Obama is a war criminal

Just a reminder!

Spoiler alert: they're on the same team, and it isn't ours

This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position and then get attacked anyway (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War in and then got attacked for being soft on Terror in 2002; they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy and the same thing happened, etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans and nothing is happening except full-scale GOP opposition accompanied by a constant barrage of GOP attacks against them as big-spending, reckless, wealth-transferring liberals.

Ultimately, the success of this program will be measured by whether it produces successful results, so why shouldn't Democrats use their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve that? That's true on this issue and in general.
- Greenwald

The answer to Glenn's question is that they have used their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve successful results. And that is true on this issue and in general.

The obvious next question is "what do Democrats think are successful results?" Some careful editing of the first part of the above quote might help answer that:

This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position ... (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War... they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy... etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans ....

Get it?

Obama Bombs Pakistan, Kills Afghani Civilians, Defends Bush

Chris Floyd documents the reality of the BO Presidency, making it clear that my dreams won't be coming true.  I wonder whose dreams these are:

Why speak of Gaza -- where the relentless and ruthless Israeli assault on civilians ended almost precisely with the ascension of Barack Obama to high office -- when that newly-ascended embodiment of hope is already drawing first blood in his marshalship of the "War on Terror"? Already, Obama has ordered his first drone missile attacks on the sovereign territory of Pakistan, an American ally; already he has killed his first civilians with the faceless, soulless weapons of remote-control mass death. 

What's more, the Commander-in-Chief has already overseen his first mass slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan, the land he calls "the central front in the War on Terror," where he plans to commit tens of thousands of more troops in a massive escalation of a war that his new Terror War envoy, Richard Holbrooke, now says will last longer than the Vietnam War. As MSNBC reports, none other than the U.S.-installed Afghan president himself, Hamid Karzai, condemned the killing of 16 Afghan civilians, including three children and two women, in a ground-and-air attack by U.S forces on Saturday. Escalating the conflict will mean much more of this, of course. In any case, Karzai's protests will cut no ice with the new regime in Washington; he is yesterday's man, yesterday's puppet, and his increasingly frantic and forthright denunciations of the mass slaughter of his people by American and NATO forces will not be tolerated much longer. Obama and his team are already manipulating the politics of the occupied land to ensure that a "dream ticket" of politicians beholden to Obama, not Bush, will "wrest control away from Mr Karzai," as the Independent reports. 

And why not? Shouldn't the new Caesar be allowed to appoint his own men to govern his dominions?

...

Of course, such things aren't serious. They don't really matter. Why should you waste your beautiful mind on something like that? 

Especially when you can be mesmerized by Obama's amazing "First 100 Hours," when he has already revolutionized American policy by, for example, restricting the overt use of torture to the torture techniques approved of by the Pentagon -- although his own intelligence supremo, Dennis Blair, refuses to say if "waterboarding" should be considered torture, and assures Congress that he will examine "whether certain coercive techniques have been effective"; i.e. which torture techniques should be continued. There is also Obama's bold ordering of the (eventual) closure of the Gitmo camp and the handful of CIA detention center,while leaving alone the Pentagon's numerous and far worse gulag centers -- where thousands of Terror War captives languish without charges, representation, or the slightest legal recourse. And of course, there is his heartening decision to go to court to defend Bush's multiple rape of American liberty: the years-long illegal surveillance scheme, which Obama had voted to support while still in the Senate.

good news

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Noam Chomsky's wife died in December and that I hoped he'd be ok and be able to get back to work. I noticed last night that indeed he has been working. As always, it is worth reading and listening to what he has to say, so check out his latest.

I have a dream

Some BO supporters like to defend his actions up to this point as unfortunate but necessary things he had to do to get the power, and they dream that once he's sworn in he'll abandon the principles he's clearly expressed and do what he truly believes is right, which of course is the same thing they believe is right. I share this dream.

I dream that starting today:

• The US will immediately begin a complete widthdrawl from Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The US will stop its unconditional support for Israeli state violence, will stop supplying the weapons used to terrorize Palestinians, and will support a 2-state solution with the 1967 borders.
• War criminals will be prosecuted: all of them, including former Presidents and executive branch leaders, Congressional leaders, and military leaders.
  
