Chris Hedges targets my deepest primal fear about Bernie Sanders and the 2016 election

as much as i love what's coming out of bernie sanders' mouth and as much as i would like to disagree with chris hedges' assessment, i can't muster an argument against hedges' sad take...

America’s Electoral Farce

I intend to devote no more time to the upcoming presidential elections than walking to my local polling station on Election Day, voting for a third-party candidate, most likely the Green Party candidate, and going home. Any further energy invested in these elections, including championing Bernie Sanders’ ill-advised decision to validate the Democratic Party by becoming one of its presidential candidates, is a waste of time.

Every action we take now must be directed at ripping down the structures of the corporate state. This means refusing to co-operate. It means joining or building radical mass movements. It means carrying out sustained acts of civil disobedience, as Kayactivists are doing in Seattle and fishing communities such as Kodiak, Cordova and Homer, as well as a dozen indigenous tribes, are doing in Alaska, to physically halt fracking, drilling for oil and natural gas or U.S. Navy training exercises in the pristine waters of the Arctic. It means striking for a $15 minimum wage. It means blocking city streets to demand an end to the indiscriminate use of lethal force by militarized police, especially against poor people of color. It means, in large and small ways, acts of open rebellion. It means always having as the primary objective the disrupting and overthrowing of corporate power. It means not playing the game. 

The corporate state seeks to get us to participate in the political charade of choreographed elections. It seeks to make us play by its rules. Our corporate media, flush with the dollars from political advertising, fills the airwaves with the ridiculous and the trivial. Candidates, pollsters, political strategists, pundits and celebrity journalists provide endless loops of banal and absurd “political” chatter, all of it a grotesque form of anti-politics. We will be bombarded with this propaganda, largely centered on the manufactured personalities of candidates, for many months. Tune it out. It means nothing. 

The voices of those who matter will not be heard in these elections. The marginalized and poor in our internal colonies, the 2.3 million people in our prisons and their families, the Muslims we persecute here and in the Middle East, and the suffering of the working poor are airbrushed out of the discussion. In this Potemkin America there is only a middle class. Our liberties, including our right to privacy, along with the consent of the governed—all of which have been taken from us—are held up in this electioneering farce as sacred and inviolate. We are assured that we live in a functioning democracy. We are promised that our voice will count. And even Sanders will tell you no different. If he stepped forward and spoke the truth, especially about the Democratic Party, he would be banned from the debates, vilified and crushed by the Democratic establishment, stripped of his Senate committee chairmanships and tossed into the political wilderness to which Ralph Nader has been exiled. Sanders, unfortunately, lacks Nader’s moral fortitude. He will, when it is all done, push his followers into the vampire-like embrace of Hillary Clinton. He is a Pied Piper leading a line of children or rats—take your pick—into political oblivion.

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Oh, yeah, let's continue to try to completely bury Bernie's chances

fer god's sake, it's enough to gag a maggot...

This Is How Hillary Loses the Primary

Bernie Sanders will never be president. But unless Clinton changes her strategy—and soon—he can still wind up toppling her.

(emphasis added)

you can almost smell the big take-down a'comin'... somebody's going to dump something out there to try to destroy bernie's candidacy or bernie himself is going to trip up somehow... gay-ron-teed...

let's say bernie does get elected... what we ought to be talking about is, if that happens, how can we, as an electorate and as a nation, keep bernie from being totally co-opted by the ptb... the last thing we want is to see another "hope and change" debacle... we also desperately need to remember that electing a president isn't the same thing as awaiting the savior and the second coming...

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My view of Hillary and the way, WAY too early 2016 presidential race

yes, by all means, let's focus on the theatrics of an empty and meaningless four-year ritual so the elites can say that the "people" have spoken... pay no attention to the billions of dollars flowing into the media coffers over the next eighteen months...

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Glenn on Assange and Manning: Who wants to be seen advocating for an unhygienic, abusive egomaniac or a psychologically crippled, gender-confused, vengeful freak

absolutely nothing is more effective in smearing public figures whom our super-rich elites and their government puppets want to destroy than innuendos and veiled accusations about their sexual behavior... that said and given that anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows how that kind of smear works, why wouldn't someone in the spotlight, particularly a controversial spotlight, not decide to simply keep it in their pants... i'm not suggesting that controversial public figures choose celibacy, but extreme caution and obsessive vigilance in all things sexual would seem to be the order of the day, wouldn't it...?

glenn...

