Tag Barack Obama

War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is

By Brian Filed in News, Rants Tagged with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Iraq War, John McCain August 19th, 2010 @ 9:56 am

Of all the meaningless gestures from the Obama Administration regarding our illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none is more meaningless than the declaration that “the last combat troops have left Iraq”.

Fifty thousand troops remain in Iraq and the number of mercenaries used in lieu of U.S. military personnel will nearly triple from 2,700 to 7,000. An American military presence in Iraq is unlikely to disappear for decades to come. Just ask the Germans, who still have 68,000 American soldiers in their country even though their war ended 65 years ago. Or the Japanese, who have 47,000 U.S. troops. Or the Koreans, with 37,000. “They need us to maintain order”, “they need us to defend them”, “the strategic value of forward placement is critical to our national security”, “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and so on. The lies evolve as the situation changes, but there is always some rationalization for permanent occupation.

John McCain had the temerity to say this on Twitter: “I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.”

Somebody should kick John McCain in the teeth. While it’s not the first time the United States trumped up some bullshit reason to invade another country, the outright lies from Bush and his allies used to gin up a case for a completely unnecessary war are nothing short of war crimes themselves. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tony Blair, every last one of them should be hauled in front of the same sort of kangaroo court that Saddam Hussein was tried in, summarily found guilty, and hanged for their crimes against humanity. Crowing triumph after seven years of unadulterated misuse of power should be seen as the craven act of a coward and a bully, and the bootlicker McCain deserves to have some sense smacked into him.

During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received a great deal of criticism for using the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig”, but the news spin on this troop reduction is exactly that. Meanwhile, Obama himself deserves a pretty good smack for continuing and expanding the war in Afghanistan, now nearly ten years old and with even less legitimacy than the invasion of Iraq.

There will, of course, never be any proper accounting for all of this. The trillions of dollars squandered, the lives lost or ruined, the incalculable damage done to not just the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but also the people of this country. But neither should there ever be a banner raised in triumph, a head held high in honor, or a page written in history that portrays these last seven years and however many more to come as anything less than a disgrace and a shame.

Your Own Personal Oil Slick

By Brian Filed in News, Politics Tagged with "If It Was My Home.com", Barack Obama, Deepwater Horizon, Google Maps, oil spill, The Daily Beast June 7th, 2010 @ 11:21 am

If you’re having a hard time grasping the scope of the sheer size of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick, this looks like a job for Google Maps! Someone has whipped up a website called “If It Were My Home.com” that superimposes the current dimensions of the oil slick onto whatever geographical coordinates you might call home (or whichever ones you type into the interface).

Placing the epicenter of the spill on Boston, the current slick would extend as far north as Brunswick, Maine, as far south as Hartford, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island, and as far west as Albany, New York…and then some.

While I appreciate the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position this situation has put Barack Obama in, I was still more than a little disappointed to read this Daily Beast story yesterday that reveals that he was briefed at the outset about the actual severity of the leak and the length of time it would take to properly correct it and chose to play a waiting game before public opinion forced him to “get angry”. Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection points out that it’s SOP for Obama to sit back rather than act, and then when he does get around to doing something it’s usually the weakest possible response.

He’s A Secret Muslim, He’s Got A Rock Star Wife — THEY FIGHT CRIME!

By Brian Filed in Amuse Tagged with Barack Obama, funny pictures, Nicolas Sarkozy April 15th, 2010 @ 12:33 pm

“Quick, Boy Wonder, to the Obamamobile!”

Shades Of Red

By Brian Filed in Links, Politics Tagged with Barack Obama, leftism, Michael Berube, Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, socialism, Stuart Hall March 30th, 2010 @ 11:59 am

Okay, let’s get this over with once and for all: Barack Obama is not a socialist. The Democratic Party is not the Soviet Politburo. Even the most left-leaning member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders, is only a little bit socialist, even though he used to call himself socialist back in his days as mayor of Burlington, VT. Mainstream American politics is firmly entrenched in the center-right, and only because the noise from the extreme right has gotten so loud that the whole kit and kaboodle has shifted rightwards does anyone even remotely centrist look like Lenin.

You know it’s gotten out of hand when the Socialist Party USA itself has to send out press releases pointing out this basic fact and reminding everyone that the health care reform legislation jut passed is nowhere close to what real socialists have proposed.

This piece from OpenLeft.com blogger David Sirota tries to further parse out the differences between the more common left-leaning political labels “liberal” and “progressive” in the context of American politics. Because the conservatives were so thoroughly successful in their effort to make the word “liberal” a pejorative (which is what brought them to having to call Obama a “socialist” in the first place), many liberals rebranded themselves as “progressives”, but Sirota argues that there is indeed a fundamental difference between the two, although he finally concludes that you cannot have one without the other.

