Saturday, December 12, 2015

Cruz Missiles and Obombers

"We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion." -- Senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, speaking this week to his high-rolling donors and war profiteers.

"Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform are stepping up our campaign to destroy ISIL.  Our airstrikes are hitting ISIL harder than ever, in Iraq and Syria.  We’re taking out more of their fighters and leaders, their weapons, their oil tankers. Our Special Operations Forces are on the ground—because we’re going to hunt down these terrorists wherever they try to hide.  In recent weeks, our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya.  Our message to these killers is simple—we will find you, and justice will be done." --  President and plutocratic hopeful Barack Obama, speaking today to his high-rolling foundation donors and war profiteers under the guise of his weekly address to "the nation."

So, which man's gruesome bellicosity do you think the New York Times is wringing its hands over today?

Let the newspaper's editorial board explain its own convoluted thought processes:   
Mr. Cruz is a lawyer and a foreign-policy neophyte. Anyone with any understanding of military strategy knows that “carpet-bombing” is a term used by amateurs trying to sound tough. Indiscriminate bombing has never been a military strategy, and it would be senseless in an age of “smart” weaponry and precise targeting.
In Syria and Iraq, mass bombing would kill hundreds of innocent civilians and fuel radicalization. That’s why military leaders utter the term “carpet-bomb” only while laughing at Mr. Cruz.
Ted Cruz apparently has the same semantic problem as Donald Trump. He isn't discreet enough about his desired rampages. Unlike Barack Obama, he apparently wouldn't quietly meditate over St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas before checking his Kill List and therapeutically bombing people into oblivion. Unlike the mature and placid Barack Obama, he is using divisive fire and brimstone Biblical language to justify death and destruction.

Obama, on the other hand, uses Biblical mythology to unite everybody in the love of death and destruction. 

 He even crams the miracle of Christmas into his accelerated bombing campaign. The co-option of religion for purposes of Permawar is, as a matter of fact, the true centerpiece of today's address:
Faith communities have come together in fellowship and prayer.  Families lined the streets for the annual children’s Christmas parade—because we can’t let terrorists change how we live our lives....Churches and synagogues are reaching out to local mosques—reminding us that we are all God’s children....   Back in San Bernardino, people from across the community have joined in prayer vigils—Christians, Jews, Muslims and others.  They’ve sent a powerful message—we’re all in this together.  That’s the spirit we have to uphold.  That’s what we can do—as Americans—united in defense of the country that we love.
I guess his propaganda shop wrote his speech before the arson attack on a mosque near San Bernardino.

Meanwhile, everybody is piling on the odious Ted Cruz, for the sole reason that his verbiage on killing innocent civilians is distasteful and crass, while Obama is not only smarmily discreet, he keeps the details of his massacres as close to the vest and as hidden from the public  as possible. The thousands of people killed by his drone strikes, for example, are part of a sanitary "Disposition Matrix" in which Muslim men of military age are considered enemy combatants until never proven otherwise. When women and children are killed, their names are not revealed either. Mistakes get unfortunately made. Obama's targets not carpet-bombed, of course. They simply get turned into pretty pink mist by predator missiles, or decapitated by cluster bombs.

And Obama does continue to use sadistic cluster bombs, refusing to sign a near-universal treaty banning their use. This year alone, the United States and/or its puppets have cluster-bombed five separate countries: Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan and Libya. Cluster bombs are essentially horse-sized hollow point bullets. When they hit, they divide themselves into hundreds of smaller bombs, the better to wreak more death and injury for miles around.



When Obama dropped a cluster bomb on Yemen in 2009, killing 35 women and children, he tried to keep the atrocity quiet by arranging for the two-year imprisonment of the journalist -- Abdulelah Shaye Haider -- who exposed this war crime to the world. Since the regime change in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has taken over the sadism, purchasing an additional $640 million worth of cluster bombs from the United States.

As Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept, the modus operandi of the Obama administration has been to condemn the use of cluster bombs by other countries while continuing to stockpile, sell and use them itself. Just as the New York Times tacitly exonerated the Democratic president in today's editorial blasting Cruz over his carpet bomb rhetoric, so too did they exonerate him earlier this year by insisting that Obama was voluntarily abiding by the provisions of the treaty he refuses to sign.

When Obama's defense secretary, Ashton Carter, appeared this week before a Senate committee (that Ted Cruz "irresponsibly" missed) in order to demand billions more dollars for weapons and the building of several more military bases from which to launch murderous attacks, he and his minions even scoffed at the Texas senator in absentia. The Times editorial noted:
At the hearing on United States military  strategy against ISIS that Mr. Cruz missed on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, assessed Mr. Cruz’s prescription.
The wanton bombing Mr. Cruz repeatedly refers to, General Selva said, is categorically “not the way that we apply force in combat. It isn’t now, nor will it ever be.”
Ted Cruz, a man who thinks he’s qualified to be commander in chief, decries terrorists’ taking of innocent lives while agitating for bombing that would kill thousands of noncombatants and radicalize thousands more. What he’s saying shows an utter lack of fitness to command America’s armed forces.
When they kill under Obama's direction, they do so with steely Zen-like resolve rather than with salivating Cruzian idiocy. Better to have a president professing love for the people on his hit list than one screaming about how much he hates their guts. Screaming while killing and maiming your victims might make them despise America or something.

