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Political Rants

Albright: He always told the truth

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Former General Colin Powell died this week of complications from COVID-19. I’m sure you’ve heard this about a million times by now. You’ve probably also heard that he was a hero, a man of great stature, an inspiration, etc. I can tell you that a lot of hagiographic remembrances came floating up from the television on Monday and Tuesday.

I don’t think it will surprise any readers of this blog that I was not a fan of the former Secretary of State. Yes, like many on the left, I never forgave him for his Feb 5, 2003 performance at U.N. headquarters in New York – a key moment in the rush to the Iraq invasion. (Some may recall that they draped Picasso’s Guernica during Powell’s presentation, which was just a little too on-the-nose.) But his career had a lot of bloody patches.

Spinning from the beginning

Powell was a Vietnam veteran. He did, actually, play a small role in concealing the My Lai massacre, suggesting that the story was unrealistic because Americans and Vietnamese had such a great rapport. What? (For more on that love fest, I suggest Nick Turse’s Kill Everything That Moves.) This has been kind of a consistent pattern in Powell’s career – deflection from the facts and subservience to power.

He served in various capacities during the Reagan administration, working closely with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. When Weiberger was under scrutiny by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Powell helped the Secretary conceal his knowledge of that operation by initially supporting Weinberger’s contention that he didn’t keep a diary. (Powell later admitted that he observed Weinberger writing in a book or tablet that he kept on his desk.)

Worthy adversaries

One of the Powell sound bites the corporate media never tires of playing is the General’s comments at the start of the Gulf War: “First we’re going to cut it off. Then we’re going to kill it.” The “it” he’s talking about was a third-world army principally comprised of conscripts. The U.S. military did just what Powell said, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers in full retreat along Route 80 from Kuwait – the “Highway of Death”.

Of course, his most notorious failing was in laying out the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Most of the media describes this case as having fallen apart in the years that followed. Actually, the cobbled-together garbage that Powell handed out that day was debunked almost immediately, and the truth was available to anyone willing to see/hear it. That was immaterial to Powell – like many senators, he was thinking of his political future, not the human cost of what was being contemplated.

Mythmaking in America

The Trump phenomenon has brought many political dynamics into stark relief. But one of the most troubling effects of his presidency is the tendency to frame any conservative alternative to him as virtuous. This is what’s been done with regard to Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, etc. Powell was ahead of all of them, frankly. It largely involves reputation laundering on the part of media figures. We saw a lot of that this week.

When Madeleine Albright appeared on Morning Joe a few days back, her closing comment was that Powell “always told the truth.” It’s a little hard to know what to do with that. It made me think back to that moment I saw at the start of the Iraq war, when Powell mischaracterized the testimony of an Iraqi defector, Hussein Kemal. I had just read the transcript, and I have to think he had seen it in some form. The man just freaking lied about what it said, straight up.

If you can make Colin Powell into a man of peerless virtue, what value does truth have?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Making heroes out of false friends.

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There are a few things we can say definitively about the mainstream media. One is that they tend to latch onto the most superficial issues imaginable and cover them with mind-numbing repetitiveness. Another is that they love, love, LOVE the two-party system and believe in the concept bipartisanship more than any normal human being.

When I say bipartisanship, what I mean is any effort to reach across the aisle, compromise, and reach consensus between the two major parties on legislation, appointments, and so on. The media’s fealty to this concept is pretty much absolute, and mostly makes no allowance for the fact that (a) bipartisanship has kind of a toxic history, and (b) one of the two major parties has gone bat-crap crazy over the past 30-40 years.

Toxic consensus

When I think of bipartisan legislation, I think of the 1994 Crime Bill, so-called “welfare reform”, the Patriot Act, the resolution to authorize the use of force in the War on Terror and to extend that authority to Iraq, and so on. Suffice to say, a lot of misery and death has been strewn in the wake of bipartisanship over the years, and I don’t think it’s coincidental.

