Of Flotuses and Hecklers

One more person finally had enough of one too many politicians pontificating about how we're here for the children.... the Children.... our Children.... We have to do it for the CHILDREN....  when she finally let loose on Michelle Obama and wondered out loud (very loud) why the president has not yet fulfilled his campaign promise to guarantee equal rights for gay employees of federal contractors.

It seems that just hours before a Washington DNC fundraiser yesterday featuring the first lady, Spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged that President Obama would renege on his campaign promise to sign an executive order ending such discrimination . Once again, he would punt an issue back to Congress for its inevitable demise. So, armed with tickets starting at $500, some LGBT GetEQUAL activists attended the exclusive confab on a private estate to GetREAL with Mrs. Obama. From the pool report:

Most notable part of the event was an interruption from a protester (later identified as Ellen Sturz) about 12 minutes into the 20-minute speech. A pro-LGBT rights individual standing at the front began shouting for an executive order on gay rights. (Pool did not hear exactly what.)

“One of the things I don’t do well is this,” replied FLOTUS to loud applause. She left the lectern and moved over to the protester, saying they could “listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice.”

Crowd started shouting that they wanted FLOTUS to stay.

“You need to go!” said one woman near the protester.

The protester was then escorted out, shouting “…lesbian looking for federal equality before I die.” (First part of the quote was inaudible.)

As New York Times editorialist Andrew Rosenthal hilariously puts it, "Mrs. Obama did not handle it terribly well by threatening to take her marbles and go home." But, since Michelle was the most popular girl in the tent (did I actually hear her putting it to a voice vote?) the crowd voted for Michelle, and the activist was led out by a security detail. There is no word whether she was issued a ticket refund.... or a ticket.

I wouldn't care about this tawdry episode were it not for the over-the-top reaction from the progressive blogosphere. (see the Times reader comments to the Rosenthal post.) "You Go, Girl!" was the most common response, favoring Michelle Obama, as if she were the bullying victim next door instead of a wealthy seasoned politician. Then there are the protestations that she is not the reflection of her husband's policies, nor is she a paid member of his cabinet.... and most of all, that the heckler was rude. For god's sake! --  heckling is meant to rude. Heckling is what a desperate person does when all else fails -- be it patience, politeness, groveling, friendly calls to Congress, campaign contributions, voting for a politician who pretends to be for the little guy. Heckling is a healthy response to lies, platitudes and demagoguery. Heckling is a valuable tool. It gets you press you wouldn't ordinarily get. Would anybody be talking about the punted employment rights bill today were it not for the heckler? Would the corporate media establishment have written about Medea Benjamin if she hadn't heckled Obama at his frightening oral excuse for state-sponsored terror and murder?

 I tend to agree with Rosenthal, that Mrs. Obama could have handled the situation better. Since the gathering was exclusive, what would it have cost her to promise the woman a private meeting afterward? Instead, she went genteel-ballistic and held the distraught (and rude, rude, rude!) woman up to ridicule, even denigrating her cause -- "It’s not about you or you or your issue or your thing. This is about our children.”

It reminds me of the very different, but equally gauche, way that Laura Bush once handled a heckler. Not to mention the very dissimilar ways the faux-gressives treated the episode -- because I can't seem to remember any Democratic outcry over the rudeness of the bereaved Iraq war mother who heckled Mrs. Bush during a campaign speech in New Jersey in 2004. Sue Niederer showed up at that event wearing a t-shirt bearing the message: PRESIDENT BUSH: YOU KILLED MY SON.

 Molly Ivins described the event in her book Bill of Wrongs:

When Laura Bush started speaking about the war, Niederer stood up and shouted "Why aren't your children serving?" She was swarmed by young volunteers carrying placards, who had instructions to surround any protester, hold up their signs, and chant "Four more years! Four more years!"

The commotion caught the attention of the first lady's security detail.

Laura Bush might have seized the moment. Confronted by a grieving mother who had lost her son a few months earlier, she might have paused and asked Sue Niederer to meet with her in private after the event concluded. A mother -- "a mom" as George W says -- of twin daughters two years younger than Seth Dvorin was when his life ended in Iraq might empathize.

For a moment, Niederer thought that might happen. She had overestimated the compassion and agility of the first lady."Her jaw dropped and her face froze when I spoke" Niederer said.

The bereaved mother was then escorted out by the Secret Service, jailed and handcuffed to a wall until the campaign event was over, and Laura Bush was safely out of town. Charges were eventually dropped, because they couldn't think up a crime fast enough.

