As you
probably already know, they executed Dale Leo Bishop in Mississippi
last night. I had urged readers to write to Governor Haley Barbour and
respectfully request that he commute Bishop's death sentence to life
imprisonment, since he did not actually murder anyone, although he did
take part in a terrible crime. Barbour refused -- even though he had
just released a man who had murdered his wife in the street: blew her
head off with a shotgun. But that actual murderer had been a servant in
Barbour's mansion; wiping the dribble off Barbour's jowls is obviously
a qualification for clemency. So the wife-murderer is free, while the
non-murderer Bishop is dead.
The execution took place at the dinner hour, 6 p.m. Perhaps Barbour was
just sitting down to a nice juicy steak as his minions were putting a
syringe full of poison into Bishop's bloodstream. We can only hope the
dead flesh Barbour devoured during the course of the execution will
clot the bowels of the bloodthirsty, graft-bloated son of a bitch. (And
we mean that in the most respectful sense, of course.)
Well, the deed is done. The world moves on. It's just too bad for Dale
Leo Bishop that he was only involved in a single murder; if he had
slaughtered a million people, like Barbour's good buddy, George W.
Bush, no doubt he'd be a free man today.
Dale Leo Bishop is scheduled to be killed tomorrow by the state of Mississippi -- despite the fact that he did not kill anyone, although he assisted an attack that turned into a murder. The actual murderer, oddly enough, was sentenced to life in prison; but Bishop, who is mentally ill, was sentenced to die. [For more, see previous post on this subject.]
All of his judicial appeals have been exhausted now. Outside a highly unlikely intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, the only hope Bishop has is a commutation of his death sentence to life in prison by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.
As the Jackson Clarion-Ledger points out in an excellent editorial on the case, just last week Barbour pardoned a man convicted of a heinous murder. Michael Graham walked up to his ex-wife's car at a streetlight in Pascagoula and shot her in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun, blowing her head off in front of her own father, who was standing across the street at the time. Graham had served 19 years of a life sentence for the killing when Barbour pardoned him. The reason? Graham had been a trusty, a prisoner working as a servant, in the governor's mansion.
From the Clarion-Ledger:
Trial testimony - undisputed trial testimony - indicates that Bishop was not the man swinging the hammer that delivered the fatal blows to victim's head....
If Bishop, who suffers from mental illness, receives a lethal injection on Wednesday, he would be only the eighth person put to death - and the first since 1996 - who did not directly kill the victim (not including contract killings) in the more than 1,100 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
There is ample evidence that Bishop's mental illness led to his waiving rights that might have spared his life at trial. There are also allegations that his post-conviction counsel representation suppressed evidence of Bishop's mental illness....
If there is mercy in Barbour's heart for a killer like Graham who was definitely guilty of a cold-blooded, gruesome murder, then the governor shouldn't blink an eye in granting clemency to Bishop - who took part in a killing but didn't deliver the fatal blows.
Bishop didn't get a chance to serve as a domestic servant at the Governor's Mansion. Graham did. That's the apparent difference.
Bishop should at most share a jail cell for life with Jessie Johnson, the man who is serving life without parole for Gentry's murder. But he should not pay the ultimate price if he did not commit the ultimate crime.
As we noted here earlier, Barbour is a rank political hack, a lobbyist, bagman and fixer from way back. His good buddy George W. Bush has steered millions of dollars in federal money earmarked for Hurricane Katrina relief to Barbour and his corporate cronies. His pardon of Graham is all of a piece with the plutocrat's code: "Everything for me and mine, diddly-squat for everybody else."
It is not very likely than an appeal to a conscience that Barbour has shown little sign of possessing will move him to spare Dale Leo Bishop from the poison needle. However, our high and mighty officials do like to appear to be figures of great moral depth, and so occasionally they can be moved to some gesture of clemency, some show of humanity, as long as there is no significant downside to their bottom line.
Therefore, we urge you once again to send a very respectful message to Haley Barbour, asking him politely to give his profound and prayerful consideration to Dale Bishop's plea for commutation. The address is below:
I think it is time for all those who have opposed the American invasion of Iraq to stand up for Barack Obama and acquit him of the ludicrous charge hurled at him by so many on the so-called "left": namely, that he has somehow "sold out" the anti-war movement with his recent statements about "refining" his long-held plans for a carefully calibrated end to the war.
Of course, the candidate himself has spoken most eloquently on this issue, pointing out that the idea of refining the details of the pullout according to the facts of the ground in Iraq has always been a key element of his plan all along. Sen. Obama is entirely correct: his views regarding American involvement in Iraq have been clear and consistent throughout his campaign for the presidency.
