Just Plain Gall vs Unmitigated Gall
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, history, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the last few years there’s been a momentous outburst of gall — the audacity of some people to bullshit despite incredible evidence to the contrary — which has touched just about every aspect of US life, especially in politics.
Two such unrelated examples occurred this past weekend, one involved GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry and the other concerned the former US vice president, The Dick.
(Illustration found here).
Due to a tilted MSM, this gall bullshit is allowed to be played out on the media wires without so much as a ‘Hey, wait a minute,” and certainly no saying ‘that’s a lie.’
A public lambasted by continuous crap comes to believe the crap is real — this caused by some like the Tea Party nit-twits who just don’t give a shit.
In the Perry case, the story is race.
Born and raised in the US Deep South (don’t hold that against me), I understand the culture of racism as a normal byproduct of ordinary life — I got outta there as soon as I could.
And with my own children’s upbringing (a single parent, I raised five kids near-about alone), there were two words that were never heard or spoken in my household on threat of great bodily harm — one was the combination of god and damn together, and the other, the “n” word for African-Americans.
The kids would sometimes blurt out the first one in anger (much to my consternation, and to their credit, they’d apologize, or at least look sheepish), but never, ever used the second.
Of course, all other words were fair game — we could make the late George Carlin blush.
Anyway, the thing on Perry arrived Sunday via a story in the Washington Post:
In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“Niggerhead,” it read.
Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s.
There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property.
In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country.
Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.
But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor.
Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.
When asked last week, Perry said the word on the rock is an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”
Perry claims the rock was painted over near immediately.
Others differ:
“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”
…
Another local who visited the property with Perry and the legislators in those years recalled seeing the rock with the name clearly visible.
“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’ ” said this person, who did not want to be named, fearing negative consequences from speaking on the subject.
The Perry camp pushed back: “A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible. The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.”
Right, and a minor example of gall as explained by this from the Post story:
Mae Lou Yeldell, who is black and has lived in Haskell County for 70 years, recalled a gas station refusing to sell her father fuel when he drove the family through Throckmorton in the 1950s. She said it was not uncommon in the 1950s and ’60s for whites to greet blacks with, “Morning, nigger!”
“I heard that so much it’s like a broken record,” said Yeldell, who had never heard of the hunting spot by the river.
Even in my red-neck of the Alabama woods I never heard such ugly racial shit as the above.
Hence use of simple gall in repudiating the whole thing.
However, unmitigated gall was displayed this weekend by The Dick.
On CNN yesterday (via Raw Story), The Dick offered praise for President Obama in the war on terror, but then demanded an apology from Obama not using the old bullshit phrase, “war on terror” and the old boy is still stung by Obama’s 2009 Cario speech.
“It matters a lot,” Cheney said. “In terms of the signals that are sent by the commander-in-chief with respect to the kind of efforts that are going to be used, what we expect our people to be doing.
He needs to be clear with what he’s doing, and he clearly is fighting a war.
I agree with the attacks.
But don’t get wrapped up in your underwear then trying to go back and validate the foolish things said in their campaign.”
…
“They need to call it what it is,” he said.
“When he goes to Cairo and in-effect says we walked away from ideals, we forgot our core principles and values on our (the Bush Administration’s) watch, that’s a big mistake.”
When (CNN moderator Candy) Crowley asked if he wanted an apology from Obama, Cheney said, “I would. Not for me, but I think for the Bush Administration and that he misspoke when he gave that speech two years ago.”
Cheney’s aughter Liz added: “I think he (Obama) did tremendous damage. I think he slandered the nation and I think he owes an apology to the American people.”
One almost has to do a double-take on that huge pile of bullshit.
The Dick and George Jr. are war criminals, no doubt and no amount of unmitigated gall will change that cold-hard fact.
A Decade of Poo
Filed Under Everything, history, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Coming upon the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, the stories are starting to pile up on the history of it all, though, the biggest single reminder of that event can be seen nowadays and the view is not pleasant.
Despite what the pundits and the GOP blubber, the attack on the World Trade Center turned the US into a large, near-useless pile of shit.
The problem isn’t US peoples, the issue belongs to the assholes in Washington, D.C., who allowed a horrible tragedy to become entangled in a much, much-bigger tragedy and that’s the fall of the House of America — in a just one short decade, the US led the world into spinning completely out of control.
And the world and its peoples are far less safe because of it.
