The Fall of Summers

I think President Obama might have been all set to announce his nomination of the new Fed chief today, to coincide with his glowing report about how great the economy is doing in the throes of the Long Depression, and how he and Larry saved us from utter destruction back in those dark days of Aught-Nine.

Then, in the midst of crafting their trumpeting celebration of The Recovery as orchestrated by Larry Himself, somebody in the White House noticed the cover of National Journal, the subtlety of which perfectly matches that of Summers Himself, and belatedly decided to pick up the phone and do a whip count. Even the Blue Dog Dems were starting to balk. Oops. 

So Larry Summers bowed out (probably not graciously, given his track record of surliness), and that is that. Or is it? Could Obama prevail, and get his first choice,  Timmy "The Foamer" Geithner, to change his mind about taking the job after all? Will Obama turn out to be a complete bitch and pass over Janet Yellen just out of pure spite? Will he nastily rub our noses in it and appoint somebody even worse than Summers? The terrible possibilities are endless. Just look at the roster of unprosecuted banksters and pro-austerians who still walk this earth on the 5th Anniversary of that other Great Fall (Lehman Brothers.)

That report on the "recovering" economy released by the White House last night certainly seems to have been written with Summers in mind. With him at the helm in those early, hairy days, we were bold! We made the tough choices! Half the population may be in poverty, but as Obama says for the umpteenth time,the grit and resilience of the American people will make everything hunky-dory (with the usual weasely caveat that there is still work to do, such as raising the minimum wage a whole dollar.) I'll have more on the gory details (and vague platitudes) later, after I have been thoroughly caffeinated. Actually, I should probably just tranquilize myself. Or, as Michelle says, Drink Up!™

Before his crash and burn (but no worries, Citigroup will always be there), Summers was also doing some revisionist history in an attempt to recast himself as a Man of the People. According to this report planted in Reuters as part of his populist resume-padding campaign for the Fed, he claims that he personally met with the banksters right after the Crash of Aught-Eight to inform them that they were not liked by the people for whom he the Man. Oh, and by the way, Larry thinks that thanks to him, Wall Street has totally changed. They now care what we think about them. (which is not much). They care about their "image."

The silver lining on this dreary end-of-summer Monday (raining here) is that there are a few principled Democratic senators left willing to thwart The One's wishes. What with Syria (which the corporate media is inexplicably pegging an Obamian blunder of epidemic proportions) he is losing political capital very early in his final term.  I suspect the NSA spying revelations, and the fact that most of the 99% are still suffering, is what's really putting the dent on his credibility.

As the world turns, so goes the worm.

Diverting the Bewildered Herd

Let's see....

Income inequality in America has officially reached its highest level since the Great Depression. Conservative estimates now have a third of us living at or below the poverty line, but in real life, fully 50% of the population is teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe. Compared to the rest of the civilized world, only the recent dictator- devastated Romania ranks lower than we do on the child poverty scale. These stats are a feature -- not a bug -- of what happens when plutocrats take charge, and government for the commonweal falls down the memory hole.

And adding insult to the injury of a financial oligarchy run amok, it turns out that a parallel criminal surveillance state has been operating in plain sight for years, both within and without our "borders" -- and it's getting bigger and nastier and more intrusive and less accountable all the time.

The natives have been getting restless. McWorkers are starting to walk off their jobs, clamoring for a living wage. The vast majority of Americans have reported themselves to be upset about government spying, and Edward Snowden is reaping higher approval ratings than Barack Obama. Erstwhile complicit Congress Critters were even threatening to hold hearings in order to hold the burglars of the NSA to account.

So, dutiful placeholders of neo-feudalism and neo-fascism that they are, the revolving-door leadership of the Military-Industrial-Media-Spy Complex has sprung into action. They've deflected attention away from their own dastardly deeds and created a brand new villain for our outraged pleasure.

Quickly advancing from merely being the Butcher of Damascus to exploding on the scene as the Hitler of the 21st Century,  Syrian President Anwar al-Assad, mass exterminator of children, is the perfect villain. Add to the mix Vlad the Bad, suppressor of LGBT rights in Russia, and you've got yourself the perfect scenario for what Noam Chomsky has called "diverting the bewildered herd."