Although in a perfect world, Obama would need no defense on this matter, its truth being so self-evident, the distortions of the corporate media -- always looking for a trivial "gotcha" issue to goose the day's horse-race coverage -- compels the "reality-based community" to step forward and set the record straight.
And Sami Ramadani -- an Iraqi writer and academic who was persecuted by Saddam Hussein and driven from his native land -- has done just that in a column in Monday's Guardian. He brings a perspective almost entirely absent from the Washington's navel-gazing debate over Iraq: the Iraqi perspective. He makes a brilliant case for Obama's rock-solid consistency on the Iraq war, and explores some of the far-reaching implications of the candidate's plan.
From the Guardian: As November's American presidential elections approach, Barack Obama's message on Iraq is being widely interpreted as "flip-flopping" and a "retreat" from a previously unequivocal stance of fully withdrawing the US occupation forces. This is to misunderstand Obama, who is not someone who shoots from the hip. There is much more to his words than cursory reading could unravel...
Obama himself has reacted angrily to claims of a policy U-turn: "For me to say I'm going to refine my policies is I don't think in any way inconsistent with prior statements and doesn't change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I'm going to end it as president." Earlier this month he resorted to an op-ed article in the New York Times to emphatically state: "On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war."
As always in examining the words of politicians, let alone Obama (who now has 300 foreign policy advisers), the devil is in the details. Here, Obama's "ending the war" declarations begin to look far from reassuring, even before he "refines" his line after meeting the US commander, General Petraeus, in Iraq.
Obama sees Iraq as part of a wider theatre of war and potential wars engulfing the entire Middle East, where US strategic goals and interests are at stake. So his obvious shift on the "surge" operations in Iraq (underlined by deleting criticisms of it from his website last week) is strengthening his call for "redeployment" from Iraq to Afghanistan. His current strategy could be summed up as: de-escalate the war in Iraq, escalate it in Afghanistan, and talk to Iran. On Iran, his offer of talks was coupled with an alarming, Bush-style threat. "I'll do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything," Obama told a gathering of the pro-Israel lobby group, Aipac, in April. He is echoing the sentiments of his famous anti-Iraq war speech in 2002, in which he repeatedly stressed that he was not opposed to all US wars.
It is worth noting that the term withdrawal, let alone a full unconditional withdrawal that will satisfy most of the Iraqi people, has never been part of Obama's vocabulary. His first carefully considered statement on Iraq was made in January last year, when he introduced the Iraq war de-escalation act to Congress. It was then that he envisaged stationing troops in Iraq on a longer-term basis: "A residual US presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces and pursuit of international terrorists." Using similar phrases, this is what he outlined in the New York Times last week.
....But it doesn't require rocket science to know that keeping "residual" forces requires heavily fortified areas, installations and a state of readiness to go to war. Unless Obama has discovered something new, such areas are known as military bases.....
Obama has even pre-empted a possible line of attack from hawks by chillingly suggesting he would possibly invade Iraq again if necessary. His website states: "He would reserve the right to intervene militarily, with our international partners, to suppress potential genocidal violence within Iraq." The word potential is worth pausing over; it is salutary to remember Bush and Blair occupied Iraq and caused the death of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people for "humanitarian" reasons.
Neither is Obama opposed to signing a military treaty with Iraq. He has two conditions to make Bush's current attempts to impose a pact acceptable: the pact should get Congressional approval, and renounce "permanent" military bases. However, leaked drafts of this colonialist-style pact do not mention the word "permanent" at all. And his "benchmarks" for continued support for the corrupt Iraqi politicians protected by US forces in Baghdad's Green Zone are strikingly similar to those of the Bush administration.
Tactical differences and issues of style aside, Obama's message on occupied Iraq is deeply troubling - not because it has U-turned but because it has been consistent. His 300 foreign policy advisers are making sure that he will not stray from protecting US imperialist interests, even if it does mean launching new wars and bolstering puppet regimes and corrupt dictatorships throughout the "greater Middle East".
A bit under the weather, so apologies for the light posting. Hope to be back in gear soon, so keep checking in.
