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.

"The newly elected House Speaker John Boehner on Wednesday

promised a new era of transparency..." – New York Times, 1/6/2011

And if you believe that promise, you're proof that Americans are as dumb as much of the world thinks we are. This pledge of Republican-led "transparency" comes from the same folks who sat on their hands while Vice President Dick Cheney crafted energy policy in secret meetings with industry reps and defied subpoenas to reveal their names; who (like many Dems) have happily allowed corporate lobbyists to literally write the text of bills; who cheered President G.W. Bush as he lied the nation into war; and who continue to lie in service of the perpetually failed idea that giving the rich more money to put in the bank creates jobs. Transparency? Good luck with that.

For an unredacted version of Obama's Tuesday Iraq speech

-- by which I mean, more literally, a transcript with italicized insertions reflecting what Obama likely wanted to say or could have said but didn't -- read this post by Michael Collins. It's as close as we'll get to an unsanitized Obama on Iraq.

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.

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.

Amid mortar, grenade and bomb attacks

aimed at voters across the country that killed 36 people, on Sunday 62 percent of Iraq's eligible voters went to the polls and cast ballots in the national parliamentary election. In 2005, 76 percent voted.

In the United States, where voters face no threat of being blown to bits when we go to the polls, 64 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election. This is considered significantly high for the U.S., where turnouts between 50 and 55 percent have been the norm for the past three decades.

The Shoe Thrown Round the World.

George W. Bush cannot even exit the oval office, it seems, without doing damage. It is safe to say that W, being a man of minimal thought, has very little idea why Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi felt moved to throw his shoes at him on Sunday, and virtually no grasp of what the event and its aftermath actually mean, short of Bush's usual boy-in-a-bubble snorting at the misbehavior of non-Americans.

But the shoe demonstrations that have sprung up in response throughout the Arab world (can you believe that the phrase "international wave of anti-US shoe demonstrations" has suddenly entered the global vocabulary?), and the elevation of the shoe-thrower to hero status amid hundreds of millions of competent adults, are yet another dose of reality for non-delusional (and non-ducking) Americans. Which is to say, Bush's sneeringly unilateral, militarily misdirected, corrupt and inept response to 9/11 and world conflict is arguably the biggest foreign policy f**k-up America has seen since Vietnam.

It is hard to fathom, really, just how far this smirking dolt of a president has set back American relations abroad. I guess we will get a truer sense of the distance to be made up when a well-informed and statesmanlike -- if himself flawed -- new president sets out on January 20 to begin to regain the international ground we have lost. While also trying to repair the devastation of a recklessly deregulated economy.

It's not that all of this is Bush's fault, although plenty of it is. But it's also that Bush is so singularly, hatefully ill-equipped for anything approaching leadership, judgment or diplomacy. Let alone basic repairs of busted governments, whether here or in Baghdad.

And so Bush, feckless and clueless as ever, makes his final victory lap, and the shoes fly. And, thankfully, in another month we will be airlifting him out of Washington.

Adding Insult to Infamy.

Well, this one certainly beats out Nikita Krushchev's notorious banging of his right shoe on a desk while interrupting a United Nations session in 1960 to yell at a Filipino delegate. There is doubt, anyway, as to whether Krushchev actually banged the shoe or instead banged his fist while holding the shoe. Apparently, no definitive photos exist.

There is no doubt, however, as to the fact that yesterday at a press conference during what was supposed to be George W. Bush's statesmanlike final Iraq tour, an Iraqi journalist stood up and fired not one but both of his own shoes at Bush's head while calling Bush a "dog" for what Mr. Bring 'Em On has wrought in that country.

To be exact, according to the 12/15/2008 New York Times, Muntader al-Zaidi, a reporter for independent Iraqi TV station Al Baghdadia, rose and shouted in Arabic, “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” as he threw the first shoe, barely missing Bush's head as W ducked. He then threw his other shoe at Bush, again barely missing W while yelling, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” Security agents then pounced upon al-Zaidi, beat him according to a witness interviewed by the Times, and detained him to face unnamed charges in what will surely be a fair judicial process in the democratic Iraq Bush is helping to forge.

And yes, there is video of the entire thing, including Bush ducking, which is in and of itself a sight not to be missed.

Strange how poetic events work. This outrageous, furiously personal incident may turn out to be the one that historians point to as best capturing the tragic absurdity of Bush's attempts to lead the free world through his eight-year spree of dishonesty, incoherence and dull-eyed supervision of carnage.

Not to be lost in the spectacle is the fact that hitting someone with a shoe is reportedly the most profound Iraqi insult, symbolizing a person's being more lowly than a dirty shoe that travels the ground.

Sounds as if, in this case, the shoe fits.

To Tell the Truth.

Let's say somebody steals your car and replaces it with a lemon.

And then, later, someone else offers you a good car. And you tell your friends, "This looks like a good car, a better car than the one I've been stuck with. I'm inclined to take it."

But then you're reminded that the thug who stole your car and replaced it with a lemon is a big wheel. He's got clout. He could hurt you. In fact, he sends goons around to your house to quiz you about what you reportedly said. So you publicly backpedal from having said you'd prefer the better car.

But the truth is, you hate the lemon that was foisted on you, and you really do want the better car, and you were being honest when you said so.

This is roughly the position in which Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki now finds himself.

Maliki, as you may have heard, gave an interview published online Saturday in the German magazine Der Spiegel, on the brink of Barack Obama's visit to Iraq, in which Maliki was quoted as saying – more than once – that he likes the timetable of Obama's troop withdrawal plan, and that he thinks it is in accord with what Iraqis want.

This, of course, isn't the story line that Maliki's sponsors in the Bush Administration want to hear, and so Administration enforcers immediately got to work on Maliki. According to the New York Times:

"Diplomats from the United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki’s advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity... After that, the [Iraqi] government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine’s rendering of the interview."

But, the Times goes on to say, Dabbagh's denial pointed to no specific mistranslation, and, further, the allegedly erring interpreter works for Maliki, not for the German magazine. Moreover, the Times obtained a recording of the interview on its own and found, through an independent translation, that Maliki's statements seemed to clearly praise Obama's withdrawal plan. This from the Times:

"The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: 'Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.' He continued: 'Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.'"

Not a convincing case for Maliki's denials.

Der Spiegel, too, stands adamantly by its story.

So the whole thing looks a lot like a man caught between his desire to tell the truth and his fear of having to face a couple of the Big Boss's gorillas wielding lead pipes.

It's tragic for Iraq as well as for the United States, this scared-stiff prime minister tremblingly disowning his own truthful assessment of his country. It's also a brutal portrait of the contrast between the bully-and-lie politics of the current White House, with its latest "general time horizon" babble about troop withdrawals, and the approach of Obama, who brings an actually presidential perspective to the real problem of ending this awful war. Maliki, understandably, succumbed for a moment to the relative good sense of Obama's basic grasp on reality. Now he is paying for it.

If you've kept tabs on me, you know I'm no Obama cheerleader. But, cripes, come January, won't it be nice for us to have an actual president?