As we noted here yesterday, Arthur Silber has written a powerful and profound series of articles on the Joe Biden VP nomination, and its deeper implications. He has now followed these up with a piece on Biden's disturbing -- not to say blood-curdling -- acceptance speech on Wednesday night. You should read Silber's latest piece in full, but I wanted to add a few comments of my own.
Joe Biden's acceptance speech was indeed a remarkable performance -- bellicose and delusional and deceitful by turns. If you closed your eyes, there were moments when you would have thought that you were back in the Cow Palace in 1964, listening to Barry Goldwater belching fire and threatening doom for all those who challenge America's uniquely exceptional special unquestionable morally superior dominance of the world.
Arthur Silber points us to some of the money shots in Biden's speech. And the porn allusion is entirely appropriate in this case. The speech, like the whole evening -- which was given over to the glorification of war and the triumphant militarization of American society -- was a lurid example of the pornography of power.
For example, listen to Goldwat -- oops, Biden -- thundering at the evil Rooskies:
Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years and in recent days, we've once again seen the consequences of the neglect -- of this neglect, with Russia challenging the very freedom of a new democratic country of Georgia. Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we will help the people of Georgia rebuild.
What will he and Barack do to hold the Russians "accountable"? And accountable for what? For acting precisely as the bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States has acted for decades: using military power to achieve political ends and "project dominance" to protect "national interests" as defined by the ruling clique? And in this case -- unlike, oh, say, the Americans in Iraq or Somalia or Panama or Lebanon or Vietnam, etc. -- the Russians were provoked into action when their soldiers (lawfully stationed in South Ossetia with UN sanction, just like the American troops at the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) were assaulted and killed, along with numerous innocent civilians, in a sneak attack by Georgian forces armed and trained by Washington.
What would an American administration have done in such a case? It would have laid waste to Tbilisi, as was done in Baghdad, Fallujah, Belgrade. It would have occupied Georgia; it would have sent soldiers barging into houses to drag out the menfolk and terrorize the women and children; it would have constructed enormous prisons to hold tens of thousands of Georgians captive, without charges, for months and years on end; it would bring in secret agents of unnameable agencies and private contractors to conduct "strenuous interrogations;" it would drop 500-pound bombs on residential areas if some guy at a computer console in a hole in Nebraska operating a drone camera spotted a Georgian man carrying a weapon or even -- heaven forbid! -- firing a weapon at the people who invaded and occupied his country, destroyed his home and killed his kinsmen.
In other words, the reaction of any American administration to such a provocation (or as in the case of Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Vietnam, etc., to no provocation whatsoever) would make Russia's action in Georgia look like a game of beach volleyball. Yet big bad Joe Biden -- and his commander-in-chief, Barry Goldwa--sorry, Barack Obama -- are going to hold Russia "accountable" (in some conveniently unspecified way) for not acting as brutally as any American administration would have done in the same situation.
(Of course, when the same Russian leaders did conduct a brutal, savage war of destruction -- in Chechnya -- there was no talk whatsoever about "holding them accountable," or kicking Russia out of the G-8, or imposing sanctions. But the Kremlin, being weaker then -- before Bush's wars and rumors of war enriched Russia with oil price spikes -- was thought to be more obedient. Now Moscow is more recalcitrant. And it is the recalcitrance -- not the "military aggression" or the "Putin tyranny" -- that sticks in the Anglo-American craw. For more on the implications of the "new Cold War-ism" breaking out among the Anglo-American elite, see these excellent analyses in the Guardian, here and here, and these letters to the paper's editor here.)
Biden declares that Georgia has been "destroyed." This is not true. There has been damage and there have been deaths, and none of them are justified (on either side). But Georgia is not in ruins, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, the three main targets (so far) of the American "War on Terror" that Biden so ardently embraced in his speech.
Biden called for a billion dollars in aid to "rebuild" Georgia. All well and good -- if this aid is really to be used to help innocent people in Georgia who got caught in the crossfire between the idiotic and violent Mikhail Saakashvili and the calculating and violent Vladimir Putin. Of course, it would be a first if such a thing happened -- if most of the "aid" didn't turn out to be weapons for the local warlord and pork for various cronies back home -- but these are days of hope and change, so who knows?
