They Got Flights

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Congress and Barack "Red Line in the Sand" Obama will only cancel the part of the sequester that inconveniences rich people. And just in time for the weekend, as they all blow town without waiting on the tarmac. Also just in time for the Hollywood celebs to blow into town for the horrific White House Correspondents Dinner after first blowing off the TSA security lines just because they can. 

Don't get mad. Get even. And while we're thinking about how on earth we will actually accomplish that, here's a little ditty, sung to the tune of Johnny Cash's "I Got Stripes" (video here)


On a Monday, their flights got arrested (uh huh)
On a Tuesday, those plutocrats got mad (oh crap)
On a Wednesday, they found they'd been sequestered
On a Thursday, the Senate met and blurted out "Our Bad!"

So they got flights
Flights in all their Lear Jets
While we got chains
Chains around our feet (CPI!)
They got their rights
But we still got no jobs, yo.
And those chains, those chains
Are about to drag us down.

On a Monday, the kids still had no Pre-K
On a Tuesday, the cancer clinics closed (oh boy)
On a Wednesday, the Navy cancelled Fleet Week
On a Thursday, we still were getting hosed.

But they got flights
Flights in all their Lear Jets
And we got chains,
Chains around our feet (oh my corns!)
They got their rights
And still we have no jobs yet
And those chains, those chains
Just keep on draggin down.  

On a Monday, they cut the AIDS relief off    
On a Tuesday, the schools they got de-staffed
On a Wednesday, they even turned the heat off
On a Thursday, the politicians laughed. (hee-haw)

'Cause they got flights
Flights in all their Lear Jets
And we got chains,
Chains around our feet
They got their rights
And we still got no jobs yet
And those chains, those chains
Just keep....on....draggin.... d-o-o-o-w-n. 


(Feel free to add more lyrics. Inspiration can be found here.)

The World's Most Exclusive Club

A mighty wind, about an F-5 on the narcissism scale, bore down on Texas today. It was a nationally televised club meeting to which you weren't personally invited. If you did have the effrontery to show up anyway, and you got just a little too close for their comfort, you got your ass kicked. No matter that you were an Iraq veteran whom the club members all professed to love and honor. Besides, the corporate media were more interested in FLOTUS's couture and what Babs and Barry were burbling on about than in the hundreds of protesters gathered outside the gates.

The wind soared mellifluously -- Barack Obama blew them all away:

When all the living former Presidents are together, it’s also a special day for our democracy. We’ve been called “the world’s most exclusive club” — and we do have a pretty nice clubhouse. But the truth is, our club is more like a support group. The last time we all got together was just before I took office. And I needed that. Because as each of these leaders will tell you, no matter how much you may think you’re ready to assume the office of the presidency, it’s impossible to truly understand the nature of the job until it’s yours, until you’re sitting at that desk.
 

I, I, I, I.  Couldn't help noticing convicted felon Silvio Berlusconi, the bada-bing Italian president, in the audience. He's not in our club, you know, we American presidents are all family men. We don't own strip clubs -- we just help private equity vultures strip assets. We don't cheat.... on our wives. Hmmm.... Bubba? It depends on what the meaning of is, is. But back to Barry Windrip. Absolutely right, the post-presidency thing is like a support group; the club really is confronted with the Herculean task of serially holding each other up and holding each other unaccountable for high crimes and misdemeanors. And I-I-I Obama, even more than Bush, desperately need the next guy (or Hillary) to never hold me accountable for drone assassinations, for Gitmo, for continuing to outsource torture to black sites. Today's homage to Bush is nothing less than a dog-whistle plea for clemency from future club members.

 The first thing I found in that desk the day I took office was a letter from George, and one that demonstrated his compassion and generosity. For he knew that I would come to learn what he had learned — that being President, above all, is a humbling job. There are moments where you make mistakes. There are times where you wish you could turn back the clock. And what I know is true about President Bush, and I hope my successor will say about me, is that we love this country and we do our best.
 

Sorry, should have said the presidency is a humbug job. We all make mistakes, which is Newspeak for politicians committing felonies. I know this is true about Georgie. And he knew he was he and I was him even before I knew it myself. His gut told him. So here's hoping that my successor will tell the same lies about me at my own special lie-berry day.

So we know President Bush the man. And what President Clinton said is absolutely true — to know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is. He doesn’t put on any pretenses. He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is a good man.

But we also know something about George Bush the leader. As we walk through this library, obviously we’re reminded of the incredible strength and resolve that came through that bullhorn as he stood amid the rubble and the ruins of Ground Zero, promising to deliver justice to those who had sought to destroy our way of life.
 

