Oh, how the ironies abound. On the heels of deploying one of the biggest shows of domestic military force in recent memory, President Obama is now accused of being a lily-livered, noodle-kneed manager for failing to muster enough votes to pass even the most tepid of domestic gun control legislation.
Maureen Dowd, in a rather half-hearted piece being universally lambasted for its mean girl tone, adds poor leadership qualities to the legendary lack of Obamian schmoozing ability to explain the Senate defeat last week. A front page article in today's New York Times lamely ascribes a lack of Johnsonian arm-twisting skills for the failure. None of the Times writers saw fit to mention the lack of the so-called "nuclear option", as perennially threatened by passive-aggressive Majority Leader Harry Reid. Filibuster reform theoretically could have passed background check legislation without a 60-vote supermajority (the final vote was 54-46).
Obama, according to The Times, also could have used threats against his own party's outliers, such as Mark Begich of Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. He could have made crucial financial support for their campaign war chests and pet projects in their home states contingent upon their support for his gun control measures. For some weird reason, according to The Times, he just doesn't use the standard quid pro quos at his disposal. He hasn't learned how to play dirty politics. He's no LBJ.
Which brings us to another important story that The Times is choosing not to cover, possibly because it proves that the conventional portrayal of Obama as a principled but weak Mr. Nice Guy is hilariously and patently false. According to The Guardian, Obama is very adeptly trying to bribe those recalcitrant boobs in the Senate with a nuclear option that even the faux-gridlocked dinosaur leadership could love. Even as he calls for more and more crushing domestic austerity, Obama's budget proposes spending $11 billion to retrofit our entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. He wants to make them every bit as accurate and streamlined and precise and surgical as his beloved predator drones. Plus, those drones are coming back to haunt him. He might need the nuclear option backup plan.
Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to reduce our stockpile of nuclear weapons, is now reneging on that promise in order to reward the defense industry-heavy districts of Congress critters whose votes on other deals he may need in the future. That's according to the various anti-proliferation public policy groups quoted in the piece. This has nothing to do, mind you, with his failed domestic arms control legislation. It's a backdoor gambit has everything to do with enriching the Military-Industrial Complex which, in turn, enriches legislators with campaign donations, who then line the pockets of defense contractors, and ad infinitum.
Domestic gun control failed because life is cheap. The bank accounts of corrupt politicians and merchants of death are more precious than the lives of 20 six-year-olds, more precious than the lives of the estimated 30 people killed every single day by guns in America. It failed because the United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world, with annual sales of almost $67 billion now constituting almost 80% of the world market, actually tripling in the past few years.
But back to that Other Nuclear Option That is Not Filibuster Reform. According to The Guardian,
Under the plan, nearly 200 B61 gravity bombs stockpiled in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey would be given new tail fins that would turn them into guided weapons that could be delivered by stealth F35 fighter-bombers.
"This will be a significant upgrade of the US nuclear capability in Europe," said Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of Nuclear Scientists. "It flies directly in the face of the pledges Obama made in 2010 that he would not deploy new weapons."
In its Nuclear Posture Review in 2010, the US undertook to do reduce the role and numbers of its nuclear weapons, in part by not developing new nuclear warheads, and pledging it would not "support new military missions or provide for new military capabilities".
(snip)
What will be going back to Europe will be a guided nuclear bomb," he said. "Especially when you combine it with F35 with stealth characteristics, that expands the targets you can hold at risk from Europe, because by placing the explosion closer to the target you can choose a lower explosive yield. That is very important as there is less radioactive fallout. For many people this is a great concern because it means making nuclear weapons more 'usable'."
Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, said he believes Obama is displaying a "schizoid" mindset, because although he "sincerely" wants to reduce nukes, he also needs to expand nukes in order to buy off his political frenemies. "I'm convinced the president wants to the continue his efforts to reform US nuclear policy," he said.
The Guardian article should have explained that Cirincione's own apparently schizoid thought processes might have something to do with his serving on Secretary of State John Kerry's international advisory board as well as on the Council on Foreign Relations.
