A Time to Weep

Here is Theodore Sorensen's graduation speech at The New School last year.

"We are no longer the world's leaders on matters of international law and peace. After we stopped listening to others, they stopped listening to us. A nation without credibility and moral authority cannot lead, because no one will follow."

Cowardice Award for Newsweek / Goebbels Award for Condi

Here is Greg Palast on the Newsweek flap.

'It's appalling that this story got out there,' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on her way back from Iraq.

What's not appalling to Condi is that the US is holding prisoners at Guantanamo under conditions termed 'torture' by the Red Cross. What's not appalling to Condi is that prisoners of the Afghan war are held in violation of international law after that conflict has supposedly ended. What is not appalling to Condi is that prisoner witnesses have reported several instances of the Koran's desecration.

What is appalling to her is that these things were reported. So to Condi goes to the Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda Iron Cross.

But I don't want to leave out our President. His aides report that George Bush is 'angry' about the report -- not the desecration of the Koran, but the reporting of it.

And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy.

Sister Punishers

Amanda Marcotte describes the right wing fascination with sister punishers like Priscilla Owen.

"In the Republican pantheon, there are Good Women and Bad Women, both very easy to catalogue, at least in theory. The prime example of a Good Woman of late is poor Terri Schiavo, brainless, wordless, unable to rebel against her parents or even say something snotty. In her state, she was the kind of woman that makes sexist men feel like saviors--they'll draw their swords and fight off all the villians to get a drink of water to that poor woman who would then give what appears to be a smile of gratitude. Who's to say that is was anything but that, anyway?

On the other side of the coin is the Bad Woman, for instance, an insolent teenage girl who ran around with boys and got pregnant and now wants to get an abortion without notifying her father...all just to avoid the beating that she has coming to her for her willfulness. Bad Women are disobedient and despicable and so low that often dealing with them is a task beneath a man. Enter the Sister Punisher, a woman whose willingness to turn on other women to curry the favor of sexist men knows no bounds. "

Ouch!

Here is the full text of British MP, George Galloway's articulate blast at smarmy, former democrat, Senator Norm Coleman.

'Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

'I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

'Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

'Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer."

May 2004

I started this blog a year ago shortly after pictures from Abu Ghraib began to circulate. Here is a snip from my first post.

"Policies have consequences both intended and unintended. Either way, patterns can be discerned.

More than 75 years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote these words: 'Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.'

The pattern of the Bush Administration includes contempt for International Law. Around the world we are experienced as a bully. The administration boasts that the UN is irrelevant and that the concerns of 'old Europe' do not matter. We do not need the advice, counsel or approval of our allies or the International community. Rather, in the Rumsfeld/Cheney universe, 'might makes right' and we are accountable to none."

And speaking of Abu Ghraib, what is Seymour Hersh predicting these days for Iraq? Scary stuff.

Making Princes and Priests Uncomfortable

Democracy Now has the transcript of Bill Moyers speaking at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis, Missouri, May 15, 2005.

"We are seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch -- to punish the journalist who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable....

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence."

Read the entire speech.

Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank

Mother Jones News has published this handy chart showing ExxonMobil's support over the last three years for the anti global warming pseudo-science movement. I guess it is really true that, left to their own devices, corporations always do what's best for the citizens.

"ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe."

Kurt Vonnegut on Iraq

Paul Krassner in The Huffington Post passes along this thought from Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite Luddite, occasionally sends something my way via snail-mail. For example, his idea for a bumper sticker: “Your Planet’s Immune System Is Trying to Get Rid of You.” So I’m taking the liberty of sharing his latest thought-provoking missive here in cyberspace:

"Dearest Iraq: Act like me. After 100 years of democracy, let your slaves go. After 150, let your women vote. At the start of democracy, ethnic cleansing is quite OK. Love you madly! Uncle Sam"

If I Were Kim Jong Il

Here is Madeleine Albright on the Real Time with Bill Maher: "If I were Kim Jong Il, I would read the message of Iraq to be, if you don't have nuclear weapons, you get invaded, and if you do have nuclear weapons, you don't get invaded. Because we didn't invade the Soviet Union and China. So I think we're sending the wrong messages and doing nothing to really prevent a very, very dangerous situation."

Living In A Free Society

Here is Garrison Keillor in the Nation.

"The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time."

Yalta Delusions

The Huffington Post debuts today. Here is what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had to say about Yalta.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 produced, according to President Bush, 'one of the greatest wrongs of history.' The Yalta agreements 'followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.…Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.'

The American president is under the delusion that tougher diplomacy might have preserved the freedom of small East European nations. He forgets the presence of the Red Army. No conceivable diplomacy could have saved Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation. And military action against the Soviet Union was inconceivable so long as the Pacific War was still going on. Our military planners, in order to reduce American casualties, counted on the Red Army to enter the war against Japan . At Yalta Stalin promised a firm date in August. And in February the atom bomb seemed a fantasy dreamed up by nuclear physicists.

As for Eastern Europe, Stalin 'held all the cards' in the words of Charles E. Bohlen, the Russian expert. But FDR managed to extract an astonishing document – the Declaration on Liberated Europe, an eloquent affirmation of 'the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live.' Molotov warned Stalin against signing it, but he signed it anyway. It was a grave diplomatic blunder. In order to consolidate Soviet control, Stalin had to break the Yalta agreements – which therefore could not have been in his favor.

The Declaration stands as the refutation of the myth, given new currency by the president of the United States , that Yalta caused or ratified the division of Europe . It was the deployment of armies, not negotiating concessions, that caused the division of Europe.

Posted at 10:55 AM | "

War And Democracy

Gen. Wesley Clark has this to say in The Washington Monthly: "Operating on the theory that if you say something enough times people will believe it, the Bush administration and its allies have in the last few years confidently put forth an array of assertions, predictions, and rationalizations about Iraq that have turned out to be nonsense. They've told us that Saddam's regime was on the verge of building nuclear weapons; that it had operational links with al Qaeda; that our allies would support our invasion if we stuck with our insistence about going it alone; that we could safely invade with a relatively small number of ground troops; that the Iraqi people would greet us as liberators; that Ahmed Chalabi could be trusted; that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for the country's reconstruction; and that most of our troops would be out of Iraq within six months of the initial invasion.

Now, they tell us that recent stirrings of democracy elsewhere in the Middle East are a direct consequence of our invasion of Iraq, that the neoconservative vision of contagious democracy has been realized. Given the administration's track record, we would be wise to greet this latest assertion with suspicion."