The man who established the popular progressive blog DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas, has written a new book: American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. It examines the similarities between Islamic extremists and the American rightwing. Markos already wasn’t very popular in conservative, neocon circles. Maybe because of his Greek name or because he is a homosexual but certainly because he has served in the US army, which most neocons can’t say. But after publishing this book he’s not that popular in some progressive circles too. Many liberals have strongly condemned the book on the ground that it is offensive and misguided to suggest that American conservatives are comparable to Muslim Terrorists by which they mean the Taliban. Glenn Greenwald finds some of these objections both absurd and revealing.

Rightwing constantly suggesting a liberal sympathy with Islamic Terrorists

In what universe is it “obscene” to compare the architects of the Iraq War, the torture regime, and endless War with Muslims “to killers and terrorists”? The comparison is true by definition. The people who launched the attack on Iraq are guilty of an aggressive war — what the Nuremberg prosecutors condemned as the “kingpin crime” that “holds together” all other war crimes — which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, turned millions more into refugees, and destroyed an entire nation. 
[read on] (more…)

Heel toepasselijk citeerde president Bush eens in een toespraak Graham Greene’s klassieke Vietnam-boek ‘The Quiet American’. Dat boek gaat over hoe de weg naar de hel geplaveid is met goede bedoelingen. En Irak is niet anders dan Vietnam, meent ook Glenn Greenwald.

De Engelse historicus H. Arthur Scott Trask in 2003.
“Uit het boek blijkt hoe weinig Amerikanen hebben geleerd van de geschiedenis. Hoe hun Messiaanse idee over democratie niet is veranderd in vijftig jaar. Onwetende, arrogante Amerikanen zoals Pyle, in Greene’s boek, storten zich op de wereld om die te verbeteren maar laten slechts een spoor van lijken, verminkte kinderen, verwoeste landen en nieuwe, meer verbeten vijanden achter. Hoe lang moet de wereld dit moorddadige idealisme nog tolereren?

President Bush, die zich heeft gedrukt voor de militaire dienst in Vietnam, zei verder in zijn speech voor de Veterans of Foreign Wars, dat de les van Vietnam is dat ‘we ons niet terug moeten trekken uit Irak’.

Amerikaans historicus Robert Dallek:
Het is niet te bevatten, welke onzin hier door de president wordt uitgekraamd. We zijn tien jaar in Vietnam geweest. We hebben meer bommen op dat land gegooid dan in de hele Tweede Wereldoorlog. Er zijn 58.700 Amerikanen gesneuveld. En we konden de Vietnamezen niet onze wil opleggen.
Wat suggereert Bush? Dat we niet hard genoeg hebben gevochten, niet lang genoeg zijn gebleven, niet genoeg bommen hebben gegooid? Dat is nonsens, een verdraaiing van de werkelijkheid.
Nu zijn we langer in Irak, dan we gevochten hebben in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Het is een ramp. Dit is niets anders dan een cynische poging van Bush de schuld bij de tegenstanders van de oorlog te leggen. Maar deze ramp is het gevolg van de invasie, niet van de terugtocht.”

The “nobody-could-have-known” excuse and Iraq

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the “nobody-could-have-known” excuse. Each time something awful occurs — the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration — one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they “could have known” what was to happen: ”I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” Condoleezza Rice infamously said on May 16, 2002, despite multiple FBI and intelligence documents warning of exactly that. One finds identical excuses for each contemporary American disaster. Robert Gibbs just invoked the same false excuse: that “nobody” knew the depth of the financial and unemployment crisis early last year.
[read on] (more…)

Het is moeilijk te geloven dat de Verenigde Staten van Amerika bij de tussentijdse verkiezingen in november de macht in de gekozen volksvertegenwoordiging zal teruggeven aan de Republikeinen. Toch is het heel goed mogelijk, als je de peilingen moet geloven. En dan ook nog aan een Grand Old Party (GOP) in een van haar meest primitieve vormen, schrijft Glenn Greenwald. De partij die de VS in het laatste decennium vrijwel heeft verwoest door een mengsel van extreme corruptie, roekeloosheid en wetteloosheid. Maar niets is dommer dan het onderschatten van het krachtige mengsel van economische onderdrukking en het opstoken van racistische en etnische haatdragendheid.
Charles Krauthammer, werkzaam voor Fox News, doet daar uiteraard volop aan mee in een column vol leugens in de Washington Post, vroeger een respectabele krant.

Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity

Charles Krauthammer (Fox News), The Washington Post, today:

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

Yahoo! News, August 12, 2010:

A new CNN poll has found that most Americans think gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married. . . . As polling-statistics blogger Nate Silver points out, the margin of error [as well as the poll’s status as the first to find majority approval] means we can’t assume that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, but it is “no longer safe to say that opposition to same-sex marriage is the majority position . . . . “

That particular factual inaccuracy, which I am 100% certain will never be corrected by the Post, is the least of the problems with Krauthammer’s column today. 
[read on] (more…)

Nu de Verenigde Staten van Amerika ook Jemen aan het clusterbombarderen is, zit er misschien wel een tweede Nobelprijs voor de Vrede in voor Barack Obama.
Glenn Greenwald ontgaat totaal de logica van het Amerikaanse veiligheidsbeleid van het laatste decennium. Ach, welk normaal mens niet eigenlijk. Het anti-Amerikaanse sentiment en radicalisme groeit in Jemen en om dat probleem aan te pakken, gaat de VS ze bombarderen met vliegende killer robots? Want niets helpt zo goed om anti-Amerikaanse sentimenten te verminderen als het afslachten van burgers met clusterbommen. Je hoeft alleen maar naar het laatste decennium te kijken om te zien hoe goed dat werkt.

An exciting new Muslim country to drone attack

Could Barack Obama become the first person in history to win the Nobel Peace Prize two consecutive years? It is hard to dispute the premise that awarding him the Prize this year would be every bit as justifiable as last year’s award. Fresh off his Nobel-winning escalation of the war in Afghanistan, we now have this monument to world peace:

Amnesty International, June 7, 2010:

Amnesty International has released images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that carried cluster munitions, apparently taken following an attack on an alleged al-Qa’ida training camp in Yemen that killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children.
[read on] (more…)

Wat er in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika gebeurt is van belang voor de hele wereld. Niet alleen omdat de VS het belangrijkste land ter wereld is en de Amerikaanse president ook een beetje de president is van de Westerse wereld, maar ook omdat de VS vaak een voorloper is op ideologisch gebied. De uit Amerika afkomstige neoconservatieve denkwereld mag dan gefaald hebben op alle fronten, nu lijkt er iets voor in de plaats te komen dat nog erger is. Teabaggers, proto-fascisten, hebben het hoogste woord in de VS en dringen naar voren in de Republikeinse Partij. Het is meer dan een strijd tussen conservatief en progressief, tussen religieus en verlicht. Het gaat tussen rede en angst, tusen chaos en anarchie. Tussen de leugens van de Rush Limbaugh’s (de BP ramp is het gevolg van ‘eco-terrorists’) en de Glenn Beck’s (’Obama has a deep seated hatred for white people’) van Fox News en de werkelijkheid van de redelijke rest. Zie dit verhaal op Daily Kos. Hannibal staat voor de poort!

Hannibal ad portas
‘ The ideas put forward by men like Glenn Beck are not “just like fascism,” they simply are fascism’

DailyKos - There is a clash of civilizations going on, and it has nothing to do with the Burlington Coat Factory Community Center. It’s more fundamental than Christian vs. Muslim. It’s reason vs. fear. Civilization vs. anarchy.
That clash is happening right here in America.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t believe that being a conservative equates with being evil. Over the course of our nation’s history, many conservative figures have raised questions deserving of an answer. They framed their issues with ideas that were testable. They contributed to the national conversation in a meaningful, beneficial way. They acted not just out of raw self-interest, but with sincere desire to do what they believed best for our nation and its people. [read on] (more…)

Special attention please for this very funny cartoon by almost US president John McCain.

by john mccain, usa

Think Progress - The right-wing group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) has announced that it will be hosting a rally against the proposed Cordoba House Islamic community center on September 11.
The confirmed list of speakers includes former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, Andrew Breitbart, and, notably, the far-right Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders. “Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,” Wilders told the Guardian in 2009, “the ideology of a retarded culture.”
In the past, Wilders’ extremism has been condemned by conservatives such as Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and even Glenn Beck, who called Wilders “fascist.” It’s a clear sign of how far the Republicans have shifted to the right and embraced Islamophobia as a political tool that movement figures like Gingrich, Bolton, and Breitbart now have no problem sharing a stage with Wilders.