While WikiLeaks enjoyed widespread support just a couple of years ago, the personal attacks on Assange and Manning — along with the unproven and even uncharged sexual assault allegations in Sweden — have dried up much of that support. Who wants to be seen advocating for an unhygienic, abusive egomaniac or a psychologically crippled, gender-confused, vengeful freak: the caricatures of Assange and Manning that have been successfully implanted in the public mind by today’s Nixonian smear artists? The truth or falsity of these caricatures matters little for this tactic to work: once someone is rendered sufficiently radioactive in Decent Society, even many who are sympathetic to their cause will turn away, become unwilling to defend them, lest any of the slime relentlessly poured on the whistleblowers splatter onto their defenders.

personal attacks aside, let's talk about the substance of the matter...

[T]he personal attributes or failings of Assange or Manning have no bearing on the threat posed by the U.S. Government’s prosecution for the publishing WikiLeaks has done. A coalition of leading journalists and media outlets in Australia have explained: WikiLeaks “is doing what the media have always done: bringing to light material that governments would prefer to keep secret” and prosecuting them “would be unprecedented in the US, breaching the First Amendment protecting a free press“; they added: “To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks . . . is a serious threat to democracy.” The Committee to Protect Journalists sent a letter to Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder expressing “deep concern” over “reports about a potential WikiLeaks prosecution,” which “would threaten grave damage to the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and the press.” Although American journalists were reluctant at first to speak out, even they have come around to recognizing what a profound threat an Assange indictment would be to press freedoms, with The Washington Post Editorial Page denouncing any indictment on the ground that it “would criminalize the exchange of information and put at risk responsible media organizations"...

[...]

Whatever one’s discomfort with Assange’s supposed personal flaws, that must not deter anyone from standing against what would truly be an odious indictment for the publication by WikiLeaks of critical information in the public interest. Last December in The Guardian, I argued that Bradley Manning deserves a medal, not imprisonment, if he actually did what he is alleged to have done.

and then we have this...

Four days after Julian Assange verdict, US Secretary Clinton to visit Sweden

It is the first bilateral visit to Sweden by a US Secretary of State in a long time, Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt writes, as he wishes a warm welcome to US Secretary Hillary Clinton who will arrive in the country just 4 days after Britain's Supreme Court announces its decision on whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden.

The announcement of Clinton's visit to Sweden, which will center around the subjects of "Internet freedom, green energy, Afghanistan and the Middle East", as well as other broad topics such as democracy and counter-terrorism, took place just 3 days after the Supreme Court published a date for Julian Assange's verdict to be issued on (the Supreme Court published the date of its judgment on May 23, Secretary Clinton's visit was announced on May 26).

you gotta be shittin' me...

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Dave Lindorff: President Obama his key advisors plus Biden, Clinton and Panetta are all currently war criminals for threatening Iran with attack

so, is this why obama doesn't want to hold the war criminals from the bush administration accountable...?

President Obama and His Key Advisors are a Gang of War Criminals

Under the Nuremberg Principles, later incorporated into the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, which is defined as a war started against another nation that does not pose an imminent threat of attack on the aggressor nation or nations, is the highest of war crimes, for which the perpetrators are liable for the death penalty. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of those above acts is an equally serious capital crime.

How then to explain the casual way that civilian and military leaders of the US and Israel are talking openly about plans and threats to attack Iran?

[...]

One would think that the magnitude of the unknown and dangerous potential consequences of a criminal attack on Iran by the US and its client state Israel would lead at least some news organizations to look into the very legality of such an attack.

But no. Apparently calling the leaders of this nation criminals is beyond the imagining of the so-called chattering class and its paymasters.

I’ll do it here though:

President Obama and his key advisors, as well as Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Panetta, are all currently war criminals for threatening Iran with attack. And if the US does attack Iran, either on its own or in support of an Israeli attack, they will be even worse war criminals, and will be deserving of the same fate met by Japan’s Imperial Army General and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, and by Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel.

another perspective missing from our traditional news media...