Every so often, in our long slog to the bottom, our leaders have to create a new monster to deflect attention away from their own monstrosity. Communism filled that role from the Fabulous Fifties, as the destruction of the New Deal and unions began, right up to the Fall of the Wall. Then, conveniently enough, came 9/11 and the open-ended, treasure and life-depleting Middle Eastern wars, security state-bloating war on terror, the whole globe becoming one big  battlefield and corporate-friendly free trade zone. Next, thanks to financial deregulation, the economy crashed and burned.  And for a couple of years, the marketing campaign miracle known as Barack Obama kept the restive herd temporarily penned in, chewing the cud of his delicious words.

Then along came Occupy (for the moment, anyway, suppressed.) Then along came Snowden, and polls began to show that people are refusing, any longer, to be terrorized. So, the Powers That Be started beating the war drums once again. Only this time, the people (and the whole world) were refusing to be tamed. They were saying No To War. So the president saved face by pretending to democratically punt over to Congress, which in turn, suddenly forgot all about the rogues of the NSA, in their haste to go on TV to posture For War, Against War, or Not Sure.

 The consumers of America are riveted. The blogosphere (myself included) ignores Snowden, the endless depression, the political graft, and the fact that not one banker is in jail as the five year statute of limitation on financial fraud of epic proportions draws to its convenient close.

Meanwhile, we the protesters of America are cheering because our People Power stopped the war in its tracks. We are celebrating Putin for Peace, and his ad agency-written New York Times op-ed. But wait. Right in plain sight, war is very much being waged, conducted in the usual manner: secretly, and proxified. That "no boots on the ground" mantra? It is absolutely meaningless when you consider that the true prosecutors, their own tender feet probably cleverly ensconced in thousand-dollar CJ Cleverley Bespokes, were only talking about GI grunt-brand boots. American weapons and personnel are absolutely on the ground, on Syrian soil, in the form of a secretly and grossly overfunded CIA, SEALs, Special Ops, and who knows who and what else. Of course, as official White House plumbers have leaked in their announcements to the corporate media, the American secret forces and associated clients only entered Syria after the Sarin attacks. Uh-huh.

Congressional approval for war is just a nicety to keep the herd diverted and believing that, despite what President Jimmy Carter recently said, we still have a functioning democracy. MoveOn, that mass herder of progressive veal, has suddenly stopped its email blasts begging for money in the name of anti-war. Critics, accused of being Nazi collaborators for speaking out against Syrian airstrikes to kill more children to avenge dead children, are being muted. We are nobly giving peace a chance at the same time we are languishing in our own domestic misery. We are back to rooting for Democrats vs Republicans, Barack vs Vlad, instead of noticing or caring that the Class War continues apace, and that we are on the losing end.

Meanwhile, to make us feel empowered™ in this, our time of mass joblessness and hunger, First Lady Michelle Obama has gone on her own offensive. Nancy Reagan once pompously advised us to Just Say No to Drugs, but Michelle is urging us to Just Drink Water (carefully not touting either the dubious health benefits or even the dangers of drinking too much of it.)

 Long forgotten are the days of the last Great Depression, when Eleanor Roosevelt actually visited poor people where they lived, listened to them verbalize their own needs. The poor have always been more than capable of knowing what they need: food, shelter, a decent income, medicine, child care, jobs. Where are the jobs, and where are the leaders who care?

But this is now, the times of the New Normal and government by technocrat and ad campaign. To make her latest initiative every bit as effective as partnering with national wage-slavemaster Walmart to shill for fresh food, our current FLOTUS is partnering™ with the lucrative bottled water industry to encourage us to buy our water as well as drink it. Evian and Poland Spring and the rest of the privatized water cartel will start carrying  Michelle's "Let's Drink Up!" logo on their products, the better to entice you in the grocery store aisles, your meager SNAP benefit card in hand. Because, as we all know, keeping the kids' bellies bloated with water temporarily staves off hunger. We have been taught by TV commercials that bottled water that you purchase is "better" and more upwardly mobile than free water from your kitchen tap. (Even though there is absolutely no difference in taste or quality, and the still-unbanned BPA in plastic bottles is actually quite harmful to your health) By purchasing water, you are good patriotic citizens helping to support a handful of low paying non-union jobs in bottling plants. You will also be boosting the tax-exempt Petroleum Industry, whose raw materials make up the plastic bottles. So drink for yourself, drink for America, and drink for Exxon-Mobil.

