alias Bruce.

This photo provides some Bible education for Tea Partiers:

It's from the Wall Photos album of the Americans Against the Tea Party site on Facebook. Go and take a look. There is plenty there to make you think, hard, about what the roots of fascism actually look like.

Thanks to Cat.

Here's a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy

worthy of the holiday, as opposed to the gelded tributes that trot out a clip of King's "I Have a Dream" speech like a Hallmark card every year. Skip the corporate-sponsored King Moments and watch this video:

 

Thanks to The Agonist for the tip.

Petraeus says “The president didn’t send me over here to seek a graceful exit”

from Afghanistan.

Uh, actually, General, that is exactly why Obama sent you there.

Obama the Pleaser hoped for enough war progress by 2011 that he could then begin a pullout, thereby placating both the hawkish U.S. military leadership and the increasingly dovish American voting public. It's not working out that way, as long predicted by those who remember the tar pit of the Vietnam War situation: A small nation sick to death of successive Western invaders; a corrupt government that would collapse in days if not propped up by the West and that offers zero possibility of viable nation-building; an American military that, driven by the hopeless mandate of its impossible mission, does more harm than good as it exposes civilians to peril and sometimes kills them outright; and all of this taking place in a nation whose physical landscape is perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare by anti-U.S. fighters who know the territory.

Obama feels a desperate need to emerge from Afghanistan with something that can be dressed up as success, but not at too great a cost. Petraeus, to his credit, is at least willing to call his boss's bluff: If these are the results you want, boss, this is the price you're going to have to pay. I think Petraeus has his own soldierly delusions about what his sword and his purported guardianship of innocents can accomplish in Afghanistan; he is in denial in his own way. But let's at least give him credit for being honest enough to tell Obama and the American public that this war is going to be long and it's going to be ugly.

And let's not forget the civility thing: Petraeus had the class to avoid voicing his dissent through mockery in a Rolling Stone article.

When Ted Koppel said today that Americans are failing to sacrifice for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars,

he had a point. Koppel was right to say, in his NPR Talk of the Nation interview, that putting the war bill essentially on a credit card held by the Chinese, and placing the sacrifices on the backs of a small pool of reservists and recruits who are recycled again and again into combat, is the wrong way for a nation to fight its battles. He was right, too, to hint that a draft would help to equalize things, and to criticize private mercenary operations such as Blackwater that prosper while military servicemen and women fight and die for a pittance.

But Koppel was wrong on two important scores.

First, Koppel misses the fact that most Americans' distance from personal sacrifice is the main reason why they have tolerated these wars at all. The Iraq War, for its part, was deceptive and uncalled-for from the beginning. An Afghanistan military action, although perhaps worth arguing for eight or nine years ago, is now a case of the horses having long ago bolted the barn. It is plain to American voters that neither of these wars has been worth fighting: the first was concocted for cynical corporate and geopolitical gain, and the second is a flailing attempt by Obama to salvage a disaster and to appear war-worthy as a president. The very fact that a draft is politically unthinkable for these wars says a lot. Bringing the nation together to sacrifice for a war requires, to start with, a supportable war.

Second, Koppel fails to see that even if the casualties of these wars are borne by a few, and much of the wars' fiscal cost is in deficit spending, there is still a brutal and widespread cost to Americans in the form of missing government support that would otherwise be covered by deficit spending. A time of national economic crisis -- which is to say, right now -- is exactly when deficit spending is sensible and justifiable. If you refuse to borrow to keep your ship from sinking, what good are your hoarded pennies at the bottom of the ocean? Borrowing billions upon billions for Iraq and Afghanistan means that those borrowed billions are therefore not available to shore up unemployment benefits, to do something about our health care disaster, and to create a national corps of jobs (e.g., repairing crumbling infrastructure, expanding mass transit, providing day care for working families). We can't sufficiently borrow to repair our busted country because we're too much in debt for bad wars? Sounds like a national sacrifice to me, Ted.

Koppel kept stressing that he did not want to get into the issue of whether or not we ought to fight these two wars. But he's ducking. Whether these wars are worth supporting IS the issue. If our nation truly bought into them, we could get the fairness of sacrifice that Koppel seeks. And if our leadership acknowledged that we haven't bought into them, we could stop killing people and instead put the money where it would do some good.