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What's worse, the Defense Authorization Act or the Stop Online Piracy Act?

as soon as i read the story about hillary's unbelievably hypocritical speech at the hague extolling OTHER countries to espouse unfettered internet freedom, i just KNEW glenn would be all over it like white on rice...

Hillary Clinton and Internet Freedom

Hypocrisy from the U.S. Government — having U.S. officials self-righteously impose standards on other countries which they routinely violate — is so common and continuous that the vast majority of examples do not even merit notice. But sometimes, it is so egregious and shameless — and sufficiently consequential — that it should not go unobserved. Such is the case with the speech delivered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday at a Conference on Internet Freedom held at the Hague, a conference devoted to making “a stand for freedom of expression on the internet, especially on behalf of cyber dissidents and bloggers.”

[...]

She astutely observed that “those who push these plans often do so in the name of security.” She added that “the first challenge is for the private sector to embrace its role in protecting internet freedom,” which — she lamented — has not always happened: “A few years ago, the headlines were about companies turning over sensitive information about political dissidents. Earlier this year, they were about a company shutting down the social networking accounts of activists in the midst of a political debate.” She concluded with a real flourish: “Our government will continue to work very hard to get around every barrier that repressive governments put up” even though such governments will try to maintain those barriers “by resorting to greater oppression.”

What Hillary Clinton is condemning here is exactly that which not only the administration in which she serves, but also she herself, has done in one of the most important Internet freedom cases of the last decade: WikiLeaks. And beyond that case, both Clinton specifically and the Obama administration generally have waged a multi-front war on Internet freedom.

[...]

Perhaps worst of all, many of the administration’s key allies in the Senate are now pushing a bill – in the name of stopping online piracy (SOPA) — that would vest the U.S. government and the largest corporations with draconian powers literally to shut down or otherwise disable Internet sites without due process. Hillary Clinton personally ”tacitly endorsed that bill,” enabling the bill’s key Democratic Congressional supporters to tout State Department support for it. As EFF’s Trevor Timm recently wrote: “Ironically, we know from the WikiLeaks cables that the State Department has also aggressively lobbied many other countries for strict new laws similar to SOPA. They have even offered to fund enforcement and literally draft the laws that sacrifice free speech for greater copyright protection for Hollywood.”

here's glenn talking with cenk uygur on current's young turks...

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Marcy says what needs to be said about the Very Scarey Iran Plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador

amazingly, there has not yet been a case submitted to a grand jury...

marcy - emptywheel - wheeler...

Our government has had eleven business days now to subject its amended case to the scrutiny of a grand jury, it had two and a half months to subject its original case to the scrutiny of a grand jury, and it hasn’t yet bothered to do so. We’re sharing our case with the rest of the world before we’re subjecting it to the most basic level of oversight enshrined in our Constitution. Instead of using the legal process laid out in our founding document, we’ve gotten the signature of a Magistrate Judge and run off with it to the rest of the world. And while I have no doubt of the competence of Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger, the judge who signed the complaint in this case, that’s simply not the way our judicial system is supposed to work. Average citizens are supposed to review the work of the government when it makes legal cases, not just Magistrates.

All of which ought to raise real questions why our government has decided to share these details with the rest of the world, but bypassed the step where they’re supposed to share them with its own citizens.

how interesting that it takes a lone blogger to make the kind of substantial point that should have been a glaring omission to even the least perceptive of our so-called professional news media... if the case was worth the paper it's printed on, a grand jury indictment should have been a slam dunk and certainly something our fear-mongering leaders would have wanted to have had in hand before trying to put that horribly scarey country, iran, back on the front burner...

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I am not moving

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So devoted is the U.S. Government to defending the actions of Israel's that it will even preemptively justify violent attacks on its own citizens

glenn follows up on my post yesterday about ray mcgovern and the gaza aid flotilla...