I suppose that this impossible melding of opposing viewpoints in one brain is an example of what is known as progressive pragmatism in contemporary Newspeak. Obama wants to reform nuclear policy by refining weapons, making them humanely more accurate in order to spare millions of innocent bystanders a hundred miles away any genetic damage affecting future generations. It's kind of like impoverishing current seniors in order to save Social Security for the unborn. It's like removing government food inspectors from poultry plants. People will die, but look at how much cheaper a Pic-of-the-Chick pack will be in your local Walmart! Look how the plutocrats will prosper! The benefits will radiate and then they'll trickle down, down, down to the permanent underclass.
Win the Future, look toward the North Star, ignite that ephemeral middle class engine. As Obama says, we Americans just refuse to be terrorized:
If anyone wants to know who we are; what America is; how we respond
to evil and terror – that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. And
unafraid.
Through days that would test even the sturdiest of souls, Boston’s
spirit remains undaunted. America’s spirit remains undimmed. Our faith in each
other, our love for this country, our common creed that cuts across whatever
superficial differences we may have – that’s what makes us strong. That’s why
we endure.
Now watch in amazement as the biggest arms dealer in the world, that brave purveyor of streamlined weapons of mass destruction known as USA, deflects attention away from itself by elevating a pair of psychopathic losers to the status of an invading rogue nation, complete with their own unsanctioned weapons of mass destruction. Be not terrified of them, but abide in your awe of America the Compassionate. Gaze upon distant mushroom clouds through rose-colored glasses. Duck and Cover.
Our long five-day national nightmare isn't over till it's over. Now begins Part Two of the long national nightmare of media frenzy, political pablum, the noblesse oblige honorifics from the austerian ruling class to the brave first responders whose wages and ranks they're freezing and whose pensions they're raiding, mindless flag-waving, obsessive-compulsive quoting of biblical scripture. It won't stop, until we all lose interest and it stops.
The stoppage will be sudden and as if by mutual consent of all the players. But do look for non-stop non-stoppage throughout this slow-news weekend period.
Just a bit of preliminary opinionating on What It All Means.
1. The fact that the perpetrators are Muslims will unfortunately give further justification to the Islamaphobic ethnic profilers in our militarized police state. The no-fly list will expand to include Russians, Czechs (whom many are now confusing with Chechens) and all Eastern Europeans with unprononouncable names. FBI agents provocateurs will be able to expand their terror-manufacturing capabilities far beyond the Middle Eastern demographic. In general, the civil liberties of all us will be taking another huge hit. And most of us will ovinely accept it. They'll tell us to run for our freedoms, and we'll run. But we can't hide.
2. Congress will bipartisanly appropriate many more billions for Homeland Security vehicles, Homeland Security couture, Homeland Security bunkers and fusion centers, Homeland Security sound-blasters and all the other stage props of the intrusive and inept police security state that were put on full, over-killing, terror-theater display on Friday. They will refuse, however, to fund a government jobs program to increase hiring the unemployed in Boston and all other municipalities.
3. With a few rare exceptions, mainstream journalists also clinched their reputations as one amazingly shallow and inept bunch. (the award goes to CNN, which at least had the sense to yank premature arrest ejaculator John King off the air on Friday)
4. U.S attorney Carmen Ortiz is still amazingly on the job in Massachusetts after her outrageous prosecutorial misconduct in the Aaron Swartz case, and has chosen to not give the surviving bombing suspect his Miranda rights. There's already a hue and cry from the usual suspects (Lindsey Graham) to send Dzokhar Tsarnaev to Gitmo as an "enemy combatant" instead of trying him as a murder suspect in a domestic court. By the time he is maybe, eventually, put on trial, actual media coverage will be sparse to sporadic anyway. But the War on Terror will have taken on a whole new life.
5. The bombings might provide a perfect excuse for our political xenophobes to put the kibosh on immigration reform. Unless, of course, their addiction to border drones and cheap household help and farm labor trumps their ideology. Stay tuned.
