FADED CELEBRITY BARRY O'S HABIT OF SELLING AMBASSADORSHIPS TO HIS HIGHEST DONORS IS BACK FIRING SO BADLY THAT IT'S EVEN RESULTED IN A HILARIOUS COLUMN BY MARGARET CARLSON.
REACHED FOR COMMENT, VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN DECLARED, "WE MAY NOT GET TO SEVEN MILLION, WE MAY GET TO FIVE OR SIX, BUT THAT'S A HELL OF A START."
We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that’s a hell of a start,”
FROM THE TCI WIRE:
It takes a whore. Apparently, it takes a lot of whores. Let's start with the one Elaine calls a "disease ridden whore" -- and that's when Elaine's feeling nice. And she's right. Though I call out Medea Benjamin, I foolishly repeatedly give her chances to redeem herself.
There is no redemption for her. She has betrayed the peace movement and she's still lying about that.
Paul Jay (Real News Network) interviews her here and there's video and, for those who can't take her whiny voice, there's also a transcript. Her lying is beyond belief.
Paul Jay asks her about the death of the peace movement and this is her lengthy reply:
BENJAMIN: Well, you said it. It's a one-word answer. Obama. And it wasn't Obama getting in; it was the leadup, it was the campaigning for Obama, when people were so desperate for an alternative to Bush that they said, I'm going to throw myself into this, I'm going to take off of work, students taking off of semesters, I'm going to put my life into getting this guy elected who said he was against the war in Iraq. And we put all our hopes and dreams into Obama, thinking that because he was against the war in Iraq and because he said Afghanistan was a good war--he didn't really mean that; you know, he was just saying that to get elected. But he was a smart guy, and he understood that war was not the answer, and he was going to get us out.
And so the steam was just taken out of the whole movement. And it was amazing to see, because you said tens of thousands. I mean, there were eight times, during the Bush administration, that we got over 100,000 people. And we had a huge movement. You just look at one group, like Code Pink: we came out of nowhere, and suddenly we had over 300,000 people on our mailing list, and we had over 300 groups around the country and, really, around the world. We weren't even trying to set up chapters, and they were just springing up on university campuses, small towns, big towns, everywhere. (08:34) When Obama started to gain steam as a candidate, those started fizzling out. And when he won the election, we had half the numbers of people we had before on our mailing list. And most of the groups started to disintegrate.
So that was indicative of what was happening to the whole peace movement.
JAY: And had you drunk any of the Kool-Aid yourself?
BENJAMIN: I drank the Kool-Aid myself, in the sense that I voted for Obama the first time around and I'm usually a Green Party voter, always voting for something other than the Democrats and Republicans. I drank the Kool-Aid in that I was very, very anxious to vote for somebody who was going to win and have somebody who was going to be an alternative to those eight horrible years of Bush.
And I was--we immediately did up a list of Obama's promises. That went from, you know, getting out of the war in Iraq to closing down Guantanamo and other things. And we started out right away: Obama, keep your promise.
And I physically moved from San Francisco, where I'd been living for 26 years, to Washington, D.C., to say, now is the time to be there to make sure Obama fulfills his promises like closing Guantanamo, getting out of Iraq.
And so I was full of hope, I would say. Yeah.
She was -- and is -- full of something but it's not hope -- hope doesn't stink like that.
There are so many lies in that quote.
First off, usually votes Green? No, not in presidential elections and she urged people to vote for John Kerry in 2004. (I voted for John in 2004 in the primary and in the general election. I donated to his campaign and I campaigned for him. But I've never pretended to be a Green and, unlike Medea, I've never popularized the lie that Ralph Nader was a "spoiler" in 2000 -- and I voted for Gore in 2000.)
Second, she doesn't vote Green in 2008?
If there was ever a time for her to vote Green it was when Cynthia McKinney was the presidential candidate.
"I was very, very anxious to vote for somebody who was going to win" -- Medea's vote was wasted. At that point, she lived in California and Barack was going to carry California. But read that statement, that's not political activism, that's a desperate (and sick) need to fit in.
And moving to DC to be a lobbyist is not activism.
As for her claim that Barack gained steam as a candidate and CodePink chapters started fizzling?
CodePink refused to hold Barack accountable.
In 2008, it was us here on the 4th of July weekend and it was Tom Hayden calling out Barack's capitulation on Iraq -- public capitulation.
That was also when Tom finally discovered what we'd been noting since March7, 2008, that Samantha Power told the BBC (this is why she left the campaign, it wasn't about Hillary) that Barack's promises on Iraq? They weren't promises. He'd decide what to do, she explained, after he got elected.
Stephen Sackur: You said that
he'll revisit it [the decision to pull troops] when he goes to the White
House. So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get
combat forces out within sixteen months, isn't a commitment is it?
