By Manifesto Joe
In the five years since this post first appeared, I've gotten in trouble with the IRS. Looks like I may end up getting an attorney before this is over. Conservatives may laugh, but hey -- if not for your moronic Iraq War, and your giving zillionaires and big corporations a tax pass, perhaps I wouldn't owe so much.
BTW, I didn't post for a few months, but I've been busy with a little thing called life. One week ago I got out of the hospital after surgery and am recovering at home. I finally have a lot of time on my hands, so I'm back on the blog trail.
Without further ado, this is from April 15, 2011:
The Republicans just don't get it, and it looks like they won't in the foreseeable future. With 40 cents of every federal dollar spent now being borrowed, they want to give yet more tax bonanzas to the rich while essentially abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.
This isn't what Americans voted for in 2008. A lower percentage of them, those who bothered to vote in 2010, voted for such folly whether they knew it or not.
The numbers cry out for a tax hike on the wealthy.
When one talks to earners at the upper-middle level, they are quick to point out the marginal rate of 35%, arguing that with progressive tax brackets, many of them end up paying more than lower earners as a percentage. (That's what comes of a steady mental diet of Fox News. That stuff rots brains.)
Yet such people seem to get amnesia when one points out that just 10 or so years ago, when the marginal rate was 39.6%, the U.S. was running a surplus. This was no accident. Even with the modest Clinton tax hike on the rich that barely passed in 1993, we didn't have the structural deficit we have now.
And the Mainstream Media are quick to obfuscate, talking to selected economists who keep telling the victims that raising taxes on the rich won't be enough. And who owns the MSM? Giant corporations -- and how much income tax do they pay?
Two-thirds of corporations pay no income tax
That's not news -- the first of the stories broke in 2008. Here's a link to one of them.
Although it's not news, many people don't seem to "get it," so it bears repeating, and repeating some more. Most of these "legal persons" are getting a free ride. They use the infrastructure (such as it is now), and have vast resources to fleece ordinary, unsuspecting victims out of many billions, yet they pay nothing.
In case you thought I was joking, here's a link to a more recent story about this, courtesy of Alternet.
In their 1990 book America: What Went Wrong?, investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele cited IRS statistics that show that, in 1959, corporations accounted for 39% of federal tax revenue. By 1989, that was down to 17%. And it's probably gotten worse since then.
Here's a brief roll call of Corporate America's tax slackers:
General Electric -- Last month, The New York Times reported that, in addition to paying no federal income taxes this year, GE, the largest U.S. corporation, is to get a tax credit of $3.2 billion. GE made $14.1 billion in profits in 2010, $5.1 billion of which came from its U.S. operations. The story was conspicuously absent from NBC News, part-owned by General Electric.
Goldman Sachs -- Bloomberg News, in December 2008, reported that Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007. The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, Goldman Sachs said. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits. U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern. "This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs," Doggett said. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."
ExxonMobil -- In March 2010, Forbes magazine reported that the oil giant, "which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS":
Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.
Mother Jones magazine noted that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. It was noted at the Wonk Room that big corporations' tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers.
This list could grow to tedious proportions. You should get the picture by now.
Let's start sharing some sacrifice
Nobody likes to pay taxes. I owed the IRS far more than I expected to this year, and will probably be until fall paying it all off. But when some common slob like me is paying Uncle Sam more, year after year, than GE is, then there must be something dreadfully wrong with this system.
But alas, our Republican brethren still don't get it. They are promoting the idea of still more tax bonanzas for the wealthy. And, although a corporation enjoys the status of a "legal person" in our psychopathic system, two-thirds of them pay nothing, and even get refunds and billions in corporate welfare on top of that.
The latest news on this was from The Associated Press. It's not just corporations that are the problem. About 45% of U.S. households will pay no income tax at all, thanks to all the breaks that people, especially the super-rich, are getting.
It should be clear, if one looks at the numbers honestly, that our structural deficit has much more to do with what needs to be raised than with what needs to be cut.
Yet, the Republicans persist in their policies of the past 30-plus years, to defecate all over ordinary people while cutting sweet deals for their rich campaign contributors. And the Democrats haven't been very much better. Even President Barack "Change you can believe in" Obama hasn't been nearly candid enough on this issue.
So, what is to be done? Giant corporations and the super-rich clearly have politicians by the balls and have been gaming the system accordingly for the past 30-plus years. What can an ordinary person do?
(1) Stop believing the MSM. They obfuscate, and sometimes outright lie. And that shouldn't be surprising, given that they are generally owned by the very corporations that have been getting a free ride.
(2) Vote in the primaries. This is where people can get real Democrats, not just more corporate lackeys, to be candidates in the general election. The one positive that came out of the 2010 midterm debacle was that now, the Democrats left in Congress are more progressive on these kinds of issues. Ironically, it was largely the "Blue Dogs" and Democrats-in-name-only who went down in defeat to Tea Party challengers.
(3) Vote in the general elections. As frustrating as DINOs can be, and as agonizingly placating as Obama has been, we're better off with them than we are now, with right-wing Republican ideologues writing the agenda. President Clinton, Republicrat though he often was, presided over the last balanced federal budget, and that was largely because he demanded that the rich pay at least a modestly higher percentage of their hefty incomes in taxes. And back then, there was little talk of privatizing Medicare.
(4) General strike. In contemporary America, it will be very hard to float this idea. But if most of the work force in this country were willing to "sick out" just one day, and a few spokespeople made clear to the powers that be that this was an organized protest, it might perk up some ears.
This country is far from broke. The trick is going to be getting the rich slackers who have the bucks to fork some of them over. There are people out there who have it -- but they aren't going to let go of any of it without a fight.
Just pay your taxes today, chumps. Serious training starts tomorrow.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Showing posts with label Iraq war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq war. Show all posts
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Can There Still Be Doubt That Il Doofus' Iraq Invasion Was A Grotesque Mistake?
By Manifesto Joe
Day by day I am reminded of April 1975, when the South Vietnamese "government" was being toppled. President Gerald Ford actually wanted to send U.S. troops back to Vietnam as it became clearer that the South would be unable to survive. Congress, overwhelmingly Democratic after the 1974 midterm elections, said no. Hell no.
This time, a half-Republican Congress seems ambivalent, and President Obama appears to have been bamboozled by the military establishment. As an early opponent of Il Doofus' foolish invasion of Iraq, Obama should know that you can't fix stupid. And among many mistakes Il Doofus made during his abysmal presidency, the Iraq invasion may have been the most imbecilic. That should be clear now.
During the 2002-03 run-up to Il Doofus' folly, I watched in amazement as the American people were misled and lied to again and again. I figured I knew what the motivation was -- oil. Il Doofus and his chief operating officer, The Prince of Darkness, were figuring that they could just send troops in there, have them welcomed as liberators, and then just help themselves to all that cheap oil. Of course, they were dreadfully wrong. What happened was an eight-year war that ended up costing thousands of American lives, ruining tens of thousands more, and killing perhaps over 1 million Iraqis.
Now, three years after U.S. involvement ostensibly ended, we're supposed to be shocked, shocked that Iraq has erupted into sectarian violence, with Sunnis fighting Shiites, etc.? And that the Baghdad "government" could be toppled any day now?
Saddam Hussein was certainly a bad guy, but at least he was the Devil We Knew. His brutal regime was the only glue that held that country together. When he was toppled, the U.S. opened a Pandora's Box that could only end the way it looks like it may end now. Containment of Saddam (as was done with the Soviet Union) would have been the wise thing, but noooo ... Instead, we had to listen to half-baked stories about "weapons of mass destruction."
