In recent days we have all witnessed two vomitous eruptions of moral nullity that would tax the powers of a Voltaire or a Vidal to do them proper justice; they quite o'er-crow the meager gifts of a hack like me. But I will sketch a few observations here nonetheless, if only to add one more small voice to those few who bear witness to the evils perpetrated by our unaccountable leaders.

We speak of course of Barack Obama's Nobel speech and Tony Blair's recent comments on the Iraq War.  Let's take the lesser figure first.

I.
Since leaving office, Tony Blair has dipped his blood-smeared snout into various corporate troughs, amassing millions, while simultaneously becoming one of the great whited sepulchres of our day, making a great show of his conversion to Catholicism, his "faith foundation," and so on. He has even lectured at Yale Divinity School. But this holy huckster looks more haunted every day. The glaring, bulging eyes, the frantic rictus of his grin – indistinguishable from the grimace of a man in gut-clenching pain --- and the ever-more strident, maniacal defense of his war crimes give compelling testimony to the hellish fires consuming his psyche.

Next month, Blair will go before the Chilcot Inquiry, a panel of UK Establishment worthies charged with investigating the origins of Britain's role in the invasion of Iraq.  Although the worthies have been remarkably toothless in their questioning of the great and good so far – the smell of whitewash is definitely in the air – the inquiry has at least performed the useful function of bringing the forgotten subject of Iraq back into the public eye, while collating and confirming, with sworn testimony, much of what we have learned in dribs and drabs over the years about the rank, deliberate deceit behind this murderous catastrophe. One choice bit that has emerged from the inquiry is the revelation that the centerpiece of Blair's case for immediate war – the claim that Saddam Hussein could hit Europe with WMD-loaded missiles on just 45 minutes' notice – came from unconfirmed, third-hand gossip passed along by an Iraqi taxi driver.

As Blair's turn on the well-padded Chilcot cushion draws near, he has launched frantic efforts to keep his testimony secret while at the same time trying to undercut the rationale for the whole war origins inquiry, which has focused on the professed justification for the invasion: disarming Iraq's (non-existent) WMD. So last week, Blair gave an interview to a friendly, timorous chat-show host in which he made the brazen admission – no, the proud boast – that he would have found a way to drive Britain into war with Iraq even if he had known for certain that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. (And of course, given the nature of the "'intelligence" that Blair used in his pre-war WMD claims  it is certain that Blair  was indeed certain that Saddam had no such weapons when the invasion was launched).

Thus it is now Blair's contention that there is no charge to answer concerning the origins of the war; all this WMD guff is meaningless. He would have found "other arguments" to persuade Britons to follow George W. Bush into the war that American militarists had long been planning.

Blair's admission has drawn a remarkable response from another Establishment mandarin, Sir Ken Macdonald, who served for five years as Director of Public Prosecutions under Blair's government – and now works in private practice at a major law firm…alongside Tony Blair's wife, Cherie. The headline in The Times puts it plainly: "Intoxicated by power, Blair tricked us into war." In his column, Macdonald writes:

The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.

...Mr Blair’s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power. Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mind-altering brew at home. But Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him. In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so. Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death. “Yo, Blair”, perhaps, was his truest measure.

Macdonald also gives us a sneak peek inside the workings of the elite, with observations that doubtless apply equally well across the ocean:

In British public life, loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation. It’s the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts, so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward. Disloyalty, on the other hand, means a terrible casting out, a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure. So which way will our heroes jump?

We must hope in the right direction — for it is precisely this privately arranged nature of British Establishment power, stubborn beyond sympathy for years in the face of the modern world, that has brought our politics so low. If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction, the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt.

It is almost certain that the Chilcot inquiry will produce little more than the usual blood-flecked whitewash. Certainly, Tony Blair will face no official action for his crimes; he will not even lose any of his corporate sponsors, unlike the heinous Tiger Woods, whose sexual intimacy with consenting adults is obviously far worse than the murder of more than one million innocent people. (We'll never see Woods lecturing at Yale Divinity School now!)

But keep looking at Blair's face; watch, year by year, as it brings forth the hideous fruits of the inferno within. For as one of his illustrious countrymen once put it: "Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ."

