We still have no real national leader on stopping the use of killer drones

Associated Press image

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has aligned himself with the Repugnican Party, the “tea party” and the libertarians, filibustered on the topic of the use of killer drones from yesterday afternoon until early this morning. Unfortunately, Paul’s concerns about the use of killer drones apparently is limited only to their use on “non-combatant” American citizens on American soil, and it seems to me that the upstart Paul’s goal is to promote and position himself as a future president at least as much as it is to tackle the problem of killer drones.

It was a breath of fresh air to see Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Rand Paul filibuster on the topic of the use of killer drones, a topic that the spineless, useless Democrats in D.C. (who are only about protecting the brand name and who have no sense of right and wrong) have refused to touch, since Papa Obama wuvs his drones, and Papa Obama must not be crossed.

The first slaughter of a human being by a U.S. drone occurred in Afghanistan in November 2001, during the reign of the unelected Bush regime. Pretty much nothing but evil came from the unelected Bush regime, yet DINO President Barack Obama decided to continue with the use of drones as remote-controlled killing machines.*

Most of the the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in D.C. want to preserve the use of human-snuffing drones for use by future Repugnican Tea Party presidents, and while many if not most of the DINOs in D.C. probably have a problem with the use of drones to kill human beings, none of them has the balls to stand up to Obama in a public and meaningful way.

So it was great to see Rand Paul buck both party establishments and speak out against at least one of the obvious problems that the use of human-killing drones poses. (I might say that that problem is their “abuse,” but since I believe that they should not be used at all, I won’t say “abuse,” because that connotes that their use at all might be OK.)

Don’t get me wrong. I could never cast a vote for Rand Paul.

Among other things, he opposes a woman’s right to an abortion even in cases of rape and incest, but would leave it to each state to determine whether or not to allow legal abortion, Roe v. Wade be damned.

At least at one time he held the view that Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits private businesses from engaging in race-based discrimination, is unconsitutional, because a private business should be allowed to discriminate by race if it so wishes.

Although Rand Paul claims to be a strict constitutionalist, he doesn’t like the fact that the 14th Amendment makes anyone who is born on American a soil a U.S. citizen, regardless of the child’s parents’ citizenship status, and so he wants so-called “birthright citizenship” to end (he supports a constitutional amendment to end “birthright citizenship” if it can’t be ended otherwise).

Rand Paul apparently wants to pick and choose among the constitutional amendments, because he vehemently supports the Second Amendment, opposing all gun control. (As I’ve noted before, no civilian needs an assault rifle, and when the so-called founding fathers crafted the Second Amendment, no such weapons 0f mass destruction existed, so to claim that of course the Second Amendment extends to them is quite a fucking stretch.)

Rand Paul personally opposes same-sex marriage but is OK with allowing each state to decide the matter. (I have a personal problem with his personal opposition to it, with his ignorance and his bigotry on the matter, his heterosexism and homophobia, and I also disagree vehemently that any state should be able to decide whether or not to honor any U.S. citizen’s constitutionally guaranteed equal human and civil rights.)

All in all, although the term “libertarian,” which Rand Paul uses to describe himself, implies a love of liberties and freedoms, with the libertarians (most of whom are right-wing white males), it is the same-old, same-old: These liberties and freedoms belong only to white, right-wing, “Christian,” heterosexual men (especially those who have power and money). They were the only ones who (regardless of what the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents proclaimed) had liberties and freedoms at the nation’s founding, and it should be that way forever, right? Just like the rich, white founding fathers intended!

That’s where Rand Paul is coming from. Indeed, he is considered a member of the “tea party” also. (I suspect that he just jumped on to the “tea party” bandwagon because the “libertarian” bandwagon wasn’t going to get him into the U.S. Senate, but if he says that he’s a member of the so-called “tea party,” and he does, then I’m going to hold him to that.)

While there is nothing that the “tea party” traitors believe that I also believe — far from being “revolutionaries” who are fighting for “freedom,” the “tea-party” dipshits support our corporate oppressors, which makes them treasonous fascists, not revolutionaries, and their belief system, if fully implemented, would bring about the even further enslavement of the American people, not our further freedom – the so-called “libertarians” are right on a few issues.

Rand Paul’s libertarian daddy, Ron Paul, for instance, although a patriarchal, misogynist homophobe also, opposed the Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War, a rarity for someone aligned with the Repugnican Party.

Of course, Ron Paul’s reasoning for his opposition to the Vietraq War wasn’t the same as mine. My main problem with the Vietraq War was the carnage — thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians as well as more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel died pointlessly in the bogus war — carnage that benefitted only Big Oil and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp.

From what I can discern, Ron Paul’s biggest problem with the war was not the cost in human lives, but was that the war, he argued in October 2002, was unconstitutional**; the U.S. Congress just giving the U.S. president carte blanche approval to declare war was akin to monarchism, he declared. I agree with that, but it was the foreseeable death and destruction, not the constitutional arguments, that were my biggest concern during the Bush regime’s run-up to its Vietraq War in 2002 and early 2003.

It also has been the gargantuan fiscal cost of the Vietraq War to the American taxpayers that has concerned Ron Paul and other libertarians — and that has been a huge problem, too, as the cost of the Vietraq War is a nice chunk of our federal budget deficit — but it troubles me that Ron Paul and his fellow libertarians haven’t focused on the human costs of such bogus warfare.

Still, I suppose, although we did our calculations very differently, at least Ron Paul came to the same, correct answer: The United States never should go to war unless it absolutely, absolutely is necessary, and, as the U.S. Constitution mandates, the U.S. Congress must keep the U.S. president in check when it comes to waging war, and must never abdicate its sole constitutional authority to declare war to the president, under any circumstances.

And wars of choice for war profiteering — robbing the U.S. treasury via bogus warfare — are intolerable. And they are treasonous. Knowingly taking the nation to war with another nation based upon lies cannot be anything other than treason, except, of course, also war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On the topic of the use of drones to slaughter human beings, Rand Paul, much like his daddy, at least partially comes to the right answer, but with calculations that are too cold.

In his nearly 13-hour filibuster, Rand Paul’s main or even only concern about the use of drones, I understand from the media coverage of his filibuster, is that killer drones might one day be used on “non-combatant” American citizens on American soil, in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that no U.S. citizen shall be deprived of his or her life or liberty as punishment for an accused crime or crimes without first having been granted a fair trial.

That’s way too narrow a problem to have with the use of killer drones.

Why should only American citizens be granted such fairness, decency and justice? Is not every human being on the planet worthy of such fairness, decency and justice, or are Americans superior to other human beings? Are only American lives valuable?

Further: Drones are a cowardly, lazy and sloppy way to kill, and their use quite foreseeably could explode to the point that innocent people all over the world (including in the U.S., of course) are being maimed and slaughtered by drones, like something out of one of the “Terminator” movies.

Therefore, the use of drones to slaughter human beings should be prohibited worldwide. Their use should not be prohibited only against American citizens, whether on American soil or whether on foreign soil, whether they are deemed “combatant” or “non-combatant,” but should be prohibited against any human being. You can’t trust the average adult with the “proper” use of a killer drone any more than you can trust the average child with the proper use of a shotgun.

Sadly, however, even Rand Paul’s public stance on killer drones is to the left of the public stance taken by the DINOs (which mostly is an eery silence).

DINO Nancy Pelosi, for instance, on the subject of the use of drones to slaughter human beings, to my knowledge only has offered a reassurance that of course Barack Obama never would use a drone to kill a “non-combatant” American citizen on American soil.

That’s not nearly good enough, Nancy.

Maybe Obama would not, but what if another election-stealing would-be war criminal like George W. Bush got into the White House? That could happen in less than four full years.

It would be wonderful if our “representatives” in Washington would actually lead, which means having an eye on the future — fuck, even the near future.

As Rand Paul stated himself during his filibuster, it’s not about Barack Obama (whose handlers constantly are asking us if we have his back when it sure would be nice if he had ours). It’s about the principle of the use of drones to slaughter human beings becoming so widespread and so out of control that we Americans or we human beings anywhere on the planet can’t fucking leave our own homes without worrying about whether or not a fucking drone might maim or kill us that day, accidentally or intentionally.

Neither Rand Paul nor any other member of U.S. Congress, to my knowledge, has stated publicly that that is the issue here.

And I’m still very leery of Rand Paul. I have no idea how much his filibuster actually was about the use of killer drones against “non-combatant” Americans on American soil and how much it was showboating because he has presidential aspirations.

It fairly clearly was such showboating when he remarked during a hearing in January to then-Secretary of State Billary Clinton on the subject of the September attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya: “Had I been president and found you did not read the cables from Benghazi and from Ambassador Stevens, I  would have relieved you of your post.”

He came off as a major prick because, well, he apparently is a major prick.

Although he’s only in his third year in the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul already was talking about his being president one day while he was attacking a woman who has been in national politics far longer than he has been. Would he have talked like that to a white male secretary of state? I doubt it. It was a sickening, nauseating display of that stupid-white-male sense of entitlement again.

