Right Wing Authoritarians [Torture is Good for You]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I am not the greatest Obama supporter, in fact I believe there are legitimate critiques of his policies -- especially his (mostly wrong-headed conservative) economic policy decisions. However, much of the right-wing criticism of Obama is fueled by hatred and, yes, racism. I quantify that last assertion here, but today I find myself SMDH at the revolting scumbags on the right. I mean, they have no sense of fuckin decency, no fuckin shame at all. I believe these cretins would fuck their own mothers over without a second thought...

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-=[ Torture is Good for You ]=-

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate Multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. p 53, The Strength to Love, 1963

First things first. It seems there’s a mini storm over the above quote by MLK. The quote, with the leading line, I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy... went viral immediately after the news of the murder of Osama Bin Laden was released. A rather irresponsible article penned by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, noted that after having Googled said quote, she couldn’t find verification. Therefore, the reporter surmised, the quote isn’t accurate, and MLK never said it.

Actually, as I have correctly cited, the quote is a genuine MLK quote. What isn’t part of the quote, is the first line and here’s what happened. The sentiment was first posted as a Facebook status, and it read (verbatim):

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” -- mlk [emphasis added]

Note the placement of the quotation marks. As the status was repeated, the quotes were misplaced, giving the impression that the leading sentence -- the sentence not part of the MLK quote -- was attributed to MLK. This then led other reporters, bloggers, commenters to assert that MLK never said it. And that’s a false conclusion. But the larger point here is that journalists are doing a piss-poor job of research. Indeed, the research can be found in the comments section of The Atlantic article. Has this journalist ever heard of... books? Direct sources? *The article has been picked in places like the WashPo, The CS Monitor, and if you Google the first line, you’ll easily get 50-60k hits (the last time I looked).

This is bullshit, lazy, hack writing, plain and simple.

Now on to the important stuff...

I guess it was to be expected. No sooner than the news of OBL’s assassination was released, that the right wing cretins went into feces flingin’ mode, and started patting themselves in the back for the deed. What’s that? Yes, the Bush administration spent trillions, sent us to two unnecessary wars where about 50,000 of our men and women were killed or maimed, and spent almost a decade without even getting close to OBL, but Bush should be given the honors. Obama is just the lawn jockey. he can’t possibly be smart enough to capture/ kill OBL, right?

Except that it isn’t true. In fact, only six months after 9/11, The Village Idiot publicly admitted he was no longer concerned about OBL. Let’s take it to the videotape, Johnny:

Spin that bitches. More importantly, Bush shut down the CIA unit weighted with the responsibility of capturing Bin Laden. Guess who opened it up again? Yup... Obama.

As I understand it, Bush depended almost exclusively on the Pentagon more than the intelligence community, which is why we cannot credit him with this specific form of strategy. I think it’s a real stretch (or... bullshit!) for the right wing twats to try to include Bush in this. Obama issued the order and he took all the risks. If it hadn’t gone well, you can be sure these racist sons of bitches would've attempted to lynch him on the White House lawn. This wasn’t an on-going operation; the operation, in fact, had been abandoned and this team, which was working under Leon Panetta, and Obama had five meetings about this after August. Bush was not involved.

One more thing, the next time some inbred, right-wing, twat motherfucker © tells you, “The soldiers, and only the soldiers, should get credit because they were the ones that were on the ground fighting,” let them know that Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” debacle was a failure not because he didn’t fight, but because the mission was not accomplished. In this case, Obama’s mission was accomplished and as it was the Commander in Chief who ordered the hit and helmed the high-level meetings about it, he gets credit for it. Yes, the President was in charge of the plan and no, it doesn’t matter that they don’t think he was.

Presidents are not supposed to be involved in the fighting. Something the inbred right-wing twat motherfuckers © might want to brush up on their history to understand why. It has something to do with civilian leadership of the military. Civilian control of the military is the proper subordination of a professional military to the ends of policy as determined by civilian authority (the civilian authority being the U.S. President). The civilian authority (our President) issues policy statements that are then implemented by the military. In this instance, the President had five high-level meetings in which he directed the implementation of the strategy. The President doesn’t go into the field to fight. The “gun” does not command the country for obvious reasons. This is how your country operates. It is how it is intended to operate. I gather that the inbred right-wing twat motherfuckers © would like to change this, but thankfully for us all, they are not in charge.

