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"what digby sez..."
Month: February 2007
Douglas Feith Tries The Swedish Penis Enlarger Defense
by tristero
Former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith on Fox News Sunday:
my office never said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Perhaps he has forgotten this leaked Feith memo, cited favorably by the Vice President, and published by the Weekly Standard:
“OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda–perhaps even for Mohamed Atta–according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. ….”
Never heard of the Swedish Penis Enlarger Defense?
[returning Austin’s personal property after reanimating him]
Quartermaster Clerk: One Swedish-made penis enlarger.
Austin Powers: [to Vanessa] That’s not mine.
Quartermaster Clerk: One credit card receipt for Swedish-made penis enlarger signed by Austin Powers.
Austin Powers: I’m telling ya baby, that’s not mine.
Quartermaster Clerk: One warranty card for Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, filled out by Austin Powers.
Austin Powers: I don’t even know what this is! This sort of thing ain’t my bag, baby.
Quartermaster Clerk: One book, “Swedish-made Penis Enlargers And Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby”, by Austin Powers.
Richard Cohen?
by digby
Deborah Howell takes WaPo blogger William Arkin to the woodshed:
Arkin apologized. He said he was “dead wrong” to use the word “mercenary,” that it “is an insult and pejorative, and it does not accurately describe the condition of the American soldier today. I sincerely apologize to anyone in the military who took my words literally.”
Readers usually take things literally. And an editor should have told him to take out the word. That’s what editors are for: They keep opinion writers from making fools of themselves.
Haha! That’s a good one.
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I Kinda Like It
by digby
From Duncan:
I can’t help but be reminded of just how lame the vast majority of the so-called liberal entertainment establishment was in the run up to the Iraq war. It wasn’t like there weren’t millions of people in the streets. Even 23 US Senators voted against the war. But as far as show business was concerned it was pretty much left to three country singers from Texas to take the slings and arrows all by themselves. It was not the industry’s finest hour.
I don’t want to give anything away to those who are watching on the West Coast, but let’s just say they are making amends tonight. About time.
C&L has the video here.
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Revenge Of The Republican Geeks
by digby
If you read nothing else tonight read this article in this week’s New Yorker profile of Rush Limbaugh’s great pal Joel Surnow, creator of the TV show “24.” It’s sad and laughable and frightening all at once.
I think you’ll especially like this part, since we’ve spent almost the entire day discussing Iran hereabouts:
Although he is a supporter of President Bush—he told me that “America is in its glory days”—Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An “isolationist” with “no faith in nation-building,” he thinks that “we could have been out of this thing three years ago.” After deposing Saddam Hussein, he argued, America should have “just handed it to the Baathists and . . . put in some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line but who’s not going to be aggressive to us.” In his view, America “is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don’t spoil them. That’s not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is.”
Surnow’s rightward turn was encouraged by one of his best friends, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-core conservative who, in 2006, wrote and produced “The Path to 9/11,” a controversial ABC miniseries that presented President Clinton as having largely ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda. (The show was denounced as defamatory by Democrats and by members of the 9/11 Commission; their complaints led ABC to call the program a “dramatization,” not a “documentary.”) Surnow and Nowrasteh met in 1985, when they worked together on “The Equalizer.” Nowrasteh, the son of a deposed adviser to the Shah of Iran, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where, like Surnow, he was alienated by the radicalism around him. He told me that he and Surnow, in addition to sharing an admiration for Reagan, found “L.A. a stultifying, stifling place because everyone thinks alike.” Nowrasteh said that he and Surnow regard “24” as a kind of wish fulfillment for America. “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”
The Baby Party strikes again. “Please have Secret Government Daddy quietly ‘take care of business’ or I’ll just die of fright!” And they admit to this embarrassing need for a big strong man to solve all their problems while Surnow refers to “foreigners” as children whom we musn’t “spoil.” Oh my god, what ridiculous people.
And, you can’t help but choke a little bit on the idea that the son of an advisor of the Shah of Iran is influencing Americans about the need for torture. Cyrus “SAVAK” Nowrasteh is quite a guy.