While I’m glad that someone finally spoke out against the use of killer drones in some meaningful way in D.C., the patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic and apparently racist/white-supremacist Rand Paul would make as awful a president as his daddy would have, and, because he limited his argument against killer drones to the protection of only “non-combatant” American citizens on American soil — and, of course, whether or not someone targeted for slaughter by drone is a “combatant” or a “non-combatant” in many cases could be up for interpretation, and thus is wide open to abuse — we still have no real leadership in Washington, D.C., on the subject of drones used to slaughter human beings.

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*DINO Barack Obama’s having continued the use of drones to slaughter human beings is one of the many reasons that I could not cast a second vote for him in November 2012. Obama is an immoral man, perhaps not immoral as most of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are, but still immoral. The lesser of two evils is still an evil.

**In his October 2002 speech in which he stated his opposition to the U.S. Congress giving then-”President” Bush the power to declare war on Iraq, Ron Paul also stated, “There is no convincing evidence that Iraq is capable of threatening the security of this country, and, therefore, very little reason, if any, to pursue a war.”

That is common knowledge now, and during the build-up to the Vietraq War it was clear to me, also, as just a consumer of the news, that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. and that the treasonous members of the unelected Bush regime were lying through their teeth (“aluminum tubes,” “yellowcake from Niger,” “mushroom clouds,” “anthrax,” etc.) and were dead-set upon invading Iraq no matter what.

In his speech Ron Paul also interestingly stated that the impending Vietraq War did not pass the “Christian” litmus test for a “just war.” He said:

First, it [the “Christian" litmus test for a just war] says that there has to be an act of aggression; and there has not been an act of aggression against the United States. We are 6,000 miles from [Iraq's] shores.

Also, it says that all efforts at negotiations must be exhausted. I do not believe that is the case. It seems to me like the opposition, the enemy, right now is begging for more negotiations.

Also, the Christian doctrine says that the proper authority must be responsible for initiating the war. I do not believe that proper authority can be transferred to the president nor to the United Nations.

In his speech Ron Paul also, besides engaging in the usual libertarian United Nations-bashing (the U.S. should call the global shots, not the UN, you see), attacked the Bush regime’s neo-conservative concept of “pre-emptive war,” stating, “No matter what the arguments may be, this policy is new; and it will have ramifications for our future, and it will have ramifications for the future of the world because other countries will adopt this same philosophy.”

It’s too bad no one is that far-sighted when it comes to the use of human-slaughtering drones!

WHO is demonic and mob-like?

Updated below

Associated Press photo

The new face of terrorism? The latest political-ideologically motivated murderous rampage was committed not by some “demonic” liberal, but by yet another paranoid, bigoted, stupid white man who, among many other wingnutty things, opposes the immigration of people who aren’t just like he is, including those who aren’t “Christian.”

When is the last time that some liberal went on a political-ideologically motivated murderous rampage here in the United States of America?

According to the American right wing, acts of violence committed by left-wingers are commonplace. In her introduction* to her subtly titled book Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America, wingnutty whackjob Ann Cunter proclaims that “The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic”; “A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group”; and “The Democratic Party is the party of the mob…. Democrats … are the mob.”

She goes on:

The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes — as yet — but uses a more insidious means to incite the mob. The twisting of truth, stirring of passions, demonizing of opponents, the relying on propagandistic images in lieu of ideas — these are the earmarks of a mob leader.

Gee, I don’t know. It seems to me that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are much more like the mob than are the Democrats, and that Cunter’s definition of mob-like behavior describes the behavior of her and her fellow Repugnican Tea Party traitors to a “T” (that’s “T” for treason).

The Democrats just let George W. Bush treasonously steal the White House in late 2000 — meanwhile, there were actual mobs of Repugnican operatives in Florida who did their best to disrupt the ballot counting at ballot-counting sites, which to me sure the fuck amounts to treason – and then the Democrats just let Bush treasonously launch his illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War in March 2003. (Thousands of our troops have died for the unelected Bush regime’s repeated lies about its reasons for having launched the Vietraq War. If that isn’t treason — to launch a war that is good for the profiteering of a relative handful of corporate war profiteers but that is disastrous for the nation as a whole – then I don’t know what the fuck is.)

There were some protests against the blatant theft of the White House and the launching of the bogus Vietraq War – I attended them — but they were nonviolent and thus they were non-threatening to the powers that be. (I’d have written “the powers that were,” but these powers essentially still are, so I’ll leave it at “the powers that be.”) Thus, the protests were ineffective. (Nonviolence, as the right-wingers know, often if not usually is ineffective, which is why they often embrace the use of violence for achieving their political aims.) 

And indeed, the unelected Bush regime was able to get its bogus Vietraq War for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp in large part because of the mob-like, toxic national political atmosphere that the Repugnicans had created in the wake of 9/11, in which to disagree with the unelected Bush regime on just about anything supposedly amounted to treason and supposedly aided and abetted the “terrorists.”**

Democrats dangerous? Democrats ready to put wingnuts’ heads on pikes?

Fuck, I only wish! (Just as I only wish that corporate-ass-licking capitulator in chief Barack “Hope and Change” Obama actually were a socialist.)

Speaking of mobs, it was the “tea party” traitors who disrupted the congressional town halls to discuss the Obama administration’s (pseudo) health-care reform. It was a nationwide coordinated attempt by the right wing to disrupt the town halls that was reminiscent of the coordinated attempt by the right wing to disrupt the ballot counting in Florida in late 2000. The right-wingers hate democracy except when democracy goes their way. (And even when democracy doesn’t go their way, they’ll treasonously steal an election if they can get away with it.)

Now that’s mob activity. I only wish that the waaay-too-easily-cowed Democrats would engage in actual mob activity when it comes to things like stolen presidential elections, the launching of bogus wars for corporate war profiteering, and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ current plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and to eliminate, as much as is possible, taxes for the rich and the super-fucking-rich — because surely the remedy for our nation’s economic woes is to make the poor even poorer and the filthy rich even richer.

Another quote from Ann Cunter before I move on: In her intro to her latest collection of venom, bile and blatant lies, she also notes, “It is official Democratic policy to appeal to the least-informed, weakest-minded members of the public.” Um, isn’t that Faux “News’” mission statement? And isn’t that Cunter’s bread and fucking butter, appealing to the least-informed, weakest-minded members of the public? If millions of so-called Americans weren’t paranoid, abjectly ignorant, bigoted, self-righteous and hypocritical mouth-breathing fucktards, Cunter couldn’t keep selling her demonic books. 

It’s hard to tell whether Cunter is someone who hypocritically projects her own evil onto others like she’s on crack or if she’s an outright liar for pay (very good pay, apparently). What she at least appears to desire, however, is an Ayn-Randian “utopia” in which everyone whom she disagrees with has been eliminated. And because she apparently fears that the left wing might one day purge the nation of the right wing, that the left wing might beat the right wing to it – even though the modern American left wing has shown itself to be pathetically unable to accomplish anything big and routinely lays down and plays doormat to the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (Sure, Gee Dubya, we’ll just give you the White House; sure, Gee Dubya, we’ll just give you your Vietraq War; sure, John “Cry Me a River” Boehner, we’ll just give you your cuts to Social Security and Medicare and your tax breaks for the rich and the super-rich) — she has written a book telling her fellow wingnuts that the liberals are gearing up to put their heads on pikes. (Or, again, she’s lying and she knows it. Hard to say which…)

While I can’t think of a single instance of an actual liberal actually having gone on a murderous rampage over his or her political ideology, Norway this past week was rocked by a white-male wingnut who went on a murderous rampage over his right-wing political ideology.

Reports Reuters today:

Sundvollen, Norway – Norway mourned [today] 93 people killed in a shooting spree and car bombing by a Norwegian who saw his attacks as “atrocious, but necessary” to defeat liberal immigration policies and the spread of Islam.

In his first comment via a lawyer since his arrest, Anders Behring Breivik, 32, said he wanted to explain himself at a court hearing [tomorrow] about extending his custody.

“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” [lawyer] Geir Lippestad said.

The lawyer said Breivik had admitted to Friday’s shootings at a Labour party youth camp and the bombing that killed seven people in Oslo’s government district a few hours earlier.

However, “he feels that what he has done does not deserve punishment,” Lippestad told NRK public television.

“What he has said is that he wants a change in society, and in his understanding, in his head, there must be a revolution.” …

More information about terrorist Anders Behring Breivik will come out, I’m sure, but it’s interesting that Ann Cunter very apparently shares his core right-wing beliefs on such issues as “liberal immigration policies” and “the spread of Islam.” I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Breivik is familiar with Cunter’s work.

The picture of Breivik above shows him to be a young white guy. Murderous thugs or terrorists aren’t supposed to be squeaky-clean-looking conservative blond white guys. Nope. They’re supposed to be black or Arab or Muslim (or some combination thereof).

I have to wonder if Breivik’s brand of terrorism — and, because he’s a right-wing white guy, are the wingnuts here at home even going to acknowledge that Breivik is indeed a terrorist? — is the new (white male) face of (domestic) terrorism. (I specify “domestic terrorism” because the white male face long has been the face of global military terrorism, although, of course, here in the United States it’s never considered to be terrorism if the U.S. military [or one of its wingnutty allies, such as Israel] commits state-sanctioned terrorism.)

Reuters notes that Friday’s “violence, Norway’s worst since World War II, has profoundly shocked the usually peaceful nation of 4.8 million.”