Meanwhile, here is some abiding wisdom on the inevitable ramifications of macro-economic cycles in an unrestricted "free" market system (also known as "One law for the rich, another law for the poor"). This learned disquisition originally appeared in 1854, and was updated in 1993 by one of our most eminent men of letters (doctorates from Princeton and St Andrews University). Perpend:
Next week, the State of Mississippi is going to strap Dale Leo Bishop to a prison guerney and shoot him full of deadly chemicals. He's going to die for murder although he killed no one. He's going to die even though his case was grossly mishandled by a lawyer who refused to present mitigating evidence of the horrible abuse Bishop suffered as a child and his life-long struggle with mental illness. He's going to die even though the man whom prosecutors admit is the one who committed the murder has been spared, while Bishop has been condemned to execution by lethal injection.
The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear his appeal last month. The Mississippi Supreme Court then scheduled his killing for July 23.
It's a complicated case. It's an ugly case. Bishop took part in the brutal murder of Marcus Gentry ten years ago. Gentry was set upon by Bishop and Jessie Johnson, who believed that Gentry had ratted out Johnson's younger brother, Cory, to the police on grand larceny and burglary charges. In the course of a beating in which Bishop landed a couple of blows with his hands and held Bishop at one point, Jessie Johnson repeatedly struck Gentry with a claw hammer belonging to Bishop and finally killed him. Bishop was 24 at the time of the attack; Gentry was 19 years old.
At the trial in 2000, Bishop admitted taking part in the beating but said he didn't know Johnson was going to kill Gentry. After his conviction, Bishop, crushed, refused to make any mitigating statement, but instead declared that he was bound for Hell and asked the court to do what Gentry's family wanted to do: kill him. The judge said, "Mr. Bishop, I'm going to grant your wish."
After the trial, Bishop changed his mind and appealed the verdict. His case was handled by the state's Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, set up in 2000 to help indigent death row prisoners. Here the case took a curious turn. As the Jackson Free Press reports:
Bishop’s lawyers accuse Robert Ryan, former director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel...with “extreme dereliction of duty” in Ryan’s failure to present mitigating evidence in Bishop’s appeal. The brief includes affidavits supporting the defense’s allegations that Ryan deliberately suppressed his own staff’s investigation, which revealed Bishop’s life-long mental illness, and summarily dismissed the volunteers working on the case.
“The director simply discarded this proof and substituted his own unsubstantiated and frivolous allegations (with the appeal). All the while, Bishop himself had no idea his lead lawyer was sabotaging his main chance to escape execution,“ the lawyers wrote.
“I don’t really know if Ryan was overworked or in over his head,” [James] Craig said... "but whatever the reason is for his lack of performance, it’s just another situation where the quality of justice you get is dependent on whether you have any money. That’s been such a theme for Dale Bishop, because his mother tried to have him taken for (psychiatric evaluation and treatment). They quoted her a price and she couldn’t possibly afford it. This was a situation that probably could have been avoided if somebody would have intervened in (Bishop’s) life.”
The attorneys contend that Bishop's illness prevented him from making a rational decision during the original sentencing. Back to the Free Press:
The brief goes on to say that Ryan failed to have Bishop evaluated although he knew Bishop was taking Lithium after doctors at Parchman diagnosed his illness. Lithium is prescribed almost exclusively to people suffering from bipolar disorder, the brief states. Instead, Ryan made the claim in his appeal that Bishop was mentally retarded, while attaching evidence indicating clearly that he was not.
“I think it’s close to criminal fraud to take the state’s money and handle a case like this,” Craig said.
Ryan's successor in the post, Glenn Swartzfager, is working with Bishop's lawyers in their appeal. In court papers, Swartzfeger called Ryan's work on the case "a sham," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports. Ryan also buried evidence of abuse suffered by Bishop as a child and youth, as the human rights organization Reprieve notes:
Reprieve volunteers assisting on the case gathered documents and witness statements which proved that Bishop suffered from a chronic mental illness (bipolar depressive disorder, formerly known as “manic depression”) and had undergone horrific trauma when he was young, which clearly affected his capacity to make rational decisions at trial. Bishop’s family noticed problems with his behavior and thinking when he was four years old. His elementary school records from Texas have many references to these problems and to evaluations that showed that Dale Bishop needed serious help. When he was in middle school, his school counselor recommended a psychiatric consultation. The psychiatric hospital Dale’s mother took him to advised immediate inpatient hospitalization, but Mrs. Bishop could not afford the high price of this care. He was only diagnosed and treated for his mental illness when he got to death row.
Also, Dale Bishop’s father was an abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children – including Dale Bishop – on a weekly basis. The family was incredibly poor. When Dale was an infant, the family had no running water, no indoor bathroom, and no money.
This is evidence that almost surely would have required a new trial, where Dale Bishop could present his case for a life sentence, giving a jury the background about his youth and illness, and letting them weigh up these facts alongside the fact that Dale Bishop was not the killer of Marcus Gentry.
