In a world overshadowed by death and domination, life and love go on – at the margins, beneath the radar, far from the madding crowd …
(UPDATED BELOW) (UPDATED AGAIN) Already the story is starting to unravel, mutate, transmogrify. Government statements that were presented as gospel truths in every media outlet in the world, and which served as the basis for ten thousand earnest, serious commentaries, turn out, one day later, to have been false. We had been told – by the president’s top “counterterrorism adviser,” John Brennan – that Osama had been “engaged in a firefight” when he was gunned down by American agents. This was not true; it turns out that he was unarmed when they shot him in the head. We were told
WASHINGTON, May 5, 2004 – In a dramatic late-night appearance in the White House press room, President George W. Bush announced that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been found in a secret stronghold near the Syrian border. “We knew he had them, we knew we would find them. It was just a matter of time,” said an exultant Mr. Bush, who has been subjected to constant criticism for more than a year over the failure to find the WMD that sparked the invasion of Iraq in April 2003. Bush said a covert military intelligence team discovered the arsenal in
The excuse for the War on Terror is gone; will the War on Terror now come to an end? The bipartisan high and mighty rushed to insist that it most certainly will not. Obama, Bush, Kerry, McCain, Boehner, Schumer — all the great and good were quick to say that “the fight is not over,” the “threat is still there” — the profitable wars and fearmongering will go on. And on. And on. (Besides, who needs bin Laden when we’ve got Gadafy back as the demon du jour? In any case, Great Satans are always thick on the ground when
It was one of those horrific juxtapositions that an imperial state breeds in abundance: the emperor joking at a luxurious banquet with fawning courtiers, while his agents are killing innocent children on a distant frontier. Such was the scene this weekend, as President Barack Obama enjoyed his star turn at the White House Correspondents Dinner, that sick-making orgy of cuddly collusion between the media and political elites. In recent years, the sycophantic shindig has turned into a veritable Oscars Night for the political set. (And increasingly the Hollywood set as well; one of the major stories of the big night
O how wonderful it is to live in such an enlightened age! Just think: not long ago, the U.S. government was seen as little more than a vast war machine — brutal, murderous, inhumane, bent on global domination. Yet now, by some marvelous, miraculous twist of fate, that same government is being led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate! It’s as if Lyndon Johnson had been turfed out of office back in the day and replaced by Martin Luther King Jr.! So what the modern-day MLK up to today? In what way was the Laureate in the White House advancing
More confirmation of imperial perfidy is on tap today from the trove of classified files originally obtained by WikiLeaks on the U.S. concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. Most of the information released so far was already known — to the very, very few who cared to find out — having emerged in dribs and drabs and fragments in various places over the years. But to see it gathered together, in raw form, in the words of the perpetrators and accomplices of this vast, still-ongoing crime, is a powerful, and sickening, experience. Almost as sickening as the atrocities themselves, however, is
Back in the heady, heated days before the invasion of Iraq, one of the quickest ways to be relegated to the margins of the debate was to claim that the financial interests of politically connected oil companies played any role in the considerations of the great statesmen of the West as they confronted the global menace of Saddam Hussein. Anyone who suggested such a thing was immediately declared “unserious,” a “knee-jerk radical,” even — gasp! — “a conspiracy theorist.” Later protests with their “No Blood for Oil” slogans were similarly dismissed. “Serious” policy analysts followed the lead of one of
Dear Good Concerned Engaged Enlightened Rule-of-Law Liberal Progressives: Is it clear enough for you now? Does he have to spell it out for you, slowly, using short and simple words, and maybe some cartoons to make it clear? Your noble Nobel Peace Laureate – bringer of hope and change, restorer of the rule of law, world-historical paradigm-shifter, etc., etc. – has just publicly (not to mention arbitrarily) committed the nation to “the supreme international crime”: aggressive war. He has pledged the blood and treasure of the United States to “regime change” in Libya: that is to say, an act of
One side lies about money; the other side does the same. The only sure thing in this sinister kabuki is that the rich will make out like the bandits they are, and the weakest will go to the wall. You can waste your time trying to parse every little twist and turn of the “policies” of these murderous poltroons, as they set about gutting the carcass of their own country and bombing the hell out of several others; you can pretend their words have meaning, that they aren’t the howls and grunts of brutal degenerates given over, sad wretches, to