A Daily Reflection of War... Thoughts from a Vietnam Vet
by Arthur James
I remember the horror of death. On a darkening evening, three soldiers encountered me on a jungle trail. Our meeting startled us. The soldiers braced to shoot me. Shaking, I wedged myself and my M-16 rifle against a tree. I shot two of them. The third person dropped to the Earth on that dusk eve, crawled into dense bushes, and thankfully fled away. "Oh God." I groaned deeply. "What have I done? Why am I here?"
War unites humanity to feel madness, horror, and insanity. There must exist an enclave of peace, meditation, solace, and a quiet place to step back from this insanity. To be able to find and touch the Self's reserve of tranquility of Being is a difficult spiritual struggle. The Word one searches for to be descriptive and speak, fails. Words are all we have to work with. Words lack the power and often we people feel diminished with hardly the capacity to communicate. I represent myself guilty of this fact.
Before I digressed into the second paragraph, I began to mention that portraits were found on the limp, lifeless, lacerated forms. In long moments immediately after their death, I began wondering about those rummaged pictures my fellow squad members found. I wondered about their mothers, fathers, children, and their extended families of friends. Being stricken with a truth I had always known: These Vietnamese were people, distinguished and unique individuals. They were fellow humans, not my enemy.
Stealing the Midterms and the Power of Myth
by Mike Whitney
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victimâ€.
Gustave Le Bon - "The Crowd"
Karl Rove is not Harry Houdini. He can’t change the fact that the Democrats could take up to 40 seats in the House and that the Republicans may lose the Senate as well. He can’t change the national polling-data which favors the Democrats by a considerable margin, or the exit polling which is predicted to show substantial Democratic gains too. And, there’s nothing Rove can do to stop the perception that the elections are now expected to be a Democratic landslide extending from sea to shining sea. The only thing that Rove can do to win the midterms is to purge the voting rolls in key states and crank up the voting machines to “full-tiltâ€.
But even that won’t be enough this time.
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Collaborators of Catastrophe: Inside the Ministry of Truth
by Manuel Valenzuela
The creators of American reality, those propagators of charades and mirages who dwell inside the hallways of the Ministry of Truth – otherwise known as the Corporate Media – continue their dance of deception and whitewash, festering in their offices of propaganda, directing the narratives and the epics hundreds of millions of Americans consider truth. Much like the disappearance of warmth giving way to the crispness of cold arrives with each annual changing of leaves, so the remarketing of American reality is altered by the changing faces of circumstance.
Today, this change is the complete disaster that is the occupation of Iraq, an endeavor whose initial fruition could not have taken shape without the blitzkrieg marketed incessantly into every home and mind in America by the Department of Propaganda, the Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists.
Herding the Sheeple, Voting on Justice
by Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.
“Let’s vote on it.†To most people
that sounds like the ideal way to solve any issue. But it can also be
one of the most dangerous.
In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Loving v. Virginia was a landmark civil rights decision. But a 1968 Gallup poll documented that 72 percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage. Had America voted on the issue in 1968, civil rights would undoubtedly have been defeated.
On November 7, 2006 Americans in several
states will vote on ballot initiatives concocted and promoted by the
leaders of the evangelical Christian Right and their Republican sycophants.
Increasingly, their incestuous relationship is being exposed at the same time their so-called
“values voters†are fading into history. The Christian Right
is slowly but surely dying, and for good reasons. But apparently they want to kill an independent
judiciary before they go.
Examples were provided in an October
17, 2006 article titled “Judicial Activism
Prompts Citizen Efforts to Restrain Judgesâ€
by
Pete Winn, associate editor of Citizenlink.com, a propaganda organ for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family theo-political empire:
South Dakota’s Amendment E is the most ambitious measure – it would allow residents to sue judges over their decisions. Grand juries would be convened, and judges would face removal from the bench if they were found guilty of an infraction.
Montana voters, meanwhile, must decide if they want … the right to have recall elections if they should become “dissatisfied†with a judge.
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Science, medicine, and the gullible Left (Is your spleen superfluous?)
by Mickey Z.
In a recent National Football League game, Tampa Bay Buccaneer quarterback
Chris Simms suffered a ruptured spleen. Simms was rushed to the hospital,
his
spleen was removed, and he is now on the road to recovery. This much
talked about injury inspired Robert N. Jenkins of the St. Petersburg Times
to declare that Simms, in reality, "didn't need his spleen." In an article
called "Humans have body parts to spare," Jenkins went on to pronounce that
we also do not need our appendix, gall bladder, tonsils, esophagus, stomach,
and adrenal glands because those organs, according to conventional wisdom,
are "vestigial."
