The Distant Ocean

Happy anniversary, Lebanon

It's been a year since Israel attacked Lebanon (with extensive diplomatic and military assistance from the US), killing over 1000 civilians, causing massive destruction to infrastructure, and intentionally saturating the country with hundreds of thousands of unexploded cluster bombs in order to punish the survivors.  So how is the US commemorating this dark anniversary?

As you've probably read, Israel is going to receive a major boost in military funding from the US over the next ten years (as part of a military aid package for various US-friendly Middle Eastern countries)--a 25% increase over the already lavish $2.4 billion per year the US currently gives it to fund its atrocities.  But you may not have seen the specific reason for this largess:

A senior official in the Bush administration said the sizable increase was a result of Israel's need to replace equipment expended during the Second Lebanon War last summer, as well as to maintain its advantage in advanced weaponry in the face of other regional countries' modernizing their forces.

I can barely imagine what it must be like for people in Lebanon to read that the US is sending Israel $600 million more per year in order to replace the weaponry that was used to shatter their lives.  I'm always ashamed of this country, but at times like this it reaches its zenith.

Zippo, corporate colossus, flexes its muscles

Maybe you've already heard this one, but I only happened to catch it in a newspaper while I was on vacation:

TSA will no longer ban common lighters in carry-on luggage starting August 4, 2007. Torch lighters remain banned in carry-ons.

Lifting the lighter ban is consistent with TSA's risk-based approach to aviation security. First and foremost, lighters no longer pose a significant threat.

So someone can now bring a device through security that lets them start a fire on the plane, but you can't bring enough water with you to put it out.  Makes perfect sense to me.  You might find yourself wondering why it is that "lighters no longer pose a significant threat"--which apparently means they once did--but good luck finding out from the TSA news release, which assiduously sidesteps the issue.  Then again, maybe it's better not to probe too deeply, since it's actually quite comforting to learn that fire on an airplane is no longer dangerous!

So how did this come about?

"We have worked closely with the TSA and the Department of Transportation on this issue and are relieved to see the ban lifted in the United States," said Greg Booth, president and CEO of Zippo Manufacturing Company, in a statement today. ...

"The work conducted by Zippo with support from Pennsylvania 5th District Rep. John Peterson and Pennsylvania Senators Arlen Specter and Robert Casey led to an exemption allowing lighters in carry-on luggage," Booth said.

I imagine you'll be somewhat less than shocked to learn that Zippo is headquartered in Bradford, Pennsylvania.  This is probably just a coincidence, though; it would be unpardonably cynical to conclude that the economic interests of a Pennsylvania corporation factored higher in the minds of these Pennsylvania legislators than the security of the general public.  After all, at some point in the last two years lighters stopped posing a significant security threat.

When I first heard this news I was wondering why Zippo in particular would want the ban lifted; surely having lighters confiscated is good for their sales?  But in thinking about it a bit more I realized that smokers would be more likely to buy a cheap disposable lighter than another Zippo, especially if they knew it might end up being confiscated as well.  And sure enough, here's what one smoker had to say when he was informed that the ban was going to be lifted:

“I’m going to get me a nice, shiny $20 lighter and carry it in my pocket,” he said. “A big ol’ Zippo.”

Mission accomplished!  It's nice to know the system works--if you're a corporation that can convince a Representative and a few Senators to look after your bottom line, that is.  If you're just a million citizens trying to get criminals removed from public office, you're out of luck.

Limp Nation-style liberalism: a reprise

My former mention of "limp Nation-style liberalism" here generated a bit of  controversy.  And I say again that the Nation often acts as a useful progressive outlet--except when it comes to the Democratic Party near election time, when it acts more like a painted harlot catcalling from a dark alley.

Case in point: in the recent YouTube/CNN debate, Barack Obama said that he was willing to meet with the leaders of US-designated rogue states around the world--notably including the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez--and Hillary Clinton tried to score a point on him for being so naive as to think that negotiations ever solved anything, responding thusly: "Certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria, until we know better what the way forward would be."