II.
"A narcissist's defense." As a description of Obama's Peace Prize speech, Macdonald's phrase could hardly be bettered. But the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama's alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah – but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.

Many have already remarked on Obama's adoption in the speech of Bush's principle of unilateral, "pre-emptive" military action, anytime, anywhere, whenever a leader declares his nation is under threat. This approach -- which Bush called "the path of action" -- was roundly scorned by critics of the former regime, many of whom now scramble to praise Obama's "nuanced" embrace of aggression. But again, let us give credit where it is due; in this aspect of the speech, Obama did in fact go beyond Bush's more narrowly nationalist conception, saying: "I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation."

Thus Obama would, apparently, extend the right of unilateral military action to "any head of state" that feels the necessity of defending his or her nation. But of course this is just empty verbiage, a pointless, bald-faced lie that not even Bush would have tried to get away with. Would Obama accept a unilateral, pre-emptive strike by Tehran against Israel, where legislators and government officials routinely talk of attacking Iran? Would Obama cheer the "right" of Russia to strike unilaterally at Poland if the U.S. "missile shield" deal, now on hold, was suddenly consummated? Would Obama support a unilateral strike by India at Pakistan -- or vice versa -- in the still-seething cauldron of tensions on the subcontinent, where both nations legitimately feel threatened by the other? Would he support the right of Kim Jong-il to "defend his nation" by attacking South Korea the next time there is a threatening border incident there?

No, it is clear that only the United States -- and its allies, like Israel -- are to be allowed the supreme privilege of unilateral war. The line was inserted in the speech simply because it would sound good in the moment, and create a temporary emotional reaction that might carry listeners past the macabre incongruity underlying the entire event: giving a peace award to the bloodstained leader of a military machine hip-deep in the coagulate gore of two, vast, civilian-slaughtering wars.

Obama staked his boldest claim to American exceptionalism with a passage that he lifted, almost verbatim, from his West Point speech just a few days before (see here and especially here), when he announced his second massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan:

Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other people's children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

Here is chutzpah -- and hubris -- raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world -- and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see -- and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.

And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America's altruism and "enlightened self-interest" in killing millions of people -- Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama's historical survey-- for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references -- so lauded by Obama's liberal apologists -- to those inadvertent "mistakes" America seems to keep making; out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don't think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass....)

Although larded with usual hyper-yet-flaccid, florid-yet-false oratorical stylings that have become Obama's trademark, his words about King and Gandhi drip with scorn and condescension. I was actually taken aback when I read these passages:

I make this statement [about the moral justification for war] mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.

The intellectual incoherence and arrogant sneering behind this supposedly laudatory passage is staggering. After claiming to be the personal embodiment of King and Gandhi's philosophy of non-violent action, Obama gives the game away with this line: "I face the world as it is." Those other two guys, they were just dreamers, they were unrealistic, they were unserious; they didn't "face the world as it is," they weren't savvy and pragmatic, like me. I have to go to war because I'm a head of state "sworn to protect and defend my nation."

[Here, Obama indulges in a trope that is pandemic among his apologists: the idea that he was somehow forced to become the head of a militarist state waging endless war around the world, that he has somehow woken up and found himself "the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars." But of course he chose to pursue this kind of power in this kind of system -- chose it, pursued it, fought like hell to win it. It's what he wanted. Yet still this notion of Obama as a helpless victim of fate -- lost in a world he never made -- persists.]

He then goes on to give the lie to his previously stated admiration for Gandhi and King: "A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms." Thus, King, Gandhi and any practitioner of non-violent resistance to evil are, ultimately, naive, ineffectual -- weak.

Notice the incoherence – or perhaps deliberate elision – at work here. Obama says he must face down "threats to the American people" -- and then talks about Hitler's armies, immediately coupling, and rhetorically equating them, with al-Qaeda's scattered handful of hidden fugitives. Are the American people now threatened by Hitler's armies? Are al-Qaeda's paltry forces -- less than 100 of them in Afghanistan, according to Obama's own war-wagers -- the equal of Hitler's armies of millions of men?

