Julian Assange was released on bail from an UK jail Thursday and confessed his ultimate dread:

Speaking to reporters in London after his release from custody, Assange said: ‘I do not have too many fears about my extradition to Sweden. The much bigger fear is about extradition to the US.’

And into the hands of those without any sense of humanity.

(Illustration found here).

Maybe Assange has gotten wind of Bradley Manning’s situation.
Manning is the 23-year-old US Army private who has been changed with, but not yet convicted of passing classified information to Assange’s WikiLeaks operation — Manning has been held in horrible conditions since his arrest last May.
Another notice of US reality.
Via Raw Story:

Coleen Rowley, a former special agent/legal counsel at the FBI’s Minneapolis division, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Wednesday that it appears Manning was receiving the same type of harsh treatment reserved for terrorism detainees.
“I’ve never heard of punishing someone pre-conviction like this in solitary confinement,” she said.
“It really sounds vindictive and in a way, it seems like some of the harsh interrogation tactics have kind of bled over now into the criminal process, which is just shocking.”

Read Glenn Greenwald’s most-excellent post on Manning’s position within the US legal system — it ain’t pretty.

And all this despite the law.
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House judiciary committee, said Thursday that the prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks goes against the standard of what the US has stood for and maintained for the last 200-plus years.
Again, via Raw Story:

“As an initial matter, there is no doubt that WikiLeaks is very unpopular right now.
Many feel that the WikiLeaks publication was offensive,” Conyers said, according to prepared remarks.
“But being unpopular is not a crime, and publishing offensive information is not either.
And the repeated calls from politicians, journalists, and other so-called experts crying out for criminal prosecutions or other extreme measures make me very uncomfortable.”
…
“But let us not be hasty, and let us not legislate in a climate of fear or prejudice,” Conyers closed, referring to the calls for new laws criminalizing the actions of Wikileaks.
“For, in such an atmosphere, it is our constitutional freedoms and our cherished civil rights that are the first to be sacrificed in the false service of our national security.”

The House Judiciary Committee itself heard from legal experts on Thursday that going after Assange and Wikileaks is not only illegal, but also that ‘excessive government secrecy is a serious problem that needs to be fixed.’

The biggest impact from WikiLeaks is the exposure, once again, of how morally-corrupt the US has become, and the fear rest of the planet has of America.
A most-horrifying shame.

In the ugly aftermath of the WikiLeaks doco-dump. the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blubbered like a baby: “This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community,” Clinton said, following talks in Washington with Turkey’s foreign minister. “We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information” and to prevent future disclosures, she added.
Going even further, Hillary continued: “Every country, including the United States, must be able to have candid conversations about the people and nations with whom they deal. And every country, including the United States, must be able to have honest, private dialogue with other countries about issues of common concern.”

(Illustration found here).

Of course, the operative words here are ‘honest, private dialogue,’ which is in direct contradiction to what the Wiki-Wiki diplomatic cable release revealed — a whole slew of bullshit and illegal activities mired in massive incompetence.
In direct violation of the 1946 United Nations’ convention on UN personnel, Hillary went to spying on everybody.
From the UK’s Daily Mail:

Hillary Clinton ordered American officials to spy on high ranking UN diplomats, including British representatives.
Top secret cables revealed that Mrs Clinton, the Secretary of State, even ordered diplomats to obtain DNA data – including iris scans and fingerprints – as well as credit card and frequent flier numbers.
All permanent members of the security council – including Russia, China, France and the UK – were targeted by the secret spying mission, as well as the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon.
…
The secret ‘national human intelligence collection directive’ was sent to embassies and consulates around the world.
The request could break international law and threatens to derail any trust between the U.S. and other powerful nations.
Requests for IT related information — such as details of passwords, personal encryption keys and network upgrades — could also raise suspicions that the U.S. was preparing to mount a hacking operation.

Although official Washington is all blustered about the WikiLeaks dump, no one anywhere near the top of the chickenshit-pecking order has even mentioned the obvious UN illegalities — diplomacy as spying.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in an interview with Time magazine that Hillary should resign if it turns out she ordered spying at the UN: “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.”
Assange himself, however, is an international fugitive, hounded by everybody.
Interpol is after him for supposedly sex crimes in in Sweden and US Attorney General Eric Holder has reported his department has “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into Assange and WikiLeaks — Fox News mouth-face Mike Huckabee called for nothing “less than execution” for those involved and twit/liar Sarah Palin Facebooked in wonder why Assange was “not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”
Assholes complete.