But, still, it’s just a TV show, right? Unfortunately, the article points out that this piece of shit is actually used by soldiers in Iraq for “ideas.” And the military isn’t all that happy about it:
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming…In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”
The meeting, which lasted a couple of hours, had been arranged by David Danzig, the Human Rights First official. Several top producers of “24” were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, “I just can’t sit in a room that long. I’m too A.D.D.—I can’t sit still.” He told the group that the meeting conflicted with a planned conference call with Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel. (Another participant in the conference call attended the meeting.) Ailes wanted to discuss a project that Surnow has been planning for months: the début, on February 18th, of “The Half Hour News Hour,” a conservative satirical treatment of the week’s news; Surnow sees the show as offering a counterpoint to the liberal slant of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
[…]
At other moments, the discussion was more strained. Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”
[…]
The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq. He told the show’s staff that DVDs of shows such as “24” circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, “People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen.” He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture “victim,” in a similar intimidation ploy. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture.
I’m not all that big a believer in the idea that sending bad “messages” to the troops should dictate what people in a free society are allowed to say or what the policy of the government should be. I think that “24” has its audience and that’s probably just the price we have to pay for living in a liberal democracy.
But I’m not sure I think that the highest reaches of government (who have made a fetish out of criticizing Americans for “sending the wrong message” to the troops,) should go this far, particularly when they are constantly telling the rest of us that we should STFU:
Last March, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, joined Surnow and Howard Gordon for a private dinner at Rush Limbaugh’s Florida home. The gathering inspired Virginia Thomas—who works at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank—to organize a panel discussion on “24.” The symposium, sponsored by the foundation and held in June, was entitled “ ‘24’ and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who participated in the discussion, praised the show’s depiction of the war on terrorism as “trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options.” He went on, “Frankly, it reflects real life.” Chertoff, who is a devoted viewer of “24,” subsequently began an e-mail correspondence with Gordon, and the two have since socialized in Los Angeles. “It’s been very heady,” Gordon said of Washington’s enthusiasm for the show. Roger Director, Surnow’s friend, joked that the conservative writers at “24” have become “like a Hollywood television annex to the White House. It’s like an auxiliary wing.”
That’s the sad part. Poor little Republican geeks, so desperate to be relevant in popular culture, so desperate to be tough guys. I think that simple observation pretty much explains everything.
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“Preserving All Our Options”
by digby
The article about Iran that tristero quotes below is full of interesting little tid-bits. Like this:
In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the “Axis of Evil.” Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush’s controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn’t ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan’s ringing denunciations of the “evil empire.”
Once again, Iran’s reformists were knocked back on their heels. “Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized,” says Adeli. “The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America’s intentions.” The Khameini aide concurs: “The Axis of Evil speech did not surprise the Supreme Leader. He never trusted the Americans.”
Ok. Let’s just unpack that bit. Bush didn’t want the world to know that he’d made up his mind to invade Iraq for no good reason, so his speech writers threw Iran and North Korea into the State of the Union address as the “Axis of Evil.” And Lil’ Junior thought it was like totally awesome because it sounded like Uncle Ronnie’s speech about the evil empire.
Many of us knew this at the time. I certainly rolled my eyes when I heard the phrase, recognizing both the absurdity of lumping these disparate nations together under the banner of “evil” (which was something out of a cheap horror movie) but I also knew that they were consciously evoking Reagan as a cheap political ploy. In fact, the whole “evil” rhetoric was Gerson’s patented fundamentalist dogwhistle nonsense designed to stoke the Christian Right base, a gargantuanly stupid thing to do when dealing with religious fanatics who are themselves using religion as a recruiting tool. But hey, they had an election to win.
So, it is not surprising that Iran was unnerved by Bush’s Christianist flag waving. Nonetheless, they came back to the US again:
It would be another war that nudged the two countries together again. At the beginning of 2003, as the Pentagon readied for battle against Iraq, the Americans wanted Tehran’s help in case a flood of refugees headed for the border, or if U.S. pilots were downed inside Iran. After U.S. tanks thundered into Baghdad, those worries eased. “We had the strong hand at that point,” recalls Colin Powell, who was secretary of State at the time. If anything, though, America’s lightning campaign made the Iranians even more eager to deal. Low-level meetings between the two sides had continued even after the Axis of Evil speech. At one of them that spring, Zarif raised the question of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a rabidly anti-Iranian militant group based in Iraq. Iran had detained a number of senior Qaeda operatives after 9/11. Zarif floated the possibility of “reciprocity”—your terrorists for ours.
