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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 7th, 2011
This country is in trouble. Our economy is on life support; our foreign policy is on autopilot and there are mountains dead ahead. What the country needs now is a proven winner, an economic innovator, a foreign policy genius, a man who knows how to more or less end pointless and interminable wars.
Now more than ever, that man is Richard Milhous Nixon.
Continue reading Tanned, resurrected and ready: Nixon’s the One in 2012
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 4th, 2011
The New York Times editorial board chooses the not-quite-successful-yet six-month effort to kill Muammar Gaddafi or chase him out of Libya as an occasion to scold our NATO friends; Barack Obama runs recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan through the scrubber; David Ignatius gives Tom Friedman a run for the money.
In an editorial entitled “NATO’s Teachable Moment“, the Times editors decry the degree to which the UK and France had to rely on the US to fill gaps in the NATO supply of munitions and accessories such as AWACs (Airborne Warning And Control System) aircraft during the six-month campaign against Libya. It is evidence, they say, that those countries are overly and unfairly reliant on the US war machine.
They also resurrect former US secretary of war Bob Gates’s hilarious warning that NATO countries “risked becoming militarily irrelevant unless they stepped up investment in their forces and equipment.”
To Gates and the editorial board, that’s a shameful future. But I ask you: could there possibly be any more cheerful fate in this day and age than to become militarily irrelevant?
Continue reading Today, we are all cheese-eating surrender monkeys
By Weldon Berger, on August 27th, 2011
Yesterday I wrote this somewhat carefully considered thing about how Obama’s reelection prospects aren’t as bad as a lot of people think because he’ll have many boatloads of money and the only official GOP candidates who aren’t too obviously insane to win in the general election are saddled with a Mormon problem that will probably doom them in the primaries. That could change, but so far none of the Republicans who don’t have those problems seem to think they can win, so they’re not running.
What never occurred to me is that Obama might run on his record; I just assumed he would run a two-pronged effort to paint Republicans as the slavering sociopaths they are while he proposes popular legislation that he can’t and probably doesn’t want to get passed. I forget that some people still take him seriously, and that presumably he and his staff do as well.
Continue reading So, well, okay: Maybe Obama really is toast.
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 July 19th, 2011
“Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
– Max Boot
Max Boot is my favorite neoconservative. He is completely unfamiliar with the concept of shame and like the rest of his clan he won’t ever flinch when it comes time to put somebody else’s life on the line. Anyone whose conscience survives initiation into that club soon gets voted out.
Where Max really shines is as a polemicist. He’s a good writer. He can turn a juicy phrase like few others. That one above, his juiciest ever—and I know writers, I know he looked at it and thought to himself, “damn, I am good …”—went into a piece he wrote for the Weekly Standard not long after September 11.
Continue reading What Max Boot learned about Libya from Afghanistan and Iraq
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 21st, 2011
A horse walks into a bar. The bartender looks at him and says “Why the long face, pal?” 50 miles away in a converted warehouse leased by the [insert 3-letter agency here], an analyst bursts into laughter, turns to the guy in the next chair and says “You’re not going to believe what I just saw.”
Continue reading What’s bugging you, pal?
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
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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