Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Into the fray.

The Bush… I mean, Obama administration announced today that it would be providing arms to the Syrian opposition, whoever that may be. Not too hard to see that coming, I suppose. When a man draws a red line, it’s because he’s already all too eager to step across it. The Syrian conflict is like that shiny new car our government and our corporate media (including its NPR/PBS sidecar) just want, want, WANT more than anything. They’re ready to let the old Afghan clunker go, were able to pawn off their Iraqi wreck, and they just keep driving by that showroom lot, looking at that awesome Syrian number.

Already, I have heard more about the numbers of killed in Syrian than I ever heard about the Iraq catastrophe. Again, no surprise. The government and the press meticulously count the victims of official enemies, but when it comes to the corpses generated by our misguided policies, we don’t do body counts. They still won’t put a realistic number on the lives lost in Iraq, hovering around the casual 30K guess Bush made in 2007 or so. I suppose once we have both legs in the mire of this conflict they will stop counting again. But for now, the statistics are useful – they are trying to push the American people closer to intervention, and it’s evident that the effort isn’t working very well. Less than one in four is in favor of intervention.

Not hard to see why. Two wars over the past twelve years, with more than 6,700 Americans killed. The very real probability that our sophisticated and destructive weapons will wind up in the hands of fanatical militants. Skepticism over the case for chemical weapon use by the regime. Who can blame us, right? The scare talk about Hezbollah is probably a bridge too far for most, as well. Frankly, they are engaged in something close to an existential struggle. If their patron Assad falls and is replaced by a Sunni-dominated regime, that puts an enemy on their eastern flank. They already have Israel to their south. Forget religion, politics, propaganda for a minute – if you were one of their strategists, what would you do?

Then there’s the small matter of the overwhelming majority of Americans being against this. But then, we were in favor of background checks, too. So long as McCain is happy, we can pound salt, apparently.

luv u,

jp

 

Political Rants

Big crimes and little ones.

I’m going to do a brief post about false equivalency, and I want to preface this by saying that I am against the Obama drone war and the ongoing program of detainee detention and (I’m certain) abuse. This would be wrong under any president, and no less under this one. In addition to being morally bankrupt, it is strategically incoherent; worse, detrimental to our long term security. We are, in essence, investing in future generations of terrorists, determined to do us harm based on the carnage we have carried out on their persons, their families, their communities.

Bush explosion or Obama explosion?
Bush explosion or Obama explosion?

That said, I also want to take issue with this argument I keep hearing that this administration is as bad as the last one with respect to extralegal killing, aggressive foreign policy, etc. It is bad enough to be against, bad enough to protest, but if we are comparing Obama with Bush II, there is simply no comparison. It was Bush who started both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, one of which we are still engaged in. These actions alone resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, uncounted thousands of abused detainees, both at the hands of U.S. personnel and under the merciless attentions of our grisly allies.

There is a tendency to minimize the crimes of the Bush era. Joe Scarborough, for instance, talked this week about the last adminstration having waterboarded “three people”. This is ludicrous. Of course, the most famous instances were those three high-value detainees he’s referencing, but there certainly were other instances of waterboarding, and many, many more instances of far worse abuses in Baghram, in Abu Garaib, and elsewhere. We like to shrink the past down to a digestible size, but this is just willful ignorance. Make no mistake – If there were an effective International Criminal Court, Bush/Cheney would be in line ahead of Obama. But they would all be in that line.

We can acknowledge that both administrations are dead wrong on this. But when it comes to comparisons, don’t even go there.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Getting warmer (redux)

We’ll be in the nineties again tomorrow. A couple of days ago, we had a tornado in upstate New York. Again. Lots of trees and limbs down, again. Flooding again. A tree crashed through my cousin’s roof and into his family room. The rain came down in sheets – literally a white-out out my back window. This is not the first really big storm we’ve had this season. And summer isn’t even here yet.

TornadoesNow, I’m not complaining. Upstate is nothing like Moore, Oklahoma, not by a long shot. But there can be no doubt that the weather here and everywhere else in the country is getting more severe. There is far more energy behind some of these storms than is normal. It takes a few mornings of driving through wreckage to drive home the notion that this may be the new normal. This may be the best we can expect in the years ahead. That is a disastrous prospect.

I have to think that, after there have been more Super Storm Sandies, more Moore-sized tornadoes, we will not take note of them in the same way anymore. We can’t reverently mark something that takes place every week, every day. Just today, multiple funnel clouds are plowing through Oklahoma City, St. Louis, and points east. Tomorrow they’ll be in Indiana, Ohio. After that, the front gets to us, and we start the cycle again.  When we’ve been through this fifty times, will it still be news?

Someone out there, perhaps reading this, will be thinking, there’s another crackpot blaming every storm on global warming. Heard it many times, and it’s still groundless. No one is suggesting storms are caused by global warming. But the higher CO2 content in the atmosphere – now 400 ppm – fuels these storms, packs them with more energy than they would have otherwise. For decades, while we might have been working to prevent this, we’ve sat around, clinging to these comforting myths, tossing up vacuous excuse after vacuous excuse. The time for that is gone.

Now we have to deal with the consequences of our inaction. And it’s not going to be easy, my friends. Wish I could say different.  

luv u,

jp