Always eager to minutely dissect whatever vapid excuse for debate is currently going on between the Democratic presidential hopefuls, various Nation authors staked out their positions on this foofaraw:

• David Corn opined that Obama had indeed committed a gaffe, saying that unlike Hillary, Obama isn't "steeped in the nuances, language, and minefields of foreign policy" and he "has to avoid such mistakes as promising to open the doors of the White House without conditions to Kim Jong Il and others of that ilk"
• Ari Berman replied to Corn that while that it may be true that Hillary has more experience, Obama can use her Iraq war vote to respond to the carping about his naivete, adding that "Hillary's evolution on the war appears to some as more motivated by calculation than conviction"
• Finally, Katrina van den Heuvel judged that Berman had the more convincing argument and that Obama "got it right."  She went on to criticize Hillary's approach, saying that as a result of Bill Clinton following that same policy, "The respective regimes of Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela have only grown stronger, and more influential in Latin America."

(Zzzzzzzz...huh?...oh, right.  Sorry, I nodded off for a second there.)

QED.  That round of analysis is so flaccid that I can't even bring myself to spend the mental effort to make fun of it.  In reading through the respective articles, I don't see a word that would be out of place in the Washington Post or the New York Times--and that's a sad statement for a magazine that touts itself as a premier source of progressive commentary.

Note in particular that not a single one of them made any differentiation between Venezuela and the other countries in the list.  And as you can see, Corn and van den Heuvel actually went so far as to adopt the mainstream propaganda frame with regard to Venezuela--directly conflating the Chavez government (oops, sorry, "regime") with the other governments (oops, sorry, "others of that ilk"), and blithely ignoring its repeatedly-established democratic credentials, its uncontested popularity with the Venezuelan people, and its progressive policies.  After all, the Democrats say that Chavez is a Bad Man, so the Nation's writers are more than happy to go along with that.

Berman touched on the Chavez issue only glancingly, when he referred to "dictators (the kind bemoaned by Clinton and embraced by Obama in last night's YouTube debate)"--implicitly if a bit obliquely lumping Chavez in with the others.  But even setting that aside, he established his Nation qualifications when he said that Hillary's "evolution" on the Iraq war "appears to some" to be calculating rather than principled.  I'd say that's a good candidate for understatement of the year, and it's just the kind of wet-noodle pundificating that's the source of my Nation aversion.

Your daily dose of Bushian hypocrisy

David Lazarus offers us item number 107 ,298 on the list of Bush's hypocrisies:

Democratic lawmakers in Washington say they're drafting a health care reform bill that would expand coverage for low-income kids. President Bush says he'll veto any such legislation, warning that it would lead the nation "down the path to government-run health care for every American."

Like that would be a bad thing.

What's particularly galling about Bush's position is that it's coming from a man who just underwent a colonoscopy performed at the taxpayer-funded, state-of-the-art medical facility at Camp David by an elite team of doctors from the taxpayer-funded National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

If anyone understands the benefits of government-run health care, it's the president

My theory:  Bush made a deal with the devil in order to become president, and it requires him to keep his hypocrisy levels at ten times the standard human allotment or else he'll immediately vanish in a puff of smoke.  Commuting Scooter Libby's sentence while his administration is pushing for mandatory minimum sentencing for the hoi polloi gave him a buffer that's lasted for several weeks, but he must have gotten a whiff of brimstone and decided it was time to get his levels up again.

Death of a President: interestingly boring

[ No spoilers, I promise. ]

Having read a few glowing reviews for Death of a President when it first came out, I decided to give it a try despite my misgivings over its likely political stance.  And for what it is--a fictional future documentary of the assassination of George Bush--it's reasonably successful.  The budget clearly wasn't that large, but the filmmakers did an admirable job of splicing together stock footage with their footage and doing Zelig-like inserts of actors into actual scenes of Bush and other administration officials in order to create an air of verisimilitude.

The problem is that there's not much more to it than what I've already described.  There are a few predictable softballs about civil liberties and racial profiling and some carping about the Iraq war, but the level of commentary (explicit or implied) doesn't go much deeper than that description.  In fact, in true documentary style, there isn't much of a viewpoint at all.  And so I reached the end of the film and found myself thinking, OK, you've succeeded in making an alternate reality documentary on a controversial topic and you've done a decent job of injecting a little tension and mystery--but what was the point?  And I'm still not sure.

Just as I feared based on the reviews, though (and a bit surprising given the subject matter), the film's political outlook is disappointingly mainstream or even conservative.  Protesters are portrayed as a mindless rabble motivated by their hatred of Bush, easily moved to anger and prone to violence.  On the flip side, the police and other authorities are portrayed as upstanding protectors of the law who use violence only in a measured way, as a last resort, and only in response to the provocations and irresponsibility of the protesters (you know, just like in real life).  It's so slanted toward the official view that you'll find yourself agreeing that these goddamn hippies need to be taught a lesson.  The closest thing to any kind of leftist commentary in the film is what you can read on the protest signs in the archival footage.