The last-minute appeal also stresses the lack of evidence that the killing was premeditated, which is "one of the components required to impose the death penalty in Mississippi when a defendant is not the actual killer. Bishop’s co-defendant, Johnson, stated in an affidavit that the murder took place after a two-week drug binge and that they had been smoking marijuana, and injecting crystal meth and cocaine prior to the crime," as the Free Press reports. Johnson, who admitted killing Gentry, was given a life sentence at his trial, which was held after Bishop's conviction.
And so this is how "justice" is going to work in Mississippi next week. Dale Leo Bishop, a man riddled with genuine, even suicidal remorse over his part in a drug-addled murder, will be killed by the state next week. Meanwhile, the man who actually committed the murder will live out the rest of his natural life as a ward of that same state.
Reprieve notes:
Dale Bishop never had a real chance in life. If the death penalty is going to be anything more than just a lottery, it’s not fair for some prisoners to lose appeals just because their State-paid lawyer discarded valuable, relevant evidence. We are shocked and sickened by what has happened in this case, and we hope others who look at the facts will feel the same. Dale Bishop’s lawyers are preparing a Petition for Executive Clemency, to present to Governor Haley Barbour if the courts deny the new appeal. We ask all those who are concerned about the justice system to write to the Governor...to ask that he seriously consider, in this case, commuting Dale Bishop’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Or, at least, we ask the Governor to grant a temporary reprieve and ask the Parole Board to study the case and make a recommendation for or against a commutation to life imprisonment without parole.
The chance that Barbour, a long-time right-wing political hack and backroom fixer, will actually commute Bishop's sentence or even delay his killing are slim. For one thing, Bishop is white -- or "white trash" as he'd be called amongst Barbour's neo-plantation set -- and his death could help redress the statistical imbalance between the executions of black and white prisoners: an imbalance that always threatens to bring in some busybody judge to interfere with the politically popular operation of the death chamber. But a slim chance is better than none.
“The death penalty feeds a mentality of revenge and vindication and further reduces the dignity and worth of human life,” said Fr. Jeremy Tobin of St. Moses the Black Priory in Raymond. “Executions teach us that killing people is OK, and in fact, should be celebrated,” he added. “Killing is immoral, it is not justified, it is anti-Christian. … Only non-violence can end the self-destruction of a blood-soaked world.”
Below are contact details for Haley Barbour:
Haley Barbour Governor of Mississippi P.O. Box 139 Jackson, MS 39205 Fax: + 1 601-359-3741 E-mail: governor@governor.state.ms.us
Reprieve also provides text for the letter that you can send or adapt here.
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop Chris - very good post, and a travesty of justice.
[i]What is, is that there is no "state of Mississippi" that will strap this man down and shoot poison into his veins. There are the the men who do it, the men who order it, and then men who support...
Death for Dinner: Haley Barbour Kills Dale Leo Bishop Everybody (Dennis Prager, the Supreme Court and the people who appropriate funds for public defender budgets aside) is opposed to the death penalty for provably innocent people. Being against capital punishment for them takes no courage. Being oppose...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge [quote]No candidate for President would get any media attention if they did not kiss the various rings of the oligarchs. Obama has been consistent because he is the proverbial slick lawyer who understands the angles and the lay of the land. Having sa...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge obama is just a smoother rapist,
one who will convince more people
to enjoy it
kahoneez above has it right -
a more elegant occupation of iraq
is a lead-in to the next war
we're 'merkins and we need more
victories - we can never have enough
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop clemency for one who becomes known to the prince
cold steel for the other who is not
many think we live under a state of fascism
we don't
royalism
News That Stays News Despite being a Dylan fan from 1964 on, personally, I rather prefer this....
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm
"Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? "...mediocre translation, but still....
hope you're feeling better, please kee...
Solid Rock: Acquitting Obama of the 'Flip-Flop' Charge 1 . Obama On 60 mins. " we must keep troops in Iraq , to protect out interest " , aka permanent military bases , to project U.S. power .
2 . Wants to " bring combat troops home " , we'll I figured it out right away and that's COMBAT troops are about...
Last Chance to Stop Execution of Dale Leo Bishop THe US lost it's national conscience, IMHO, at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, not that there was much of a conscience to lose. Barbour, on the other hand, never had one, but an appeal to his vanity and political self-interest might reach something in that sh...