But that’s not even what’s truly important here. What really gets to me, what uncovers the naked Right Wing Authoritarianism in its naked ugliness is that they are now trying to use Obama’s accomplishment as justification for torture. The morning after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, the inbred, right-wing, twat motherfuckers © started crowing that credit should be given to Bush for having the foresight and courage to torture the people who provided the intel that led the CIA to OBL’s McMansion in Islamabad.

The meme began circulating Monday based on one important piece of the larger puzzle: several years ago, intelligence agencies obtained the pseudonym of OBL’s favorite courier from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi. Inbred, right-wing, twat motherfuckers © and like-minded activists -- including notorious chickenhawks Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and others, jumped to a conclusion: U.S. officials gained the information via torture.

Except, for one minor detail: that’s not what happened.

None other than infirm incompetent, Donald Rumsfeld (of all people), disputed the talking point yesterday on the right wing propaganda site, Newsmax, noting that Bush-era torture policies weren’t responsible for obtaining the information.

The Associated Press thoroughly dismantled this lie, reporting, “Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation.” [emphasis added]

In this way, the strongest rationale for giving Bush any props for this falls apart like a house of cards or a Heritage Foundation economic theory.

Joan McCarter, Marcy Wheeler, and Brian Buetler have more on this, offering an even more detailed take down of the argument. For example, the case can be made that torture delayed procurement of important intel. What’s truly at stake here is not just about who should get credit (it’s Obama’s, for good or bad), but the spinning of one of the darkest moments of our history -- a time in which elected officials brazenly trumpeted war crimes -- as something noble or even effective. It wasn’t noble then and it still isn’t.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...

* All the articles getting the MLK quote wrong did publish updates, but still. It’s unprofessional...

How It's Done

¡Hola! Everybody…
I just had to repost the following from one of my contacts, 2 Political Junkies. I once had a public relations consultant tell me that about 70-80% of the “news: is actually publicity. This example shows how now the media is wholly corporate-owned:

From today's Sunday Pops at Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review:

More than 300 economists have signed a letter stating that failure to extend the Bush-era tax cuts will devastate growth. Obamanomics hasn't worked. What a novel idea -- return to fundamental economics. [Bold in original]

I know you're all chomping at the bit with some questions; What letter? Who sent it? Where can I see it?

Took a few seconds, but here's the letter. It's posted at the National Taxpayers Union website.

Guess who (c'mon, just frickin guess) is a huge financial supporter of the NTU?

That's right, Richard Mellon Scaife - owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

According to mediamatters, in fact, the Sarah Scaife Foundation offered up the single largest financial support of the NTU, with $1.23 million in support from 1991 to 2007. This does not count the $275,000 in support from the Scaife-controlled Carthage Foundation from 1993 to 2003 or the

* $50,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2009.

* $75,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2008.

By my calculations, that's $1.63 million in financial support over the years.

Considering the fact that Scaife is more than likely among those wealthy who'll see their taxes go back to up Clinton-era levels once the Bush-era tax cuts end, he stands to benefit personally if the tax policy positions suggested by those 300 economists are implemented.

His foundations supported the NTU, the NTU posted the letter saying the tax cuts should be extended, his paper lauded the letter as the right thing to do.

The circle jerk continues.

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And we’re swallowing it.

Love,

Eddie

The Hiroshima Maidens

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Yesterday was the anniversary of one the most horrible atrocities in human history: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I first came to know the truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki when I returned to school and discovered the Hiroshima Maidens…

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The Tree of the Knowledge of good and Evil/ Hiroshima Maidens

60"x80" Oil on Canvass/ Wood, 2003

The central image of this painting is a representation of the tree of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The side panels are taken from displays in the Hiroshima Peace Museum showing the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of that city.

-=[ The Hiroshima Maidens ]=-

The Hiroshima Maidens is a group of twenty-five Japanese women who were seriously disfigured as young women as a result of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. They have dedicated their lives to telling the story of the Hiroshima bombings and the horror of nuclear war.

My curiosity piqued after listening to their talk, I investigated further and what I discovered wasn’t pretty, to say the least.

The accepted rationale for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that if the atomic bomb had not been dropped, the war would have continued and more lives would have been lost. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many nations have tested nuclear weapons, but only one has ever used them. That nation, of course, is the United States; the bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 1945 incinerated more than 100,000 residents and left perhaps twice that number dying slowly from radiation poisoning. However, politicians at the time and conventional historians still maintain that those acts were justified. Short of a full-scale invasion of Japan, its leaders would not have been convinced to surrender, and that, the reasoning goes, would have resulted in an even higher death toll.