Ik wil u dit commentaar op bovenstaand stukje op het blog Think Progress niet onthouden. Van Leftside Annie:

“I’ve never been harmed by a Muslim – and yet, I have literally been harmed several times by conservative “Christians;” I’ve received death threats, I’ve been told I should commit suicide, my car was vandalized, several times they tried to run me off the road, one of them threatened to send me “a surprise” and told me that I should be afraid to open my door, they reported me to DHS, and they tried to cause me to lose my job.
I’m not scared of Muslims. I’m scared of these conservative teabagging fascists.”

Toen Glenn Greenwald vijf jaar geleden begon te bloggen, kwam ik per toeval een artikel van deze voormalige advocaat tegen. Ik vond hem gelijk briljant. Toen was ik één van de weinige lezers van zijn blog Unclaimed Territory. Nu is hij beroemd in de VS. En terecht. Greenwald is van zijn eigen blog naar een betaalde baan op de bekende internetsite Salon gegaan. Hier maakt hij gehakt van een neoconservatieve ‘journalist’ die zoals een echte neocon betaamt oproept om een ander land te bombarderen. In dit geval betreft het Iran dat, net als het land dat twee buurlanden bezet houdt, atoombommen wil.

Does the past record of journalists matter?

The Atlantic’s James Fallows, whose analysis I often find worthwhile, yesterday defended Jeffrey Goldberg and his Iran article from unidentified critics (emphasis added):

Is this article warmongering? Or to put it more delicately, is it meant to condition the American public and politicians to the prospect of an attack on Iran? Many people have portrayed it as such. I disagree. I think that those reading the piece as a case for bombing Iran are mainly reacting to arguments about the preceding war.
[read on] (more…)

“Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President. One hopes it is the same half.” - Gore Vidal

US cable network Fox News has the oldest audience of all networks. The average viewer last season of Fox News was 65 years old, according to Nielsen. Heck, it’s viewers are even older than viewers of Hallmark Channel, Military Channel and Golf Channel.
Perhaps the reason why viewers tend to leave Fox News on all day racking up hours of big viewing numbers is because they can’t actually change the channel?

According to conservative Christians in the United States Einstein’s theory of relativity is a mathematical system that is heavily promoted by liberals. And it’s not true. The anti-science position of the American right - no evolution, no global warming - is going to extremes.

The Onion: The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.

However, as this entry in Conservapedia shows, you can only out-crazy the right for so long. For people who don’t know the American Christians well … this is not a joke, Conservatives believe this.

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.
[read on] (more…)

Liz Cheney asked president Obama on Fox News to do what her family knows best: bombing. This time it is Wikileaks that should be obliterated because it released 92,000 files on the Afghan war. Dick Cheney’s daughter also suggested that Australian founder Julian Assange of Wikileaks has ‘blood on his hands’ and should be waterboarded until he confesses to his leaking.

“Julian Assange’s effort was to change course for the US policy in Afghanistan. He was unsuccessful in that. He does clearly have blood on his hands potentially for the people whose names were in those documents who helped the US and I think that’s something he will have to live with now,” Cheney told Fox News’ Chris Wallace Sunday.
“I would really like to see President Obama to move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that website down. I would like to see him move to shut it down ourselves if Iceland won’t do it. I would like to see them move aggressively to prosecute Mr. Assange and certainly ensure that he never again gets a visa to enter the United States,” said Cheney.

In a recent interview with the right-wing Christian Zionist Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes shared his view that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should threaten to use nuclear weapons against Iran as a means of “applying pressure” on the United States.
“I think it’s realistic for the Israelis to attack and do real damage,” Pipes said. “Now, what constitutes success, I’m not exactly sure. There are many, many questions“:
[read on] (more…)

Bush-enabler Jay Bybee regrets he authorised the torture of thousands because of all the horrible things it did to his family. ”It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family.” 
Remember… What Jay Bybee did caused countless detainees to be subjected to systematized, medieval torture techniques designed to permanently break their mind and spirit. Innocent men spent years wasting away in a cage, with no due process of any kind, subjected to horrific and life-destroying abuse because of what Bybee authorized. But the only victim Bybee recognizes in all of this is himself, and the only “regret” he has is the self-pitying objection that the dark, ugly and destructive work he did caused him to be subjected to some criticisms. Glenn Greenwald:

Jay Bybee’s sociopathic self-absorption

The New York Times has an article today on Jay Bybee, the torture-authorizing Bush OLC lawyer and current judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The focus of the article is Bybee’s recent Congressional testimony that several of the torture tactics used by the CIA were never approved by the Justice Department — which means they should fall outside the scope of the Obama DOJ’s immunity shield from prosecution — but it was the last passage that I think is most noteworthy (h/t reader rg):
[read on] (more…)

Nog weer eens een voorbeeld van de doorzichtige en leugenachtige wijze van een neocon aan het werk. Nu legt een supporter van Bush uit dat Amerikaanse Joden het zogenaamd niet meer in president Obama zien zitten vanwege zijn onafhankelijkere politiek ten opzichte van Israel. Nonsens! Onbegrijpelijk dat deze gefaalde ideologen nog steeds een forum hebben in de Verenigde Staten waarop ze hun leugens kunnen spuien, meent Glenn Greenwald.

Marc Thiessen and the myth of the American Jewish voter

When The Washington Post hired torture advocate and low-level Bush propagandist Marc Thiessen as an Op-Ed columnist, it got exactly what it apparently wanted: a regular dose of falsehood-filled neoconservative tripe. But even by his own lowly standards, Thiessen outdoes himself today by hauling out one of the neocon Right’s most disproven though still-favorite myths:  that Jewish American voters are about to abandon Democratic politicians en masse because of their supposed lack of devotion to Israel. The Right spent all of 2008 spreading the myth that Obama had a “Jewish problem” because of his perceived unreliability on Israel, only for Obama to receive close to 8 out of 10 Jewish votes, even more than John Kerry received in 2004. That’s because the dirty little secret of neocons is that the vast majority of Jewish American voters reject their worldview. Undeterred, Thiessen today goes back to that discredited well, blaming Obama’s alleged hostility toward Israel and Netanyahu for this claimed development:
[read on] (more…)

On Sunday, Octavia Nasr — CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs — acknowledged the death of Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by tweeting:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot..

Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings. But Nasr’s comment was enough to spark fierce outrage from the various precincts of the neocon blog/twittersphere, who went after Nasr for her egregious failure to reduce Fadlallah to an anti-Israel, anti-American terrorist bogeyman.

Responding to the uproar, Nasr wrote, “It was an error of judgment for me to write such a simplistic comment and I’m sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all”:
[read on] (more…)

De neoconservatieve Jeffrey Goldberg heeft gereageerd op een stuk van Glenn Greenwald, hier ook op drasties. Greenwald zet in dat stuk op een rijtje waarin Goldberg het in het verleden fout heeft gehad, zeg maar zo’n beetje alles dus. 
In een reactie zegt Goldberg dat Greenwald eerst maar eens, net als hij, naar Koerdistan moet reizen om uit te vinden hoe fijn de Koerden de verwoesting van Irak vinden. Dan pas mag Greenwald oordelen.
Vervolgens gaan ook andere neoconservatieven zich er mee bemoeien. Ze stellen dat Greenwald de bezetting van Sudetenland door de Nazi’s vergelijkbaar vindt met de bezetting van Irak door George W. Bush. Lees hier hoe dom en leugenachtig allemaal.

The universality of war propaganda

Jeffrey Goldberg responded yesterday to my post detailing his long list of journalistic malfeasance by telling me that he and the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kuridstan would like me to travel there to hear how much the Kurds appreciate the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Leaving aside the complete non sequitur that is his response — how does that remotely pertain to Goldberg’s granting of anonymity to his friends to smear people they don’t like or the serial fear-mongering fabrications he spread about the Saddam threat prior to the invasion? – I don’t need to travel to Kurdistan to know that many Kurds, probably most, are happy that the U.S. attacked Iraq. For that minority in Northern Iraq, what’s not to like? [read on] (more…)

This weekend President Obama attended the G-20 Summit on international economic cooperation in Toronto. Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann fears that the 20 countries were really working to set up “a one world government.” In an interview on Scott Hennen’s radio show today, Bachman declared that “President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy”:

BACHMANN: What really concerned me was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that we don’t want to see one country’s economy doing better than another. What? This is the U.S. Treasury Secretary? We don’t want to see Zimbabwe’s economy do better than the United States? Aren’t we supposed to be about the United States and making sure that our economy can be the greatest in the world. If you look at the G20, what they’re trying to do is bind together the world’s economies. Look how that played out in the European Union when they bound all of those nations economies together and one of the smallest economies, Greece, when they got into trouble, that one little nation is bringing down the entire EU. Well, President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy where all of our nations come together in a global economy. I don’t want the United States to be in a global economy where, where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe. I can’t, we can’t necessarily trust the decisions that are being made financially in other countries.