[T]he Clinton State Department is now explicitly threatening Americans who participate in the flotilla with criminal prosecution (h/t Jason Ditz):

The United States on Friday warned activists against plans to send a new aid flotilla to challenge Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, saying it would be irresponsible and dangerous. . . . "We underscore that delivering or attempting or conspiring to deliver material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas, could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration," [State Department Spokesperson Victoria] Nuland said.

In contrast to the Israel-must-always-be-defended mindset of U.S. political officials, compare how other governments view the possible shooting of their citizens by a foreign country:

As the second "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" gets ready to sail this week, Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore urged Israel to avoid any repeat of last year's actions against the convoy, Irish media reported Sunday.

"Israel must exercise all possible restraint and avoid any use of military force if attempting to uphold their naval blockade," Gilmore, who also holds the post of trade minister, said after meeting with Israeli Ambassador to Dublin Boaz Moda.

"In particular, I would expect that any interception of ships is conducted in a peaceful manner and does not endanger the safety of our citizens or other participants," he added, reiterating the country's position that the Gaza blockade was "unjust and counterproductive'" and that the violence that marked last year's flotilla venture was "completely unacceptable and unjustified."

That type of uncontroversial statement -- you shouldn't shoot our unarmed citizens -- is inconceivable when it comes to the U.S. and Israel. So devoted is the U.S. Government to defending the actions of Israel's that it will even preemptively justify violent attacks on its own citizens, threaten Americans protesting Israel's policies with prosecution for aiding Terrorism, and isolate itself from the world to defend them.

what the fuck is wrong with my country...?

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A humanitarian military intervention in Libya...? Glenn: "Please."

glenn has the same visceral reaction to glaring hypocrisy that i do...

[W]hat I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny and violence against one's own citizens. This is the same government that enthusiastically supports and props up regimes around the world that do exactly that, and that have done exactly that for decades.

By all accounts, one of the prime administration advocates for this war was Hillary Clinton; she's the same person who, just two years ago, said this about the torture-loving Egyptian dictator: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family." They're the same people overseeing multiple wars that routinely result in all sorts of atrocities. They are winking and nodding to their Yemeni, Bahraini and Saudi friends who are doing very similar things to what Gadaffi is doing, albeit (for now) on a smaller scale. They just all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim nation because they just can't stand idly by and tolerate internal repression and violence against civilians? Please.

yep... where's our "humanitarian intervention" in gaza...? ivory coast...? equatorial guinea...? nothing like displaying our true colors for all the world to see and, believe me, they see them... here in the u.s., we may allow ourselves to be deluded by the constant barrage of media and government propaganda, but most of the rest of the world gets it and stands by in amazement that we don't - or won't...

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The "Kill Team" photos are not unusual and are not the work of "rogue" U.S. soldiers

yes, i know that spiegel is trying to soften the story by blaming it on "rogue" individuals but that's simply not the case... photos are routinely taken by soldiers commemorating their work just as miscellaneous body parts - fingers, toes, etc. - and other "memorabilia" are taken from individuals killed "in the line of duty"...

i personally stood behind a soldier at the post office in a base near kabul who was asking the clerk if it was ok to mail body parts home... i was stunned to say the least... the clerk didn't appear surprised by the question but responded with a clear "no"... when i returned to the u.s., i told the story to my son and daughter-in-law who both work for the va hospital here... they asked around and were told by a va counselor that "harvesting" such "trophies" was fairly common...

i'm not saying that everybody does it or that there aren't a majority who would not only not consider such behavior but would find it morally and ethically repellent... however, it's certainly not the rare occurrence our leaders and the media would have us believe... and, despite the fact that this story was broken by a german publication about u.s. troops, you can be sure there are german soldiers in afghanistan who are doing exactly the same thing...

i am posting the photos that accompanied the spiegel article because i believe they need to be seen and we absolutely need to feel the full impact of what is happening in our collective names...



This image shows the body of Gul Mudin, the son of a farmer, who was killed on Jan. 15, 2010. A member of the "kill team" is posing behind him. SPIEGEL published just three photos out of the some 4,000 images and videos it has seen. Court martial proceedings against the soldiers involved in the killings are to begin soon.


In this image, a different soldier poses with the same corpse. The US Army on Monday apologized for the behavior of the soldiers involved in the "kill team."