6. President Obama is looking more and more like President Buzz Windrip (the fascist demagogue of It Can't Happen Here) as he drones on in one church after another, one disaster scene after another, his appeal rapidly eroding as his populist campaign promises devolve into the bleak, harsh double agenda of National Security and Economic Austerity.
And although more people are beginning to notice his hypocrisy, as well as the victims on the receiving end of our own exceptionally American brand of terror, we will continue to meekly acquiesce in droves as we wave our flags and send our prayers.
Until, as if by mutual consent, we suddenly wake up and smell the cognitive dissonance.
Wolf Blitzer is not in custody. John King is apprehensive but not apprehended. As a matter of fact, he made a significant breakthrough in a dramatic shift, falsely alerting the public to a dark-skinned man in a hoodie and backwards baseball cap. Homeland Security maven Fran Townsend is still at large after getting out ahead of herself with her trusted sources. Chris Cuomo is conflicted, simultaneously applying the brakes and "accelerating incredibly quickly".
An arrest has been made, no arrest has been made, an arrest has been made.
In case you missed the afternoon's adventures in comedically inept journalism, you can watch a recap right here.
In other news, Capitol Police mistakenly removed the wrong people from the Senate chamber this afternoon, for the offense of publicly shaming public officials who are psychopathically incapable of feeling any. Joe Biden, wiping away some eye liquid, outrageously admonished the Tucson heroes to observe the proper decorum instead of properly directing his wrath toward his colleagues.
He continued weeping as President Obama strained to simulate anger in a Rose Garden gun control defeat ceremony. Earlier in the day, Majority Leader Harry Reid had delivered a self-absolving whine-a-thon in order to let advocates of gun reform know that they can't blame him when the next slaughter goes down, simply because he simulated bucking the NRA at the last minute, when it was far, far too late to make a damn's worth of difference. He's a grandpa, you see.
Since Harry Reid failed to reform the filibuster when he had the chance, his
zero-hour crocodile tears were just an obvious effort to save face, to place all
the blame on the other side of the Money Party, to maintain the illusion that
the Democrats are still the party of the people, and to give the president the
cover to display some righteous public indignation. (without having to mention
that it was only a few months ago that he had heartily congratulated Reid on his
pretend filibuster reform efforts)
What Obama did get right, though, was
his statement that our elected officials pay no attention to the will of the
people they allegedly serve. (Whether he saw himself reflected in the camera lens, thinking about his own grand betrayals as he delivered his remarks, is up for debate.)
Just a few more justifications today for a huge, long-overdue outpouring of
public dissent and protest, flying shoes and rotten tomatoes.
There's only one thing wrong with today's New York Times headline, "U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Report Shows." It's written in the past tense. It insinuates that the war crimes have stopped under the Obama Administration.
If anything, they have only gotten worse. Torture is still ongoing at Guantanamo, as evidenced by yesterday's powerful oral history of an editorial dictated by a hunger-striking unindicted inmate chained to a bed and undergoing forced feeding. It's still being outsourced to so-called black site prisons. Worst of all, waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation techniques" have largely been supplanted by the ultimate torture. Euphemistically known as the Disposition Matrix, it is effectively The Final Solution, Obama-style. This is the Terror Tuesday Kill List, the ongoing program of "signature" drone strike executions, conducted simply on the basis of age, ethnicity, and location, location, location.
Not only is the Obama Administration continuing the Bush-era war crimes, it is going out of its way to punish whistleblowers coming forward to report on them. It has just issued yet another blanket gag order on all federal agencies in the convenient name of "national security," hoping to ensure that the chilling effect on journalism solidifies into a monolithic glacier of unprecedented opacity.
Of course, with yesterday's terror attack in Boston, the last thing to enter the minds of the leadership class will be anything remotely resembling regretful self-reflection. They have officially never heard of Blowback, or chickens coming home to roost. Instead, they'll double down, stand their ground, burst into an off-key cacophany of America the Beautiful. They'll ratchet up the price of admission to National Security Theater, a grotesque show of authoritarianism in which we once again become both the actors and the audience.