But here's a curious thing. Later on in his speech Biden says that, in Iraq, he and Obama will "shift the responsibility to the Iraqis." The Georgians, who instigated a war they could not possibly win, must be given all assistance to "rebuild" their undestroyed country; but the Iraqis, whose country was invaded and destroyed in a flagrantly criminal action by a vastly superior power, have to "take responsibility" for the damned mess that got made over there in Mesopotamia.
[Biden] has been one [of] the leading congressional supporters of U.S. militarization of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, of strict economic sanctions against Cuba, and of Israeli occupation policies.
Most significantly, however, Biden, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the lead-up to the Iraq War during the latter half of 2002, was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that oil-rich country...
It is difficult to overestimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible. More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on Aug. 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the American public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.
And, as Zunes and Silber note, Biden was calling for an invasion of Iraq years before "9/11 changed everything" -- just like the Cheney-Rumsfeld "Project for the New American Century" group, which openly yearned for a "new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" its agenda for the expansion of empire and further militarization of American society:
Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration's lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of "weapons of mass destruction" years before President George W. Bush even came to office.
As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq's WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job. ...
Calling for military action on the scale of the Gulf War seven years earlier, he continued, "The only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone," telling the Marine veteran [and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter] "it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down."
When Ritter tried to make the case that President Bill Clinton's proposed large-scale bombing of Iraq could jeopardize the UN inspections process, Biden condescendingly replied that decisions on the use of military force were "beyond your pay grade." As Ritter predicted, when Clinton ordered UN inspectors out of Iraq in December of that year and followed up with a four-day bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox, Saddam was provided with an excuse to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. Biden then conveniently used Saddam's failure to allow them to return as an excuse for going to war four years later.
Zunes and Silber also bring out one other point that bears repeating, over and over: Biden has been a champion of dismembering Iraq, chopping the country up in a forced partition that even the Bush Administration found too extreme. Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote here about one of the "partition" plans that so-called "liberals" like Biden have been bandying about:
While Bush pursues ethnic cleansing by stealth in Iraq -- or rather, pursues it quite openly, but just doesn't call it ethnic cleansing -- the Democrats and their outriders, the "liberal hawks" (or "humanitarian interventionists" or "Wilsonian idealists" or whatever tag they're wearing these days) are championing the policy in the public sphere. The idea of a three-way split of Iraq between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds has long been mooted in some quarters -- Joe Biden and "liberal" intellectuals like Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith were early enthusiasts -- and it is now gaining force within the foreign policy "clerisy"... Firedoglake points us to the incisive commentaries of Reidar Visser, "an actual expert on the regional aspects of Iraq and its history," who has lately been debunking the deeply ignorant and murderously arrogant "partition" proposals of Galbraith and others.
Visser takes aim at one of the most hideous of these proposals: "The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq," by respected "scholars" Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph:
...using cool academic language, the authors review the nuts and bolts of relocating somewhere between 2 and 5 million Iraqis in order to create new ethnic federal entities. Snippets from this part of the report probably speak best for themselves: “we advocate where possible dividing major cities along natural boundaries” (p. 16); “on the actual day of the relocation operation, Iraqi and US-led coalition forces would deploy in sufficient numbers to look for snipers, cover the flanks of the civilian convoys, inspect suspicious vehicles for explosives and conduct similar tasks” (p. 17); and finally, on p. 24, “this [internal border] control system would place some burdens on Iraq’s internal trade and other aspects of its economy. It would complicate the efforts of individuals to cross from one region to another to visit family and friends. For the most part these burdens would be bearable. For individuals or businesses that need to make frequent crossings across Iraq’s new internal borders, or those willing to pay for the privilege, an EZ pass system [sic] might be developed to expedite movements for those with important and regular business to conduct.”
"On the actual day of the relocation operation...." Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by "Iraqi and US-led coalition forces." Actually it's not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah," and "Schindler's List." Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the "relocations" of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the "Trail of Tears," the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.
These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O'Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: "For the most part these burdens would be bearable."
I have a suggestion for Mr. O'Hanlon [and Joe Biden]. I propose that he subject himself to such a regimen, then come back and tell just us how "bearable" it is. He doesn't even have to move five million Iraqis under armed guard to participate in this experiment: he can go to Palestine right now, where the people already live under his kind of "soft partition." Let him try it on for himself, just for a few months -- not the lifelong sentence he proposes for the Iraqis. We can even give him an "EZ Pass" to expedite any "important business" he needs to do.
This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them.