It reminds me of the time during the Obama campaign, when the prez was set to face off against  Mitt Romney for the infamous Binders Full of Women debate, and Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cherie Honkala showed up. Those women never even got the chance to heckle (not that they necessarily would have, mind you) before the Secret Service whisked them away and handcuffed them to metal chairs....  until the Obamas and the Romneys were safely out of town.

I am actually surprised that the Washington establishment does not get heckled regularly. They deserve it. And it's a healthy means of expression for the abused and the marginalized. Tomatoes, rotten eggs and flying shoes are also in order.

Of course, there is that little matter of H.R, 347, passed last year, which facilitates the criminalization of demonstrations within the sight or hearing of any public figure receiving Secret Service protection.

There are free speech zones.... and then there is the Twilight Zone, where democracy sunsets, humanists are ridiculed, and crowds mindlessly chant "Four More Years! Four More Years!"

 

Annoying Email of the Day

 

Dear Karen,

Last November, we did something special: we took on the full power of the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, FOX News, and the energized Republican Right, and we re-elected President Obama.

How did it all happen? In The Center Holds, Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an embattled President fighting back with the support of millions of us.

Buy yourself a copy and savor our historic victory!

Bob Fertik

This is the same Bob Fertik who co-founded the anti-Bush, anti-war organization called AfterDowningStreet.org (I still wear my ADS tee shirt occasionally, and my ADS sticker is still affixed to my old laptop.) This is the same Bob Fertik who, in 2009, called for the newly-elected Barack Obama to hold the Bush war criminals accountable for torture and worse. This is the same Bob Fertik who apparently hasn't noticed that "the man you re-elected" has not only embraced Bush's anti-democratic policies, he has expanded upon them. And that the man "we" re-elected raked in over $1 billion from kowtowing to the rich donor class, and that his re-election victory was wholly dependent upon that money paying for non-stop branding, advertising, and super-secret data mining.

Oh, and the fact that Mitt Romney was the greatest gift that the Wall Street Democrats could ever have asked for. Mitt Romney is the devil incarnate, and Obama is the devil in disguise. "We" chose the Satan Sandwich with the more appealing garnish. 

Incidentally, the Jonathan Alter book, based on the usual insider intrigue, sycophantic access and schmooze, is getting lukewarm reviews. (here, here, here ) I'd already decided to give it a pass after Maureen Dowd plugged it in a recent column. As I mentioned in my comment at the time, I'd call such discourse shallow were it not for the fact that whenever I read that kind of stuff, I feel like I'm suffocating in a deep hole, with no chance for escape.

The centrist cult center of the plutocrats that Alter serves so well may be holding, but millions upon millions of Americans are barely hanging on by a thread. And because six media companies now control 90% of everything we read, see and hear, Alter is getting the grand book tour star treatment. The true center cannot hold for very much longer. It's shrinking as fast as the polar ice, as almost all of the gains since the 2008 meltdown have gone straight to the top. A recent report from the St. Louis Fed reveals that the average household has only regained 45% of the wealth it lost since the beginning of our long depression. And put another way, via Pew Research," the end of the recession in 2009 through 2011 (the last year for which Census Bureau wealth data are available), the 8 million households in the U.S. with a net worth above $836,033 saw their aggregate wealth rise by an estimated $5.6 trillion, while the 111 million households with a net worth at or below that level saw their aggregate wealth decline by an estimated $0.6 trillion."

Yeah. It's a deep, dark, suffocating hole. It's the Class War. And yet here we have an erstwhile "aggressive progressive" tell us that it's really all about a Battle Royale between Obama and his enemies.  

Geeks, and the Havoc They Wreak

Welcome to Monday (a k a Terror Tuesday Eve). Well, we finally have all the proof we ever needed to show that They Really Are Out To Get Us. The following announcement has been popping up with odd regularity on the New York Times homepage lately: 

 

Truthers be told, my first thought on seeing this ad was that it was a plug for a new work of fiction by Friedman, something rip-offingly speculative, a cross between Schrodinger's Cat and the pulpy new Dan Brown best-seller. My second thought was that some Onion-inspired prankster had actually hacked the Times site and inserted Friedman the Illuminatus as a practical joke. (In case you haven't heard of The Illuminati, it's a nefarious cult of secretive plutocrats who are secretly plotting to create a New World Order. Actually, I thought they were being pretty blatantly gauche about taking over the world. But whatever. For the uninitiated among you, Gawker has published a handy guide to the bright bulbs of Conspiracyville.) 