But there is a deeper untruth beyond these cheap rhetorical tricks. For it is blatantly untrue to say that "a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies." First of all, one cannot make that statement because this approach was never tried. Therefore you cannot say categorically that it would not have worked. Doubtless it would have cost millions of lives; but as Gandhi himself pointed out, the violent resistance to Hitler's armies also cost tens of millions of lives. But Obama's formulation -- which is a hackneyed one indeed -- only deals with one view of non-violent resistance to Hitler: i.e., from the outside, resisting his armies as they poured across the borders. There is another way in which a non-violent resistance movement without any doubt could have "halted Hitler's armies": if it had taken root and spread throughout Germany itself, including among the armed forces and its supporting industries.

In the event, this did not happen. But it was not, and is not, an impossibility for humankind to pursue such an approach. Therefore it is fatuous and false to state what cannot possibly be known: whether non-violent resistance would have thwarted Nazism, and whether this would have been more or less costly than the way of violence.

Similarly, it is false to say that "negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms." The only response to this bald statement is: How do you know? Has anybody tried it? No. Therefore you cannot call it an impossibility -- and then use this supposed, untested "impossibility" as your justification for laying waste to whole nations. You may say that it would be unjust to negotiate with al-Qaeda, that those who use murderous violence to achieve their ends should simply be killed or prosecuted. (Although where would that leave the leaders of the exalted, exceptional, unilateral United States?) But of course this is precisely what Gandhi did: he sat down and negotiated with the representatives of an empire that had caused the deaths of millions of his own people. He negotiated with them in good faith, with good will, despite what they had done and were doing to his people -- and despite the fact that many of his interlocutors, such as Winston Churchill, hated him with a blind, racist fury. And he was successful -- although again, not without cost, both before and after the liberation. But Gandhi, and King, knew the costs of non-violence – because they were genuinely savvy, and genuinely realistic about the nature of evil.

In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama's deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify -- to himself and to the world -- his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked "path of action" as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.

No one forced any of these decisions – or these specious, obscene justifications – on Obama or Blair. It is their own narcissism -- their own lust for power, and their love for the system that gave them that power – that has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed.

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Grandma Jefferson said:

Thank You, Chris, for this Most Excellent Dissection... ...because that despicable abomination of a speech left me choking in disbelief, and I'm still rendered incoherent reading any part of it. A bloody tissue of twisted lies and obscene sophistry that should have had the Committee wrenching that farce of an award from his clutching fingers. But insane Kabuki is the rule now, everywhere. I said long before the election that the Oligarchs who tore apart the Constitution to wrench the Cheney junta into power, would never abandon the result of that coup d'etat, that they would never relinquish their stranglehold on the US Government, the result of years of labor and billions in bribes and blackmail. And their contemptible new front man proves this every day, but this speech is beyond anything as far as proclaiming the Universal "Rule Americana". I'm sure the entire world was far more enlightened by this nauseating monstrosity of an acceptance speech than any of the beer-swilling morons here, to whom it probably made " a lotta sense." Meanwhile, we can't run up deficits paying for Universal Health care for the people, 'cause that's fiscally irresponsible, don't 'cha know, and we sure can't have that around here, can we? We only run up deficits for illegal wars, genocide, eternal surveillance, criminal weaponry, CIA money-laundering & Black Ops, torture, gulags, bank bailouts, and extortion-based InsuranceCo freebies, as in "Buy the Healthcare Insurance, motherfuckers, or get fined and maybe jailed too. How dare you unemployed lazy swine spend money for anything other than their premiums, assholes? Now cough it up!" In short, McCain's insurance platform, without McCain. Perhaps we'll get those emergency rooms at Wal-Mart next, another idea of his whose time has clearly arrived. But we can all feel safer now that the Lackey-In-Chief has proclaimed Cheney's 1% doctrine of preemptive war, forever and ever. Thank gawd, the profiteers are safe for the next few decades. Please never stop laying out the corpse, Chris.