Reprising the Genocidal Fury of Thomas Friedman
Sunday, 13 April 2008
I'm away this week at the usual undisclosed, secure location. In the interim, here's a look back at a piece on the very model of a modern major punditiot. Unfortunately, it is still all too relevant, as the mindset anatomized below still reigns -- and roars -- supreme over what is laughingly called our "public discourse." (It is neither, of course; the "public" has zero input into it, and "discourse" is a painfully inappropriate word for the witless barbarisms of our knuckle-dragging mandarins.) This piece originally ran in November 2006.
You would think that
by now we would have "supp'd full with horrors" on the New York Times
op-ed pages. What could be worse than the atrocities that have filled
those gray columns in the past few years,
the loud brays for war, the convoluted excuses for presidential
tyranny, the steady murmur of chin-stroking bullshit meant to comfort
the comfortable elite and confirm them -- at all times, at any cost --
in their well-wadded self-righteousness? Surely, you would think, we
have seen the worst.
If
this was your thought, then alas, alas, alack the day, you were
bitterly mistaken, my friend. Comes now before us the portly,
fur-lipped figure of Thomas Friedman, Esq., who today has penned what
must be the most morally hideous and deeply racist column ever to
appear in those rarefied journalistic precincts: "Ten Months or Ten Years."
It
seems that this very enthusiastic promoter of the unprovoked war of
aggression against Iraq - which he proudly called "a war of choice,"
apparently not realizing that he was parroting the propagandists of the
Nazi regime that killed millions of his ethnic kindred -- has now
discovered that Iraqi Arabs are hopeless, worthless barbarians, broken
by "1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism" and can only be held
together by an "iron fist." (He got all this from reading a new book,
apparently. Well, a little literacy, like a little learning, is a
dangerous thing, I reckon -- and as anyone who has ever exposed
themselves to the dull, flat buzz of Friedman's prose can attest, his
literacy is little indeed.)
In
fact, the only thing America did wrong in its "effort to bring
progressive politics or democracy to this region" was not coming down
hard enough on this darky riff-raff: "Had we properly occupied the
country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron
fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new
course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough
troops." Instead, we took it easy on them -- I mean, Jesus H. Jiminy
Cricket Walker Christ, we only killed 600,000 of them; what kind of
pussyfooting around is that? -- and look what happened. A Sunni
insurgency sprang up, whose only goal -- whose ONLY goal, mind you --
was to make America look bad: "America must fail in its effort to bring
progressive, etc., etc. America must fail – no matter how many Iraqis
have to be killed, America must fail." What was their "only one goal"
again, Tom? Oh yeah: America must fail. Not a single ding-dang one of
them ornery critters ever had any other motive whatsoever to take up
arms against an army of foreigners who had invaded and occupied their
country.
Actually, I think there was at least one other
goal of the insurgency, and it hangs over Friedman's piece like a bad
smell he is loath to acknowledge in polite company: they wanted Thomas Friedman to
fail. Here we come to the corroded heart of the matter. Friedman, like
all the pro-war "liberal hawks" who see aggressive war as the very best
method of implanting "progressive politics or democracy" in benighted
lands, is personally affronted by the Iraqis' ingratitude. They will
not and cannot accept even the slightest implication that there was
ever any flaw in their philosophy of benign bloodlust. (Bloodlust by
proxy, of course, always by proxy! Goodness gracious granny me, you'd
never see one of these paladins so much as muss their cuticles in the
service of their noble ideals. That's what God made Mexicans and
Salvadorans and white trash crackers for.)
In his column,
Friedman makes much of his pre-war enthusiasm, and proudly claims that
he was the first to come up with the "Pottery Barn rule" of
international diplomacy -- "You break it, you own it" -- which he
further claims Colin Powell copped from him. Perhaps he's right;
certainly, it's hard to believe that two separate lifelong chewers of
conventional wisdom cud could have come up with such a banal and
suburban-brained observation independently!
But the fact that Tom Friedman's war has failed -- that these
dastardly, dumb-ass Arabs (and Tom, swoopstake, includes the entire
"Sunni Muslim world" in his condemnation for "tolerating and tacitly
support[ing]" the insurgency; he has obviously gone and polled every
single Sunni Muslim on earth to procure this knowledge) -- is the
unspoken leitmotiv of the entire piece. This was my war
-- and the Arabs ruined it! They didn't want the "progressive politics
or democracy" that I wanted to give them at gunpoint -- or with an
"iron fist" -- and now the whole thing's just a hopeless mess. Hell,
the Arabs are so goddamned stupid, says Tom, that they "can't even have
a proper civil war. There are so many people killing so many other
people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that
all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable."
