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By Weldon Berger, on May 4th, 2012
If you missed it, and nobody could blame you if you did, Newt Gingrich called it quits a few days ago. He took the opportunity to kick off the first of his 21-hour long Lincoln-Douglas style debates, henceforth to be conducted in his living room, or stateroom if he takes to the high seas again, between himself and the multitude of voices roiling in his head.
He finally endorsed Mitt Romney on his way out, saying that everyone should vote for whichever ambulatory non-Ron Paul opponent of Barack Obama appears on ballots across the nation. As this appears to be Mitt, Newt guesses you may as well vote for him.
Meanwhile, the bankster-funded, narcissism-powered centrist challenge to the major party duopoly is sputtering to a halt after spending, according to the Washington Post, $30 million on their “process.” Americans Elect has postponed its May caucuses because none of the candidates have gathered enough support to trigger that part of the process.
Continue reading The party’s over: Gingrich wanders offstage, muttering; Americans Elect doesn’t elect
By Weldon Berger, on April 14th, 2012
The law is a ass, and it wants to see yours. Watch what you think; don’t think it out loud; don’t think it in the vicinity of a marijuana dispensary. Good news: the one candidate who can truly unite Americans of all political stripes has jumped into the race.
In a decision supported by the Obama administration, the Supreme Court ruled earlier this week that security services can strip search anyone they arrest even when they have no reason to think the search is necessary. Given the latitude police have to determine probable cause for arrests, the ruling licenses police to arrest and subject anyone to a strip search for no particular reason.
In his dissent to the ruling, Justice Stephen Bryer paraphrased the language of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Breyer described unwarranted strip searches as an “affront to human diginity.”
Continue reading Bad things your mad dog government has got up to lately; the Unity Candidate arrives
By Weldon Berger, on April 4th, 2012
He’s concerned that the Greeks won’t have as much money to spend on killing humans in other countries as the US would like.
“Today Secretary Panetta met with Greek Defense Minister Dimitris Avramopolous at the Pentagon to discuss a variety of mutual defense interests including the upcoming NATO Summit, the missions in Afghanistan and . . . → Read More: US Secretary of War Leon Panetta ponders the human cost of the Greek financial crisis
By Weldon Berger, on March 31st, 2012
BTC News has learned that senior Congressional Democrats are quietly directing staff members to organize an effort to pass Medicare-for-all legislation in the event the Supreme Courts strikes down the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, also know as Obamacare.
The staff members are reaching out to leaders of key advocacy groups for support of the effort. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee official told BTC News that the fight for universal health care in America will play a critical role in the reelection campaign of President Obama, and in the efforts of Democrats to regain control of the House and solidify control of the Senate.
Continue reading Democrats agree to push for single-payer health care system if mandate falls
By Weldon Berger, on March 27th, 2012
Like as not we’re now fighting three generations of Taliban in Afghanistan. Can we hold on long enough to make it four? Yes We Can!
The Department of Homeland Security just extended an ammunition contract for up to 450 million .40 caliber hollow-point rounds. That works out to something like 150 15-round clips for every DHS employee, including the IT guys. So don’t ask them to reboot the internet when your browser locks up.
Other countries actually attempt to hold people accountable for torture and stuff, even when it was on our dime. Novel!
Continue reading Ain’t gonna study war … oh, never mind. Plus: torture inquiries! (Not here, of course.)
By Weldon Berger, on March 25th, 2012
I haven’t seen any right-wing conspiracy theories yet about how George Zimmerman was set up by ___________ to kill Trayvon Martin so that ____________, and I’m somewhat surprised by that. My bet with myself was that somebody would blame the anti-gun crowd, as in, “They knew he was a loose cannon and they set him up to kill the gangster so they could attack our right to bear arms.”
I would like to note that so far this century, US government employees salaried by you and me, dear reader—well, not me, exactly but all for one and so on—have violently destroyed, degraded, uprooted or otherwise disrupted the lives of millions and millions of people who live (or lived, as may be) in other countries and never did you or me or those government employees a lick of harm. And the spasm has nowhere near run its course. No need to internalize that, of course, as what would that accomplish?
Somebody somewhere remarked on some right-wing person’s assignment of blame for widespread drug use to hippies and liberals of the 1960s, which reminded me that a while back I found this trove of 1950s New York Times stories on drug use.
