Needlenose

This:

Or this:

Who's the Saudi's beeatch?

I sure hope there was no tongue involved *shudder*

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

I’ve been warning for some time about the rising levels of wrong-wing hate, and how that hate is again turning to either outright violence, preparing for violence or just simple hate-mongering and hate-speech that can incite others to violence.  Now others are noticing a dramatic resurgence of militia activity that is

“(is) reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s – right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups”

Did you catch the news about the wing-nut who brought and dropped a gun at a political meeting?  I mean I know the reactionaries are crazy and stupid, but do they really believe the Libruhls are gonna attack their crazy tea-bag parties and protests?  Don’t they realize that we aren’t armed?

Back in the Clinton era my own life was threatened by some wing-nut because I had posted a tongue-in-cheek website parodying the ‘black helicoper’ crowd (the main reason why I remain anonymous on this site).  Bad as the Bush years were, the wing-nuts seemed to calm down in spite of the volume and stridency of the reactionary media hate speakers like Billo the Clown and Ann Coulter.

However the massive rejection of the Repugs at the polls and the election of a centrist President seems to have thrown them back into a frenzy that if anything seems even nastier and scarier than before.  Living in San Francisco as I do I rarely encounter reactionaries, but today I was having a conversation with a self-described “moderate” from the South who went on at length about Obama’s Socialist agenda for health care and financial services, and railed about the swelling deficit – a guy who never squawked once about how Shrubya threw Clinton’s balanced budget to the wind and drove up the deficit like a two-bit lobbyist with a federal credit card.

I guess one of the downsides of the end of the “War on Terror” is that the reactionary talking heads have turned the other half of their hate rhetoric, formerly targeted at the Islamic world, at us Libruhls, again firing at us figuratively and literally with ‘both barrels.’

*Update* Bill Clinton better worry if he plans to participate in the contentious health care ‘town hall’ meetings - wing-nuts might use this guy’s technique to conceal an assassination weapon.

Following the hand-jive of uber nationalist and former Israeli PM Sharon, current Israeli PM Whatayahoo just gave the finger to Obama and his foreign policy.

Seriously, unless there are some consequences to their actions (like, oh, cutting off the $2.4+ billion in aid we give them every year), why would Israel do anything else but flip us off and laugh at us in disdain?

*Update 5/29/09* I guess the Israeli wrong-wingers grew unaccustomed to push back on their slo-mo colonization program, but Whatayahoo is puzzled by Washington demands to back off their settlment expansion program.  Unlike Shrubya, Team Obama at least told Israel to get back with the program.  Still, dialoging has done nothing during my lifetime, so unless Washington follows up with some consequences, Whatayahoo will stay ‘puzzled.’

Jeremy Scahill of AlterNet claims that torture and brutality are alive and well at Gitmo under Obama:

“…IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner’s head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them — sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.”

And speaking of Obama carrying on evil Shrubyian policies, in spite of his attempt to suppress the release of the additional Abu Ghraib torture photos from yesteryear, some of them have been leaking out.  Follow this link if the ‘classic’ Abu Ghraib pics didn’t make you queasy: http://www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2006/02/15/1139890768716.html.

I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

If you thought that by electing Obama we’d get out of the Shrubyian quagmires any sooner, you’d be sadly mistaken.  It looks like Obama is following Shrubya’s brokeass ‘strategy,’ i.e. engagements without an exit strategy, no clear goals and a continuing drain of soldiers and cash.

In a move right out of the Shrubya playbook, Obama is replacing one general with another in Afghanistan, saying that it’s time for some ‘fresh thinking.’  Seriously, Mr. President, the only ‘fresh thinking’ we need is from you!!  It doesn’t matter whom you put in the hot seat, he/she will continue to muddle along until such time as it becomes clear what they need to achieve in order to get out of the quicksand.

And in the case of Afghanistan, as long as the Taliban live free and untouchable just across the border this war will drag on for as long as we wish to expend the lives.  Our ally Pakistan will neutralize the Taliban?  Don’t make me laugh, Mr. President, they are already busy getting their asses kicked by the Taliban’s tribal hosts.

