Tuesday, March 20, 2007

THIS JUST IN! BULLY BOY TELLS A JOKE!

 
FIRST OFF THEY SAID ALBERTO GONZALES, ATTORNEY GENERAL AND WINNER OF THE BILLIE JEAN KING INTERNATIONAL LOOKALIKE, WASN'T INVOLVED.  THEN AS IT TURNED OUT THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY TO FIRE STATE PROSECUTORS WITHOUT CAUSE AND TO CIRCUMVENT THE SENATE'S APPROVAL PROCESS FOR REPLACING THEM, THE WHITE HOUSE ISSUED ANOTHER LAUGHABLE STATEMENT.
 
THE WHITE HOUSE WILL ALLOW KARL ROVE AND HARRIET MIERS TO SPEAK TO CONGRESS ABOUT THE CONSPIRACY BUT NOT UNDER OATH.  WHICH MEANS THEY CAN LIE THROUGH THEIR TEETH SOMETHING THAT WORKING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE HAS ALLOWED THEM TO HONE THEIR SKILLS IN.  ON TOP OF THAT, BULLY BOY WANTS NO TRANSCRIPT TO EXIST OF HIS 2 LIARS' TESTIMONY.
 
HE THREATENED A CONSTITUTIONAL SHOWDOWN (SOMEONE WILL EXPLAIN WHAT THAT MEANS TO HIM) AND THEN, TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF, OFFERED A JOKE BY REFERRING TO FAILED SUPREME COURT NOMINEE MIERS AND THE C.I.A. AGENT OUTING ROVE AS "HONORABLE PUBLIC SERVANTS."
 
 
 
Today on KPFA's The Morning Show, Andrea Lewis and Philip Maldari spoke with Tom Hayden and Frances Fox Piven about Iraq (Hayden has a book on Ending the Iraq War due out in June and professor Piven authored The War At Home.).   Frances Fox Piven noted that it was time to "begin withdrawal immediately and we also should push for an interim authority in the area made up of other national representatives that's either nations in the area or UN authority that tries to surpress violence while we are withdrawing.  We should withdraw as fast as we can.  The Democrats are as timid as they are not because they don't have the support of the American people for withdrawal but because they have their eye on the 2008 election and they want to avoid any circumstancing which they can be attacked, including attacked for 'exposing the troops' or . . .  adding to the 'losing' of the war, or whatever, politicans are always going to be cautious, especially in a two-party system where there is no alternative to the left of the Democratic Party so they can position themselves very moderately and still hope to gain electorally."  Hayden noted that Bully Boy "wants to put the issue to the test in the 2008 presidential election as well.  He wants to push it on. It's not unusual for presidents, leaders of the state, the establishment, to want to avoid losing at all costs and escalation is always the answer to losing, you just pass it along so you can say that you finished your term without losing any honor blah, blah, blah."  Maldari brought up 1968 and Nixon's secret plan for getting out of Vietnam (apparently the secret plan was the threat of his own impeachment).
 
Piven: Certainly one of the factors leading to the pull out from South Vietnam was the military themselves who were in --
 
Hayden: In revolt.
 
Piven: . . . the GI anti-war movement was escalating, really, beginning in 1970, the prospect of losing control of the military, the prospect of this kind of international disaster certainly had a lot to do with the ultimate pull out from Vietnam. It also had a lot to do with the reluctance of the American military to go to war on that scale again.  Instead we had a lot of small wars.
 
 
Hayden spoke of the importance of setting a deadline and planning for an orderly departure. 
and observed, "No one in the media has ever called for the withdrawal of American troops or setting the deadline for withdrawal."  Which is a good time to drop back to the start of the month when John R. MacArthur (writing for the Providence Journal) noted that withdrawal of US troops also means planning who gets withdrawn -- as in Vietnam, there are many who've aided US troops and who among them will be allowed (most have already been promised that they will be) to leave with the US military.  The issue of the financial costs for the illegal war was addressed and how the losses were more complex than some might realize.
 
