Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

War’s end.

President Obama delivered his second address to the nation this past Tuesday, this time on the subject of the “end of combat operations” in Iraq. Here – unsolicited by anyone – are my comments:

Turn the page. President Obama said it was time to “turn the page” on the War in Iraq. Um… not so fast, Mr. President. I know you are obsessed with looking ahead rather than behind, but if everyone took that attitude (say, local law enforcement), no one would be held accountable for anything. This war was caused by people in our own country – people in positions of authority. Your administration has neglected to even examine the record of those responsible for this disaster. This has emboldened them to the point where they regularly flaunt their guilt in public, secure in the knowledge that they will never pay a price for what they did.

Good intentions? At one point, the president said this:

This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.

I won’t address the “patriot” issue, since that is such a loaded term. But I can most certainly doubt President Bush’s “support for our troops” without any resort to imagination. He sent them into Iraq to die by the thousand, for no legitimate reason, in pursuit of an illegal and immoral war – a war of choice, no less. He shipped National Guard troops overseas in the ramshackle vehicles they used back home, with no armor, no protection. He is no friend of our soldiers or military families. To suggest otherwise is simply obscene.

Dark creations. The president went on:

Along with nearly 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq, they fought in a faraway place for people they never knew.  They stared into the darkest of human creations — war — and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.

This passage is worthy of his predecessor. Reading it, one would think we invade Iraq to help the Iraqis.  It also, like so much of Bush’s prose, seeks to cloud the notion of agency behind the initiation of the war itself, as if to suggest that our troops went to Iraq on their own initiative to do good works, as if they were Peace Corps volunteers. This is just a rhetorical cop-out, a between-the-lines attempt to deflect criticism away from those who plan the wars by keeping the focus on those sent to fight them.

His call to Bush reminds me of that closing scene in Animal Farm, when Napoleon the pig was having dinner with the farmer and the other barnyard characters, looking on, couldn’t tell one from the other. Such is our ruling class, I suppose.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Jihad-jitsu.

How are we our own worst enemy? So many ways, it seems. 9/11 – much referenced by conservative politicians – can be seen as an example of extremists using our own flawed technology and screwed up national infrastructure against us. (And with national assets like the Minerals Management Service and a toothless Securities and Exchange Commission, we hardly need Al Qaeda… As Richard Pryor might have put it, we’re kicking our own ass.) 

 Here are, it seems to me, a few obvious ways we facilitate those we are supposedly fighting:

The “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy. This is an unexpected bonanza for jihadi recruitment. It validates much of the propaganda about an America at war with Islam. It demonstrates the depth of our political pathology and our willingness to scapegoat more than 1 billion people because of the actions of a handful of criminally insane zealots. And it does so at the worst possible time, when expectations in the Islamic world are already being deflated by Obama’s Bush-like foreign policy. Jihadi leaders hope that this controversy will drag on, I’m sure, or that the Park 51 center will be forced to relocate in Staten Island so that its detractors, flush with victory, will expand their campaign against Muslims.   

Drone Strikes in Pakistan. Let me set aside, for a moment, the notion that extrajudicial murder, domestic or foreign, is just plain wrong and criminal. This CIA and private paramilitary-driven effort should be named the “Hothead Jihadi Promotion Program.” Every time we kill some functionary in the Taliban, he (and it likely is a he) is most likely replaced by someone younger, more zealous, and less open to compromise. Killing senior leadership means that inexperienced hotheads straight out of Kill! Kill! camp will be making all the decisions. Add to that the fact that we’re also killing hundreds of civilians, thereby generating more and more young people who hate us like fire… enough to, I don’t know, join the Taliban?   

Iraq’s Forgotten Refugees. There are still millions of disaffected Iraqis living in squalid conditions in Jordan and Syria, two of the poorest nations in the Middle East. Their homes have been destroyed, their country is a bloody mess, and their future is grim. We are doing next to nothing to recompense these folks in some way. Where do you think this is headed?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

They did the mosque.

Would that the late Boris Karloff were still with us. Someone might be able to convince him to do a reworking of the “Monster Mash” that would fit the lunatic rantings of right-wing blogger Pam Geller: They did the mosque! (They did the monster mosque!)

Yes, Geller referred to the proposed Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center as the “monster mosque.” But it’s far too easy to simply heap opprobrium upon pathetic paranoid freaks like her. No, it’s the established right-wing media and much of our political class that has kept this ball in the air for the past week. Such a remarkable nation we live in – one in which people crow about our constitutional freedoms and yet run hysterically from them whenever they are put to the test. Political figures from every corner of the country have been climbing over each other to denounce the “mosque” as inappropriate, insensitive, unacceptable, “sacrilege” (Charles Krauthammer), and so on.

What you will hear exactly none of them say is that a) it is NOT a mosque; it is a community center with a prayer space in the upper floors, and b) it is NOT at ground zero or in the World Trade Center complex; it is two blocks away in the empty former Burlington Coat Factory building. And while Newt Gingrich (Remember him? He was what was fucked up about the nineties.) likens this to opening an office of the Nazi party next to the Holocaust Museum, it is really more like… someone opening a community center in an abandoned building. Perennial New York State also-ran Rick Lazio was on cable yesterday substituting his sorry judgment for that of the City of New York, complaining that this was not a residential district but a business district. Well, hell – so this is a zoning issue, is it, Rick? Sounds like what they used to use to keep black people out of certain neighborhoods.

Honestly, this would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. And it truly is sad. While millions of Muslims in Pakistan suffer from the worst flooding in that nation in memory, all we can talk about is this non-issue. What is next? Muslims are not allowed to open a business in lower Manhattan? They won’t be allowed to walk within two blocks of Ground Zero? Where does it end?

If the national conversation is being driven by lunatic bloggers – and it evidently is – then we’ve got bigger problems than this manufactured controversy. First Acorn, then the “new Black Panthers”, then Shirley Sherrod, and now this. What next?

luv u,

jp