If a white male wingnut can slaughter 93 innocent people in the name of his political ideology in a nation that (until now, anyway…) has enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most peaceful nations on the planet, what might we expect here at home?

While Ann Cunter blathers on about Democrats seeking to put the heads of American wingnuts on pikes, it was a white-male wingnut who apparently agrees with her on the core issues who in cold blood slaughtered dozens of mostly teen-aged members of his nation’s Labour party, which is roughly equivalent to the United States’ Democratic Party. (I can only say “roughly equivalent” because the establishmentarian Democratic Party, since Bill Clinton, has been drifting further and further to the right to the point that it really can no longer be called “liberal.” Even calling it “centrist” is a stretch, since it’s more center-right than it is center-left.)

While Cunter blathers on about Democrats being violent, it was an apparently right-leaning young white man, Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head (and shot six others dead) in Tucson in January.*** Oh, and this was after Repugnican Tea Party (then-)queen Sarah Palin had posted this image on the Internet, in which Giffords had been indicated on a map with a gun-sight crosshairs:

Yes, it’s the Democrats who are mob-like, certainly not the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, whose presidential aspirants actually think it’s perfectly OK to post mob-like hit lists of political opponents on the Internet. 

I’m not advocating that we actual liberals seek out the white male wingnuts and pre-emptively put their heads on pikes because they are ticking time bombs ready to start shooting into gatherings of people whose ideology they oppose (I could list several examples of their potential targets, but I don’t want to give them any ideas) and to start bombing government buildings a la Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was yet another right-leaning white male terrorist (and who might have inspired Breivik; I suppose that we’ll find out).

Should the white male wingnuts start mimicking Anders Behring Breivik (and Timothy McVeigh and Jared Lee Loughner and…) here at home, however, I wouldn’t rule that out.

My general feeling is that if the treasonous wingnuts want another civil war, then we should give them one — and annihilate them this time, instead of actually help them with reconstruction, only so that they could continue to drag the nation down to this day.

In the meantime, however, it’s quite easy to lay waste to the claim that it’s the liberals who actually are “demonic” or “mob-like” when it’s the wingnuts who always actually have committed the lion’s share of the killing of innocents and other mob-like behavior.

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*No, I have not and I will not read Cunter’s entire book. I’d never contribute a single fucking penny toward her poisonous and treasonous right-wing propaganda. The intro to her book, if you want to read it, is available at amazon.com.

**I use quotation marks because it’s only others who kill for political gain who are “terrorists,” even though the United States slaughters far more innocent civilians in its pursuit of its own political (well, corporate) objectives than does any other nation, hands down.

***Loughner appears to be insane and his political ideology (what we know of it, anyway) therefore is muddled, but he inarguably meets the profile of the alienated, angry, dangerous young white man whom we have come to know and love. And certainly his target, a female Democratic lawmaker, sure looks like, symbolically, at least, an assualt on the liberal and the feminine by the conservative and the masculine. With a gun, of course, because the alienated, angry, dangerous young white men sure love their guns. And aren’t they exactly the ones who should possess their own home arsenals?

Update (Sunday, July 24, 2011): I’ve done a lot of reading on Anders Behring Breivik. It’s quite interesting. Apparently we know that he was inspired by at least one American white male wingnut — Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” portions of whose manifesto Breivik reportedly simply lifted for his own lengthy manifesto.

Breivik reportedly signed his wingnutty manifesto as “Andrew Berwick,” which suggests that he identifies with the Anglo(-American) brand of winguttery, even though he is a Norwegian nationalist who apparently wants to see Norway (and indeed, all of “white” Europe) purged of people who don’t look and believe like he looks and believes, much like the Nazis of Nazi Germany wanted to purge Nazi Germany of its “undesirables” and the anti-immigrant, xenophobic, misogynist, patriarchal, homophobic, capitalist/anti-socialist, Islamophobic “Christo”fascists (and some right-wing Jews) of the United States (who, with rare exceptions, such as Repugnican Tea Party presidential aspirant Herman Cain, also are white supremacists) would love to purge the United States of its “undesirables.”

The world — its demographic make-up and its balances of power – is rapidly changing, and the stupid white men who always have been in charge of the show (at least in Europe and in the United States) — and their supporters – are coming unglued. Suddenly they are the “victims” — even though no one is victimizing them and they continue to victimize others.

Finally, you should read Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the definition of the word “terrorism.”

As Greenwald points out amply, to hypocritical Americans (and, I suppose, to some hypocritical Europeans and Israelis as well), it’s only “terrorism” when a Muslim does it. And I mean literally — to many, the very definition of “terrorism” necessitates that it is an act committed by a Muslim, because, very apparently, “Christians” (and Jews) are, by definition, incapable of committing terrorism. (When you are God’s chosen, you can do no wrong, apparently. Especially if your skin is white.)

This discussion of the definition of “terrorism” reminds me of how George W. Bush used to toss around the word “civilized.” According to Bush, the Muslim “terrorists” (oops — that’s redundant!) are not “civilized,” while the “Christian” (and Jewish) residents of the United States of America (and the United States’ partner in crime, Israel), by definition are “civilized” – even though in my lifetime the “civilized” “Christians” and Jews of the United States and Israel have slaughtered far more innocent Muslims than vice-versa.

(The tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis whom the United States of America has slaughtered since March 2003 in the Vietraq War in retaliation for the roughly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11, 2001 — even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11 — is in line with the insane disproportionate amount of killing that we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the Israelis whine that they are “victims” when, in fact, every time there is an Israeli-Palestinian flare-up, only a handful of Israelis die in comparison to the large number of Palestinians who die as a result of the military aid that the United States gives Israel.

Yeah, the United States and Israel — God’s chosen nations, dontchya know — are “civilized.” Right. Just like Anders Behring Breivik is civilized.)

My last word on the assassination of Osama bin Laden (I hope)

I had thought that the Osama bin Laden assassination would have run its course by now here in the United States of Amnesia, but, with nothing else to replace it – except, perhaps, for the “news” that Bristol Palin’s facial appearance indeed has been altered, she says, because she had jaw surgery (this is the most-viewed “news” story on Yahoo! News as I type this sentence) — it lingers still.

It’s a sign of the collapsing of the American empire that so many Americans have found comfort, I suppose the word is, in the assassination of a rather pathetic man in hiding whose last big show was almost a full decade ago.

I mean, how convenient it is to blame more than a decade of American stupidity and laxity* on one man, and how tempting it is to believe that with his death goes American stupidity and laxity. If bin Laden was the cause of all of our problems, then surely his death is the magical solution to all of our problems! Right? Right?

As I wrote right after I found out about it, bin Laden’s assassination has changed nothing except for the national “news” obsession du jour (or, in this case, de la semaine). Bin Laden had been fairly powerless for years before his assassination, and his largest achievement was in destroying the American economy.

And hell, he didn’t even have to do the work. It was the treasonous wingnuts of the unelected Bush regime, using their wet dream of 9/11 like the Reichstag Fire to fulfill their wingnutty wish list, who did the work for bin Laden, using 9/11 for years as their cover to push through a radical right-wing, treasonous agenda they otherwise never would have been able to push through.

And it was an hysterical, cowed populace that allowed them to, just as it had allowed them to steal the White House in the first place.

While President Barack Obama seems to have driven the final stake into the heart of “birtherism,” whose death was long overdue, and for at least the short term can stave off any charges that militarily he’s a pussy, sooner or later the economy is going to reassert its political gravitational pull on Planet Obama.

An NBC News poll taken late last week shows that while almost 60 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s handling of foreign policy (the bin Laden bounce, no doubt), almost 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy.

The bin Laden bounce has put Obama slightly above a 50-percent overall approval rating in the Gallup Poll after he had languished in the 40s for more than the past year, only occassionally hitting 50 percent or 51 percent in that time period.**

Given the weak field of Repugnican Tea Party candidates, however, Obama’s re-election is likely even in an economic environment that might otherwise seriously jeopardize a second presidential term.

But what Obama’s probable re-election means is the continued rightward drift of the nation, in which the new “center” is still right of center and continues going rightward. What’s good for Barack Obama’s personal political fortune, unfortunately, is bad for the nation and for the rest of the planet.

And how you do something matters. I don’t mourn the death of mass murderer Osama bin Laden any more than I would mourn the death of mass murderer George W. Bush or mass murderer Dick Cheney (or mass murderer Condoleezza Rice*** or mass murderer Donald Rumsfeld or…), but how it was achieved was shitty, regardless of how history, which up until now, at least, always has been written by the victors, might tell the story.

George W. Bush is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent human beings, is a much bigger mass murderer than was bin Laden, yet should a military team from a justice-pursuing Iraq (which was home to most of Bush’s victims) take out Bush on American soil like a military team from the U.S. took out bin Laden on Pakistani soil, Americans would be, literally, up in arms.

Even mass murderers like George W. Bush deserve a fair trial. Summary, extrajudicial execution, no matter who its victim is, is always wrong. The perpetrators of such tactics are no better than are their victims. And that’s what the Obama administration’s assassination of Osama bin Laden proved to the world: That the majority of the inhabitants of the United States of America is no better than was bin Laden.

Finally, I hope to make this my last post on Osama bin Laden’s assassination. But before I go I want to leave you with Ted Rall’s current column on the topic. Here it is, in full:

President Obama murdered Osama bin Laden. I am surprised that the left has been so supportive — not of the end result, but of the way it was carried out.