A similar distinction is at the core of this article at Dissent Magazine by the noted scholar Michael Bérubé, wherein he describes a correspondence with someone over his latest book (via 3QuarksDaily. The person made the distinction between the “liberal” mainstream leftism of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the clearer traditional “leftism” of Noam Chomsky. Bérubé refutes his correspondent’s observation, putting Chomsky more in the camp of contrarianists, citing the social theorist Stuart Hall as perhaps a better example of the left as alternative to the right rather than just a critical mirror (Hall was influential in British Labour Party politics in the Thatcher era), but I think his refutation helps further refine the spectrum.

An Aggregation Of Nincompoops

By Brian Filed in Links, Politics Tagged with Alex Massie, American politics, bad politicians, Barack Obama, foreign policy, Harper's Magazine, Howard Dean, Jamie Malanowski, John R. MacArthur, True/Slant Blog March 3rd, 2010 @ 12:22 pm

According to Alex Massie, writing in Foreign Policy, that’s how the Obama Administration is seen by counterparts in Europe, having piddled away the enormous political capital among those groups much the same way he has with the American public: an inability to turn an overwhelming legislative majority into forward progress, lack of follow-through on foreign policy reforms and initiatives that were seen as “must-haves” by the European public after eight very long years of George Bush, and waffling on global issues like “cap and trade” policy for climate change…all due to what is perceived as political incompetence. What we see as “insider baseball” with stories about in-fighting between Obama advisors like Rahm Emanuel, the rest of the world sees as fiddling while Rome burns.

Posting at True/Slant, journalist Jamie Malanowski brings a more American perspective:

Sometime, somewhere, some friend of the president needs to give him a swift kick in the ass. Somebody ought to explain to him that the country is hopping mad, and it’s mad not because `government is too big’ but because people don’t have jobs and the government isn’t doing anything about it and—here’s the kicker—highly bonused investment bankers whose skins were saved by the public continue to wager and collect without impunity. It would do the president a world of good if instead of inviting Republicans to come over for milk and cookies, he began directing throwing his weight around—ordering this, directing that, opening an investigation on something else. He must stop yielding his authority to compose the national narrative to tea baggers and Fox Newsmen.

The publisher of Harper’s Magazine, John R. MacArthur, suggests that maybe what Obama needs to get his skinny ass in gear is a primary challenge in 2012, and he offers a specific suggestion: Howard Dean. Dean, who got the boot as DNC chairman after his 50-state campaign strategy helped Obama win in 2008, has been very vocal as the progressive opposition to the hopeless health care reform legislation, and has been winning back support from the disaffected liberal Democratic voters who feel badly betrayed by Obama. MacArthur implies that Dean would only be needed to rattle Obama’s chains a little, not actually offer any stiff resistance to Obama’s re-election bid, but this Politico profile from a few weeks ago points out that Dean might have the juice needed to be a serious contender. Either way, what should be painfully obvious to anyone is that appeasing the Republicans and continuing to try to move to the right is a losing proposition, and if Obama won’t take the hint himself, then maybe somebody else needs to.

Three Must-Read Articles

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Food, Links, News, Politics Tagged with 3Quarks Daily, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Michelin Guide, The New Yorker, Vogue November 23rd, 2009 @ 12:23 pm

Of interest:

The December issue of Vogue has an excellent interview/profile of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Van Meter. It’s gotten most of its attention from the behind-the-scenes explanation of how she came to accept the offer to be Secretary of State when she really did not want the job. The piece really shows Hillary’s ability to keep moving forward despite being tossed around by political misfortunes not entirely of her own making, and leaves me genuinely feeling like the Democrats picked the wrong nominee. For all the Hillary Hatred that the right would have mustered up against her, it couldn’t be near as bad as the batshit-insane stuff they’ve plastered Obama with, and I think she would probably have made more headway by now than Obama. Most insiders expect that she won’t stay if Obama wins re-election in 2012, but unlike Bill Clinton, who’s massive ego keeps him going and going and going, it’s hard to see what she would do ex officio.

Last week’s New Yorker takes a peek inside the world of Michelin restaurant reviewers. While all restaurant reviewers have to struggle with maintaining anonymity, the people who work for Michelin are a whole order of magnitude more secretive about it. Author John Colapinto’s description of meeting one of the reviewers who covers New York City for lunch at Jean Georges reads like the machinations of a James Bond novel…and it seems the Michelin people prefer it that way. There’s some criticism of the guides and their old-fashioned biases toward traditional French restaurant cuisine, and after reading the challenges the reviewers themselves face in having to maintain their secret identities, having to live up to the demands of the guide’s management, and having to eat everything on their plate everywhere they dine, I think I won’t be applying for that job.