Il Doofus' adventure in Iraq was a grotesque mistake that will cost Iraqis, plus Americans, for many decades. The U.S. should have left well enough alone in the first place, and renewed involvement now would just compound the error. Let's face it -- we've lost another war. Now let's try not to do this again, ever.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Postscript: It was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who referred to the Iraq war as "a grotesque mistake."
Day by day I am reminded of April 1975, when the South Vietnamese "government" was being toppled. President Gerald Ford actually wanted to send U.S. troops back to Vietnam as it became clearer that the South would be unable to survive. Congress, overwhelmingly Democratic after the 1974 midterm elections, said no. Hell no.
This time, a half-Republican Congress seems ambivalent, and President Obama appears to have been bamboozled by the military establishment. As an early opponent of Il Doofus' foolish invasion of Iraq, Obama should know that you can't fix stupid. And among many mistakes Il Doofus made during his abysmal presidency, the Iraq invasion may have been the most imbecilic. That should be clear now.
During the 2002-03 run-up to Il Doofus' folly, I watched in amazement as the American people were misled and lied to again and again. I figured I knew what the motivation was -- oil. Il Doofus and his chief operating officer, The Prince of Darkness, were figuring that they could just send troops in there, have them welcomed as liberators, and then just help themselves to all that cheap oil. Of course, they were dreadfully wrong. What happened was an eight-year war that ended up costing thousands of American lives, ruining tens of thousands more, and killing perhaps over 1 million Iraqis.
Now, three years after U.S. involvement ostensibly ended, we're supposed to be shocked, shocked that Iraq has erupted into sectarian violence, with Sunnis fighting Shiites, etc.? And that the Baghdad "government" could be toppled any day now?
Saddam Hussein was certainly a bad guy, but at least he was the Devil We Knew. His brutal regime was the only glue that held that country together. When he was toppled, the U.S. opened a Pandora's Box that could only end the way it looks like it may end now. Containment of Saddam (as was done with the Soviet Union) would have been the wise thing, but noooo ... Instead, we had to listen to half-baked stories about "weapons of mass destruction."
Il Doofus' adventure in Iraq was a grotesque mistake that will cost Iraqis, plus Americans, for many decades. The U.S. should have left well enough alone in the first place, and renewed involvement now would just compound the error. Let's face it -- we've lost another war. Now let's try not to do this again, ever.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Postscript: It was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who referred to the Iraq war as "a grotesque mistake."
Monday, December 26, 2011
Are The Holidays A Bad Time To Remind People That The Iraq War Was A Hideously Bad Idea?
By Manifesto Joe
Tact was never one of my strong suits, so I'm going to go ahead with this. It isn't that the U.S. has never "invaded" another country -- I think the Vietnamese can attest to that. But at least the anti-communist crusade of the later 20th century was a somewhat better reason for that adventure, ill-fated though it clearly was.
This time, it was so transparent, I can't see how the Il Doofus administration got a majority of the Senate, including Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, to more or less vote for this fiasco.
It didn't turn out to be quite as expensive as Vietnam, at least from the U.S. standpoint. There were a lot more amputees and nonfatal casualties, thanks to better medicine and equipment. U.S. deaths numbered less than 4,500, compared with about 58,000 in Vietnam. The proportion of wounded and permanently maimed, relatively weighed, was larger.
But a sad thing is that brown-skinned people don't seem to count in the eyes of many Americans. It's estimated that well over 1.4 million Iraqis died as a result of the war of 2003-2011. And, if you check the news posts of recent days, they are still dying. Apparently it isn't over yet.
I never believed any of the administration's bullshit, not from day one. They had no "weapons of mass destruction" credibly documented, and as it turns out, they never did. The administration basically forced Colin Powell to lie to the U.N. to engineer some kind of credibility for this invasion. And it's not hard to see what the true motives were.
It's certainly true that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, one who largely modeled himself and his methods after Josef Stalin. But, Saddam was being very effectively contained. And, the U.S. has not merely tolerated, but has actually supported, many dictators just as bad. Those despots just happened to be rancid butter on the right side of the bread.
The widespread political ignorance of the American people was largely exposed during this farce. If you went out onto the streets and asked many Americans about this war -- to this day, many would mistakenly say that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, that he actually did have "weapons of mass destruction," that he was linked to the 9/11 attacks, and so forth. The Il Doofus administration eventually had to admit that none of the above was true. But the propagandists had worked the damage long before that, and lastingly.
Now, as I understand it, the U.S. has basically put the Iraqi government du jour on notice that no more military intervention is forthcoming. There will be diplomatic missions, but even if Iraq erupts into civil war in coming months -- which looks entirely possible -- no more American troops will be sent in.
The rotten motive for this war is not hard to see, and never really was. If this place hadn't had oil, and lots of it, no one in the Western world would have considered them worth a second thought.
Problem was, how to get it out. Pipelines would get blown up. There were never enough workers to get it out of the fields, anyway. A place with so much turmoil isn't a place that can be a reliable supplier of cheap oil to a dominating Western nation.
So, it turned out to be, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi phrased it, "a grotesque mistake."
A lot of people thought that Barack Obama, once in the presidency, should have hastened U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. After all, he'd opposed the invasion from the start, to his credit. But Obama apparently felt that he had to take the advice of experienced military minds, and then proceed with a withdrawal slowly. After nearly three years, it has only recently been concluded. (Well, sort of. There are still a hell of a lot of "advisers" there.)
A sad thing for Obama is that, if civil war does indeed erupt in Iraq in coming months, Obama's Republican rivals will probably depict him as weak, that he pulled the troops out too soon, and that he shouldn't have announced a specific timetable. But if he decides to be a "hawk" and send U.S. troops back there, then he'd be a reckless warmonger. You can't win when confronted with fools.
Something I ran into along the way, as a center-left blogger, is the argument that the "surge" worked. What the "surge" appears to have done was to simply drive the Iraqi insurgency into hiding, with them waiting for the U.S. exit, then to re-emerge. Now, absent a U.S. occupation, it looks like they're coming back out. And they were always going to, no matter how long it took. When it's your country, you're usually willing to wait.
I am profoundly sad, not only for those Americans who died in this nasty desert, but also for those who left arms, legs and minds behind in the horrific slaughter. And I have numerically more sorrow for the many, many more Iraqis who died and were exiled, some perhaps never to return.
I am reminded of an old U.S. literary debate between poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish and poet and literary critic Malcolm Cowley.
MacLeish, who served as an officer in World War I, argued that there was a just cause that Americans died for during that war. But looking back, how much difference was there, essentially, between the Britain-France alliance, and the Kaiser's Germany?
Cowley was with the American Field Service during the war. His argument back was, basically, that they (Americans) died for nothing. I fear that he was right.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tact was never one of my strong suits, so I'm going to go ahead with this. It isn't that the U.S. has never "invaded" another country -- I think the Vietnamese can attest to that. But at least the anti-communist crusade of the later 20th century was a somewhat better reason for that adventure, ill-fated though it clearly was.
This time, it was so transparent, I can't see how the Il Doofus administration got a majority of the Senate, including Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, to more or less vote for this fiasco.
It didn't turn out to be quite as expensive as Vietnam, at least from the U.S. standpoint. There were a lot more amputees and nonfatal casualties, thanks to better medicine and equipment. U.S. deaths numbered less than 4,500, compared with about 58,000 in Vietnam. The proportion of wounded and permanently maimed, relatively weighed, was larger.
But a sad thing is that brown-skinned people don't seem to count in the eyes of many Americans. It's estimated that well over 1.4 million Iraqis died as a result of the war of 2003-2011. And, if you check the news posts of recent days, they are still dying. Apparently it isn't over yet.