Imagine if the killing had gone down the same exact way, but under Bush. Armed commandos invade a foreign country, storm into a suburban neighborhood, blow a hole in a house and blow away an unarmed man in front of his 12-year-old daughter. The guy is a murder suspect. Mass murder. But there’s no attempt to arrest him or bring him to justice. They spirit his bloody corpse out of the country and dump it into the ocean.

Osama bin Laden was suspected ordering of one of the most horrific crimes of the decade. He might have been taken alive. Yet Obama’s commandos killed him. A big part of the puzzle — the key to the truth, who might have led us to other people responsible for 9/11 — is gone.

Barack Obama is our Jack Ruby.

Liberals would be appalled if this had happened four years ago. They would have protested Bush’s violations of international law and basic human rights. They would have complained about killing the Al Qaeda leader before questioning him about possible terrorist plots. They would have demanded investigations.

But this happened under Obama. Which means that even liberal lawyers who ought to (and probably do) know better are going along. At a panel discussion at the Justice Institute at Pace Law School, University of Houston law professor Jordan Paust asserted: “You can [legally] use military force without consent in foreign countries.”

“At some point a sovereign state [such as Pakistan] that’s harboring an international fugitive loses the right to assert sovereignty,” added Robert Van Lierop.

Paust and Van Lierop are, respectively, a leading opponent of torture at Guantánamo and a former UN ambassador known for his activism on climate change. Both are “liberal.”

In the U.S., conservatives and “liberals” agree: Might makes right. America’s military-intelligence apparatus is so fearsome that it can deploy its soldiers and agents without fear of retribution.

Might makes right. [Emphasis mine.]

In 2007, for example, U.S. Special Forces invaded Iran from U.S.-occupied Iraq in order to kidnap Iranian border guards. It was an outrage. In practical terms, however, there was nothing the Iranians could do about it.

The United States’ 900-pound gorilla act might go over better if we weren’t a nation that constantly prattles on and on about how civilized we are, how important it is that everyone follow the rules. For example:

“We’re a nation of laws!” Obama recently exclaimed. “We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate.”

He wasn’t talking about himself. This was about PFC Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of supplying the big Defense Department data dump to WikiLeaks. Manning has been subjected to torture including sleep deprivation and forced nudity — treatment ordered by Obama.

Truth is, the Constitution, our treaty obligations and our stacks of legal codes are worthless paper. We’re not a nation of laws. We’re a nation of gun-toting, missile-lobbing, drone-flying goons.

U.S. officials do whatever they feel like and then dress up their brazenly illegal acts with perverse Orwellian propaganda. [Emphasis mine.]

“I authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,” Obama claimed, as if blowing away an unarmed man in a foreign country was the moral equivalent of filing an extradition request with the Pakistani government and putting him on trial before 12 unbiased jurors in a court of law.

Justice is a legal process. It is not a military assault. [Emphasis mine.]

When considering the legality or morality of an act it helps to consider different scenarios. What, for example, if Pakistan had military power equal to ours? Last week’s lead news might have begun something like this:

“Pakistan has intercepted four U.S. helicopters over its airspace, forced them to land, and taken 79 heavily-armed commandos as prisoners. According to Pakistani military officials, the incident took place about 100 miles from the border of U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.

“‘They didn’t stray across the border accidentally. This was a deliberate act,’ said a Pakistani general. President Asif Ali Zardari has asked Pakistan’s nuclear weapons infrastructure has been placed on high alert as the parliament, the Majlis-e-Shoora, considers whether to issue a declaration of war…”

Or let’s assume a different reimagining. What if the United States really [were] a nation of laws?

Then the news might look like the following:

“Bipartisan demands for congressional investigations into the assassination of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden quickly escalated into demands for presidential impeachment after reports that U.S. forces operating under orders from President Obama invaded a sovereign nation without permission to carry out what House Speaker John Boehner called ‘a mob-style hit.’

“Standing at Boehner’s side, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi decried Obama’s ‘cowboy antics’ and said she had received numerous phone calls from the relatives of 9/11 victims furious that true justice had been denied. Meanwhile, in New York, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon moved for sanctions against the United States…”

In fact, no one knows whether Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11.

They suspect. They feel. They don’t know.

For what it’s worth, he denied it: “Following the latest explosions in the United States, some Americans are pointing the finger at me, but I deny that because I have not done it,” bin Laden said in a statement released on 9/16/01. “The United States has always accused me of these incidents which have been caused by its enemies. Reiterating once again, I say that I have not done it, and the perpetrators have carried this out because of their own interest.”

Why should we believe him? Why not? He admitted his responsibility for the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998.

Interestingly, the FBI never mentioned 9/11 on his “wanted” poster.

There was the famous “confession video” — but it was translated into English by the CIA, hardly an objective source. Arabic language experts say the CIA manipulated bin Laden’s discussion of what he had watched on TV into an admission of guilt. For example, they changed bin Laden’s passive-voice discussion to active: “[the 19 hijackers] were required to go” became, in the CIA version, “we asked each of them to go to America.”

“The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it,” said Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg.

Other [bin Laden] communiqués appear to take credit for 9/11 — but there’s a possibility that he was trying to keep himself relevant for his Islamist audience. Anyway, a confession does not prove guilt. Police receive numerous “confessions” for high-profile crimes. They can’t just shoot everyone who confesses.

I’m not angry that Bin Laden is dead. Nor am I happy. I didn’t know the guy or care for his ideology.

I’m angry that, without a trial or a real investigation, we will never know whether he was guilty of 9/11 — or, if he was, who else was involved.

Our Jack Ruby, Barack Obama, made sure of that.

Yup. And I’ve wondered if perhaps bin Laden was assassinated by the Obama administration because he knew too much, and a trial at an international court of law would have brought what he knew to light. 

–

*Our problems preceded Sept. 11, 2001. Our democracy pretty much was diagnosed with terminal illness when Americans just allowed Team Bush to steal the White House in late 2000. After that, anything else that followed, such as the devasation that was just allowed to occur on 9/11 and with Hurricane Katrina four years later, couldn’t have been a surprise.

**Obama enjoyed approval ratings in the 60s during his first six months in office. He then gradually slid into the 50s and then into the 40s.

***Rice’s recent interview on MSNBC was, um, interesting. She hasn’t changed a bit. You still know when she’s lying — it’s whenever her lips are moving. (Seriously, though, she always has the quavering voice of a liar, and when she’s really lying, she moves her head rapidly from side to side.)

While I doubt Rice’s sanity, as I doubt the sanity of any mass murderer/war criminal, I don’t believe that she actually believes the lies that she spews forth. I believe that she is terrified that one day she might actually be hauled before an international criminal court, and therefore she’s sticking to the same old lies about her part in the execution of the illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War that she’s been telling for years now.

About to leave a comment? Comments are a courtesy, not a right, and as such are subject to rejection or deletion. (You can always man up and post a blog piece of your own on your own blog; I’m not required to help you get your opinions out there.) General guidelines for leaving comments are here.

The (Jessica) Lynching of Osama bin Laden

Wow. You expected this kind of shit from the unelected Bush regime, with its lies about and cover-ups regarding the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman sagas, but you (or at least I) expected more from the Obama administration.

Until now I have held off on repeating any of the details that have been released regarding Osama bin Laden’s actual moment of death because I was skeptical of them – and for good cause, because now, they are reporting, apparently bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot dead in the head and did not use one of his wives as a “human shield.”

The “human shield” charge especially was repeated all over the corporately owned and controlled mass media, because it fit in nicely with the pre-existing jingoistic narrative of bin Laden as actually being a “coward” instead of a bad-ass — a charge that is probably more false than true and that says a lot more about Americans’ actual collective level of courage than it does about bin Laden’s. (Americans, after all, kill with high-tech weaponry and they usually kill from a distance. [Which makes American killing “civilized,” you see, while the less technologically advantaged “terrorists” often if not usually kill others more closely and personally, which makes them “terrorists,” as does the fact that they're not Americans.])

Anyway, so now the latest word is that bin Laden was unarmed and that the woman who was shot dead along with him was not his wife, but was another woman, and that his wife was injured in the firefight, but was not used by bin Laden as a “human shield.”  

These are just basic facts of what the fuck happened. You would think that the “transparent” Obama administration would have done a much better job of getting out accurate information about such a momentous news event.

And the fact (well, the fact du jour, anyway…) that bin Laden was unarmed raises the legal, moral and ethical question of whether or not he should have been captured and brought to trial instead of executed on the spot. Does a “civilized” nation of “laws” and “order” and “human rights” execute someone who is unarmed, even someone like Osama bin Laden, on the spot?

I recognize the huge problems, including, of course, security issues, that putting bin Laden on trial would have presented. But do we have principles or not? Do we mean what we say in our Constitution about human rights — including the right to a fair trial and the right not to be summarily executed, no matter what it is believed that you have done – or don’t we?

All of this — the initial misinformation about bin Laden’s summary execution, the apparent fact that bin Laden could have been taken alive — makes Barack Obama way too much like George W. (“W” for “Wanted Dead or Alive”) Bush for my sense of right and wrong, and I have to wonder how much of bin Laden’s execution was calculated to benefit Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

I mean, fuck: In January, Team Obama did indeed roll out, as part of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, the lame meme of “We do big things” in the State of the Union Address. Yesterday, Obama said of bin Laden’s execution, “Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do.”