All of this is OK with Joe Biden. As noted, he was one of the earliest advocates of partition. But in the end, it doesn't matter: partition the Iraqis, abandon them, occupy them openly -- or covertly occupy them with "non-permanent" permanent bases for "residual forces" and "training brigades" and "counterrorism response" and "force protection," which is the current Obama plan -- who the hell cares? We've killed a million of their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers, but now it's time to go strut around in Georgia, it's time to bring more heat to Afghanistan and nuclear-armed, politically unstable Pakistan, "the real central front in the war on terror," as Biden proclaimed on Wednesday. The Iraqis are trash, pure trash; let them "take responsibility" -- while we do whatever the hell we want to do, or don't want to do, with their country.
As we said here yesterday: listen to what Biden and Obama are actually saying. I consider myself a fairly skeptical person, especially about politicians and their promises of "change" and "hope," but even I have been taken aback by how openly brutal and bloodthirsty the Obama campaign has become. I thought they would make much more hay of the "anti-war" stance, but they threw that aside long ago, and have now put one of the chief enablers of the war on the national ticket. It turns out that Obama is not "anti-war" (even as a cynical, vote-getting posture); he and Biden and the Democratic establishment -- and vast tracts of the "liberal" blogosphere as well -- are simply "other-war."
Iraq was the wrong war, you see, the wrong application of deadly, murderous force for dubious ends that have nothing to do with the well-being and security and pressing concerns of ordinary American citizens. But they heartily approve such applications elsewhere, and hope to see more of them.
***
I must admit that these days I'm feeling much as I did in the weeks and months after 9/11, when it seemed the whole nation had gone mad -- and deaf as well, simply not hearing the crimes and atrocities and immoral, dishonorable actions that were being planned and promised in their names. For example, what in God's name did people think Dick Cheney was talking about when he announced on national television -- on Sept. 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks -- that "we will also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will"? Or when George W. Bush declared on Aug. 7, 2002: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." Or in the long, slow build-up to the act of aggression against Iraq, when the most transparent lies were told -- easily debunkable by the most ordinary person with an internet connection or the slightest acquaintance with recent history, as I used to demonstrate week after week in the Moscow Times -- much less by savvy "foreign policy experts" like Joe Biden?
To speak out against all this -- to simply point to plain facts and the obvious implications of what national leaders were actually saying, to take the very traditional and indeed conservative position that America should not wage aggressive war and should obey its own laws -- was in those days like shouting into a hurricane. Nobody listened, nobody cared, and any nay-sayer was denounced as a crank or a fool or a traitor, whose dangerous carping would give aid and comfort to the enemy, and help the bad guys win. Strange days indeed.
And here we are again. Joe Biden stood on a stage before the world Wednesday night and, echoing Barack Obama's own positions, clearly promised more hell on earth for us all. Yet his speech was greeted rapturously across almost all of the liberal commentariat, and treated respectfully, as a serious and completely legitimate policy statement, even by those politically opposed to Biden and his boss.
But if you point to the plain facts and obvious implications of what the leaders of the Democratic ticket are saying -- i.e., "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland" -- you will be accused of "helping John McCain into the White House." You will be denounced for trying to derail "our last hope for change, however imperfect it may be."
But it is not the critics of the openly stated positions taken by Obama and Biden who are "derailing our last hope for change." It is these powerful men in the pursuit of more power who are betraying those hopes by embracing the corruption and violence of domination, belligerence, greed, militarism, and imperial expansion. I'm not forcing them to do it. I don't want them to do it. But should we not tell the truth as we see it?
UPDATE: Jon Schwarz dissects a veritable library of lies from Joe Biden about the run-up to the Gulf War. In an interview with Tim Russert in 2007 -- 2007, mind you -- Biden regurgitates almost every falsehood peddled by Cheney and Bush in justifying the act of aggression against Iraq: a war crime in which Biden, as noted above, played a vital role.
I've been away for seven days, without access to email or the internet, in a country where I couldn't speak the language, in a place with no newspapers in English anywhere to be found. It was a blissful detoxification from the media echo chamber -- and from the even more deadly poisons of politics and power that the chamber so confusingly and cacophonously presents.
