The Obama Doctrine: Killing Beyond the Horizon

The thousands of men, women and children who have been killed and maimed by the secretive and escalating Drone attacks overseas are finally getting some big-time attention from the mainstream press.  The Washington Post ran an excellent and disturbing article on its front page yesterday.  The gist is that lawmakers in Washington kind of know about the program, but are kind of not allowed to talk about it, because it's a big fat secret. Here's the part that sent chills up my spine:

Key members of Obama’s national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator . . . 

The only member of Obama’s team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence.

During a National Security Council meeting in November 2009, Blair sought to override the agenda and force a debate on the use of drones, according to two participants.

Blair has since articulated his concerns publicly, calling for a suspension of unilateral drone strikes in Pakistan, which he argues damage relations with that country and kill mainly mid-level militants. But he now speaks as a private citizen. His opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year. (bold mine).

  The New York Times, meanwhile, is hauling the Administration into court for its failure to be transparent about just how, who, what, where and why it kills civilians without so much as a press release, let alone due process.  Glenn Greenwald surmises that Democratic partisans are loath to accuse the nice guy in the White House of rogue terrorism because doing so might give aid and comfort to Mitt Romney. But human rights and civil liberties organizations are ever so politely asking Obama what the deal is with these long-distance murders.

The White House isn't talking, but its close think tank partner -- The Center for American Progress -- is.  In a stunning policy paper quietly published online just before Christmas,analyst Peter Juul writes that the drone attacks are indeed the new Obama Doctrine, the defacto foreign policy of the United States. Terror is being defined as leveraged diplomacy. Killing targets from afar is cheap, it's easy, it's fiscally responsible and it boosts the president's austerity bona fides during this second Great Depression. The public need not worry its pretty little head about what mayhem is being committed in our name.  Writes Juul: 

In 2011 President Obama crafted a new doctrine for the United States’ use of force, but this doctrine is more apparent in his administration’s actions than in his speeches. The new doctrine effectively removes counterinsurgency and nation-building as the main approaches to advancing American national interests and replaces them with partnering with allies and leveraging America’s unique, over-the-horizon military capabilities. This new approach reduces the burdens on the United States in terms of high military casualties and out-of-control military spending while playing to its diplomatic and military strengths.
Regardless of the more controversial aspects of this approach such as drone strikes, President Obama has crafted a more sustainable way for the United States to use its hard power to advance its interests in the world.

The war in Libya was the Obama Doctrine writ on a larger, "over-the-horizon" scale -- Qaddafi was taken out on the cheap, in less than a year! No American lives were lost either.

 It's called diplomacy, American-style. Speak softly and simply allow a grunt in a Nevada trailer to push a button.  Pay no attention to the blowback, the resentment being fomented in Muslim countries for generations to come.  

The overthrow of Qaddafi only cost the United States $1.1 billion, (Juul continues) with no American or NATO lives lost over the course of seven-and-a-half months. This compares with $1.38 trillion spent and 7,632 coalition lives lost in multiyear counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Juul's muted cheerleading propaganda piece fails to mention the thousands of Libyan corpses -- including children -- left behind on the killing ground that no shiny American jackboots ever needed to touch.  He also failed to mention the American journalists killed in the fighting.  The main thing is the glorious fiscal responsibility of War the Obama way.  Nothing to see on TV because as far as you're concerned, the Obama Doctrine does not exist. The Defense Dept and the CIA have been melded into one hypersecretive, coldly efficient hybrid agency. No guts, but plenty of glory for the White House Warrior.

The bellicosity of the mellow guy in the Oval is definitely becoming a political talking point.  In a piece in today's Hill, Obama operatives are gearing up for a campaign in which the president will be sold as the "Warrior of the Middle Class" as well as the warrior who protects us from the ephemeral threats from abroad.

Part of the reason, opines Glenn Greenwald, that the Republican Party is plummeting over the right wing lunatic cliff, is that's hard to fight against a defacto Republican warmonger already esconced in the White House.  In a Guardian op-ed piece, he writes:

A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Indeed.  Maybe this is what the Obama apologists had in mind when they theorized that he is the genius of all time and is simpling gaming the GOP in a marathon session of 11-dimensional chess.

Bye Bye Big Bird

Mitt Romney came not to kill Big Bird, but to pimp him out. At a campaign stop at Homer's Deli in Iowa today, the GOP android told a crowd of mainly old people that PBS should start running commercials aimed at the pre-school set, who are too lazy to pay taxes.  We just have to stop funding certain programs, he shrilled, even the ones we like. "Stop them! Close them! Turn them off!"

