My interview with Medea Benjamin

My interview with Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin is up at Change.org, "Barack Obama: No Friend of Civil Liberties."

What evil looks like

Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, arrive at the White House to dine on aborted Cambodian fetuses.

(via Mariscat)

Photo Credit: Reuters

Liberal blogger denounces violent rhetoric, hints at murdering Fred Phelps

As a sensible, mainstream liberal Democrat, "progressive blogger/activist" Howie Klein must of course view every tragedy through a strictly partisan lens. So, naturally, he knows, damn it, that Sarah Palin is directly responsible for the massacre in Arizona carried out by the crazed Jared Loughner. Indeed, like other good partisans, he knew it before the bodies in Tuscon were even cold (just as he knew Loughner must be a Ron Paul devotee -- you know, that crazy Texan who opposes all those humanitarian wars carried out by our liberal, Nobel Peace Prize-winning president).

This being the glorious age of social media, Klein, like other painfully plugged-in progressives sickened by violent political rhetoric -- but not so much by violent acts embraced by their favorite politicians -- took to Twitter to snarkily pronounce his verdict, with a series of 140 character insights like this one:

And this one:

So, one must wonder, how completely unaware, how absolutely devoid of self-consciousness, must one be to write things like the above -- accusing one's political foes of inciting their followers to commit murder through the power of hyperbolic rhetoric -- while seeing nothing unseemly about posting something like this?

It's a rhetorical question.

Incitement

Why won't the media hold Barack Obama responsible for inciting his followers to commit grave acts of violence?

Photo Credit: Minnesota Public Radio

Seriously, fuck that dude

A few months back, I took Center for American Progress blogger Matt Yglesias to task for arguing that, because the U.S. economy was in recession, it was better to spend money blowing up poor Afghan civilians than not -- you know, Keynesianism and the multiplier effect and all that economic jazz. After he surprisingly responded to be on Twitter, I apologized for calling him a "truly awful human being."

I was much too kind.

In a post this morning, my favorite liberal foil provides definitive proof that he is either 1) an idiot, or 2) evil -- though I suspect he may be both.

Take it away, asshole:

[W]ars undertaken for perfectly good reasons of collective self-defense can swiftly turn into situations that require post-conflict stabilization. North Korea might attack South Korea in a way that demands response, and the response could well lead to the collapse of the DPRK state requiring the victorious allies to administer former DPRK territory. So it’s not smart to just say “COIN is bad, so let’s make sure we can’t do it and then hope for the best.”

What we need, I think, is some form of American gendarmerie—a quasi-military federal organization specialized in police/security functions rather than finding and killing bad guys per se. Such a force would, unlike today’s military, have a valuable peacetime domestic role to play as a flexible auxiliary police force that could assist high-crime jurisdictions with the kind of temporary infusion of extra personnel that can help push crime rates down to a lower equilibrium.** A “surge” if you will. But it would also be prepared to deploy abroad in the case of contingencies. The regular military would be big enough to beat an adversary (i.e., a lot smaller than the regular one) but it would need to call on the gendarmes (who naturally would need a less French name) to conduct an occupation. This means we wouldn’t be caught lacking capacity in a real emergency, but since the gendarmes would be performing a useful peacetime domestic service politicians would (appropriately) feel that initiating situations that require their mobilization is high cost situation that ought to be avoided if possible.

I could go on at length at what is wrong with this suggestion -- first, allow me to speculate that Mr. Matt, as a pasty white employee at an establishment liberal think tank (full disclosure: I'm pasty white too), hasn't had much interaction with the quasi-military forces that already occupy American cities -- but seriously, do I really need to? If you're reading this blog, you probably don't need a remedial class on progressive dumbfuckery.

Anyway, I think IOZ would (and, fingers crossed, will) do a better job.

(via Thoreau)

In the Navy

I did not know this:

Other former Navy officers acknowledged that ribald humor, similar in nature to the sexual innuendo in Honors's videos, is a storied part of Navy tradition. For decades ships have held elaborate "Shellback" ceremonies for sailors making their first trip across the equator. These rituals typically have involved young sailors in drag and licking grape jelly from the belly button of a fat sailor who is dressed in an oversized diaper.

Sure he's a war criminal, but at least he didn't cheat on his wife!

In 2002, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards supported a preemptive war on Iraq that ended hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than 4.5 million people to flee their homes. And according to his top political adviser at the time, he did so not because he thought the invasion was necessary to protect America – he was privately skeptical of that – but because he thought it would be good for his political career.

Edwards of course went on to be the 2004 Democratic candidate for vice president – because, not despite, of his support for the war. Even after it was exposed that he'd backed the bombing of poor brown people on the other side of the globe for purely selfish reasons, he made a serious run for the presidential nomination in 2008.

Only after it was revealed that Edwards porked someone who wasn't his wife did all good, patriotic Americans start hating on the sleazy bastard. That whole support for an unjust, immoral war he knew was wrong thing? Again: a feature, not a flaw.

Seriously, fuck you America.

I'm so bored with the USA

. . . but what can I do?

Oh yeah. Leave the United States.

I'd tell you where I'm going, but I think I'll leave it to the next batch of WikiLeaks documents.

Waiting by the phone

Matt Taibbi on the path to a prosperous career as a reasonable liberal:

First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.

Read the rest.

Boycott Amazon

Sign the petition.

The New York Times and the undermining of America

Barrett Brown from the League of Ordinary Gentleman:

"I am constantly reminded that there remain a great number of people who still believe that the media in general and The New York Times in particular operate under a conscious and deliberate agenda by which to undermine America and its government. As someone whose entire life revolves around the undermining of America and its government, I would simply note that the NYT has not been particularly helpful."