I never believed any of the administration's bullshit, not from day one. They had no "weapons of mass destruction" credibly documented, and as it turns out, they never did. The administration basically forced Colin Powell to lie to the U.N. to engineer some kind of credibility for this invasion. And it's not hard to see what the true motives were.
It's certainly true that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, one who largely modeled himself and his methods after Josef Stalin. But, Saddam was being very effectively contained. And, the U.S. has not merely tolerated, but has actually supported, many dictators just as bad. Those despots just happened to be rancid butter on the right side of the bread.
The widespread political ignorance of the American people was largely exposed during this farce. If you went out onto the streets and asked many Americans about this war -- to this day, many would mistakenly say that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, that he actually did have "weapons of mass destruction," that he was linked to the 9/11 attacks, and so forth. The Il Doofus administration eventually had to admit that none of the above was true. But the propagandists had worked the damage long before that, and lastingly.
Now, as I understand it, the U.S. has basically put the Iraqi government du jour on notice that no more military intervention is forthcoming. There will be diplomatic missions, but even if Iraq erupts into civil war in coming months -- which looks entirely possible -- no more American troops will be sent in.
The rotten motive for this war is not hard to see, and never really was. If this place hadn't had oil, and lots of it, no one in the Western world would have considered them worth a second thought.
Problem was, how to get it out. Pipelines would get blown up. There were never enough workers to get it out of the fields, anyway. A place with so much turmoil isn't a place that can be a reliable supplier of cheap oil to a dominating Western nation.
So, it turned out to be, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi phrased it, "a grotesque mistake."
A lot of people thought that Barack Obama, once in the presidency, should have hastened U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. After all, he'd opposed the invasion from the start, to his credit. But Obama apparently felt that he had to take the advice of experienced military minds, and then proceed with a withdrawal slowly. After nearly three years, it has only recently been concluded. (Well, sort of. There are still a hell of a lot of "advisers" there.)
A sad thing for Obama is that, if civil war does indeed erupt in Iraq in coming months, Obama's Republican rivals will probably depict him as weak, that he pulled the troops out too soon, and that he shouldn't have announced a specific timetable. But if he decides to be a "hawk" and send U.S. troops back there, then he'd be a reckless warmonger. You can't win when confronted with fools.
Something I ran into along the way, as a center-left blogger, is the argument that the "surge" worked. What the "surge" appears to have done was to simply drive the Iraqi insurgency into hiding, with them waiting for the U.S. exit, then to re-emerge. Now, absent a U.S. occupation, it looks like they're coming back out. And they were always going to, no matter how long it took. When it's your country, you're usually willing to wait.
I am profoundly sad, not only for those Americans who died in this nasty desert, but also for those who left arms, legs and minds behind in the horrific slaughter. And I have numerically more sorrow for the many, many more Iraqis who died and were exiled, some perhaps never to return.
I am reminded of an old U.S. literary debate between poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish and poet and literary critic Malcolm Cowley.
MacLeish, who served as an officer in World War I, argued that there was a just cause that Americans died for during that war. But looking back, how much difference was there, essentially, between the Britain-France alliance, and the Kaiser's Germany?
Cowley was with the American Field Service during the war. His argument back was, basically, that they (Americans) died for nothing. I fear that he was right.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Deficit Hawks Don't Seem Worried About The Cost Of Wars
By Manifesto Joe
While the "deficit hawks" in Congress are scheming for all kinds of attacks on Social Security and other flimsy strands of the U.S. social safety net, news just came out that an estimated $5 billion-plus of what was spent for rebuilding in war-ravaged Iraq was wasted. Yep, wasted.
Here's a link to a story about this.
It's funny how it is with deficit hawks, most of them Republicans -- there's never enough money to keep jobless people going, but there's always money for a war, and for its ancillary costs.
The Iraq war is now supposed to be over in terms of the U.S. combat role, or so says President Obama. Don't bet on it. The U.S. is leaving 50,000 troops in the country, and insurgents are suddenly re-emerging to launch coordinated attacks. I hope I am pleasantly surprised, but I doubt that U.S. forces will be leaving Iraq anytime soon. Expect a permanent occupation, similar to the ones in Germany and Japan, and one not nearly as tranquil.
Meanwhile, the cost will keep rising, well beyond the estimated $750 billion that the Iraq war has already cost U.S. taxpayers.
The way the Republican Party and the DINOs play politics, Obama will end up holding the bag for all this, one way or another. If he withdraws all U.S. troops eventually, expect something perhaps worse than a Vietnam scenario, with Iraq descending into chaos and civil war. "Obama lost the war!" will be the Fox News mantra.
If he keeps a permanent occupation force in Iraq, then the Michael Steeles out there will have license to rewrite history. Never mind that Obama has always regarded the Iraq war as a terrible mistake. It has become his war, regardless of Il Doofus' grotesque 2002-03 decision and regardless of the outcome. Politically, he's in a no-win situation.
Meanwhile, expect a solid bloc of Republicans and a few "Blue Dog Democrats" to try to cut Social Security and stymie extensions of unemployment benefits, while at the same time supporting every war appropriation that comes before them. For them, there's always a deficit for life -- and there's always a huge surplus for death.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
While the "deficit hawks" in Congress are scheming for all kinds of attacks on Social Security and other flimsy strands of the U.S. social safety net, news just came out that an estimated $5 billion-plus of what was spent for rebuilding in war-ravaged Iraq was wasted. Yep, wasted.
Here's a link to a story about this.
It's funny how it is with deficit hawks, most of them Republicans -- there's never enough money to keep jobless people going, but there's always money for a war, and for its ancillary costs.
The Iraq war is now supposed to be over in terms of the U.S. combat role, or so says President Obama. Don't bet on it. The U.S. is leaving 50,000 troops in the country, and insurgents are suddenly re-emerging to launch coordinated attacks. I hope I am pleasantly surprised, but I doubt that U.S. forces will be leaving Iraq anytime soon. Expect a permanent occupation, similar to the ones in Germany and Japan, and one not nearly as tranquil.
Meanwhile, the cost will keep rising, well beyond the estimated $750 billion that the Iraq war has already cost U.S. taxpayers.
The way the Republican Party and the DINOs play politics, Obama will end up holding the bag for all this, one way or another. If he withdraws all U.S. troops eventually, expect something perhaps worse than a Vietnam scenario, with Iraq descending into chaos and civil war. "Obama lost the war!" will be the Fox News mantra.
If he keeps a permanent occupation force in Iraq, then the Michael Steeles out there will have license to rewrite history. Never mind that Obama has always regarded the Iraq war as a terrible mistake. It has become his war, regardless of Il Doofus' grotesque 2002-03 decision and regardless of the outcome. Politically, he's in a no-win situation.
Meanwhile, expect a solid bloc of Republicans and a few "Blue Dog Democrats" to try to cut Social Security and stymie extensions of unemployment benefits, while at the same time supporting every war appropriation that comes before them. For them, there's always a deficit for life -- and there's always a huge surplus for death.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Bringing The New Torquemada To Justice
By Manifesto Joe
I confess that I've been a little nonplussed about the Obama administration's lack of aggressiveness in bringing the Bush-era war criminals to justice. The man who seems to present the biggest legal target is the modern Grand Inquisitor himself, Dick "Torquemada" Cheney.