But worst of all is the portrayal of Bush and his administration.  I wouldn't go so far as to call it hagiography, but it's surprisingly close.  Bush is depicted as a normal human being rather than the mendaciously malevolent half-wit he actually is, and he's usually described in glowing positives (and outright eulogized at one point, of course) since his fictional advisers and others close to him do most of the talking.

So it comes down to this: if George Bush was actually assassinated, would you spend an hour and a half watching a limp mainstream documentary about it?  If not, you should skip this movie as well.  Trust me, there's just not enough payoff to justify the time (and no, not even that, you evil person you).

I have to say that the filmmakers really missed an opportunity with the title, too.  There were so many better options available:

• Death of a Moron
• Looking for Mr. Good Aim
• Four Years and a Funeral
• The Pretzel Strikes Back
• Goodbye, Mr. Chimps

Oh well--too late to change it now.

A definition

conservative Christian (n. phrase): Someone who spends Monday through Saturday blaming liberals for everything that's wrong with the world, then goes to church on Sunday to worship a socialist.

Why I like Charley Reese

I mention Charley Reese here far more often than my actual interest in him would warrant--mainly because of my personally entertaining but ultimately doomed hobby of keeping his Wikipedia page free of (some) libel.  But the reason he earned my respect in the first place, despite the many differences in our respective viewpoints, was because of stuff like this:

It is now clear that the proper name for the war going on in Mesopotamia is the "Republican War." Never before has a political party so decisively asserted ownership of a foreign war.  ...

The Republicans and their shrinking number of warmonger supporters have long since forgotten that the Republican War is an illegal war, a war of aggression launched against a country that had not attacked us or ever threatened to attack us. They have conveniently forgotten how the Republican War was sold to the American people with outright lies. They ignore the fact that the war was bungled from Day One and that ordinary Americans have paid a terrible price for those blunders.

I'd say the only hope of getting through to cat-hating Bush voters--as vanishingly slim as that hope may be--is to have them see an established conservative like Reese saying these things.

The bafflingly anti-cat heartland

I'm currently on a trip to the rust belt, where American flags are omnipresent, gun racks are plentiful, and libruls are scarce.  On a rack of bumper stickers in a hardware store I saw the usual suspects:

• GOD, GUTS AND GUNS KEEP AMERICA FREE
• SAVE A PLANT -- KILL A VEGETARIAN
• GOVERNMENTS PREFER UNARMED PEASANTS
• YOU HAVE OUR TAXES -- YOU CAN'T HAVE OUR FLAG (under a Confederate flag)
• I NEVER SAW AN AMERICAN FLAG BURNED AT A GUN SHOW

Blind flag worship, militant religion, barely-suppressed homicidal urges directed at people who don't share your views...yep, we're definitely in Bush country.  But I admit that I was nonplussed by these two:

• HOW MANY CATS HAVE YOU MICROWAVED TODAY?
• 1000 KILLS AND COUNTING (with a cat in the crosshairs)

Huh.  Well.  Ok.  I guess I'd never made the connection between gun nuts, conservative politics, latent racism, and felicide.  And to be honest it doesn't even seem that clear in retrospect.

Is this anti-felinism just the flip side of good old-fashioned American pro-doggism?  Dog good, cat bad?  Are cats obviously a liberal pet in some way that I'd missed, and therefore unworthy to live (like liberals themselves)?  I admit that I prefer dogs, but I'd never thought of it as a political statement.  Is it just the gun/hunting/dog connection, which by some twist of logic requires you to want to kill cats en masse as well?  Or is it nothing more than another example of the mindless vindictive cruelty that so often seems to go hand in hand with a willingness to vote for Republicans?

Really, help me out here.

Whatever it is, it's at times like these that I start to wonder if it really makes sense to think of human beings as a single species.  I'm not sure how I'd even begin to communicate with someone who not only found this stuff entertaining, but who felt that it expressed their inner thoughts so perfectly that they wanted to plaster it to the back of their car for the whole world to enjoy.

Democrats achieve exactly what they set out to do

Nothing:

Democratic Senate leaders knew going into Wednesday's procedural roll call on their proposal to withdraw most U.S. forces from Iraq that they didn't have the votes to win, but victory wasn't their goal.

Instead, the Democrats forced the Senate into a marathon 19-hour debate as a way of putting pressure on Republicans for their continued support of President Bush's Iraq policy, which polls show is opposed by large majorities of the American public.