How many lives would have been lost in such an invasion is not clear. While President Truman threw around figures from 500,000 -- one million dead, at least one historian wrote that the figures the military planners projected put the number at between 20,000-46,000. However, the disturbing issue here is not the discrepancy in numbers, but the fact that neither an invasion nor a nuclear attack was necessary to make Japan surrender.

By June 1945, whole-scale bombing of Japan’s six largest cities had substantially wiped out Japan’s infrastructure and countless lives. In March of that year, as many as 1 million Tokyo residents were left homeless from the bombing raids. No oil shipments were getting into the country, which was utterly dependent on foreign oil, and by late July 90% of Japanese merchant shipping had been destroyed.

While it is true that some Japanese factions were resisting the notion of surrender, the leaders in charge were on the verge of calling it quits. The only point deterring surrender was the Japanese concern that the emperor would be allowed to maintain his title. The US forces, of course, eventually accepted this condition.

A US government report issued in 1946 concluded that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did cause a Japanese surrender. The report cited documentation that as early as May 1945, Japanese leaders had decided that the war be ended even if it meant complete acceptance of Allied terms. The document cites the conclusion that Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped and even if no invasion had been planned or completed.

Another 1946 document, a recently discovered secret intelligence study by the army’s top planning and operations group came to the same conclusion: an invasion “would not have been necessary” and the A-bomb was not decisive in ending the war.

This view wasn’t some radical lefty bullshit; key military leaders echoed it. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender… In being the first to use [the atomic bomb] we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages,” said William D. Leahy, who was the president’s Chief of Staff and the nation’s senior military officer. The same opinion was offered by Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill.

This isn’t hindsight, these assessments were known by US policy makers before they chose to drop the bombs. In fact, in July, American intelligence had intercepted a cable from Japanese foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to his ambassador in Moscow that referred to “His Majesty’s strong desire to secure a termination of the war… ”

There was no attempt on behalf of the Truman administration to demand surrender. No show of power by, say, dropping the bomb on an unpopulated island. There was no careful consideration. This wasn’t the act of last resort.

So, if there was no true imperative to drop the bombs then why?

There are several theories, but the one I adhere to is that the US was about enter an unprecedented position of leadership in most of the post-war world and the bombs were intended more for the Soviets than anything else. It was a show of power to the Soviets, a nation the military feared. In fact, that the second bomb was made from plutonium, and not uranium as the first one, suggests that the Japanese people were the subject of a gruesome scientific experiment.

The bombs were more of an opening shot in a Cold War that would last for decades.

I write all this because we should never forget... We all should know all those innocent men, women, and children didn’t need to die, as those in power would have us believe.

Love,

Eddie

Resources

Alperovitz, G. (1995) The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. (New York: Knopf)

Zinn, H. (1991). A people's history of the United States: 1492-present. New York: Perennial Classics.

Loewen, J. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong New York: Touchstone Books.

The Most Dangerous Place in the World

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Our politicians and journalists, who serve the corporations that own them, love the term “just war.” It’s one of those terms so easily bandied about. Almost no one questioned Obama’s historical revision of war during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, for example.

Please justify the war, or any other war, described below. Even WWII (a supposedly just war) wasn’t necessary (nor just). But we like to talk about it as the “good” war, and an “unavoidable” war. And that’s a bunch of bullshit...

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-=[ The Forgotten War ]=-

The first casualty of war is the truth...

Euphemistically described as a conflict, the war in the Congo is the deadliest war since World War II. After reading about it and watching the videos, I was reminded of the book by Danny Schechter, The More You Watch, The Less You Know. The title precisely describes how I feel writing this blog today.

In one of the most isolated and dangerous places on earth, in the conflict dubbed “Africa’s Forgotten War,” 45,000 people are killed every month (or 1500 per day), half of them children. However, this isn’t unusual, considering most scientists declare civilians, mostly women and children, make up the bulk of war casualties. Defend that. Tell me that killing, maiming, and raping children is somehow justifiable. Go ahead and use the utilitarian principle that justifies some deaths for the good of the many. That philosophy was implemented as a justification when nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, though historical facts show that dropping the bombs wasn’t necessary. The Japanese were ready to surrender before the decision to use nuclear force was made.

Unlike Matt Taibbi, who recently wrote of the fracturing of the Left, I never fooled myself into thinking Obama a progressive. In fact, I think Taibbi's premise is flawed: Obama never was and never will be a progressive by any stretch. Still, I have to grant that many progressives voted for Obama in the hopes that he would veer leftward, even if just a little bit. And believe me, actually framing health care as a right rather than privilege is deemed left only in America. The rest of the free world has already ceded that point.

