(Illustration: The Dick, George Jr., and a Known-Known, posture hypocrisy on an American country road, found here).
In just a few words, a glimpse into the horror-nightmare of Iraq, and a status-update to the current fight to retake Tikrit from the militants: “The animals are eating the corpses of ISIS,” Brig. Resan al-Brahimi, a federal police commander, told the assembled journalists. “The balance has shifted.”
Some indication of the violence level of Iraqi life. Although the Iraqi national army wants to claim a win, the Washington Post story from above (from last night) paints a kind of ambiguous picture of the Tikrit situation at best, colors a bad scene at worse: But the success of the new offensives is yet to be proved, and it is unclear whether Iraqi army forces — which have made up for mass desertions with rapid training of new recruits — will be able to hold retaken ground in areas where anti-government sentiment runs high.
According to the BBC, the offensive has stalled.
Apparently, reality depends upon which ground one is standing.
And in these here United States, our land mass of 2.3 billion acres covers a lot of ground. Almost all blood soaked in a history so warped, the rest of the world just shakes its collective head in disgust. Yet knowing this, they still flock here by the millions — illustrates the depth of the all-encompassing lie.
In my sixth-grade history class, Wounded Knee, for all practical purposes, didn’t exist. Mainstream life so white-washed our past, the deception was reality.
Last week, from Northwest Public Radio and a story on maps depicting Native American tribes:
What makes Carapella’s maps distinctive is their display of both the original and commonly known names of Native American tribes, according to Doug Herman, senior geographer at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
“You can look at [Carapella’s] map, and you can sort of get it immediately,” Herman says.
“This is Indian Country, and it’s not the Indian Country that I thought it was because all these names are different.”
He adds that some Native American groups got stuck with names chosen arbitrarily by European settlers.
They were often derogatory names other tribes used to describe their rivals.
For example, “Comanche” is derived from a word in Ute meaning “anyone who wants to fight me all the time,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“It’s like having a map of North America where the United States is labeled ‘gringos’ and Mexico is labeled ‘wetbacks,’ ” Herman says.
“Naming is an exercise in power. Whether you’re naming places or naming peoples, you are therefore asserting a power of sort of establishing what is reality and what is not.”
And our pure-white right to own as we take — from a piece by historian Miguel Ángel González Quiroga in a series on the US-Mexican War at PBS: Manifest Destiny was a graceful way to justify something unjustifiable. It has not escaped our attention that Ulysses S. Grant, one of the most prominent of American military men, and himself a participant in the war, wrote in his memoirs, “I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”
Our real past totally renders the so-called ‘American exceptionalism‘ theory completely hilarious — funny as a tomb. And serious as shit, mainly due to the dumb-ass factor of the great wad of US peoples, which is much-fueled by bullshit overplayed by lying assholes on a near-continual basis. The current Iraqi craziness is just an update.
In a display of historical amnesia in historical proportions, original critics of the Iraqi invasion 10 years ago are nowhere to be seen/heard on the MSM commenting/expostulating in this latest of a never-ending series of domino-like disasters that have plagued Iraq since those three clowns pictured above created it — shown unbeknownst to themselves in the purest of iconic/ironic poses.
And one of them three, The Dick, has opened his yap way-wide on subjects Iraq this past week or so, and seems to lie at the drop of a simple question — hence this exchange on the Charlie Rose Show which displayed the pure-white-as-the-driven-snow untruth of The Dick:
Rose: “I hope you, as Secretary Kerry and the Australians and the Brits have done, will loudly denounce the Egyptians for the three Al Jazeera newsmen being sentenced to seven years.”
Cheney: “I haven’t seen that, I’m not familiar with it.”
Rose (bewildered): “You haven’t read that story on the front page of the paper that three Al Jazeera reporters were sentenced to seven years by Egyptian courts?”
Cheney: “I missed that one.”
Bewildered? Nothing but a full-frontal lie. The Aljazeera story was too big for someone like The Dick not to have noticed it, or at least have it brought to his attention — why couldn’t Charlie just have asked, “You’re fuckin’ lyin’ right now, aren’t you, sir?”
But no…
Idea for this post came via an excerpt at Moyers & Company from Charles Lewis’s book, “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” which details how those three bozos got the US/the world in the Iraqi mess we’re in now.
Some highlights:
Our report found that in the two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq.
The carefully orchestrated campaign of untruths about Iraq’s alleged threat to US national security from its WMDs or links to al Qaeda (also specious) galvanized public opinion and led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
Perhaps most revealing: the number of false statements made by top Bush administration officials dramatically increased from August 2002 to the time of the critical October 2002 congressional approval of the war resolution and spiked even higher between January and March 2003, between Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address before the United Nations General Assembly and the fateful March 19, 2003, invasion.
Within hours of the release of our report, White House press secretary Dana Perino responded with scorn: “I hardly think that the study is worth spending any time on. It is so flawed in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world. Because as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed a dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.”
This sophistry was at least consistent with the administration’s track record of distorting reality.
In fact, neither Congress nor America’s international allies was demanding an invasion of Iraq before the administration started beating the war drums.
…
And a month after the stunning Times stories, one of the White House officials who had actually made several false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, former press secretary Scott McClellan, wrote a “surprisingly scathing” memoir admitting that his own public comments at White House briefings about Iraq had been “badly misguided,” that President Bush had not been “open and forthright on Iraq,” and that instead he had relied on “propaganda.”
…
Investigating this tale of dishonesty by those in power and acquiescence on the part of those charged with reporting the truth has been a disheartening experience for me.
Even more sobering, however, is the fact that the Iraq War deception, with its 935 public, shameless lies, is simply the latest and most egregious story of truth betrayed that I’ve witnessed or reported on over the past five decades.
My career in journalism has coincided with a tragic period in American history — one in which falsehood has increasingly come to dominate our public discourse, and in which the bedrock values of honesty, transparency, accountability and integrity we once took for granted have been steadily eroded.
Nice that last part, but sadly wrong. The “we once took for granted” wasn’t reality — all those “bedrock values of honesty, transparency, accountability and integrity” never in reality really existed.
And that’s why those three assholes shown above will never, ever be brought to justice. This country has fractured into a mess.