This original post at the group blog 3Quarks Daily by Evert Ciliers gets down to brass tacks about Afghanistan: it was stupid to go to war there in the first place, everything we do there is back-assward, and Barack Obama is only making things worse by prolonging the conflict in order to look tough. Here’s the money pull-quote, which is actually a quote from John R. MacArthur at Harper’s:

“’Fighting terrorism’ in Afghanistan ‘to prevent another 9/11′ simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers. No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being ‘soft on terror’ in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as ‘humanitarian interventionists’ — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s ‘civilizing’ mission in the world includes not only establishing ‘democracy’ but also ‘freeing’ Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”

If you’re still operating under the delusion that Barack Obama is Superman, hopefully this article will dissuade you of that once and for all. If you’re operating under the delusion that Our Soldiers are Fighting For Our Freedom, this probably won’t change your mind because you’re too big a dumbfuck to get it.

To End All Wars

By Brian Filed in Links, News Tagged with "The War To End All Wars", Afghanistan, Angela Merkel, Armistice Day, Barack Obama, peace, Veterans Day, Woodrow Wilson, World War I November 11th, 2009 @ 10:26 am

Ninety-one years ago, in a railroad car in Compiegne, France, an armistice was signed between Germany and the Allied Powers that ended the conflict we now call the First World War. Several months later, as Woodrow Wilson sailed to France to preside over the negotiations to formalize the peace and impose reorganization and reparations on the demolished empires of Europe, he did so with the promise that the conflict would become “The War To End All Wars”. His grand designs would, of course, sow the seeds of the Second World War to come twenty years later, which, in turn, would result in thirty years of confrontation that threatened a Third World War big enough to destroy the entire planet.

And so it comes to pass that today the Chancellor of Germany, herself a prisoner of that unwaged war, would become the first leader of Germany to stand side-by-side with the President of France at the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate the fallen soldiers of both nations in the very same week when she also stood in Berlin to mark the end of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the reunification of her country.

Though Wilson was disasterously wrong in his schemes at Versailles, in the long term the notion of a Europe in peace, with self-determination for many of the people who for centuries had been subjects of empires, has largely come to pass. Even the upheavals in the Balkans, which were the precipitating events that led to World War I in the first place, have not seriously threatened the security of the continent. Today, the European Union, largely driven by the co-operation of the French and the Germans, covers the breadth and width of the continent. As the last remaining veterans of that War To End All Wars have finally been laid to rest, perhaps so has a war-driven Europe once and for all.

Meanwhile, on this day we have co-opted to celebrate our military might rather than to reflect on the horrors of war, the current President of the United States stands poised to send tens of thousands of troops to a war initiated by his predecessor eight years ago, with neither an achievable objective nor a justifiable rationale for continuing a struggle that has cost several thousand soldiers their lives, bankrupted the nation, and called into question whatever moral authority this country might once have had. How many wars will this nation fight until it realizes that in the long term the way of peace is the only right one?

Waking Up In Bizarro World

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with Barack Obama, Mad Men, Michael Jackson, Moon, Nobel Peace Prize October 9th, 2009 @ 10:15 am

I can’t be completely sure, but I *think* I woke up in Bizarro World this morning. These are the clues:

When I opened my eyes, we were bombing the FUCKING MOON, and Matt Lauer was complaining because there was nothing cool to see.
Then they said that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize…but nobody knows WHY
Apparently the most influential man in the world is a fictional character on a TV show, and he’s not even a superhero or a police detective, but a 1960s ad agency executive!. The guy who just won the Nobel Peace Prize is #3 on the list, and #6 is a dead pedophile.

I think I might go back to bed and see if I can’t shake this.

We’re All Socialists Now

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with "Democrat Socialists", "National Socialists", Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Politics, right-wing wackos, socialism May 14th, 2009 @ 10:18 am

The Republican Party has spent the last 20 years transforming the word “liberal” into a slur and has been so successful that liberals themselves have struggled to find a replacement for that term. It seems that “progressive” has won out as the most commonly used substitute, although whenever I hear anybody use that term to describe their politics, I presume they are too spineless to own up to the real definition of liberal in the first place. John F. Kennedy’s timeless quote is the touchstone that I personally always look to when I want or need to define liberal to anyone:

“What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a ‘Liberal.’”

It is possible to reclaim the word, of course. African-Americans have reclaimed a word that never had a positive connotation in the first place, “nigger”, and turned it into a subversive idea that throws the hatred of its original use back in the face of those who would use it and at the same time reframes it as an expression of solidarity. The transformation of the word “gay” is so complete that it has lost any of the negative connotations it was meant to convey and has simply become the standard term, but the gay community has similarly reclaimed the word “queer”.