My third thought, as I clicked on the Friedman ad, was: "Holy Crap! This is totally effing real!" Tom Friedman, resident millionaire free trade techno-babbler of the Times, is headed out to San Francisco later this month to host a $495-a-ticket (just reduced from $995) event on the New World Order. That he did not preface the title with Brave was probably just an oversight on his part.  

It gets even stranger. Friedman's column did not appear in yesterday's Times. And filling in was none other than besieged Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who must have slipped a mickey to Times editors for allowing the publication of a such a scathing piece of anti-Friedmanism. It's all about the creepy rise of Silicon Valley as a global political power, and the banality of Google's no-evil evil, as evidenced by a new book by its founders. Technocratic imperialists are taking over our lives and our world, joining corrupt governments to destroy the hopes and dreams of entire peoples through a campaign of mass, soft-power control. But unlike most conspiracy theories, this one, like the Friedman Festival of Fascism, seems all too real. Assange writes: 

“Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.  

Look no further than Obama's paradoxical White House. This administration, the most secretive in recent memory, prides itself on its transparency via such illusory populist ploys as its occasional "Google Hangouts" and "We the People" petition website. And as Edward Luce describes it in another chilling piece published in today's Financial Times, the president literally gets away with murder and other civil liberties assaults precisely because he comes across as such a nerdy, harmless geek who wouldn't hurt a fly. He is protected by the Silicon Shield, much as Ronald Reagan was protected by the teflon of his own bonhomie. According to Luce,

One of the geekocracy’s main characteristics is a serene faith in its own good motives. It is not hard to imagine how much greater the US left’s outrage would be over the drone programme were it carried out by George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. When Mr Obama asks Americans to trust that he evaluates every target on his “kill list”, most acquiesce. That pass is also extended to Mr Obama’s “signature strikes”, which select targets by probability based on often sketchy information. But there is a world of difference between zapping a known target and taking an educated guess. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr Obama’s reputation for being a nerd shields him from tougher criticism. Call it geek exceptionalism.  

It's no accident that, along with Wall Street and Hollywood, the president's biggest fundraisers were held in Silicon Valley, close neighbor to the site of Friedman's upcoming Brave New World convention. Obama's campaign database is the stuff of legend. Google founder Eric Schmidt, whom Assange eviscerated in his op-ed, is a defacto member of the Obama Administration. It turns out he was more intimately involved than we thought in constructing that massive database, having personally trained and recruited the geeks who creep, data-mining the personal information, habits, loves, beliefs and search histories of what is believed to be every registered voter in America. Joshua Green of Bloomberg has the scoop: 

(The) team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength. 

Green also confirms what many of us had long suspected -- that the information about private citizens that the Obama campaign was able to glean will also now be shared with predatory insurance companies to target potential enrollees in Obamacare. Your past medical history, prescriptions, allergies, proclivities, visits to websites for info on your hemorrhoids and other worrisome symptoms -- it's all likely there in the Obama Database to help the corporations pick and choose their subscribers and set their rates. 

Illuminated yet?

If not, Thomas Friedman explains it all in the video embedded in his New World website (linked above) You can actually hear him, see him in the flesh, previewing what the Times is actually going to charge you money to endure:

“And my view is that this is changing every job, every workplace, every industry, every job. and we’re not talking about it. Yet we’re all living it and feeling it...If you don’t start every day asking, ‘What world am I living in?’ you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.”

In the real world, the court martial of Bradley Manning begins today, and Occupy is making a comeback.  

The Joy Boy of Joblessness

Live long, don't prosper.

Peter Orszag

That's the advice from one of the brightest young stars in the Plutocratic Galaxy of Greed. If you're whining about being chronically unemployed, just shut up and be grateful. You'll have less risk of turning into highway splat now that you no longer have to commute to work. If you're stuck in the impoverished suburbs, you don't have to breathe in the polluted air in our big city jobs centers. If you're lucky enough to live long enough to become warehoused in a nursing home, rejoice. You'll probably get better care in an economic depression than you would during a boom time. That's because there are theoretically enough people desperate enough to take a $9/hour job emptying bedpans than would have been the case without the government austerity policies dictated by capitalists gone wild.