Court martial proceedings are currently being prepared against 12 suspects. This image of two "kill team" victims comes from the collection of one of the suspects.

The United States and NATO are concerned that reactions could be intense to the publication of images documenting killings committed by US soldiers in Afghanistan. The images appeared in the most recent edition of SPIEGEL, which hit the newsstands on Monday.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already telephoned with her Afghan counterpart to discuss the situation. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon has likewise made contact with officials in Kabul. The case threatens to strain already fragile US-Afghan relations at a time when the two countries are negotiating over the establishment of permanent US military bases in Afghanistan.

In a statement released by Colonel Thomas Collins, the US Army, which is currently preparing a court martial to try a total of 12 suspects in connection with the killings, apologized for the suffering the photos have caused. The actions depicted in the photos, the statement read, are "repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States."

The suspected perpetrators are part of a group of US soldiers accused of several killings. Their court martials are expected to start soon. The photos, the army statement said, stand "in stark contrast to the discipline, professionalism and respect that have characterized our soldiers' performance during nearly 10 years of sustained operations."

saying that these photos and the behavior connected with them "stand in stark contrast" is denial, pure and simple... yes, i understand that's what the military would LIKE to have us believe, but it's simply not true...

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Yes, I know Hillary's portfolio is focused OUTSIDE the U.S.

and, yes, as secretary of state, i know that's the way it is for hillary... however, when you're dishing out advice to other countries, you should REALLY be careful of the old "those who live in glass houses" dilemma...

here's hill talking about recent events in tunisia...

Thursday, Secretary Clinton delivered what the New York Times called a "scalding critique" to Arab leaders at a conference in Qatar.

"The region's foundations are sinking into the sand," Clinton said, calling for "political reforms that will create the space young people are demanding, to participate in public affairs and have a meaningful role in the decisions that shape their lives." Those who would "prey on desperation and poverty are already out there," Clinton warned, "appealing for allegiance and competing for influence."

dontcha kinda think, hill, m'dear, that there are a lot of people, young and old, in the united states who might like to "participate in public affairs and have a meaningful role in the decisions that shape their lives"...? yaknowhutimean, hill...?

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Hillary Clinton pre-emptively deployed in Pakistan

only from the onion...

The White House released its own statement, 'We reserve the right to use Hillary Clinton when all other options have failed.'

Preliminary figures we have show that over 500 civilians suffered the full force of Mrs. Clinton and over 1,000 may have suffered from some exposure to her inflexible hair and pseudo-folksy hand gestures.

(thanks to forbidden knowledge tv...)

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Certainly one of the greatest disasters of the modern age

truly horrifying in a country that was a nightmare to begin with...

Tens of thousands of Haitians slept on sidewalks or wandered the streets of this heavily damaged city early Thursday, a sign of the vast homelessness emerging after the devastating earthquake.

[...]

Bodies lay everywhere: tiny children next to schools, women in rubble-strewn streets with stunned expressions frozen on their faces, men hidden beneath plastic tarps and cotton sheets. Desperate residents turned pickup trucks and wheelbarrows into ambulances and doors into stretchers, the Associated Press reported, trying to ferry the dead and wounded even as they acknowledged that help was almost impossible to find.

[...]

In the central Bel Air neighborhood, the streets and sidewalks were covered with people sleeping on mattresses, plastic chairs and bits of cardboard. Survivors set up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food being scavenged from the rubble.

[...]

Indeed, the neighborhood had largely been reduced to rubble. Flames licked from the shell of one ruined building. Balconies had crashed to the ground. Cars were buried under chunks of gray concrete the size of dining-room tables. The street was littered with bricks, shattered plastic chairs, glittering shards of glass.

Huge crowds swarmed through the city overnight, carrying meager possessions -- a cooking pot, a sack of vegetables -- and shoeless toddlers with terrified eyes. Many people had wrapped themselves in bedsheets, adding to the ghostly air.

it's a heart-wrenching experience to read of a disaster of this magnitude... i'm experiencing a depth of feeling for these people similar to what i experienced as the epic catastrophe of katrina unfolded...

what i don't get is how our erstwhile secretary of state, hillary clinton, can say something like this, an entirely true statement imho, without making the connection that the united states has produced precisely the same situation for the afghanistan people without benefit of an act-of-god natural disaster...