I mean, that looks like a link to me. It’s fairly apparent that Team Obama sat around and pondered: Hmmm… How can we fit Osama bin Laden’s death into our re-election campaign narrative?

Even in this great age of cynicism, that’s some sick shit, in my book.

Again, I’m not crying that Osama bin Laden is dead, but we cannot claim to be a “civilized” nation that respects human rights and laws and at the same time do shit like summarily execute the “bad guys.” (As far as body counts of innocents go, we Americans actually are the biggest global bad guys, but because we’re Americans, we’re fucking saints.)  

And to watch Barack Obama act as though he went over to Pakistan and got bin Laden himself – when that long, hard work was done by other people, including some who apparently put themselves at the potential risk of great injury or death – is nauseating, especially when Obama apparently plans to use bin Laden’s scalp for political gain.

But that is the history of the slimy political opportunist Obama: taking credit for others’ work, such as how he only rode, all the way to the White House, the wave that Howard Dean had created with the left-leaning “netroots.”

Now, it appears, it is the execution of Osama bin Laden that is going to keep Obama in the Oval Office for another four years.

Assorted shit

Flub heard ’round the world

Reuters photos

The insane ignoramus U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann shows what a true patriot she is by sacrificing herself to recite the pledge of allegiance and then holds aloft a tea bag while incorrectly identifying New Hampshire as the location where the first shot in the American Revolutionary War was fired. Utter stupidity and uber-jingoism are a dangerous mix, as we saw during the eight long, nightmarish years of rule by the unelected, fascistic Bush regime.

The larger point should not be lost in the reportage that Repugnican Tea Party whackjob Michele Bachmann yesterday told a group of Repugnican Tea Party traitors in New Hampshire that the American Revolutionary War started in their state — when, in fact, it started in Massachusetts.

Notes The Associated Press today:

Though Bachmann probably wasn’t the first to confuse Concord, N.H., with Concord, Mass., her mistake was striking given her roots in the “tea party” movement, which takes its name from the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor by angry American colonists in December 1773….

It’s not just that Bachmann, like the majority of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, are utter dipshits who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about — not even the basics of those things that they align themselves with, such as the American Revolutionary War (these fascistic white supremacists who want to drag us back to the Dark Ages are “revolutionaries,” you see!) and the contents of the New Testament. (Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven, and he advised his followers not to fight against paying their taxes – which the “Christo”fascist Repugnican Tea Party traitors don’t mention when, say, they fight for more tax breaks for the rich and the super-rich. A simple oversight, I’m sure.)

The bigger picture is that the members of the Repugnican Tea Party wrap themselves in both the U.S. flag and in the Shroud of Turin — they claim the mantles of both patriotism and Christianity – when, in fact, they’re just fucking charlatans, are just aligning themselves, for personal political gain, with groups that they perceive to be large and powerful — because the stupid and the cowardly, utterly unable to stand on their own two feet, align themselves with groups that they perceive to be large and powerful.

The reason that Bachmann doesn’t know her material is that for Bachmann it’s not about the material — it’s all about Bachmann and her insatiable lust for power. The material is just the cover that she uses for herself in her fascistic quest for power.

Not to be hypocritical; while I know much, much more about U.S. history and the contents of the New Testament than does your typical tea-baggin’ traitor, it’s an awful lot of material and I certainly don’t have all of it memorized.

But then, unlike the members of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party, I don’t go around acting as though I do.

–

TIME calls Wisconsin guv “Dead Man Walker”

Reuters and Associated Press photos

Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, surrounded by his cabal of fellow stupid white men, signs legislation eliminating collective bargaining rights for public servants in Wisconsin. About two-thirds of Americans believe that public servants should have collective bargainging rights, according to a Bloomberg poll taken this month.

TIME.com quotes Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker as having said on Friday, when he signed the union-busting legislation that the Repugnican Tea Party rammed down Wisconsinites’ throats:

“Some have asked whether this is going to set a national precedent. And I don’t know… but if along the way we help lead a movement across the state for true fiscal reform, true budgetary reform to ultimately inspire others across this country, state by state and in our federal government, inspire others to stand up and make tough decision to make a commitment to the future, so that our children across all states don’t have to face the dire consequences we face because previous leaders have failed to stand up and lead, I feel that is a good thing.”

Wow. So to destroy labor unions and to give the corporations even more power to exploit their wage slaves is for the children! This is novel!

It’s true that our leaders have failed to stand up and lead. For instance, not a single Wall Street crook who helped put us into our economic cataclysm is behind bars. The Obama administration, in fact, puts Wall Street crooks in charge of national economic policy – just as the Bush regime did.

We do have a huge failure of leadership, but that failure is to stop the runaway greed of the rich and the super-rich, for whom the word “enough” is not in their vocabulary.

Scott Walker’s “vision,” to the contrary, is to make the working class and the middle class suffer even more for the crimes of the treasonous plutocrats and corporatocrats whom he treasonously aids and abets.

Walker calls the rich getting even richer and the poor getting even poorer “true fiscal reform, true budgetary reform.” And George Orwell is spinning in his grave.

Walker admits what we already knew, which is that the Repugnican Tea Party is on a “state-by-state” jihad to destroy labor unions.

As Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, the reason that the Repugnican Tea Party did not tell voters before Election Day 2010 that they would seek to destroy labor unions is that to destroy labor unions is not what the American majority wants.

A Bloomberg nationwide poll taken this month, in fact, show that about two-thirds of Americans believe that public servants should have the right to collectively bargain — and that about two-thirds of Americans believe that corporations have more political power than do labor unions.

And according to this poll, how do Americans feel about our public-school teachers, whom the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party has tried to make into Public Enemy No. 1? A full two-thirds of Americans support public-school teachers’ right to be in a labor union.

Thing is, it’s human nature to not realize how much you value something until its continued existence is threatened.

What WalkerCorp has done is made most Americans realize how valuable labor unions and collective bargaining are and that corporations have way too fucking much power and drastically need to be reeled in.

While Americans bought a lot of Orwellian shit during the eight long, nightmarish years of the unelected Bush regime, at this point, I believe, they realize that they’ve been punk’d repeatedly, and they reject the Repugnican Tea Party “argument” that the middle class and the working class are the cause of our nation’s economic problems and that they need to sacrifice even more.

“Wisconsin’s Governor Wins But Is He Still Dead Man Walker?” TIME.com asks.

The question is not whether Walker’s political career is finished, but when. If he is not successfully recalled — and unfortunately he cannot be recalled until January 2012 — he certainly won’t be re-elected in 2014.

And recall efforts of Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin state senators who can be recalled now already are under way, which should mean that if Walker does manage to finish his first and only four-year term, the Repugnican Tea Party won’t control both houses of Wisconsin’s Legislature for very long into his first and only term.

–

Is Obama lazy and/or cowardly – or politically smart?

The Associated Press reports that Barack Obama proclaimed in a speech in 2007:

“If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

Of course, the AP also reports that

So far, however, the White House has stayed away from any trips to Madison, the [Wisconsin] state capital, or other states in the throes of union battles. The Obama administration is treading carefully on the contentious political issue that has led to a national debate over the power that public sector unions wield in negotiating wages and benefits.

Questions abound.

Is Obama too lazy and/or cowardly to have inserted himself into the historic battle for the rights of the working class and the middle class in Wisconsin? Or did he and/or his handlers calculate that such an insertion might actually harm, rather than help, the cause — and thus they wisely have kept out of the battle in Wisconsin, regardless of Obama’s 2007 promise to “walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America”?

If I had to put money on it, my money would be on Obama being too lazy and/or cowardly to fulfill his 2007 promise, but I surmise that it nonetheless is better that Obama continue to stay out of it, whatever the reason(s) for his peculiar absence might be.

That way, what truly is a populist upswelling against the pro-plutocratic Repugnican Tea Party — I can’t recall that thousands of Americans in any state ever sustained a three-week protest in at least the past three decades – won’t be branded as simply a Democratic Party thing when it actually is about we, the people.

Battleground Wisconsin only peripherally has been about the Democratic Party. For the most part, it has been about the majority of the people in a state who have had more than enough abuse at the hands of the Repugnican Tea Party — and who aren’t sitting around waiting for the Democratic Party to save them.*

–

*That said, I laud the brave 14 Democratic Wisconsin state senators who did the best that they could to stand up for their constituents by vacating the state for three weeks. I laud their courage, their solidarity and their resolve, traits that utterly are lacking in most elected officials who call themselves Democrats.

Although the traitors who comprise the Repugnican Tea Party repeatedly accused these 14 Democratic state senators of not doing their jobs, they certainly did do their jobs: they refused to go quietly to the guillotine that the Repugnican Tea Party so lovingly had set up for them and for their constituents, who aren’t corporations but who are we, the people.

This is all I’m going to say about 9/11

The unelected Bush regime beat the nation over the head with 9/11 for many years, so sue me if I long have been 9/11’d out.

