The Distant Ocean

Clarification

Actually, accusing people like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson of "dual loyalty" is deeply offensive.  Their loyalty to Israel is second to none.

Memo

TO: Robert Fisk

RE: Your mention of "all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal"

Robert,

Just wanted to reassure you that I find nothing at all humorous about this phrase.

Soberly,
John

State of the Illusion

For anyone on the left who's tempted to relapse into 2008 euphoria by the president's early-campaign turn to rhetorical populism, this remains as true as it always was: Obama is not your ally who's been co-opted; he's your enemy who is co-opting you.

Nothing else ever has

I'm glad to see that my 2012 resolution to post grudgingly and infrequently until SOPA/PIPA are defeated is finally inspiring other people sit up and take notice of this threat to the continued existence of the Internet.  If you want to do your small part to help free us all from the grasp of pure evil, head on over to EFF and click it up.

LESSER EVIL: A little something for your Democratic friends:

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet's unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. [...] The newly-opposed Senators are skewed strongly to the Republican side of the aisle. An Ars Technica survey of Senators' positions on PIPA turned up only two Democrats, Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who announced their opposition on Wednesday. The other 11 Senators who announced their opposition on Wednesday were all Republicans.

(This was an early count—later in the day the tally stood at 2 Democrats and 16 Republicans.)

Loose juice

Leon Panetta on the assassination of yet another Iranian nuclear scientist:

"We have some ideas as to who might be involved but we don't know exactly who was involved," [Panetta] said, adding that "we were not involved in any way, in any way, with regards to the assassination that took place there."

In related news, O.J. will find the real killer any day now.

Only off by three years

"We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court," said Romero. "Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today."

We will eventually have assumed control

Living through 1984 was a worthwhile milestone even if it didn't quite live up to the billing, and 1999 was good as far as it went, but even as a kid I'd figured out that I'd have to settle for 2012 as my closest brush with the ultimate year in rock (since the eternal youth treatments that might have given me the extra century are as conspicuously absent as the rocket cars, hyper-intelligent apes, teleportation and rollerball tournaments).  Though it does seem like the elder race of man (is that us?) should be well on its way to destruction by now (oh, right), and maybe someone should start thinking about a charter for that whole Solar Federation thing or at least scoping out a good site for temples at Syrinx, or of Syrinx, or however that works.

Oh well; on the plus side, at least we still have our guitars.

RELATED P.S.: This was always one of my favorite deep B-side selections from the lads in question, and thanks to this posting it's been playing in my brain all day long (and it should explain what the hell I'm talking about if you're not one of the two people who knew right off or the six others who were curious enough to figure it out with Google).

UNRELATED P.S.: On the plus side, this is the last of ten hellish years of having no agreed-upon way to refer to the current decade, followed by two years in pure decadal limbo; thank god that nightmare is nearly over.

Annals of nincompoopery: Dave Lindorff edition

It's hard to imagine a better example of reputation destruction than Dave Lindorff's 2008 pledge to vote for Obama, which I happened across again recently.  Let's take a look, shall we?

I also, perhaps against all logic and experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Well sure, because the success rate of choosing to act "against all logic and experience" is so high.

Call me naïve...

...should become the nickname he uses in all his future writing, on his business cards, whenever he introduces himself to people, etc: Dave "Call me naïve" Lindorff.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke...

Yes, largely because of people who regularly opt to swim in rivers of self-delusion rather than pay attention to trivialities like "logic and experience."  For example:

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take Obama’s warmongering seriously. Given the man’s background, I am confident that he is not a militarist by nature.

Right, because it's always a good idea to disregard a politician's most damning statements and instead trust that he'll contradict not only his own words but the consistent actions of every other politician who's ever held the office he's pursuing (that would be the aforementioned "experience").  If you want to know where Lindorff crossed the line from garden variety sucker to complete maroon, look no further.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as quickly as possible. Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I simply can’t see a smart guy—and Obama is a smart guy—getting dragged into another quagmire.

Pollyanna?  God, no, it's like you were Nostradamus.

[T]he crisis of global warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right person at the right time, to lead that response.

Sure, if you happened to be ExxonMobil.

Now, I realize it's easy to laugh at people like Lindorff.  But it's also fun.  Give it a try and see for yourself.