"In the wake of disasters like this, people do get desperate," Clinton said in a televised interview with CNN. "If you have a starving baby in your arms, you're going to find food wherever you can."

yes, hillary... desperate people do desperate things... when they can't feed or take care of their families and are left with no options, they are very vulnerable to doing things they might never otherwise consider... what happened in haiti and what's happening in afghanistan are both hugely tragic but the one was and is preventable...

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Graphically, why the situation in Afghanistan is so dire

if this doesn't tell the story, i don't know what does...


USAID and Department of Defense Overall Spending in Afghanistan

you wanna talk about an imbalance...? this visual representation of u.s. development vs. defense spending in afghanistan, to me at least, makes it staggeringly clear why afghanistan is such a goddam mess... of all the money that goes for defense in that country, you can be 100% sure that virtually none of it ends up in the pockets of those in most desperate need... it goes primarily to the u.s., afghanistan and third-country defense contractors whose lips are firmly attached to the u.s. money tit... meanwhile, the "just folks" afghans continue to scramble for even the tiniest crust of bread and soiled rags to feed and clothe their families...

however, hillary does make a point...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, during last week's marathon set of hearings on President Obama's new strategy in that war, gave two examples of forthrightness that are worth further examination: a discussion of trouble with expanding the workforce of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, and a tough look at how U.S. aid money is being slipped into the hands of the Taliban.

yes, hillary, i'm well aware that even the pathetically small amount that gets spent on development often doesn't go where it's most needed either, but you can bet that if more were spent on development and less on defense, it would increase the odds that at least SOME of it would get where it needs to go...

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We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon

gore vidal in the uk times via information clearing house...

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”

[...]

America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

nothing i can add to this, that's for sure...

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Should we start running around with our hair on fire over the recent dire pronouncements about Pakistan?

every time we find our government making pronouncements about the dangers to world peace due to what's happening in another country, we would be well advised to stay calm, NOT start running around with our hair on fire, and start looking for more rational and informed perspectives... the u.s. public has been duped so often and so thoroughly over the years, you'd think we would be much more discriminating consumers of our leaders' propaganda and a great deal more suspicious of their motives... sadly, even though i consider myself to be one of the more discriminating, because i wasn't stopping to think about what i was reading over the past few days, i was falling prey myself to the dire picture of pakistan that the media is spooning down our collective throats...

juan cole, one of the more astute observers of this part of the world (i am typing this at my desk early sunday morning in kabul, a mere 100km from the pakistan border), begs to differ from the official line...

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

[...]

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess the alarmism is being promoted by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

the one thing professor cole barely touches on is pakistan's relationship with and impact on afghanistan... afghanistan is, in many ways, caught in a tug of war with its powerful neighbors, india, iran, and pakistan, and i'm sure china and russia are active behind the scenes as well... pakistan sees afghanistan as not only a territory to be influenced if not outright dominated, but also as a valuable captive market... given the heavy u.s. involvement in afghanistan and pakistan's heavy involvement with afghanistan as well as the u.s., it's hard to imagine that recent u.s. pronouncements about pakistan don't have a plan for afghanistan lurking somewhere in the background...

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Aid to Afghanistan... I'm sure Hillary is talking about attacking the symptoms rather than the disease...

i read this as i sit here in kabul, working for a "civilian" aid program...

The billions of dollars spent in U.S. aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years have been largely wasted, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

"For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work," she said. "There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line."

[...]

Since 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $5 billion in Afghanistan, according to figures on the agency's Web site. Clinton oversees USAID, which has boasted a number of success stories, including building hundreds of schools, distributing 60 million textbooks and vaccinating 90 percent of children against polio. But a report by Oxfam last week charged that much of the U.S. aid in Afghanistan is wasted on consulting costs, subcontractor fees and duplication.

