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Home Free: No Worries for Dr K as Complicity is Revealed

Just think, it was once a “scandal” that an American secretary of state gave the green light to a program of “targeted killings” — assassinations — murders — that he knew was about to take place. This was once considered a deeply serious matter — so staining and shattering to the official’s reputation that he has spent almost 35 years lying about it, and having other people lie about it for him: Cable Ties Kissinger to Chile Scandal (AP): As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone

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The Accomodationists: Memo to Liberals on the White House Death Warrants

(UPDATED BELOW) Let us hear no more excuses for Barack Obama. Let us hear no more defenses, no more special pleading, no more extenuations. Let us have no more reciting of the “pressures” he is under, of the “many obstacles” that balk him in his quest to do us good, of the “bad advisors” who are swaying him to unworthy acts against his will. Let us be done at last with all these wretched lies, these complicitous self-deceptions that are facilitating atrocity and tyranny on a monstrous scale. Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American citizen, without trial,

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The Muted Plain: Anticipating the Wake of the Wikileaks Revelation

So, thanks to Wikileaks.org, Americans now know that their soldiers often gun down civilians in occupied countries during reckless missions based on little or no intelligence (in every sense of the word). This will no doubt come as a great shock — yea, a veritable political earthquake — in a land where the top commander in what is now its chief war just recently confessed that his troops were slaughtering an "amazing" number of civilians who posed no threat whatsoever. We all recall the vast hue and cry that greeted this astounding admission by Afghan top gun General Stanley McChrystal,

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The Silence of the Liberal Lambs: Outrage at Outliers, Hosannas for State Crime

[UPDATED BELOW] Charles Davis (via Jon Schwarz) has an incisive take on the high fluttery flail induced in our imperial courtiers by the latest Tea Party tantrums. Davis demolishes a piece in The Nation by progressive paladin Melissa Harris-Lacewell, in which she waxes lyrical — not to nonsensical — about the great threat to “the legitimacy of the state” posed by Tea Partiers disrespecting our elected officials. These acts — spitting, swearing, insulting, shouting, etc. — which might have been considered legitimate expressions of citizen anger (or at least good clean fun) if directed at, say, George Dubya or Dick

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Bitter Laugh

    Bitter Laugh Death the great deceiver Whispers to the soldier That the love he bears his comrade Is the greatest he will know It sets a mist around him A force field of emotion A cloud of blood and hormones That makes monstrous the foe And when his friend is wounded When his life pours out in battle And his spirit leaves his body Like smoke rising from a flame The soldier’s gripped by madness The berserker rage of Ares And he swoops down like a fury To savage all within his aim Then falls the grieving mother

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An Unaccustomed Truth: American Commander Admits Afghan Atrocities

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief Saying, “Tell me great hero, but please make it brief Is there a hole for me to get sick in? — Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues” One can only assume that the regular editors of the New York Times were all out at a party, or left early for a weekend in the Hamptons, or something — but somehow, the paper published a front webpage story that stated — without the usual thousand excuses and extenuations — that American troops are routinely slaughtering Afghan civilians at

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Progressive Front: Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant

Dennis Kucinich is now reaping the reward for his high-profile bug-out on the Compulsory Corporate Profit Act of 2010, also known as “health care reform.” And what a pearl of great price it is! Well worth selling out your heatedly avowed principles for! I mean, Mahatma Gandhi himself would traded his loincloth for a pinstripe suit to bag some bling like this! Check it out: Dennis Kucinich the new face of Dem campaign committee. That’s right: Dennis is now fronting the big-time money-grubbing operations of party hacks! Just days ago, Kucinich was condemning the health care bill as a bad,

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Closing Time: An Historic Confirmation of Corporate Power

It looks like heaven but it feels like death; It’s something in between, I guess: It’s closing time. — Leonard Cohen Official transcript of remarks by President Barack Obama after the March 21 vote in the House of Representatives on H.R.3590: Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments to Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: My fellow Americans. As many of our more serious commentators have noted, Democrats and progressives have sought genuine reform of our broken, bloated, unjust health care system for almost a hundred years. Today, I am proud to say that we have brought that century-long struggle to

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Night Riders: Afghan Atrocity and American Values

If you are an American — or indeed, any denizen of “Western Civilization” whose security and values are supposedly being “defended” on the far-flung fields of the Terror War — then take a good, long look at what is being done in your name, with your money, by the ever-surging Peace Laureate and his War Machine. From The Times: Covert troops who killed two pregnant women and a teenage girl in eastern Afghanistan went on to inflict “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” on the survivors of a botched night raid, a report by the UN said. The family of the

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Pressure Drop: Brave Sir Dennis Ran Away

 (UPDATED BELOW)  Kucinich drops opposition to health-care bill (Washington Post). Well, so much for conscience. The other day here, we had kind words for the stand taken by Dennis Kucinich against the boardroom-backroom boondoggle known as the health care bill. The main thrust of that post was not meant to be the innate wonderfulness of St. Dennis but the hypocrisy of the “Fightin’ Progressives,” such as Commander Kos and Alex Koppelman, who had launched a vituperative attack on Kucinich for daring to oppose the bill — a measure which not only represents a complete and craven surrender of even the

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