Friday, November 5, 2010
Reminder (first posted on the eve of election day 2010)
I just wanted to remind all you people out there how important it is for you to get out and vote DEMOCRATIC today.
Why? So you can say you didn't vote REPUBLICAN.
As Barack Obama has shown, it is very important in a neo-feudal mediocracy to KEEP THE ILLUSION OF HOPE ALIVE.
Keeping the illusion of hope alive allows us to pretend that we really have not lost control of things in the US and, more importantly, it allows the people who actually run the place not to have to face the anger that kleptocrats usually face when the people they rule find out they are getting systematically screwed.
So again. VOTE DEMOCRATIC!!
KEEP THE ILLUSION OF HOPE ALIVE!
Why? So you can say you didn't vote REPUBLICAN.
As Barack Obama has shown, it is very important in a neo-feudal mediocracy to KEEP THE ILLUSION OF HOPE ALIVE.
Keeping the illusion of hope alive allows us to pretend that we really have not lost control of things in the US and, more importantly, it allows the people who actually run the place not to have to face the anger that kleptocrats usually face when the people they rule find out they are getting systematically screwed.
So again. VOTE DEMOCRATIC!!
KEEP THE ILLUSION OF HOPE ALIVE!
William Astore USAF Retired
The New American Isolationism
The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities
By William J. Astore
A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war’s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.
Old-style American isolationism had everything to do with avoiding “entangling alliances” and conflicts abroad. It was tied to America’s historic tradition of rejecting a large standing army -- a tradition in which many Americans took pride. Yes, we signed on to World War I in 1917, but only after we had been “too proud to fight.” Even when we joined, we did so as a non-aligned power with the goal of ending major wars altogether. Before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans again resisted the call to arms, looking upon Hitler’s rise and other unnerving events in Europe and Asia with alarm, but with little eagerness to send American boys into yet another global bloodbath.
In the decades since World War II, however, “isolationism” has been turned inside-out and upside-down. Instead of seeking eternal peace, Washington elites have, by now, plunged the country into a state of eternal war, and they’ve done so, in part, by isolating ordinary Americans from war’s brutal realities. With rare exceptions (notably John F. Kennedy’s call for young Americans to pay any price and bear any burden), our elites have not sought to mobilize a new “greatest generation,” but rather to keep a clueless one -- clueless, that is, as to war’s fatal costs and bitter realities -- unmobilized (if not immobilized).
Such national obliviousness has not gone unnoticed. In a recent New York Times op-ed headlined “The Wars that America Forgot About,” former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw asked the obvious question: Why, in an otherwise contentious political season, have our wars gone so utterly undebated? His answers -- that we’re in a recession in which people have more pressing concerns, and that we’ve restricted the burdens of war to a tiny minority -- are sensible, but don’t go quite far enough. It’s important to add that few Americans are debating, or even discussing, our wars in part because our ruling elites haven’t wanted them debated -- as if they don’t want us to get the idea that we have any say in war-making at all.
Think of it this way: the old isolationism was a peaceable urge basic to the American people; the new isolationism is little short of a government program to keep the old isolationism, or opposition of any sort to American wars, in check.
Americans Express Skepticism about War… So?
When you’re kept isolated from war’s costs, it’s nearly impossible to mount an effective opposition to them. While our elites, remembering the Vietnam years, may have sought to remove U.S. public opinion from the enemy’s target list, they have also worked hard to remove the public as a constraint on their war-making powers. Recall former Vice President Dick Cheney’s dismissive“So?” when asked about opinion polls showing declining public support for the Iraq War in 2008. So what if the American people are uneasy? The elites can always call on a professional, non-draft military, augmented by hordes of privatized hire-a-gun outfits, themselves so isolated from society at large that they’ve almost become the equivalent of foreign legionnaires. These same elites encourage us to “support our troops,” but otherwise to look away.
Mainstream media coverage of our wars has only added to the cocoon created by the new isolationism. After all, it rarely addresses the full costs of those conflicts to U.S. troops (including their redeployment to war zones, even when already traumatized), let alone to foreign non-combatants in faraway Muslim lands. When such civilians are killed, their deaths tend to take place under the media radar. “If it bleeds, it doesn’t lead,” could be a news motto for much of recent war coverage, especially if the bleeding is done by civilians.