The idea was brought up at a mid-May meeting between Bush and his chief advisers in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the White House basement. Riding high, Bush seemed to like the idea of a swap, says a participant who asked to remain anonymous because the meeting was classified. Some in the room argued that designating the militants as terrorists had been a mistake, others that they might prove useful against Iran someday. Powell opposed the handover for a different reason: he worried that the captives might be tortured. The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about “preserving all our options.” (Cheney declined to comment.) The MEK’s status remains unresolved.
Around this time what struck some in the U.S. government as an even more dramatic offer arrived in Washington—a faxed two-page proposal for comprehensive bilateral talks. To the NSC’s Mann, among others, the Iranians seemed willing to discuss, at least, cracking down on Hizbullah and Hamas (or turning them into peaceful political organizations) and “full transparency” on Iran’s nuclear program. In return, the Iranian “aims” in the document called for a “halt in U.S. hostile behavior and rectification of the status of Iran in the U.S. and abolishing sanctions,” as well as pursuit of the MEK.
An Iranian diplomat admits to NEWSWEEK that he had a hand in preparing the proposal, but denies that he was its original author. Asking not to be named because the topic is politically sensitive, he says he got the rough draft from an intermediary with connections at the White House and the State Department. He suggested some relatively minor revisions in ballpoint pen and dispatched the working draft to Tehran, where it was shown to only the top ranks of the regime. “We didn’t want to have an ‘Irangate 2’,” the diplomat says, referring to the secret negotiations to trade weapons for hostages that ended in scandal during Reagan’s administration. After Iran’s National Security Council approved the document (under orders from Khameini), a final copy was produced and sent to Washington, according to the diplomat.
The letter received a mixed reception. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage were suspicious. Armitage says he thinks the letter represented creative diplomacy by the Swiss ambassador, Tim Guldimann, who was serving as a go-between. “We couldn’t determine what [in the proposal] was the Iranians’ and what was the Swiss ambassador’s,” he says. He added that his impression at the time was that the Iranians “were trying to put too much on the table.” Quizzed about the letter in front of Congress last week, Rice denied ever seeing it. “I don’t care if it originally came from Mars,” Mann says now. “If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important as the two-page document” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971, indicating Mao Zedong’s interest in opening China.
A few days later bombs tore through three housing complexes in Saudi Arabia and killed 29 people, including seven Americans. Furious administration hard-liners blamed Tehran. Citing telephone intercepts, they claimed the bombings had been ordered by Saif al-Adel, a senior Qaeda leader supposedly imprisoned in Iran. “There’s no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld growled. Although there was no evidence the Iranian government knew of Adel’s activities, his presence in the country was enough to undermine those who wanted to reach out.
Powell, for one, thinks Bush simply wasn’t prepared to deal with a regime he thought should not be in power. As secretary of State he met fierce resistance to any diplomatic overtures to Iran and its ally Syria. “My position in the remaining year and a half was that we ought to find ways to restart talks with Iran,” he says of the end of his term. “But there was a reluctance on the part of the president to do that.” The former secretary of State angrily rejects the administration’s characterization of efforts by him and his top aides to deal with Tehran and Damascus as failures. “I don’t like the administration saying, ‘Powell went, Armitage went … and [they] got nothing.’ We got plenty,” he says. “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start’.”
I think the key here is this:
The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about “preserving all our options.”