Former Obama budget director/millionaire Citigroup executive Peter Orzsag has written a sleazy piece citing these and other "findings" to extol the upside of a crappy economy for the little people. And here you thought austerity had been thoroughly debunked!  "This is a morbid column about some unexpected and encouraging news," he cheerfully begins. (I can just envision him sitting at his engraved Apple laptop, cuddled up in a velvet smoking jacket, sipping Courvoisier as he taps out this drivel).

A reasonable estimate is that for every percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, the U.S. mortality rate drops by 0.3 percentage point. In other words, and although it runs counter to our intuition, recessions may be bad for your our wallets but good for our health.

Orszag cherry-picks his way through various studies, noting that since destitute people can no longer afford to smoke and drink, they're being forced to protect their lungs and livers. He cites the economic collapse in Iceland, and the ensuing improved health of the inhabitants who found themselves priced right out of vice. Strangely, he does not see fit to add that Iceland actually let its banks fail and chose to bail out its people instead. He also doesn't mention that Iceland's recession has essentially ended, thanks to good public policy and a democratic system of government. 

America's depression, for all but the booming stock market and those at the very top, slogs on and on and on. Its long-term health effects are just now getting some serious attention.

To be fair, Orszag wrote his plutocratic puff piece before a more recent study was released, reaching the exact opposite conclusion: Joblessness does indeed shorten lives, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. From today's New York Times: 

“What is it about employment that has this huge impact on mortality, beyond the material resources it brings?” said Jennifer Karas Montez, the study’s lead author, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

The study was an attempt to explain the reasons behind the troubling trend of declining life expectancy for the least educated Americans, particularly women. A study last year found that white women without a high school diploma lost five years of life expectancy between 1990 and 2008, a measure of decline last seen among Russians in the economic chaos that came after the fall of the Soviet Union. This year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that mortality for women had gone up in more than 40 percent of the counties in the United States since the early 1990s.

But the study raised more questions than it answered, in particular about why employment status affects physical health. Ms. Montez said there was some evidence that having a job offered intangible benefits that could improve health, including a sense of purpose and control in life, as well as providing networks that help to reduce social isolation.

Meanwhile, banker cum health expert Orszag actually thinks that statistics showing that unemployed people get more sleep is a huge plus. He either doesn't know, or chooses not to know, that excessive sleepiness is a sign of clinical depression. Or that the 30% increase in the past decade of our national suicide rate has been directly linked by the Centers for Disease Control to our unaddressed crisis of long-term unemployment. His glib conclusion:

None of which should make us plutocrats wish for economic trouble. (But it does, it does!) Higher unemployment means loss of productivity, lower income and mental anguish, and those are more than sufficient reasons to combat joblessness. There may be some small consolation, though, in learning that it probably doesn’t harm human health the way that we all imagined. (We can ease what little is still left of our Randian consciences, fellas!)

The Pete Peterson Fix the Debt cabal are going to jump all over this piece, and the dubious statistics behind it, in an effort to resurrect austerity policies in the wake of the epic scandal of the flawed Reinhart/Rogoff study. Their new, improved message: the Sequester and all the other whips and chains of gratuitous economic sadism may be painful, but a whole bunch of new cherry-picked stats now shows that they'll help all you peasants live to a shriveled old age.

The better to chain-CPI you with, my dears, said the Orszag wolf at the door. Yes, it is Orszag who's also been championing cuts in Social Security -- not because it'll actually help the economy, but because making people suffer for no good reason will magically tranform his old boss into a Profile in Courage in the eyes of Wall Street. That corner office is waiting.

Black Comedy for Terror Tuesday

From the Department of the Unintentionally Hilarious comes this observation from Senator Lindsey Graham on President Obama's ballyhooed Pivot to Peace:

At the end of the day,this is the most tone-deaf president I ever could imagine, making such a speech at a time when our homeland is trying to be attacked literally every day.

So here we have the top Congressional proponent of endless war on the global battlefield admitting that there is such a thing as blowback. And he actually wants it! By raining down drones from the skies, America is recklessly making itself a target for more terrorist attacks. Thanks, Lindsey, for speaking truth to power. You finally admit that we will stop getting attacked if we'd only stop attacking others. You even kind of admit that getting attacked turns you on. When you turn your country into a victim of The Other, it's so much easier for the real culprits of Corporate World to continue their stealth attack on the national economy.

 Lindsey's priceless quote is tacked on the very end of a very priceless piece by the New York Times' Peter Baker. The headline is In Terror Shift, Obama Took the Long Path.

