As Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Joe Being Joe" notes, in the US the campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues. And Joe remains the dog in the lead. Yesterday, CNN did not one, not two, but three townhalls because it makes it all the harder for a candidate to stand out when three townhalls take place on the same day.
US House Rep Seth Moulton, Iraq War veteran, declared in his townhall that racism cost Stacy Abrams her shot at being governor. One wonders what Kimberle Crenshaw and others might make of Seth's remark?
Oh, that's right, the press doesn't really care about intersectionality. The corporate press only really embraced the topic in 2008 when it was used to destroy Hillary Clinton's run. But here's Kimberle's TED Talk on the topic of intersectionality.
Nothing better than a fat White guy -- wearing a ton of make up, by the way -- going on CNN and announcing a woman lost because of racism. Voter suppression is something that Georgia's long specialized in -- Republicans and Democrats. In fact, the Democratic Party, please remember, worked overtime to defeat an incumbent Democrat, an African-American woman, in the 2002 Democratic Party primary. Georgia's political issues are a lot deeper than Seth's sound byte or his tiny brain can explain.
So he runs with "racism." Because? Because admitting sexism might result in calls for him to do his part to combat sexism by ending his campaign and throwing his support behind one of the six women running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination (Tulsi Gabbard, Marianne Williamson, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar). That is, after all, how you can combat entitlement. But Seth's not interested in that, he's just interested in saying anything he can to try to get above 1% in the polling.
Medicare For All is a rallying cry but Seth's down at 1% and declaring, as he did yesterday, that Medicare For All can't happen ("As a political reality, this is the other thing, it's just never going to get passed. So it's not realistic right now.") makes him just another skidmark on a road of campaigns that slammed on the brakes.
Seth was tossing racism charges around all through the debate. He wasn't asked about it, he just kept bringing it up. The country was racist, Donald Trump is racist, old White Republicans in Congress are racists. Racist, racist, racist! He screamed and he pointed.
He didn't offer any way to address any of his claims. He just kept screaming "racist!" over and over.
You know what he didn't do, though?
HGe never spoke about war. The Iraq War hit the 16 year mark this year while the Afghanistan War can dive and vote later this fall when it turns 18. He wants to be president but he never raises those issues? He thinks he can do anything for the American people while these wars continue?
Grasp that the debt for these wars isn't just growing, it's not been paid. What happened to the USSR when it couldn't pay for its wars and quagmires?
The US could be the next Bolivia, at this rate.
We don't get real about that. The closest we come to getting real is noting that we can't have needed things in this country if we don't end these never-ending and costly wars.
Seth is a tiny man -- wearing a lot of make up (and, yes, the cucumbers did take the puffiness out underneath the eyes) -- with no real answers or solutions. But, hey, isn't it great to see a White man who does nothing to help improve the lives of minorities stand up on stage and scream "racism!" over and over? It's political theatre, it's just not reality.
If Seth seems bad -- and he is -- take comfort int he fact that Senator Tammy Duckworth isn't running -- yet! Mike's "Shut up, Tammy!" refutes Tammy's b.s. claims that US troops need to stay in Iraq because the Iraqi government is our ally. No, it's not.
And let's say a big f**k you to Tammy and all of her other trans-partisans. Tammy's a Republican posing as a Democrat. Her argument was refuted 13 years ago by the Democratic Party.
That is why Democrats demanded benchmarks to measure success.
Tammy, like Republicans back then, rejects a call for benchmarks or a means to measure progress. She just argues for open-ended and never-ending troops on Iraqi soil.
Senator Asshole McCain made that argument, remember? When he was running against Barack Obama in 2008? He was fine, fine, f**king fine with US troops being on Iraqi soil for another 100, another 150 years.
Tammy is the new John McCain and, no, that's not a good thing.
Mayor Pete would like to be the new John McCain and to be the Democrats presidential nominee. Unfortunately for the Tony Perkins (the actor) lookalike, not everyone's impressed. Former State Dept employee Peter van Buren notes how Mayor Pete tries to use his service, such as it is, to advance his political dreams:
Buttigieg gets away unchallenged with these shots because critical thought on military service is the third rail of journalism. But context matters. Buttigieg did all of six months in 2014 as a reservist deep inside Bagram Airfield, mostly as a personal driver for his boss, locked and loaded inside a Toyota Land Cruiser. It is unlikely he ever ate a cold meal in Afghanistan.