It isn't merely that Cheney is a contemptible, sneering weasel who doesn't know when to give up on his special brand of right-wing whitewash. From the available evidence, it was the "vice president" of the time who is most directly traceable to orders to carry out "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Writing for Truthout, Steve Weissman brought out a few unsavory points about the employment of torture (yeah, let's call it by its honest name):
Cheney's signature success with torture came when the CIA sent al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi to Egypt, where he "confessed" that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda in chemical weapons. Al-Libi's statement, extracted under torture, was the smoking gun that Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell all used to sell their pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. So, don't tell Cheney that "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" do not work. They damned sure do if your goal is to get the propaganda you want to go to war.
Few in Congress or the mass media have pushed Cheney on this "great success." Fewer still have seen that that Bush and Cheney's illegal use of torture to sell their pre-emptive war in Iraq was probably their single greatest crime. Why the reluctance? Why do so many Americans refuse to see the obvious?
In large part because Congress, the corporate media, and even the general public were to some degree complicit in the crime. Whatever the CIA told Congressional leaders about waterboarding, sensory and sleep deprivation, stress positions, or sending captives to other counties for interrogation, only the mentally challenged had any excuse for not knowing from the public record at the time the rough outlines of how far Bush and Cheney had stepped beyond the law.
To read the entire article, go here.
The implications are far-reaching. It isn't merely a matter of Cheney, Il Doofus & Co. knowingly and deliberately violating the Geneva Conventions. They used evidence extracted from a terrorism suspect as part of the argument to drag the U.S. into one of our most needless and regrettable wars. The Iraqi loss of life has been staggering in proportion, comparable to that of the "pacification" of the Philippines over 100 years ago.
The probable waterboarding of one suspect may have led to slaughter on a mass scale, and robbed the U.S. of any moral authority it may have had, for generations. "We" weren't supposed to be doing this sort of thing -- that was the kind of thing that "we" said made the "bad guys" bad.
It's pretty obvious now that basing a war, at least in part, on the confession of one wretch who was being subjected to prolonged torture was the height of pseudo-pragmatic imbecility. I consider myself a reasonably tough person. But if you waterboarded me enough times, I would probably sign my house and car over to you and confess to the murders of Jonbenet Ramsey and the Lindbergh baby.
There's a rogue's gallery of suspects implicated in this, but the biggest cheese of all seems to be the gangsta that Il Doofus picked to be sort of a de facto president, his chief operating officer, "Torquemada" Cheney.
(An aside: One thing I am very proud of is that I never bought into any of this. I could see Bush becoming a neocon opportunist with his "Axis of Evil" State of the Union speech in January 2002, and I never believed anything the bastards said from that point on. Unfortunately, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and much of the allegedly liberal media did buy into at least some of it. As for me, I was against the Iraq misadventure from the very beginning.)
Sadly, Dick Cheney is likely to be dead of heart failure long before it would be possible for him to serve a day in jail. Obama and Eric Holder don't seem to want to push this, and if they don't change their minds, it will go down as another one of those hideous scandals that litter our history. I mentioned the "pacification" of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. It's estimated that up to 1 million Filipinos died as a result, from fighting, hunger or disease. I learned this from independent reading as an adult. It's not often in history books. We mustn't let this episode of war crime slip into some footnote.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
I confess that I've been a little nonplussed about the Obama administration's lack of aggressiveness in bringing the Bush-era war criminals to justice. The man who seems to present the biggest legal target is the modern Grand Inquisitor himself, Dick "Torquemada" Cheney.
It isn't merely that Cheney is a contemptible, sneering weasel who doesn't know when to give up on his special brand of right-wing whitewash. From the available evidence, it was the "vice president" of the time who is most directly traceable to orders to carry out "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Writing for Truthout, Steve Weissman brought out a few unsavory points about the employment of torture (yeah, let's call it by its honest name):
Cheney's signature success with torture came when the CIA sent al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi to Egypt, where he "confessed" that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda in chemical weapons. Al-Libi's statement, extracted under torture, was the smoking gun that Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell all used to sell their pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. So, don't tell Cheney that "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" do not work. They damned sure do if your goal is to get the propaganda you want to go to war.
Few in Congress or the mass media have pushed Cheney on this "great success." Fewer still have seen that that Bush and Cheney's illegal use of torture to sell their pre-emptive war in Iraq was probably their single greatest crime. Why the reluctance? Why do so many Americans refuse to see the obvious?
In large part because Congress, the corporate media, and even the general public were to some degree complicit in the crime. Whatever the CIA told Congressional leaders about waterboarding, sensory and sleep deprivation, stress positions, or sending captives to other counties for interrogation, only the mentally challenged had any excuse for not knowing from the public record at the time the rough outlines of how far Bush and Cheney had stepped beyond the law.
To read the entire article, go here.
The implications are far-reaching. It isn't merely a matter of Cheney, Il Doofus & Co. knowingly and deliberately violating the Geneva Conventions. They used evidence extracted from a terrorism suspect as part of the argument to drag the U.S. into one of our most needless and regrettable wars. The Iraqi loss of life has been staggering in proportion, comparable to that of the "pacification" of the Philippines over 100 years ago.
The probable waterboarding of one suspect may have led to slaughter on a mass scale, and robbed the U.S. of any moral authority it may have had, for generations. "We" weren't supposed to be doing this sort of thing -- that was the kind of thing that "we" said made the "bad guys" bad.
It's pretty obvious now that basing a war, at least in part, on the confession of one wretch who was being subjected to prolonged torture was the height of pseudo-pragmatic imbecility. I consider myself a reasonably tough person. But if you waterboarded me enough times, I would probably sign my house and car over to you and confess to the murders of Jonbenet Ramsey and the Lindbergh baby.
There's a rogue's gallery of suspects implicated in this, but the biggest cheese of all seems to be the gangsta that Il Doofus picked to be sort of a de facto president, his chief operating officer, "Torquemada" Cheney.
(An aside: One thing I am very proud of is that I never bought into any of this. I could see Bush becoming a neocon opportunist with his "Axis of Evil" State of the Union speech in January 2002, and I never believed anything the bastards said from that point on. Unfortunately, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and much of the allegedly liberal media did buy into at least some of it. As for me, I was against the Iraq misadventure from the very beginning.)
Sadly, Dick Cheney is likely to be dead of heart failure long before it would be possible for him to serve a day in jail. Obama and Eric Holder don't seem to want to push this, and if they don't change their minds, it will go down as another one of those hideous scandals that litter our history. I mentioned the "pacification" of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. It's estimated that up to 1 million Filipinos died as a result, from fighting, hunger or disease. I learned this from independent reading as an adult. It's not often in history books. We mustn't let this episode of war crime slip into some footnote.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Slicing Through 'Surge' Propaganda: Haven't We Heard It All Before?
By Manifesto Joe
Full disclosure: I have no military background. I do have 30 years of experience as a professional journalist, and have known enough U.S. history, for long enough, that at 17, I earned 6 hours of college credit in that subject just by taking a test. Take those for whatever they're worth.
My perhaps-risky thesis: The "surge" in Iraq, now being touted as some kind of unequivocal success, is yet another deception in a military campaign that will be remembered as the war that keeps on costing.
Granted, al Qaeda in Iraq has apparently been dealt some crushing blows (for now), and U.S. military casualties are sharply down. These things are being widely reported as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is in Baghdad to take stock of things.
But, the latter point, about the decline in U.S. casualties, reflects the ethnocentrism with which Americans tend to look at foreign conflicts. Juan Cole, writing on Informed Comment, points out:
Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.
That is, the Iraqi death toll is actually still worse now than the last time Obama was in Iraq! (See the bombings and shootings listed below for Sunday). The hype around last year's troop escalation obscures a simple fact: that Obama formed his views about the need for the US to leave Iraq at a time when its security situation was very similar to what it is now! Why a return to the bad situation in late 05 and early 06 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren't for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn't be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.
