War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
As the Gaza situation continues, even in the face of international outcries and the top U.N. human rights official calling for a war crimes investigation, the real-deal hand in all this, Iran, is being cool. One great fear of this entire cruel episode is that Israel will piss off its Arab neighbors so bad, an…
Intelligence does not always mean brainy. Charlie Wilson wasn’t a spook, but he used the stuff of spooks to create such an explosive blowback situation in Afghanistan that the war he fueled altered modern life — and not at all for the good. Wilson is a Custer-like asshole who convinced all of DC the CIA…
As one of the most-bizarre and just-plain-weird years comes to a close and a new 12-month cycle just cranks off, I’ve gotten this really-bad feeling about Decider George and all the horrible, immoral, illegal shit he’s done — he’ll just ride off into the sunset scot-ass free. That’s just so wrong. (Illustration found here). The…
Interview of Seymour Hersh by Arabic daily, Asharq Al-Awsat, via AlterNet: I really believe something happened to America; after 9/11 we became a different country. That is fine, presidents sometimes might want to do that, but my issue is how did Bush do it? How did he beat the press? How did he beat the…
Life as we know it is coming to a quick, sure end. A story this morning is disturbing: So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA (International Energy Agency) radically changed its assessment. Until this year’s report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword…
Bloomberg reported Friday a certain Turkish shoe is flying off the shelf (h/t TPM): Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. … “We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks…
During the daily US State Department press briefing Thursday, Sean McCormack said the infamous shoe-throwing incident last weekend will be eclipsed by other more-important shit 50 years from now. An image, though, for pure foolish failure: A shoe-gram for the last eight years. (Illustration found here). Also a pure snapshot of twisted, historical logic. (h/t:…
Another observation from the UK’s Patrick Cockburn on last weekend’s shoe-throwing-at-Decider George incident and how these press conferences, media glad-handing photo ops can be highly misleading. Even with all the Iraqi public support for the shoe bomber. I used to comfort myself with the thought that these official visits did little harm even if they…
War correspondents are a relatively new entity on history’s battlefields, only since the middle of the 19th century have these adrenaline-driven reporters been around to point out foolish, fatal horrors of war. In the Crimean War (1853-1856), William Howard Russell is credited with being the world’s first battlefield reporter. Others followed, such as Winston Churchhill,…
Under the newly-approved SOFA arrangement in Iraq, US troops have to be out by 2011. This dovetails with President-Elect Obama’s 16-month commitment to pull the plug on the Iraqi misadventure, but the way things happen, this may or may not be the reality. Decider George’s Middle East entanglements leave a narrow window of opportunity to…