Only the recent release of classified documents and videos by WikiLeaks, for instance, has forced our media to bring the mind-numbing body count we’ve amassed in Iraq out of the closet. If nothing else, WikiLeaks has succeeded in reminding us of the impact of our vastly superior firepower, as in a now infamous video of an Apache helicopter gunshipfiring on non-combatants in the streets of Baghdad. Such footage is, of course, all-too-personal, all-too-real. Small wonder it was shown in a censored formon CNN.
Where’s the benefit, after all, for corporate-owned media in showcasing others’ terror and pain, especially if it’s inflicted by “America’s hometown heroes”? Our regular export of large-scale violence (including a thriving trade in the potential for violence via our hammerlock on the global arms trade) is not something Americans or the American media have cared to scrutinize.
To cite two more willful blind spots: Can the average American say roughly how many Iraqis were killed or wounded in our “liberation” of their country and the mayhem that followed? In mid-October, U.S. Central Commandquietly released a distinctly lowball estimate of 200,000 Iraqi casualties (including 77,000 killed) from January 2004 to August 2008. That estimate (lower by 30,000 than the one compiled by official Iraqi sources) did not include casualties from major combat operations in 2003, nor of course did it have any place for the millions of refugees driven from their homes in the sectarian violence that followed. The recent WikiLeaks document dump on Iraq held at least another 15,000 unacknowledged Iraqi dead, and serious studies of the casualty toll often suggest the real numbers are hundreds of thousands higher.
Or how about the attitudes of those living in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan subject to the recent upsurge of U.S. drone strikes? Given the way our robotic wars are written about here, could most Americans imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Zeus-like lightning bolts?
Here’s what one farmer in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal borderlandshad to say: “I blame the government of Pakistan and the USA… they are responsible for destroying my family. We were living a happy life and I didn’t have any links with the Taliban. My family members were innocent… I wonder, why was I victimized?”
Would an American farmer wonder anything different? Would he not seekvengeance if errant missiles obliterated his family? It’s hard, however, for Americans to grasp the nature of the wars being fought in their name, no less to express sympathy for their victims when they are kept in a state of striking isolation from war’s horrors.
Analgesic War
Once upon a time, America’s Global War on Terror was an analgesic. Recall those “shock and awe” images of explosions that marked the opening days of Iraqi combat operations in 2003. Recall as well all the colorful maps, the glamorous weapons systems, and the glowering faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein interpreted and explained to us on our TV screens by retired U.S. military officers in mufti. In this curiously sanitized version of war, weapons and other military arcana were to serve to ease our pain at the tragedy we had suffered on 9/11, while obscuring the “towers” of dead we were creating in other lands.
In fostering analgesic war and insisting on information control, our elites have, yet again, drawn a mistaken lesson from the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, even if it took years, free-to-roam and often skeptical reporters finally began to question the official story of the war. Violent images came home to roost in American living rooms at dinnertime. Such coverage may not have stopped the killing, at least not right away, but it did contribute to a gutsy antiwar movement, as well as to a restive “silent majority” that increasingly rejected official rhetoric of falling dominoes and lights at the end of tunnels.
Iraq and Afghanistan, by way of contrast, have been characterized by embedded (mostly cheerleading) reporters and banal images of U.S. troops on patrol or firing weapons at unseen targets. Clear admissions that our firepower-intensive form of warfare leads to the violent deaths of many more of “them” than of “us” -- and that many of them aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, our enemies -- are seldom forthcoming. (An exception was former Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal’s uncommonly harsh assessment of checkpoint casualties: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.")
“We don’t do body counts on other people,” said a cocky Donald Rumsfeld late in 2003 and, even though it wasn’t true (the Pentagon just kept its body counts to itself), an obliging Pentagon press corps generally fell into line and generally stayed there long after our new wars had lost their feel-good sheen. Clearly, military and political elites learned it’s better (for them, at least) to keep vivid images of death and destruction off America’s screens. Ironically, even as Americans seek more lifelike and visceral representations from ever bigger, brighter, high-def TVs, war is presented in carefully sanitized low-def form, largely drained of blood and violence.