• The US will stop violating international law, will give up its UN Security Counsel Veto, and follow World Court rulings.
• The Federal Reserve will be abolished.
• The US Military empire of bases will begin to be liquidated, troops repatriated and reintegrated into civilian life, and reparations paid where owed.
• Corporate personhood will be revoked, and measures adopted to eliminate corporate influence on elections.
• The CIA will be dismantled, along with much of the "intelligence" structure.
• The war on (certain kinds of people who use certain kinds of) drugs will end. Non-violent offenders will be released with support. Prohibition on drugs will end.
• Universal health care will be adopted, fully funded by the government.
• A sensible national food plan will be adopted, eliminating subsidies for mass-produced industrial monoculture, and providing extensive support for local, sustainable farming.
• Public mass transit infrastructure and alternative energy, especially renewable sources like solar and wind, will be heavily supported by the federal government, as part of a plan to drastically reduce US carbon emissions.
  

I'd like to see lots of other things, but I'll just leave it there because I believe this list is extremely conservative. It simply says we should follow the law, enact policies supported by the population (sometimes called "democracy"), and act according to very simple moral truisms.

If Obama disavows everything he's said and done so far and gets started on that, I'll gladly join the crowd celebrating his work. I won't even mind if he waits a few years to turn himself in for his own war crimes.

But we all know this is just a dream, and is no closer to being acheived than Dr. King's dream.

molding young minds

BO saw this, and decided he needs to bring this to the national level. Read that if you're interested in education.

McCain advising Obama, ha!

Ha! For all of you lesser-evil supporters of BO evil, how do you feel about this? You voted for BO to keep McCain away from power, right? To make sure he has nothing to do with the important decisions, right? Well now Commander Hope-n-Change is calling McCain every night asking him what to do, almost as if he thinks McCain is likely to have something useful to say.

h/t Chris Floyd

don't fall for it

I managed not to notice that today was MLK day until a friend mentioned it on the phone last night. I'm assuming that Canada doesn't pay attention to this particular day, but I might just be oblivious. Anyway, I thought I'd write something about how feel-good connections between today's commemoration of a heroic human rights advocate and tomorrow's imperial management succession ceremony are full of shit, but, as usual, better bloggers have already done it. So go read them.

Perrin:

God, I hate inaugurations -- a massive commercial for the imperial state, with some "populist" tinsel tossed around to make consumers feel included.

...

No one seems to mind hearing pro-FISA Obama praise Martin Luther King, who was on the other end of government wiretaps.

Schwarz: Works the Same Everywhere


Silber:

But the absolutely overwhelming amount of colossal shit attendant upon this inauguration ("Look, Mom! Barack made me fly!" -- I do not exaggerate even slightly, scroll to about the midpoint of the story) is enough to make anyone who remains remotely sane loathe all mankind throughout all eternity.

update

James: Blast from the past: Commemorating MLK, Jr.

a space in the howling madness

In an essay that is worth reading for many reasons beyond what I'll mention, Chris Floyd says:

What commentary could adequately address such madness? Simply to see it is to know what it is. And if you cannot already see it for what it plainly is -- when the bare, unaccomodated facts shout this evil from the lower depths to the highest heavens -- what amount of commentary will sway you?

Then again, I don't write to sway anybody any more, if I ever did. I write to stay sane, to keep from exploding in rage or going dead with despair, to try to clear a space in the howling madness for myself, and for anyone else who might come this way. I write to bear witness -- mostly to myself, and to what's left of my conscience. I write because somewhere along the line, by drift of circumstance, my mind was shaped in such a way that it is only by writing that I can try to understand the world, and my own thoughts and beliefs. If I could do all that without writing -- or if I could stop looking at reality and caring about it -- then I probably would. But for whatever reason -- those same drifts of circumstance, no doubt -- I can't; so I go on.

A lot of the time that has been the reason why I've kept writing in this stupid blog of mine. Maintaining what's left of my sanity and conscience, maybe helping anyone else do the same, trying to understand the world and myself. That's what it has been about, albeit on a much different level than Chris. (That guy is amazing.)

Increasingly I think I'm finding myself doing this in other ways. I'm too lazy to check the stats but I think I'm posting less frequently and with less volume. At least it feels that way. Of course I've been pretty busy with school, and my computer at home is falling apart so I guess I have a lot less opportunity to write. But I still feel like a lot of the time I consider writing something and just decide it isn't worth it. So, yeah, I think I'm getting whatever it is I used to get out of this some other way now.