To read the entire Cole article, click here.
What we seem to be hearing is that when fewer Americans are being killed and maimed as a result of the "surge," that makes it an unequivocal success. When the furrenurs is gettin' whacked a little faster than they wuz two and a half years ago, well, that's their tough luck. It's an A-Murkan world.
And, we've heard all this before, at other times and in other places. And it hasn't been so long since we've heard it. I seem to recall that "we" (in the editorial sense) were supposed to have pretty much routed the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan. Been reading or hearing any news from there lately? It ain't over till it's over. And that one, the war "we" actually have reasonable justification for, is far from over.
I also seem to recall a day in 2003 when, just weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Il Doofus staged a landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared major military operations in Iraq to be over.
The MSM mouthpieces remain very much on the Pentagon bandwagon (not to mention the Straitjacket Express), with a mantra of "Obama was dead wrong" on the outcome of the "surge."
True, Obama didn't call it right in predicting that the "surge" would bring an increase in violence.
But, given the continued toll on Iraqi civilians, reports of success seem greatly exaggerated. I think the "surge" could be pronounced a success on the day that there are no unusual civilian deaths in Iraq, that the millions of refugees can return home safely, and that a stable Iraqi government can be elected without being propped up by a U.S. military presence. Perhaps in 100 years?
I'll venture a possibly risky prediction, but one firmly based on recent U.S. history.
In January 1973, the Nixon administration finally reached that elusive "peace with honor" deal with North Vietnam. The "peace" lasted a while. Then, a couple of years later, communist troops were overrunning South Vietnam. The American people were so sick of that bottomless pit of lives and money that they said a loud and resounding "NO" when the Ford administration had the nerve to propose that "we" go back in there.
The bottom line is that the U.S. is an occupier in a land generally hostile to the occupation. And, it should come as no surprise that the resistance will hide and play possum with every "surge" that our taxpayers can be conned into bankrolling. That's the name of the game in guerrilla warfare.
I'll gamble, and predict an outcome similar to the previously cited ones. For Americans, this will be the war that keeps on costing.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Full disclosure: I have no military background. I do have 30 years of experience as a professional journalist, and have known enough U.S. history, for long enough, that at 17, I earned 6 hours of college credit in that subject just by taking a test. Take those for whatever they're worth.
My perhaps-risky thesis: The "surge" in Iraq, now being touted as some kind of unequivocal success, is yet another deception in a military campaign that will be remembered as the war that keeps on costing.
Granted, al Qaeda in Iraq has apparently been dealt some crushing blows (for now), and U.S. military casualties are sharply down. These things are being widely reported as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is in Baghdad to take stock of things.
But, the latter point, about the decline in U.S. casualties, reflects the ethnocentrism with which Americans tend to look at foreign conflicts. Juan Cole, writing on Informed Comment, points out:
Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.
That is, the Iraqi death toll is actually still worse now than the last time Obama was in Iraq! (See the bombings and shootings listed below for Sunday). The hype around last year's troop escalation obscures a simple fact: that Obama formed his views about the need for the US to leave Iraq at a time when its security situation was very similar to what it is now! Why a return to the bad situation in late 05 and early 06 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren't for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn't be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.
To read the entire Cole article, click here.
What we seem to be hearing is that when fewer Americans are being killed and maimed as a result of the "surge," that makes it an unequivocal success. When the furrenurs is gettin' whacked a little faster than they wuz two and a half years ago, well, that's their tough luck. It's an A-Murkan world.
And, we've heard all this before, at other times and in other places. And it hasn't been so long since we've heard it. I seem to recall that "we" (in the editorial sense) were supposed to have pretty much routed the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan. Been reading or hearing any news from there lately? It ain't over till it's over. And that one, the war "we" actually have reasonable justification for, is far from over.
I also seem to recall a day in 2003 when, just weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Il Doofus staged a landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared major military operations in Iraq to be over.
The MSM mouthpieces remain very much on the Pentagon bandwagon (not to mention the Straitjacket Express), with a mantra of "Obama was dead wrong" on the outcome of the "surge."
True, Obama didn't call it right in predicting that the "surge" would bring an increase in violence.
But, given the continued toll on Iraqi civilians, reports of success seem greatly exaggerated. I think the "surge" could be pronounced a success on the day that there are no unusual civilian deaths in Iraq, that the millions of refugees can return home safely, and that a stable Iraqi government can be elected without being propped up by a U.S. military presence. Perhaps in 100 years?
I'll venture a possibly risky prediction, but one firmly based on recent U.S. history.
In January 1973, the Nixon administration finally reached that elusive "peace with honor" deal with North Vietnam. The "peace" lasted a while. Then, a couple of years later, communist troops were overrunning South Vietnam. The American people were so sick of that bottomless pit of lives and money that they said a loud and resounding "NO" when the Ford administration had the nerve to propose that "we" go back in there.
The bottom line is that the U.S. is an occupier in a land generally hostile to the occupation. And, it should come as no surprise that the resistance will hide and play possum with every "surge" that our taxpayers can be conned into bankrolling. That's the name of the game in guerrilla warfare.
I'll gamble, and predict an outcome similar to the previously cited ones. For Americans, this will be the war that keeps on costing.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
'There Will Be Blood' Comes To Iraq
For years, those of us who have argued that the Iraq war is mainly about oil have been dismissed as wild-eyed neo-Marxists, conspiracy theorists and prematurely senile ex-hippies. Tell that to journalism legend Bill Moyers.
Moyers and Michael Winship present a compelling look at the clear motive behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in "It Was Oil, All Along."
For reader-supported Web news service Truthout, Moyers and Winship wrote:
"Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil."
Go here to read the entire article. I found the analogy to the film There Will Be Blood intriguing. -- MJ
Moyers and Michael Winship present a compelling look at the clear motive behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in "It Was Oil, All Along."
For reader-supported Web news service Truthout, Moyers and Winship wrote:
"Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil."
Go here to read the entire article. I found the analogy to the film There Will Be Blood intriguing. -- MJ
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Breaking News: Bushies Already Sabotaging Obama Plans For Troop Withdrawals
By Manifesto Joe
If Barack Obama wins the presidency in November, he may be stepping into a foreign policy minefield come January, courtesy of the Bush administration. The Independent (U.K.) newspaper reports that it received leaked information of a secret plan being negotiated in Baghdad that would establish 50 U.S. military bases, give the U.S. control of Iraqi airspace and give all American soldiers and contractors legal immunity.
It's finally here -- the Iraq 100 Years War Plan. It doesn't take much imagination to conjure up a more or less permanent insurgency, a permanent state of low-grade warfare. Maybe the neocons will tell us to look on the bright side -- all those unemployed and underemployed young poor and working-class men and women will have three-year contract jobs awaiting them, for decades to come.
The al-Maliki government is reportedly torn, basically opposing the idea but scared shitless that it can't be viable without being propped up by U.S. military force. It shapes up into a no-win situation for most concerned parties: The Independent reports that the terms of the deal that the Bush administration wants "are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq."
This deal would pretty much show the hand of what the Bush junta wanted all along -- a permanent military base in the Middle East, under cover of a puppet government, theoretically forming a bulwark against Iran and eventually giving the U.S. an inside track on all that light sweet crude.
If Obama is elected, he might be forced into the position of deal-breaker. There's a lot of money riding on this one, too.