The same might be said of presidential appointments, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court. John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and even Neil Gorsuch were confirmed on a bipartisan basis, lopsidedly so in the first two cases. The Democrats who voted to confirm these justices bear some responsibility for the results of their opinions.

Praising the maverick

If you’re old enough, you remember the degree to which the press loved John McCain, mainly because he straddled the center-line in a politically strategic fashion. It’s typically enough for these “mavericks” to adopt a controversial opinion on a single topic for them to be carried on the shoulders of the mainstream media. For McCain, it was campaign finance. For Liz Cheney, it’s Donald Trump.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard MSNBC talk about a congressional representative more than they have about Liz Cheney over the last two weeks. They’re doing this on the basis of her refusal to accept her party’s line on who won the presidency in 2020. In other words, she’s being roundly praised for speaking a very simple, obvious truth. As a result, they are helping her build her national brand in a dramatic way, though she voted to support Trump’s agenda from one end of his regime to the other.

Don’t buy it!

Bottom line, MSNBC and other mainstream outlets are working overtime to mainstream extremists like Liz Cheney as well as Wall Street reactionaries like Mitt Romney. As people on the left, we can’t adopt the standard of the enemy of our enemy being our friend. These people are building a national brand that they hope will carry them to higher office. The difference between that and a Trump 2.0 presidency is one of degree, not of kind.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Pardoner’s tale.

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When I heard the news that Trump had pardoned the perpetrators of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq, my first reaction was much the same as when I learned of Chelsea Manning’s conviction: If we’re waiting for justice to prevail with regard to our illegal invasion and wanton destruction of Iraq, we will be waiting a very long time. Of course, this is not the first time Trump has freed mass murderers from accountability. For someone who claims to have opposed the Iraq war (even though he really didn’t back in 2002-03), he never seems to extend that sentiment to entail sympathy for the victims of the invasion. He is, of course, a wannabe autocrat, so any display of weakness is to be avoided. Trump likes a “tough” guy, though how machine-gunning unarmed Iraqi motorists, including a young boy, or stabbing to death a prisoner of war in custody amounts to “toughness” I will never understand. More like cowardice. A lot more.

I, like many, was appalled by the actions of these Blackwater mercenary thugs on that fateful day in Baghdad in September of 2007. And I don’t want to minimize the criminality and cravenness of their actions – not one bit. But it’s important to remember that this was one incident in a massive bloodletting that began many years before the start of the 2003 invasion, and which has continued up to this day. There are plenty of people in the United States who are outraged by Trump’s pardon who also supported the war in Iraq, which was itself a continuous Nisour Square massacre that even a casual glance at the news reporting on the ground at the time would confirm. Even those who did not support the war included many who were either supportive of or indifferent to the economic strangulation of the Iraqi people for the twelve years prior to the invasion. And it’s hard to find people who didn’t wave the flag after the Gulf War, which entailed a destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including its water treatment and supply system, that would later contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths. (I won’t go into our support for Saddam Hussein, which is another long and sordid story.)

Again, I’m not trying to minimize the gravity of the Nisour Square crime. It was a rare case of accountability in the context of a war whose prosecution included many who could legitimately be described as war criminals. Trump’s action this week simply reaffirms what most of the world already knew – that America does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants, and will never take responsibility for it. They know that, in fact, America will even resent those it invades for not being grateful for its criminal action. Trump has signaled this quite loudly over his tenure in the political spotlight, and he’s not the only one. Our wars are presented as a civilizing mission in a certain sense, not unlike the claims of prior colonial powers, or those of the Europeans who first overran the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s the same impulse that drives Trump to defend statues of Columbus or hold up the National Defense Authorization Act to keep the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases (an example of a snake eating its own tail if ever I heard one).

Trump is a reliable thug and a low-information autocrat, but he is most importantly a reflection and an expression of our worst impulses as a people. It’s best we don’t forget that as we move past this disastrous administration.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Week that was (5.0).