Since the results of the 2008 election demonstrate a clear trend back toward liberalism, the Republicans have had to turn up the heat a little bit. The early actions of the Obama Administration to deal with the banking debacle found Republicans and other right-wingers trotting out the term “Socialist” to apply to the TARP bailout, and that worked so well in their echo chamber of madness, they’ve decided to run with it. The Republican Party has decided, against the objections of its own chairman Michael Steele, to refer to the Democratic Party as the “Democratic Socialist Party” in all of its official communication and in talking points for the media. According to that report, they are going so far as to convene a special meeting of the RNC next week to enact this resolution, making it official policy of the Republican Party, and also delivering a great big “Fuck you, nigger!” to Michael Steele in the process.

Calling Barack Obama, a thoroughly middle-of-the-road politician who shows no inclination toward anything resembling liberal politics, a “Socialist” was ridiculous in the first place. Applying that term to the entire Democratic Party, which, like the Republican Party, has so many corporate lobbyists up its ass that all they can see is the first guy’s shoes, transcends ridiculousness. But that’s the state of affairs in the GOP these days: “let’s take the most outrageously stupid thing we can do and do it harder.”

I’m sure you’ve probably read by now, though, that 20% of the American public now thinks socialism is probably a better idea than capitalism, and that among voters under 30 that shoots up to 33%. And, at the same time, the percentage of people willing to identify themselves as Republicans to a national pollster is down to around 20%. So maybe the Republicans could take a clue from those polls and jump on the Socialist bandwagon. If they did, they could double their numbers overnight!

Of course, they’d need to rebrand themselves a little bit. “Republican Socialist” just doesn’t have a ring to it, but Republicans like to paint themselves as the “defenders of the nation”, so maybe they could go with “National Socialists”. Hey! I think that works! Check it out:


Democratic Socialist	National Socialist

Real Democratic Socialism as embodied by the Socialist Party USA is quite a different beast entirely from the “free handouts to the rich and powerful” socialism that the Republicans are complaining about. You’d also have a very hard time pegging social democracy to the excesses of the Soviet state and its satellites. In practice, social democracy long ago became the norm in Western Europe and learned to play nice with the status quo, while establishing broad-based social welfare systems that have made people throughout the EU better educated, given then better medical care, and improved their standards of living to rival or exceed those of Americans. So maybe it’s a pretty good deal to be a Democratic Socialist. And if you can’t deal with being called a “Socialist”, I guess “liberal” is probably up for grabs again now that the Republicans have moved on from it.

Waist Deep In The Big Muddy

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy", Afghanistan, Barack Obama, George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson, quagmire, Richard Nixon, Smothers Brothers, Vietnam, YouTube May 6th, 2009 @ 3:34 pm

Speaking of Barack Obama’s middling 100-Days report card, we’ve all been so distracted by the shitty economy that not much attention has been paid to his willingness to pour money, people, and materiel into Afghanistan to continue the same war against the Taliban that ultimately bankrupted the Soviet Union. And, it seems reasonably apparent that this same war is going to escalate from the current situation of border raids into Pakistan to a pretty-much full-fledged battle theater in Pakistan before its all over.

Now, you may not realize it, especially if you’re not over the age of 50, but that’s not a lot different from what happened with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all those years ago before Hanoi Jane lost the war. Lyndon Johnson took JFK’s little adventure in Southeast Asia and turned it into a big ol’ mess thinking he could just muscle his way through it (which was LBJ’s standard M.O. and had worked for him up to that point in his career). You know a war has turned into a debacle when a guy like Richard Nixon has to be the one to get out of it.

Back in the 1960s, public sentiment was generally in favor of the war in Vietnam until things started to go wrong. Legend has it that LBJ himself knew the jig was up when Walter Cronkite came out against the war in a news commentary. In the heady days of 1968, folk singer Pete Seeger got himself and the Smothers Brothers into a heap of trouble by singing a song called “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy”, which was a thinly-veiled swipe at LBJ (oh, and Happy 90th Birthday to Pete Seeger, while I’m thinking of it).

Even though Nixon won in 1968 with a “Secret Plan” to get out of Vietnam, by 1972 we were still there, albeit not for too much longer, and George McGovern ran against Nixon in the presidential election by also running against Lyndon Johnson. That didn’t work out too well for McGovern, unfortunately. But, unlike Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern is still with us today and he’s a little bit concerned that Barack Obama could be setting himself up for the same sort of debacle in Afghanistan that Johnson did in Vietnam. Here he is in a recent interview:

Frankly, I think it’s working to Obama’s long-term advantage that this is not a front-burner topic, because it does give him some room to change his mind; I’m just not sure if he will get a dose of sense and actually change his mind before he commits us to yet another quagmire.

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Tag Barack Obama

War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is

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To End All Wars

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