It’s pretty clear what those options were. It wasn’t a secret even then, no matter how unbelievable it may seem that they would even attempt it:
November 20, 2001
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Eliot Cohen advocating the overthrow of the mullahs in Iran. Cohen writes: “First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the US should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the US government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.” [Wall Street Journal, 11/20/2001]
Soon the groundwork was being laid:
February 8, 2002
Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer meets with US Vice President Dick Cheney and tells him that Israel is concerned that Iran, which Israel believes will have nuclear weapons by 2005, represents a greater threat to Israel than Iraq. “The danger, as I see it, is from a Hezbollah-Iran-Palestinian triangle, with Iran leading this triangle and putting together a coalition of terror,” he tells Cheney. [Ha’aretz, 2/9/2002]
August 9, 2003
Newsday reports that according to a senior official and another source within the Bush administration, the “ultimate objective” of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and “a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.” The report says that the “immediate objective appeared to be to ‘antagonize Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them.’” It apparently is no secret within the administration, as Secretary of State Colin Powell has recently complained directly to the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, about Feith’s activities. [Newsday, 8/9/2003]
January 2005
The US Air Force begins flying sorties over Iran from its bases in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars so the US can develop “an electronic order of battle for Iran.” “We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them,” an unnamed administration official tells United Press International. [United Press International, 1/26/2005 Sources: Unnamed Bush administration officials] Washington initially denies the overflight reports. [Guardian, 1/29/2005]
January 2005
A Farsi-speaking former CIA officer says he was approached by neoconservatives in the Pentagon who asked him to go to Iran and oversee “MEK [Mujahedeen-e Khalq] cross-border operations” into Iran, which he refused to do. Commenting on the neoconservatives’ ambitions in Iran, the former officer says, “They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran.” He says their plans for Iran are “delusional.” “They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilize the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world’s problems are solved,” he says. [Guardian, 1/18/2005]
And the beat goes on. Today we are looking at a concerted PR campaign to implicate Iran in the Iraq war, a third carrier group is steaming to the Gulf and nobody believes a thing the US Government says.
And we watch as our democratic institutions seem to be incapable of hitting the brakes and I’m not sure I understand why. It was one thing after 9/11 for everyone to be caught up in the emotion of the moment. There is no such excuse now. The entire world knows now that the US is not only irrational but it is widely perceived as being incompetent. What could be more dangerous than having delusional megalomaniacs playing RISK at a time like this?
Here’s an example of what the administration is listening to now:
The opponents of military strikes against the mullahs’ weapons facilities say there are no guarantees that we can permanently destroy their weapons production. This is true. We can’t guarantee the results. But what we can do is demonstrate, to the mullahs and to others elsewhere, that even with these uncertainties, in a post-9/11 world the United States has red lines that will compel it to act. And one nonnegotiable red line is that we will not sit idly and watch a virulently anti-American terrorist-supporting rogue state obtain nukes. We will not be intimidated by threats of terrorism, oil-price spikes, or hostile world opinion. If the ruling clerical elite wants a head-on collision with a determined superpower, then that’s their choice.
Stirring words, I’m sure, to an embattled president whose codpiece is becoming more and more superfluous and to an unaccountable vice president with a messianic sense of mission. (That is exactly the schoolyard “strategic vision” he lives by.)
Apparently the clear history of the last six years isn’t enough for our media, though. They are still prey to administration propaganda:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisted again Friday that, despite persistent reports to the contrary circulating in Washington and around the world, the United States is not planning military action against Iran.
“I don’t know how many times the president, Secretary Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran,” an exasperated Gates told reporters at a NATO meeting in Spain. In fact, he said, the administration has consciously tried to “tone down” its rhetoric on the subject.
Similar statements in recent weeks by President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others follow a high-level policy assessment in January that U.S. and multilateral pressure on Tehran, to the surprise of many in the administration, might be showing signs of progress.
Officials highlighted growing internal public and political criticism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the reemergence, after months of public silence, of Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani. Larijani arrived in Munich yesterday for talks with European Union officials.
As a result, new talking points distributed to senior policymakers in the administration directed them to actively play down any suggestion of war planning.
Well now, I sure feel better don’t you?
I can’t help but wonder, however, why this wasn’t the lede instead of being buried nine paragraphs in:
Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 “the year of Iran” and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility. Hannah declined to be interviewed for this article.