A more apt title would be The Agony in the Rose Garden. Baker, with an assist from the usual high-ranking but anonymous White House propaganda sources, is jumping on the bandwagon of the latest PR campaign that portrays Obama as a Biblical Christ-like figure at war with his other self: the wrathful Old Testament patriarch of a deity.

"Revenge is mine" saith the Paternalist in Chief about the unknown militants targeted for assassination below his watchful eye.

"Let this drone cup pass from me", pleads Obama the Son, surrounded by his sleepy disciples in the Gethsemane of the Oval Office. "But let it be as you, not I, would have it." 

The only thing missing from the New York Times narrative are the bloody drops of sweat dripping from the presidential brow. His pronounced and vague sacrificial relinquishment of drone murder was "a pivot two years in the making," writes Baker. Talk about interminable spin -- this administration personifies it.

While part of the re-evaluation was aimed at the next president, it was also about Mr. Obama’s own legacy. What became an exercise lasting months, aides said, forced him to confront his deep conflicts as commander in chief: the Nobel Peace Prize winner with a “kill list,” the antiwar candidate turned war president, the avowed champion of transparency ordering operations over secret battlegrounds. He wanted to be known for healing the rift with the Muslim world, not raining down death from above.

Over the past year, aides said, Mr. Obama spent more time on the subject than on any other national security issue, including the civil war in Syria. The speech he would eventually deliver at the National Defense University became what one aide called “a window into the presidential mind” as Mr. Obama essentially thought out loud about the trade-offs he sees in confronting national security threats.

Rest assured that the anonymous sources revealing the secret gyrations of a tortured presidential psyche will never be punished under new whistleblowing guidelines, nor will Peter Baker's phone records ever be seized by the Department of Justice. This journalist is doing God's work, for God's sake, acting as the earthly conduit for the glorification of the powers that be. 

Current CIA Chief John Brennan is transformed by the Times into a John the Baptist figure, going forth into the desert last year to spread the drone message, pre-Obama's Sermon on the Mount speech. Barack had bigger loaves and fishes to fry, remember, worrying about getting re-elected at the same time he was having Terror Tuesday meetings to decide who'd live and who'd die. And because of grueling endless politics, he had to cast aside his inner gentle Jesus and become Big Daddy Deity:

While the agencies argued, Mr. Obama focused on winning a second term, boasting about the same aggressive approach he was privately rethinking. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top Al Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” he said in response to campaign criticism.

But here's where the latest White House propaganda narrative starts to fall apart from the weight of its own glaring inconsistencies. After all the supposed agonizing and hand-wringing on the pivot toward love and peace,  the Old Testament appears to be winning out over the New Testament (or, as the Obama Administration chillingly calls his latest gospel, Archive 2.)  The article continues, 

Ultimately, the president and his team decided to tighten the standard for striking targets outside overt war zones. Instead of being authorized for any “significant threat to U.S. interests,” drone strikes would be used only in cases of a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” They would also be limited to cases with a “near certainty” of avoiding civilian casualties.

The C.I.A.’s opposition to shifting responsibility for drones entirely to the Pentagon resulted in a compromise: There would be a transition period for the program in Pakistan, which would be reviewed every six months to determine if it was ready to be moved to military control. Administration officials suggest that the transfer of the Pakistan drone program may coincide with the withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014.

Translation: the devil is in the parsing. New Testament same as Old Testament. One hundred percent certainty that a drone victim is a bad guy is replaced by "near certainty". Meaning what -- 51 percent? Hellfire missiles raining down on Pakistan will gradually subside from a raging downpour to a steady shower? And anyway, the withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014 is not going to happen. The bases, and the residual military "support staff" will stay forever.

And for all the talk about Obama's switching responsibility for the drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon, those protected, anonymous White House sources assure us that the hand of God will still be in ultimate control:

The hawks may be grumbling about it, but that’s to be expected,” said a senior government official who supported the strategy shift. “This is a big change. But no one is screaming.”

The hawks proposed a change of their own, suggesting, as The Daily Beast has reported, that the president leave individual strike decisions in authorized areas outside overt war zones to the Pentagon and the C.I.A. But the White House rejected that. Mr. Obama felt those decisions were the president’s responsibility: he wanted to keep his own finger on the trigger.