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It has been another one of those weeks, packed to the gills with news, mostly bad. Of course, this is not a bug but merely a feature of the times we live in, so I will make my usual lame effort at grappling with a small subset of what has been assailing us over the past few days in the final full week of the third year of Our Lord Trump, king of the chimps.

Debate #7. Not at all sure I see the point of these corporate exercises in superficial political sparring. The CNN questioners were clearly excited to dig in to their “breaking news” story about what Bernie said to Elizabeth a couple of years ago in a private conversation. The moderator who queried Sanders on this when straight to Warren with a question that assumed he was lying in his response. I am disappointed in Warren, frankly, for perpetuating this line of attack. It plays on the odious claim the Sanders and his followers were misogynistic in their race against Clinton in 2016 – something Clinton alumni cling to as one of the rationales for their loss. This is toxic, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that it could ultimately blow the election. WTF, people … time to put the movement above your personal fortunes. Knock. it. off.

When a billionaire has to intervene, you know there's a problem.

Impeachment. A historic week in terms of the delivery of articles of impeachment to the Senate for only the third time in American history, with respect to presidents, at least. It seems like a forgone conclusion that Trump will walk away from this, but not unscathed – impeachment without removal is a kind of accountability. If there is history after this presidency, this action will be indelibly recorded next to his grisly name. As for the trial, well … I expect a relative circus as compared to the already ridiculous Clinton impeachment. The G.O.P. has decayed considerably over the past 20 years, such that there’s some question as to whether all of them will keep their pants on for the entire proceeding. We shall see.

War lies. Bernie had it right Tuesday night: our two biggest foreign policy disasters in recent decades were spawned by lies – Vietnam and Iraq. Though with Vietnam, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened, with the U.S.S. Maddox and Turner Joy. (There were a lot of lies that preceded that with regard to Indochina.) Of course Trump is lying about Iran … that’s the same as saying he’s speaking about Iran. We are in a similar boat with Iran as we were with Iraq back in 2001-03; elements within the the administration want to have a war for whatever reason, perhaps ideological, perhaps mercantile, likely some mixture of both. It appears that the general population is more against the idea than it was in the case of Iraq 2003, and that that opposition is broad-based enough to make Trump somewhat cautious. Ironic that this heightened tension is taking place in the immediate wake of the release of the Afghan papers, the DOD internal history of the Iraq conflict, and the big Intercept / NY Times scoop on the activities of Iran’s intelligence services in Iraq. (Of course, these were all one or two-day stories at best.)

Natural Disasters. Heartbreaking climate-fueled fires in Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, volcanic eruptions in the Philippines. Jesus H. Christ, what next?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Do no harm?

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Former secretary of defense under Donald Trump James Mattis has a book out, so he’s making the rounds of all the talk shows, talking about leadership, acting as though his reluctance to criticize the president is somehow rooted in personal integrity. What he won’t talk about on the book tour is how his “leadership” responded to policies that any person of average integrity would take issue with. Mattis sat still when Trump started banning Muslims from entering the country. He said nothing when Trump began separating children from their parents at our southern border and putting them in cages. He was silent as Trump praised white supremacists as “good people” in the wake of Charlottesville. When did he finally throw in the towel? When Trump decided to remove troops from Syria. That tells you much of what you need to know about Mattis.

Steve Inskeep’s fawning interview on NPR had few high points. Somehow Mattis saw fit to claim:

“From a Roman general, I used no better friend, no worse enemy. We were going in to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam. We were not going in to dominate them. I didn’t want triumphalism. I wanted to go in with a sense of first do no harm.”

First do no harm? Seriously? He has a funny way of showing it. One of Mattis’s bragging points was always his pivotal role in the various battles of Fallujah, a bloody massacre in which the U.S. military’s first act was to commandeer the city hospital. It’s kind of ridiculous to refer to such operations as “battles”, when the enemy they are fighting are so outgunned. In any case, the Iraqi casualties in Fallujah were so high that the city was left out of the Johns Hopkins study of Iraqi deaths caused by the 2003 invasion because they felt it would skew the numbers. That study, first published in 2005 I believe, numbered Iraqi deaths at more than 500,000 as a result of the war. It was revised later to something like 650,000. Do no harm?

