming into the light just about every day.
The West wanted to believe the Russians were the bad guys in the Georgia war, even Jackboot John McCain blubbered, “We are all Georgians” during the conflict, but the facts on the ground seemed to point another way and into some man-to-man bullshit talk.
From the UK’s timesonline this morning:
- Nicolas Sarkozy saved the President of Georgia from being hanged “by the balls” — a threat made last summer by Vladimir Putin, according to an account that emerged yesterday from the Élysée Palace.
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With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government.
According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.
Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked.
“Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”
Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?”
Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”
Cute, figured Nicolas:
- Mr Saakashvili, who was in Paris to meet Mr Sarkozy yesterday, laughed nervously when a French radio station read him the exchange.
“I knew about this scene, but not all the details. It’s funny, all the same,” he said.
(h/t to Lawyers, Guns and Money).
The whole shebang might just be back-ass backwards.
Fog of war or lies?
Only boots on the ground can tell as the New York Times reported last week:
- Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.
…
President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.
We thinks Mr. Saakashvili should really be tightening his jock strap.
Obama & Iran = Huh?
Filed Under Musings, Orwellian, Politics | Leave a Comment
Rhetoric dreams fade fast when confronted with political reality.
Despite President-Elect Obama calling for easy, unconditional talks with just about everybody, and for quickly getting US GIs out of Iraq, reality bites the ass of expectations.
How quickly should troops leave, however, is the main concern, especially with the Pentagon.
Obama’s stance on Iran, however, has a ‘what the shit?’ under-taste, like, this dude should have better sense.
Indications are he’s shifting views from the openness expressed during the CNN/YouTube debate last year to a kind of clinched fist approach voiced in a July speech to a pro-Israel group.
Iran should be way down on the list for really big problems.
Indeed, a better relationship with Iran could help the looming catastrophic disaster that’s Afghanistan.
(Illustration was found here).
Instead, Obama presented a fairly strong voice in his first press conference toward Iran, even downplaying a congratulatory message from its boogie-man president.
- US President-elect Barack Obama said on Friday that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was “unacceptable” and he would “respond appropriately” to a congratulatory letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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“It has only been three days since the election,” he added. “Obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion.
“I think we’ve got to think it through.”
Think about what?
A piece at investigative post atlargely.com has the narrative line:
- I firmly believe that Obama was the best of two choices and that he’ll make the world safer by being less likely by far to carry through on belligerent rhetoric that ignores the facts as they are known — but let’s not stick our heads in the sand about his oft-repeated words and what they in fact mean.
He has ignored/denied the IAEA and NIE findings almost as much as Bush or McCain have, doubtless for his own political reasons. (I refuse to believe he’s so dumb as to actually 100% believe his bald claim that Iran is actively seeking nukes in the face of the extant evidence.)
The National Intelligence Estimate last winter on Iran’s nuclear weapons program dropped a anti-Decider George bomb that the Iranians had discontinued atom warfare activities in 2003.
Not to mention Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa, which forbids the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons and we have a good argument to chill out about the Iranians.
Always-interesting writer (and former Navy guy) Jeff Huber posted some acute observations today on Obama’s mental drift into some other netherworld in foreign policy.
- One has to wonder, then, how much of the neocon line on Iran Barack Obama had swallowed when he said at his first post election press conference that, “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon I believe is unacceptable. We have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.”
…
Iran’s conventional forces can’t project power against Israel.
Its army has never operated more than ten miles from its border, and that was in the only war Iran ever fought, one that Iraq started by invading Iran, by the way. (Iran never invaded anybody, which is a lot more than you can say for, um, Israel-yay.)
Iran’s antique air force would shoot itself down or run out of gas before it got halfway across the Persian Gulf, and its coast guard of a navy would sink of natural causes before it reached the Red Sea.
Their navy might be able to close the Strait of Hormuz for a little while, but not to the extent that a barrel of oil would cost the same as a B-2 stealth bomber.
They might be able to embarrass our Navy, if they get lucky.
A torpedo up the prop locker of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier might put it out of action for the duration; we might even have to tow one of those behemoths all the way home. It’s pretty near impossible to sink a carrier, though. The Klingons might be able to pull it off, but like Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the Klingons don’t actually exist.
…
Less than 10 percent of is Iran is arable.
The rest is mainly mountain and desert. Iran’s population and infrastructure are gathered in eight major cities. If Iran ever were to acquire a nuclear weapon and put it in a ballistic missile and launch it at someone, the retaliation would effectively end the 6,000-year old Persian civilization in the course of an afternoon.
Read Huber’s post here.
We just hope Obama has enough audacity to stay the right course.
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