As Obama himself soothed, Bush-like, today,
This week, we’ll move forward on all fronts.  On Monday, I’ll go to the Pentagon.  And there, I’ll review our military campaign and how we can continue to accelerate our efforts.  Later in the week, I’ll go to the National Counterterrorism Center.  There, I’ll review our efforts—across our entire government—to prevent attacks and protect our homeland.  And this week, the Department of Homeland Security will update its alert system to ensure Americans get more information, including steps that you and your communities can take to be vigilant and to stay safe.
He's even bringing back those bizarre color-coded terror threats to help keep your minds off the fact that you don't have as much money for Christmas presents for the kids this year. When you're visiting family and friends during the holiday season, make sure you monitor them for suspicious language and activities. If you see that Uncle Joe's eyes are glittering maniacally as he carves the turkey, say something.

Who is the idiot here? Obama seems to believe that killing more people will magically prevent their friends and relatives from becoming "radicalized" and killing us. Who is the radical here?

God bless us, everyone. 

"We worship an awesome God...." -- Barack Obama, from the 2004 keynote address that lit the fuse under his own presidential campaign.

11 comments:

Carol said...

I don't know why many others don't see there's no difference between Cruz and the Obama administration. I guess it's pure selfishness.

voice-in-wilderness said...

I've concluded it is useless to speculate on what Obama believes. Underneath the flashy smile and mysterious Harvard credentials (mysterious in the sense of what impact did that legal training have on the man?), all he really cares about is his own career arc, keeping himself in power. In other words, very much a Washington politician.

Meanwhile we continue to live in a "Nineteen Eighty-Four" world, fighting against a shifting mix of distant enemies, indulging in a daily two-minutes hate, spying on each other, afraid of ending up in Room 101, while the jaded leaders of The Party are in control. Complete with the boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Pearl said...

Meanwhile in an article from Bernie Sanders to registered Democrats or contributors he mentioned the endless coverage of the Donald and other
republicans for days, weeks and a mere several minutes to anything he has to say by all the major media. Almost similar to coverage of Hillary.
They don't have the means for me to forward his comments which I have contacted them about, but he has a lot to say about how the media is trying to muzzle him.
Proof of how elections are bought and paid for by the power elite.

Jay–Ottawa said...

To carpet bomb them or to surgically bomb them––that is the question.

No either/or, pro-or-con, yes-or-no argument there. Cruz and Obama are on the same side of the debating table, and their opponents have yet to show up in force. For team Cruz/Obama there is no "either/or," just a question of degree. They're merely one-upping each other in the game called stupid and stupider.

At least the Brits debated the issue formally as to whether to bomb or not bomb the hell out of ISIS. Tory David Cameron's argument boiled down to this: ISIS is evil; it is right and proper to hate and fear evil; so obviously, we're pro-evil unless we send the RAF to destroy ISIS. The debate closed in Parliament with a yes-or-no vote on 2 December. The good guys (imho) lost. As a result, the RAF is on the way to the Syria/Iraq caliphate to bomb the hell out of ISIS, but in the Obama style, that is, no carpet bombing, just the Brits' new super-sophisticated "Brimstone" missiles. (How dare the Brits call their missile Brimstone when ours is already called Hellfire!)

The debate in Parliament was not along strict party lines, Tories vs Labour. (Forget the Liberals for the moment.) Arguments pro and con came from all sides. Among the conservatives who spoke AGAINST sending the RAF to Syria was Tory John Baron. He is not a pacifist. He is a decorated army officer who was for intervention in Afghanistan (but not Iraq, and not Libya). Long before that, Baron had served as a platoon leader during the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland …
"….a conflict in which, despite heavy casualties among service people and civilians, the British government didn’t carry out air strikes."

Pause. Reread that sentence.

"Of course they didn’t! But why ‘of course’? Something was somehow obvious in Ulster that is not obvious in Syria. What is it?"
….
"Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighbourhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbours wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n24/james-meek/after-the-vote?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3724&utm_content=usca_subsact&hq_e=el&hq_m=4064340&hq_l=8&hq_v=c83d249599

Pearl said...

Meredith: That was a great comment you had to Krugman's latest about the meeting in France to deal with environmental problems. And a Mr. Lundgren from Sweden had an excellent comment about how his country deals with such problems and lists the various methods in detail which can be copied in the U.S. His comment is now two below yours.

I hope both comments can be shown in Sardonicky.

Andy T. said...

Karen,

Great piece on how little room there truly is between the two corporate parties' imperialistic agendas. You would never know this from reading the NYT. If you didn't know Obama was a "rational" Democrat you'd think he was a fundamentalist Christian or something, the way he brings up God all the time, esp when he talks up the wars. I doubt he is a true believer, but he truly believes in pandering, don't he?