Noam Chomsky, renowned American linguist and political dissident responded: “What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and of course the Israeli political leadership.”
Malou Innocent in a commentary on the reality of the WikiLeaks leaks:

For years I have told anybody who would listen how U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan contribute to Pakistan’s slow-motion collapse.
Well it appears that my take on the situation was not so over-the-top.
Amid some 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables released by online whistleblower Wikileaks, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson warned in cable traffic that U.S. policy in South Asia “risks destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal.”
…
I’m all for less government secrecy, particularly when U.S. officials are doing bizarre things like tabulating the biometric data of various UN officials, the heads of other international institutions, and African heads of state.
That these supposedly “confidential” communications were so easily leaked highlights the appalling ineptitude of our unwieldy national security bureaucracy.
Indeed, the phenomenon of Wikileaks says as much about government policy as it does about government incompetence.

Hear, hear Hillary.

UPDATE

This morning a bluster of lying bullshit — and from the White House.
Obama front man Bob Gibbs was on NBC’s Today show and offered that the WikiLeaks exposure of Hillary and Assange calling Hillary to resign for spying at the UN was “are both ridiculous and absurd” and US diplomats don’t do spy work.
Who to believe — the US government or all of our collective lying eyes?

Such funny, funny people.

(Illustration found here).

As always, Mark Twain notedly recorded the festivities:

“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.”

As some US peoples sit down to tables stacked with fatness, to gorge themselves, watch TV for several mind-bungling hours, and supposedly give thanks for the fat-ass and arrogant bounty which came via blood and horror.
US history is a shitload of lies wrapped in fuzzy feelings easily embraced by a population underwhelmed by what the last few hundred years has really wrought and live in a vapor of desire to understand, or maybe even care.
Not all US peoples are so swell: 17.4 million households won’t have such a holiday dinner and nearly 15 percent have had problems sometime during the year with “food insecurity” and food stamp use is at a record 40.8 million folks.
Food stuffs is in the eye of the beholder.

Arthur Silber, who can utilize words that cut like a buttered knife through a bird carcass, has a good recent post titled “A Cause For Genuine Thanksgiving” in response to a new upcoming Wikileaks release reportedly coming this week.
Silber’s money bit:

It must be noted that the U.S. government has yet to offer the smallest particle of evidence that any Wikileaks release has damaged “national security” or jeopardized even a single life.
In starkly unforgiving and murderous contrast, the U.S. government and its military have unleashed an immense amount of suffering, brutality and widespread death in country after country over endless, blood-drenched decades.
The constant, but for most people almost entirely muted, soundtrack of our existence is a howling scream of pain as countless lives are mutilated, deformed and ended.
The overwhelming majority of Americans fail even to notice it.
This is simply the way we live — and die.
When unbearable pain is the never-ending theme, we learn to diminish it or ignore it altogether. For most people, the only “solution” is to deaden their souls more every day — or to slowly go mad.
Most Americans choose to murder themselves in slow motion. In this manner, the world — your world — becomes more brutal with every hour that passes.

Black Friday is tomorrow — a recipe for greed.
Gobble-gobble.

As no stranger to alcohol — currently manager of a liquor store and a former brown-bag drunk — I’m not shocked at a new study out of the UK that found that booze is far worse for society than all the usual suspects, like heroin, crack and crystal meth.

(Illustration found here).

Although the usual suspects were bad for the individual, alcohol was far worse for the unwashed masses.
From the BBC:

The findings run contrary to the government’s long-established drug classification system, but the paper’s authors argue that their system — based on the consensus of experts — provides an accurate assessment of harm for policy makers.
“Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm,” the paper says.
“They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy.”
…
The new more complex system ranked alcohol three times more harmful than cocaine or tobacco. Ecstasy was ranked as causing one-eighth the harm of alcohol.

The study was conducted by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs and published in the Lancet, the Brit medical journal.

This little report comes in time for Prop 19 here in California — making marijuana legal — and anyone with any decent-enough sense can see that a doobie is far-less harmful than a few fingers of Jack Daniels.
Pot sets the standard for a double-standard asshole view for people in regards to booze.
The AP examines the study:

Experts said alcohol scored so high because it is so widely used and has devastating consequences not only for drinkers but for those around them.
“Just think about what happens (with alcohol) at every football game,” said Wim van den Brink, a professor of psychiatry and addiction at the University of Amsterdam. He was not linked to the study and co-authored a commentary in the Lancet.
When drunk in excess, alcohol damages nearly all organ systems. It is also connected to higher death rates and is involved in a greater percentage of crime than most other drugs, including heroin.
…
Experts said the study should prompt countries to reconsider how they classify drugs. For example, last year in Britain, the government increased its penalties for the possession of marijuana. One of its senior advisers, David Nutt — the lead author on the Lancet study — was fired after he criticized the British decision.
“What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science,” said van den Brink.
He said considerations about revenue and taxation, like those garnered from the alcohol and tobacco industries, may influence decisions about which substances to regulate or outlaw.
“Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit,” he said.