When President Obama introduced his “just war” doctrine to rationalize his accepting a Nobel Peace Prize while escalating the war on Afghanistan, he cited mass rape in the Congo as one reason wars are needed. What he didn’t explain is causes of this war and the abuse -- and how the US contributed to it over the years. He also didn’t mention that to the parties fighting here, this is their own version of a “just war” with each side rationalizing its conduct, denying abuses, and fighting on in the name of higher principles.

Don’t take my word for it. Human Rights Watch has a full chronology online so you can see for yourself how one crisis led to another...

It’s time for Obama to start walking the walk and not merely talking the talk. So far, his leadership on health care reform was abominable. His responses to the economic mess has amounted to “more of the same” -- help the economic elites and pray they rain piss on the rest of us (aka Reaganomics). As it stands, he’s now merely a darker (though admittedly more articulate) version of the Worst President in History.

Get it together brother. You may have inherited a large portion of this mess, but your actions today will assure you will own it a year or two down the road.

Yours,

Eddie

Neoconomania

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I wrote a few months back, but it needs re-stating... Some people, when faced with evidence refuting their frame of reference will eschew the evidence and keep the frame. After years, I am firmly convinced such people will never be able to think in an original manner. I have my own special pet name for such people...

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-=[ Necons & Healthcare ]=-

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth.
-- Mark Twain

It never fails: whenever the national dialog comes to the issue of universal single-payer health care for all Americans, neocons predictably spew out the usual myths.

Any talk about changing one of the most expensive and least effective health care systems in the industrialized world brings on the cries of “socialist!” These are usually the same people who blame blue-collar working stiffs (instead of predatory lending practices and derivatives) for our financial collapse and who most likely voted for a dimwit like Palin.

In other words... idiots.

First, they tell me that health care is not a right. They say it’s each individual’s responsibility to provide for his or her family. “Don’t take my money!” they squeal. This is just another excuse for neocons to look down on the poor who cannot afford the “luxury” of medical insurance. It makes them feel superior. But the irony is that it isn’t just the poor who can’t afford medical insurance. You might have insurance and the muthafuckas running the show won’t let you get life-saving treatment!

In any case, my response to the cunts and twats (aka neocons) is to point out that health care is indeed a basic human right as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory.

Article 25(1) of the UDHR states:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

But human rights standards don’t tend to sway the cunts and twats. After all, these are the same people who praise and defend the practice of torture. Nah, rights don’t mean a damned thing to neocons. That’s why they’re cunts and twats in the first place.

Their favorite rallying cry is the accusation of “socialism,” as if that’s a bad thing. The radical right (aka cunts and twats) too often (and very stupidly) equate socialism with Communism or Marxism, which are not the same as socialism. They fail to see that national single-payer health care managed by the government would not be much different from our current system of socialized libraries, socialized fire departments, and socialized police departments. These services are paid for with our tax dollars, and they’re readily available to us when we need them. It’s all for the greater good. Not just for the corporate good, but the greater good.

But what the cunts and twats love to do the most is wave the flag and tell us that we must not change our health care system because the U.S. offers the very best health care available.

Huh?!!

Here, too, they need a bit of education. In fact, the United States ranks 37^th in the World Health Organization’s rankings of the world’s health systems (below Malta, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, and numerous other countries that would surprise you).

Additionally, as a recent report suggests, “the costs and performance of the U.S. health care system have put America’s companies and workers at a significant competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace.” Simply put, Americans spend a lot more on health care than other countries, but along with getting an inferior product, we aren’t as healthy. In addition, we put our industries at a disadvantage. How would automakers in the US, for example, have fared if they had the same advantage of universal healthcare systems of foreign automakers? That seems to confirm the World Health Organization’s assessment of our less-than-stellar level of care, with the added issue of how we’re paying so much more to get so much less. Corporate profits over the health of the people. God bless America and Corporate KKKhristianity!

That brings me to my final point: many neocon types describe themselves as “Christian.” Well, wasn’t Jesus all about healing the sick? And, I’m far from a scholar, but from my take on how the bible describes his ministry, I don’t think Jesus ever charged a penny for his healing services. (Lazarus would still be payin’!)

I have yet to see a valid, logical response from the assorted twats and cunts to this last point.

And I don't expect to.

Love,

Eddie