The result? Uncomfortable questions about our wars rarely get asked, let alone aired. A boon to those who want to continue those wars unmolested by public opposition, even if a bust when it comes to pursuing a sensible global strategy that’s truly in the national interest. In seeking to isolate the public from any sense of significant sacrifice, active participation in, or even understanding of America’s wars, these same elites have ensured that the conflicts they pursued would be strategically unsound and morally untenable.
Today, Americans are again an isolationist people, but with a twist. Even as we expand our military bases overseas and spend trillions on national security and wars, we’ve isolated ourselves from war’s passions, its savagery, its heartrending sacrifices. Such isolation comforts some and seemingly allows others free rein to act as they wish, but it’s a false comfort, a false freedom, purchased at the price of prolonging our wars, increasing their casualties, abridging our freedoms, and eroding our country’s standing in the world.
To end our wars, we must first endure their Gorgon stare.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. His books and articles focus mainly on the military, technology, and society. Listen to a Timothy MacBain TomDispatch audio interview withAstore on what it felt like to come out of the military and learn how to write honestly about wars by clicking here or download it to your iPod, here.
He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.
Copyright 2010 William J. Astore
The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities
By William J. Astore
A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war’s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.
Old-style American isolationism had everything to do with avoiding “entangling alliances” and conflicts abroad. It was tied to America’s historic tradition of rejecting a large standing army -- a tradition in which many Americans took pride. Yes, we signed on to World War I in 1917, but only after we had been “too proud to fight.” Even when we joined, we did so as a non-aligned power with the goal of ending major wars altogether. Before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans again resisted the call to arms, looking upon Hitler’s rise and other unnerving events in Europe and Asia with alarm, but with little eagerness to send American boys into yet another global bloodbath.
In the decades since World War II, however, “isolationism” has been turned inside-out and upside-down. Instead of seeking eternal peace, Washington elites have, by now, plunged the country into a state of eternal war, and they’ve done so, in part, by isolating ordinary Americans from war’s brutal realities. With rare exceptions (notably John F. Kennedy’s call for young Americans to pay any price and bear any burden), our elites have not sought to mobilize a new “greatest generation,” but rather to keep a clueless one -- clueless, that is, as to war’s fatal costs and bitter realities -- unmobilized (if not immobilized).
Such national obliviousness has not gone unnoticed. In a recent New York Times op-ed headlined “The Wars that America Forgot About,” former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw asked the obvious question: Why, in an otherwise contentious political season, have our wars gone so utterly undebated? His answers -- that we’re in a recession in which people have more pressing concerns, and that we’ve restricted the burdens of war to a tiny minority -- are sensible, but don’t go quite far enough. It’s important to add that few Americans are debating, or even discussing, our wars in part because our ruling elites haven’t wanted them debated -- as if they don’t want us to get the idea that we have any say in war-making at all.
Think of it this way: the old isolationism was a peaceable urge basic to the American people; the new isolationism is little short of a government program to keep the old isolationism, or opposition of any sort to American wars, in check.
Americans Express Skepticism about War… So?
When you’re kept isolated from war’s costs, it’s nearly impossible to mount an effective opposition to them. While our elites, remembering the Vietnam years, may have sought to remove U.S. public opinion from the enemy’s target list, they have also worked hard to remove the public as a constraint on their war-making powers. Recall former Vice President Dick Cheney’s dismissive“So?” when asked about opinion polls showing declining public support for the Iraq War in 2008. So what if the American people are uneasy? The elites can always call on a professional, non-draft military, augmented by hordes of privatized hire-a-gun outfits, themselves so isolated from society at large that they’ve almost become the equivalent of foreign legionnaires. These same elites encourage us to “support our troops,” but otherwise to look away.
Mainstream media coverage of our wars has only added to the cocoon created by the new isolationism. After all, it rarely addresses the full costs of those conflicts to U.S. troops (including their redeployment to war zones, even when already traumatized), let alone to foreign non-combatants in faraway Muslim lands. When such civilians are killed, their deaths tend to take place under the media radar. “If it bleeds, it doesn’t lead,” could be a news motto for much of recent war coverage, especially if the bleeding is done by civilians.