Mr. Kindness himself.

The example he gives of a young officer choosing not to shoot up a building in Baghdad in order to spare civilians sounds apocryphal in light of the stories that have come out of that war. Robert Fisk described the U.S. tank shell that destroyed the building that housed Reuters journalists, among others. That was more along the lines of common practice, frankly. The U.S. military doesn’t exactly walk around on tip-toe. How any senior commanding officer attached to this atrocity can have the gall to speak proudly about his humanity in the context of imperial war is beyond me.

Save your leadership lessons, mad dog. You lost all credibility the moment you signed on to the criminal enterprise that was the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Empire news.

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Brazil’s fraudulently elected president Jair Balsonaro visited with the marginally less detestable Donald Trump this past week – a reported love fest in which Trump not only announced Brazil’s new status as a “non-NATO ally” (which means lots more weapons for Balsonaro to use against his own people) but breezily suggested elevating Brazil to full NATO membership …. which is a little strange, and may have taken Trump’s advisors somewhat by surprise. The two pretenders also discussed the ongoing U.S. attack on Venezuela, which Balsonaro is happy to join in on. Of course, that would only make him like most of our political class here at home, which has openly supported the coup attempt by right-wing Venezuelan politician Juan Guaido … as have much of our corporate media.

Just to single out a particularly egregious recent example, NPR’s insipid Morning Edition ran a piece by one-time journalist Phillip Reeves about the crisis in Venezuela. The framing of the piece was typical of Reeves and NPR – through the lens of U.S. historic role in the hemisphere; that of a hegemonic power. “How is the president of Venezuela still in power?” asks host Steve Inskeep in the intro, adding that the U.S. is “moving to choke off the oil revenue that supports the socialist government.” First of all, that revenue has already been “choked off.” Second, NPR always characterizes these siege-like sanctions as only punishing the government, not the people of Venezuela. Finally … “socialist”? What the hell kind of socialist country has as many wealthy people as Venezuela does? Yes, the government controls the oil industry, but that pre-dates Chavez. The neo-colonial economy of the country is one based principally on export of petroleum – that’s largely why the economy is in turmoil.

NPR: Giving Venezuela the Iraq treatment

Reeves’s story suggests an opposition under pressure, but what he’s describing is a self-proclaimed president, Guaido, who is still functioning inside the country, openly calling for intervention by the hemispheric superpower … and yet, still not incarcerated by this supposedly very oppressive government. Every mention of Maduro or the government emphasizes the label “socialist” and paints the regime as dictatorial. Chavez, Reeves writes, was Maduro’s “socialist mentor” who “took power in 1999” (i.e. won the first of several elections). Reeves talks to several Guaido supporters, most English-speaking, but only one Maduro supporter, whom he describes as “a lifelong communist” who lives in a “ramshackle home.” This sixty-five year old man, Reeves reports with seeming disbelief, is “convinced the U.S. is at war with Maduro to seize Venezuela’s oil.” Where would he get THAT idea? (Well … from Trump himself, from John Bolton … from recent and not-so-recent history.)

Pretty amazing stuff to run on the 16th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq – an anniversary that Morning Edition didn’t see fit to mark in any serious way. You’d think that any outlet that was as flat-footed as NPR was in the run-up to the Iraq War might have learned enough from the experience not to mindlessly serve the interests of a bellicose administration set on regime change. And you would be disappointed.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Another week that was.

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I know we’ve all been drinking from a news fire hose this week and you hardly need me to remind you of that. Still, I’m going to do some short takes on various topics … unless I get on a tear, then all bets are off. (No betting!)

Iraqi-versary – It’s been fifteen years since the American invasion of Iraq. Still seems like yesterday, particularly when you consider the state Iraq is in right now – divided on a sectarian basis, barely holding together, bombs going off at regular intervals, struggles persisting over the rubble of its cities. Our war cost them upwards of a million lives, and that’s compounded on the many hundreds of thousands who died in the 11 years of sanctions that preceded the 2003 attack. No one has been held accountable for this, so I’m confident it will happen again in some form.