This past July made it 15 years since I’d had an alcoholic drink — I wish it’d been 30 years.
One of my favorite drinking tricks was to put liquor — beer wasn’t my forte — into the freezer and after a little while the shit went down so smooth, and quick.
Never a mixed-drink fan, I chased it with a bit of water.
What a waste.

A late bloomer with marijuana, I was a senior at the University of Florida when I discovered its most wonderful qualities — I can even remember the date, May 15, 1974, because after I left a friend’s house, stoned as a critter for the first time, went home and watched transfixed as CBS News’ Roger Mudd reported on the Ma’alot massacre terror attack on an Israeli school that killed 16 teenagers — and welcome to real reality.
Pot is a much-weaker sister, however, if combined with booze — you didn’t get higher, you just got more drunk.

And from Saturday’s Sanity Rally was my most-favorite sign: “Why Can’t We Just Get A Bong” — number 47 on a top 100 signs at the gathering found here.

Why not: ‘Toke up, Shriners.’

In the front-page explosion off the San Francisco Examiner, pictured to the left there, are the impressions slapped on the tragedy by all the subsequent death, dying and bullshit, which in the long, perilous run, most-likely worst than the actual horror of 9/11/01 — the word ‘Bastards‘ in a huge headline, and way down below, the real page turner, ‘A Changed America.’

On Monday morning, the day before that Tuesday, I was driving my then-21-year-old daughter to work.
She was living at home during a transition: Her fiance was in the US Navy, stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, and she was concerned about how life would be in the military.
And in a moment of true wisdom, I replied (and in paraphrase), the military is cool right now, not much going on, there’s a lot of benefits, and it’s pretty-much like any other job, then smiling at her with some sarcasm (as I recall), and said, “unless there’s a war.”

(Illustration found here).

Although the memory on the rest of that early-morning conversation is cloudy, those last few words are remembered fairly distinctly — words played and re-played over a near-decade, starting the very-next day.
Damn, didn’t I just open mouth, insert feet, and ass.
What has come to pass since, was-then beyond my imagination.

Not only did the US get attacked that day nine years ago, the entire planet shifted somehow, causing a kind of horrific clock to begin ticking, gearing for a wind-down in the now-an-extreme-near-future.
Back then, I didn’t even know of the term, “blowback,” or of Osama bin Laden/al-Qaeda, and for damn-sight sure, didn’t even consider how dangerous and crazy was George Jr.’s operation.
In the process of history, who’s been more-worse for the US, Osama and his boys, or the Decider and his Dick?

Ted Koppel, a fairly-decent MSMer, in an eloquent piece for the Washington Post this morning, seemed to sum up the vast, overwhelming problem the past near-decade.
Koppel says Bin Laden baited a nasty rat trap, George Jr tried to snatch the cheese, and presto, bad shit hit the fan.
Some good bits:

And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another.
Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves.
Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.
…
Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan.
Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, “black sites,” extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it — more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead.
Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting — for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence — is one of our few growth industries.
…
Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald’s.
Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Read the whole piece — worth it.

Of course, Koppel is concerned with national security and US foreign policy, but George Jr. did so, so much more to create, indeed, a changed America.
And of whom did they (at the Examiner) write in such bold lettering, which bastards?
The US has become a divided, nasty, mean-spirited place, and with the ugly rise of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., this twisted narrative is without-shame spattered across the airwaves, especially with the non-event, so-called ‘ground-zero mosque’ non-controversy.
Via RawStory:

“Here’s the chilling proof that Ground Zero stretches well beyond the boundaries of the World Trade Center site,” Murdoch’s New York Post boasted.
“The map was obtained by The Post from sources after the Fire Department did not respond to requests to review it. It shows that remains were found just 348 feet to the south of the mosque site at 45 Park Place.”
Although the Post article does not make it clear how the map was obtained, it appears that the Fire Department was opposed to its release.
An even more ominous version of the same map, with lurid red dots glowing like puddles of freshly-spilled blood against a dark background, was deployed by the hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends on Friday morning.

There’s a video at the RawStory link of Fox and Friends — bastards.

(Illustration found here).

Similar to peeling the layers off one rotten-assed onion, the horrors of the last presidential administration continues to strike nausea and shame into the very hearts of any US peoples who have any heart left to smell the shit — in the last few weeks bad odorous news has spewed forth from DC about just how corrupt and vile were the years 2001 to 2009.

If the current trend continues, George Jr. and Dick Cheney will be viewed as monsters.

Via antiwar.com on the inquiry by Spain into US “enhanced” techniques:

The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. Military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force.
Despite President Barack Obama’s publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture — and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces’ actions illegal — IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.
…
So notorious are these teams that a new lexicon was created and used by prisoners and guards alike to describe the beatings: “IRF-ing” prisoners or to be “IRF-ed.”
Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described “the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.”
Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners’ “private areas” and Korans to “rile the detainees,” saying it “seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it.
“Those who did were always IRFed.”

