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By Weldon Berger, on December 29th, 2011
The latest scam spam in my inbox is a letter from a high-ranking official of the International Monetary Fund telling me to deal only with him in recovering my money from Nigeria. What is it with Nigeria?
Okay, so the war in Iraq is over, according to Obama. This is because the Iraqis rejected his energetic pleas to let him keep some troops in the country—”Okay, not 30,000. How about 10,000? 5? 3500? Okay, fine, we’re leaving, but don’t blame me if we have to come back in with guns a-blazing …”—rather than observing the exit plan humorously agreed upon by the Bush administration.
But even with that we’re not leaving, not if you count the 16,000-strong crowd manning the murder holes in the State Department’s gigantic downtown Baghdad bunker. By way of comparison, that’s almost as many people as staff every other US embassy in the world combined, minus Afghanistan.
Continue reading The IMF wants me, plus, Iraq Who?
By Weldon Berger, on October 14th, 2011
If you were to set out building a fantasy Bad Foreign Policy team, one that could reliably saddle you with the most foul, murderous foreign policy disasters imaginable, the place you would want to start is here, at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). That’s what the Bush administration did, staffing their foreign policy and national security establishments with signatories to the now-dormant organization’s statement of principles.
Continue reading The case for invading Iraq: Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team is on it
By Weldon Berger, on September 18th, 2011
All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity.
President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying.
Continue reading If you really loved America, you would have died on 9/11
By Weldon Berger, on September 17th, 2011
By Weldon Berger, on August 25th, 2011
Barack Obama has two huge disadvantages going into the 2012 election: The economy and the economy. He also has two huge advantages: The Republicans and the Republicans. Despite the administration’s addiction to neoliberal crack, economic conditions could, possibly, in a perfect world, by accident, improve before the election; the Republicans can’t, and they’re what’s driving the Obama fundraising machine so far.
Make that three advantages: Few of his potential supporters seem to care much about his militarism—imagine the infuriated cries of liberals had George Bush been the president who decided to exclude the (no doubt furiously protested) bombing of Libya, and hence future air campaigns against whichever states are pissing him off, from Congressional oversight the way Obama did—or his national security excesses, or his refusal to prosecute even publicly confessed war criminals, or that he claims the right to execute Americans without due process. Turns out Democrats aren’t much different than Republicans when it comes to forgiving the hypocrisies and sins of their own. So all is well on that front.
Continue reading Time, God and a billion in the bank: Why Obama’s prospects aren’t so bad
By Weldon Berger, on August 15th, 2011
A question for you: From what authority does anyone derive the power to decide whether or not you can have a job when you want one, or a doctor when you need one, or a decent place to live?
News for you: A rail transit provider in the United States disabled mobile phone services to prevent a planned protest on [August 11], attracting criticism and unflattering comparisons to crackdowns on dissent in the Middle East.
A friend told me a few weeks ago that the 2004-2009 incarnation of Battlestar Galactica is worth watching, so I have been. A few days ago I got into a huge dustup (culminating in my regrettably profane and Nixon in ’62-like withdrawal from the field) with a few progressive sorts over whether or not a long-time antiwar activist had said, in connection with their disinclination to participate in the civil disobedience actions planned for October 6, that they were Nazi sympathizers. (He hadn’t.) That same night, I happened to arrive at the Battlestar Galactica episode in which one of the characters reprised the conclusion of Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech at Sproul Hall on the University of California at Berkeley campus.
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
Continue reading A message from outer space: “Put your bodies upon the gears …”
By Weldon Berger, on July 16th, 2011
A few days ago I wrote about a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by former Microsoft COO Bob Herbold, who had recently returned from a visit to China. Herbold was enthused by the strides that country is making toward building a modern infrastructure and investing in technology development and scientific research. The lesson he took away from China’s progress is that the US needs to deal with “the burden of entitlements”—no surprise, coming from the Journal’s editorial pages—and elect a unified government capable of emulating China’s five-year plans. He expressed admiration for China’s own government, saying that “[t]he autocratic Chinese leadership gets things done fast (currently the autocrats seem to be highly effective).”
Herbold is far from the only person who dreams of a unity government and has access to opinion pages. New York Times doofus Tom Friedman reliably calls for a gridlock-shattering third party representing the massive Tom Friedman segment of the electorate, although he stops short of recommending dictatorial powers for Michael Bloomberg or whichever “centrist” plutocrat/daddy figure he thinks can crack the whip over a fractious Congress and impose the grownup agenda favored by wealthy columnists across the land. (Particularly entertaining was his insistence that Bloomberg couldn’t be influenced by money because he already has most of it.)
Continue reading Moving closer to one-party right-wing rule
By Weldon Berger, on June 12th, 2011
Reader(s) whose memory extends back into the mists of prehistory, around 2003 or so, may recall how the US and other heavily-armed oil-consuming nations got Moammar Ghadaffi, or some variant thereof, to get out of the unconventional weapons business in exchange for working toward what passes for normal relations between them and him. One . . . → Read More: Too evil to breathe and yet they still do
By Weldon Berger, on November 21st, 2010
Actually it’s just the one, former president George H. W. Bush, who is a far less egregious choice than his son would have been, but in general, were one’s advice to have been asked, it would have been that the less said about former presidents of the past three decades or so, the better. . . . → Read More: The Robot Pundits address Obama’s Medal of Freedom recipients
By Weldon Berger, on November 8th, 2010
As most people know by now, President Obama is spending $1 trillion on an overseas foreign policy/standup comedy tour timed to distract voters from pressing domestic concerns just days before the midterm elections that will help shape the outcome of his Marxist agenda during the remaining decades of his presidency. The imperial extravagances flaunted . . . → Read More: Obama’s budget-breaking excursion pays off, plus: your wacky DEA!
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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