He went through some weird jerky up and down motions to counter his natural stiffness, like a lying Pinocchio trying to convince the audience he is an authentic real live boy. It was the Puppet vs the Muppet!

"You might say, I like the National Endowment for the Arts. I do!  I like PBS. We subsidize PBS. Look, I'm going to stop that. I'm going to say that PBS is going to have to have advertisement. We're not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird is going to have advertisements, alright?" 

(But just so you know, he is going kill ObamaCare dead. On Day One!  With no Congressional input and no ads and no borrowing money from China! Watch a blessedly shortened video clip of his hour-long harangue here.  Notice the Deli employees snickering in the background. Notice he lied by omission by not revealing that the federal government funds less than 5% of public broadcasting!)

This idea of defunding Sesame Street, by the way, is as stale and old and Scroogey as the Republicans who first suggested it last century. The Capitol Steps satire group even composed a song about the GOP wanting to privatize PBS, and put it on their "Whole Newt World" album. "This Big Bird can make you rich/In the right market niche" goes one verse to the tune of "Bye Bye Black Bird." The song suggests beer and cigarettes as some lucrative products for Marxist freeloader Big Bird to shill to the two-to-five-year-old demographic. (audio clip here). 

We all know, thanks to the fact that Gail Collins puts it in every one of her New York Times columns, that Mitt Romney is an animal abuser.  He once strapped the family Irish Setter, Seamus, to the top of his station wagon for a vacation to Canada. (Yeah, he was enclosed in a crate with his very own windshield, but the pooch became violently ill en route).  And now, it seems, Mitt doesn't care too much about the psyches of children, either.  According to the American Academy of Pediatrics,

Research has shown that young children—younger than 8 years—are cognitively and psychologically defenseless against advertising. They do not understand the notion of intent to sell and frequently accept advertising claims at face value. In fact, in the late 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held hearings, reviewed the existing research, and came to the conclusion that it was unfair and deceptive to advertise to children younger than 6 years.What kept the FTC from banning such ads was that it was thought to be impractical to implement such a ban. However, some Western countries have done exactly that: Sweden and Norway forbid all advertising directed at children younger than 12 years, Greece bans toy advertising until after 10 pm, and Denmark and Belgium severely restrict advertising aimed at children.

You can take the man out of Bain Capital, but you can't take Bain Capital out of the man.

New York Times Hacked?*

I just got an email from the New York Times, telling me they were sorry I had cancelled my subscription.  That is pretty funny, because I don't even have a subscription.  I get my endless 20 free articles a month by simply cleaning out my browser cache every time my quota runs out.  So at first I thought they had outed me as a cookie cleaning kook and were demanding payment.  After all, the Gray Lady is in a big financial hole.  She just sold a bunch of regional papers out from under the poor slobs who worked for them, and froze the pensions of foreign correspondents at the same time the CEO is leaving with a multimillion-dollar buyout.  Reporters and other staffers are apparently getting ready to storm the office of Publisher Pinch Sulzberger. You can read their open letter here.


Well, it seems that The Times email database of commenters and subscribers has been hacked, and that the emails about subscriptions are pure bogus spam. Or maybe even an inside job from a disgruntled past or present Times worker bee. No word yet if the hacktivist group Anonymous is behind the spoof, although this is the week they had vowed to hack websites of various and sundry oligarchs.  Here's the "Times" email:

Dear Home Delivery Subscriber, Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.
We do hope you’ll reconsider.
As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*
Continue your subscription and you’ll keep your free, unlimited digital access, a benefit available only for our home delivery subscribers. You’ll receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com on any device, full access to our smartphone and iPad® apps, plus you can now share your unlimited access with a family member.†
To continue your subscription call 1-877-698-0025 and mention code 38H9H (Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. E.D.T.).

Here's more.  The frantic Tweets of panic-stricken Times people are hilarious. And the Times Media Decoder section is running a front-page item online. It's a slow news week matched by a slow response from the newspaper. Here is my favorite reader comment, from Dawn of Princeton:

As a home delivery subscriber who received that e-mail I would like the Times to promptly let me and others know how this happened and most important if our personal information, such as credit card information on file for automated monthly payments, has been compromised. The fact that the Times has responded so slowly to this makes me want to actually cancel my subscription.

* Update, 4:30 pm: The Times now says a disgruntled worker sent out the mass email to 8 million people.  No spam, no hack, no credit card info stolen, no problem.  Martin Weiss of Mexico, MO ain't buying it: 

Keep moving. There's nothing to see here. Fatherland Security was just checking addresses of intellectuals and leftists. (Don't mention the news blackout on Obama signing the NDAA which eliminates the need for jury trials, allows the Army to hold Americans suspected of supporting insurgencies incommunicado indefinitely, and funds internment camps with a capacity of two million.) After all, NY Times staff are above the law and needn't worry about the hoi polloi. Just because the Argentine Junta disappeared over twenty thousand professors, journalists and labor leaders doesn't mean a right-wing fascist coup is in progress here. We don't need the Posse Comitatus or the Bill of Rights anymore, anyway, as government has become an impediment to profits. Are your papers in order?