Only the recent release of classified documents and videos by WikiLeaks, for instance, has forced our media to bring the mind-numbing body count we’ve amassed in Iraq out of the closet. If nothing else, WikiLeaks has succeeded in reminding us of the impact of our vastly superior firepower, as in a now infamous video of an Apache helicopter gunshipfiring on non-combatants in the streets of Baghdad. Such footage is, of course, all-too-personal, all-too-real. Small wonder it was shown in a censored formon CNN.
Where’s the benefit, after all, for corporate-owned media in showcasing others’ terror and pain, especially if it’s inflicted by “America’s hometown heroes”? Our regular export of large-scale violence (including a thriving trade in the potential for violence via our hammerlock on the global arms trade) is not something Americans or the American media have cared to scrutinize.
To cite two more willful blind spots: Can the average American say roughly how many Iraqis were killed or wounded in our “liberation” of their country and the mayhem that followed? In mid-October, U.S. Central Commandquietly released a distinctly lowball estimate of 200,000 Iraqi casualties (including 77,000 killed) from January 2004 to August 2008. That estimate (lower by 30,000 than the one compiled by official Iraqi sources) did not include casualties from major combat operations in 2003, nor of course did it have any place for the millions of refugees driven from their homes in the sectarian violence that followed. The recent WikiLeaks document dump on Iraq held at least another 15,000 unacknowledged Iraqi dead, and serious studies of the casualty toll often suggest the real numbers are hundreds of thousands higher.
Or how about the attitudes of those living in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan subject to the recent upsurge of U.S. drone strikes? Given the way our robotic wars are written about here, could most Americans imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Zeus-like lightning bolts?
Here’s what one farmer in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal borderlandshad to say: “I blame the government of Pakistan and the USA… they are responsible for destroying my family. We were living a happy life and I didn’t have any links with the Taliban. My family members were innocent… I wonder, why was I victimized?”
Would an American farmer wonder anything different? Would he not seekvengeance if errant missiles obliterated his family? It’s hard, however, for Americans to grasp the nature of the wars being fought in their name, no less to express sympathy for their victims when they are kept in a state of striking isolation from war’s horrors.
Analgesic War
Once upon a time, America’s Global War on Terror was an analgesic. Recall those “shock and awe” images of explosions that marked the opening days of Iraqi combat operations in 2003. Recall as well all the colorful maps, the glamorous weapons systems, and the glowering faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein interpreted and explained to us on our TV screens by retired U.S. military officers in mufti. In this curiously sanitized version of war, weapons and other military arcana were to serve to ease our pain at the tragedy we had suffered on 9/11, while obscuring the “towers” of dead we were creating in other lands.
In fostering analgesic war and insisting on information control, our elites have, yet again, drawn a mistaken lesson from the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, even if it took years, free-to-roam and often skeptical reporters finally began to question the official story of the war. Violent images came home to roost in American living rooms at dinnertime. Such coverage may not have stopped the killing, at least not right away, but it did contribute to a gutsy antiwar movement, as well as to a restive “silent majority” that increasingly rejected official rhetoric of falling dominoes and lights at the end of tunnels.
Iraq and Afghanistan, by way of contrast, have been characterized by embedded (mostly cheerleading) reporters and banal images of U.S. troops on patrol or firing weapons at unseen targets. Clear admissions that our firepower-intensive form of warfare leads to the violent deaths of many more of “them” than of “us” -- and that many of them aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, our enemies -- are seldom forthcoming. (An exception was former Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal’s uncommonly harsh assessment of checkpoint casualties: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.")
“We don’t do body counts on other people,” said a cocky Donald Rumsfeld late in 2003 and, even though it wasn’t true (the Pentagon just kept its body counts to itself), an obliging Pentagon press corps generally fell into line and generally stayed there long after our new wars had lost their feel-good sheen. Clearly, military and political elites learned it’s better (for them, at least) to keep vivid images of death and destruction off America’s screens. Ironically, even as Americans seek more lifelike and visceral representations from ever bigger, brighter, high-def TVs, war is presented in carefully sanitized low-def form, largely drained of blood and violence.
The result? Uncomfortable questions about our wars rarely get asked, let alone aired. A boon to those who want to continue those wars unmolested by public opposition, even if a bust when it comes to pursuing a sensible global strategy that’s truly in the national interest. In seeking to isolate the public from any sense of significant sacrifice, active participation in, or even understanding of America’s wars, these same elites have ensured that the conflicts they pursued would be strategically unsound and morally untenable.
