Saturday, January 07, 2012

3-year-old (mentally) David finds his way home

They say politics is show biz for ugly people so David Shorr should have a large lead; however, that's just not the case.

Yesterday's snapshot noted David Shorr's dishonesty and spin. It's now been posted at TPM, an e-mail advises. Good. That's where it belongs. Stick in pin it that, we'll come back to it.

Why does Barack own the Iraq War as well as Bush?

David Shorr wants to be walked through like he's a four-year-old but I think that's aiming too high so let's go real slow for Davey.

1) Barack campaigned screaming in those tent revivals across America, "We want to end the war! And we want to end it now!" He left voters convinced that he would end the Iraq War immediately.

Now some voters, yes, believed things that were wrong (like the "free gasoline" claim that was so popular on YouTube) and that's on them because Barack never said any such thing. But he did say, "We want to end the war! And we want to end it now!" And he did say ending it would be his top priority and that, as soon as he was sworn in, he'd begin withdrawing and on and on.

He's the one who gave the impression he'd end the war in Iraq.

He was lying. That's why Samantha Power left the campaign. She went to England and shot her mouth off repeatedly. She didn't resign for calling Hillary a "monster." She resigned for giving an interview to the BBC (see the March 7, 2008 snapshot, we documented it in real time) and declaring that Barack's words were empty and meaningless. Excerpt from the interview.

Stephen Sackur: You said that he'll revisit it [the decision to pull troops] when he goes to the White House. So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out within sixteen months, isn't a commitment is it?


Samantha Power: You can't make a commitment in whatever month we're in now, in March of 2008 about what circumstances are going to be like in January 2009. We can't even tell what Bush is up to in terms of troops pauses and so forth. He will of course not rely upon some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US Senator.

Really? BBC started airing it on the Friday that Samantha quickly announced her resignation. (She resigned, she was not fired.) (She made the decision, she was not asked to resign. She was even told she could just lay low. Power was smart enough to realize that she had to get out the door immediately or this would be a major news story.) It broke, in the US mid-day on a Friday. Most outlets were still grudge f**king Hillary with the monster storyline and, of course, a large number were in the tank for Barack. (David Corn of Mother Jones being one of the most obvious.)

Around midnight (EST), another Barack whore decided to spin. The Nation magazine loved a 2006 editorial so much, they put it on their cover, text on the cover, no illustration. In that editorial they proclaimed that they would support no candidate who did not call for the immediate withdrawal of Iraq.

So surely, The Nation rushing a piece up online at the end of Friday was going to be about what Samantha Power had said, right?

Wrong.

It was John Nichols lying and distracting. See "John Nichols Employs 'Girl Power' for Sammy Power." As we noted, it was one lie after another from Nichols who avoided Power's Iraq comments but did put forward the lie that Samantha and Hillary were 'tight' and had known each other for "years" so "monster" didn't really matter -- they'd met once and only once -- a fact Nichols ignored but that Power had already admitted on Charlie Rose's program. Damn, disgusting liar.

John Nichols would go on Democracy Now! when AP reported -- and proved -- that Barack's campaign was telling the Canadian government of Stephen Harper not to worry about Barack's anti-NAFTA remarks because they were just empty words being used to win the primary. John Nichols go on Democracy Now! and insist that it was actually Hillary and he was working on an explosive story about that, and then the little two-bit whore's rumor would go all over the internet via the Cult of St. Barack. Reality, it was Barack. Reality, John Nichols is a dirty ass whore who cannot now or ever again be trusted. He has refused to own up to his lies. And remember, this is the little bitch whore wrote a book on impeachment but dropped the topic a immediately after the book came out -- in hardcover -- because Pelosi and company were gearing up for the 2006 elections and she had declared impeachment was off the table.)

Barack lied. Samantha Power told the truth about that to the BBC and had to leave the campaign.