And the Democrats used the publicity they knew their talkathon would generate to spotlight a small group of Republican senators up for re-election in 2008 who haven't yet split with Bush over the war and whose seats are prime Democratic targets. 

I'd say the San Francisco Chronicle has it exactly right here (why do I suddenly feel dirty?).  In fact, "victory wasn't their goal" may be the best summary of the Democratic party I've ever heard*.  For the Democrats this was nothing more than a publicity stunt, meant to give them a cudgel they can use to bash the Republicans (ineffectively, if history is any guide) in the upcoming elections.  They don't care about Iraq as a moral issue, which is why they studiously avoid doing the things they could do that would actually bring the war to an end; for them it's just another political shuttlecock.

Here's a typical example of Democratic principles from that pillar of righteousness, John Kerry:

"How much longer will some in this Congress fail to vote their conscience and do what's right to bring about change in Iraq? No number of Republican filibusters and politically motivated votes change this fact: Without real deadlines to force Iraqis to compromise, they will not compromise. No American soldier should die for Iraqi unwillingness to solve their differences."

Yes, I know when I think of what's happened in Iraq and who's to blame for it, the first thing that comes to mind is the unwillingness of Iraqis to compromise.  And I'm sure that when voters gave the Democrats control of Congress in 2006, what they most wanted was to have the Democrats legislate some tough deadlines on the Iraqi government.

And while the Democrats work tirelessly to make political hay out of this issue however they can (as long as it doesn't threaten to achieve anything), Iraqis continue to die by the hundreds of thousands in the war the US brought to them.

* (For the Republicans it'd be something like "First, the rich".)

The Cassandra complex

A few weeks ago a Scottish commission determined that the Libyan man convicted of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice".  But this was no news at all to those who'd been paying attention to the facts and ignoring the US's transparently opportunistic flip-flopping and posturing on this issue.

Just recently Nir Rosen appeared on CNN and gave a remarkably detailed and pointed description of how the US and Israel fomented the civil war in Gaza, leading CNN hairbot John Roberts to respond incredulously with "Nir, I mean what are you talking about" and conclude the interview dismissively with "Well, there's definitely a lot of different opinions on what's going on. Nir Rosen with one of them."  Yes, John, there's [sic] a lot of opinions--and there are also a lot of facts, like the ones that you just heard and rejected so superciliously.

When the US was attacked on 9/11, many of us understood exactly why it had happened.  But the official catechism that "they hate us for our freedoms" has become so entrenched that when someone like Ron Paul speaks the simple truth, they're greeted with that same kind of disbelief and dismissiveness.

In the months before the US attack on Iraq, the Bush administration made a new claim on almost a daily basis that was either contradicted by readily available evidence or simply outright false.  For those who were paying attention, that is; for the media and for the public at large nearly every claim was treated as received truth, and the wealth of counter evidence was ignored or (at best) minimized to the point of effective nonexistence.

This all comes back to something I realized years ago when I started becoming much more politically active and aware (after a long period as a relatively apolitical liberal and standard-issue Democrat): as a progressive, you gain an immense amount of knowledge that's clear, logical, and  supported by a mountain of facts...but which is also completely outside of the realm of standard discourse in everyday society.  You start to feel like Cassandra--doomed to know what's going on without having anyone believe it (I don't know how many times I've heard "well, yes, if that's true" from someone I knew would never make the effort to verify it for themselves).

It's simultaneously gratifying to feel that you've begun to understand the world a little better and frustrating to know that that understanding puts you in a marginalized, demonized minority.  And it's only exacerbated by the fact that there's no profound knowledge or penetrating insight involved; it's all very basic stuff.  The same information is readily available to anyone else as well, if only they'd look past the layers of official obfuscation to see it...or if only they even realized that there was anything there to see at all.

The deviousness of the Persian mind

You won't be surprised to learn that this bit of news has been generating much hilarity across the web:

Iranian intelligence operatives recently detained over a dozen squirrels found within the nation's borders, claiming the rodents were serving as spies for Western powers determined to undermine the Islamic Republic.

"In recent weeks, intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran's borders," state-sponsored news agency IRNA reported. "The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence services."

Squirrels?  Ha ha ha ha!  Those paranoid Iranians and their zany conspiracy theories!  How laughably unconvincing their ham-handed propaganda sounds to our sophisticated Western ears!