Total ass clown.Bolton – Speaking of being held accountable, HE wasn’t, and now he’s going to be National Security Advisor. All I can say to that is, expect war with Iran … but don’t expect it to be the cakewalk that Iraq was. (Yes, I know … but Iraq will seem like a cakewalk once we wade into Iran.)

Yemen Vote – The Sanders-Lee-Murphy amendment to force debate on an authorization for supporting the Saudi assault on Yemen garnered 44 votes, which is encouraging but not enough to save the millions facing hunger, cholera on a biblical scale, and endless death and destruction rained down by a U.S. sponsored and guided Saudi air force. We need to do better for the people of Yemen. Be sure to remind your federal legislators (and our president) that this is on them. And bear in mind that Trump pushed for the bill to fail as not to displease his beloved weasle-prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is a primary architect of this slaughter.

Cambridge Analytica – Count me as someone who doesn’t believe the machinations of Russian bots and dodgy data companies like CA had a decisive effect on the 2016 election. That’s not to say it didn’t have ANY effect. And that’s also not to say that they aren’t tremendous dicks for steeling millions of people’s data and using it to help elect a self-aggrandizing racist moron president of the United States. My feeling is that they – and, in fact, Facebook as well – should be broken up and scuttled for all they’re worth. If you want to stop rogue billionaires, the best way to do it is by taking away their billions. Let them rough it as mere millionaires, poor sods.

Russia Probe – Message to Donald Trump: Please, please talk to Mueller or to the grand jury. Get your side of the story down, dude. It’s the only way out of this mess. You can do it, Donald. Just wear your white sheet and speak truth to power.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Good reads.

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Instead of making you read through my usual rantings and ravings, I wanted to share a few items I saw on the Web that I thought were particularly good, eye-opening, useful, etc. Let’s see if you agree.

Thinking About the Election
Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom
Z Magazine, September 2016
https://zcomm.org/zmagazine/thinking-about-the-elections/

This is one of the best-written, most thoughtful arguments in favor of strategic voting in the 2016 elections from a distinctly radical-left perspective. As someone who considered his support for Bernie Sanders a rightward compromise, I think this piece provides some really valuable answers to the Bernie-or-Bust obsession, as understandable as that sentiment may be. No one can accuse Z Magazine of watery liberalism or crypto-Clintonism. This article demonstrates that they have looked seriously at the current political moment and understand the full potential costs of a Trump presidency. It made me proud to be a longtime Z subscriber.

Ratfucked
Interview with David Dailey
Majority Report podcast, August 26, 2016
https://youtu.be/a-9giSMnVW0

Still more to be said about this.I am a fan of the Majority Report, particularly of their interview segments. This one is a must read for anyone frustrated with the state of legislative politics both on the state and the national levels. Dailey has done a deep dive into the Republican strategy to control redistricting after the 2010 census. Their calculated assault on the democratic process was wildly successful and will probably guarantee them House majorities for the rest of this decade and beyond. Using big data, sophisticated demographic mapping, and enough money to tip the balance in key state-level races in key states (i.e., states that would be redistricted after 2010), the GOP ran the table, catching the Democrats flat-footed. It’s a sobering indictment of the Dems’ lack of engagement and a real must-listen.

Remember the Iraq War? (Chilcot Report Episode)
Best of the Left Podcast – 2016/07/26
http://www.bestoftheleft.com/

This episode of BOTL goes runs through much of what was contained in the British report on their government’s rush into the Iraq war. I think the most valuable part of this is that it reminds us of how much was known before the invasion, and how much of what was argued by the left at that time turned out to be true. It’s worth listening to if only to remind ourselves that we must not be swayed by criticism, we must not be turned back by accusations of un-Americanism … we must fight on.

I’m also finally getting around to reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which is amazing.

luv u,

jp