‘Change’ = ? = WTF!
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Change out my wizened, ancient ass!
Yesterday from CREW – Citizens for Responsibility And Ethics In Washington — on the so-called Valerie Plame Wilson episode:
CREW learned today that the Obama administration is opposing our request that the Supreme Court reconsider the dismissal of the lawsuit, Wilson v. Libby, et al.
In that case, the district court had dismissed the claims of Joe and Valerie Wilson against former Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Richard Armitage for their gross violations of the Wilsons’ constitutional rights.
Agreeing with the Bush administration, the Obama Justice Department argues the Wilsons have no legitimate grounds to sue.
It is surprising that the first time the Obama administration has been required to take a public position on this matter, the administration is so closely aligning itself with the Bush administration’s views.
(Illustration found here).
When Obama was elected last November, the whole affair was akin to a daydream.
After eighth years of a living nightmare, this was the kind of change the US could put its grip on and feel good about.
Alas, now nearly four months into his administration, Obama’s curtain has been parted and the wizard is exposed — Nothing really has changed.
Starting with his “business as usual” slection of his financial inner circle to continuing the foreign policy operations from up the ass of Dick Cheney, Obama has already proven he’s not the man of the vast-throngs that voted for him, but instead for the powermongers in DC.
Even in explaining his decision to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay was softened by his speech this morning:
After September 11, “faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions,” he said.
“I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often, our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.”
Is he shitting us — ‘motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people’ — ?
Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were so removed from any kind of sincerity the very thought makes one want to blow chunks.
Paul Craig Roberts via antiwar.com ties the whole bullshit together:
America has lost her soul, and so has her president.
A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony.
The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.
The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms.
But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.
The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies.
Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.
…
Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that “sovereign immunity” protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens.
Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.
…
Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military/security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.
Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language.
He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric.
The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words that now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony.
No shit, Sherlock!
Change we can’t even believe in and there’s now nothing to do but watch.
‘IRF-ed’ — Biblically Speaking
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Mad as Hell, Media, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
The terror/shame of America.
(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!
Tartuffery
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Mad as Hell, Media | Leave a Comment
Why the US talks out the ass.
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.
Killin’ Themselves
Filed Under Just Plain War, Mad as Hell, Media | Leave a Comment
“Suicide is painless,” and yes indeed it does bring on many changes, but with the game of life hard to play, since it’s gonna be lost anyway, to win is to cheat, lay it down before gettin’ beat…
Paraphrasing a description of a definite blowback from two ugly wars grinding this country into dust.
(Illustration of ‘Suicide’ by Ralph Sirianni found here).
This afternoon from CNN:
- The Army said 24 soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in January alone — six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, according to statistics released Thursday.
The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.
If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January.
“This is terrifying,” an Army official said. “We do not know what is going on.”
What a dumb-ass remark — what’s going on is an army too small is fighting wars that are so huge, so out-of-hand, brutal and seemingly endless, thus creating a continuous US GI shuttle into meat-grinding combat zones.
So lopsided:
- Since 2005, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the lives of two soldiers from the Utah National Guard.
Suicide has claimed 10.
Last year, the Rand Corp. reported in a study that “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment…”
Hopefully Eric Shinseki, most likely President Obama’s most-perfect department pick, will give the VA a good kick to rev-up its capabilities to handle an-even more unique situation that Vietnam.
Shinseki does sound good, though:
- “I am now watching all of our efforts to understand PTSD, TBI, substance abuse amongst our veterans and have a better appreciation of what we put my comrades through when we came back” from Vietnam, he said.
“None of these programs were available, in fact. None of these terms were in vogue then. We still don’t understand enough. We are still learning.”
…
“One of the things we have done at the VA is that we’ve taken mental health from being in a separate part of the complex and moved it into the primary-care area to reduce the stigma of someone having to go to that part of the hospital,” he explained.
…
Suicide attempts are also a major issue for the VA, Shinseki said.
The department has a national suicide hotline that got 67,000 calls from veterans and some active duty personnel between October 2007 and October 2008 and managed to intervene to prevent suicides in 1,700 cases. Over the past three months, he added, the hotline has helped intervene on 700 calls.
“We are doing more. Not enough. We are learning as we go,” he noted.
Maybe it’s the emotion.
Maybe good, old George Carlin nailed it right (again!) and the problem lies with the reality of words — post-traumatic stress disorder has lost that searing emotion of the original term for the battle condition, “shell shock,” first diagnosed in WWI.
Carlin explained in his bit about US peoples propensity for euphemistic language, the condition, “shell shock,” was more accurate: “Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables. Sounds almost like the guns themselves.”
However, by WWII the same condition had been downgraded in emotional sound to “battle fatigue,” which to Carlin became less real: “Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to be as hard to say. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock.”
In Korea, the same condition had morphed into “Operational Exhaustion,” a Madison Avenue catchphrase: “Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase now. It’s totally sterile now. Operational Exhaustion: sounds like something that might happen to your car.”
And then Vietnam.
- And thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen.
And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I bet you, if we’d still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I bet you that.
We’d bet, too, Mr. Carlin.
Read the whole langauge monologue here.
Not Done It Pundit
Filed Under Mad as Hell, Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Another brick in the wall.
The DOD’s IG says the DOD did nothing illegal in the DOD’s TV news military analysts program:
- But in the new report, the inspector general’s office, noting the absence of a clear legal definition of propaganda, said there was an “insufficient basis” to conclude that the program had violated laws prohibiting the government’s domestic use of it.
(Illustration found here).
Last April, the New York Times ran a huge piece on the Pentagon’s use of retired military officers on TV news programs — instigated before the Iraqi invasion — and used DOD talking points in pushing the run-up to the war and all the military bullshit that appeared in the wake of the disaster.
Read the entire Times piece here.
Since the broadcast news organizations were up to their CBS’ eyeballs in the whole sordid business, there’s been a near-complete TV news blackout of the entire affair, even with the Pentagon quietly closing down the program last summer.
This IG report has already churned up a bit of a stir — the whole inquiry was restricted, as related in the Times story today, the IG itself limited itself in “search parameters” of different subjects, especially looking into the shenanigans of one slime-ball retired general, Barry R. McCaffrey, claiming investigators had been unable to document any instance where military analysts had used their special access — scores of meetings with senior officials, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, hundreds of pages of briefing materials — “to achieve a competitive advantage for their company.”
Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH) told TPM the report a nice parting gift to the Bush White House from the Pentagon.
And Hodes is also quoted by the Times with a similar remark: “To say there are factual inaccuracies in this report is the understatement of the century. I think it is a whitewash.”
Next month, the Government Accountability Office is supposed to complete its own report on the Pentagon’s pundit program.
The Federal Communications Commission, which has regulatory oversight of broadcasters, is also reportedly investigating.
Piss poor Pentagon pundit planning, if you ask me.