As the Libby trial unfolds we see once again a picture of an extremely powerful Vice President who believes he can do anything.He does not even believe he answers to the president. Considering recent history, it is far more significant that John Hannah is telling people that an attack was a real possibility than it is that Condi’s sadly irrelevant State Department is trying to tamp down the rhetoric in public. Everything we have seen for the last six years shows that in these administration battles Cheney always wins. Watch what they do not what they say. They lie as easily as they breathe.
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This Time They Plan To Do It Right
by tristero
No, this time (meaning going to war with Iran, which very well could mean going to nuclear war with Iran, with your tax dollars being spent on a first strike), there’ll be no ambiguous, mysterious meetings that didn’t happen in Prague, but a clear-cut casus belli. This time, there’ll be heaps of dead Americans killed unambiguously by The Evildoers which we’ll splatter all over the news shows (tastefully cropped, of course, so that anyone who sees them won’t start to wonder what on earth they were doing in harm’s way in the first place).
And if those goddamm treacherous Iranians are too lazy to go out of their way to attack us for no good reason, well then, hell, we’re just gonna help make it right easy for them:
“They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. …
A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident’s spiraling into a crisis are higher than they’ve been in years.
The time to shut down Bush’s mad scheme to go to war with Iran is now. Call your Congresscritters and demand they act immediately to stop this insanity.
He Really Is The Stupidest Fucking Guy On The Planet
by tristero
Truly incredible. He actually thinks we’ll fall for this crap:
In a telephone interview yesterday, Feith emphasized the inspector general’s conclusion that his actions, described in the report as ‘inappropriate,’ were not unlawful. ‘This was not ‘alternative intelligence assessment,’ ‘ he said. ‘It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance.
My God, talk about a lack of remorse and contempt for the American people. As Kevin says:
Got that? He didn’t actually believe any of that stuff. He was just passing it along for giggles.
And while Feith and his gang continue pretend this was not a big deal, over 3100 American soldiers have died to date, and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis. Due in great part, directly to the lies Feith concocted and spread, lies which were used to take this country into an illegal, immoral, unnecessary, counterproductive, and thoroughly catastrophic war.
Outrageous.
We The People – Part OneAbsolutely Disgusting
by poputonian
It took a long time for Samuel Adams to come to the surface of Boston politics, even though his father was a powerful figure in the caucuses and the General Court. One reason for the delayed “arrival” is that Adams is almost alone in history as a man who sincerely desired anonymity. His major writings were signed not “Adams” but “Determinatus,” “Candidus,” “Vindex,” “Populus,” “Alfred,” “Valerius Poplicola,” “T.Z.,” “Shippen,”, “a Bostonian,” “a Tory,” “E.A.,” “a Layman,” “an Impartialist,” “a chatterer,” — even later, when he could have gained great credit by acknowledging his full opus, he would not take the trouble. The writings had done their work; that was what he wanted. He often ended his letters with the command “Burn this,” and he took his own advice by consigning nearly all his correspondence files to the flames, leaving behind a relatively small amount in the hands of others or in public print.
…
In the eighteen months from December 1770 to June 1772 he turned out 36 political essays for the [Boston] Gazette, an output not matched by any other writer of the time.
———–
[Boston Gazette, October 7, 1771]I Think it necessary the publick should be inform’d, that his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor of this Province, has lately receiv’d, a warrant from the Lords of the Treasury in England, for the Sum of Twenty-two Hundred and fifty Pounds Sterling for his Services for one year and a half, being at the rate of Fifteen Hundred Sterling or Two Thousand L. M. per Ann. – The payment is to be made out of the Commissioners Chest; wherein are reposited the Treasures that are daily collected, tho’ perhaps insensibly, from the Earnings and Industry of the honest Yeomen, Merchants and Tradesmen, of this continent, against their Consent; and if his friends speak the truth, against his own private judgment. – This treasure is to be appropriated according to the act of parliament so justly and loudly complain’d of by Americans, for the support of civil government, the payment of the charges of the administration of justice, and the defence of the colonies: And it may hereafter be made use of, for the support of standing armies and ships of war; episcopates & their numerous ecclesiastical retinue; pensioners, placemen and other jobbers, for an abandon’d and shameless ministry; hirelings, pimps, parasites, panders, prostitutes and whores –
…
~ Candidus
Samuel Adams, hiding behind the pseudonym of Candidus, complained about paying taxes to support an army occupying his own town, and called the Governor of Massachusetts a whore.