If you poke around on this topic, though, you'll find that the dastardly Iranians have apparently been at this game for years--planting similar stories in the Western media in order to pave the way for their crowning glory, the secret spy squirrels.  Here's a bit of balderdash from 2003 written by the "Associated Press" and published in some obscure conspiracy rag known as "USA Today":

When the CIA's secret gadget-makers invented a listening device for the Asian jungles, they disguised it so the enemy wouldn't be tempted to pick it up and examine it: The device looked like tiger droppings. ...

The guise worked. Who would touch such a thing? The fist-sized, brown transmitter detected troop movements along the trails during fighting in Vietnam, a quiet success for a little-known group of researchers inside the world's premier intelligence agency. ...

Besides the jungle transmitter, the exhibits include a robotic catfish, a remote-controlled dragonfly and a camera strapped to the chests of pigeons and released over enemy targets in the 1970s. The secret gadgets currently used by CIA are left to the imagination of visitors.

The pigeons' missions remain classified, made possible only after the CIA secretly developed a camera weighing only as much as a few coins.

And here's yet more poppycock from 2005 from an outfit with the improbable name of "CBS News":

Dolphins and sea lions are currently serving in the Persian Gulf where they help protect coalition forces. Theirs is the longest combat mission in the history of this special unit. ...

"Dolphins, with their echo-location capability to be able to look long-distance under water, and sea lions, with their great eyesight — five times better than yours and mine — so they can see in dark, turbulent waters," Marine Mammal Program director Michael Rothe says.

Tiger turd microphones, robotic fish, remote-controlled dragonflies, videographer pigeons, and military cetaceans?  Come on, Iran, can't you invent something more convincing than that?  Even setting aside the ludicrous subject matter, though, it's the little errors that expose these articles for the frauds they are--like the superfluous "e" at the end of "Roth".  Nice try, Iran, but next time you might want to run your flimsy stories through spell check before you plant them.

My favorite part is the bit about "the secret gadets currently used by CIA are left to the imagination of visitors."  You have to give the Iranians credit for thinking ahead on that one; you can practically see the intelligence agent who whipped it up willing his readers to imagine a squirrel carrying a walkie-talkie and binoculars, years before the fact.  But unfortunately for these foreign devils, Western audiences are far too sophisticated to be taken in by such transparent propaganda.

Welcome back to Disneyland

This excellent article by Dahr Jamail is well worth reading for the picture it gives of life on the ground in Iraq these days:

Having spent a fair amount of time in occupied Iraq, I now find living in the United States nothing short of a schizophrenic experience. Life in Iraq was traumatizing. It was impossible to be there and not be affected by apocalyptic levels of violence and suffering, unimaginable in this country.

But here's the weird thing: One long, comfortable plane ride later and you're in Disneyland, or so it feels on returning to the United States. Sometimes it seems as if I'm in a bubble here that's only moments away from popping. I find myself perpetually amazed at the heights of consumerism and the vigorous pursuit of creature comforts that are the essence of everyday life in this country -- and once defined my own life as well.

Here, for most Americans, you can choose to ignore what our government is doing in Iraq. It's as simple as choosing to go to a website other than this one.

I know a little of what he's talking about.  I went to the West Bank and Gaza in 2002 to work with the International Solidarity Movement to offer the protection of my US passport and light complexion to the Palestinians.  Over the course of two weeks I was threatened by Israeli tanks, shot at, and attacked with concussion grenades.  I saw Palestinian houses, offices, mosques, and hospitals that had been ransacked or destroyed, stood at the side of a mass grave, and walked through the ruins of a refugee camp.  And I had dozens of chances to see exactly how the Israeli government has used the massive amount of funding it's received from the US to reduce the Palestinians to a state of misery, hopelessness, and desolation that's difficult to fathom.

Then suddenly I was back in the US, trying to reconcile the carefree world around me with what I'd been seeing in the weeks before.  It's not just jarring but feels profoundly wrong that our country can be causing such misery elsewhere in the world and yet people here are completely insulated from it (and usually oblivious to it as well).  I saw the same thing on a much more intimate scale in Israel itself, where many Israelis studiously ignore what's being done to the Palestinians just a few miles away from them.

I can barely guess how strong this feeling must be for Dahr Jamail, though, since the situation in Iraq is at a level of horror that beggars imagination--like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life.

Charley Reese: protected at last!