As nightmarish as it was to have had to experience the reign of BushCheneyCorp after the stupid, fat and lazy American public just allowed the right-wing thieves (redundant…) to steal the White House in late 200o, the traitors who comprised the Bush regime were, in their own sick, twisted and treasonous way, brilliant. I mean, they took a spectacularly tragic event that they’d been warned about but did not prevent — and used it for political gain.   

It was only until the mid-term elections of 2006 that the Repugnicans no longer could wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 for political gain.

What have we Americans learned since Sept. 11, 2001?

Absofuckinglutely nothing.

We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because we wantonly had slaughtered Muslims, or allowed them to be slaughtered or allowed or caused them to die, in the Middle East. In fact, the main reasons given by 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden himself (and other members of al-Qaeda) for 9/11 were: the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, including children; the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia after the first George Bush war on Iraq; and the U.S. government’s blind, slavish support of Israel.

So: What has changed since then?

Well, let’s see: The U.S. killed even more innocent Iraqi civilians in George W. Bush’s Vietraq War for Big Oil and for the war profiteering of the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton; the U.S. military moved its main base in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, which, to my understanding, still violates the fundamentalist Islamist belief that no infidel should be allowed to occupy Muslim land; and the U.S. government still licks the ass of Israel, which can do no wrong and which enjoys the blind, slavish support of both parties in the duopolistic dog and pony show that we call “democracy.”

While I’m not asserting that when Osama bin Laden shouts “Jump!” Americans should ask “How high?”, it seems clear to me that Americans are hated around the world because they just allow their government and their military (which are only in the service of the corporatocrats and the plutocrats) to shit and piss upon the poorer, weaker peoples all around the globe — yet these same Americans fully expect to be adored around the world just the same.

Why do they hate us?

They hate us because we’re stupid.

They hate us because we’re xenophobic — we don’t even bother to try to learn about other cultures, but we function from the stubborn but incorrect belief that other cultures have just failed at being us. We just assume that they want to be just like us (they don’t) but that they just can’t pull it off because they don’t have what it takes.

They hate us because we’re hypocrites. (To give just one of many examples, the U.S. government maintains that Israel may have nukes but that Iran may not. And for the only nation ever to have nuked another nation to be dictating who does and who does not get to have nukes — because you just can’t allow one nation to nuke another nation —  is pretty fucking insanely hypocritical.)

They hate us because we have no empathy whatsofuckingever. We use the occasion of the anniversary of 9/11 to wallow mawkishly in our own national pity party about the 3,000 or so Americans who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, while we don’t say a word about the tens of thousands of civilians whom we allowed our government to kill or cause to die in Iraq using 9/11 as a pretext. We talk only about American losses because we consider only Americans to be fully human. Yes, they hate us because we don’t consider them to be fully human.

They hate us because we’re greedy, fat and lazy — and that we use violence around the globe to support our ability to be fat and lazy.

They hate us because we’re destroying the very planet, such as with global warming.

They hate us because we are, in a word, Rome, which I surmise also was rather hated throughout the world.

We fat, lazy and stupid Americans should remember: Rome fell.

Happy International Burn a Koran Day.

‘Obama’s Katrina’ is our fault

Comparisons of the Obama administration’s slow response to the current crisis created by corporate greed in the Gulf of Mexico to the unelected Bush regime’s slow response to the crisis created by Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 perhaps have been inevitable, but they miss the point.

Yes, both catastrophes have happened in the Gulf of Mexico, but that’s just about where any valid comparison ends. And by making such clumsy comparisons, we risk the failure to prevent more massive oil spills in the future.

The Bush regime didn’t respond to Hurricane Katrina because the Bush regime didn’t give a flying fuck about a bunch of poor black people in Louisiana. Had the eye of Hurricane Katrina been headed for “President” George W. Bush’s Texas, there might actually have been a response.

What prevented the Obama administration from responding faster to British Petroleum’s disaster, however, is the vast amount of power that the mega-corporations have accrued over the past several decades.

Although Obama has claimed that his administration has been on top of BP from day one of its April 20 oil rig disaster, it seems fairly apparent to me that BP kept the Obama administration at bay for some time, and that only after it became glaringly apparent that BP didn’t have the oil leak — which now is being called the worst in U.S. history – under anything like control that the Obama administration finally stepped up to the plate, under increasing political pressure.

We can make all of the Hurricane Katrina comparisons that we want to, but unless and until we, the people, take back our power that we stupidly and slovenly ceded to the corporations, we can expect more catastrophes like BP’s.

We need to take a long, hard look at capitalism and ask ourselves whether some tasks are too important and/or too dangerous to leave to the profit-driven private sector.

The private sector can do everything better, the capitalist swine snort.

Bullshit. The profit-driven private sector keeps cutting corner after corner in order to continually increase profits until we have such things as the current catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and the actual “death panels” that the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — industry established in order to deny people medical care in order to increase the insurance companies’ profits. (They get filthy rich only if they don’t give you the health care that they’re being paid to provide you when you need it. That’s a great fucking model for health care.) Global warming, too, is a result of corporate greed.

And speaking of global warming, to me the most alarming news today is that meteorologists predict that this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which begins next week, could be as bad as the 2005 season, which brought us Katrina.

Right about now is the perfect time for hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Never claim that things couldn’t get any worse than they already are, because of course they always can.

But I digress…

I’m all for the private sector making and selling things like cars and iPads and television sets and telephones and clothing and computers and movies and porn. Hell, I’m even more or less OK with the private sector continuing to make and sell houses, although the housing debacle would make me want to put a lot more thought into that issue, since housing is a necessity and not a luxury.

But drilling big holes in the ocean to tap oil reserves and maintaining those big holes? Health care? Education? Ensuring an ample supply of clean drinking water?

These kinds of things are too big and/or too important to leave to money-grubbing weasels. They need to be left to the government. To introduce a profit – and thus a corner-cutting — motive into them is inviting disaster, as the crude-oil-coated creatures of the Gulf of Mexico — and those whose living depends upon the Gulf of Mexico — can attest.

And giving such huge tasks as offshore oil drilling entirely to corporations means that the government doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise to deal with any problems that might occur, because over time it’s the corporations that have taken over those tasks. Cutting out the stonewalling corporate middlemen also would mean that problems could be addressed immediately by the government, because the government wouldn’t have to coordinate its efforts with any profit-driven corporation.

And corporate-crony-loving Repugnicans have no right whatsofuckingever to criticize the Obama administration’s sluggish response to the BP debacle when the eight long nightmarish years of rule by the unelected, oily Bush regime created an awfully cushy environment for Big Oil.

The Bush crime family has had oily dealings in Texas and in Saudi Arabia, Dick Cheney’s oily Halliburton wanted and got its Vietraq War and apparently has played a significant part in the current BP disaster, and fuck, even Condoleezza “You Know She’s Lying When Her Lips Are Moving” Rice had had a fucking Chevron oil tanker named after her, for fuck’s sake.

I don’t believe in letting President Obama off the hook for shit that is his responsibility, but we can’t blame Obama for the long-standing socioeconomicopolitical environment that he not only inherited in January 2009, but that all of us have allowed.

We can’t even blame the unelected Bush regime entirely for what it allowed Hurricane Katrina to do to the Gulf Coast in 2005 – after all, we, the people, had just allowed the Bush regime to blatantly steal the White House in late 2000 with no serious opposition from us. We should have been rioting in the streets, should have taken up pitchforks and torches, but instead we sat on our asses, sipping our Slurpees, telling ourselves that this Bush guy couldn’t be that bad. 

Had we acted as the patriotic citizens that we claim to be, “President” Bush, and thus Hurricane Katrina, might have been prevented.

And had we not just allowed our democracy to become a corporatocracy, we probably wouldn’t be witnessing the largest oil spill in U.S. history right now — while a savage hurricane season is just around the corner, ready to spread all of those millions of gallons of crude oil around even more quickly and more widely.

The BP oil spill should be our wake-up call and should teach us a great lesson.

And that lesson is not that we, the people, can continue to pin the blame for our national and global catastrophes on just one person, such as the president of the United States.

That lesson is that we, the people, get the kind of nation and the kind of world that we create and that we allow.

When, and if, we demand – really demand, exerting incredible political pressure – better of the powers that be, we will get better.

For right now, though, we are faced with millions of gallons of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico while Hurricane Katrina’s sequel looms, and the only people we can blame for that is ourselves.

War on right is war on ignorance

 

My boyfriend and I were in a Borders bookstore last night, and in the politics section I saw a paperback copy of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism on a shelf right above Glenn Beck’s hardcover Arguing with Idiots. (That Glenn Beck should accuse others of being “idiots” with “small minds” – that’s mind-blowing…)

I picked up and placed the copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism immediately to the right of Beck’s Arguing with Idiots, giving something of the effect above, as it seems so appropriate: If Beck wants to dress and act like a Nazi, well, then, if the jackboot fits, then he should wear it (and he probably does wear jackboots, prancing around in them in private…). And further, it seems to me that Beck and his ilk indeed could be the originators of an American totalitarianism that would make the Taliban jealous.

Of course, the battle between the left and the right rages beyond the politics sections of bookstores, where it’s common to see books representing the political opposition (usually progressives) turned around so that their covers are obscured. (Books featuring the visages of our lesser-evolved primate cousins also have appeared juxtapositioned to books whose covers feature Barack Obama’s face. Ha ha ha! Racism is so funny!)