Only once, briefly, did I find myself in a room where CNN was blaring on a tiny television set. As it happened, it was the exact moment when Joe Biden was being anointed as Barack Obama's running mate. It was a live feed: Biden was at the podium, giving a strangely stilted speech in a fake Southern accent. (Perhaps he was trying to channel Bill Clinton -- or maybe Sam Nunn.) Although wearing a tie, he was coatless, with shirtsleeves rolled up, in that classic pose of political hackery: a man ready to "go to work for the American people." (Obama, looking on rather distractedly from the side, was dressed in the same way).
I'll admit that I was somewhat surprised that Biden was the pick. Even before my exit from the echo chamber, I had been studiously ignoring the fevered speculations and fine-toothed combing that attended every burp and belch from the Obama camp leading up to the great announcement. It was obvious that Obama would continue his Dukakis-come-lately strategy and pick some safe, white pair of man-hands covered in Beltway hoar. And I had noted that he had dispatched Biden to Georgia during the late unpleasantness there. (To do what exactly was unclear, unless it was to assure Mikhail Saakashvili that the flow of arms from America's war-profiteers would keep flowing under an Obama administration, despite Misha's bone-headed brutality in launching a sneak attack on South Ossetia.) But still, in the few nano-seconds that I thought about it, I assumed that Obama was just using Biden to build up some foreign policy cred with the media-think tank crowd -- the only people stupid enough to believe that Joe Biden is some kind of foreign policy expert.
Yet there he was, Old Joe Biden, hawing and barking behind the rostrum, just one step away from being one heartbeat away from being the President of the United States. The only thing I could think to say was what my daddy always used to say when confronted with a confounding event: "If that don't beat a hen layin' in a wool basket." I had many other, better things to be getting on with at that moment, so I let Biden's outpouring of clichés -- clunkers so worn down with over-use that they hardly qualified as actual communication -- slide away without much notice...until he began to tell about his own background. Then my gorge began to rise.
Biden talked of a roughhewn upbringing among honest, hard-pressed working folk. Yes, this prince of the Senate -- 36 years of feeding at the public trough, of being wined and dined and coddled and bankrolled by some of the most powerful interests in the land -- dared hold himself out as a champion of the common people. This would be the same Joe Biden who spent year after year relentlessly pushing the creation of what I once called "the nuclear bomb of class warfare": the Bankruptcy Bill, which put a stranglehold on millions of Americans -- the weakest, the poorest, the sickest, the unlucky, the ripped-off, the young couples just starting out, the old people trying to hang on. Biden poured filth on them, he joined his campaign paymasters -- the hoggish credit-card conglomerates -- and his ideological soul-mates on the Republican side to drop this bomb on the hard-pressed working folk he was now claiming to roll up his shirt sleeves and go to work for. He was turned back many times (I first wrote about the bill back in 2002), but at last he locked arms with George W. Bush -- his partner in "financial services industry" grease -- got the bill passed in 2005.
So what does the bill do? It makes it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it makes it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangers child-support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allows millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of equity in homes and asset-protection trusts; it makes it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allows creditors to provide misleading information; and it does nothing to rein in lending abuses....
Williams goes on to note:
It turns out the average annual income of Americans who file bankruptcy is less than $30K, not the loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires gigging the system that we all heard about when this bill was debated. Also, the vast majority of people who file bankruptcy don't do so to strategically hang on to their mansion on the hill, but because of medical bills, a job layoff, or both. Real people, real lives.
And as I noted back in 2002, the pre-Biden/Bush bankruptcy laws were no bowl of cherries:
In most cases, the existing laws do wipe away some debts, particularly unsecured debt. But it leaves many others on the books, while destroying the debtor's credit rating for years to come, closing the door on dreams of buying a car or house, or engaging in any of the innumerable transactions that now require ID and surety in the form of -- what else? -- a credit card. It's no "easy out;" it's a hard step, a desperate measure, fraught with lingering doubts, agonizing decisions, and irrevocable consequences no matter what you choose--much like abortion, in fact.
And now it turns out that Biden's son was on the payroll of credit-card behemoth MBNA -- one of the prime movers of the nuclear attack on working people, the poor and the sick -- for years, first as an employee, then as a "consultant," until the bill oozed its way onto Bush's desk to be signed into law. (MBNA is not only one of Biden's biggest campaign supporters; it was also the largest single corporate giver to George W. Bush back in 2000, surpassing even the criminal syndicate known as Enron.)