Fasten your seat belts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
If Barack Obama wins the presidency in November, he may be stepping into a foreign policy minefield come January, courtesy of the Bush administration. The Independent (U.K.) newspaper reports that it received leaked information of a secret plan being negotiated in Baghdad that would establish 50 U.S. military bases, give the U.S. control of Iraqi airspace and give all American soldiers and contractors legal immunity.
It's finally here -- the Iraq 100 Years War Plan. It doesn't take much imagination to conjure up a more or less permanent insurgency, a permanent state of low-grade warfare. Maybe the neocons will tell us to look on the bright side -- all those unemployed and underemployed young poor and working-class men and women will have three-year contract jobs awaiting them, for decades to come.
The al-Maliki government is reportedly torn, basically opposing the idea but scared shitless that it can't be viable without being propped up by U.S. military force. It shapes up into a no-win situation for most concerned parties: The Independent reports that the terms of the deal that the Bush administration wants "are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq."
This deal would pretty much show the hand of what the Bush junta wanted all along -- a permanent military base in the Middle East, under cover of a puppet government, theoretically forming a bulwark against Iran and eventually giving the U.S. an inside track on all that light sweet crude.
If Obama is elected, he might be forced into the position of deal-breaker. There's a lot of money riding on this one, too.
Fasten your seat belts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Where Are The Liberal Media When You Need Them? Thoughts On Scott McClellan's Spiel
By Manifesto Joe
In the time I have worked in American news media -- 30 years -- we've had to deal with right-wingers' allegations of "liberal bias." It goes on to this day, despite many years of Fox News obviously functioning as the right-wing Republican answer to Soviet state TV. Even if you go back 20 years or more, to a time when some faint whiff of liberal influence on American media might have been evident, it pales in comparison to the partisan bashing one sees on Fox, every hour on the hour.
In his new, much-discussed book, Scott McClellan touches -- just slightly -- on the problem. That being that the right wing had a strategy, and that despite any rational opposition, they made it work.
Scotty only brings it up in the context of the Iraq war, and American news media's absolute failure to hold the Bush administration's propaganda up to proper scrutiny.
I suggest that this reverse bias strategy has been going on a pretty long time, and still is. The strategy was to cry "liberal bias" so often that the great lie would become accepted as truth, a la Joseph Goebbels. As a result, the right seems to have at least their U.S. hard-core 30% in tow, no matter what happens on the world stage.
It's common sense that a profession like journalism will attract more liberals than conservatives. There are some righties who go into the field (with backing from trust funds and inheritances, usually) because they think their influence is needed among these hordes of liberal reprobates in the profession. I have known some like that. But mostly, liberal types are drawn to these jobs. The jobs don't usually pay well as "college required" professions go, so that means you have to have a bigger moral and emotional stake in it than if you were going into, say, banking. One goes into journalism actually hoping to do meaningful work and make the world a slightly better place.
The right's strategy has been to cry "bias" so many times, and to assemble dubious inductive arguments with isolated instances of sloppy journalism, that eventually many people would buy the line. Over decades, they succeeded to a frustrating degree.
But, with Scotty coming forward like this about media cheerleading on the Iraq war, the ruse is beginning to fall apart. I remember the period of 5-6 years ago, and wondering where the hell our Murrows were while Colin Powell was lying to the U.N. Even Bob Woodward seemed to be shilling for the administration during that time. There was a total collapse of the scrutiny, the skepticism, the suspicion that comes with media at its watchdog best. You know, the traits that "liberals" usually bring to it.
The Free Press Action Fund has kept abreast of the reactions to Scotty's book, and there's more there than has been headlined in general:
... he takes it one step further, implicating the mainstream media for its role in "enabling" this propaganda: "The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House" in spreading the president's case for the war, McClellan writes. The mainstream media didn't live up to its watchdog reputation. "If it had, the country would have been better served.
There's more:
The media's complicity in promoting this war was confirmed Wednesday night by CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin who said that network executives had pushed her not to do hard-hitting pieces on the Bush administration as the nation readied for war.
"The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation," Yellin told CNN's Anderson Cooper. Here's the video:
This is all very familiar turf for me. I've heard it, from bootlicking editors, in many ways. "These people in your story, they're not OUR people." "We need to stick to the facts of the story." (I thought that's what I had been doing.) "We have advertisers, and we need to think about them." (Hey, that was when they were trying to be half-assed honest.)
Perhaps this has driven one more nail into the coffin of the myth of liberal media bias. If not -- give me a bag of nails, a coffin and a good shovel, and I will gladly finish the job. I can vouch from experience that it is among the most toxic of all political myths.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
In the time I have worked in American news media -- 30 years -- we've had to deal with right-wingers' allegations of "liberal bias." It goes on to this day, despite many years of Fox News obviously functioning as the right-wing Republican answer to Soviet state TV. Even if you go back 20 years or more, to a time when some faint whiff of liberal influence on American media might have been evident, it pales in comparison to the partisan bashing one sees on Fox, every hour on the hour.
In his new, much-discussed book, Scott McClellan touches -- just slightly -- on the problem. That being that the right wing had a strategy, and that despite any rational opposition, they made it work.
Scotty only brings it up in the context of the Iraq war, and American news media's absolute failure to hold the Bush administration's propaganda up to proper scrutiny.
I suggest that this reverse bias strategy has been going on a pretty long time, and still is. The strategy was to cry "liberal bias" so often that the great lie would become accepted as truth, a la Joseph Goebbels. As a result, the right seems to have at least their U.S. hard-core 30% in tow, no matter what happens on the world stage.
It's common sense that a profession like journalism will attract more liberals than conservatives. There are some righties who go into the field (with backing from trust funds and inheritances, usually) because they think their influence is needed among these hordes of liberal reprobates in the profession. I have known some like that. But mostly, liberal types are drawn to these jobs. The jobs don't usually pay well as "college required" professions go, so that means you have to have a bigger moral and emotional stake in it than if you were going into, say, banking. One goes into journalism actually hoping to do meaningful work and make the world a slightly better place.
The right's strategy has been to cry "bias" so many times, and to assemble dubious inductive arguments with isolated instances of sloppy journalism, that eventually many people would buy the line. Over decades, they succeeded to a frustrating degree.
But, with Scotty coming forward like this about media cheerleading on the Iraq war, the ruse is beginning to fall apart. I remember the period of 5-6 years ago, and wondering where the hell our Murrows were while Colin Powell was lying to the U.N. Even Bob Woodward seemed to be shilling for the administration during that time. There was a total collapse of the scrutiny, the skepticism, the suspicion that comes with media at its watchdog best. You know, the traits that "liberals" usually bring to it.
The Free Press Action Fund has kept abreast of the reactions to Scotty's book, and there's more there than has been headlined in general:
... he takes it one step further, implicating the mainstream media for its role in "enabling" this propaganda: "The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House" in spreading the president's case for the war, McClellan writes. The mainstream media didn't live up to its watchdog reputation. "If it had, the country would have been better served.
There's more:
The media's complicity in promoting this war was confirmed Wednesday night by CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin who said that network executives had pushed her not to do hard-hitting pieces on the Bush administration as the nation readied for war.
"The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation," Yellin told CNN's Anderson Cooper. Here's the video:
This is all very familiar turf for me. I've heard it, from bootlicking editors, in many ways. "These people in your story, they're not OUR people." "We need to stick to the facts of the story." (I thought that's what I had been doing.) "We have advertisers, and we need to think about them." (Hey, that was when they were trying to be half-assed honest.)
Perhaps this has driven one more nail into the coffin of the myth of liberal media bias. If not -- give me a bag of nails, a coffin and a good shovel, and I will gladly finish the job. I can vouch from experience that it is among the most toxic of all political myths.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Obama Vs. Strawmen: Barack Knows Some Of The Context, But ...