Today, Americans are again an isolationist people, but with a twist. Even as we expand our military bases overseas and spend trillions on national security and wars, we’ve isolated ourselves from war’s passions, its savagery, its heartrending sacrifices. Such isolation comforts some and seemingly allows others free rein to act as they wish, but it’s a false comfort, a false freedom, purchased at the price of prolonging our wars, increasing their casualties, abridging our freedoms, and eroding our country’s standing in the world.
To end our wars, we must first endure their Gorgon stare.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. His books and articles focus mainly on the military, technology, and society. Listen to a Timothy MacBain TomDispatch audio interview withAstore on what it felt like to come out of the military and learn how to write honestly about wars by clicking here or download it to your iPod, here.
He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.
Copyright 2010 William J. Astore
George Duhamel on the Writing of Literature
Here is an extract The Mission of Literature by the French literary scholar Georges Duhamel, a defense of the idea of humanism propounded by Erasmus and Cervantes. The extract, is, according to Kenzaburo Oe (my source for the quote, writing in El País) from the book's chapter on Cervantes. Obviously Duhamel was thinking about the life of the great author of El Quijote in his exhortation to the young concerning what they should do if they are of a literary bent.
EU
"So, young person, above all, live life. Drink abundantly from the milk of the udder of life in order to feed your future creations. You say you want to write good novels? Take my advice and board a boat in some port. Travel the world earning your living in modest occupations and learn to put up with poverty. Don't be in a hurry to pick up a pen. Subject yourself to pain and suffering. Learn from the thousands of people you come across. What I really wish to say as I give this advice is never ever try to slide past the anxiety that others generate in you or the adversities that you might have to experience in order to make them happy. (...) You want to write good novels? Then, listen to me well. Above all, try to forget the desire to do so. Set out on a journey with no fixed route. Sharpen your sight, your hearing, your sense of smell and your appetite. Hope and wait with an open heart."
EU
"So, young person, above all, live life. Drink abundantly from the milk of the udder of life in order to feed your future creations. You say you want to write good novels? Take my advice and board a boat in some port. Travel the world earning your living in modest occupations and learn to put up with poverty. Don't be in a hurry to pick up a pen. Subject yourself to pain and suffering. Learn from the thousands of people you come across. What I really wish to say as I give this advice is never ever try to slide past the anxiety that others generate in you or the adversities that you might have to experience in order to make them happy. (...) You want to write good novels? Then, listen to me well. Above all, try to forget the desire to do so. Set out on a journey with no fixed route. Sharpen your sight, your hearing, your sense of smell and your appetite. Hope and wait with an open heart."
Extreme Unction on Radio
As some of you know, i've been doing some local radio in CT. The other day, I went national on Antiwar.com, where I have also published a number of articles.
The interview is a bit more rambling than I would have liked as the host did not talk with me previously about anything he'd be asking or what topics he was interested in.
That said, "algo es algo".
Check it out:
http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/10/29/thomas-harrington/
The interview is a bit more rambling than I would have liked as the host did not talk with me previously about anything he'd be asking or what topics he was interested in.
That said, "algo es algo".
Check it out:
http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/10/29/thomas-harrington/
Obama and Kirchner
Well, Obama got his ass kicked him on Tuesday, something, of course, he richly deserved. The problem is that the people taking over are the last more or less openly fascist people in any of the world'd developed countries.
And these nuts, in unison with the media they control (ether directly, or by dint of the fecklessness of the non-Republican "liberals"--CNN, PBS, NPR NYT etc-- in the news game) will rip poor Barry from stem to stern through congressional investigations and media "investigations".
It will be bad.
So, at the time of this debacle, it seems fair to ask "Would it really have been any worse than this had actually done things to serve the liberal base that got him elected?
On the assumption he would be getting his ass whipped either way, would you rather have a president with just a sore ass, or a SORE ASS AND:
1) A single payer health care system
2) A closed Guantánamo and the persecution of all the people committed war crimes under Bush
3) The reinstatement of the rights lost under Bush, for starters the right to email and talk on the phone without being snooped upon
4) A bail out that put money into the hands of America homeowners with mortgage problems rather than banks. That way banks would get there money (because people would not be in default) and the people themselves would get to keep their houses.