(Illustration found here).
While the US (and the world as it seems) is more concerned about weather right now than anything — Tropical Storm Lee is dying, leaving a huge amount flooding on the Texas coast and is spreading the water up into the Tennessee Valley, while at the same time, Hurricane Katia is gaining strength as it churns through the Atlantic, this morning south-southwest of Bermuda — the spirit of the 9/11 attacks looms large in the media.
There’s all kinds of stories — even on CBS is a new video of the crash of United Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field — and in the next few days, leading up to Sunday, most-likely there will be a ton of such stories.
But what was it all about, and what’s happened in the ensuing decade?
War, famine and disaster, that’s what.
Noted UK correspondent, Robert Fisk, has an essay up at The Independent on the lie of 9/11, and comes up without an answer beyond, why.
The money bit:
But I’m drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11.
“All the evidence … indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level,” they write.
One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel.”
Palestine, the authors state, “was certainly the principal political grievance … driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg”.
The motivation for the attacks was “ducked” even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors.
The commissioners had disagreed on this “issue” — cliché code word for “problem” — and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: “This was sensitive ground …Commissioners who argued that al-Qa’ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa’ida’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.”
And there you have it.
So what happened?
The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, “settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive.”
There’s a hint in the official report — but only in a footnote which, of course, few read.
In other words, we still haven’t told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – “changed the world for ever.”
Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I’m really not surprised.
Despite what George Jr. blubbered nine days after the WTC attack: “Americans are asking `Why do they hate us?’ They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
The problem with that — a lie.
Osama and his boys were just involved in what’s called ‘Blowback,’ a retribution for the US foreign policy of shit-kicking anyone we wanted in their own lands.
And then George Jr. pulled his own US version of a blowback scheme and it’s been horrifying.
A New York Times editorial last week:
Historians will label the events of that September morning 10 years ago as the most destructive act of terrorism ever committed up to that time.
But I suspect they will also judge America’s last decade as one of history’s worst overreactions.
Of course, overreaction is what terrorists hope to provoke.
If judged by that standard, 9/11 was also one of history’s most successful terrorist acts, dragging the United States into two as yet unresolved wars, draining the treasury of $1 trillion and climbing, as well as damaging America’s power and prestige.
These wars have empowered our enemies and hurt our friendships, and have almost certainly generated more terrorists than they have killed.
And it never ends, mainly because George Jr. and his guru, The Dick, have attempted to re-write history.
Read a most-excellent post at Daily Kos on how George Jr.’s administration not only screwed up defending the US, but were still able to maintain their arrogant incompetence.
Quite a hat trick.
The always noted Frank Rich explains his version of the event in a piece at The New Yorker, and hence dips into the horror of the last 10 years.
And the debris it created.
Some bits:
Now, ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on.
Decades are not supposed to come in tidy packages mandated by the calendar’s arbitrary divisions, but this decade did.
For most Americans, the cloud of 9/11 has lifted.
Which is not to say that a happier national landscape has been unveiled in its wake.
…
National unity proved to be short-lived.
An extreme, jingoistic patriotism soon gripped the land, accompanied by a rigid code of political correctness.
You were either with the White House or you were with the terrorists.
If you didn’t subscribe to what Joan Didion called the “fixed ideas” of 9/11, then it could be said “the terrorists have won.”
ABC News found its patriotism questioned when it dared ban flag pins for its on-air journalists; the journalist William Langewiesche was heckled at readings for his book American Ground, a scrupulous firsthand account of the marathon ground-zero cleanup in which not every participant emerged a saint.
Each time Hollywood attempted earnest (if less than brilliant) dramatizations like Flight 93 and World Trade Center, it would cue a debate about whether it was “too soon” to go there.
The most famous journalistic photo of 9/11, Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man,” was banished from view following its morning-after appearance in the Times.
…
In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street.
This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within.
…
In such an alternative telling of the decade’s history, the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy.
It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead.
Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it.
But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his “hope” that “they make no sacrifice whatsoever” beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him.
Bush would soon implore us to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping.
Read the whole post, worth the time.
And it’s hard to believe in the few days after Sept. 11, 2001, the entire world was on the side of the US — yes, even the Iranians marched in the streets in support of all US peoples.
Then….