That is absolutely disgusting. Adams should have been barred from the Revolution.
In the article, Candidus struck at the fact that one of the Boston born, now appointed and paid by the Crown, was on the path to tyranny:
But the people, and a great part, I hope, of the clergy of this enlightened country, have understanding enough to know, that a Governor independent of the people for his support, as well as his political Being, is in fact, a MASTER; and may be, and probably, such is the nature of uncontroulable power, soon will be a TYRANT. It will be recorded by the faithful historian, for the information of posterity, that the first American Pensioner – the first independent Governor of this province, was, not a stranger, but one “born and educated” in it – Not an ANDROSS or a RANDOLPH; but that cordial friend to our civil constitution -that main Pillar of the Religion and the Learning of this country; the Man, upon whom she has, (I will not say wantonly) heaped all the Honors she had to bestow – HUTCHINSON!! –
The almost singular skill of Samuel Adams was in undermining the hierarchy, and his singular focus was to shift power to the people.
On a Sunday morning in the fall of 1803 he died. He was eighty-two, and John Adams said he had been a “weeping, helpless object of compassion for years.” He died at home, trying to whisper something to his wife, some few words that she could not make out. A friend, William Bentley, tried to sum him up that day in an entry in his diary. “He was feared by his enemies,” Bentley wrote, “but too secret to be loved by his friends.” He went on:
He could see far into men, but not into opinions. He could be sure of himself on all occasions, and he did more by what men thought of him, than what he discovered to them. His religion and manner were from our ancestors. His politics from two maxims, rulers should have little, the people much.
Saturday Night At The Movies
Children of Morons: Mike Judge Does America
By Dennis Hartley
If the 2007 Super Bowl commercials and ever-escalating voter participation in shows like “American Idol” are any indication, the dumbed-down “future” of America depicted in Mike Judge’s lightweight allegory, Idiocracy
Army librarian Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) loves his cush job. It’s the perfect gig, because, as he tells a fellow soldier- “No one ever comes here” (I think I just heard every librarian reading this review say “No kidding.”). Much to Joe’s chagrin, however, his gravy train is derailed when he is “volunteered” as a guinea pig for a top secret military experiment.
Joe is assigned to spend one year in a suspended animation “pod”, a process the military is testing for typically nefarious reasons. Joe is not alone, however. A hooker named Rita from “the private sector” (SNL’s Maya Rudolph) is also enlisted (don’t ask.)
When our intrepid pair finally awake, it’s a tad more than a year later. After a series of silly events, they in fact find themselves in the year 2505 (whoops!). Does hilarity ensue?
Well…the America of 2505 is not so much dystopian, as it is dys-stupido. As the droll narrator explains, evolution has favored those who reproduce the most (you know…morons!). The #1 TV show is called “Ow My Balls”, and the #1 film is “Ass” (kinda says it all). Anyone who conjugates a verb or speaks in complete sentences is accused of talking “like a fag”. In a nutshell, this is what would happen if the entire U.S. gene pool was whittled down exclusively to the descendants of Gallagher’s fan base.
If you’ve surrendered to the premise at this point in the film, you won’t flinch when the President, a former WWF champion (not such a stretch, considering former and current guvs Ventura and Schwarzenegger) ends up appointing Joe his Secretary of the Interior.
Judge isn’t really saying anything new here, beyond pointing out that we live in a dumbed-down culture (yawn). There are a few inspired moments; particularly the keen observation that the accelerated reduction of America’s average IQ seems to be directly proportionate to the ever-increasing square footage of the average WalMart.
There is a bit of irony I can’t get past; it was Mike Judge who created the “Beavis and Butthead” show, which one might argue played its own part in the “dumbing down” of a generation that came of age in the 90’s. (Despite the satirical intentions, I think B & B ended up as role models for some, not unlike those cowboys who completely missed the joke and merrily sang along with Borat’s “Throw the Jew Down The Well”…discuss!)
What a stupid country: Borat – Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
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