What does it say?

Think about this.

The President and Vice-President of the US openly admit to having committed crimes under domestic and international law. They are criminals under US law and they are war criminals. They ordered wireless surveillance in violation of FISA law, openly admit to having done so, and thus are criminals. They ordered or approved of water-boarding, which is a violation of international law an which the US has previously prosecuted people for doing under torture laws, and thus are war criminals. This can't be controversial because they openly admit it. There's simply no disputing that these are the facts of the situation.

And in response to this, the political elite in the US are unified in their response: Bush and Cheney should not be held responsible for this in any way. They should not be impeached, and they should not be prosecuted. We're talking about the entire US political machinery, not just close party allies of these guys. From the idiot talking heads on TV to the idiots writing op-eds for the major papers, to Nancy "impeachment is off the table" Pelosi, to Barrack "look forward, not backward" Obama, absolutely everyone is lined up on the side of the openly criminal regime. They shall not be punished.

What does that say about the United States?

Strains on this simple observation have been circulating through the blogs I tend to read these days - Silber, Floyd, Greenwald - and if you want me to point you towards particularly well written pieces I'll be happy to do so, but what I've written here is the gist of it. Our highest elected officials are openly criminal, and nobody within the official leadership structures gives a flying fuck.

BO recently commented on Israel's war against humanity in Gaza something to the effect that if someone lobbed rockets at his family, he'd do everything in his power to respond, too. And when asked if Bush should be prosecuted for his crimes, he said we should look forward, not backwards. Can anyone spot the hypocrisy? This is supposed to be the great new progressive hope for America?

What does that say about America?

Bush and Cheney are widely despised. Their approval ratings have been abysmal, and at times polls have shown a majority of Americans in favor of impeachment. And that is without any major leadership on the impeachment issue. Can you imagine how popular a high-profile politician would become by fighting for impeachment? Anyone who did that would instantly gain hero status for huge numbers of people throughout the world. And yet nobody is willing to do this.

What does that say about America?

how we roll, continued

Mustached Chicks Smoking Carrots




Dotted-Line 'Stache




Free Mustache Rides

end beard. begin mustache.

As promised:

before





after



(Yes, in the first picture there is a woman with a mustache grading papers behind me. That's just how we roll up here.)

yes, Obama is the same as Bush

A recent commenter here objected to my likening of BO to Bush, citing BO's "superior moral grounding" as a reason for optimism. Chris Floyd makes a mockery of this argument:

It's true that the United States government is facing a severe and prolonged budget crisis. But what does it say about the underlying moral philosophy of an administration when its first target for budget cuts are programs designed to help ordinary people – including the weakest among us? When it will not cut a penny from a war machine that has only made the nation more and more insecure over the long decades of its ascendancy, involving the American people in an endless series of conflicts in which they have no business, and no genuine national interests at stake? If urgent cuts in government spending are needed, why would you not look first to this gargantuan swamp of waste and corruption and dangerous meddling? Instead, Obama proposes to pour even more money into it, and to increase the dangerous meddling.

The president-elect has made his fundamental priorities clear – for anyone who wants to see them. The war machine and the financial markets will continue to be gorged and comforted in their wonted manner. Programs to help ordinary citizens, programs to enhance the quality of life for individuals and the well-being of society, will be the first – perhaps the only – areas to feel the budget axe. Whatever you may think of the efficacy of such programs, this ordering of priorities -- war and profits over people -- bespeaks the same depraved sensibility that has prevailed for generations in Washington. It is the same old rancid swill in a stylish new container.

BO = bo = plagiary!

crispin sartwell is stealing my highly original nomenclature. i'll retaliate by stealing his no caps style!

to advance his convictions

I don't have any plans to note the official transition from one evil emperor to the next with any special fanfare, on this blog or otherwise, but TomDispatch has a good piece on Bush's legacy. Spoiler alert: he destroyed everything he touched and piled up gruesome numbers of dead bodies:

Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt: all this was brought to us by a President, now leaving office without apology, who said the following in his first inaugural address: "I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility… to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."

2008 year in review pictures.