Re-brand the Brand
Filed Under Literary, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Apparently, the late Osama bin Laden was tired of his brand name — al-Qaeda just didn’t have the kick and the joke-juice necessary to kill the crowd.
All organizations from time-to-time have to take a painful look at themselves, and it seems Osama was in the same fix, needing some kind of reboot to alter the ugly perceptions brought on by mass killings, which ultimately could get in the way of the group’s bottom line — more mass killings.
Osama just needed some space to brainstorm the problem — but there’s the boom, time’s up.
(Illustration found here).
From Wired:
The Associated Press reports that some of bin Laden’s final writings display an obsession with how far al-Qaida’s brand had fallen.
While the United States has flagellated itself for years for losing the information wars in the Muslim world, bin Laden thought he was worse off, irreparably tainting his terrorist organization by killing too many Muslims.
He started brainstorming new names.
The problem is that bin Laden sucks as a brand manager.
One of his new handles for al-Qaida? “Monotheism and Jihad Group.”
That was the original name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s bloodthirsty al-Qaida franchise in Iraq that killed so many Muslims that Ayman Zawahiri begged Zarqawi to stop.
When Zarqawi didn’t listen, he lost his Iraqi allies, got blown up by the United States, and his group snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Not exactly a model for a new look.
There’s a spot at the bottom of the Wired post where you can submit some original titles of your own.
I’ve always considered, ‘Osama and the Tora Bora Terror Boys‘ a good catchy name — kind of gives the organization that folksy, Pete Seeger, hootenanny type of feel to it.
And now, after Seal Team Six, ‘Obama Nails Osama,’ though, it really doesn’t uplift or inspire terror, mainly the opposite, but it does look good in a newspaper headline.
Sham War
Filed Under Bullshit, Media, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
A whole shitload of US peoples have nothing between their ears, except maybe emotions placed there by an incompetent, corrupt media and in reality, are like dumb-ass sheep responding to the most-lowest of hysteria.
This past week is a shameful example.
Even as climate change is wrecking havoc upon the US — unimaginable flooding along the Mississippi River, a drought of pre-history proportions in Texas, a horrible spade of ‘unnatural’ tornadoes killing and destroying in the southeast — people are out in the streets blubbering about how great the nation, how wonderful the killing of a guy in a place far, far away.
And without a sliver of a clue.
Kathy Kelly, an activist with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, describes how US drone strikes affect/effect ordinary life in Pakistan in a post at Counterpunch.
The central theme:
Just three days after Osama bin Laden was killed, an attack employing remote-control aerial drones killed fifteen people in Pakistan and wounded four.
Last month, a drone attack killed 44 people in Pakistan’s tribal region.
CNN reports that their Islamabad bureau has counted four drone strikes over the last month and a half. Friday’s suspected drone strike was the 21st this year.
There were 111 strikes in 2010.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that 957 innocent civilians were killed in 2010.
I’m reminded of an encounter I had, in May, 2010, when a journalist and a social worker from North Waziristan met with a small Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation in Pakistan and described, in gory and graphic detail, the scenes of drone attacks which they had personally witnessed: the carbonized bodies, burned so fully they could be identified by legs and hands alone, the bystanders sent flying like dolls through the air to break, with shattered bones and sometimes-fatal brain injuries, upon walls and stone.
“Do Americans know about the drones?” the journalist asked me.
I said I thought that awareness was growing on University campuses and among peace groups.
“This isn’t what I’m asking,” he politely insisted.
“What I want to know is if average Americans know that their country is attacking Pakistan with drones that carry bombs.
Do they know this?”
“Truthfully,” I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Where is your democracy?” he asked me. “Where is your democracy?”
Yes, indeed — on those university campuses this week, however, were the joyous chants of ‘USA, USA’ in the killing of Osama bin Laden without a second (or a third, or maybe even a fourth) thought on the real picture of what the so-called ‘war on terror’ really means.
These kids weren’t even teen-agers on Sept. 11, 2001.
In that regard, Kelley B. Vlahos, in a post at antiwar.com, says it plain:
The result hasn’t exactly been pretty.
While there’s plenty of thoughtful analysis assessing the raid itself — the details and legality, the Pakistani fallout, the impact on the wars in Afghanistan and even Iraq going forward — count on the mainstream media to frame yet another major event down to its lowest common denominator, in a way that indicates Americans are all cynical, narcissistic, brutish, and not to mention a little desperate to prove we can still “get it up.”