ALSO: If you think I'm being too hard on our erroneous friend, consider these choice morsels from a February 2009 article of his:

[A]ll this formalistic arguing about the virtues of supporting a third party is an infantile diversion. ... In a way, the obsession of some people on the left with third party politics is like a perfect safety valve to prevent real change within the Democratic Party. ... [L]et me say it straight: third parties are a useless, and even dangerous diversion.

(Well of course, because real adults ignore "all logic and experience," right?)

Lindorff dubbed this infantile/useless/dangerous diversion of less politically savvy activists the "third party delusion"—clearly a malady to be avoided.  Until he adopted it himself in July of 2011, that is:

There is at this point only one thing to do...It is to move forward with a strategy to develop a fully-competitive progressive Third Party to run races in every Congressional district and for every Senate seat up for grabs in 2012, and to run a serious candidate for President.

Feel free to search for any recognition of the hilarious contradiction between these two quotes.  As with his logic-and-experience-eschewing support for Obama—and in behavior that's 100% consistent with other former Obama-backing progressive commentators I've read—Lindorff reverses himself without the slightest nod to the repudiation of his previous certainties, much less any admission of error.  How wonderful it must be to live in an eternal now, where you feel that nothing you've said or done in the past has any bearing on whether or not people should listen to you today.

Apotheosis Now

Not content with merely groin kicking Newt Gingrich's "invented people" quote, MJ Rosenberg fires up a stadium-sized pile driver and totally GROIN OBLITERATES it.  Were he to be deified for this feat he would forever be known as TESTISMASHICLUS, RACKER OF WORLDS.  Fear his wrath, hasbarists!

Stalliony Christmas

On this of all days, I'm sure many of us gain a deeper appreciation for Tolstoy's observation that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  And for the few Bradys out there who don't: count your blessings, you nauseating bastards.

FURTHERMORE: Someone needs to say it: when it comes to A Christmas Carol, the George C. Scott version is far and away the best.  It's not only an effective ghost story but offers a measured and believable transformation—you can feel every word Scott speaks in the cemetery at the end.  I can understand the attachment people have to the Sim version and it does have its charms, but it just doesn't achieve anything similar, and I expect there'll never be a more convincing Scrooge than George C. Scott.

AND: On a related note (and closer to the usual blog fare), John Nichols admonishes us to remember that it's evil Republicans who're just like mean old Mr. Scrooge, no doubt hoping to prevent his readers from directing any of their ire toward the wrong party.

Near miss

Just when I'm ready to give up on the human race and settle into a life of comfortable apathetic resignation I see something like this:

In the eyes of many of the people I "served" with, the people of Fallujah remain dehumanised and their resistance fighters are still believed to be terrorists. But unlike most of my counterparts, I understand that I was the aggressor, and that the resistance fighters in Fallujah were defending their city.

It is also the seventh anniversary of the deaths of two close friends of mine, Travis Desiato and Bradley Faircloth, who were killed in the siege. Their deaths were not heroic or glorious. Their deaths were tragic, but not unjust.

How can I begrudge the resistance in Fallujah for killing my friends, when I know that I would have done the same thing if I were in their place? How can I blame them when we were the aggressors?

Thanks a lot, former-marine-with-a-conscience Ross Caputi.

After the war, Hitler will have the courage to really help the Jews

Presented for your hilariation:

I very much hope for a [Barack] Obama reelection. In his second term, he will have the courage to really represent his progressive base and stand up to the corporately controlled Congress people — people who are trying to obstruct the democratic process, who openly say their mission is to defeat Obama.

I realize tweaking Ani DiFranco for Obamalove doesn't even merit the phrase "low-hanging fruit"—more like the peaches are throwing themselves into the basket.  But I've got presents to wrap, and I think all our lives are richer for the phrase "corporately controlled Congress people."

The things we do for love

Names you will see in Michael Moore's article decrying the detention and mistreatement of Bradley Manning: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.  No prize for guessing which name you won't see.

CONJUGATIONAL RELATIONS:  Here's the passage in question:

But it is not Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney or Wolfowitz who sit in prison tonight. It is the hero who exposed them. It is Bradley Manning who has lost his freedom and that, in turn, becomes just one more crime being committed in our name.

Odd how the passive voice has become Moore's favorite verb tense since the divine ascension of January 2009, isn't it?

From metaphorical to actual ghoul

I'll get around to writing a lengthy commentary on the death of Christopher Hitchens as soon as I run out of things I care more about, like this nasty hangnail.