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +21

vastleft said:

	Sobering as always "I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation." Remember when it was the biggest joke in the world that Sarah Palin didn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" was? Obama doesn't just know it, he loves it!
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December 15, 2009 | url
Votes: +8

Jimmy Montague said:

You're right, Chris -- I, too, have noticed Blair's face of late: he looks more like a peeled egg every time I see him. So if he looks haunted by his sins (as he does), we can say he is being "deviled" by memories of his former life. Blair's conversion to Catholicism is thus explained: His conscience drove him to find someone he could talk to, but he found it impossible to confide in anyone except the Pope, who is himself the intellectual product of the Hitler-Jugend. Put yourself in Blair's place and tell me -- Who else could he trust?

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +2

Art James, bebop-o, GoodCelery! said:

Narcissist's TEETH. They are very happy looking? Fake grins, and kale in teeth, the carpenter did liposuction, and they try to practice smile? They got a dental rectus grin? Oops Chris F. ho ho fugue ho! Plutocrats love C. Floyd much? They should thank you, brother. Montaigue wrote you must tell. If breath smells like sewer, tell. St. Pete Divinity school ask you. Say`You have hairy armpits, chin, and you slobber when you sneer. If Chris don't tell, no pizza pies, new red socks, gator aid, soaps, and lipstick at Pearly Gates, huh? I am not sure. I flunked Baptist. Preacher picked my green teeth. The nun picked my holy pockets. I listen to Bob Dylan and Johnny? Cash! I got holes in my socks and pants. I don't wear scratchy underpants. They are in panic states. Yessum. They got a mouse in the britches. Trough. Yep. 'Um sip from a ditch. Seepage grins. Drainage. Sop kiss. People can sense a omen to come. People try to fool. Fools grin ugh. Fools can't even smile real smiles. Let's ask the ornithology provost? She can sew black crow wax wings. Next, Blair will say his prostitute a therapist? Pathetic.

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +1

Michael Hureaux Perez said:

... "Near pathological" is too kind. Not only is the man a willing embodiment of the worst characteristics of our people, he is consciously encouraging mass derange-ry. It is well Obama often cites Ronald Reagan's example of exemplary presidencies. Obama's own ability to orchestrate mass self-deception is one that leaves Reagan's in the dust. When I made these comments in the presence of a colleague in the Language Arts department at this high school the other day, I was treated to an excoriating response in which I was informed that had "America" not been willing to lead the world the way it has for the last eighty years, that I wouldn't be standing in her presence mouthing my naivite'. I was well told that it was "typical" of "people like me" who "whine" about the excesses of U.S. aggression that I would be the first to complain if the U.S. DIDN'T step into the breach, when in fact what I was saying was the exact opposite. So there you have it, the "democrats" in a nutshell. For years now, they've gone out of their way to shut down any opposition voice within their ranks, to the point of closing anti-war planks out of their national platform. Now a good many of their supporters are so wrapped up in their myths that they can't even hear what's being said to them. Obama will deepen this stupidity, and his Nobel Speech is a classic example of how he works. I always tell my students that when they are auditing any politician, they should make sure they obtain a hard copy of the statement made, so that they may critically evaluate it away from the lights and the cameras. Words mean what they mean, we have all learned this at great cost, except for my colleague, who, by the way, is department head of the Language arts component here at Rainier Beach in Seattle. But itk is unfortunate, and deathly clear, that the entire world is getting ready to learn a lesson far more costly than what may be encountered at the personal level.

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +15

Jimmy Montague said:

	Art James I hear Sarah Palin has never actually lived in Alaska. She just claims to have done so. If anyone calls her bluff, she drops her drawers and shows 'em her Carhartt panties. Nobody questions her after that.
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December 15, 2009
Votes: -1

Sean O'Neil said:

... A great essay with great comments following. I would like to repost the parenthetical thought Mr Floyd offered, because this is where the intellectual struggle still sits: .......................... [Here, Obama indulges in a trope that is pandemic among his apologists: the idea that he was somehow forced to become the head of a militarist state waging endless war around the world, that he has somehow woken up and found himself "the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars." But of course he chose to pursue this kind of power in this kind of system -- chose it, pursued it, fought like hell to win it. It's what he wanted. Yet still this notion of Obama as a helpless victim of fate -- lost in a world he never made -- persists.] .......................... The enduring myth of Obama is this: He is a highly moral, noble and pure man. If he should join with empire, then there are only two reasons why this could be: (1) empire is the right path, and in due course Obama will prove this to us; or (2) the path is chosen as a slippery ruse in Obama's multidimensional chess game, the strategies for which are beyond the comprehension of mere rubes like us, and in due course Obama will unleash his brilliant counter-strategy which will expose the folly of empire. Sadly, both tropes persist.