Piven: I think that the official figures bring the costs of the wars in Afgahnistan and Iraq up to around 400 billion at this point and yes they are cutting Medicaid and Medicare.  And they stopped building low-cost housing.  There's a very long list of domestic needs that are going unmet.  I think it's a little more complicated than that.  All that's true but at the same time I think it's also true that their motives for going into war in the first place had a lot to do with the way war and war time enthusiasm would allow them, at least for a time, to manipulate the American public.  They depicted a great menace overseas.  They evoked all kind of foreign dragons that nobody could asses in terms of their own experience or their own perceptions,  And they created a lot of war like enthusiasm in the United States.  And then they used that enthusiasm not only to get themselves elected -- their majority increased in 2002, to get re-elected in 2004 -- but they also used that kind of enthusiasm, and the domination of all branches of government that it gave them, to slash taxes on the very rich and to do that again and again and again.  And Tom DeLay said 'nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes'.  And they used the war time enthusiasm to push through subsidies for the pharmaceutical companies, for the energy corporations.  So . . . the domestic costs to the war are truly profound.  They go beyond the simple arithmetic of 'we could have spent the money that went for Iraq on what our children need'.  That's true but the war also corrupted democracy to an extent that one can choke on and also allowed them to engage in this very predatory behavior in domestic politics.
 
 
Hayden noted the polling of Iraqis and how they want troops out.  (A point made in the segment, was also that it's up to the people to educate one another on what withdrawal means as opposed to what it's sometimes portrayed as.  He wrote about this last week at The Huffington Post.)  As time ran out, one of the most important points was made.  Hayden stated, "The Baghdad government is a sectarian police state that's based on militias and death squads and that's the issue for funding should funding tax dollars go continually to that regime?  That was a big issue in '73.  It's a big issue today."
 
 
And that is who is being supported and the support needs to be questioned.  Earlier this month, Joseph Forrest (Socialist Appeal) interviewed US war resister Darrell Anderson and asked Anderson if he thought the Democrats would be ending the war anytime soon?  "No, no," Darrell Anderson replied.  "If anything the Democrats will go into Iran or have a draft of something.  I have no belief in Hillary Clinton or any of them, because they're all politicians.  They're not going to stop the war."  Anderson, who self-checked out after serving in Iraq and receiving the Purple Heart, returned from Canada last year to turn himself in and he discussed with Forrest how that went, "I went to turn myself in at Fort Knox and I found the Generals at Fort Knox, and they had the choice to either Court Marshall me or not, and I told them that they're going to have to put my uniform on me and pin my medals to my chest, put me on Court Martial, and that my whole defense is going to be talking about all the war crimes we committed, all the friends I've seen beating prisoners to death, all the times we killed innocent civilians.  They told me I was going to go to jail for one to five years, and when I got to the base they started to break, saying, 'Come in quietly and we'll let you go.'  I told them no.  I was gonna keep talking, and I got to the base and three days later I was sent away with discharge papers, because the soldiers on the base were really reacting to me being there.  They were like, 'What the hell is going on?  This guy against the war and he has a purple heart.'  So they released me.  I guess they felt the longer I was at the base, the more trouble I was going to cause, the more soldiers would have gotten on my side, and they felt it was better for the military to get rid of me basically."
 
Also speaking out was US war resister Dean Walcott who is attempting to be granted refugee status in Canada.  Melanie Patten (The Canadian Press) reports on his participation at the rally in Hallifax where he was received by a "cheering crowd" and declared that, "I'm not a politician I don't know the ins and outs of political theory but I do know that there's got be a better way for a nation to be free whether than us putting a gun in their face and demanding it of them."
 
Anderson and Walcott are part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Ehren Watada, Kyle Snyder, Joshua Key, Agustin Aguayo, Mark Wilkerson, Camilo Mejia, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.


Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
 
 

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