Isaiah's latest THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Hollywood Vs. Reality." In the film THE CALL, Halle Berry answers, "911. What's your emergency?" In Buffalo, a 911 operator answers, "911. Don't piss me off or I'll hang up on your ass." Isaiah archives his comics at THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS.
From Thursday's snapshot:
AFP reports, "Donald Trump is not in the White House. You do not know if he will run again (he seems to want to but Donald loves to f*k with people's heads), you do not know if he could get the GOP nomination if he tried to run, you do not know who the Democrats will run in 2024, "
Freud said the criminal had a compulsion to confess. I'd like to think the incident was more than a mere slip of the tongue. I'd love to believe the millions of Iraqis he killed haunt Bully Boy /bush's sleep, that they wreck every waking moment.
That's what should happen. Hes responsible for an illegal war, he's responsible for suffering, he's responsib le for a genocide.
Shame on those who are too weak and too stupid to hold him accountable. I'm referring to the ones who in 2015 would have called him out but now, because they share his hatred for Donald Trump, they're BB's best buddy.
AP offers, "The 75-year-old former president jokingly blamed the mistake on his age, shaking his head and correcting himself, drawing laughter from the crowd." It's not a laughing matter. Arwa Mahdawi (GUARDIAN) notes:
Tell you what, I’m not laughing. Nor are a lot of Arabs. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the depravity and horror of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraqi prisoners of war – many of whom were innocent people who were arrested by mistake – were violently tortured by US and UK troops. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. The entire country was left in ruins. And the suffering continued long after the occupying forces left. The US military’s frequent use of munitions containing depleted uranium in Iraq, along with military hardware abandoned by troops, poisoned the environment and the population. Even now babies are being born with severe birth defects linked to the invasion. “Doctors are regularly encountering anomalies in babies that are so gruesome they cannot even find precedents for them,” the lead researcher of a 2019 study said. “The war has spread so much radiation here that, unless it is cleaned up, generations of Iraqis will continue to be affected.” So, yeah, please excuse me if I don’t find Bush’s slip-up particularly funny.
You know what’s even less funny? The fact there has been zero accountability for any of the architects of the Iraq war. Sure, some of the military personnel were convicted of crimes relating to torture of Abu Ghraib prisoners, but the people who were really in charge have faced no consequences whatsoever. Bush himself has had his reputation whitewashed in recent years; he has transformed himself into a cuddly grandpa figure who paints and pontificates about “unity”. As for his coterie of enablers, most of them went on to high-paying jobs and prestigious positions.
Before anyone starts making excuses for the architects of the Iraq war (“how could they have known?”), let me remind you that it was clear from the start that the war – and the flimsy weapons of mass destruction excuse used to justify it – was a sham. In February 2003 millions of people, including myself, in at least 650 cities around the world took to the streets to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq. It was the largest one-day global protest in history. Ordinary people could see the war was immoral and probably illegal – and yet there is a concerted effort in some quarters to rewrite the war as a deeply regrettable lapse in judgment that nobody at the time could really have been expected to get right.
To add insult to injury, the US has not yet issued an apology to Iraqis, and almost two decades after the invasion, some — at least those in Bush's audience on Wednesday — are still laughing about it." Chip Gibbons (JACOBIN) advises, "If Bush is not going to stand trial for war crimes, he should at the very least have the decency to avoid appearing in public as a moral authority on unjustified invasions. Instead, as Bush’s recent gaffe and his audience’s clear amusement at his misstatement demonstrate, neither Bush nor US society has ever really reckoned with the consequences of his imperialist crusade." I remember bumping into Chip all over the country back when he was helping to push back against the hideous PATRIOT ACT. Just tossing that out there because when I saw the byline, I smiled remembering many interesting conversations over the years. I look forward to reading his upcoming book on the FBI. At WSWS, Patrick Martin notes:
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning, condemning the support for the war, not only by the Bush administration and the Republican right, but by the bulk of the Democratic Party. It was the leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then-Senator Joe Biden, who played a central role in pushing through the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that provided a congressional rubber stamp for the illegal invasion.
In a series of articles in May 2007, the WSWS summed up the devastation inflicted by the US conquest and occupation of Iraq, branding it “sociocide,” the deliberate destruction of an entire society, and pointing out that under both Bush and his father, American imperialism had carried out crimes of the type previously associated only with fascist regimes. We wrote:
Iraq, once among the most advanced countries of the region, has been reduced, in terms of basic economic and social indices, to the level of the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
What is involved is the systematic destruction of an entire society through the unleashing of violence and criminality on a scale not seen since Hitler’s armies ravaged Europe in the Second World War.
Less than a third of the population nationwide has access to clean drinking water, and just 19 percent have a functioning sewage system. Both the water and sewage systems were damaged heavily by US bombardments in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion…
On average, Iraqis receive only eight hours of electricity a day, with even worse conditions in Baghdad, where most of the capital’s seven million people get only six hours or less of service daily.