As of July 4th, the Charley Reese page on Wikipedia has been protected from editing by the Wikipedia vandals who keep trying to tar him as an anti-Semite.  Actually the protection only extends to unregistered or newly-registered users, but so far that appears to be a big enough barrier to keep them away.

I admit I'm torn about this.  On one hand it's good to have these cretins stuffed for a while; on the other hand, reverting their libel was a regular (albeit tiny and fleeting) source of amusement for me.  But I have no doubt they'll be back when the protection expires on August 1st.

(In case you're just joining us and you want to see the previous pointlessness in this series, you can start here.)

And furthermore

One more thing regarding the Democrats' failure (or more accurately, refusal) to use their Constitutional power to control the funding for the Iraq war: the very same talking point that inspires such fear in them--that if they don't pass a bill that Bush will sign, they're not "supporting the troops"--applies just as well (and in fact with greater force) in the opposite direction.  So why don't they send the same bill to Bush over and over and force him to veto it repeatedly, and then browbeat him with the very charge that they fear so much themselves?  It's a measure of their ineptitude that they've already let themselves be tarred with this talking point despite the fact that they've never even seriously considered defunding the Iraq war, and yet Bush has actually vetoed an appropriations bill--actively denying funding to the military--and paid no political price for it.

Democrats: too cowardly to do the right thing, and too incompetent to do the wrong thing the right way.

Press still giving the Democrats cover

The press is still busy giving the Democrats cover for their cowardice in stopping the war in Iraq, as evidenced by a piece headed "Bush still holds best hand in strategy battle / Until Congress can break his veto, he can run the war as he sees fit".  The article goes on to say:

Even with Republican defections, as votes in both houses made clear this week, opponents do not have the veto-proof majorities needed to wrest leadership of the war.

But as FAIR observed last month:

In fact, if the Democrat-controlled Congress wanted to force the Bush administration to accept a bill with a withdrawal timeline, it didn't have to pass the bill over Bush's veto—it just had to make clear that no Iraq War spending bill without a timeline would be forthcoming. Given that the Constitution requires Congress to approve all spending, Bush needs Congress's approval to continue the war—Congress does not need Bush's approval to end the war.

Democrats may not have wanted to pay the supposed political costs of such a strategy, but news coverage should have made clear that this was a choice, not something forced on them by the lack of a veto-proof majority.

That last sentence is the key, of course.  The Democrats could easily stop the Iraq war, but not without being accused of not "supporting the troops" and being hit full force with the new conservative talking point that they "own defeat" in Iraq.  Cravenly calculating as ever, the Democrats only take significant policy actions if they feel they can do so without incurring heavy criticism--and so we're all but guaranteed that they'll never choose the one option that the Constitution clearly puts in their hands in this case.  Or at least, not until enough Republicans defectors take the lead for them and provide them with sufficient political cover.

Part of the reason that the Bush administration has been able to do such damage is because--as much as it's possible for politicians to do so--Cheney and Bush simply do not care about the political cost of their actions.  They've shown just what you can achieve in politics if you're willing to forgo standard political calculations.  Unfortunately for us all, it's only those who are fully dedicated to the gutting of human rights, the savaging of international law, the destruction of the environment, and the ascendancy of corporate interests who have the courage of their convictions.

Keep supporting those troops

Last year I collected some examples of what it really means to "support the troops".  Now Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian have put together a  carefully-documented account of exactly what US soldiers are doing in Iraq, and exactly what they're doing to Iraqis.  It's essential reading, though tough going at times.  You'll feel your heart swell with pride as you read things like this:

Spc. Patrick Resta, 29, a National Guardsman from Philadelphia, served in Jalula, where there was a small prison camp at his base. ... He recalled his supervisor telling his platoon point-blank, "The Geneva Conventions don't exist at all in Iraq, and that's in writing if you want to see it."
__________________________

In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, "a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want."
__________________________

One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse.
__________________________

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," he said. "This car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200 rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father and two kids. The boy was aged 4 and the daughter was aged 3. And they briefed this to the general. And they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"

Yeah, colonel, and if you weren't occupying someone else's country, that man, his wife, and their two children would still be alive--along with hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis.  When I see people with bumper stickers saying "support the troops" (or "support our troops"--italics in the original--as if to chastise those who merely support the troops for their insufficient level of identification with US soldiers), I wonder if they're even remotely aware of things like this.

Congratulations to Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian for doing such meticulous work in documenting these stories.  When you see journalism of this caliber coming--as always--from small independent sources like The Nation, it makes you wonder why the entire staff of the New York Times doesn't just resign in disgrace rather than put out yet another's day worth of stenography.

