Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Fitting the problem.

Barack Obama is a decidedly small-bore president. This is by no means a revelation to anyone. I voted for the guy in 2008 because the notion of a McCain presidency (and a Palin vice-presidency) scared the bejesus out of me, and rightfully so. (I remain convinced that denying him the presidency saved us about 14 wars.) I voted for him again in 2012 to deny the Republicans the joy of having all three branches of government. But that’s about all I’ve gotten out of it. He’s a very cautious man, a very conventional man, and not at all inclined to take bold steps. 

Not a big, bold idea guySure, he’s Simon the Likeable. I think of it as the liberal equivalent of conservatives seeing W. Bush as someone they would like to have a beer with. Obama has an appealing persona to people like me, mostly because he’s the first president in my lifetime that shares our experience. Of course, those considerations are an empty category, politically speaking. It doesn’t matter at all whether or not I “like” this man I don’t know. What matters is how he handles driving the enormous killing machine that is the American Presidency.

And from what I’ve seen, he’s not much better than his immediate predecessors. It’s that incrementalism – the big speech followed by the tiny half-step. Like this week, as Egypt’s military crushed the Muslim Brotherhood protesters, Obama stepped up to the mic in Martha’s Vineyard and duly intoned his concern, then canceled joint military exercises with the Egyptian generals. Kind of a puny response. For one thing, the Egyptian military is getting plenty of exercise now … shooting and rounding up their own people … with arms provided by us. That last part is the problem. If you want to have an impact on the generals’ planning, pull back on the free guns. Don’t just call off bombing the desert for the thirty-seventh time.

The presidency has a life of its own, it seems – some stuff stays the same no matter who occupies the oval office. One such item is our enduring relationship with the military in nations – like Egypt – with weak (or non-existent) civilian governments. So… how do we shift that? Any ideas?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week that was (again).

I’m not going to focus hard on one topic this week, friends. At least I don’t think I will. I never know until I get down to the third paragraph, so we’ll see.

Snowden. Was asylum for Edward Snowden worth canceling a summit about? The administration says that is not the only reason, but there can be little doubt it was a (if not the) deciding factor. Our own senator in New York, Schumer, used some pretty incendiary language about Russia, saying they had “stabbed us in the back”, which is way over the top for him. This is not a place we want to go.

Our greatest creationBest remind ourselves that the Russia we have today is the one we worked toward building yesterday. Putin is the beneficiary of a strong presidency established by Yeltsin in the 90s with our enthusiastic support (back when we had them privatizing state assets for pennies on the dollar and creating what was then the most dramatic demographic self-implosion in many decades). Remember how he shot the Russian Parliament full of holes? Well, now we’re just staring our own blinkered foreign policy in its beady eyes. The authoritarianism, the anti-gay laws – it’s pretty disgusting. But then, have we broken with Saudi Arabia yet? Their laws are worse.

At the movies. Network biopics are almost invariably stupid and disposable, particularly about political figures. So the proposed NBC mini-series about Hillary Clinton seems like a dumb idea to me, and the right (including rare food disease Reince Priebus) is using this nebulous project as a talisman for all of their fantasies about the liberal bias of Hollywood, network television, etc. It’s always someone else’s fault when you lose, isn’t it, Reince? Last we heard from Republicans on biopics about Hillary was how overjoyed they were about the hatchet job served up by Citizen’s United, the litigation over which had such a happy outcome in the Supreme Court. Then there was the whining about a proposed miniseries about Reagan that wasn’t hagiographic enough for their tastes. Get a life, for chrissake.

Right. Not a lot to say, but I said it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Justice in America.

Bradley Manning is guilty, per his military proceeding. That’s the way it’s going to be. The government did not manage to pin the “aiding the enemy” charge on him, but because we live in the era of massive prosecutorial over-charging, he was convicted on about 20 other counts. It’s likely that, on top of abusive pre-trial detention amounting to at least psychological torture (and probably physical torture as well – exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, etc.) Manning will be treated to decades in prison for the crime he committed; that dastardly crime for which there can be no excuses given, no quarter offered. “Justice” has been served.

Guilty of telling us the truth about us.What was the crime again? Oh, yes. Exposing the sprawling criminality of our foreign policy, namely the Iraq war and the Afghan war, plus releasing a raft of diplomatic cables relating to prosecution of the global war on tactics … I mean, terror. Heinous indeed. Perhaps someone needs to remind me again why the man who informed us of the war’s true impact is going to jail while the men who started the war are living a comfortable – and loudly opinionated – retirement. Rank has its privileges, to be sure.

One thing Manning reminded us of was the fact that, to the federal government – the permanent national security state that persists through administrations of both parties – we are the enemy. Manning was accused of aiding the enemy, and that’s what he did. He gave us the information we need to fully understand the global war being fought in our names. Armed with that knowledge, we could compell our government to stop the killing, the torturing, the endless detentions, etc., because we live in a formal democracy. That makes us a threat to the persistence of the national security state. That makes us the “enemy”.

I know a medical professional whose son is in the military. He had four tours in Iraq, was knocked around by IED explosions. He lives in pain. He’s had his neck operated on, the doctors fusing his vertebrae together. He’s losing his sight. Worse yet, he can’t work but he can’t get decent disability benefits unless he stays in the Army for another 150 days. He’s a very young man with two young children, and his life is ruined. I hear about him, the many thousands like him, the many, many more thousands killed, and I see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of them, and their comfortable retirements.

That’s justice? Not quite.

luv u,

jp