Matt Yglesias: “The existence of a global economy in which events outside our borders impact us is not something Barack Obama dreamed up, and the idea that having world leaders gather for occasional meetings constitutes a ‘one world government’ is insane.”
[read on] (more…)

Glenn Greenwald gaat weer eens in op de belabberde staat van de pers in de Verenigde Staten. Hier naar aanleiding van de neoconservatieve journalist Jeffery Goldberg die in zijn opruiende stukken vrijwel altijd fout zat - Saddam Hoessein en Al Qaeda werkten samen voor 9/11 - maar toch nog een forum heeft in de VS.

The Jeffrey Goldberg Media

In a stunning display of self-unawareness, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg pointed to last week’s forced “resignation” by Dave Weigel from The Washington Post as evidence that the Post, “in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.” Goldberg then solemnly expressed hope that “this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.” Numerous commentators immediately noted the supreme and obvious irony that Goldberg, of all people, would anoint himself condescending arbiter of journalistic standards, given that, as one of the leading media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq, he compiled a record of humiliating falsehood-dissemination in the run-up to the war that rivaled Judy Miller’s both in terms of recklessness and destructive impact. [read on] (more…)

Minister van Defensie Ehud Barak zei dat er in Gaza maar één persoon is die humanitaire hulp nodig heeft. De gevangen gehouden Israelische soldaat Gilad Shalit.
De neoconservatieve Amerikaan Jay Nordlinger schrijft dat Gaza net is als de dictaturen in Cuba en China waar het Rode Kruis geen toegang krijgt tot gevangenen. Volgens deze neoconservatief “zou daartegen in Europese en Amerikaanse steden massaal worden gedemonstreerd als Gilad Shalit geen Israelier zou zijn.”
Gelukkig hebben we Glenn Greenwald. 
Waar waren die demonstraties dan? Zijn eigen land de VS heeft namelijk precies hetzelfde gedaan als Cuba, China en Gaza. Te weten, het Rode Kruis de toegang ontzeggen tot (niet Israelische) gevangenen? Weet je nog Nordlinger, toen jullie aan de macht waren via de stroman George W. Bush.
Diens vader George H.W. Bush zei ooit dit nadat de Amerikaanse marine een Iraans passagiersvliegtuig met 300 inzittenden uit de lucht had geschoten: “I will never apologize for the United States of America, I don’t care what the facts are.”

American right-wing self-delusion

National Review’s Jay Nordlinger cites a truly repellent (and false) comment made this week by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “A million and a half people are living in Gaza, but only one of them is really in need of humanitarian aid,” Barak said. Nordlinger points out that Barak was referring to Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held hostage for years by Hamas, which refuses to permit the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to him. After observing that neither “the Cuban dictatorship or Chinese dictatorship permit the Red Cross to see prisoners,” Nordlinger then claims — with the needy victimization that typifies the Right — that “there’d be mass demonstrations in [Shalit’s] behalf all over Europe, and on American streets, too” if “Shalit were other than Israeli.” In other words, Nordlinger believes that the Western World would never tolerate the denial of ICRC access to detainees except when the detainee is Israeli.
I’m asking this literally: is Nordlinger ignorant of the fact that the United States of America denied ICRC access to non-Israeli prisoners for years during the prior administration? [read on] (more…)

CIA-artsen hebben onder president George W. Bush medische experimenten uitgevoerd op gevangenen. De proeven werden verricht om martelmethodes als het suggereren van verdrinking (waterboarding) te verbeteren. Dat schrijft mensenrechtenorganisatie Physicians for Human Rights in een vandaag vrijgegeven rapport. Geert-Jan Knoops, hoogleraar internationaal strafrecht: ”Het verbaast me, omdat na de Tweede Wereldoorlog medische experimenten op gevangenen zijn afgezworen. Er blijken zoutoplossingen te zijn gebruikt waardoor de verdrinkingsdood kan worden uitgesteld.”
Hier de reactie van Glenn Greenwald op dat bericht. 