Ah,
but wise old Tom has a proposal to settle this problem -- a most
condign punishment for the Arab trash who have so bitterly disappointed
him. Friedman proposes -- seriously, one assumes,
for surely nothing is more serious than Tom Friedman in full cry --
that we "re-invade" Iraq with 150,000 more troops...and this time really do
a number on those recalcitrant tribes, do whatever "is necessary to
crush the dark forces in Iraq" and pound some sense into them, or at
least some obedience, with our big "iron fist." (This is, after all,
the only thing that Arabs understand, right? No doubt Tom has read "The
Arab Mind," Raphael Patai's reduction of fellow human beings to
abstract ciphers bound up in a hive mentality -- an outdated, outmoded,
outlandish spasm of hidebound "Orientalism" that has long been required
reading not only for war-of-choicemongers like Friedman but also for
Pentagon brass and officers in the field.)
Whatever
is necessary. Whatever it takes. This is, I believe, what is
technically known as the "Close Your Hearts to Pity" strategy, in honor
of that great war-of-choicer who thus exhorted his officers as they
stood poised on the Polish frontier back in the glorious days when men
were men and an iron fist was an iron fist. Nowadays,
of course, we hollow men, headpieces filled with straw, obviously lack
the will to power. And so even while Tom adjures his great hero, the Commander-in-Chief,
to unleash the re-invasion force (where Tom proposes to get 150,000
more fighting troops from remains a mystery; maybe China will loan us
some), thereby "crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling
borders, and building Iraq's institutions and political culture from
scratch," it's clear that he believes that the sissy-mary American
public lacks the proper martial spirit to carry through the necessary
10 years of fisting that the Iraqis so clearly deserve. And so, more in
anger than in sorrow, he proposes the only other possible alternative
to a brand-new blitzkrieg: bugging out in 10 months time and forgetting
the whole shebang ever happened. Otherwise, "it will only mean throwing
more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled
with more and more broken pieces."
Yes,
yes, the "Pottery Barn Rule" says that if we are responsible for those
broken pieces, then we own them. But never let it be said that Friedman
lacks the moral courage and mental elasticity to admit that he is
wrong. Not about his advocacy of the war, of course. Nor about the idea
that murdering 600,000 civilians (and counting) is a jim-dandy way to
advance "progressive politics or democracy." Heavens to Betsy my word,
no. All of that still goes, and we can only hope to see this course
followed again elsewhere, and soon -- and done right this
time. No, what Tom manfully admits is wrong is his "Pottery Barn Rule"
itself. It turns out that "Iraq was already pretty broken before we got
there." So none of what has happened is our fault. The blame lies with
those "1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism." (So much more
corrosive than the European authoritarianism that overlaid the
White-Folk homeland for, oh, say 3,000 years or so.) The blame lies
with "three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule" -- that would be the
Sunni Baathist rule that was put in place by means of not one but two CIA-assisted coups, and maintained with lavish help from Ronald Reagan and George Humpty Dumpty Bush.
The blame also lies, it seems, with a "crippling decade of UN
sanctions," screwed on ever tighter by those champions of humanitarian
intervention, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
In
fact, who can forget Tom's giddy cheerleading for the Clinton-Blair air
war against the civilian population of Serbia? Who can forget his
bone-chilling warning to the unruly Slavs in his classic 1999 column,
"Give War a Chance," when he wrote: "Let's at least have a real war. It
should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge,
road and war-related factory has to be targeted...Every week you ravage
Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing
you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."
In a column the year before, as Norman Solomon notes, Friedman called
for "bombing Iraq, over and over and over again."
So
there you go. Iraq was already ruined before we got there. We didn't
have a blessed thing to do with it. Certainly, the "war of choice"
launched by the knowing lies of Bush and Blair ("the intelligence is
being fixed around the policy") has no connection whatsoever to the
deep hole filled with broken pieces that is Iraq today. And if it turns
out that we really are too
wimpy to close our hearts to pity and put these ragheads in their place
once and for all, we can still leave behind the hellhole -- and those
600,000 dead -- with a clear conscience. For we have not failed. (Thomas Friedman has not failed.) We were
not wrong. (Thomas Friedman was not wrong.) It was all the fault of
those "progress-resistant," broken-down, hive-minded, barbaric Arabs.
We can either slaughter them by the millions, or flush them down the
toilet. There is no other way.