Nothing demonstrates the reality of Barack Obama's candidacy than his pick of Joe Biden as his running mate:
Joe Biden voted to give George W. Bush a blank check to wage a war of aggression against Iraq -- a vast, brutal and brutalizing war crime that is inevitably breeding countless smaller war crimes of its own. (One of which is noted here by the New York Times.)
Joe Biden is eager to prosecute the Terror War, which has already laid waste to three countries (yes, three; just because Obama, Biden, Bush and McCain never mention Somalia doesn't mean that ravaged, unlucky land is not part and parcel of their beloved WOT) and killed more than a million innocent people. Let that last fact sink in for a minute. Let that blood wash over your hands as you sit back with a cold brewski to watch the political conventions and debate fine points of presentation and handicap the "horse race." Mountains of the dead, vast pits of the dead, row upon row of the dead, just like the film clips you've seen of the Holocaust, all in the name of the berserker rage -- and the cooly calculated profits and power-games -- of the 'War on Terror' that both Biden and Obama want to wage in a "better" way than Bush has done.
(And now the UN informs us of 90 more innocents blasted to pieces in Afghanistan -- where Obama, like McCain, has promised to expand the Terror War, with 10,000 or more extra troops, and more bombs, more missiles, more attacks into the nuclear powder keg of Pakistan.)
And, as noted above, Joe Biden stood shoulder to shoulder with class warlords like Bush and Cheney to punish and ravage and drive down working people and the poor, on behalf of the rich and powerful.
No one forced Obama to choose such a running mate. No one forced Obama to make the statement of his own values that such a choice proclaims. It is glaringly, painfully apparent that he has no genuine values, beyond a keen ambition for power. Last week he was denouncing the Bankruptcy Bill. This week he's defending Biden's role in putting together a satisfactory "compromise" on the atrocity, while excusing the flagrant conflict-of-interest in the employment of Biden's son at MBNA. (It is also noteworthy to see how many liberal-progressive "dissident" types are suddenly finding outstanding qualities in Joe Biden, overcoming their various "quibbles" about his record and "evolving" toward a more mature and considered position on his virtues.)
Sometimes after I write critically of Obama and the Democrats, people ask me: "Well, what are we supposed to do? He's not perfect, they're not perfect, but don't you think McCain would be worse?"
As it happens, I do think McCain would be "worse" -- but only marginally so, for reasons I've laid out before. But what does that matter? These are the wrong questions for a nation swimming, sinking, drowning in the innocent blood shed by its bipartisan war machine. These are the wrong questions for a nation whose politics have become -- literally, with no metaphor or exaggeration -- insane, mired in violence, delusion and self-destruction. Whatever happens, whoever wins, there will be more war, more needless death, more mass murder in the name of America. Whoever wins, there will be more state-assisted assaults on working people and the poor. There will be more coddling of the rich, more servicing of the powerful, more injustice, more inequality.
The country is broke -- the bipartisan elite have looted it. The infrastructure is rotting; communities are dying; the quality of life is deteriorating for millions of people; the socioeconomic system, based on cheap gas and the consumption of a vastly disproportionate amount of the world's resources, is unsustainable -- but the bipartisan elite won't fix these problems. They won't even address them. They are too busy expanding the frontiers of empire, pushing for new adventures in Pakistan, in Georgia, in Iran, pushing for more war, more bases, more missile sites, more troops. Yes, McCain might push a little bit harder and a little bit faster, or in different directions -- but the self-destructive, mass-murdering push will go on. Listen to what Obama is actually saying, listen to what Biden is actually saying, look at their records, look at their coterie of advisors. There is nothing but blood and suffering as far as the eye can see.
And the choice of Joe Biden as a running mate only confirms this grim fate, which, it is now clear, we must bear out even to the edge of doom -- if not beyond.
Announcer: Good evening, America! Welcome to the Rush Limbo Hour -- brought to you by Bush-Walker! OK girls, take it away!
Chorus:
Who put the armor on Hitler's Panzer tanks? Bush-Walker! Bush-Walker!
Who helped the Nazis hide their assets in our banks? Bush-Walker!
Bush-Walker! And who kept helping Hitler while he was killing Yanks?
Bush-Walker! Bush-Walker!
Announcer:
Yes, folks, that's Bush-Walker -- purveyors of the finest international
investments. Now here's our host, a man who always talks out of the
Right side of his mouth: Rush Limbo!