"If you enjoy your freedom, thank a vet,"

read a bumper sticker I saw yesterday on the highway.

Talk about a whoring out of the role of veterans.

The last war in which the American military arguably protected our freedom was World War Two.

The Korean War did not protect our freedom. Neither did the Vietnam War. Neither did the Gulf War. Neither did the Iraq War. Neither does the Afghanistan war, although one could make the argument that had Bush not blown off Afghanistan in favor of oil, it might have at one point. But certainly not now.

Want to know what really threatens my freedom? Out-of-control corporations. Out-of-control health insurers. Gelded federal regulatory agencies. Politicians who auction themselves off to the bidding of companies (e.g., Verizon) that would invade my privacy and violate my constitutional rights. A "security" state that trades its foreign policy for oil revenues and cynically strategic military alliances. A for-profit prison industry that hawks incarceration as a solution to rage and drug addiction. Police departments for whom the War On Drugs has become a money-making enterprise.

Want to thank veterans? Then let's stop using them, with all they have sacrificed, as pawns in a long-running ruse of false enemies. Vets deserve far better.

As the person who posted a link to this,

Sean Paul Kelley at The Agonist, said, this has gotta be a gag:

From People's Daily Online, July 9, 2010:

Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents are training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops, according to a recent report by a British-based media agency.

Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few "monkey soldiers" holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.

Read the rest here.

I have to say that we already tried the armed monkey thing (see 2000-2008 US presidency) and it didn't work out so well.

So President Obama went ahead and fired General McChrystal.

Good for him. It's about time the Pretty-Please-Prez showed some cojones beyond his oratory. During the past couple of days, while we all awaited Obama's decision, I figured it at about 50/50 that Obama would or would not send McChrystal packing. It was too close to call.

On the one hand, it would be predictably Obamian to pull the punch and theatrically read the general the riot act -- again. (Remember that Obama cut McChrystal a break the last time he publicly mocked Biden and dissed Administration thinking.) One could argue, in fact, that the way to really grab McChrystal by the short hairs would be to spare him yet again and let him live in fear.

On the other hand, this looked like too outrageous an incident for even Obama to tolerate. Already increasingly typecast as spineless and leadership-averse, how could Obama afford to let this one slide? Moreover, as I keep repeating because, dammit, I think it's true, Obama has more potential for leadership than he has shown us in the past 18 months -- if he dares to begin to use it. Sure, he's no progressive and he never will be. But I'm guessing Obama is tiring of having to be a Good Nonconfrontational Negro for the sake of a nation that perpetually fears the idea of a Bad Nigger.

So it's good to see Brother Barack show somebody who's boss.

Like most shock drama, this McChrystal story comes with irony. For one thing, McChrystal was probably right when he warned last year, in an infamously leaked report, of potential "mission failure" in Afghanistan, although he was and is wrong about ass-whipping being the way to win in a country with a corrupt and essentially neocolonial government. Another irony is that, since Obama met him more than halfway on troop increases and counterinsurgency, McChrystal and the President have not had serious policy differences on the war. This was not Harry Truman firing General Douglas MacArthur for going against orders. This was a general getting himself fired for proving, through colossal stupidity and arrogance, that his judgment and his respect for civilian command cannot be trusted.

Read the Rolling Stone story, and see how many organizations you can think of in which an underling could diss the Big Boss's people with such wild-eyed recklessness and have a prayer of keeping his job. I mean, WTF? Going on the record with that kind of shark bait? For a Rolling Stone story, no less? Was McChrystal on crack? Did he feel omnipotent in the presence of President Softie? Did he assume in his lizard brain, like the yokel congressman who yelled "You Lie!", that a black president is safer game for blatant abuse? Does he have some mental disorder that has not been publicly announced?

It may be a while before we know, if ever. My guess is that, for the time being at least, McChrystal is going to shut his mouth.

Petraeus tells it like it is on Israel.