A water-logged herd is so much easier to divert. Away from the flood, and right over the cliff.

TANKA, Not Tanks

by Nan Socolow

The following are six comments I submitted to the New York Times yesterday morning.  I wrote all of these comments in TANKA, Japanese form of poetry  using 5 lines of 5,7,5,7,7 syllables each. 

Threaten to Threaten, Tom Friedman:

 

Arab Gulf leaders

 

Support Obama's effort.

 

Syria's amok.

 

We're not the Global Police

 

No need to aid Jihadists.

 

 

Who do you Trust?  Maureen Dowd:

 

 

Pooty-Poot's given

 

Obama and John Kerry

 

The red-line exit.

 

Joe Six-Pack is anti-war

 

He was Bush's base.

 

 

 

Homeland Confusion, Tom Kean, Lee Hamilton:

 

 

Homeland not secure.

 

Congress needs to scrutinize

 

Gaps in oversight.

 

Today Anniversary

 

Of World Trade Towers attack.

 

 

 

The Government and Inequality, Tom Edsall:

 

 

Inequality

 

America's Sin Qua Non

 

The rich are richer

 

The poor struggling for money.

 

Our Middle Class has vanish'd

 

 

 

09/11, My 2 Cents, Mark Bittman:

 

 

We use drones to kill.

 

Isn't gassing people worse?

 

Who will bell Assad?

 

Limited action?  No way.

 

Faint heart never kiss'd the cook.

 

 

The President Speaks on Syria, Ross Douthat:

 

 

I watch'd Obama. 

 

You're alone, wrong pundit!

 

O, insulting?  Not!

 

Ross, your lifetime has been short.

 

Study Putin and Assad.

 

 

Nan Socolow

Cayman Brac

British West Indies

Wargasms on the Potomac: U.S. Weapons Good, Syrian Weapons Bad

By Fred Drumlevitch

cross-posted from freddrumlevitch.blogspot.com (Progressive Food for Thought)

The sound of war drums rose over the Potomac. As did also certain other items. The tumescent political “leadership” and their rent boys of the mainstream media alternated between stroking each other to the point of wargasm and oh-so-seriously rationalizing to the public why they must let loose their dogs of war. Fortunately, many ordinary Americans have begun to realize just how tired they themselves are of getting screwed by the imperial overreach of what is supposed to be their government. Ostensibly elected by public vote, supposedly beholden to the people and meant to serve them, “our” government has over the past 30+ years transformed into one dedicated to delivering benefits to the rich, the banks, the corporations, and the military-industrial-surveillance-security complex — and that perpetuates its malfeasance through lies, manipulation, the marginalization and repression of protest, and the distraction of never-ending war.

Never-ending war? Well, nearly so. And this refers to far more than the duration of our most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or our ongoing assassinations via drones in several sovereign foreign nations including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Time dulls the memory, especially for those who weren’t active participants, but a recent Associated Press story summarized major U.S. military actions over the past three decades: Beirut (1982-83), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Iraq (1993), Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994-96), Iraq (1996), Sudan and Afghanistan (1998), Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Osama bin Laden (2011). 

It doesn’t end there. The United States probably maintains at least 500 military bases in at least 100 foreign countries, and it is likely that actual numbers are considerably higher. (The exact numbers are hard to know for a variety of reasons including deliberate obfuscation by the U.S. government. See here, here, here, here, and here). We spend more on our military than the next highest-spending fifteen to twenty nations combined. Is our country destined to forever undertake foreign military actions with the compulsion of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn? What will our unending pursuit of worldwide military domination beget?

And I haven’t even yet referenced our covert operations, which, since WWII, have been instrumental in the overthrow of several legitimate foreign governments (and significantly subverted many more). The overthrows of Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Jacobo Árbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Patrice Lumumba (Congo, 1961), and Salvador Allende (Chile, 1973), stand as but the most prominent examples in a long and sordid history of covert U.S. actions.

