War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
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,…
Advice from fabricators and twisters of truth. The current White House people have produced “contingency plans” for President-Elect Obama in case some emergency might quickly pop up in the first few weeks of his administration, which in turn, creates the silly scenario of actually taking serious the managing director of the White Star Line. (Illustration…
Quick and forceful: Decider George dodged and ducked more than some footware today. See the YouTube video here. (Illustration found here). Accordingly, one Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist with Egypt-based al-Baghdadia television network, the guy above with the shoe in his up-raised hand, threw both his footwear at Decider George this evening during a press…
(Illustration — ‘Baghdad Sunset‘ — can be found here). Wikipedia has a good-as-any overall summation of the Iraqi war and can be found here, but there’s a shitload of other case studies of Decider George’s horror tale, just Google ‘Iraq War’ then sit back. In the last few months, however, the story has narrowed down…
Everything!! (Illustration found here). Just when you figured Decider George’s blundering for near-eight years was all in the big stuff — Iraq, Katrina, the economy — think once, and maybe even think twice more. According to Raw Story this morning, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group which recently “set out…