President Obama has even chimed in on the national political “vitriol,” but the common assertion that the left is just as guilty as is the right in denigrating the national political discourse — a myth that even Obama himself occasionally parrots, in an apparently well-meaning but woefully misguided attempt to be fair and balanced, to spread the blame around, whether it’s actually factually accurate to do that or not – is fucking bullshit.

The right always has been more rabid, more racist, more ignorant, more hateful and more willing to resort to aggression to get what it wants than has the left. In the past decade alone, the American right resorted to stealing presidential elections, started a bogus major war, and gave the rich such tax cuts that, coupled with the hundreds of billions of dollars sunk into the bogus Vietraq War, resulted in a record federal budget deficit that the right now blames on Obama, and the right has created a surreal, down-the-rabbit-hole national political climate in which it’s deemed perfectly fine to piss hundreds of billions of the taxpayers’ dollars away on the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, but it’s “socialism” to actually spend a fucking penny of the taxpayers’ money on the taxpayers. 

And I don’t recall any leftists having spat on Repugnican lawmakers on Capitol Hill during the eight long nightmarish years of the Bush regime’s unelected rule, or calling them epithets, or hurling bricks through their office windows. I don’t recall any Democratic politicians talking about “reloading” and using the symbol of a gun-sight crosshairs to target their political opponents.

I only wish that the peacenik lefties were nearly as guilty as are the wingnuts in being rhetorically or even actually aggressive.

Lefties almost always have to remain above it all, such as how Al Gore had to remain above it all and just allowed Team Bush to steal the White House in late 2000.

The results of “remaining above it all” and just allowing the wingnuts to wreak their havoc upon the nation are plain to see in the smoking ruins of the nation that the treasonous members of the unelected Bush regime left behind when they finally were forced from the White House. There comes a point where “remaining above it all” no longer is remaining above it all at all, but is a dangerous dereliction of duty to democracy.

Also at Borders last night I saw a copy of Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, the premise of which, I understand from its back cover, is that the switch from a primarily print culture to a primarily audiovisual culture has resulted in a dangerous dumbing down of the United States of America, a danger to the nation’s democracy, which cannot survive when so many of its citizens are dumbfucks. (I’m buying Hedges’ book on amazon.com, as paying full cover price when I don’t have to pains me too much.)

I’m all for greater literacy, but just as it has hijacked our democracy, the right wing has hijacked what remains of the print culture. Chillingly, I long have seen far more wingnut books than progressive books on amazon.com’s top-100-selling books list.

The right wing is busily rewriting American history to suit is ideology in a way that would make George Orwell’s history-revising Big Brother jealous. And the stupid-white-male authors and broadcast pundits who have the audacity to liken themselves to the nation’s founding fathers are as much like the founding fathers as the likes of Pat Robertson and the pedophile-protecting Pope Palpatine are like Jesus Christ.

Sure the wingnuts read books, you say — but they read right-wing revisions not only of American history, but right-wing revisions of American principles. And then they inflict their ignorance upon the rest of us.

In their “tea party” bullshit, the wingnuts actually equate the nation’s declaration of its independence from the oppressive English monarchy to their dislike of the democratically elected American president whom they don’t like primarily because he’s black and because their old-white-guy candidate lost the election, 46 percent to Obama’s 53 percent. 

The wingnuts also have hijacked the term “common sense,” both as a noun and an adjective. Sarah Fucking Palin-Quayle can’t shut the fuck up about “common-sense” this and “common-sense” that, and, of course, Glenn Beck put out a book titled Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, as though a dry-drunk baby boomer like Glenn Fucking Beck is really on the same level as is Thomas Paine.

And that’s what the term “common sense,” as the wingnuts use it, is meant to achieve: It’s meant to say that you don’t have to be educated, that you don’t have to work at attaining knowledge and wisdom. “Common sense,” as Beck and Palin-Quayle and their ilk use the term, means that whatever utter bullshit that you pull out of your mentally lazy, ignorant, wingnutty ass is the gospel fucking truth — because you say so.

In her chapter titled “Junk Thought” in her worthwhile The Age of American Unreason, author Susan Jacoby talks about “the folk belief in the superior wisdom of ordinary people.”

“Folk belief” there is the key.

Ordinary people can become intelligent and wise — but not without doing the work.

There are no shortcuts, although that is what the right wing promises its followers: Simply wearing a lapel pin of the U.S. flag makes a politician “patriotic,” and simply reading a book by Sarah Palin-Quayle or Glenn Beck makes one “politically educated.” (And, of course, simply declaring onself “saved” makes one “saved.”)

Listening to — or even reading — the likes of Beck or Palin-Quayle or Rush Limbaugh, because their retrogressive, reality-evading worldview is comforting in rapidly changing, rapidly diversifying times, doesn’t cut it.

Ignorance will destroy the nation, and the fight against the right wing ultimately is the fight against ignorance.

A return to a fact- and reality-based print culture, as many authors (such as Jacoby and Hedges and yes, even Al Gore) have recommended probably is the answer. The Internet, I suspect, already has been playing a large role in bringing Americans back from the purely audiovisual, purely one-way medium of television to an interactive print culture. Sure, there’s plenty of garbage on the Internet, but there’s plenty of quality stuff available, too. 

I, for one, stopped watching television years ago, after all of the major, corporately owned and operated TV networks treated the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust March 2003 invasion of Iraq as an entertainment or sporting event (“shock and awe!”) instead of covering it journalistically — that is, critically, intelligently and objectively. And I credit the Internet with having facilitated my political knowledge and activism.

Of course, the wingnuts are on the ’Net, too.

But the more that the nation returns to a fact- and reality-based national political dialog, the less the right wing can survive.

Ignorance is the right wing’s oxygen, and the way to snuff out the right wing is to deprive it of its oxygen.

Internet revolution the ONE good thing about the dog shit of a decade that was

The last 10 years really have sucked ass.

First there was the blatantly stolen presidential election of late 2000.

Hey, what harm to the nation could a band of thieves possibly do in the White House for four or eight years? George W. Bush & Co. are whining more loudly for the White House, so let’s just let them have it! In late 2000 that was the mentality of Americans, who, fat and lazy from the prosperous Clinton years, didn’t give a shit that their democracy had been dangerously subverted by Team Bush. Hey, they had things to buy and things to consume!

Bush had lost the popular vote by “only” more than a half-million votes. Close enough! And that his brother was the governor of Florida, the pivotal state that Bush “won” — and that Florida’s top elections official, Repugnican Katherine Harris, also had sat on the state’s committee to elect Gee Dubya — and that the Repugnican-tilted U.S. Supreme Court voted to stop the whole silly recount nonsense; none of that was a problem. Democrat Al Gore was just being a “sore loserman.”

I saw the decade coming. In early 2001 I attended a “Not My President Day” rally at the California State Capitol here in Sacramento to voice my dissent to the Universe. In November 2000 I’d voted for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, but it was obvious that Al Gore had won the too-close election.

Then there was Sept. 11, 2001, and the months of post-9/11 hysteria. 9/11 was the unelected Bush regime’s Reichstag fire.

Speaking of which, then there was the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust launching of its Vietraq War in March 2003. (In February 2003 I was at the state Capitol again, this time protesting the coming Vietraq War, which the Bush regime might have called “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” except that that spells O-I-L, so they called it “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”) On May 1, 2003, “President” Bush declared “mission accomplished,” but thus far the Vietraq War has claimed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives (these Iraqis were permanently “liberated,” you see) and the lives of more than 4,300 U.S. military personnel. And hundreds of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars that the Repugnicans are perfectly OK handing over to the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, via bogus wars – but not to things that Americans need, such as health care. Because that would be socialism! Better dead than red, but, of course, with the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system, you’re going to be dead anyway.

Then there was Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 to blow away and wash away any and all doubt that it was a big fuckin’ mistake to have just allowed Team Bush to steal the White House in late 2000.

Both Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 killed more than 2,000 Americans each, yet the Repugnicans now are lambasting President Barack Obama — who, if nothing else, actually fucking won the presidential election — because some lonely young dude from Nigeria tried to blow up an airliner but only succeeded in burning himself.

We just can’t trust Obama to keep us safe!, except that thus far he has, and it was George W. Bush who couldn’t keep us safe. But facts have become a matter of opinion in the United States of Amnesia.

But I digress.

After Hurricane Katrina, it was just waiting it out until President Bozo and Vice President Penguin were termed out of the White House.

Barack Obama and Billary Clinton duked it out for months on end during the interminable 2008 Democratic presidential primary season.

Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination and the general election based upon his promises of “hope” and “change.”

Keep on hoping for that big change! That was the theme of 2009.

So yeah, the last 10 years have been a big, steaming pile of dog shit.

But it was an article via AlterNet titled “This Decade Mostly Sucked — Except for the Huge Expansion of the Internet” that made me realize that yeah, there was one good thing about the past decade.

The author of the piece notes:

The Internet is a disruptive technology for our entire species, even if it has a long way to go before it spreads to all humans. The exponential decline in the cost of information brought about by the Internet and mobile phone technology will be, in all likelihood, the top cultural and technological development of our lifetimes. The way this has changed, and will continue to change, our economic, social and mental structures puts it on par with the printing press as an agent of change….