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +6

john kelley said:

... "A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies." ...qualifies as inflammatory rhetoric. I wonder if the irony was lost on Reverend Wright? _____________ Can Tony Blair bear the weight of his abysmal debauchery? Sure he can, though the darkness of the confessional and the unresolved sputtering in his noggin will offer little respite. Yes, indeed, war is peace, lies are truth, failure is success. We're such a resilient species.

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +3

Sheila Samples said:

	Fan-damn-tastic! Posted it on OpEd News... http://www.opednews.com/articl...5-720.html You, Chris, are the Robert Redford of truth -- the Best that ever was... Thanks.
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December 15, 2009 | url
Votes: +4

john kelley said:

	... Glad to see this piece posted at counterpunch and uruknet.info
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December 15, 2009
Votes: +2

scott douglas said:

... Chris, I have waited for this fusillade for many days, knowing you would deliver. And, Man, did you! Wait. I just unconsciously used militarist rhetoric to describe your essay decrying militarist rhetoric dressed up in an honorarium, a faux pacifist speech... Oh. Goodness. Land O' Goshen. I am clearly not up to this. My friends, My friends, my head is spinning 'round and 'round. Like a whirlwind, it never ends. ha. Two small revolts: 1) now consistently telling dem friends that the compact is broken and that only a Gandhi-style mass movement to force a Constitutional Convention can save the Nation. Wow. I feel brave. I actually SAID it. woooh-woooh. Several times! 2) The Operations Manager came around yesterday eliciting bribes for the GM for Christmas and I lead the crew in saying NO. N. O. Spells NO. "When I was a young man, the Company gave bonuses to the workers for their service during the year; no one would have dreamed of shaking down the employees for a bribe to the Manager, and I will have nothing to do with it!" Several of my co-workers rallied to this declaration. Hmmm. Very foolish of me, no? Yes. Time is short. The underpass is calling! Vive La Revolution!

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December 15, 2009
Votes: +6

Michael Hureaux Perez said:

	... Oh, you're kidding us Scott Douglas. Are there really people in this pathetic culture that are that obsequious? Christmas bonuses from the workforce for management? What's next? Fealty to the Lords of the Manor?
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December 16, 2009
Votes: +0

jo6pac said:

	WTF Once again you nailed it and I hate when I agree with every one here. Please never stop writting.
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December 16, 2009
Votes: +3

Martin White said:

	... Brilliant - to counterpose Blair and Obama was true and just. This was Obama's defining moment - his Katrina - the Peace Nobel directly after the war jingoism and the bankers' trillions - resoundingly captured by the irreplaceable CF.
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December 16, 2009
Votes: +5

Jimmy Montague said:

Scott is right -- The compact is broken. It's been broken for a long time but it took George W. Bush to articulate the true nature and severity of the fracture. Even he wasn't truly explicit: He said it was "just a goddam piece of paper," but he DIDN'T say "I'm gonna wipe my ass with it." Only those with ears to hear what Bush left out of his declaration understand what needs to happen. Looks like Scott finally heard the horn blow. Welcome aboard, Scotty. Now if only you could beam the rest of 'em up....