They are all George Bush now. They're comfortable with what they did, they're comfortable with what they'll keep on doing. They're too big to fail and too big to jail. The government of the United States maintains its function as a monstrous protection racket for the rich and the powerful.
You'd think that Grand Compromiser and Consensus Builder Obama would praise the bipartisan nature of the torture report released today by the Constitution Project. Don't hold your breath. After all, it does criticize Obama for his own abject failure to investigate the Bush era abuses, even as it stops just short of indicting him for his own ongoing reign of terror. But it at least suggests that Obama himself is guilty of war crimes for failing to hold his predecessor accountable. It also criticizes him for his "excessive secrecy."
With more and more people expressing revulsion at everything from the slashing of the safety net, to inhumane treatment of people both here and abroad, to the relentless kowtowing to private interests at public expense, the very legitimacy of this administration is becoming rapidly eroded. The scales are falling off, the blinders of the populace are coming off.
Another day in America, another outburst of violence. I am not going to speculate or opinionate, except for this one thing -- when I watched the coverage, saddened yet shockingly not shocked, the only thought that did not enter my mind was what our kill list president would eventually intone:
I’ve updated leaders of Congress in both parties, and we reaffirmed that on days like this there are no Republicans or Democrats -- we are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens.
He just can't get away from his obsessive legacy-burnishing, consensus-building, bipartishit meme, even on "days like this", coming at ever shorter intervals, illustrating that this nation is indeed crumbling into a million tiny pieces.
You'd think that on "days like this" he would spare us the bromides. Our leaders are about as committed to their fellow citizens as BP is committed to the Gulf.
To really show how sincere is his appreciation for all the first responders and National Guard personnel on scene, Obama should immediately light a fire under the VA about those languishing disability claims, reverse his effective pay cut on federal workers, and forget all about his proposed regressive tax hikes on all working class people.
The people of Boston don't need a politician to tell them that ordinary Americans are on their side. Regular people always do a lot better than fleeting thoughts, bogus prayers and empty promises of government aid. Just look at who stepped up to help the Hurricane Sandy victims.
Get ready for yet another spate of horrific George W. Bush memorabilia. The fawning courtiers of the national media, along with every fawning living president, will soon be descending upon Texas to witness the dedication of his lieberry. (that's how we pronounced it during my Long-goyland childhood, arright?)
To get you all fired up and ready to go for the grandiose occasion, the Dallas Morning News has published a blockbuster interview with W. And here's the big scoop: along with his recently revealed talent for primitive folk art, George has also developed skills in primordial self-reflection. He rudimentally ruminates:
I'm comfortable with what I did. I'm comfortable with who I am.
One of the real challenges of life is that when you complete a chapter, you don’t atrophy, that you continue to find ways to contribute.
Freedom is universal. Free markets are fairest. Free societies are based upon good education. Those who fought for freedom should be honored. To whom much is given, much is required.
Of course, some people are surprised I can even read.
Some people would be surprised if he even had a soul. How otherwise is he even able to venture out in public after receiving that gut-wrenching farewell letter from dying Iraq war veteran Tomas Young? (I know, I know. See last quote)
Like too many veterans, Young has had to wait an unconscionable length of time to be "honored" with disability benefits and therapy. The workings of the Veterans Administration are even more primitive than Bush's attempts at painting, with wounded veterans waiting years in some cases to have their claims heard, and often denied. Young wonders if Bush & Co. will ever have the moral courage to apologize for the damage and destruction they have wrought.
If he read the Dallas Morning News, he just got his answer. Like most psychopaths, and I'd wager, most modern politicians, Bush is comfortable inside his own skin. He's comfortable with what he did. He's comfortable with who he is. He's just comfortable.
I don't think the man has ever known an uncomfortable moment in his whole cosseted life.
If anybody deserves a state funeral, it's this guy. His brand of insanity kept a lot of us sane over the years.