The covert operations and smaller military interventions may seem (by our imperial-capitalist metrics) to be fabulously successful, but are in fact profoundly dangerous, for they set the stage for later blowback, plus overreach elsewhere and spectacular failures. Our frequent foreign interventions, whether large or small, overtly military or instead covert, are part of a highly-dangerous feedback system of U.S. action and arrogance, a runaway self-righteousness that puts our entire foundational national purpose at profound risk. Do we exist to be the world’s policeman? The preamble to the United States Constitution does state that it was established "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", but these refer to this nation. Nowhere in our founding national documents do I recall any mention of world policeman.

As important as are the issues of imperial overreach, media failure, and perversion of the purposes of a democratic republic, they and their psychological underpinnings have been thoroughly examined countless times, and I will not further pursue them here (beyond including these links to recent posts by Andrew Bacevich, Ira Chernus, and George Lakoff). Instead, my focus in what follows will be on something else: a brief look at U.S. governmental hypocrisy in its current characterization of chemical weapons as so abhorrent as to necessitate U.S. military action in Syria.

To understand the scope of this hypocrisy, we might examine any of a wide variety of weapon systems that have been deployed, used, and, in many cases, provided to others by the United States: napalm and other incendiaries, Agent Orange, cluster munitions, land mines, thermobaric bombs, and nuclear weapons. President Obama, Secretary Kerry, Senator McCain, and all others so eager to militarily strike Syria — surely you are aware of the massive death and suffering these American weapons have inflicted on civilian populations. Please spare us your outraged denunciations of Bashar al-Assad and your insistence that we must act — unless you are also willing to denounce and adequately hold accountable American soldiers (and allies) who have caused the deaths of foreign civilians using the aforementioned weapons. Ah… I thought not.

(The United States is not even willing to properly hold accountable those soldiers who have murdered with more conventional weapons; while Major Nidal Malik Hasan was quite deservedly sentenced to death for his murder of thirteen U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, Army staff sergeant Robert Bales was allowed to plead guilty and thereby escape the death penalty for his brutal murder of sixteen Afghan civilians. And most American war criminals are never properly punished. For example, in 2012 a U.S. military court would release with absolutely no prison time the leader of a U.S. Marine squad that in 2005 massacred 24 civilian men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq — a war crime within the even broader war crime of a war of choice by the U.S. against a country that posed no threat to us.)

Let’s consider napalm and other incendiary weapons. (Open in front of me is the book Napalm: An American Biography, by Robert M. Neer, published in 2013 by Harvard University Press. Extensive in scope and supporting references, it should be required reading for those wishing to learn how weapons come to be developed, used — and misused. It and Wikipedia are my main sources for what follows).

British RAF bombers using magnesium weapons incinerated eight square miles of Hamburg in July 1943; the death toll from the Hamburg attack was an estimated 44,600 persons. A German doctor wrote “Bodies were frequently found lying in a thick, greasy black mass, which was without doubt melted fat tissue… All were shrunken so that clothes appeared to be too large.” (Neer, p.62-63). The RAF aided by the United States Army Air Forces incinerated fifteen square miles of Dresden in four raids in mid-February 1945, with a death toll estimated at around 25,000 (Wikipedia).

These attacks would be dwarfed by the aggregate of later U.S. incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. The night of March 9-10, 1945, U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay dispatched over 300 B-29s to wage an incendiary attack on Tokyo using napalm, magnesium, and white phosphorus, creating a firestorm, incinerating 16 square miles of the city, and producing approximately 100,000 deaths and tens of thousands of injured. But that was just the beginning. “After Tokyo, American bombers attacked Japan’s largest cities with napalm for ten days, […] until supplies ran out on March 19, 1945. After a three week pause to restock, incendiary bombardments started again on April 13, and continued again until the end of the war. […] During the five months until the end of the war over 33 million pounds of napalm in about 13 million M-69 bombs, along with napalm in other bombshells, explosives, and other incendiaries, laid waste to 106 square miles in Japan’s six largest cities, and destroyed or damaged 169 square miles in sixty of its largest metropolises” (Neer, p.83-84).