President Obama is not only protecting repugnant crimes and the criminals who committed them, but also ensuring that they will occur again.

Physicians for Human Rights yesterday released a report documenting (while relying on heavily redacted material) that “medical professionals who were involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects engaged in forms of human research and experimentation in violation of medical ethics and domestic and international law.” To those paying close attention, the evidence suggesting that this occurred has long been clear. Today, The New York Times Editorial Page said this:
read on>> (more…)

Vice President Dick Cheney was the big boss of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. Democrat senator Lautenberg found that Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in 2004/2005, RAW STORY can reveal. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney’s options — worth $241,498 a year ago — are now valued at more than $8 million. The former CEO of the oil and gas services juggernaut, Cheney has pledged to give proceeds to charity.

Liz Cheney sticks up for Halliburton: ‘I don’t know what planet you live on’

This morning on ABC This Week, Arianna Huffington brought up the role the Bush administration played in creating a regulatory system “full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies they’re supposed to be overseeing,” especially when it comes to the oil industry. Indeed, a 2008 report by the Interior Department’s Inspector General found that workers at the Minerals Management Service were “partying, having sex, using drugs and accepting gifts and ski trips and golf outings from energy company representatives with whom they did government business.” She then tried to talk about the role Halliburton, the energy giant formerly run by Dick Cheney, has in the oil spill, but she was soon cut off by Liz Cheney, who rushed to defend her dad and the corporation:

HUFFINGTON: Right here, we have the poster child of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism. Halliburton involved in this, and we haven’t said about that. They after all were responsible for cementing the well. Here’s Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars –

CHENEY: Arianna, I don’t know what planet you live on, but that’s not –
read on>> (more…)

Representative Alan Grayson (D) about the new book by the creators of the popular website Crooks and Liars and good friends of drasties:

Over the Cliff - How the Election of Barack Obama Drove the American Right Insane

Rep. Alan Grayson:
At their hugely popular website ‘Crooks and Liars,’ John Amato and David Neiwert have helped to expose the fact that there is no conservative party in America any more. They show that the right wingers are not conservatives, they are anarchists.
The only law the right wing believes in is the Law of the Jungle. No schools, no hospitals, no job programs, no nothing. Their idea of nirvana is Mogadishu. See it there, at ‘Crooks and Liars,’ and read it here.

Dit is echt voor het eerst dat JdeW met groot genoegen uitkijkt naar het gebruik van bunkerbusters. Ik bedoel, het hoeft toch niet beslist een atoombom te zijn? Een paar goed geplaatste superbommen kunnen wellicht het boorgat in elkaar drukken en/of zoveel zand verplaatsen dat het boorgat afgesloten wordt. En er komt geen radioactief materiaal vrij. Kom op Oilbama, laat zien dat je niet onder doet voor de Bushmen: Shock and Awe that oil well into submission!

how the russians did it

Nuking the oilspill is becoming a serious option!
Oilman Matt Simmons - chairman of Simmons & Company International, a prominent oil-industry insider - said the US government should immediately take the effort to plug the leak out of the hands of BP and put the military in charge.
“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapons system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” he said.
His idea echoes that of a Russian newspaper that earlier this month suggested the US detonate a small nuclear bomb to seal the oil beneath the sea. Komsomoloskaya Pravda argued in an editorial that Russia had successfully used nuclear weapons to seal oil spills on five occasions in the past.

The video is a pretty decent overview of how the Russians have tackled blown wells with nuclear devices, but it doesn’t really look at the ecological price attached to detonating a nuclear device in an ecologically sensitive area, or how to contain the toxic waste generated by such an explosion.
David Neiwert wrote about this awhile ago, and some of the comments really sent chills down my spine. continue reading»

George W. Bush: “The Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.” 