Most Americans never heard about what Samantha Power said as the primaries were ongoing. We noted the silence in "Editorial: The Whores of Indymedia" at Third in March of 2008. A few more heard about it July 4, 2008 when Tom Hayden suddenly 'discovered' Power's statements in a Huffington Post column. (Hayden was aware of Power's remarks in March of 2008. He chose not to write about them. He was asked by several people to address the remarks -- and they though he would because he'd actually had the guts -- for one moment in time -- to call out the little war cabal at Harvard that Power was a part of. But a dirty whore's a dirty whore, a pointe we note in Third's "Letters to An Old Sell Out: Iraq").

Barack lied and misled the American people.

2) Despite his parroting Hillary in a debate that the president sets the mission and stating he would do that, he would task the military with withdrawal immediately, he didn't do that. He asked for an assessment. His 'a brigade a month' as soon as he was sworn in didn't come to pass, now did it.

3) He was not elected to continue Bush policies.

4) By refusing to immediately withdraw -- as he promised he would -- he owns the war. We made that point repeatedly and, even for a 3-year-old like David, it shouldn't be confusing. He is commander-in-chief of the military. He continued the war, he owns it. The only way he wouldn't own it -- and we noted it over and over in real time -- was to immediately start withdrawing. He was elected with a mandate to end the Iraq War immediately.

If he had done that, anything that went wrong in Iraq would be Bush's fault. And his response would be, "I promised to bring an immediate end to the war. I was elected on that promise. The American people have spoken." And that would have been it.

But he had to stay with the war -- and try to continue it -- and he owns it now as much as Bush. In fact, maybe more. This is a point we made repeatedly in 2008 when his alleged 'superior judgment' on Iraq was being trumpeted over and over. We were told Barack was so smart because in 2002 he was against the war. (Forget that he told the New York Times in 2004 that had he been in Congress at the time, he wasn't sure how he would have voted on the 2002 resolution.) This made him smarter than Hillary and John Edwards who voted for the war in 2002.

But Barack got to the Senate in 2005. And he promptly voted for every Iraq authorization, over and over.

If you know the war is wrong, it's worse to vote for it.

Hillary and John could have argued that they had realized it was a mistake over time. But Barack was right-from-day-one. So why did he vote to continue the war? (Because he supported it as Elaine has documented since before Barack was campaigning for president. We attended his big money fundraiser for the Senate and we used our face time to ask him about Iraq only to have him tell us to our faces that he wouldn't support withdrawal because "the troops are there." We left without donating a cent. He was just another lying, useless politician. We saw it before he got into the Senate, all that the left now sees, we saw years ago.)

3) Attempting to keep troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (which continues, the talks on that continue) also betray the promise. As does the continued occupation of Iraq via the militarization of the State Dept.

4) When critics in Congress (Republians but it includes Democrats -- as well as independent Joe Lieberman) speak of the "hasty exit," they are referring to Barack announcing in October that the talks had fallen through and moving to bring troops out of Iraq. That's what they're calling hasty.

5) Pretending not to grasp that makes David not just a very physically unattractive man but deeply ugly on the inside, where it really matters.

The aspiring 4-year-old is a liar so providing this walk through won't help him at all. But little will. He'll go to his grave a cheap ass liar who put partisanship above truth. (And he won't be the first or the last.)

Now he's reposted his crap at Talking Points Memo, as an e-mail informed.

Good. That's where it belongs.

That's not an anti-war site. That's not a site that stood tall and brave when it mattered. It's the equivalent of Judith Miller's reporting or all the "Case closed" columns after Colin Powell lied to the United Nations.

And for those who didn't grasp what a coward Josh Marshall was and is or how ethically challenged he is, let's note this from Bob Somerby (Daily Howler):

In our view, this tribal politics is death for progressive objectives. Progressive reforms will never be achieved in this situation. It seems to us that savvy progressive leaders would warn against this tribal division.

That’s why we were so intrigued by several recent posts by Josh Marshall. In these posts, Josh gives us a portrait of the way a certain type of liberal “intellectual leader” may decide to go thoroughly tribal.

