A service member who publicly refused to deploy to Iraq wrote an e-mail asking if he was manipulated?
He took a stand that proved costly for him. He lives with that stand and feels it was the right thing for him. But he wonders about all the 'support' he briefly had. He notes how quickly it vanished and how the people he thought were outraged by the Iraq War no longer appear to care.
We've gone from expressing outrage, he noted, over the conditions in Iraq to not even caring.
And he's right.
Nouri's killing civilians. Not his usual round-up-Sunnis-disappear-them-into-torture-chambers type crimes. He's bombing residential neighborhoods in Falluja and has been doing this for five months now.
And where's the outrage that the US installed and kept puppet is killing Iraqi civilians?
He may or may not get a third term as prime minister but it's amazing how the press could note that Sunnis felt marginalized or worse by Nouri but the same press (western press) couldn't note he was carrying out War Crimes.
Collective punishment is a legally defined War Crime. When you say a populated area has X (terrorists, insurgents, militants, rebels, etc) in it and you decide to bomb it, that's collective punishment. You're punishing civilians for the 'crime' of where they live.
As prime minister of Iraq, he is obligated to protect the citizens. Instead, he's killing them.
He's killing them and he's getting away with it.
The White House begged the Congress to drop their objections to arming Nouri with new weapons at the end of last year. Senator Robert Menedez became the last hold out. But the White House assured that Nouri would not use the weapons on the Iraqi people.
Well that's all Nouri's done.
And not only is it a War Crime, the Leahy Amendment bars the White House from providing funds or arms to a government targeting its own civilian population.
The rush to normalize Iraq is really something to see.
As with most cover ups and lies, it says much more about society than telling the plain truth ever could.
The world community has no ethical ground to stand on. With the exception of the European Parliament, no ruling body has made a point to call out these killings.
It's amazing to look at the current administration's various War Hawks and their various attempts since 2009 to justify war on this nation or that with claims of gassing civilians or whatever while at the same time they stay silent as Nouri is on month five of bombing Falluja's residential neighborhoods.
Samantha Power was always a piece of trash.
A lot of embarrassing idiots (Davy D, we mean you) never do the work required. They're too busy gas bagging, you understand. So there was Davy D braying on the air waves (KPFA) about 'poor' Samantha "Powers" (so stupid was Davy D, he didn't even know the woman's name) and how she was forced out of Barack's primary campaign because she called Hillary Clinton a "monster."
"Poor" Samantha was not kicked out of the campaign. She chose to leave. She chose to leave because she'd shot her mouth off.
Not the "monster" comment.
She resigned so that her resignation was the story that day. As it became the story, the BBC interview Samantha had taped prior but was just now airing was largely ignored.
We covered it.
That's the interview where she explained Barack's 'promise' to withdraw all troops within 16 months of being sworn in was meaningless and that Barack intended to decide what to do about Iraq once he was sworn in as president.
That's why she resigned.
To mute that story.
But Barack had so many enablers she need not worry.
Where a lie needs telling there is John Nichols.
These are the people who were defended by the left.
That's why the United States is in so much trouble.
A weak left in Congress?
What of the US 'left' institutions -- The Nation, The Progressive, etc.
The members of Congress have to answer to their constituency. The Nation and The Progressive, by contrast, present themselves as brave truth tellers, as a free press.
They're an embarrassment.
Six years of whoring and six years of silence cannot be overcome nor will it be forgotten.
Katrina vanden Heuvel will always be remembered as the person who destroyed The Nation. She can't rebuild it.
Her reputation is out there. She's been exposed as a fraud -- and a ditzy one at that. No idiot strives harder to self-present as an intellectual.
The Nation had a huge circulation once upon a time. Katrina destroyed that. The magazine's useless, it's even worse as a digital enterprise.
Like most in the know, I realize that some sizable ad buys by the DNC have helped the teetering Nation magazine but that's no reason to whore for the DNC -- especially not when you try to call others out for the same actions.
For those who wondered why, back to Iraq War resistance, The Nation refused to come out and strongly support war resisters, it's because they worried Bully Boy Bush would pull the postal rate The Nation operated under or institute something like the Palmer raids.
If you really think that could happen, you don't fall silent. You use your voice immediately in the hope that you can prevent it from happening.
The Nation engaged in non-stop paranoia during the Bully Boy Bush reign.
There was no conspiracy or 'conspiracy' they couldn't get behind. That included the 9-11 truth movement which Katrina briefly hopped on board of via a voice from France and then backed off of quickly. (After people explained to her what she was endorsing -- she's a deeply stupid person.) Plane crashes killing senators? A prominent Nation writer promoted that in numerous speeches.