I agree with all of that. Unfortunately, the author then goes on to discuss Net neutrality, which is an important issue, but he misses what I think is the biggest achievement of the Internet: the Internet has been an end-run around the baby boomers, who have been hell-bent upon destroying the nation that they inherited from their spoiling parents (the so-called “greatest generation”) in a fat and juicy state but have sucked bone dry during their too-long lifetimes.

The Internet wasn’t around during most of their lives, so to the boomers the Internet wasn’t that important. It was a mildly useful and/or amusing tool or toy – you can buy stuff on it, you can save money by sending some e-mails instead of stamped letters or instead of making long-distance phone calls, you can look at porn (but you probably shouldn’t, because while they enjoyed wild, uninhibited sex when they were young, the boomers don’t want the generations that follow them to enjoy sex, and since the boomers’ sexual excess brought us AIDS, we can’t).

But the boomers never appreciated the potential power of the Internet.

Until it was too late.

“Inspired” by the multiple rapings to our democracy, starting with late 2000’s theft of the White House, and also “inspired” by the inevitable Vietraq War, which it was clear that the unelected Bush regime was going to start no matter fucking what, I started blogging in late 2002, and millions of others also have been using the power of the Internet this decade to do an end-run around the traditional power structure.

Information is power, and so the informational system is the power system, and we sneaky Generation X’ers (and Gen Y’ers [and yes, a handful of non-evil boomers]) have used the Internet to get around the blockages that the power-hungry boomers placed before us.

Not to get too geeky here, but the human body, when a large blood vessel is blocked or otherwise not functioning, will form a network of smaller, more numerous blood vessels in order to compensate for the lost circulation.

That’s what we progressives have done: gone around the boomers’ blockages in smaller, more numerous ways, such as with blogs and many other new ways of sharing information electronically.

The invention of the printing press indeed made it harder for the powers that be to maintain their power by withholding information from us peasants, and the Internet has expanded upon the success of the printing press exponentially, because while printing presses cost a lot of money, almost everyone has access to the Internet. (Indeed, don’t even get me started on how hard it is to get noticed as a blogger, even if you’re an excellent fucking writer, as I am, because of the crushing number of blogs out there.)

As I said, before the boomers realized how powerful the Internet could be as a tool for the downtrodden to politically organize and to share information that the powers that be would try to keep from us peasants, it was too late; the world had changed irreversibly because of the Internet. The “solid” foundation that the boomers thought they were standing upon had been quietly eaten from beneath them by millions of busy termites.

It’s too late for the boomers who never bothered to join the Internet revolution. The world has changed around these dinosaurs while they’ve remained stuck in the past. (Fuck, I have had boomer “managers” who can’t even fucking touch-type in this, the Information Age!)

So anyway, we end 2009 and the decade with President Obama. Let me remind you that he never was the superhero that many made him out to be, with a big “O” on his chest. Obama simply rode the wave that Howard Dean created in his campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.

Speaking of which, the 2004 election also was a big event of the past decade to me; I’d never been that politically involved before or since, and it was the felons and the traitors of the unelected Bush regime who induced me to become so politically aware and active* — an unintended side effect of their treason and their felonies, I’m sure.

Anyway, even though I always supported John Kerry over Dean, figuring that there was no way that Dean could win the White House in 2004, not with the Repugnicans still rabidly milking the TERROR! cow, I credit Team Dean with having changed forever the way that presidential politics are played, including the phenomenon of individuals’ political donations (including mine) becoming as important if not more important than the fat cats’ political donations.

As 2009 and as the decade come to a close, it’s clear that we progressives — those of us for whom “hope” and “change” aren’t just slogans that you cynically slap on campaign merchandise — have a long way to go, but we start the new year and the new decade with the advantage of having seriously undercut, quietly but surely over the past decade, the biggest threat to our nation and our democracy: the baby boomers.

We did it legally and democratically and, luckily for them, bloodlessly.

So far.

*I became so politically active that, among other things, at one point I got to shake John Kerry’s hand during one of his visits to California (too bad that he didn’t become president), and I also met Cindy Sheehan before she became nationally (in)famous for having camped outside of Gee Dubya’s ranch in Texas in August 2005 in protest of the Vietraq War, in which her young son Casey had been killed. (I will brag that I blogged about Sheehan a full six months before she became nationally known.)

I have to say that Sheehan might be my most-admired person of the decade. I can think of no one else who so courageously stood up against the Bush regime — too bad that Al Gore didn’t in late 2000, or the decade might have turned out quite differently — and she took so much bile and venom for her incredibly brave patriotism.

The war that Sheehan opposed but took so much shit for having opposed is now considered by the majority of Americans to have been a bullshit war. (I doubt that anyone has apologized to her, though, because being an American means never having to say that you’re sorry…)

Pot calls the kettle ‘radical’

Media bias can be subtle. But there it is.

Take this from The Associated Press today:

A radical American imam on Yemen’s most-wanted militant list who had contact with two 9/11 hijackers praised alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as a hero on his personal website [today].

The posting on the website for Anwar al Awlaki, who was a spiritual leader at two mosques where three 9/11 hijackers worshipped, said American Muslims who condemned the attacks on the Texas military base last week are hypocrites who have committed treason against their religion.

Awlaki said the only way a Muslim can justify serving in the U.S. military is if he intends to “follow in the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

“Nidal Hassan [sic] is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people,” Awlaki wrote.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 in a shooting spree [on] Thursday. Hasan’s family attended the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., where Awlaki was preaching in 2001.

Hasan’s mother’s funeral was held at the Falls Church mosque on May 31, 2001, according to her obituary in the Roanoke Times newspaper, around the same time two 9/11 hijackers worshipped at the mosque and while Awlaki was preaching.

Awlaki is a native-born U.S. citizen who left the United States in 2002, eventually traveling to Yemen. He was released from a Yemeni jail last year and has since gone missing. He is on Yemen’s most-wanted militant list, according to three Yemeni security officials….

Wow. So we are more or less associating Hasan with 9/11 because Awlaki has praised Hasan on Awlaki’s website and Awlaki might have known some of the 9/11 hijackers. Irresponsible.

But most of all, I have a problem with the casual use of the word “radical.”

What a loaded term, “radical.”

I just Googled “radical,” and the first online dictionary definition of the word “radical,” as the AP story above uses it, that I see is this:

3 a : marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional : extreme b : tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions c : of, relating to, or constituting a political group associated with views, practices, and policies of extreme change d : advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs <the radical right>

OK, so maybe we accurately can call Anwar al Awlaki “radical,” but what about the United States of America?

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Arab/Muslim hijackers – 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon – attacked targets on U.S. soil, killing under just 3,000 people.

In response, the unelected Bush regime (stealing a presidential election — that’s pretty radical in my book) launched wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush regime did not treat 9/11 as what it was — terrorist attacks — meaning that you hunt down the terrorists responsible for the attacks – but instead repeatedly called it a “war,” a la Big Brother in 1984. (Just repeat a lie often enough…)

The U.S. may declare war on another nation legally only when that nation has provoked a war. The U.S. had no legal grounds on which to go to war with Iraq, which is why the Bush regime gave the United Nations Security Council — which had refused to rubber-stamp the Bush regime’s Vietraq War like a good little Security Council should – the middle finger and in March 2003 invaded Iraq anyway, against the United Nations’ wishes.

That seems pretty radical to me — to launch wars upon Iraq and Afghanistan, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, when those nations didn’t even have any of their citizens participate in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

And it’s pretty fucking radical to expect Muslims and Arabs not to have a problem with this illegal, immoral, unjust, unprovoked and indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims and Arabs on their own land. 

I don’t blame Hasan for having had a problem with it, because I have a problem with it, and I’m not even Arab or Muslim. I just have a conscience. (And I can reason and I have some idea of what actually is going on in the world because I don’t watch Fox “News.”)

Killing people when it is not in clear self-defense is radical, whether the killers are “Islamofascist” suicide bombers or shooters like Hasan — or members of the United States military who continue to kill innocent civilians throughout the Middle East to this day. (It’s still killing even if it’s high-tech.)

I agree with the “radical” Awlaki that Hasan apparently “could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people” — that seems rather obvious — and it is my understanding that the conflicted Hasan tried to leave the U.S. military, but that the U.S. military not only would not release him, but decided to ship him off to Afghanistan.

Smart!

If we are going to argue that Awlaki or Hasan is “radical” or “insane,” then we also should take a look at the actions of the United States of America, which only continues to fuel the flames of the “war on terror” that it claims it wishes to extinguish. That is radical and that is insane.

(Of course, it’s debatable whether the powers that be want the “war on terror” to ever end in the first place; it’s great business for the war profiteers and the oil mega-corporations.)

It’s pretty radical that I, who do not subscribe to Islam or Christianity (or the other Gang for God, Judaism), am caught up in the war between the three feuding bullshit religions whether I want to be or not, because with the launching of some nuclear missiles, this “holy” war could change things radically for every living thing on the planet.

It is the media’s job to tell us what’s going on — not to take sides and to get us also to take sides in “holy” wars.

If the AP is going to refer to those outside of the United States who act beyond the pale as “radicals,” then it should start referring to those within the United States who act beyond the pale as “radicals” as well.

You know, to be fair and balanced…