Samantha
Power: You can't make a commitment in whatever month we're in now, in
March of 2008 about what circumstances are going to be like in January
2009. We can'te ven tell what Bush is up to in terms of troops pauses
and so forth. He will of course not rely upon some plan that he's
crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US Senator.
In the interview, the whorish Medea notes that CodeStink bird-dogged Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries. She 'forgets' that they never did that with Barack. She 'forgets' to note that CodeStink co-founder Jodie Evans was a bundler for Barack.
Wasn't that something CodeStink should have revealed?
When they were doing all their Democratic primary actions, shouldn't they have revealed that?
They didn't.
They used their so-called independence to destroy any of Barack's rivals.
They whored, they are cheap and useless whores.
In 2006, I was so very kind. They did their stupid action of fasting and we noted it here with medical warnings they should have provided and we also noted that you could do a one day fast. We noted that fasting wasn't really a political action for women -- not in a country where women have so many eating disorders.
They stopped all actions on Iraq. September 2012, when Tim Arango reported Barack sent an Special-Ops brigade into Iraq, CodeStink didn't say one damn word.
They're little whores whose inaction destroyed the peace movement.
They're part of a ridiculous group right now.
We'll highlight them in their own entry but I don't pollute the snapshots with them.
Their key lie right now is that what's needed is to focus on local.
No, that's the same damn lie they used after January 2007, when the Dems took control of both houses of Congress, They never again wanted a DC action. They were fine with it when it put the spotlight on Republican War Hawks but once Democrats were in charge of both houses of Congress, gone were the DC actions.
What really stands out from the whores interview is how little Iraq mattered to her.
There's no CodeStink condemnation of Nouri's assault on Anbar or of Nouri's abuse of Iraqi women or of the US government -- Barack -- supplying Nouri with weapons.
There's just lies from a cheap whore who thought DC was going to give her more media attention.
If you're not getting what a liar she is, note this exchange:
Benjamin: And so the steam was just taken out of the whole movement. And it was amazing to see, because you said tens of thousands. I mean, there were eight times, during the Bush administration, that we got over 100,000 people. And we had a huge movement. You just look at one group, like Code Pink: we came out of nowhere, and suddenly we had over 300,000 people on our mailing list, and we had over 300 groups around the country and, really, around the world. We weren't even trying to set up chapters, and they were just springing up on university campuses, small towns, big towns, everywhere. (08:34) When Obama started to gain steam as a candidate, those started fizzling out. And when he won the election, we had half the numbers of people we had before on our mailing list. And most of the groups started to disintegrate.
So that was indicative of what was happening to the whole peace movement.
On the other hand, I think that what was concerning to me was people who were a part of the collateral damage who weren't being acknowledged anymore. And if we allowed that to keep happening, it would keep happening. And so what we did is brought people from--who had direct family members killed on 9/11, brought them to Afghanistan, took them back to meet with their counterparts, which--there were many, unfortunately.
And they would say, yes, we hated the Taliban, but what did I have to do with that? And why was my family hurt? And why won't the U.S. government apologize for what they did to my family? And now how am I going to feed my kids? And my husdand's gone.
And so we did a campaign to get compensation for innocent victims. And it was--actually ended up, after a couple of years, being a successful campaign. The first pot of money was a $40 million fund in the name of one of the women that we worked with, Marla Ruzicka, to compensate innocent family victims.
JAY: And this was all under the roof of Code Pink.
BENJAMIN: This was before--it started before Code Pink, when we had a group of women that gathered--actually, it was a gathering around women concerned about the environment was when we had already invaded Afghanistan and there was talk about invading Iraq. And at that point we were saying, how can we allow the U.S. to go in and invade another country, this one that really had nothing to do with 9/11? We've got to do something about it.
What the hell is that?
Marla died in Iraq in 2005.
Why is she connecting Marla to Afghanistan and stating this "started before"?
We could go line by line. But what the interview does is find Medea lying repeatedly, pretending that the grassroots packed up the peace movement (when it was 'leaders' like Medea), find her explaining she just wants to go along with a crowd and refusing to take accountability for her actions then or since.
As Elaine frequently points out (such as here, here, here and here), Medea pretends to want to end The Drone War but her writing on it keeps 'forgetting' to mention Barack Obama, you know, the one running The Drone War.
RECOMMENDED: "Iraq snapshot"
"Over 600 violent deaths in Iraq this month already..."
"Reviewing War Crimes, Green and Silence"
"U.S. backs terror against Venezuela (Berta Joubert..."
"Fox's TV show "Gotham""
"Sister Megan Rice and Debra Messing"
"Fantastic Four"
"Again to Detroit"
"Ms. magazine doesn't care about Iraqi women"
"Did Robin Wright talk to Brett McGurk?"
"The terrorizing war"
"is tim mcgraw breastfeeding?"
"Net neutrality"
"I Dream of Jeannie"
"He loves TV"
"THIS JUST IN! THE TV ADDICT!"