You see a similar statements from the right today with regards to Barack Obama.
Opposition to Barack and rumors about Barack for the right stem with him being a Democrat.
It's not that hard to grasp. A similar madness plagued those of us on the left when Bully Boy Bush was in the White House.
(Those of "us." Include me. I took part in the fear fest of 9-11 for about two days before I realized I need to turn off the TV and hit the road. What I saw was very similar to what Joan Didion wrote of -- a public wanting to arm themselves with knowledge but being encouraged by the government to not do so, to instead wallow in fear and hate.)
Psychotic Naomi Wolf spent day after day telling us the country was coming to an end. She could speak out, she explained, right now because she still felt safe but there would come a point where she wouldn't be able to speak out against the government because it would be too risky.
So that time's now, Namoi?
Does that explain why, under Bully Boy Bush, you publicly rebuked the occupant of the Oval Office for this destruction of our civil liberties and that assault on our basic rights but today you still can't call out Barack?
We're all real good about pointing out the flaws and crimes of the other side.
But maybe the left in the US wouldn't be so pathetic and ineffective if we learned to critique our own side?
When it happens, there's the knee jerk nonsense with someone insisting "circular firing squads!"
No.
And a left that could actively self-examine is a left that could make a difference in this country.
Instead, we've got a left that's opposed to illegal spying and to illegal war when a Republican is in the White House but fine and dandy with it when a Democrat is overseeing it.
And we've got a lot of stupid people.
And I mean stupid, not uninformed.
Thanks to the MSM, we do have an uninformed population and that's not the fault of the public. They can only follow the stories the media chooses to cover.
But we've got stupid too.
Stupid are the people who have obsessed over Sarah Palin since 2008.
I don't mean this as an insult to the woman but she's not going to be a major national ticket again. Her VP run was it. I'm not speaking to her qualifications or skills. I'm noting that she was a breakthrough woman and that's a one time thing. Geraldine Ferraro's attempts to portray her own breakthrough role later into a Congressional seat did not come to be.
Sarah Palin is a political commentator and that's probably her active role from now until she decides to step away from politics.
So why has the left spent so long obsessing over her?
Why has The Nation repeatedly invoked her name in the never-ending fund raising letters they (snail) mail?
There are real things and events that America is facing. A Sarah Palin national race is really not likely to be one of them.
And there's so much more that they've focused on that was equally worthless to those of us on the left.
And if you get worked up over this bulls**t, I'm sorry if I'm the first to tell you, you're really stupid.
Not uninformed.
Stupid.
Again, Palin will not be on another national ticket.
She's a voice of the right!
They've got a lot of them.
So what?
She's marginalizing herself even as a commentator.
[TV's a visual medium. If you're going to try to be an on air commentator, you need to get your visuals down pat. That means you don't let your hair overpower your face, to offer only one example of how post-VP candidate Palin fails the visual test.]
When we started online, one of our regular complaints here (mine and community members) was that Democrats in Congress were not leading.
Instead of pushing the needed issues and the needed conversations, they wasted all their time on response. They were passive as a result.
And that criticism is now true of our left institutions like The Nation and The Progressive which waste time and space on non-issues and responses (often to non-issues) when they should have been pushing Democrats in office and they should have been presenting the arguments for what we need.
We did not need ObamaCare.
We did need universal coverage (not mandated purchases). Instead of whoring for a White House, The Nation should have made cover story after cover story about what the country needed and how it could get it.
There was, for example, no need to write new law. Just get Congress to pass a law to expand Medicare (so that it covers every American and kicks in at birth). The program already exists. There's no change to it, just an expansion of it.
But instead The Nation felt they were doing something good by defending and promoting ObamaCare.
Iraq no longer mattered when Bully Boy Bush left office.
In fact, it really needed to be put down as a topic because too many Democrats supported the war.
That's why you get the whorish writing pieces today about Iraq that ignore any and everything that has happened since 2009.
They don't want to go into how Barack Obama secured a second term for Nouri al-Maliki.
They don't want to tackle how the US-brokered Erbil Agreement resulted in increased violence and one political crisis after another.
They want to pretend that a drawdown was a withdrawal.
And they don't want to address the special-ops brigade Barack sent into Iraq.
Nouri wants predator drones and is willing to bring in more US troops if he can get those drones.
But The Nation and The Progressive don't want to address that.
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