And in case you’ve forgotten, Shrubya already tried launching a ‘death from above’ strategy in both quagmires and learned the hard way that for every ‘terrorist’ you kill, you create dozens of pissed-off new terrorists.

If you want to eliminate the Taliban threat to Karzai and ‘new’ Afghanistan, you need to take the war to them…on the ground…where they are.  If you can’t or won’t do that, then get us the hell out of there.  Fresh thinking, Mr. President, fresh thinking!

The Repugs, riding the wave of public indignation, are having a field day with the AIG executive retention bonus crap.  And why shouldn’t they?  It was a Dem legislature that stripped out the provision to cap the bonuses of firms getting Federal bailouts to keep afloat?

I mean, $163 Million sure is a lot of money, right?

Well the public should get a sense of perspective, and call the Repugs out for their feigned amnesia – I mean where the fuck was all the ‘indignation’ when goddman Shrubya & the Repug Congress of the day lost $12 Billion in the ” biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve” in a ‘rebuild Iraq’ program that had Zero oversight and accountability?

It’s time for a reality check here – that is 2 orders of magnitude larger than when the Dems just pooch-screwed away, and what’s more – at least we know where the $163 Million ended up (and we might be able to get it back through a special tax)!!  The $12 Billion just vanished without a trace.

And that’s not including another $10 Billion spent on no-bid contracts with unenforced oversight handed out to Shrubya cronies on “questionable or unsupported charges in Iraq reconstruction contracts.”

There are days when I believe they put funny pills in the American drinking water supply.  Seriously.

The key justification for the crackdown on the Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank spouted by the pro-Israeli camp is that the Palestinians are terrorists, because their suicide bombings and other attacks ‘target civilians.’  Frankly, I fail to see the ‘fine point’ these apologists put on it when, for example, in the recent ‘put down’ of the Hamas rocket launchers, the Israeli army killed an estimated 960 civilians out of a total of 1434 total dead – 67%!

Israel, of course, immediately and automatically disputed the number of civilian dead.  The ultra-nationalist message of the country’s leaders, however, was undercut by direct testimony from members of the IDF, who are coming forward with tales of policy-driven slaughter of civilians, including unarmed women & children.

It’s hard to take the moral high ground after the US did all this and worse during the dark years of the Shrubya Iraqi fiasco.   However, now that we are under new management, I really hope (but sadly doubt)  Clinton will put some pressure on Israel to investigate their war crimes.

The New York Times reports today on “the first day of the trial of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush at a news conference in Baghdad two months ago”:

As the journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, was escorted into the courtroom on Thursday morning, the crowd — family members, politicians, lawyers, even some Iraqi reporters — erupted into applause, shouting, weeping and ululating, drawing a rebuke from the judge.

That has to be awkward for the Maliki government — which, despite impertinent questions about how much the prime minister really minded the shoe toss, undoubtedly feels pressured obligated to punish al-Zaidi severely (the de riguer jailhouse beatings and other torture in the newly democratic and “free” Iraq notwithstanding).

Then again, this passage from the Associated Press account of yesterday’s events is intriguing:

The defense argued Thursday that the current charge is not applicable because Bush was not in Baghdad on an official visit, having arrived unannounced and without an invitation.

“The visit was not formal because Bush is an occupier and he was received by the commander of the U.S. Army and it was an undeclared visit,” lawyer Ghalib al-Rubaie said. . . .

Judge Abdul-Amir al-Rubaie recessed the trial until next month, saying the court needed time to ask the Iraqi Cabinet whether Bush’s visit was “formal or informal.”

Is this a serious legal question (which, if upheld, would give a whole new meaning to the term “casual day”)… or just a chance to look for a way out of sentencing a popular hero?  Either way, it’s hard not to sympathize with the shoe-thrower’s explanation of his motive while watching Shrubya’s self-congratulation during the press conference:

“I was seeing a whole country in calamity while Bush was giving a cold and spiritless smile,” al-Zeidi testified.

Yep.  We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)