Satire resurrected, then killed again

In retrospect I'm surprised I didn't see this coming:

The Geneva Convention on armed conflict and the 100 year-old Hague Rules on war need to be "fine tuned" to meet the challenges posed by 21st century asymmetrical warfare, Israeli and American experts said during a conference in Herzliya on Monday. ...

"We're not calling for an abandoning of international law or an extreme change, but for an internationally accepted platform," [Boaz] Ganor [, Executive Director of the Institute for Counter Terrorism] emphasized. "We do believe there is a need to go over international law and fine tune it," he added.

Yes, international law needs to be "fine tuned" so that all the parts of it that the US and Israel are regularly violating can be changed to conform with the actual crimes on the ground.  I'm sure pedophiles would like to see restrictions on child pornography "fine tuned" in a similar way; maybe they should have a conference to discuss it?

I thought I was seeing a faint glimmer of sanity as I started into the following paragraph from the article, but it had already faded by the end of the first sentence:

"Last summer, the IDF faced the issue of human shields, and the storing of weapons in civilian areas. We've seen this in other places such as Somalia and the Balkans. We are likely to see this again," [Mitchell] Wallerstein [, Dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University] said.

"International law does not adequately deal with this issue," he added.

Like me, you might have been tempted for a few words there to think that Wallerstein was talking about Israel's well-known and continuing practice of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, like this:

Or this:

But that would require a willingness to embrace reality that Wallerstein obviously lacks.  No, instead he's parroting the apocryphal Israeli propaganda claim that Hezbollah used human shields during the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon--and evidently trying to think of ways to turn the bombing of civilian centers from a flagrant violation of the rules of war into more of a polite suggestion that Israel and the US can ignore whenever it suits their needs.  This is just the kind of flexible thinking on human rights issues that you'll need to embrace if you're ever going to fulfill your dream of becoming the Dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Believe it or not, though, I actually find this story very encouraging.  Like the rabid US (and Israeli) opposition to the International Criminal Court, the very fact that these questions are being debated shows just how much the criminals who run our governments fear the ever-expanding mechanisms of international justice.  And their fear is justified, because there's been a slow but steady movement in the world towards greater respect for human rights and international law.  The day may not be that far off when they can't venture outside of their own countries without facing the prospect of arrest, trial, and conviction for their crimes--and what a great day that will be.

Go see Waitress right now

I had serious misgivings about Waitress.  I was afraid it would be another Little Miss Sunshine--a mildly entertaining but derivative bit of sitcom-level filmmaking that inexplicably managed to inspire gushing torrents of critical acclaim.  But happily, this time the reviews were spot on.

You should go see it right now.  Really.  It's pure cinematic joy.  It's so good that near the halfway point, I started grinning like a fool as I realized that I still had another hour of it to look forward to.  Everything in this film works, and works perfectly--even the stuff that you wouldn't believe could work (like a cantankerous Andy Griffith).

So really: stop reading, shut off your computer, and go see Waitress.  The Internet will still be here when you get back.

(Ok, ok, I know I'm a bit behind the times with this, and you may not be as lucky as I am to live in a city where great films have a longer lifetime thanks to independent and second-run theaters.  So just see it when you get the chance...you won't be sorry.)

Punish the victim

We all know that there's a huge problem with health care in the US, where more than 45 million people have no health insurance, in large part because they're too poor to afford it.  And we all know that something needs to be done about it.  But what?

Massachusetts has a plan: punish the victim.  As the Washington Post reports:

Today, the home of some of the nation's most prestigious hospitals and medical schools becomes the first state to require its residents to have health insurance or face financial penalties. ... When Massachusetts residents file their state tax returns next spring, they must certify that they had acceptable coverage as of the end of 2007 -- or lose the $219 personal exemption. The penalty grows steeper in subsequent years, big enough, officials hope, to persuade most holdouts to get coverage.

And just how much steeper will those penalties become?  According to Business Week:

Beginning in 2008, individuals who don't have insurance will be subject to a penalty equal to half the cost of health insurance. Last year, coverage for an individual ran about $4,000 a year, and nearly $11,000 for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. "That's a significant penalty," says John McDonough, executive director of Healthcare for All, a consumer advocacy group.

"Holdouts" is an interesting choice of terminology on the Post's part, especially considering this later excerpt from the same article:

Costs are still too high for some. Already, state officials expect to exempt 60,000 residents from the new mandate because they cannot afford the insurance at the going rates, even though they earn too much to qualify for subsidies.