Limbo:
Ha ha, thanks, Johnny! Hello out there in radioland! My friends, we've
got a special show for you tonight. We're honored to welcome one of our
very own sponsors: a great man, a great American -- Prescott Bush! Come
on out, Pres, and say howdy to the folks!
Bush: Howdy, folks.
Limbo: Har har! You know, Press, that advertising jingle that always leads our show - it really says it all, doesn't it?"
Bush:
You're so right, Rush. We at Brown Brothers Harriman -- that's the chief
vehicle for the Bush-Walker fortunes -- we're just gosh-darn proud of
the way we've always stood up to the "political correctness" crowd,
those silly-billies bleating about "ethical investments" and what have
you. Gosh darn it, Rush, there's only one kind of ethical investment --
one that makes money for you and your business partners. Everything
else is just, well, flapdoodle, if I can say that on the radio.
Limbo:
Hee hee, sure you can! I said it just yesterday, talking about this war
profiteering witchhunt in Congress. I said it was pure flapdoodle, the
way Senator Harry Truman and his gang are blackening the name of good
American tycoons just trying to make a buck or two in wartime.
Bush:
It is a darn shame, Rush. Just look at our situation. Now, it just so happens
that some of our German business partners are major backers of Hitler
and major players in arming his war machine. So what? We were operating
in Germany long before Herr Hitler came onto the scene. We'll be
operating there after he's gone. That's what we do: We operate.
The nature of the regime doesn't matter: king, communist, Nazi, sheik,
warlord, poobah, it all comes down to this: Are they open for business?
If they are, then we have a duty -- yes, a moral duty -- to ourselves and
to our stockholders to maximize our profits anywhere we can, in any way
we can.
Some nervous nellies said we should have divested
ourselves of our German interests after the Nazis took power. And let
someone else make all that money? No way, Jose! That would be a
betrayal of everything we stand for.
You know, I always look to the
example of my good friend William Farish at Standard Oil. He signed a
deal with the Nazis on secret patents for synthesizing rubber. Hitler
couldn't have gone to war without it. And after Roosevelt and his pinko
cabal led us into this war, good old Bill stood by his Nazi partners
and refused to share these precious trade secrets with the U.S.
government, despite the American military's dire need for rubber. Now that's
honor and integrity for you, Rush! And that's the ethos that we in the
Bush family try to pass on to our children. It's just a gosh-darn
doodley-doo shame that Bill had his knuckles rapped with those
conspiracy charges after that little haberdasher Truman put the heat on.
Thank goodness we pulled enough strings to keep my
name out of the papers when they seized our Nazi assets under the
Trading With the Enemy Act last year! But things have reached a sorry
pass in this country when decent businessmen are forced to give up
profits and betray their foreign partners just because of some
ridiculous law. I mean, come on! The law is for regulating the behavior
of the lower orders; it was never meant to apply to people like us!
You
know, I'm starting to think that government is just too darn important
to be left to the whims of the so-called electorate and their childish
notions about law and justice and morality. I might have to get into
politics one day and straighten things out. Because I have a dream,
Rush.
Limbo: Say on, brother!
Bush:
I dream of a world where no tycoon need ever lose a dime of profit just
because it came from the blood of innocent people. I dream of a world
where the rabble keep their mouths shut and the well-born can exercise
their God-given privileges in any way they see fit. I see a world where
votes go uncounted and judges take orders, where bribes flow and
kickbacks abound, where public service and private enrichment are
joined in one great, golden revolving door. I see a world where war,
corruption and deceit are exalted, where stupidity is rewarded and
arrogance enthroned in power.
And if I can't get us there, if I
fall along the way, then maybe my son or my grandson will pick up the
banner and lead us to that promised land. But I believe we'll make it
there somehow, Rush. We'll leave this rickety old constitutional
republic behind and see our great country submit at last to the natural
order, ordained by God and confirmed by history: the rule of elites,
backed by brute power, gorging on the toil and blood of others.
Rush: Amen, Pres! My friends, you can forget about Comrade Roosevelt's "freedom from want, freedom from fear" jazz -- this is the true voice of American leadership. All hail the Natural Order!
Here's an historic speech by a noted African-American leader on August 28, 1963:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
....This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
And here's what we will see in Colorado when another noted African-American leader delivers an historic speech there on August 28, 2008:
Individuals arrested at the Democratic National Convention will be processed at an industrial warehouse with chain-link cells topped by razor wire, a facility some have compared to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Groups planning marches, concerts and other events during the Aug. 25-28 convention dub the center "Gitmo on the Platte," for the nearby South Platte River...Video footage of the north Denver warehouse on Denver's KCNC-TV showed coils of razor wire topping chain-link cells. A sign read: "Electric stun devices used here."