On the campaign trail, Buttigieg refers to himself “as the first veteran president since George H.W. Bush.” Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Seth Moulton was a platoon commander in the initial company of Marines that entered Baghdad in 2003, returning for a total of four combat deployments. Tulsi Gabbard did two full tours in the Middle East, one inside Iraq. She volunteered to become the first state official to step down from public office to serve in a war zone, 10 years before Buttigieg. So if you wanna measure for size, bro, the line forms behind Moulton and Gabbard.
And picking up on Elaine's "Wheezie Joe, who died when you didn't go?," Peter notes;
Maybe so. But for those who like comparisons, current frontrunner Joe Biden received five student draft deferments, the same number as Dick Cheney, and in 1968, when Biden’s student status was wrapping up, was medically reclassified as “not available” due to having had asthma as a teenager. In his autobiography, Biden describes his active childhood, being a lifeguard, and playing high school football. His vice presidential physicals mention multiple aneurysms. Asthma, no. And there’s no record of The New York Times tracking down Biden’s dead doctor’s daughters to investigate medical draft fraud.
If military service is important and Vietnam-era medical deferments open to question, maybe Mayor Pete should be talking about Biden as well as Trump. And if you are now learning about Biden’s multiple deferments for the first time, maybe you should ask yourself why.
Left out of all of this is context. American men of a certain age all had to make a choice about Vietnam. They made those choices not in the jingoistic context of 2019, when we all Support Our Troops and wave away concerns with slogans like “Love the Warrior, Hate the War.” Sixty percent of men in the Vietnam generation took active measures to qualify for deferments, while up to 90 percent of National Guard enlistments (domestic service instead of Vietnam) were draft-motivated. Trump’s—as well as Clinton’s, Cheney’s, Biden’s, Sanders’, Bush’s, et al—story is “surprisingly typical of his generation,” according to one historian.
The Vietnam-era military was not a widely loved institution. Many veterans, at least when they spoke about it back then, were more ashamed than proud, and actively encouraged young men to avoid serving. Families were weary of sending their sons to Vietnam, a place from which more than 58,000 Americans never came home (compared to under 7,000 dead in the 18 years of the war on terror and its sequels). The military was wounded by failure in Southeast Asia, drugs, and racism. Vietnam was the era of fragging, soldiers killing their own officers. That occurred in numbers far lower than movies would have you believe, but it was enough to leave officers living under threats far greater than any Lieutenant Buttigieg ever conceived of in Afghanistan.
Another veteran is under fire.
- They guy who ran an explicitly racist anti-Muslim campaign in 2018 is now boasting about killing civilians in Iraq.
What's amazing is that anyone would reTweet Mehdi Hasan.
Saturday, we noted:
US House Rep Duncan Hunter is in the news over his time in Iraq.
Rep. Duncan Hunter said that his unit in Iraq "killed probably hundreds of civilians" cnn.it/2HTnUdX
He's talking about the reality of war. Not the pretty-up version the corporate media provides.
Can we hold off judgment on Duncan long enough to absorb that this is what is happening in our names? Can we not make the story Duncan Hunter but what he is actually revealing?
There's all the time and the world to go after Duncan. How about we take just a minute to register the reality Duncan's presenting versus the scrubbed version so many outlets keep selling?
"The idea of once we enter into a war our job is to go kill anything that moves … is blatantly false," says Iraq War veteran @waitmanb. "It demonstrates a real disturbing lack of understanding of how to deal with civilians and noncombatants in the battlefield… It's deplorable."
No, little boy, it's actually what war is and it's why war needs to be opposed. But keeping pimping the notion of 'good war' and be glad that 'journalists' like Amy Goodman provide you an outlet for these lies.
In other news . . .
Iraq sentences all 11 French IS suspects to death https://cna.asia/2I9dRju
France has betrayed its citizens and its beliefs.