When Josh arrived on the Internet, he was a very bright player; he was a doctoral candidate at Brown, and he acted a good deal like same. Yes, he played it safe in 2002, hemming and hawing and seeing all sides when it came to the proposed war in Iraq. But there may have been a good reason for that! In this profile of Josh in the New York Times, Noam Cohen quoted Josh describing his career outlook in the early years of his on-line tenure:

COHEN (2/25/08): Seven years ago, Mr. Marshall was a Ph.D candidate in early American history at Brown University; the Washington editor of a liberal magazine, The American Prospect; and a new blogger. He had started the blog as an outlet for his ideas and to track the recount fight in Florida—the name came from a term bandied about during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

''If I had quickly happened into a staff position at The New Yorker, I probably wouldn't have done this,'' Mr. Marshall, 39, said of his migration to full-time online journalism.

By 2008, Josh was running a full-time site, not his original blog. But if he’d happened into a position as a career journalist, he probably wouldn’t have done that.

In other words: When Josh started his blogging, he was part of the career journalism world (through his spot at the American Prospect)—and he was still imagining the possibility of a full-time career in upper-end, established media. And can we talk? In 2002, if you wanted such a career, you tended to cast yourself as a Serious Person. You puffed on your pipe and you hemmed and you hawed. When it came to the war in Iraq, you saw all sides of Bush’s thoughtful proposal.

You weren’t sure that war was best—but you certainly saw all the angles! This may be why Josh walked such a Serious line in the months leading up to Iraq.


So it is very appropriate that a pathetic pieces of lies about the Iraq War would end up at Josh Marshall's pathetic site which aided the outbreak of that illegal war. Little David heard the call of his mother ship, at last he's back home.

The following community sites -- plus Cindy Sheehan, NPR, Antiwar.com, Watching America, the Independent and On TheWilder Side -- updated last night and today:




Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills)
Fincher
13 hours ago

Thomas Friedman is a Great Man
Changey?
16 hours ago




We'll close with this from international law expert Francis A. Boyle, "Preventing War by the United States against Iran:"



Article 2 (3) of the United Nations Charter requires the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran. To the same effect is article 33 and the entirety of Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter that mandate and set up numerous procedures for the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran. And of course Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter prohibits both the threat and use of force by the United States against Iran.

Furthermore, both Iran and the United States are parties to the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, upon which legal basis the Nazi Leaders were prosecuted by the United States, inter alia, at Nuremberg for Crimes against Peace, sentenced to death, and executed. In Article I thereof the States Parties “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another." The United States has been illegally threatening war against Iran going back to the Bush Jr. Administration. Article II requires the United States only to pursue a pacific settlement of its international dispute with Iran: “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

Finally, both the United States and Iran are parties to the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes. This seminal Hague Peace Convention establishes numerous mechanisms for the pacific settlement of international disputes between contracting parties that are too numerous to analyze here. But they are discussed in detail in my book Foundations of World Order (Duke University Press: 1999). According to article 27 thereof, if a serious dispute threatens to break out between contracting powers, it was the DUTY of the other contracting powers to remind them that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague is open to them, and such reminder could not be treated as an unfriendly act of intervention by the disputants. Today the world needs one State party to either the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes or the 1907 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes to publicly remind both the United States and Iran that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, together with its International Bureau and the entirety of the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes , are available to the two States in order to resolve their dispute in a peaceful manner.

After the terrorist assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June of 1914, Serbia made an offer to Austria to submit the entire dispute to “the International Tribunal of The Hague”—i.e.,to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Austria did not accept the offer, the First World War broke out, and about 10 Million Human Beings were needlessly slaughtered. The death toll from World War III will be incalculable. Humanity must not allow our history to repeat itself! Otherwise, that could be the end of our Humanity.


Francis A. Boyle

Professor of International Law



Francis A. Boyle

Law Building

504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.

Champaign, Illinois 61820



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.























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