President Bush, he is the man. I lifted that part about his sheddy reptile skin directly from the puffball interview he gave to the Dallas Morning News last week. He is one comfortable lizard brain, is George. If we weren't all comfortable with who we are and the crimes we commit in the name of freedom, we couldn't sleep nights. And please, folks, forget everything I ever said against the Iraq War when I was running for my first term. George, as he stood in the rubble that day at no personal risk to himself, was salivating over what a perfect excuse 9/11 would be for the invasion, what a lucrative opportunity for Big Oil, for Bechtel and Northrup Grumman and Boeing and Blackwater and General Dynamics and Halliburton. As my old pal Rahm once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." And Afghanistan.... still there, always will be. There's gold in them thar hills, drones in them thar skies. Enriching the plutocrats is what is meant by "our way of life" -- just in case I was not being perfectly clear. 

And finally, a President bears no greater decision and no more solemn burden than serving as Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military that the world has ever known. As President Bush himself has said, “America must and will keep its word to the men and women who have given us so much.” So even as we Americans may at times disagree on matters of foreign policy, we share a profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families. And we are united in our determination to comfort the families of the fallen and to care for those who wear the uniform of the United States. (Applause.)
 

Forgive my boilerplate jingoism. Weasel words: "solemn burden" = lying our complacent asses off with a straight face and pretending it's a huge drag. "Profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families" = we'll say a prayer, but forget about those benefits even after ten years of soul-crushing deployments. With the exception of Bush Sr. and Jimmy Carter, the good old boys in the Exclusive Club have never put their own hides at risk. Their families will never have to put themselves at risk. That's for other people's sons and daughters.  And if they do come back, they will wait months and years for their disability claims to be chained-CPI'd or even denied, they'll commit suicide at the rate of 22 every day, and their PTSD and traumatic brain injuries combined with their weapons expertise will make them more dangerous than the foreign terrorists we speciously claim are trying to destroy our way of life. But when the Homeland Security secretary warned about such an eventuality, her report was maligned by the offended wingnuts across the beloved aisle and across the reactionary spectrum. 

No one can be completely ready for this office. But America needs leaders who are willing to face the storm head on, even as they pray for God’s strength and wisdom so that they can do what they believe is right.
 

George always listened to his gut. Like all of us, he left whatever vestigial conscience he may once have possessed at the Oval Office door.  Because when it comes to killing and maiming and spying and torturing and giving ourselves and the criminal financiers who destroyed the entire world economy free rein, we the members of The World's Most Exclusive Club will simply blame it all on our invisible friend in the sky.

 

 

Wednesday Links / Open Thread

Horror in Bangladesh: a substandard building that housed several clothing factories supplying American retailers has collapsed, killing at least 70, injuring hundreds and trapping hundreds more. Employees had noticed a crack in the building, but were forced by bosses to enter and start working anyway. A fire in another Bangladeshi clothing factory killed more than 100 people only five months ago. Walmart, of course, sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil and knows nothing, nada, zilch about its outsourced slave labor camps.

The devastated tiny town of West, TX is already being forgotten as the Boston bombing continues to hog all the mainstream news coverage (although that may change tomorrow when POtus and FLOtus, a.k.a. the Obamas, fit in yet another memorial service. But only after first licking the designer cowboy boots of George W. Bush at his lie-berry extravaganza and attending a DLC fundraiser stuffed with unregulated and unrestrained Texas tycoons.) Labor journalist Mike Elk has written an excellent piece on the West disaster and the dearth of workplace safety reporting since Walter Cronkite shamed the nation with coverage of the 1968 West Virginia mine explosion. 

Oh, and speaking of fund-raising: I got an email from Elizabeth Warren last night, seeking donations for the Boston One charity for victims of the Marathon bombing. The catch? You need to go through Organizing for Action, the Obama slush fund, so that they can grab your email address and personal info before sending your money on to the actual recipients. I just scratched Warren off my ever-dwindling list of tolerable politicians. But to be fair, she's only helping the Obama outfit catch up with Debbie Wasserman Shultz's DNC data-mining email blitz that smarmily urges recipients to thank everybody in Boston -- and then allowing a respectable interval to elapse before hitting them up for campaign cash. 

The Senate finally held a hearing on drones yesterday, with Majority Whip Dick Durbin actually chastizing the Obama administration for failing to show up. An Air Force colonel warned that we should not even be uttering the D word, because saying it will only help Al Qaeda. The certifiable GOPer Lindsey Graham continued in his whole-world-is-a-battlefield mode, praising Obama for using his drone killing program in a "a very commander-in-chief-like way." If you think the Duopolists are going crazy with role reversal, not to worry. Like the earth's magnetic poles, they're flipping all the time. And nobody even notices, because in the end, money holds the whole shebang together.

Nuclear Options

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.

Patriotic Anti-Terror Cult Rises Again

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.

Arrested Developments

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.

The Beatings Will Continue.....

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.