[Sheriff's spokesman Capt. Frank] Gale said each cell will be about 20-by-20 feet. He refused to say how many people could be processed there.
"It's just ridiculous, the thing looks like a dog pound," said Mark Cohen of the protest group Recreate-68 Alliance. "Even if you only put dogs in there, people will be complaining about it. I think you ought to have the Red Cross and Amnesty International come take a look at this thing."
And you thought it was just Republicans that wanted to stifle free speech.
"The infamous "free speech zone," set to make a comeback at Denver's upcoming Democratic National Convention, needs to be within earshot of delegates, a coalition of civil liberties advocates backed by the ACLU said [last month]. Chain link fencing or chicken wire at the end of the parade route, about 700 feet away from the Pepsi Center under the current plan, would separate demonstrators and protesters from other convention attendees, the Rocky Mountain News reported.
"No human voice, or any other sound," ACLU counsel said in Monday's amended complaint, "can ever hope to reach a person at the entrance."
The ACLU and other groups filed suit against the plan to protect the delicate shell-like ears of top Democrats from any unseemly criticism or unkind remarks. But they lost the case:
Protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Denver can be restricted to fenced-in areas, federal judge ruled on Wednesday, saying that security needs outweighed curbs on their rights...
U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger agreed that the protesters would suffer some infringement on their freedom of expression but said those interests had to be balanced with security concerns.
"The restrictions inhibit the plaintiffs' ability to engage in some forms of expressive conduct, (but) ... the plaintiffs have a wide variety of alternative means of expression that will allow them to effectively communicate their messages," Krieger wrote in her 71-page ruling.
Why yes -- they can always send Barack a text message! Or maybe they can form a Facebook group. Or even write a blog post! All Americans are perfectly free to express their opinions in any venue whatsoever -- as long it is a venue which the high and mighty can ignore at their own discretion. Let their freedom ring, yes -- but let everybody else shut up. Let each and every one of us outside the golden circle of power lower our heads, muffle our voices, and keep well away when our betters are passing by. We must not disturb their party, we must not trouble their repose, we must not speak to them of what they have done, of what they countenanced, and of what they have most miserably failed to do.
Martin Luther King Jr. walked down the middle of hostile streets, through crowds spewing hatred at him, howling for his blood; he faced down police bayonets and the power of the state. Now our modern-day heroes can't bear to allow a few critical words within 700 feet of their pampered selves.
What a falling-off is there! Looks like we'll have to keep on dreaming that dream, Brother Martin; the chimes of freedom are sounding more distant than ever.
George Monbiot takes up a theme we dealt with here the other day: the centrality of the Pentagon war machine -- and its attendant corporate war profiteers -- in American policy and politics today.
Monbiot's specific subject is the U.S. "missile defense system" -- the greatest boondoggle in human history, and an endless fount of corruption for decades. But he also provides an excellent general description of America's degraded, dysfunctional state, which is never on more naked display than during the quadrennial freak show of a presidential campaign:
If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government's interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.
I'm afraid this will be the chief question of interest to the next administration as well. As for "missile defense" -- which is now playing a starring role in the new Cold War being avidly fomented by America's bipartisan political elite - Monbiot is worth quoting at length:
The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing....All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn't have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.
This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile's susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.
Monbiot then gets to the corroded heart of the matter: scratch, geetus, moolah, long green. As he notes, the Pentagon and its willing enablers on both sides of the political aisle have come up with a truly artistic budgetary innovation to keep golden goose a-laying: "spiral development." From Monbiot:
The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government's usual accounting standards. It's called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.
Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that "the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation". Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars' worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.
So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I'll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn't work.
US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.
Monbiot also points out the obvious: the nation must be kept in a constant welter of fear and indignation in order to keep the pork flowing:
To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets.
Yes, there's nothing inherently American about fearmongering and corruption. The Kremlin knows full well that the missile defense system which Bush is installing in Poland doesn't work. But it looks threatening, and is a handy bogey-man to shake at the Russian people. Then again, the missile base is just a beachhead for the coming horde of NATO forces that will soon be bristling on Russia's border, so the Kremlin's alarm at the placement is not just rabble-rousing. And of course, there is also the fact that the missile base could easily accomodate offensive weapons as well as the boondoggled duds. The threat to Russia from U.S. missiles and NATO encroachments is considerably more real and substantial than the idea that Russia poses any kind of genuine threat to America.