Oliver Stone’s new documentary South of the Border, which interviews several left-wing leaders of Latin American countries, has unearthed a startling new allegation from Argentina’s former president Néstor Kirchner. During his interview with Stone, Kirchner said he once discussed global economic problems with former President George W. Bush. The former Argentine president says that when he suggested a new Marshall Plan, referring to the WW II-era European reconstruction plan, Bush “got angry” and suggested that “the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats.” Instead, Kirchner says, Bush suggested that “the best way to revitalize the economy is war”:

KIRCHNER: I said that a solution for the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war. And that the United States has grown stronger with war.
STONE: War, he said that?
KIRCHNER: He said that. Those were his exact words.
STONE: Is he suggesting that South America go to war?
KIRCHNER: Well, he was talking about the United States: ‘The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.’ He said it very clearly.

It is worth noting that despite the prosecution of two major wars, there was very minimal net job growth during Bush’s tenure as president. And of course, he bequeathed an economy that suffered massive job losses in his wake.

Ieder weldenkend mens weet dat George W. Bush verantwoordelijk is voor alle ellende heden ten dage in de Verenigde Staten: de oorlogen, de recessie, de misdaad, de olievervuiling in de Golf van Mexico, dat Oprah weer dik is. Met hulp van de neocons, het is allemaal wetenschappelijk bewezen.
En, laten we er geen doekjes om winden, ook voor de rotzooi in de rest van de wereld. Eigenaardig dan ook dat er toch mensen zijn die het interessant vinden om te discussieren over deze schuldvraag. Zie dit stuk op Crooks and Liars.

Is Bush culpable in Gulf oil spill? Obama points to ‘corrupt practices.’ Foxheads bemoan ‘blame game’ — aka reality

It’s funny how right-wing talkers and their Beltway Village cohort really hate it when you point out how the lax regulatory oversight that resulted in the horrific Gulf oil spill originated in the Bush/Cheney administration.

Today at President Obama’s press conference, it was Villager Chip Reid’s turn to be all offended:

REID: Secondly with regard to the Minerals Management Service, Secretary Salazar yesterday basically blamed the Bush administration for the cozy relationship there.

read on>> (more…)

The birthers argue that Barack Obama is not born in the United States of America and therefore not a legitimate president of the U.S.A.:

“Hawaii, the state where President Obama was born, has done everything they can to debunk this myth that he wasn’t born in America,” Clinton said. “They’ve done everything but blow up his birth certificate, put it in neon lights and hang it on the dome in the Capitol.”
“But 45 percent of registered Republicans still believe that he is serving unconstitutionally,” Clinton insisted, though he did not identify the poll.
“Why?” he asked. “Because they’ve been told that by the only place they go to get information.”

Het meest agressieve land van de wereld is zonder twijfel de Verenigde Staten van Amerika. Het voert op dit moment oorlogen in Irak en Afghanistan en als het aan de neocons ligt binnenkort ook in Iran. Is dat een onderwerp tijdens de aanstaande tussentijdse verkiezingen voor de Senaat en het Huis, vraagt Glenn Greenwald zich af.
Nee dus. Het zijn dan ook geen Republikeinse oorlogen meer, het zijn ook de oorlogen van de Democraten. Gevolg: einde debat!

Glenn Greenwald: Thanks to Fred Hiatt and his friends, war is basically the permanent American condition: war is who we are and what we do as a nation. We’re essentially a war fighting state. We have been at “war” the entire last decade (as well as largley non-stop for the decades which preceded it), and continue now to be at “war” with no end in sight. That’s clearly true of our specific wars (in Afghanistan). And, worse, the way in which The War, more broadly, has been defined (i.e., against Islamic extremism/those who wish to harm Americans) makes it highly likely that it will never end in our lifetime. The decree that we are “at war” has been repeated over and over for a full decade, drumbed into our heads from all directions without pause, sanctified as one of those Bipartisan Orthodoxies that nobody can dispute upon pain of having one’s Seriousness credentials immediately and irrevocably revoked. With war this normalized, is it really surprising that nobody debates it any longer? It’d be like debating the color of the sky.

The absence of debate over war

The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt ponders how little attention our various wars received during the primary campaigns that were just conducted: ”You would hardly know, from following this year’s election campaign or the extensive coverage of last week’s primaries, that America is at war… those wars, and the wisdom of committing to or withdrawing from them, have hardly been mentioned in the hard-fought campaigns of the spring.” Hiatt is right in that observation, and it’s worth examining the reasons for this.
read on>> (more…)

what have the romans ever given us in return?

by luojie - china daily, china