Bravo, Martin!

Boxing Day Blogging


The USA has finally caught up with the UK and made Boxing Day a legal holiday!  Well, no: since Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, Monday is a day off for most government and higher wage, non-Walmart employees. No mail delivery means no more holiday cards, no packages, no bills. Sob.


Thanks to everyone for your contributions to the Christmas threads. Meanwhile, what other fun holiday stuff did we miss?  Here are a few inspiring yuletide snippets to wreak havoc with your joy bubbles:


It Don't Mean a Thing If You Got Too Much Bling:  Pope Benedict, his snowy pate snuggled inside his jewel-encrusted papal mitre, and his feet toasty warm in their red Prada loafers, announced to the world that there is too much commercialism in Christmas.  Ya think?  I don't know if he actually used the word "bling" in his global address to the globe; the AP translation had it as "glitter."

The King of Bling

I have tried in vain to find a monetary value for the Pope's couture.  When I Googled "Papal Bling" I came up with nada.  Except, of course, from Nextag, which promises to give us the lowest prices on the web for papal finery.  EBay is selling a papal crown replica for a starting bid of just three bucks. 
I did find out that the Catholic Church donated the real deal, the original priceless papal tiara, to the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, where it's on display.  This is the same mega-church where Tiffany Princess Callista Gingrich sings in the choir and where, presumably, the crown jewels of Il Papa are within her view and give her inspiration between shopping trips.  She and Newt. a Catholic convert, are huge fans of the pope, and their production company even made a DVD of the recently beatified John Paul.  Copies of their books are on sale in the Basilica gift shop, along with pope soap on a rope and other trinkets. 

The Papal Tiara

The hat is not for sale, not even to Callista. But here is some glittery glitz that you can buy in the Basilica of Bling Gift Shop.




Jewels for the Ladies




Gold Crucifix Money Clip for the Gents

  Which brings us to....


Yes Virginia, There Is a Virginia:  Santa Claus came early to the Old Dominion, which sensibly dumped both Newt and Rick Perry from its Republican "Super Tuesday" primary ballot, because face it, they just don't have enough fans. The response from Perry, who may have been in a Vicodin haze, was muted. He still respects Virginia, because of its "economic and military strength". But Newt is livid.  He has compared himself to the United States being bombed at Pearl Harbor.  Election rules blindsided him the same way the Japanese blindsided FDR.  Silly old rules, they should not apply to Newt.


Campaign Manager Michael Kroll took to Facebook:

“Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941.We have experienced an unexpected set-back, but we will re-group and re-focus with increased determination, commitment and positive action. Throughout the next months there will be ups and downs; there will be successes and failures; there will be easy victories and difficult days - but in the end we will stand victorious.”

Kroll said he and Newt feel the whole process is just "too cumbersome".  But guess what -- Newt was not bombed.  He did bomb.  And he fell right into the Cumberland Gap. But maybe he will take root in his ditch with the help of his grassroots.  Don't forget that his entire campaign staff dumped him earlier this year when he and Callista dumped them for a Greek vacation.

Merry Christmas!

Feel free to share songs and links and stories.  Cheerfulness not required, humbug welcome.

I want to thank my readers for your kind thoughts and pithy commentary over the past year.  Here's hoping 2012 is good to all of you. 

Karen

Christmas Eve

By Jay - Ottawa

After a big, satisfying dinner exactly 100 years ago the publisher of the New York Times encountered a hungry man in the street. On that occasion the disparity between the two was recognized not just by the poor man but by the rich man as well, and thus was born the Times’ Neediest Fund. For all my irritation with the Times, I salute them for the Neediest Fund and hope that once great paper can bring such needs to the front page for another hundred years.

No philanthropist or charity can possibly meet all the needs of the poor in a nation of our size. However, the government of a big, rich country can come close to that goal -- when it makes the right choices. Today the richest people and their courtiers who run America have no intention of letting the government help its most needy. While neighbors starve in cold alleyways the elites continue to wear a warm smile and spend money, conspicuously, on their pets. (See Reuters photo, previous post.)

For Christians the Christmas story revolves – or should revolve -- around a child born in poor housing to parents barely scraping by. The growing discipleship of Ayn Rand will tell you that Mary and Joseph, like other irresponsible people of today, brought hardship down upon themselves by making poor life choices along the road to Bethlehem and Nazareth and Golgotha.

