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

 

Usual Rubbish

Stuff and … stuff.

What the fudge. Mother of pearl. Is that the phone again? Take it off the hook – I’m busy, damn it. Busy as John Henry.

What am I doing? Working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A decidedly low-tech collection, recorded in the clammy basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill hear in soggy upstate New York, hammered out with great care and aplomb, dropped out of a three story window, and tied in a bow for your enjoyment. We hope you will be pleased, most pleased. Or at least, not angry, like our landlord, who is demanding all of the proceeds from our album sales in return for 47 months of back rent. (Turns out someone owns this dump after all. Who knew?)

Anyroad, yes, yes, I’m working on a CD package for the limited run we will be burning, mostly for giveaways. Cowboy Scat is going to begin life as a digital release, for the most part. We’ll send a copy to Nashville, one to Texas, one to Wyoming, and a few more of those big, square states out there. The drier the better. We may even send you a copy, one one condition: Don’t Tell Rick!

Yeah, Cousin Rick might be sore when he hears these songs. Can’t blame us. We merely culled them from the score of a musical whose libretto was lost on Lake Tahoe in the 1970s and never recovered. A musical that somehow predicted the meteoric presidential ambitions of a man barely out of short pants by that time. A truly prophetic work! Had it lived….

So, why am I doing the album art …. again … after such a mediocre performance on our previous albums? Simple answer: we are cheapskates. Why the hell else would we be squatting in this abandoned mill for the past ten years plus?

And as they say, it’s the stingy man who pays the most. So … back to my payment plan. Keep those cards and letter coming.

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

Weird ass music since 1986