I'm not here to debate what - if any - human organs are superfluous. What interests me more is the fact that most folks would read Jenkins' article
and accept the premises therein without question... and this includes the most cynical lefties you'll ever meet. I know people skeptical enough to
think the Foley sex scandal was leaked by Republicans to distract the public
from the fiasco in Iraq. But tell those same people that some scientist has declared their spleen obsolete and they're not likely to rush off to post a
rebuttal on their blog.
Let's March in January! An Impeachment Call to Action
by Dave Lindorff
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that, barring some incredible act of criminal cynicism such as the bombardment of Iran by the president, the Democrats are going to take over the House of Representatives.
That being the case, I propose that it's time all those patriots and lovers of liberty, all those who oppose the administration's mad imperial military policies, all those who recognize the so-called War on Terror for what it is--a War on America, all those whose stomachs turned at the sight of the fatal drowning of New Orleans, all those who are outraged at a president who claims the right to violate laws at will, to ignore acts of Congress and to snub rulings of the Supreme Court, all those who are sick of seeing their government function like a whorehouse for corporate Johns, all those who are angry at having a government that tortures and kidnaps people, including children, in our name, all those who know that there are dark secrets about 9-11 being buried by traitors in the White House, all those who despair at seeing the Bill of Rights ripped out of the Constitution article by article, begin a mass campaign to make impeachment of President Bush item one on the agenda of the next Congress.
Get An Absentee Ballot!
By Tom Chartier
Are you worried about fraud
at the polls? Ah… you must live where electronic voting machines are
being used. Are they the ones made by Diebold? If so, that is all the more reason
to be uneasy.
If you are a staunch Republican Bush supporter fear not! I have no doubt your party line Republican vote will be correctly counted as you wish. Of course, if you are a Democrat or, God forbid, a Libertarian, or even a member of the Bull Moose Party, you might have cause for concern.
Electronic voting machines are, in the words of my hard-core Midwestern Republican, Information Technologies expert buddy, a “formula for disaster.†Indeed they are. They can be easily hacked as some researchers at Princeton University recently proved.
Brutality and Reality: The American-Israeli Arrangement
by Chris Floyd
Israel admits it used phosphorus weapons (Guardian)
Israel Adds Far-Right Party to Coalition (NY Times)
The good news just keeps rolling in from Israel, where the "light unto the nations" plows on in its relentless self-exile into outer darkness. That epithet of "light" once had the tang of truth, in the great line of thinkers, artists, activists, theologians, healers, humorists, and diviners of the natural world, largely in the Diaspora, from Maimonides to Mendelssohn, from Judah Ha-Levi to Boris Pasternak and Bob Dylan, from the Baal Shem Tov to Martin Buber, from Spinoza to Einstein, and on and on in every field of worthy endeavor. But the political inheritors of this matchless legacy seem hellbent on squandering what once seemed an inexhaustible storehouse of the human spirit.
Every week seems to bring some new brutality, some new degradation, some further coarsening – and some new parallel with the Bush Regime and the brutal,
coarse and degraded currents in American society that it so amply embodies and represents.As a side note – or maybe even a main note – I'm not one of those who subscribe to the "Israel made us do it" meme that seems to loom large in the dissident blogosphere. I just can't buy the idea that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the gang are somehow being jerked around by wily Zionists – as if they wouldn't be following their "unitary executive"-global domination-war profiteering agenda even if Israel didn't exist. I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the American ruling class – and yes, Virginia, there is an American ruling class and a pretty vicious, voracious, self-serving lot they are, too. The idea that these factions of gargantuan wealth and privilege – much of it, as with the Bushes, going back for generations – could be induced to act against their own narrowly defined but passionately held interests by the arguments of third-rate hacks like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, or Douglas Feith seems fairly risible.
Yes, they are happy to make use of the neo-cons, the Likudniks, AIPAC, etc. etc., especially as the hard-right in Israel dovetails neatly with the American elite's own harsh, bellicose vision of the world. And yes, the Israel lobby has a broad and pernicious influence on the workings of American politics – just as, say, the Turkish lobby does (ask Denny Hastert about those suitcases stuffed with Turkish cash; Foleygate is nothing compared to the yet-untold story of Treasongate), or the Saudi lobby, which has spread infinitely more baksheesh through the American system than the Israeli lobby could ever hope to match . But when the American elite go to war, they go to war for themselves, for their own benefit, not for anyone else. Despite various contretemps over the years (that little spot of bother about the USS Liberty, for example), Israel has ultimately served the American elite's purposes. If it didn't, then the untold billions of dollars in American cash and arms that have propped up Israel for decades would disappear overnight, and the country would be left to its fate.
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One Crime Too Many
By Mike Whitney
Iraq is the great tragedy
of our generation. Every day men and women are brazenly killed
in their own homes or cities by foreign troops who occupy the
country without justification.