But why invest in biblical stories of dubious provenance? Moderns should trust in facts that are up-to-date and verifiable. Check reality with measures that stand up to scrutiny. Then chose to respond, somehow. Or not respond.

Thanks to a foreign newspaper I learned that the National Center for Homeless Families (NCHF) just published a report about homeless children in America. Here’s a Twitter-size executive summary: During the course of a calendar year a total of 1.6 million American children experience homelessness. That’s 1 in 45.

The NCHF has an interactive map that allows you to see the homeless child statistics for your state. Just possibly, in light of recent wheeling and dealing in Washington, the numbers will increase dramatically before next Christmas.

The number of homeless kids in my native New York is an embarrassment, despite all the efforts, public and private, to address the needs of poor children. Where does your state stand in the rankings?
http://www.homelesschildrenamerica.org/reportcard.php

There are many reasons to vote for or against certain candidates. I’m not a single-issue voter, but I, like others of you, will hold it hard against certain parties and candidates who have allowed that 1.6 million to suffer in the first place. Just about everything those same powers-that-be do lately tells us that the number of homeless children is sure to increase.

The end-of-year season puts us in mind to ask ourselves and each other, peaceably, how we are to conduct ourselves in the year ahead. By assenting once again to the lesser of two evils will we become increasingly bigger collaborators, despite what we say on the sidelines? To what measurable degree, if any, has the party of lesser evils slowed -- or hastened -- the progress of injustice, compared to the party "In opposition"? Is there a responsible Third Option?

(Ed. Note: In case you missed it, you can watch the excellent 60 Minutes report on homeless children here.)

Don't Spend It All in One Place

The only thing more annoying than media pundits shrilling about Republican intransigence over the payroll tax cut extension is media pundits shrilling about how great this kabuki disaster has been for the president's approval numbers.  It is so easy to round up the usual annoyances right around Christmas time, but this year we have a brand new one:  The White House, that most savvy of social media bastions, has rolled out its own new Twitter propaganda campaign even as it is trying to squelch the tweets of alleged Somali militants.


Since a failure to approve the can-kicking tax holiday will result in an average and immediate $40 deduction from the "typical" ($50,000/year) paycheck, the Obama people are asking "folks" just how they would spend those two missing twenties.  Actually, it is former campaign director turned G.E. millionaire lobbyist turned White House adviser David Plouffe who did the asking. The thing that ticks me off is how they are glossing over the fact that you have to be solidly middle class in the first place in order to "lose" the much-touted $1000 a year.


Thousands of folks have dutifully responded thus far, and the White House has published a few of the stories on its website.  Unfortunately, the stories they have chosen to share are from people who probably don't even come close to earning the $50,000 a year it takes to qualify to lose $40 the first pay period. The stories they have chosen to publish are from people who sound like they could easily qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, and home heating assistance. (They also sound like people who can stretch a dollar to magical proportions: a week of groceries for only $40?) People on the brink of poverty are being fooled into believing Tax Holiday Grinch Theater applies to them.  A few examples the Obama people are using to make their political points:

  
 After everything that comes out, including my mortgage my take home pay is $150.00 every two weeks. So minus forty would be $110.00. I can barely get by now, that forty bucks is my gas for my car to get to work. Taking forty away from my pay would, just about put me under.



A single mother of two, with no financial support from my children's father, 40 dollars means lunch money for my children at school. It means a tank of gas, and it means covering my weekly visit copays to the doctor.


That is almost 1 weeks of groceries for me or how much it costs to fill my gas tank for 1 1/2 weeks or medical copay at the specialist office. Which one am I to go without? This is going to hurt. Please don't let this happen.

Meanwhile, in what was meant to be a feel-good holiday photo-op, President Obama preemptively blew his own $40 on toys for Bo the Dog in PetSmart yesterday.  What a man of the common people.

(Reuters)

Also lost in the gimmickry is the fact that the payroll tax holiday would only be for one more year, and that we will go through this whole fake rigmarole again next Christmas, when the economy will still suck. Does anybody really believe we can make this thing temporary, and that the so-called holiday is not an underhanded plan to turn Social Security into a means-tested welfare program? The Beltway bubbleheads are already fond of calling it an entitlement, rather than an insurance, program -- and pretty soon they will get their wish. Bernie Sanders voted against this "holiday" in the Senate for just that reason. You don't get what you don't pay for. Garbage in, garbage out.

Conventional wisdom, however, is that one more year of tax holiday will do nothing to affect the solvency of the trust fund. And the Bush tax cuts were supposed to pay for themselves too, and they were supposed to expire, and the moon is made of green cheese.