Of course, the above statistics do not convey any of the specifics of the human suffering experienced. “‘In the dense smoke, where the wind was so hot it seared the lungs, people struggled, then burst into flames where they stood’. … Jammed bridges became funeral pyres. Civil guard commander Kinosuke Wakabayashi and his daughter, shielded by a concrete warehouse, saw thousands ‘streaming towards the Sumida River bridges, and leaping into the river, clothes and even their bodies aflame. Soon both banks of the river were clogged with bodies. The bridges were so hot that anyone who touched a bit of iron or steel was seared like bacon on a grill.’ On the Kototoi Bridge, another recalled, ‘The steel grew white-hot and people who touched the metal were seared like steaks on a barbeque’. ‘[I]n some of the smaller canals the water was actually boiling from the intense heat’ recounted a U.S. government after-action report. Pools and ponds vaporized.” (Neer, p.79). “‘The updrafts brought with them a sickening odor, an odor that I will never be able to get completely out of my nostrils — the smell of roasting human flesh. I later learned that some pilots and crewmen gagged and vomited in reaction to this stench, and that a few had passed out,’ [ace pilot Robert] Morgan wrote.” (Neer, p.81). … “Dr. Shigenori Kubota […] described his travels in freezing temperatures through the devastated area just before dawn on March 10: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned into carbon.’” (Neer, p.82).

 

"Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945" (Wikipedia/Wikimedia)

photographer: Kōyō Ishikawa 1904-1989

Charred bodies of woman and child, firebombing of Tokyo
photo taken March 10, 1945 (Wikipedia/Wikimedia)
photographer: Kōyō Ishikawa 1904-1989

Such barbarism was not unique to World War II. I could continue with similar details from U.S. use of incendiary weapons and strategic bombing in Korea and Vietnam. I could describe the birth defect and cancer effects on the Vietnamese (and on U.S. veterans) produced by Agent Orange, the contamination of which during manufacture by a[n at that time unidentified] toxic substance was known to the U.S. government as early as 1952, long prior to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I could document the continuing deaths and maimings (including of children) produced by anti-personnel land mines — an international treaty on which the U.S. has refused to sign. But I believe that I have made my point. War is indeed hell, and any attempt to characterize chemical weapons as somehow worse than other weapons that have been widely used by the United States is not just disingenuous, it is a bald-faced lie, and cannot be used to justify military strikes. It is in fact just one of many bald-faced lies that have come to dominate the U.S. political stage and been used to manipulate us during the past several decades. Those lies must end. The manipulations must end.

We, the people of the United States, do hereby declare that we will no longer offer blood and treasure to the gods of war. We will not replenish the coffers of the military-industrial complex. We will not sacrifice our own lives — nor will we take the lives of others — for the delusions of small men in high places. We ourselves hold no delusions about our ability to dominate the world, and we have no desire to do so. We will not be bamboozled into believing that our security is dependent on us acting militarily every two or three years in some far-off land. We will not accept being spied upon by our government, nor will we tolerate governmental repression of our dissent. We are reclaiming our country, and rededicating it to the purposes envisioned by its founding fathers. We will fight, but it will be domestically, for our Constitutional rights, opportunity for all, and social and economic justice. To the current politicians of this land we say: Understand that, accommodate yourselves to that, or vacate your offices, for you will be irrelevant to the future.

Text Copyright: Fred Drumlevitch

Fred Drumlevitch blogs irregularly at www.FredDrumlevitch.blogspot.com
He can be reached at FredDrumlevitch12345(at)gmail.com

Farewell to Arms?

Now that he has apparently been given a huge out by Uncle Vlad after getting all mucked in his own red line, President Obama's appearance before the nation tonight might as well consist of just two words:

After all the high drama that has distracted us from such important crap as the debt ceiling and where Hillary ate lunch, Herr Assad Hitler is, according to reports, giving up his CW stash in exchange for not getting blown to bits (not that the presidential palace or the royal presidential person itself was ever on Obama's hit list, or anything untoward like that.)

So, there is reason to be optimistic today that through no fault of our own dear leaders, there will be Not-War for the time being.

 By the way, my suspicion is that Obama had again desperately tried to engage Putin over staging a CW intervention and sending Assad to Sarin rehab at last week's G-20, and Putin probably just played him like a cat toys with a mouse. Then, after enjoying the American political spectacle for several more days, Putin finally pounced on Kerry's "off-the-cuff" offer, and put them all out of their misery.

It looks like Barack Obama is joining Edward Snowden in that new club called Russian Asylum.

Oh, and Michelle is against war on Syria. After all, she does send her kids to a Quaker school. No wonder Obama looked so testy in St. Petersburg and so downright ebullient in his TV interviews last night. He'd just made both a political and domestic escape from his surgical, tiny, pinprick of a Tomahawk missile bunker ball buster of a war. 

