Going through the e-mails as I do posts and here are three items noted by four members that they'd like shared with the community.
On the Bully Boy's speech Maria and Lloyd e-mailed (seperate e-mails) to say they think it's the most to the point commentary they've seen. What is? Jude's "Bush Speech: Nothing has Changed:"
See my remarks, written directly after hearing almost the same speech from Bush on September 7, 2003.
Excerpt: BUSH: "Two years ago [in 2001], I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there -- and there they must be defeated." BACK THEN, I RESPONDED: "The central front of a war on terror? Do you mean Pakistan? Saudi Arabia--where most of the 9-11 hijackers came from? Are you speaking of the Phillipines? Indonesia? Iran? Georgia? Azerbijan? Are you saying the heart of terror was or is in Iraq? Or are you saying you carefully CHOSE Iraq because she was the weakest nation, knowing you would "bring on" the terrorists from all these other regions once the pre-emptive attack began?
Maria says that what she enjoyed most was that Jude (Iddybud) "went to the analog. Bully Boy trots out the same nonsense and Jude's not going to waste time with a new critique when everything she said before still applies."
Zach e-mails to note Ray McGovern's "Stay the Crooked Course" (CounterPunch):
The editors of the New York Times this morning feign shock that in his speech at Fort Bragg yesterday evening President George W. Bush would "raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks." Kudos for that insight! Better three years late than never, I suppose.
Forget the documentary evidence (the Downing Street minutes) that the war on Iraq was fraudulent from the outset. Forget that the U.S. and U.K. starting pulverizing Iraq with stepped-up bombing months before president or prime minister breathed a word to Congress or Parliament. Forget that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his merry men-his co-opted, castrated military brass-have no clue regarding what U.S. forces are up against in Iraq. The president insists that we must stay the course.
As was the case in Vietnam, the Iraq war is being run by civilians innocent of military experience and disdainful of advice from the colonels and majors who know which end is up. Aping the president's practice of surrounding himself with sycophants, Rumsfeld has promoted a coterie of yes-men to top military ranks-men who "kiss up and kick down," in the words of former Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford, describing UN-nominee John Bolton's modus operandi at the State Department. So when the president assures us, as he did yesterday, that he will be guided by the "sober judgment of our military leaders" he is referring to the castrati.
Terry e-mails to note Glen Ford and Peter Gamble's "Reject the Language of White Supremacy" (The Black Commentator):
This is all lost on doting congresspeople like Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who has been around long enough to know better than to recite oxymorons. Most striking last week was his quixotic appeal to the military's top brass to give a candid assessment of the situation.
As we move toward an historic national Black convention in the first quarter of 2006 -- "Going back to Gary," as convener William Lucy, President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists phrased it, referring to the 1972 National Black Political Convention in that Indiana city -- it is imperative that we reexamine the language of our political discourse. Otherwise, we will wind up talking nonsense -- or worse, speaking against our own interests.
In the 33 years since the Gary convention, corporate-speak has become ever more deeply embedded in the national conversation, reflecting the assumptions and aspirations of the very rich, who have vastly increased and concentrated their power over civil society. This alien language saturates the political culture via corporate media of all kinds, insidiously defining the parameters of discussion. Once one becomes entrapped in the value-laden matrix of the enemy's language, the battle is all but lost. We cannot strategize ourselves out of the racist-corporate coil while ensnared in the enemy’s carefully crafted definitions and points of reference.
"Going back to Gary" must mean going back to straight talk, from the African American perspective. The political consensus among the Black masses remains remarkably consistent, but has been relentlessly challenged since 1972 by 1) the rise of a small but vocal corporate class of African Americans who see their own fortunes as linked to larger corporate structures, and 2) aggressive corporate subsidization, beginning in the mid-Nineties, of a growing clique of Black politicians who define Black progress in terms of acceptance among rich, white people.
Thus, the internal contradictions in African American politics have greatly multiplied since Gary. This has not occurred because of increasing conservatism among a much enlarged Black middle class over the last three decades -- a corporate-concocted slander for which there is no factual evidence -- but by the determination of Big Money to impose an alternative leadership on the recalcitrant Black masses.
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