Hillary, being a true believer Methodist, would be even worse. There is method to her madness for sure.

annenigma said...

Obama's God is a Shock n' Awesome God. I've never had the slightest impression that he had a single bone of religious faith or grounding in him, nor a moral compass. I don't believe he's loyal to our country or people either - just to his Board of Directors, the investors in this multi-national corporate empire of which he is current CEO - USA, Inc., aka The Corporation.

Obama's exceptionally aggressive fight for the TPP proves that. As a President/Chief Executive Officer, I consider him one of the most dangerous, especially (but certainly not exclusively) in regard to his Executive power grabs. Why would we consider the likelihood that that many highly successful CEOs are sociopaths but not the possibility that the most powerful CEO of the biggest, most powerful corporate empire isn't? He's not grabbing power for just himself, and certainly not for a democratic or Democratic agenda, he's grabbing power for all future President's/CEOs of The Corporation.

Recall that Obama deliberately threw his entire army of supporters (stakeholders, if not shareholders) under the bus after his election instead of using that army as a force for good. Along with having a Democratic Congress, that SHOULD have been a cake walk for successfully enacting a Democratic/people's agenda. After all, that was the whole point of successfully elected them all!

Instead, the Obama army was demobilized and insulted as being a bunch of 'Sanctimonious Purists'. He went on to align and surround himself with an army of Capitalist purist warmongers. There was barely a objection from the Democratic establishment, the same ilk who are now behind Hillary Clinton. Their loyalty is obviously only to their Corporation and it's investors, not to the people who voted them in.

When are we going to stop being their puppets, pulling the lever for their corporatist Presidents? We know better now, post-Occupy and witnessing the third Bush administration in action. We can't settle for the lesser evil. It doesn't buy time, it just further poisons the system. We can even see clearly now that the NYT even tries to black out coverage of our choices. Could it be more obvious?

The power players have the money to sway elections in various ways, but we still have the vote necessary to actually get someone elected to office - unless they rig the electronic voting machines. They'd have to be pretty desperate to try that risky move while they still have the corporate media in their pockets - and vice ver$a. It's a symbiotic relationship that is unlikely to end.

Don't do evil - don't vote for it!

Pearl said...

The storm clouds behind the Liberal sunny ways: Tim Harper http://on.thestar.com/1O3GrTh via @torontostar




I think this is a pretty accurate report on what is ahead for the Liberal Party here in Canada for those interested. Time will tell

Meredith NYC said...


My comment to Krugman---

The Gop congress will work to hold back world progress in climate change. They dominate the US, deny science, and are in close alliance with big money fossil fuel industries. The party depends on these corporate interests as do all US elections now.

And this must inhibit trust in the US by other world democracies, whose govts and parties can operate more independently from corporate monopolies. Their election campaigns are more publicly funded and religious fundamentalism that denies science and evolution are not a feature of their politics, even their right wing. All this makes the US an outlier among modern nations.

PK says “So what will stop the fossil fuel industry from buying enough politicians to turn the accord into a dead letter?” It’s past time for PK to devote an entire column, not just a sentence, to our campaign financing that legalizes the grip of corporations, post Citizens United.

What other country calls unlimited donations by super rich private interests to politicians ‘free speech’? Or has 2 year campaigns costing multi billions? This is now a centrist, not a liberal concern. Reforming campaign finance is the necessary basis for any progress on Climate policy, and on every issue you could name.

Also, it’s time for another Krugman column on TPP and Climate agreements. Where does he stand now? Seems like corporations can regulate national policy, but national govts can't regulate corporate policy. The 1st is defined as preserving free enterprise, the 2nd as the road to dictatorship.

Meredith NYC said...

Pearl---
Below is a question re immigration to Canada. I said to a pessimistic reply saying Trump/Cruz may win:
Er, btw, what are Canada's emigration policies for Americans? Seriously---will Trudeau take pity on US refugees if your pessimism of Trump or Cruz possibly winning comes true? At least on admittance, we'd all get health care cards, like the Syrian refugees received on being admitted. That's something, since millions of Americans are still left out of ACA.

Another comment to Lundgren from Sweden and his details of how he uses green energy by Anetliner Netliner

Larry Lundgren's comment from Sweden illustrates an important truth: continuing climate change denial will leave the U.S. eclipsed by other nations in the development and use of clean technologies, leaving us economically isolated and at a competitive disadvantage.

Re above....So my question is----why isn’t our competitive disadvantage constantly explained? Both with green policies and with huge health care costs burdening our employers---which businesses in other nations don’t have to deal with. Why isn’t this the main topic for profit driven USA?

Meredith NYC said...

Krugman has now done something useful. It’s well worth it to go over to his blog to see the PolitiFact Chart he’s put up---- the complete list of candidates and their patterns of out and out lies vs truth telling, in a range from Pants of Fire to false, mostly false, half false, the truth. Very interesting, tho subject to interpretation, of course.
I tried to copy in the chart here, but doesn't work.

See blog “The Facts Have A Well-Known, You Know” Dec 13.