5) An Israel forced to either make peace or have its funding cut.
6) A real muscular liberal on the supreme court rather Carreerist Kagan who never met an "anti-terror" abridgment of liberties she didn't like.
7) A real, as opposed to fakely staged, end to the Iraq war.
8) Real vigorous participation in the Copenhagen (Global Warming Conference) rather than the role of cynical preserver of the status quo.
9) No more innocent pakistanis and afghanis dying from drones strikes
The list is endless. He and the media can tell us all they want about our being a center right country and not having the votes BLAH, BLAH BLAH. They are all pitiful cover stories for endemic cowardice.
If you want to see what someone can do when their life is about convictions rather than a purely narcissistic pursuit of power, look at the life of Nestor Kirchner who died suddenly a week ago at the age of 60.
Kirchner was no saint and he was not without his own lust for power. But while he liked power, he also really liked helping its country in BIG WAYS.
This was a guy who came into office on a razor thin majority at a time (2003) of unbelievable crisis for the nation. The country was bankrupt and depressed. (Can you imagine almost all of your savings/ retirement being cut by 75% overnight).
He was basically a nobody (in the eyes of the public) who had worked his way steadily up the ranks of one of the most historically corrupt political parties in the western world, el Partido Justicialista. And this in what had lately been one of the most corrupt national political cultures in the western world
From all appearances he was just a hack who. like the hacks before him, could be expected to fail nd fill his pockets.
But something happened. Nestor Kirchner, as man with an historical consciousness , looked in the mirror and said to himself. 'This is my time and am not going to blow it. I got into politics in the seventies to pursue justice and dignity for Argentina and its people. I may not win all the battles, but I'm going to fight hard on every one of them".
He didn't care who he offended (just look at how the Argentine right and the Establishment press talks about him) .
And guess what? It mostly worked. Argentina is a country on the move with a growing economy, a cancelled foreign debt, a shrinking income gap and a vigorous pubic discussion of human rights where torturers and state-sponsored murderers no longer walk around (as they did for some 20 years) smiling on the street at the people they abused, confident that the law would never touch them.
In short, Nestor Kirchner used every bullet he had at his disposition in his fight for what he thought the country needed. And when he used up the first six, he re-loaded again again and again. According to the doctors, he literally worked himself into the grave.
And if we except the people whose plutocratic party he rudely and crudely (he was not subtle) disrupted (and who have used their control of the media to pursue him endlessly), he was pretty widely loved and respected at the time of his death.
This was supposed to be Obama's story line. Don't you remember all those amateur chess player/Obama supporters who told us again and again "He is just saying what he needs to say to get elected. then he'll fight for us".
Hoo-hah. That's a good one!
To fight you have to have courage. and to have courage you have to have values. And to have values, you have to have been something more than a serial pleaser and cameleon. You have to have have things that burn in your gut and keep you up at night.
Barry has none of this.
And these nuts, in unison with the media they control (ether directly, or by dint of the fecklessness of the non-Republican "liberals"--CNN, PBS, NPR NYT etc-- in the news game) will rip poor Barry from stem to stern through congressional investigations and media "investigations".
It will be bad.
So, at the time of this debacle, it seems fair to ask "Would it really have been any worse than this had actually done things to serve the liberal base that got him elected?
On the assumption he would be getting his ass whipped either way, would you rather have a president with just a sore ass, or a SORE ASS AND:
1) A single payer health care system
2) A closed Guantánamo and the persecution of all the people committed war crimes under Bush
3) The reinstatement of the rights lost under Bush, for starters the right to email and talk on the phone without being snooped upon
4) A bail out that put money into the hands of America homeowners with mortgage problems rather than banks. That way banks would get there money (because people would not be in default) and the people themselves would get to keep their houses.
5) An Israel forced to either make peace or have its funding cut.
6) A real muscular liberal on the supreme court rather Carreerist Kagan who never met an "anti-terror" abridgment of liberties she didn't like.
7) A real, as opposed to fakely staged, end to the Iraq war.
8) Real vigorous participation in the Copenhagen (Global Warming Conference) rather than the role of cynical preserver of the status quo.