We noted the 150 percent increase in the infant mortality rate from 1990 to 2005. Half of all Iraq’s children were suffering from malnutrition; only one-third were attending school. Half of Iraq’s doctors had fled the country. Per capita GDP was half that of 1980, and Iraq’s state-owned industries had been privatized and shut down, with the loss of half a million jobs, by an ideologically motivated campaign of the Iraq occupation authority set up by the US in Baghdad. The WSWS concluded:
The premeditated destruction of an entire society carried out on the basis of lies and in pursuit of the financial and geo-strategic interests of America’s ruling elite constitutes a war crime of historic proportions, punishable under the same statutes and on the basis of the same principles as those used to condemn leading figures of Germany’s Third Reich at Nuremberg.
Those responsible for launching the war in Iraq consist not merely of the right-wing Republican cabal grouped around Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. They include also the Democrats who enabled this war, the heads of US energy conglomerates and finance houses that hoped to profit from it and the chiefs of the media monopolies that promoted it. All of these layers, constituting the political establishment and financial aristocracy of the United States, are guilty of the same fundamental crime for which the Nazis were prosecuted nearly 60 years ago: the plotting and waging of a war of aggression. It is from this principal crime that all the multiple crimes and horrors inflicted upon the Iraqi people have flowed.
It is not a matter of justifying Putin’s reactionary attack on Ukraine to point out that the war he launched has produced nothing like the level of destruction inflicted by the US in Iraq.
Bully Boy Bush is a War Criminal. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a fraud. The following sites updated:
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 20, 2022
https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-answer-to-the-latest-greedy-war-spending-should-not-be-greed/
I know I should consider myself lucky to have located anybody at all in the United States who opposes the latest $40 billion “for Ukraine.” But from both the right and the left, those who oppose it almost universally express resentment of spending money “on Ukraine” instead of keeping that money in the US of A or spending it on “Americans.”
The first problem with this is a factual one. The vast majority of that money will never leave the U.S. The biggest chunk of it is for U.S. weapons dealers. Some is even for U.S. troops (in a war they’re supposedly not fighting in).
The second problem is that arming Ukraine with endless weapons (even the New York Times just editorialized that, at some future point, some limit should be set) doesn’t benefit Ukraine. It prevents a ceasefire and negotiations, prolonging a catastrophic war. Next to the Russian invasion, the U.S. weapons shipments are the worst thing that’s happened to Ukraine lately.
The third problem is that Ukraine is not an island. The crop destruction will create famines around the globe. The damage to cooperation on climate, disease, poverty, and disarmament impacts everyone. The risk of nuclear apocalypse is ours to share. The sanctions are hurting us all.
But those are the minor problems. Or at least they don’t offend me as much as another problem that builds on the misunderstanding of those first three. I’m referring to the problem of greed. Not the greed of the weapons dealers and lobbyists. I mean the greed of the people outraged at supposed help for Ukraine when the U.S. needs baby formula, the greed of the caller to a radio show I was on this morning who demanded that we have a public referendum before sending any money overseas, the greed of the peaceniks with shirts reading “Bring Our War Dollars Home.”
How is that greed? Isn’t that enlightened humanitarianism? Isn’t that democracy? No, democracy would be having a public referendum on spending money anywhere, on giving tens of billions of dollars in tax scams to the super rich, on handing $75 billion a year over to Lockheed Martin. Democracy would be a Ludlow Amendment (a public referendum before any war) — or compliance with the laws that forbid war. Democracy is not a corporate free-for-all limited only when it comes to “helping” anyone abroad.
The whole world needs food and water and housing. And the funds exist to give those things to the world including the United States. There is no need to be greedy.
The U.N. says $30 billion a year would end starvation on Earth. Take the latest $40 billion from war and put it into preventing starvation. The other $10 billion would be nearly enough to give the whole world (yes, including Michigan) clean drinking water. Getting greedy about money on behalf of a national flag is not just a little bit warlike, but also suggests a failure to grasp how much money goes into war. In the U.S. alone it’s over $1.25 trillion a year — enough to transform the lives of all of us in every country.
It’s also worth considering that the country responsible for providing the rest of the world (as well as itself) with basic services — rather than bases and weapons and trainers of oppressive thugs — would be far more protected from foreign attack than the resident of the world’s deepest bunker. The safest way to handle enemies is to not create them in the first place.
Our cry should not be “Spend the money on this little group of people!”
Our cry should be “Move the money from war and destruction to the needs of people and planet!”
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and U.S. Peace Prize Recipient.
Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
Help support DavidSwanson.org, WarIsACrime.org, and TalkWorldRadio.org by clicking here: http://davidswanson.org/donate.
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