You have got to read this from a Foreign Policy article by Mark Perry:

On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

It's about time somebody on the Obama team said it. Sure, Biden lambasted the latest planned settlements, and the disastrous timing of their announcement, as a monkey wrench in current efforts for peace talks. But Petraeus went a gargantuan step further by saying, in effect, Israeli arrogance is gonna get American troops killed and weaken American power in the Mideast. He is right, of course, and there is nothing new about the revelation except the fact that a general of Petraeus' influence dared to say it.

FP's Perry went on to report, just as stunningly, that Petraeus has asked "that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command -- or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus's reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region's most troublesome conflict."

Holy Cojones, Batman.

Petraeus' request was refused in an instant. But think about what this means: A general overseeing U.S. major military operations sees Israeli behavior as being so dangerous that he wants authority over the region in order to try to mitigate Israel's endangerment of American troops.

According to Perry, ripples of shock at Petraeus' candor are spreading in the Obama administration. One question, I guess, is whether the administration will silence the messenger or understand his having delivered a reality check. Or maybe both. In any case, American indulgence of Israel's destructive excesses has become harder to publicly defend over the years. Even the conservative Andrew Sullivan has become quite the critic of Israeli policy. He wrote a few days ago:

Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world.

One thing is for certain: A general committed to protecting American military influence is not one of the usual easily-dismissed critics of the Israeli regime. Israel's shit is now seriously hitting the fan.

Obama's Fall? Or Ours?

Julianne Hing at RaceWire has a strong piece reminding us that Barack Obama was never, ever going to be a progressive messiah, and that it was and is our job as citizens and activists to end the war in Afghanistan and to inject sanity and the public interest into American policy on terror, health, and finance. Her essay includes an Obama video clip from 2007 that will make you pine for the days when he seemed so  believable. It's a good (and short) read and a good wake-up call.

It's not funny

when a president sends troops potentially to their deaths, and upon looking back at last night's post I need to say that I did not mean to imply that it is. There is no humor in the catastrophe of civilian and military deaths, rotted government and misogynistic persecution that we call the Afghanistan War. I think I was writing from a sense of the tragic absurdity of Obama's lack of moral and political leadership. He reminds me more and more of Ronald Reagan: a stylized figure who plays a bang-up Leader of the Free World on TV but who relinquishes the force of leadership to others behind closed doors.

Not that Reagan and Obama can be called equals. Reagan had far more resolve and conviction than Obama, which is in itself a horrifying realization. Obama has far more intellect. But both have done their best work on camera. Their main difference in usefulness, I think, is that Reagan made a great figurehead for his deeply-held agenda (because he had one), while Obama makes a lousy one (because he doesn't). What a sinking feeling I had last night as I watched Obama yet again strike his trademark commanding pose, this time in front of the cadets at West Point: his eyes flashing, his stance lean and strong, his words crackling -- all for naught, as we have learned with his treatment of Wall Street and health care reform and now Afghanistan, where once again his actual acts of policy fold miserably into a let's-please-everyone collapse that neglects essential ingredients for success in any direction.

In the case of Afghanistan, that means an escalation (no! say doves and most Americans) that broadcasts its ending date to the Taliban and al-Qaeda (no! say hawks) while increasing casualties (no! say doves and most Americans) without any reasonable probability of victory in a nation whose topography and social fabric are not made for successful foreign intervention (no! say doves as well as those hawks who know this cannot be a short war). Obama offers just enough of what pleases all sides -- tough-sounding troop increases for the hawks, a quickie withdrawal deadline for the doves, vague promises of partnership for skeptical and fearful Afghans -- to assure that this mess will yield no one's desired result. Obama lacks the spine to call this "anti-terrorist" stab at nation-building what it really is: a militarily unwinnable enterprise that, in saner times, would be supplanted by international economic and political development and detective work. Perhaps he has talked himself into this war. Or maybe, when things go badly, he will follow the Iraq War model and retreat toward the door while proclaiming that we have "achieved our goals." Or perhaps, if things get awful enough, he will simply change his tune and roll with the long-war plan, explaining in an artfully-delivered speech to the nation how we no longer have the option of withdrawal.

No, it is not at all funny, seeing a man of such great gifts roll over and do dog tricks in his desire to please many masters -- while people die for his lack of fortitude. For a man who cast a lonely vote as a senator against the war in Iraq, yesterday at West Point was just about the bitterest joke one could imagine.