Even Jon Stewart at The Daily Show slobbered about Osama’s death without a decade’s worth of context at all — see ‘Big Deady’ here.
And what about the US-led wars, where US GIs are still dying and getting crippled — will Osama’s death mean anything other than more warfare?
US officials in Afghanistan issued warnings Monday to Americans about an increase in violence in country, while at the same time, Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the U.S. military commander responsible for Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, says although Osama’s death “definitely hurt” the insurgency, nothing will change: It’s not the end of the war, as some people are saying,” Campbell said in a telephone interview. “One man doesn’t make the war, and so we’ve got to continue to stay at it.”
Meanwhile, at the same time, US troops in Afghanistan are seemingly a reverse bounce from Osama’s killing: U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan are experiencing some of the greatest psychological stress and lowest morale in five years of fighting, reports a military study.
Meanwhile, too, in Iraq al-Qaeda is getting stronger in a forceful comeback bid while the Iraqi government’s resources are getting weaker — one must remember there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until after the US invasion, as they’re there because we’re there.
Those kids dancing in the streets last week should look beyond Osama bin Laden and the horrible, dumb-ass US foreign policy in the Middle East — a shameful sham.
Osama Madness
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“They gonna make him outta be a martyr.”
– liquor store customer
The above quote came from just one of a ton of customers at my liquor store yesterday, all expressing some form of jubilee at the death of Osama bin Laden and offering a wink-wink at how life will now somehow return to normal.
In fact, that’s all about anyone talked about yesterday — from the talking heads on TV to the steady stream of people after cigarettes or booze.
Odd, too, that a guy nearly forgotten becomes near-literally overnight the ultimate subject matter for everybody.
(Illustration found here).
Out of the mud-hole, however, George Jr.’s people gave credit where none is due.
Even legal beagle Alberto Gonzales in an interview in Texas:
If you study carefully, Obama’s statement last night emphasized the notion that Osama was a military target enemy combatant.
This is a war on terror.
We didn’t send the FBI in there.
We didn’t send law enforcement to get bin Laden.
This is a war on terror.
Bush recognized early on that we needed to have a legal framework of a war on terror.
This was not a law enforcement measure.
President Obama to his credit has continued that framework.
He understands this is more than a law enforcement action on our enemy.
This is a war on terror, and the lawyers worked very, very hard to help the President establish and adopt a legal framework.
What an asshole — ‘legal framework?’
One must remember George Jr. in 2002:
So I don’t know where he is.
You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you.
I’m more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong; that when we find enemy bunched up like we did in Shahikot Mountains, that the military has all the support it needs to go in and do the job, which they did.
…
Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him.
And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure.
And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said.
I truly am not that concerned about him.
I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country.
I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.
Now, of course, we all know George Jr. was lying — right then Tommy Franks was putting together the plans for the invasion of Iraq, so why worry about some insignificant asshole like Osama?
And indeed, due to the outbreak of freedom fighting in the Arab world this spring, Osama had already been placed in the dustbin of history — his killing was his best way to retire from the world’s stage.
From an analysis at Aljazeera English:
Indeed, what must have been most crushing for bin Laden was the rise of the so-called Arab Spring.
The very people in the Arab world whose concerns bin Laden claimed most importantly to represent have revealed the utter fallacy at the heart of Sheikh Osama’s message.
The al-Qaeda leader had long professed that the only means of liberation for the Muslims was to strike at the Western powers who propped up their repressive leaders, and thereby to undo the vast US-led conspiracy to subjugate them.
What the Arab youth have shown is that the means of their liberation is in their own hands, and has always been.
Indeed, they have shown that in the face of their moral example, the Western world, more often than not, will be forced to support them.
Even more importantly, the world which those responsible for the uprisings throughout the Arab world are trying to construct for themselves looks nothing like the dark, obscurantist vision of bin Laden and his core followers.
Even the most radically anti-western of the genuine religious leaders in the Muslim world have long since soundly rejected the Takfiri doctrines perpetrated by al-Qaeda.
…
It may seem an odd analogy, but I am put in mind of a former Hollywood celebrity who had long since been personally repudiated by the public, whose death a number of years ago was described unkindly by one wag as a “good career move”.
The same might easily be said of Osama bin Laden.
He might appear to have died with a bang.
But he had long since died with a whimper.
And ain’t anybody gonna make him outta a martyr.