The above-mentioned James Yee is the same guy who was harassed out of the military on all sorts of trumped-up bullshit because of his concern for the well-being of other human beings at Guantánamo.
All the charges were eventually dropped.

And while all these “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding… was going on, US defense chief at the time, the dastardedly Don Rumsfeld was dispatching daily the ultra-top secret Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update to George Jr. with Bibical quotes smeared on them.
See some of this creepy, weird and hypocritical shit here at GQ.
Rumsfeld might a backstabbing criminal, but he knew George Jr.
Some background on this craziness can be found at Think Progress.

This particular aspect of the Rumsfeld/Cheney era will be a hot topic right now — there seems to be no end to the uncovering of the workings of the most-corrupt adminstration in this nation’s history.

Frank Rich, once again in the New York Times this morning nails it.
President Obama has to open the can of worms to clean-up US history.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch.
If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Amen, brother!

Churchgoing makes one a much-nicer person:

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified.
Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it.
People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.
Only four in 10 of them did.

(Illustration found here).

Who are these “white evangelical Protestants” you ask? — The GOP!
And George Jr. is right there.
In October 2005:

One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said:
“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”
Mr Bush, who became a born-again Christian at 40, is one of the most overtly religious leaders to occupy the White House, a fact which brings him much support in middle America.

And I guess ‘God’ also told him that if he couldn’t get the right answers out of some people —  just torture the shit out of them.

• The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

Just as President Obama told the Islamic world, “Americans are not your enemy,” some sex-crazed rapist puts the feud back into fuel for extremists.

(Illustration found here).

Reportedly, Andrew Warren, the 41-year-old CIA station chief in Algiers, had made videos of the sexual encounters and were found in his official residence along with the drugs, Valium and Xanax, the perfect date-rape high-ball.
And apparently this episode wasn’t the first.

• The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.

This incident is not only a slap at Muslims, but a real-burn on the CIA.

• “This will be seen as the typical ugly American,” said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. “My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas,” Baer said.
  “From a national security standpoint,” said Baer, the alleged rapes would be “not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that’s something the CIA should have picked up on,” said Baer. “This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency,” he said.

Welcome to the age of the real ugly American, Mr. Leon Panetta.

This effectiveness as a killing tool is obtained by little bomblets scattered about by the dispenser before hitting earth — submuntions in military terms.
Although today about 100 nations will sign a binding document that would ban such weapons, the real shitheads won’t be putting any John Hancocks on the treaty.

• But the big military powers, most, or all, of which are also nuclear-capable — namely the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan — have declined to sign the cluster-bomb ban.

Hypocrisy of weaponry.
Seemingly, the more humanity civilized itself, the less humane its warfare.
India and Pakistan can obliterate a couple of continents and sub-continents, and of course, the US and Russian could reduce the entire planet to ash.

(Illustration found here).

How does President-Elect Obama react?
Last year as senator he backed an amendment to curb the Pentagon’s use of cluster bombs, but what will he do as commander-in-chief in inking the treaty?
Right now, he’s dancing around the subject with thick verbiage.
Reports the New York Times‘ The Lede blog:

• “President-elect Obama is deeply concerned about the well-being of civilians in situations of conflict, as reflected by his support of the legislation in 2006 that would have prohibited the use of cluster munitions near concentrations of civilians. As president, he will carefullly review the new treaty and work closely other countries to ensure that the United States is doing everything feasible to promote protection of civilians in conflict.”
  – Brooke Anderson, Obama’s chief national security spokesperson

One would think with all this change we can believe in stuff, a concept of banning a horrible, and unnecessary, weapon would be a no brainer.
Politics is the US way.

The NYT bog also noted Decider George’s official stance, via the State Department:

• U.S. government officials have stated that “the United States relies on them [cluster munitions] as an important part of our own defense strategy,” and that Washington’s preferred alternative to a ban would be “to pursue technological fixes that will make sure that these weapons are no longer viable once the conflict is over.”

What conflict, asshole?
And a defense strategy — Cluster bomb the Canadians if they decider to invade the US in mass?
Or better yet, and also, use cluster bombs as an alarming deterrent tool for immigration control along the southwestern US?

Innocent victims the bottom line.
According to a Handicap International survey two years ago, casualties off cluster munitions could number a 100,000:

• The full extent of the damage caused by unexploded “bomblets” scattered by the weapons will probably never be known, it says.
  Ninety-eight per cent of the casualties it found were civilian.
  Of the 11,044 cases it discovered, 3,830 people were killed and the remainder injured.

Read the details here.

Get some backbone Barack!

• “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.