This,
ladies and gentleman, is what passes for Establishment thought on the
most respected newspaper in the land. This complete and utter moral
perversion -- like unto an act of sexual congress with the beasts of
the field -- is now the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes,
the "public intellectuals," and the powerful elites whom they so
cravenly serve. This blood-flecked drivel -- a precise echo of the
genocidal fury being voiced on what once was once considered the
lunatic fringes of the far right -- is now at the heart of American
political life.
How many more people will have to die to keep the warmongers from colliding with the enormity of their crimes? What child will be ripped to shreds tonight
-- and tomorrow night -- and every night afterward, for "ten months or
ten years," to keep Thomas Friedman snug and cozy in the gilded palace
of his endless self-regard? ***
My thanks for the reprise of this, for exposing the putrid heart of the toxic culture these monsters have created. As a little update:
"So we've been talking about police protection during the upcoming convention when all those stinky protesters are coming… You know, I'll tell you what works on a crowd like this -- a machine gun, that always works very well...You must have order, you cannot have a civilized society without order and if that means cracking a few skulls, so be it. A good ole boy network is what you need and hand out some ax handles. Chris Baker KTLK radio morning show, 4/4/08
Nothing more civilized than cracking skulls to maintain order, especially those stinky commie terrorist sub-human protesters. And the supine cowards here grovel before it all.
The smug and smarmy smile of Mr Friedman awakens the urge to let blood. I imagine myself holding the machete, hacking away at the bloated Kurtz-like corpulence of the jowly Friedman. The red river runs from beneath his lifeless corpse, and one more knell on the bell of free thought may be rung.
Damn Thomas Friedman to Hell. He is nothing but an apologist for Empire, a stinking rotting apologist who pretends at detached honest criticism.
I remember that piece from the first time you ran it. As I read it this time, what struck me hardest was my realization of how Fat Tommy will cheer on the goons who come to chasten the American public for voting against the rat-pack junta who, bent upon world conquest, have captured the Oval Office. Just think how fast and far things are gonna go south after Big Dick and Georgie Porgy pull the trigger on Iran and then find out they need a draft to cope with the blowback.
The first time I heard of Brown-nosing Colin Powell's use of the Pottery Barn rule - I thought of its logical application to my old neighborhood's (a slum in Manila) fascist thugs ..."Okay, so we gang-raped your sister, now we get to keep her!" The destruction of Iraq has been a wild success for Israel. The only real mistake Bush and the NYT's trashmouth Tom Friedman (Leslie Gelb et al) really made was believing the Neo-Con's Israeli advisers who assured them that Arabs cannot fight, they cannot resist, they cannot organize and sustain a protracted people's war against an imperial aggressor and its colonial clients, they cannot win against the Empire. A minor detail.
I think you misread a few things. Nobody in the Bush-Cheney Crime Syndicate was concerned about the battle-readiness of anyone. The Iraq debacle isn't about military victory. It was never about that. And Israel doesn't advise us. We run Israel. Israel is a US/UK puppet.
I hope you weren't trying for some thinly veiled Jew-baiting. That sort of bigotry is as bad as the misanthropy of the Bush-Cheney Crime Syndicate.
Oh course the invasion and destruction of Iraq is about Israel's regional ambitions and its neo-con agents within the US decision making apparatus are calling the shots when it comes to US Middle East policy. You are free to denounce an objective, anti-imperialist analysis of Israel's manipulation of US foreign policy as 'thinly veiled Jew baiting' ... on the level, you say, of the war crimes ('misanthropy' is your dainty term) of the current US Administration - a bit overblown given the over 1 million Iraqi civilians already slaughtered since the US/UK invasion. There are growing numbers in the US and UK who would vigorously disagree with you.
Regardless - the State of Israel is the main if not the only strategic beneficiary of this process of 're-drawing' the borders of the Middle East and it is furiously using its agents in the US to provoke an attack on Iran and attempt to bomb it back a few centuries. This militarist agenda, I am proud to note, is being met with growing world-wide resistance.
You see what you want. You want to hate Israel and Jews, so you blame Israel and you advance ideas that what we are doing is in Israel's interest. If your brain was opened to a full-function mode, you would see the truth. The truth is that Israel cannot get anywhere without military and other funding from the USA and UK. If the USA and UK didn't buy military technology and espionage technology from Israel, Israel would wither and die. If the USA and UK hadn't worked to put Israel where it presently sits, there would be no Israel. Israel can demolish Palestine one piece at a time because the USA and UK allow it to do so.
So there's very obviously an agenda at work that you won't see. And the only reason to not see it is bigotry, prejudice, hatred of Jews.
Please travel elsewhere to spread your lies and bigotry.