Read the rest.

Ah, liberalism

From the Media Consortium:

“Don’t touch my junk!” has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body’s autonomy for the greater good.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald notes that The Nation has also taken to smearing those who object to the TSA's security theater as all just a bunch of loony libertarians (in the process illustrating that Charles Koch is now the liberal left's George Soros: an evil, shadowy figure behind all that is wrong with the world).

Interview with Gloria Killian

After having to interview some asshole politician or spokesman from EDF day in and day out about why the latest monstrosity of a climate bill is absolutely vital, not to save the planet, but to transition us to a "21st century clean energy economy" (TM), it's so refreshing to talk to people actually doing something good for the world. On that note, check out my interview with Gloria Killian, a California woman who spent more than 16 years behind bars for a murder she didn't commit and who now works on behalf of those prisoners she left behind.

'Fuck Sanity'

The great Dennis Perrin on Jon Stewart's march of moderates for "sanity":

Fuck Sanity.

Maybe I'm missing the satirical angle here, if there is one. When Jon Stewart apologized for calling Harry Truman a war criminal, I initially thought, "Hey! Nice parody of the wimpy, obedient pundit!" Then I realized that Stewart was serious. Had any other global leader ordered nuclear strikes on civilians, I suspect that Stewart wouldn't be so understanding. But this was an American president -- a Democrat no less! How ugly and partisan it would be to question Truman's action, or worse, satirize it. That is something an insane person would do. And as we know, Jon Stewart is among The Sane.

Again, Stewart could be putting everyone on. I certainly hope so, yet doubt it. You don't achieve mainstream prominence by calling our terrorist culture by its right name. And you sure as fuck don't mock it. Stewart knows his place. Just the other night he sat across from a man who oversees a vast network of theft, torture and mass murder. And how did our most celebrated satirist since Mark Twain react? With deference. Respect. Sanity.

I previously took on Stewart myself for ludicrously claiming Obama had "given back so much executive power" since taking office. (Pathetically for Stewart, Bill O'Reilly had to correct him on that.) And earlier I addressed Stewart's remark that he didn't care if Obama smoked cigarettes, because "I prefer that to . . . bombing countries. I’ll take a smoker." (Congratulations, funny guy, we've now got a president who ends a rough day of cluster bombing Yemeni civilians with a Marlboro. And he's so smart!)

Yes on 19, please, but hold the politicians

IOZ, doing his thing:

Regarding the question of voting, I do not vote for the same reason that I do not pray five times a day facing toward Mecca. I do not believe in representative democracy. I think it is a fiction. That is not to say that I don't believe Americans exist anymore than calling Allah imaginery means I do not believe that Muslims exist; I believe in voting booths just as much as I believe in mosques. It is not the existence of the ritualized act that I call unreal; it is the deity at the other end of the prayer line.

'In whose voice do you wish justice to be done?' 'Martin Sheen'

'You wanna know about my thumb do you boy?'

(Watch the clip here.)

Can we really blame Republicans for the wars?

Michael Moore has a list of five things he says Democrats should do to avoid a disaster at the polls in November. His first recommendation? That the Democratic Party run ads reminding voters "Who the Hell Put Us in the Misery We're In":

People need to be reminded over and over that it was the REPUBLICANS who concocted and led the unnecessary invasion of two countries, putting us in our longest war ever, wars that will eventually cost us over $3 trillion.

I know readers of this blog probably don't need me to detail all that is wrong with that sentence but, fuck it, I'll try to anyway. First, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who signed into law a bill that made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy, and it was the Clinton administration, by continually bombing Iraq and maintaining a deadly sanctions regime throughout the 1990s ostensibly due to an ongoing, scary (and conveniently swarthy) threat of a madman with weapons of mass destruction, that helped make the 2003 invasion politically possible.

Second, Democrats were critical to selling the Iraq war in the wake of 9/11, with the likes of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry -- and the top candidates for the party's 2004 and 2008 presidential nomination -- taking to the Senate floor with tales of ties to al-Qaeda and WMDs to justify an aggressive war against a country that was not threatening the United States. And the authorization to use force in Iraq was approved by more than half the Democrats in the Senate and more than 80 of those in the House. Sure, more dissented than in the Republican ranks -- just not many in meaningful leadership positions and none with greater political ambitions.

Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party; Congress authorized the use of force by a vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. And during the 2008 election campaign, and before that in 2006, Democrats across the country campaigned on a platform that labeled Afghanistan the Good, Forgotten War, with Harry Reid, Barack Obama, et. al denouncing the Bush administration for not sending enough young Americans to kill and be killed there.

There's also this small quibble I have with the "blame REPUBLICANS for the wars" strategy: as "our longest war ever" drags on with no end in sight, draining taxpayers of tens of billions of dollars every year, the Democratic Party controls the House, the Senate and the presidency. The Democrats, it can be fairly said, control the government of the United States of America -- the same government that not only continues to occupy two Middle Eastern countries, but has further expanded the war on terror in Yemen and Pakistan, killing hundreds of civilians with Predator drones and cluster bombs.

Democrats can go ahead and blame the GOP all they want for starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I suspect some voters will rightly respond: "well okay then, Bush should've been impeached and John Boehner is totally a dick, but who's dropping the bombs now?"

I am certain our cause is just

. . . now give me the god damn money!

Ken Silverstein is leaving Harper's -- and Washington

Here's why:

"When you can read an entire column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and never once feel the urge to cut out your own heart with a dull knife, you know that you no longer have the sense of outrage that is essential to reporting from our nation’s capital."

The rest is worth reading.