Continue reading Drugs, guns and money, plus: was Zimmerman set up? Plus: Blogs on Parade
By Weldon Berger, on March 22nd, 2012
Not long after the big Republican win in the 2010 elections, the Obama administration’s best and brightest gave up on explaining that putting people to work is really good for both the economy and for people who need work. The concept was too complicated for voters, they thought, so instead the president went off to negotiate with a crew of irresolute drunks and psychotic killer termites over how best to tighten the belt of government around the necks of the poor, the sick, the old and the unemployed.
This is according to David Corn’s new book, Showdown, which is apparently meant as a generous portrait of the administration.
Continue reading An epitaph for Obama: “I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson.”
By Weldon Berger, on March 20th, 2012
Charlie Pierce, whose writing I always admire and whose understandings of things I share more often than not, wrote a little bit yesterday about Marc Thiessen, one of the columnists who serve as bellwethers of the intellectual and literary rot inside the Washington Post’s editorial pages. The one-time speechwriter’s facility with the written word is a really good fit with the way his former boss, George W. Bush, handled the spoken one.
Thiessen wrote a column about the need to stay in Afghanistan. Pierce takes issue with it, highlighting a section where Thiessen says that we have to stay because if we don’t, what’s left of al Qaeda will 1) crow about it and 2) try to directly attack the US again. He’s almost certainly right on the first count, but it’s a piss-poor peg to hang a war on. He’s probably right on the second count too, although not, as he says, because our departure will have “emboldened” them, but because there’s no indication that they ever stopped wanting to attack us; it’s only that we messed them up thoroughly enough to make it really really difficult.
Continue reading Why is it bad for the right to say “Stay in Afghanistan,” but not for the president?
By Weldon Berger, on March 17th, 2012
It’s like an epidemic. First there was David Atkins, representing from the mean streets of Santa Barbara for the liberal fans of violent empire, and now Max Boot, Dean of the Kipling School for Foreign Policy in the 21st Century, has popped his head up to chitter angrily at opponents of US military intervention in Syria.
Max Boot … I love Max Boot. He’s got the perfect imperialist name and, unlike Atkins, has both self-awareness and balls enough to proudly quote from “The White Man’s Burden” in one of his essays—America’s Destiny Is to Police the World, published in the Financial Times a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq. But more than that, he penned the single best line ever written in support of American imperialism in a piece, The Case for American Empire, that appeared in the Weekly Standard a few weeks post-911. Stand back and let it shine, o my brothers …
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.
You could make a career out of deconstructing that. It’s glorious.
Continue reading “The Kipling is strong with this one …”
By Weldon Berger, on March 16th, 2012
Writing at the widely-read liberal blog Hullabaloo, David Atkins says the most recent US atrocity in Afghanistan means it’s time to pull the plug on what should, and in his estimation could, have been The Good War. He weeps for the Buddhas of Bamiyam (destroyed by order of Taliban leaders in 2001); he accuses his fellow liberals of parochialism and closing their eyes to the plight of Afghan women; he quotes both the penultimate stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s iconic poem, The White Man’s Burden, and the exhortation scribbled on the final page of Kurz’s monograph in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Possibly I made that last bit up. But “Ye dare not stoop to less” and “Exterminate all the brutes!” are clearly visible just beneath the surface. He doesn’t despair that we invaded and occupied Afghanistan; he despairs that we didn’t do it better.
Oh, he cites the “enormous peril of foreign intervention in largely intractable situations,” and he says that “prolonged occupations anywhere are a terrible idea” because “[t]hese sorts of incidents are almost inevitable.” He says that “continuing this awful, endless occupation replete with civilian massacre after civilian massacre is no answer at all. It’s long past time to go.” But then he closes with this:
Still, weep for the people we will be leaving behind. Weep for the Shi’ite ethnic hazara who will likely be doomed upon our departure … And mourn the fate of a people who once had hope for a better future, and now have none because America ended up doing more harm than good when all was said and done. It didn’t have to be thus [emphasis mine].
Well, David: it did have to be thus. Because thus is what wars and invasions and occupations are.
Continue reading “Take up the white man’s burden …” Plus, your world record moment of Zen
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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