Today, the former Likud Party Israeli Prime Minister Bennie Netanyahu said the follow in reference to 9/11 : "We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," The Israeli newspaper, Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."
Tom Friedman is just a bathermouth for the repulsive policies of Israel.
You have no proof of Israel controlling the USA. You rely strictly upon someone being Jewish, and you imply that Friedman's Jewishness makes him an agent for Israel. This means nothing. I am an Irish-American. Does that mean I work for the IRA or Sinn Fein? Not at all. Does the fact that the Kennedys have been prominent in American politics mean that Ireland has "agents" that control US Policy in favor of Ireland? Not at all.
You have no proof regarding the allegation that Israel controls the USA. What you use is implication, robinea. You imply that because an Israeli person says that US Policy benefits Israel's interests, it means inescapably that Israel controls the USA. This is ridiculous, it is not even logical. Many foreign nations benefit from the current policies of the USA. Those are incidental benefits, and you cannot prove otherwise. So you are left with your implications.
I defy you to you prove that the US government is a puppet of Israel, robinea. While you try to do that, please make special efforts to explain how it is that Israel would not even exist if it were not for funding and global political support from the USA (which predates Israel by 170 years) and from the UK (which predates Israel for 1000s of years).
I really doubt you can prove any of these things. I think it much more likely that you hate Jewish people for reasons that have a lot to do with bigotry, prejudice and ignorance. I think it much more likely that you blame Israel in order to take heat off the Bush-Cheney Admin and the US Congress. I think you are a disinformation stooge. Whether that's by conscious design or mere circumstance due to bigotry, I do not know. It doesn't really matter. You're just spouting Jew-hatred, which is pathetic.
If you want to talk about the crimes of Israel against humanity, I'll happily join the attack on Israel's reprehensible policies and actions. But when you step well outside reality and allege that Israel controls the USA and UK through "secret agents," I have to just laugh at your delusions.
That 'Israeli person' I quote...praising the beneficial effects of the '9/11' attack for Israel's agenda in yesterday's Ma'ariv Newspaper is not your Uncle Sammy the Falafel Vendor, but Benyamin Netanyahu the former, and soon to be again, cold-blooded, homicidal Likud Prime Minister of that little Spartan parasite. And I would revile Netanyahu, for his policies and machinations,just as much if he were an 'Irish American' blather-monger like you claim to be. My own capacity for contempt is not limited to Israelis and their nasty Fifth Column in the US: I really find reactionary Irish-Americans unpleasant, if no where near as significant or dangerous as the Militarist Zionists - and therefore not worth much consideration. As for 'Israel controlling the USA' which I think is an absurd comment on your part...it is enough for Israel to control critical aspects of US policy in the Middle East in order to advance its regional agenda. If this contention of mine, and not solely my analysis, 'takes the heat off' of the treasonous Bush-Cheney administration and its craven Congressional enablers of genocide, as you claim, then let us hope this old 'disinformation stooge' will be well rewarded.
A long paragraph full of coprolites. That's what you offered. I know who Benjamin Netanyahu is, who he was, who he wants to be. I know his aims. He is like the Dick Cheney of Israel. So what? Benny doesn't speak for all of Israel, he doesn't control all of Israel, and even with those two facts in hand, you still haven't proved how Benny "controls" the USA as an "agent" of Israel.
robinea, you can hate Jews through time immemorial. You can be paranoid endlessly. Neither proves your ridiculous theory.
As I said, if you want to criticize the actions of the Israeli government, I'll happily join you.
If you want to criticize the actions of the US government, I'll happily join you.
But if you want to lauch a tirade against Jews, I'm going to tell you that Joseph Goebbels belongs in his grave, as do his thoughts, and I do not think anyone needs to hear or read them again in modern context.
And when you talk in paranoid terms about Israel controlling the USA, I will step aside and laugh at you from the world of the sane, the reality-bounded. Because really, your theory is insane. Whether that means you personally are insane, I do not know. I know only that it is absolutely impossible for Israel to control the USA or UK, no matter what your paranoid fears and bigoted Jew-hatred tell you.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anyone who contends that neo-cons or Jews or the Israeli government are "controlling" US foreign policy is just an apologist for the Bush-Cheney regime. You might as well be taking a big fat check directly from the White House. Because all you are doing is worshipping at the altar of "American Exceptionalism": "Oh mercy me, no! Good old red-blooded American leaders could never launch aggressive wars, torture people, etc etc; they are only being led astray by the wily Jews." This is vicious ignorance. But be assured: those on the commanding heights of the American power structure love to hear that kind of thing. They love to be absolved by the very people they are stomping upon.
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