Only in the US could someone look at the health care crisis and say, "The real problem here is all of those healthy, flush deadbeats who refuse to get insurance--so we'll penalize them for it and fix everything!  Sure, they won't be able to afford a third BMW, but at least they won't be able to rip off the rest of us anymore by taking advantage of that great emergency room service."  It takes real dedication to reach this conclusion despite the readily available and heartbreaking stories about why so many people lack insurance and are forced to live (or die) with inadequate health care.

The "holdouts" bit isn't the only instance of cynical doublespeak in the Post article, though.  There's also this:

This is not the first time the state has attempted to tackle the problem. Nearly 20 years ago, then-Gov. Michael S. Dukakis signed universal health-care legislation that was supposed to bring coverage to everyone by 1992. But the law's requirement that employers provide coverage to workers or pay a tax proved unpopular, and it was never implemented.

The requirement "proved unpopular"?  Gosh, with whom, exactly?  I somehow suspect you've already figured that one out, but let's set the Wayback Machine to 1991 to verify the obvious:

The Massachusetts plan to guarantee health insurance for all, once hailed as a model for the nation, is faltering under the weight of a soured economy, a hostile new [Republican] Governor and the fierce opposition of small-business owners, who would be required to pay for coverage of employees. ... In the new economic and political climate, larger companies' support for the law has faded, and the owners of small businesses who long opposed it have intensified their attacks.

As the director of the Boston group Health Care for All observed, "The business opposition is more ideological than rational."  And these (corporate) ideologues were victorious, as they usually are.

I've had my own Kafkaesque encounter with health care in the US.  When I joined the ranks of the self-employed a few years ago, I had to go out and find health insurance for myself.  The applications asked me to identify and explain every single incident in my health history, and because of my fatal flaw--honesty--I did.  As a result I received a rejection notice from one prominent health care provider which said that because of my "serious medical problems" (e.g. a single back spasm I'd had while I was in my 20's) they couldn't offer me their standard insurance, but they might still be able to cover me under California's dead-end medical insurance program--albeit with exorbitant premiums.  I wrote back and explained the facts, and they relented.  Now, this was happening to me when I was young and in perfect health; I could barely imagine what it would have been like for someone who actually did have "serious medical problems" or significant pre-existing conditions, especially if they were within striking distance of the poverty line.

We can only hope that Sicko will refocus the health care debate on what this country really needs: not some half-assed punitive "mandatory health insurance" program that leaves private insurers in the driver's seat, but a genuine national health care program that gives all of us what the citizens of so many other nations have had for years.

First, lie to yourself

Here's an excerpt from a story in the Independent about Tony Blair's lack of doubts regarding the invasion of Iraq:

[Alastair Campbell,] Downing Street's former director of communications suggests that Mr Blair was the only member of his inner circle who did not have private reservations about the decision to topple Saddam Hussein.

The Blair Years describes the scene in the former prime minister's Commons room after he won the crucial vote on the eve of the war despite a rebellion by 139 Labour MPs. He wrote at the time: "All of us, I think, had had pretty severe moments of doubt but he hadn't really, or if he had he had hidden them from us. Now there was no going back at all."

Like George Bush, Tony Blair is an amoral scumbag, but unlike George Bush he's not an idiot--in fact he's quite intelligent and perceptive.  And yet if we're to believe what one of his top aides has written, he actually expressed no doubts about the invasion of Iraq even in private to his most trusted advisers.  And certainly in every public speech and appearance I've seen from him since then that's the line that he's maintained.  How is it possible that someone with even a modicum of wit could contemplate the use of massive violence and the breakup and subsequent restructuring of Iraq without any qualms?

It's possible that Tony Blair is insane, but I doubt it.  Rather, I think that like all the best liars, he lies first to himself.  Having chosen the path of destruction (literally and metaphorically) despite the evident uncertainty and risks, he banished all doubt from his mind; his aides didn't see any reservations because they genuinely didn't exist within him anymore.  It's difficult to tell where Blair the true believer leaves off and Blair the practiced deceiver begins, but in this case I really do think he was--and still is--deeply mired in self-deception.

Most of us have experienced this on a smaller level in our own lives; I know I have.  But when it happens at the level of power that people like Bush and Blair wield, innocent people die by the hundreds of thousands.  That's one of the many reasons I'm an atheist: because absolute certainty is one of the mortal enemies of genuine morality.