By Manifesto Joe
Nobody got very tough with Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker during Tuesday's questioning by senators on the Iraq disaster. That really wasn't to be expected, not even from presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. John McCain, of course, aped the banal Republican rah-rahs that were anticipated from him.
But Obama did show a shining moment of clarity during a round of questioning. He took a couple of minutes to make a flat statement: In essence, the decision to invade Iraq was a massive strategic blunder -- one that he opposed from the start. He laid out some historical context of this fiasco -- but unfortunately, not all.
Understanding that he's running for president, that's probably as candid a statement as could be expected from Obama. For pragmatic reasons, he had to stop short of certain arguments: That the Iraq war is, at its core, about oil, as the U.S. and other powers would not have worried about a local despot like Saddam Hussein had he not been sitting atop the world's third-largest reserve; that this was clearly an invasion, an act of aggression, arguably in violation of international law; and that the rest of the world has widely regarded the U.S. as a rogue superpower ever since.
Obama pointed out that the particular terrorist "threats" in Iraq exist because of the invasion, and did not exist prior to it. He said there is really no hope for stabilizing the region without the involvement of neighboring Iran, so we're going to have to talk with them sooner or later.
He acknowledged that the men he was questioning were not the ones who made the decision to invade. They are simply the ones left to "clean up the mess."
A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq seems to have been ruled out by all concerned, including Obama.
The Illinois senator seems to appreciate some of the context of this predicament, but perhaps not all.
I am just old enough to have started following public affairs as a tween/teen during the late '60s and early '70s. I, for one, do not love the smell of napalm in the morning -- it smells much like defeat, not victory. It smells like the Vietnam War, and all those familiar rationalizations for the U.S. to just stay, and stay, and stay some more, year after bloody year.
The historical context that Obama doesn't grasp, or at least feigns not to, is that there really isn't going to be a quick way to "clean up" a mess this big. Ultimately, the Iraqis will have to do that themselves, and it won't be easy. The wounds will still be there in 50 years, maybe even 100.
As Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again. I vividly remember the "de-Americanization" and "Vietnamization" of the war of 40 years ago. The escalation, and how that buildup of troops was supposed to eventually pacify the country. I recall Richard Nixon on TV many nights, telling us about how we had to stick it out and "win the peace."
I remember being told how much more competent, how much less corrupt, how much more democratic the South Vietnamese puppet government was becoming. How the South Vietnamese were going to control their destiny, as soon as those communist villains were beaten back into the jungle holes where they belonged.
There are different words for all this nowadays. Instead of escalation, we have the "surge." We have "progress," "sustainable security," and the like. And of course, we have a time frame for these things that, listening to Petraeus and Crocker, seems without end.
Obama did go so far as to suggest that a timetable for withdrawal would be pressure that the current Iraqi government may need if it is ever to become truly viable. If he's thinking anything beyond that, he was careful not to let on, and I expected that.
Barack Obama was born in 1961 (and I honestly don't hold that against him). But consequently, he was a first-grader during the Tet offensive. He would have been an eighth-grader when America saw video of a helicopter being pushed off the side of an aircraft carrier headed out of a lost Vietnam. What he knows about the parallels between then and now would mostly have to come from history lessons.
I hope he was a great student of that subject, and knows more about this than he's letting on just now.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Nobody got very tough with Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker during Tuesday's questioning by senators on the Iraq disaster. That really wasn't to be expected, not even from presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. John McCain, of course, aped the banal Republican rah-rahs that were anticipated from him.
But Obama did show a shining moment of clarity during a round of questioning. He took a couple of minutes to make a flat statement: In essence, the decision to invade Iraq was a massive strategic blunder -- one that he opposed from the start. He laid out some historical context of this fiasco -- but unfortunately, not all.
Understanding that he's running for president, that's probably as candid a statement as could be expected from Obama. For pragmatic reasons, he had to stop short of certain arguments: That the Iraq war is, at its core, about oil, as the U.S. and other powers would not have worried about a local despot like Saddam Hussein had he not been sitting atop the world's third-largest reserve; that this was clearly an invasion, an act of aggression, arguably in violation of international law; and that the rest of the world has widely regarded the U.S. as a rogue superpower ever since.
Obama pointed out that the particular terrorist "threats" in Iraq exist because of the invasion, and did not exist prior to it. He said there is really no hope for stabilizing the region without the involvement of neighboring Iran, so we're going to have to talk with them sooner or later.
He acknowledged that the men he was questioning were not the ones who made the decision to invade. They are simply the ones left to "clean up the mess."
A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq seems to have been ruled out by all concerned, including Obama.
The Illinois senator seems to appreciate some of the context of this predicament, but perhaps not all.
I am just old enough to have started following public affairs as a tween/teen during the late '60s and early '70s. I, for one, do not love the smell of napalm in the morning -- it smells much like defeat, not victory. It smells like the Vietnam War, and all those familiar rationalizations for the U.S. to just stay, and stay, and stay some more, year after bloody year.
The historical context that Obama doesn't grasp, or at least feigns not to, is that there really isn't going to be a quick way to "clean up" a mess this big. Ultimately, the Iraqis will have to do that themselves, and it won't be easy. The wounds will still be there in 50 years, maybe even 100.
As Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again. I vividly remember the "de-Americanization" and "Vietnamization" of the war of 40 years ago. The escalation, and how that buildup of troops was supposed to eventually pacify the country. I recall Richard Nixon on TV many nights, telling us about how we had to stick it out and "win the peace."
I remember being told how much more competent, how much less corrupt, how much more democratic the South Vietnamese puppet government was becoming. How the South Vietnamese were going to control their destiny, as soon as those communist villains were beaten back into the jungle holes where they belonged.
There are different words for all this nowadays. Instead of escalation, we have the "surge." We have "progress," "sustainable security," and the like. And of course, we have a time frame for these things that, listening to Petraeus and Crocker, seems without end.
Obama did go so far as to suggest that a timetable for withdrawal would be pressure that the current Iraqi government may need if it is ever to become truly viable. If he's thinking anything beyond that, he was careful not to let on, and I expected that.
Barack Obama was born in 1961 (and I honestly don't hold that against him). But consequently, he was a first-grader during the Tet offensive. He would have been an eighth-grader when America saw video of a helicopter being pushed off the side of an aircraft carrier headed out of a lost Vietnam. What he knows about the parallels between then and now would mostly have to come from history lessons.
I hope he was a great student of that subject, and knows more about this than he's letting on just now.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Bush's Bully-Boy Antics Cost U.S. Dearly Among Allies In Iraq Run-Up
By Manifesto Joe
Here's yet another signpost of the worst U.S. presidency in 150 years. According to a forthcoming book by leading Chilean diplomat Heraldo Munoz, the Bush administration threatened trade sanctions -- among other things -- against allied governments that, during the run-up, declined to support a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The threats of reprisals, the spying, and all the other little nasties, Munoz wrote in a book due out next month, have cost the U.S. very dearly in credibility, good will, and leadership standing among our allies since war drums started beating back in 2002.
The Washington Post report was, in part, as follows:
UNITED NATIONS -- In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.
The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, Heraldo Munoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month.
"In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished" for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein's government, Munoz writes.
But this schoolyard-bully act couldn't go on indefinitely. After the invasion, when the war situation just kept getting worse, Bush had to wag his tail like a sniveling cur
and suck back up to all the "allied" governments he had pissed off in such a cavalier manner. More from WaPo:
But the tough talk dissipated as the war situation worsened, and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Munoz's account suggests that the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.