Thank God for God. The exalted figure who meditates on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine before acting as judge, jury and executioner will be keeping his own finger on the trigger. Rather than repudiate the power of the president to disregard the Constitution, he simply put the kibosh on hordes of bloodthirsty professional spies and soldiers running amok with the joysticks. Father Knows Best. And without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, those same heartless creatures who voted down the triggerman's impassioned plea for gun control laws.

In the eternal internal struggle that is Obama, it looks like the murderous paternalist is here to stay, despite all the self-serving conflicted rhetoric. The Times piece concludes: 

Mr. Obama was also interested in instituting an independent review of how and when drone strikes would be conducted. Multiple papers were prepared and multiple options evaluated. Among them was a special court to oversee targeted killings, but the discussion became tied up in knots about how it would work. Would a judge have to approve such strikes in advance or after the fact? What about an independent board within the executive branch instead? Administration lawyers argued against surrendering presidential authority, and defense policy makers argued against giving up operational control.

That proved to be a debate Mr. Obama could not resolve. In his speech, he invited Congress to come up with ideas. He also thought it was time to review the authorization of force that Congress passed in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, and that has been the legal foundation for the war on terrorism. But after a two-hour discussion just days before the speech, he could not decide exactly how to do that, either.

Eventually, the president just decided to add one telling caveat to his aspirational message, the phrase that all politicians use when they want to placate the masses, yet have every intention of maintaining the status quo: Be Patient.

Change takes time, remember. Especially when the homeland is trying to be attacked, every single day.

Honoring Those Who Spoke Out

As MSNBC host Chris Hayes discovered to his surprise and chagrin last year, you don't criticize the term "war heroes" on Memorial Day and get away with it. Here are his fateful words:

Why do I feel so uncomfortable about the word 'hero'? I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

No, he wasn't wrong about that. I actually think his words were measured, sensitive and circumspect in addressing a subject deserving of a lot more outrage and vitriol. But such was the outrage from all over the political spectrum that he was soon forced to issue an apology, which ended thusly:

But in seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don't, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.

Since Hayes is one of the few bona fide journalists gracing the airwaves today, I think that his apology, in retrospect, was a relatively small price to pay for keeping his job. He was even considered ready for primetime and given a promotion recently by his corporate bosses of the media industrial complex. 

This is not the usual story. There is a long history of other fine reporters who have been fired from media empires or otherwise marginalized for speaking truth to power about our great American War Machine.

The late Howard Zinn had his Boston Globe column cancelled in 1974 after he spoke out against war. On Memorial Day, no less:

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

You can read the whole thing here. It remains a classic of anti-war literature, even more timely than when it was written nearly forty years ago.

Chris Hedges resigned from the New York Times rather than hang around waiting to be fired, having been booed off the stage for delivering an anti-Iraq war college commencement address in 2003. An excerpt:

Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by calling for the annihilation of others but ends if we do not know when to make or maintain peace with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern weapons, with our own destruction.

The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true -- it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong.

War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War for those who enter into combat has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning.

I.F. Stone had already been blacklisted from the mainstream press for decades when he became the first and only journalist to challenge Lyndon Johnson's veracity on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam War. Since no corporate outlet would have him, he'd started his own weekly newsletter, the archives of which can be found here. You might even call him the prototype of the independent blogger, answerable to nobody. His mantra has been largely ignored or forgotten by the sycophantic propagandists of war masquerading as contemporary journalists:

All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

See my previous post about smoking and drones. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

But to its credit on this platitude-heavy Memorial Day, the New York Times did use the occasion to finally criticize President Obama's backdoor proposal to modernize our fleet of nukes. As I laid out in a post last month, Obama's actions in this regard once again directly contradict his campaign promises. Here's my own Times comment to help counter today's outbreak of war glorification sentiment:

According to Hans Kristensen of the Federation of Nuclear Scientists, what Obama is proposing is nothing less than the development a stealth nuclear weapons system, every bit as streamlined and precise as his beloved drones, one "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'."

This should be sending a chill right up your spine, especially since there has been little fanfare in the media about this sneaky, deadly backdoor item in the president's budget -- not to mention lack of reaction from leaders of Congress. If they can't even rein in gun violence here at home, I suppose it's too much to ask that they put the kibosh on bigger, deadlier killing machines abroad.

When it comes to maintaining the military-industrial complex, no price is too high, no weapon too lethal, no defense contractor's pocket too deep, no politician too hypocritical.