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December 16, 2009
Votes: +0

scott douglas said:

	... Dear Jimmy, Thanks for the encouragement, but I can't even beam MYSELF up! But who knows? Let's keep our options open, eh? Scott
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December 16, 2009
Votes: +0

Grandma Jefferson said:

Meanwhile.... ...it was announced that Citicorp, and "other companies" will be getting billions in tax breaks http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34...ton_post/ ...in which "The government is consciously forfeiting future tax revenues. It's another form of assistance, maybe not as obvious as direct assistance but certainly another form," said Robert Willens, an expert on tax accounting who runs a firm of the same name. "I've been doing taxes for almost 40 years, and I've never seen anything like this, where the IRS and Treasury acted unilaterally on so many fronts." So, the banksters who destroyed the economy, and were bailed out by the rape of the US taxpayers, now get yet another bail-out in the form of tax relief on their ill-gotten gains since then, to "help their liquidity". Let's see, taxpayer money bailed them out and paid their CEO bonuses, while these same companies levied usurious interest rate increases on credit cards and loans to milk the same taxpayers yet again, in order to pay back the TARP funds, and now are given obscene tax cuts which will in fact be a tax increase on guess who, because we got those 2 or 3 wars to keep funding for the next few years or decades. But don't worry, we won't squander your tax dollars on bleeding heart government backed Universal Health care for the whiney citizens, because that's socialism, and fiscally irresponsible, and we're ain't no Commie/Pinko Socialist state here, got it? Had enough yet?

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December 17, 2009
Votes: +5

Bill Jones said:

	I know this is a bastard question But of the pittance I have, what percentage should go to Empire Burlesque and what to Arthur Silber?
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December 17, 2009
Votes: +0

Chris Floyd said:

	... Dear Bill -- give it all to Arthur Silber. He depends on the website for his entire livelihood, and is in bad health. So if you have some spare change, please send it to him.
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December 17, 2009
Votes: +0

john kelley said:

... "So, the banksters who destroyed the economy,..." Barack Obama: "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers." March 28, 2009, -WASHINGTON -- The nation's top bankers walked away from a summit with President Barack Obama pledging broad support for his bank-bailout program and efforts to revive the economy, but the meeting failed to resolve tensions over executive pay and the president's tough rhetoric of recent weeks.- (Wall Street Journal) Tough rhetoric. December 15, 2009, -WASHINGTON - Even as major banks scramble to repay billions of dollars in taxpayer aid, President Obama took the nation's top bankers aside Monday and implored them to do more to get people back to work and Main Street vibrant again.- (Los Angeles Times) Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons were all no-shows at the big White House meeting. Inclement weather.

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December 17, 2009
Votes: +0

Debbie Kimlin said:

	... Absolutely wonderful, as usual, Chris. Had hoped to se you write about that horrrid nobel speech.
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December 18, 2009
Votes: +1

Howard Hawhee said:

... >>For it is blatantly untrue to say that "a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies." First of all, one cannot make that statement because this approach was never tried. I think one could make a slightly stronger statement than that. There WERE a few occasions where nonviolent tactics were tried by members of the general population against the Nazis and in particular against the Holocaust (check out information -- easily obtainable -- about such resistance in Nazi-occupied Denmark and to a more limited and qualified extent in Nazi-allied Bulgaria). From the small amount of information we have, they appear to have had some success. Now, some of these nonviolent actions did involve sabotage (in Denmark anyway), but in my book as long the resistance took care to avoid killing anyone (not always successful -- I think some soldiers died in explosions), they were nonviolent. In the end, as Chris points out, we just can't say for sure HOW effective such a nonviolent movement could really be, because it's not been practiced on a large scale.

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December 18, 2009
Votes: +0

jason bates said:

... following on howard hawhee's comment, h. arendt discusses in "eichmann in jerusalem" where non-violent resistance, both passive & active, had some success in saving lives, if only by gumming up the machinery of death, in italy, hungary, etc., and of course denmark. obama's remarks were such murderous self-serving nonsense, i couldn't make it half-way the text of his speech. obama also elides the fact that hitler would never have arisen w/o lots of help from certain parties outside germany. anyway, thanks chris. awesome post.

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December 19, 2009
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Bia Winter said:

"Give it BACK!" Hello Chris! I wanted to submit the cartoon I drew regarding Obama and the Nobel Prize..."Give it BACK!" Any way to do that here? (I see no "paste" function, etc) (Sigh) anyway....a terrified Obama-as-Scrooge is visited by Nobel-as-Marley, saying "Barack! GIVE IT BACK!", and flanked by the Ghost of Afghanistan-past and the sepulchral Ghost of Future Wars, with a mushroom cloud behind him.

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December 19, 2009 | url
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