Needlenose

Remember the Media-driven perception back in the dark days of ’00 and ’04 about how Bush was the candidate “you’d rather have a beer with?”  Ironic because he was a recovering alcoholic.  Doubly ironic because he never invited anybody over for a beer.

The sign of Obama’s genius is his latest press op drinking beer with Professor Gates and Sargeant Crowley.  Genius because…that’s how ‘ordinary guys’ solve disputes – you sit down over a beer and talk through your dispute.

But beyond the ‘ordinary guy’ image going here (he’s already out-ordinaried Bush with his earlier burger joint runs), there is a subconcious appeal to a secret desire we all share here – that somehow we ordinary people could actually sit down and have a beer with Obama! 

Of course it’s a preposterous notion, you’d have to engineer some awful confrontation, get Obama to misspeak and say something stupid, and hope he invites you to the Oval office to smooth things over.  But the genius is the subconcious appeal of a celebrity President.

Although Obama seems to be having some trouble getting unity among his own party in Congress, there is some good news – 8 Republican Representatives  crossed party lines to vote with the Dems on the recent climate change legislation.

Although I’ve occasionally decried the leadership of Pelosi and Reid, the looming GOP attacks on these 8 Representatives could give Pelosi something to work with in the form of a small group of ‘quislings’ to give the appearance of bi-partisan support to legislation and offset the more disloyal and conservative Democratic Representatives.  Definitely 8 Reps to keep an eye on!

In related and joyful news, Al Franken is now Senator Al Franken, because “he’s good enough, and smart enough, and doggone it, Minnesotans like him!”

I found this puff piece on ‘secret’ negotiations between the US and so-called ‘moderate’ members of the Taliban on HuffPo and I was quickly skimming through it when this bit caught my eye:

Also included in the negotiations is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious renegade Afghan warlord whose active insurgency continues to fight against U.S. and coalition forces.
Two former Pakistani intelligence officials say a deal was underway in which Hekmatyar would call for an end to his insurgency and be allowed to live above ground in Saudi Arabia with a budget of $85 million. At least one Afghan government official confirmed that a deal with Hekmatyar was being assembled.

Seriously?  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? If there is any credence whatsoever to the article, Obama will just be the next in line to be taken by this consummate “Khan” artist.

Several weeks ago I wrote a despairing post about the state of our war in Afghanistan, criticizing Obama for following Shrubya’s tired strategy of fighting a counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan while the enemy thrived, unmolested, across the border in Pakistan.

Since then, Pakistan really bumped up their game and has made major gains in fighting the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their sympathizers in the Swat Valley.

I should probably have posted something about that  earlier, but their past claims of ‘victories’ and gains were either gross hyperbole or outright lies.  However, I’m actually heartened by Osama Bin Laden’s latest missive blaming Obama for “ordering” President Zardari to attack the guerrillas.

Check out the speech – it strikes me as the typical ‘tough talk’ a leader has to give when his followers are backed into a corner – kinda like that some of the speeches given by the (now dead) head of the Tamil Tigers as his guerrillas were increasingly trapped by Sri Lankan forces.  The other comforting thought is that Obama could actually ‘order’ President Zardari to do anything!  Don’t you wish that were true?  I guess American Liberals aren’t the only people that believe Obama has magical powers!

It’s much too early to determine if this is a true sea change in the battle – who knows how many Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors donned burkhas and slipped out among the civilian refugees?  And don’t forget that Pakistan is only one of the countries bordering Afghanistan suitable for a base for the guerrillas, and that is a horribly corrupt country at that.

But it’s definitely cause for optimism – let’s hope this reduces some of the strain on President Karzai and the NATO forces in Afghanistan!

*Update 6/4/09* A friend of mine just got back from a couple of weeks in Karachi – he tells me things are really messy there right now – lots of internal divisions between groups such as the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns are boiling up to the surface resulting in pitched street fighting.

What’s the profile of a terrorist likely to strike in America’s heartland?  If you say a swarthy, middle-eastern guy in a turban, you’ve been watching too much Faux News!  How about:

“…a white male in his 50′s or 60′s with grey hair that is balding in the middle. He is about 6’1″ and about 220 pounds and was wearing a white shirt and dark pants.”

Man that sounds just like the profile of an American wrong-winger, and surprisingly like a stereotypical serial killer.

Joining in the ranks of Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh and the Anthrax Letter guy, the suspect of today’s murder of an abortion doctor has been apprehended, identity still unreleased.

Don’t be fooled, folks – these pudgy, aging wrong-wing haters aren’t buying guns because they are afraid Obama and the Dems are going to enact gun control legislation, they are buying guns to terrorize the rest of us!

*Update* Evil has a name, Scott Roeder, and apparently he was pretty open about his extremist wrong-wing views and was: a member of the nasty ‘Freemen’ group, once convicted for making explosives, and  one of those guys who went to various anti-abortion events and said obliquely menacing things in a monotone.

*Update* Cristina Page clearly lays out the case for why this isn’t a random incident, but rather part of a pattern of wrong-wing terror:

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.

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.’

I’ve spent the last 8 years called the Republicans the Repugs.  But the Dumbocrats are also screwed up.  The one thing their devilish counterparts had going for them was party unity.  As wrong as they always were, they worked together like pack animals to destroy America.

Check out the Dumbocrats – on the eve of having a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate – they can’t back their own man in the White House – the stupid jerk-wads won’t close Gitmo.  WTF?

Harry Reid has got to go!

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!