To be sure, Russia, and China, do pose a genuine threat to the American elite's idiotic, arrogant agenda of forcing its will on the entire world. Thus the frothing nonsense and belligerent posturing -- and murderous military adventures -- of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment will go on. But as we've often noted here before, none of this has anything to do with the genuine interests or well-being or security of the American people. That is just not "a question of interest" to our moneyed elites and our ludicrous, "purpose-driven" politicians.
Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War blue ox babe asks me -- "Don't you think it's a little naive and childish to expect the changes to come from the Donkeys?"
Not a bit. I expect nothing from the Donkeys. I only said they might change, but I doubt it. I doubt it because they show no i...
Biden, Obama and The Blood-Dimmed Tide Nader is approaching double-digit support in some recent polls, from Sam Smith's Undernews: [quote]A new Time/CNN poll shows Ralph Nader polling 8 percent in New Mexico, 7 percent in Colorado, 7 percent in Pennsylvania, and 6 percent in Nevada.[/quot...
Biden, Obama and The Blood-Dimmed Tide There is a real third choice, other than staying away from the voting booth: Nader/Gonzales. At least inform yourself at triple-w vote nader dot org. Check the issues there, and if you don't agree, at least it won't be because of willful ignorance....
Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War 'But should we not tell the truth as we see it?'
Sure.
'I must admit that these days I'm feeling much as I did in the weeks and months after 9/11,...'
My last post for awhile (but not my last visit to read) since I say mostly the same thing over a...
Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War J Ford --
Don't you think it's a little naive and childish to expect the changes to come from the Donkeys? Why shouldn't you take part in the change? Why should they have to do it? Why should you get to sit back and wait for them to change?
Biden, Obama and The Blood-Dimmed Tide [quote]Actually, you get a third choice -- keep the hell out of it, and let the followers of these goons duke it out.[/quote]
Antifa, my friend -- let's have a chat.
Biden, Obama and The Blood-Dimmed Tide Mr Silber indeed returned with a vengeance.
Sadly, I hear many Obamabots and Donkeybots talking about what a "wise" choice it was to make Biden the Veepster. Most talk about his sagacious foreign policy "expertise," which is neither wise nor expert...
Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War Hi Chris, thanks for a great post revealing what Biden is like. I didn't know much about him, really, and although ignorance is bliss it is much better to know what the world has in store for it...
Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War I've been hoping for a McCain win in November. It will be bad for all of us, but it might possibly be good for the Democratic Party. If, after the Bush administration, Democrats find they cannot beat John McCain, it might scare them into embracing a ...
Biden, Obama and The Blood-Dimmed Tide Very succinct stuff, Mr. Floyd. There's nothing to add. There's solace in music...remember this verse from the song, 'Politician', by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown...
'Hey, hey now baby, get into my big, black car,
I wanna just show you, wh...
Am just an average depression ridden trainwreck of a person sitting in Raleigh, NC. Used to be very politically active with progressive groups here, but can't do much anymore. Was born in Pakistan and came to the US in '92 when I was thirteen. Still have connections back home, speak urdu and punjabi fluently. Nowadays that I can't do much of anything so I read and read.
You know chris, I have never registered to any blog. But yours made me do it. Thanks for your humanity. I'd love to see you if I go to England, like in a year or two.
Please post as much as you can, I visit your site whenever I feel desperate for oxygen, which is quiet a few times a day.
I heard your interview on antiwar radio a while back, and I was just wondering... how does your southern accent go down there in England? hehehe...
Please keep up the good work, I eagerly await your posts.
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Only once, briefly, did I find myself in a room where CNN was blaring on a tiny television set. As it happened, it was the exact moment when Joe Biden was being anointed as Barack Obama's running mate. It was a live feed: Biden was at the podium, giving a strangely stilted speech in a fake Southern accent. (Perhaps he was trying to channel Bill Clinton -- or maybe Sam Nunn.) Although wearing a tie, he was coatless, with shirtsleeves rolled up, in that classic pose of political hackery: a man ready to "go to work for the American people." (Obama, looking on rather distractedly from the side, was dressed in the same way).