9) No more innocent pakistanis and afghanis dying from drones strikes
The list is endless. He and the media can tell us all they want about our being a center right country and not having the votes BLAH, BLAH BLAH. They are all pitiful cover stories for endemic cowardice.
If you want to see what someone can do when their life is about convictions rather than a purely narcissistic pursuit of power, look at the life of Nestor Kirchner who died suddenly a week ago at the age of 60.
Kirchner was no saint and he was not without his own lust for power. But while he liked power, he also really liked helping its country in BIG WAYS.
This was a guy who came into office on a razor thin majority at a time (2003) of unbelievable crisis for the nation. The country was bankrupt and depressed. (Can you imagine almost all of your savings/ retirement being cut by 75% overnight).
He was basically a nobody (in the eyes of the public) who had worked his way steadily up the ranks of one of the most historically corrupt political parties in the western world, el Partido Justicialista. And this in what had lately been one of the most corrupt national political cultures in the western world
From all appearances he was just a hack who. like the hacks before him, could be expected to fail nd fill his pockets.
But something happened. Nestor Kirchner, as man with an historical consciousness , looked in the mirror and said to himself. 'This is my time and am not going to blow it. I got into politics in the seventies to pursue justice and dignity for Argentina and its people. I may not win all the battles, but I'm going to fight hard on every one of them".
He didn't care who he offended (just look at how the Argentine right and the Establishment press talks about him) .
And guess what? It mostly worked. Argentina is a country on the move with a growing economy, a cancelled foreign debt, a shrinking income gap and a vigorous pubic discussion of human rights where torturers and state-sponsored murderers no longer walk around (as they did for some 20 years) smiling on the street at the people they abused, confident that the law would never touch them.
In short, Nestor Kirchner used every bullet he had at his disposition in his fight for what he thought the country needed. And when he used up the first six, he re-loaded again again and again. According to the doctors, he literally worked himself into the grave.
And if we except the people whose plutocratic party he rudely and crudely (he was not subtle) disrupted (and who have used their control of the media to pursue him endlessly), he was pretty widely loved and respected at the time of his death.
This was supposed to be Obama's story line. Don't you remember all those amateur chess player/Obama supporters who told us again and again "He is just saying what he needs to say to get elected. then he'll fight for us".
Hoo-hah. That's a good one!
To fight you have to have courage. and to have courage you have to have values. And to have values, you have to have been something more than a serial pleaser and cameleon. You have to have have things that burn in your gut and keep you up at night.
Barry has none of this.
The Last Best Hope for Mankind? What say the indexes?
For those that continue to cling to the idea that the US remains a world model of social advancement check out the following indexes. One is the Gini index which measures income distribution in the society and the other is the index of corruption in society.
Given that the American dream is all about anyone being able to "make it", it would figure that we'd be pretty good on income distribution. And given our role as perpetual tutors of democracy for the unwashed, we would figure to be pretty good on corruption.
Well on the Gini (inequality) index we are 45th from the bottom or 57th from the top of 102 countries on which there is full data. Our most immediate neighbors on the list are Uganda, Jamaica Uruguay (slightly worse) and Ivory Coast, Cameroon Iran and Nigeria (slightly better). Outstripping us easily are places like Russia. Morrocco, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Romania.
See for yourself: http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index_2010_0.html
As for the corruption index we are 22nd from the cleanest countries at the top and our neighbors there are Chile and Belgium (slightly better) and France and Uruguay (slightly worse)
http://transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results
Given that the American dream is all about anyone being able to "make it", it would figure that we'd be pretty good on income distribution. And given our role as perpetual tutors of democracy for the unwashed, we would figure to be pretty good on corruption.
Well on the Gini (inequality) index we are 45th from the bottom or 57th from the top of 102 countries on which there is full data. Our most immediate neighbors on the list are Uganda, Jamaica Uruguay (slightly worse) and Ivory Coast, Cameroon Iran and Nigeria (slightly better). Outstripping us easily are places like Russia. Morrocco, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Romania.
See for yourself: http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index_2010_0.html
As for the corruption index we are 22nd from the cleanest countries at the top and our neighbors there are Chile and Belgium (slightly better) and France and Uruguay (slightly worse)
http://transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results
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