Might As Well Face It, You're Addicted To Drones

 Yesterday's endless airy words about endless treasury-depleting wars from the Motormouth-in-Chief were last seen hovering somewhere over the blighted heap of waste formerly known as the Motor City. The monstrous rhetoric cloud is now believed to be headed west toward his hometown of Chicago, where nearly 50 public schools in poor neighborhoods are being closed to make room for more profits for real estate developers and the other denizens of the ruling class. From there, it will emphysemically wheeze its way to the site of an interstate bridge collapse in Washington State.

As he exhaled his oratory on the flag-draped stage of National Defense University, Barack Obama sounded like a strung-out rambling addict who grudgingly admits that he should probably cut back on his costly and deadly drugs, but just not yet. Not today. He's still in the bargaining stage. Quitting now would provoke too much tension. He's got plenty of time. He still thinks he's invincible and America is invincible, despite all those pesky little symptoms that keep popping up: crushing poverty, crumbling bridges, and civic rumblings here at home, dismal approval ratings abroad. A condemnation from the United Nations here, blowback there. But right now, he really needs that cigarette, that drink, that snort of coke, that vicarious thrill of the joystick, that puff of smoke, that bugsplat. He promises he'll cut back, though. Really truly he does. Trust him, he says.

I suppose that once you've indulged yourself with the power to kill at will, it must be a very hard habit to break. So let the bargaining and the obfuscation begin. First, the bait and switch -- he'll transfer the drone program from the secretive CIA to the "more accountable" special ops of the Defense Department. I'd say it's like a nicotine fiend trading Camels for Salem Menthol Lights and calling it an embrace of a healthier lifestyle. But Barack is too much into the hard stuff for that analogy. He's more like the guy who promises his concerned family members that from now on, he'll smoke crack in a locked bathroom rather than in the closet of the locked bathroom.

He'll appoint yet another expendable hack to make a list of potential Gitmo transfers. He'll play Santa Claus and check it twice, and then, to great fanfare and self-approbation, repatriate a few emaciated "folks" back over to Yemen. Once there, he'll no doubt secretly arrange for them to be housed with investigative journalist Abdullelah Haider Shaye, whose imprisonment Obama himself orchestrated when the reporter got too nosy and truthy about the women and children getting killed by his drone strikes. 

You see, when Barack Obama says that he loves freedom of the press, he means it in terms of their freedom to take his dictation. But when reporters ask questions of his underlings behind his back? They must be tamped down like one of his cigarettes. Shaye is thrown in jail over there, reporters are frozen out and and spied upon and threatened over here. The second-hand smoke we're allowed to inhale will be of the hygienically filtered variety, the pretense being that selective toxins are safe toxins. Barack Obama is selling you his lethal foreign policy the same way tobacco companies sell you their safe cigarettes.

He'll task another task force to draw up secret plans to set up a secret court to review his secret kill list. He'll appoint the attorney general to look into the same first amendment abuses that the attorney general himself orchestrated. That's the trouble with untreated addiction to a powerful drug. You don't even notice the nightmare quality of your own actions, the fact that your oratorical orifice is now spewing doubletalk. Just a few examples:

 We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.

Translation: Persistent efforts against specific networks the wide world over are different from boundless efforts against the specific networks taken as a whole. We will smoke only one cigarette at a time until we go through the whole pack, but we will never actually admit to smoking the whole pack. That would be unhealthy. Not to mention disgusting!

 But our commitment to constitutional principles has weathered every war, and every war has come to an end.

I may smoke like a chimney, but I eat healthy. Even when my ciggies get sucked down to the nub, I still look great and my teeth still gleam.

Now, this is not to say that the risks are not real. Any U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies and impacts public opinion overseas. Moreover, our laws constrain the power of the President even during wartime, and I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. The very precision of drone strikes and the necessary secrecy often involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.

At some level, I know that smoking causes cancer. I know that my second-hand smoke will cause disease and death. I fully accept that there should be some no-smoking areas scattered at wide distances, that even I should honor. But those secretive hidey holes are so damned tempting.

And for this reason, I’ve insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action. After I took office, my administration began briefing all strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress. Let me repeat that: Not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes. Every strike.

If I smoke like a fiend and cough in your face and spread my poison, it's because Congress hasn't outlawed cigarettes. Every time I light up, they know or they ought to know. So it's their fault that I can't quit. They know about every strike. Every lucky strike.

I'll never be impeached or tried for war crimes, because then they'd have to impeach themselves. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and I are all safe. Now hack away hack away hack away all, and to all a good night.