The U.S. was already running short of friends in Latin America, for reasons that go back over a century in our respective histories. I suppose a hardened cynic might think that those south of the border should be used to American intervention by now. Our Marines have been in Nicaragua so many times, they should perhaps rename the country "Camp LeJeune South."
Anyway, in a time when leftist, anti-American (well, at least anti-Bush) governments are ascendant in the region, the high jinks over Iraq couldn't have helped matters.
You can read the entire WaPo story here.
This administration's problem -- well, one among an infinite number -- is that they keep goosestepping through the pasture in their jackboots, expecting others to follow, and even for the others to do the wiping up after the mess is made.
Most of the world could see the utter foolishness of the Iraq invasion before the fact. Bush, buoyed by pathological liar VP Dick Cheney and groveling high-class prostitute Colin Powell, led the U.S. and some of the rest of the world into this, sound advice be damned.
This is just one more chapter in the travesty. But I hope Munoz's account will circulate and somehow hasten an end to the grotesque chapter in world history that the Iraq war has been.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Here's yet another signpost of the worst U.S. presidency in 150 years. According to a forthcoming book by leading Chilean diplomat Heraldo Munoz, the Bush administration threatened trade sanctions -- among other things -- against allied governments that, during the run-up, declined to support a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The threats of reprisals, the spying, and all the other little nasties, Munoz wrote in a book due out next month, have cost the U.S. very dearly in credibility, good will, and leadership standing among our allies since war drums started beating back in 2002.
The Washington Post report was, in part, as follows:
UNITED NATIONS -- In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.
The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, Heraldo Munoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, writes in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month.
"In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished" for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein's government, Munoz writes.
But this schoolyard-bully act couldn't go on indefinitely. After the invasion, when the war situation just kept getting worse, Bush had to wag his tail like a sniveling cur
and suck back up to all the "allied" governments he had pissed off in such a cavalier manner. More from WaPo:
But the tough talk dissipated as the war situation worsened, and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Munoz's account suggests that the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.
The U.S. was already running short of friends in Latin America, for reasons that go back over a century in our respective histories. I suppose a hardened cynic might think that those south of the border should be used to American intervention by now. Our Marines have been in Nicaragua so many times, they should perhaps rename the country "Camp LeJeune South."
Anyway, in a time when leftist, anti-American (well, at least anti-Bush) governments are ascendant in the region, the high jinks over Iraq couldn't have helped matters.
You can read the entire WaPo story here.
This administration's problem -- well, one among an infinite number -- is that they keep goosestepping through the pasture in their jackboots, expecting others to follow, and even for the others to do the wiping up after the mess is made.
Most of the world could see the utter foolishness of the Iraq invasion before the fact. Bush, buoyed by pathological liar VP Dick Cheney and groveling high-class prostitute Colin Powell, led the U.S. and some of the rest of the world into this, sound advice be damned.
This is just one more chapter in the travesty. But I hope Munoz's account will circulate and somehow hasten an end to the grotesque chapter in world history that the Iraq war has been.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Five Years And Counting In The 100 Years Iraq War: Thoughts On Bush And Saddam
By Manifesto Joe
Il Doofus, a man with a unique ability to invent his own reality every day, gave a speech at the Pentagon on the fifth anniversary of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." If you take Bush at face value, he's still very convinced of the rightness of his decision. Here's the report from McClatchy Newspapers.
Presuming that we can take this man at face value, let's just, for purposes of argument, do the same regarding the late Saddam Hussein. Saddam seemed quite convinced, to his last hour, that he was the man who "built Iraq." He cussed judges, cussed his guards; he was defiant to the very end. If there was any fear of perdition lurking in the man's heart, he never let it show.
Mind you, there's no doubt in my mind that if there is a hereafter and a God who judges, Saddam is probably in a pretty awful place now. By any objective standard, he was a murderous dictator of the Stalinist type.
But there is the perverse possibility that he really didn't see himself as an evil man. Could it be that he simply embraced that nasty little idea that making an omelet means breaking eggs? (Yes, it's a bad analogy. But it isn't mine.) In other words, that the ends justify the means?
Saddam was guilty of direct and arbitrary enormities that Bush will never match. I know there are lefties out there who may object to that statement. But the very fact that they are blogging, organizing, and able to do any of the above should illustrate the distinction. Even if the contemporary U.S. can be characterized as crypto-fascist -- I think there's a good argument for that -- at least they aren't summarily executing the likes of me, waterboarding me, or opening camps. (Well, not yet.)
It is apparent, though, that Bush & Co. have been personally responsible for a whole lot of death and suffering. Pointing out the nearly 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq is typical U.S. ethnocentrism. It's as though the Iraqi deaths, estimated by some sources as close to 700,000, are secondary.
Yes, Saddam was a homicidal thug. The U.S. foreign policy establishment knew that while they were supporting and arming him in the '80s, during his foolish eight-year war with Iran and his genocidal suppression of the Kurds. It wasn't until he started getting uppity against U.S. interests that anybody appears to have had a problem with him being a career sociopath.
A comparison of Saddam with Bush is a long stretch. It's like comparing a seasoned hit man to a dude in an Armani suit who had an underling hire a few killings, then pretended he just didn't know.
But there is the possibility that both men were firmly convinced of their rightness. After five years of preventable tragedy, that may be the saddest part of the story.
The killing will go on for at least another year. And if McCain is elected ... (see post title).
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
Il Doofus, a man with a unique ability to invent his own reality every day, gave a speech at the Pentagon on the fifth anniversary of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." If you take Bush at face value, he's still very convinced of the rightness of his decision. Here's the report from McClatchy Newspapers.
Presuming that we can take this man at face value, let's just, for purposes of argument, do the same regarding the late Saddam Hussein. Saddam seemed quite convinced, to his last hour, that he was the man who "built Iraq." He cussed judges, cussed his guards; he was defiant to the very end. If there was any fear of perdition lurking in the man's heart, he never let it show.
Mind you, there's no doubt in my mind that if there is a hereafter and a God who judges, Saddam is probably in a pretty awful place now. By any objective standard, he was a murderous dictator of the Stalinist type.
But there is the perverse possibility that he really didn't see himself as an evil man. Could it be that he simply embraced that nasty little idea that making an omelet means breaking eggs? (Yes, it's a bad analogy. But it isn't mine.) In other words, that the ends justify the means?
Saddam was guilty of direct and arbitrary enormities that Bush will never match. I know there are lefties out there who may object to that statement. But the very fact that they are blogging, organizing, and able to do any of the above should illustrate the distinction. Even if the contemporary U.S. can be characterized as crypto-fascist -- I think there's a good argument for that -- at least they aren't summarily executing the likes of me, waterboarding me, or opening camps. (Well, not yet.)
It is apparent, though, that Bush & Co. have been personally responsible for a whole lot of death and suffering. Pointing out the nearly 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq is typical U.S. ethnocentrism. It's as though the Iraqi deaths, estimated by some sources as close to 700,000, are secondary.
Yes, Saddam was a homicidal thug. The U.S. foreign policy establishment knew that while they were supporting and arming him in the '80s, during his foolish eight-year war with Iran and his genocidal suppression of the Kurds. It wasn't until he started getting uppity against U.S. interests that anybody appears to have had a problem with him being a career sociopath.
A comparison of Saddam with Bush is a long stretch. It's like comparing a seasoned hit man to a dude in an Armani suit who had an underling hire a few killings, then pretended he just didn't know.
But there is the possibility that both men were firmly convinced of their rightness. After five years of preventable tragedy, that may be the saddest part of the story.
The killing will go on for at least another year. And if McCain is elected ... (see post title).
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
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