In Baghdad, “liberation†has become a permanent state of martial
law where one can never be certain if his door will suddenly be
kicked in and he will either be shot or dragged off to some
remote prison for torture.
Entire cities are now under siege; surrounded by concertina-wire
and massive walls of dirt. The townspeople are forced to exit
and enter through American-run checkpoints and forced to verify
their identity to their foreign jailors.
Putin Gets Mugged in Finland
By Mike Whitney
Most people won’t pay any attention to this week’s energy summit in Lahti, Finland, but they should. It is particularly instructive for anyone who is interested in the latest developments in the global resource war.
The purpose of the meeting was to work out the nettlesome issues of energy policy, but the hidden agenda was to pressure Russian President Putin into signing away the control of his country’s critical assets to the big-players in the world energy cartel. The proposed “Energy Charter Treaty†is designed to tie up Russia’s resources through legal obligations which serve the overall interests of the energy giants. The treaty is no different than the EU Constitution which was voted down last year when the “informed†European public realized that it was just another boondoggle set up by big business to override national sovereignty, environmental safety, and civil liberties. The Energy Charter Treaty and the EU Constitution focus on the very same objectives, that is, establishing the legal framework for placing the world and its dwindling resources in the hands of a small cadre of obscenely-wealthy western plutocrats.
Time for Truth and Consequences
by Dave Lindorff
The Bush administration, losing the war in Iraq, has come with a "new" strategy: setting a timetable for Iraq's puppet regime and its fledgling army to "stand up" to the task of running the country so that the U.S. military can "stand down."
If you think this brilliant "new" plan sounds remarkably like the one proposed earlier this year by many Democrats, who were accused at that time of "cutting and running" for proposing just such a withdrawal timetable, you're right.
` It also sounds like yet another one of those Bush/Rove scams that are pulled out at each election to trick gullible voters into thinking the president is actually going to do something dramatic when he is really just talking. The truth is this plan is no more serious than Bush's early announcement of a plan to send Americans to the moon and on to Mars.
That plan, of course, was a joke from the start. The president didn’t offer any money for a Moon or Mars project, and never had any intention of doing so. It was just more of the same at NASA, blowing money on the giant white elephant in the sky called the International Space Station. And of course, we don't hear anything about Mars anymore.
The Real Axis of Evil - A State without Mercy
by William A. Cook
“And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies: but they are not valiant for the truth upon the earth; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they know not me, saith the Lord. … shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?†(Jeremiah 9:3, 5:29)
Nothing in the past 60 years revealed the true face of Israel to the world at large (and perhaps to the Lord above) as its illegal invasion of Lebanon. Never before has the Israeli government allowed the world to witness the depth of its brutal aggression as it defied international law with its collective punishment of the innocent. At no time in the past has Israel lost control of the flow of information allowed into or out of Israel and the occupied territories until it abandoned its borders and invaded Lebanon. That mistake ripped away the veil of “victim hood†that the Israeli propaganda machine had constructed around the tiny, beleaguered state beset with fanatics intent on erasing it “from the map†and suicide bombers that threatened death in the streets.For a full month the world watched as Israel let loose the enormous power of its military might on small towns, on cities, on roads and bridges, on electric power plants and water supply stations, on ports and ships, on oil tanks and beaches, and on the innocent who fled by car, truck, and foot. The condemnation from the world communities appeared universal, until one turned to America. Here our representatives crawled before AIPAC begging them to pen a resolution that would show our absolute commitment to the devastation being wrought on the Lebanese.
Fortunately, our representatives do not represent the American people any more than our main stream media represents what the people of the United States feel regarding the state without mercy, the reprehensible state of Israel. Indeed, the Jewish state of Israel does not represent the Jews of America. Listen to what Jews with a conscience say to the state of Israel: “There is no Jewish safety, nor claims to justice, reason, or equity, beyond Jewish commitment to the unconditional safety and liberation of the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and the other Arab and Muslim countries currently under attack by Israel, the U.S. and its allies.†Real Jews, those committed to the morals that give strength to Judaism, demand of Israel that “(1) it stop its brutal siege on Gaza and on Lebanon and call for an unconditional cease fire; (2) it stop expansion of the Israeli Wall of Separation, dismantle the completed sections, and completely withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem; (3) the United States support the United Nations resolutions demanding that Israel uphold international law and support the sanctions against Israel necessary to enforce these resolutions; (4) the United States end military and economic aid to Israel; (5) that Israel support reparations for the Palestinian and Lebanese people for the death and destruction they have suffered and for the aid towards the rebuilding of their countries.†(Petition for U.S. Jewish Solidarity with Muslims and Arab Peoples).
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