Clinton's blunt comments on past aid programs -- which appeared to also indict the broader international effort -- will probably raise the bar for the administration's aid programs. "We are scrubbing every single civilian program," she said. "This is part of my mission as secretary of state. We are looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent and where it's going and trying to track the outcomes. We want to see real results."

i would be the very last person to argue that aid programs in afghanistan have been a resounding success... far, far from it... however, i would also be the last one to voice one iota of confidence that those in washington have any ability whatsoever to discriminate between the aid programs that have added value and those that haven't... so, what hillary says means to me is that they're going to jump in and "scrub" programs wholesale in the time-honored tradition of attacking the symptoms rather than the disease...

also, it's definitely worth noting that she doesn't mention the much more staggering sums "wasted" on military expenditures...

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Juan Cole 'splains Gaza, Hamas, Israel, and Palestine for you

strip away all the b.s. and this is pretty much what you get...

juan cole...

Shorter AFP: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will try to tell Binyamin Netanyahu, the far rightwing prospective prime minister of Israel, that he should allow the rebuilding of Gaza and start up a peace process that leads to a Palestinian State. Netanyahu [will] ask her to let him bomb Iran and go on colonizing the West Bank and making sure there is a never a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu probably won't get his way on Iran, but he likely will keep the Palestinians stateless, i.e., in subhuman conditions.

Clinton arrives in Israel from a donors conference in Cairo that raised $5 bn. Unfortunately, Israel won't let most of it in, since it is trying to half-starve the Palestinians into submission. And the only realistic conduit for that amount of money is the Palestinian Authority bureaucracy in Gaza, which was taken over by Hamas when it won the January, 2006 elections. But the US and Israel refuse to deal with Hamas and won't let the money go through bureaucracies it controls (all the relevant ones). Washington and Tel Aviv will probably try to use the money to bolster Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction within the Palestinian authority. What they can't understand is that Palestinians have excellent bs meters, and don't support people they view as corrupt collaborators. The frantic search for the 'good Palestinian' only creates unpopular failures over time, in the nature of the case.

Anyway, rebuilding is pretty hard when Israel won't let in concrete for . . . rebuilding.

Aljazeera English reports on the challenges of rebuilding Gaza and the Israeli blockade that is keeping basic materials out. 90% of Gaza's water is unsafe to drink, and the damage the Israelis did the sewage treatment plant has sent raw sewage into the drinking water.

now, THERE'S a strategy for ya - starve people into submission... ya gotta love that israel...! what a country...!

al jazeera...

Israel's 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip has left a trail of destruction. Rebuilding is an enormous project, now being done with little money, a few tools and no organization. But as billions of dollars are being pledged to fund the reconstruction efforts, [the] Israeli blockade is still in effect.

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Ding-dong, the witch is dead... And, of course, McSame wants to poach her disgruntled supporters...

friggin' FINALLY...!

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will endorse Senator Barack Obama on Saturday, bringing a close to her 17-month campaign for the White House, aides said. Her decision came after Democrats urged her on Wednesday to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around Mr. Obama.

Howard Wolfson, one of Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategists, and other aides said she would express support for Mr. Obama and party unity at an event in Washington that day. One adviser said that Mrs. Clinton would concede defeat, congratulate Mr. Obama and proclaim him the party’s nominee, while pledging to do what was needed to assure his victory.

a few powerful folks must have had a "come to jesus" chat with her behind closed doors... they probably also insisted that she leave her broom outside... (sorry, i'm not feeling terribly "gracious"...)

cue the poacher...

Memo to disappointed women supporters of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton: Republican John McCain wants your vote.

McCain, the senator from Arizona who has wrapped up his party's White House nomination, moved on Wednesday to woo women and other Clinton backers whose disappointment over her defeat by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama could cause them to switch teams.

"I would welcome any of Senator Clinton's supporters' vote," McCain told reporters in Louisiana, adding he would seek backing from people across the political spectrum.

"I think there's a lot of Senator Clinton's supporters who will support me because of their belief that Senator Obama does not have the experience or the knowledge or the judgment to address this nation's national security challenges," McCain said.

i suppose if someone was misguided enough to support hillary, they're probably also misguided enough to support mccain... establishment look-alikes, dontcha know... i'm just hoping that, beneath all that inspiring rhetoric, obama isn't one of 'em...

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