Unless, of course, bombing Syria was never about chemical weapons and children and human misery at all, and they're now scrambling to find another excuse/locale for their Mideast power/land grab.

Oh well. It's always something. But, as he is likely droning in the ear of his National Security Blanket Advisor Susan Rice, "We'll always have our Terror Tuesdays."
<

Screw the Psy-Ops

In another sign of how tenuous the Empire's case for attacking Syria is becoming, New York Times columnist Bill Keller "went there" today. He implied that to oppose this war (he never calls it a war, of course, because that would defeat the purpose of his sanitization) is to be anti-Semitic. He compares today's anti-war sentiment to the "armchair isolationism" that allowed Hitler to come to power:

Many pro-Israel and Jewish groups last week endorsed an attack on Syria, but only after agonizing about a likely backlash. And, sure enough, the first comment posted on The Washington Post version of this story was, “So how many Americans will die for Israel this time around?” This is tame stuff compared with 1940, when isolationism was shot through with shockingly overt anti-Semitism, not least in the rhetoric of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.

When a solid reason for going to war is not available, you pivot to shaming the recalcitrants into developing the required patriotism -- and while you're at it, play the old divide and conquer card by very lazily and derisively shuffling the right and the "left" into the same demented deck:

Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front yard counts as mastery of international affairs. But sophisticated readers of The New York Times are not immune, or so it seems from the comments that arrive when I write in defense of a more assertive foreign policy. (In recent columns I’ve advocated calibrated intervention to shift the balance in Syria’s civil war and using foreign aid to encourage democracy in Egypt.) Not our problems, many readers tell me.

Isolationism is not just an aversion to war, which is an altogether healthy instinct. It is a broader reluctance to engage, to assert responsibility, to commit. Isolationism tends to be pessimistic (we will get it wrong, we will make it worse) and amoral (it is none of our business unless it threatens us directly) and inward-looking (foreign aid is a waste of money better spent at home).

Get it? We are all Sarah Palin now, our opposition to bombing for corporate profit simply an indication of our brain cell loss. Keller's classic of a doublethink column is obviously part of the Obama administration's "full court press" underway this week to win hearts and minds. It is how they psy-op the Enemy (which, let's face it, is us.)

 But judging from the reader responses to Keller's pabulum, our psyches are refusing to be opped. My posted comment:

Were George Orwell still alive to write a revised edition of "Politics and the English Language", he might have used this column as an example of the pompous verbiage necessary to get people to go along with war. Obfuscation trumps elucidation every single time.

Examples: Mr. Keller substitutes "spine in your diplomacy" for bombing the hell out of Syria. "Foreign engagement" and "activist foreign policy" become euphemisms for maiming and killing and destroying everything in sight.

And above all, instill the guilt. Because in the absence of any hard evidence of exactly who ordered the gas attacks (and the Obama administration is refusing to supply proof, even when confronted by an Associated Press FOIA request), guilt is all they've got. So absolutely, compare launching an unprovoked attack on Syria with FDR defending us against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. And while half-heartedly admitting that likening Assad to Hitler could well be over the top, do it anyway. Some of it just might sink in to guilt-ready pliable minds.

How does Mr. Keller shame us? Let me count the ways. We are anti-social, irresponsible, isolationist, selfish, cynical. We are not getting with the official program. What is wrong with us anyway, that we can't patriotically cheer murder by drone, Tomahawk missile and bunker buster bomb in order to make ourselves feel all warm and gooey inside? You'd think we didn't believe in Biblical revenge, or something.

If it wasn't the New York Times and if they don't constantly threaten to cut you off at the knees if your language lacks sufficient sophistication, respect, and "thoughtfulness", I would have added this: 

Happy Birthday, Pearl

Please join me in congratulating regular commenter Pearl Volkov on the occasion of her 90th birthday.

Pearl has brought a lifetime of erudition and compassion to this forum and also to the New York Times reader commentariat, where she posts under the handle "pvolkov." I got to know Pearl several years ago, when a bunch of us diehard Times posters started an email correspondence circle.  

Here's wishing you a happy day with your children, Pearl, and many more years of agitating and educating....  here, there, and everywhere. L'Chaim!