An epiphany I had yesterday: the US has become a classic kleptocracy. You got the small, self styled elite enriching themselves at the public’s expense (tax cuts, pork barrel, “faith based initiative”, “reconstruction of Iraq”) and a repressive regime at home coupled with militairy adventurism abroad to distract the public and a quiescent media, either directly or indirectly controlled by the same elite.
What do you think?
Am I the only one who finds all the attention to the “tragic death” of Michael Kelly somewhat offensive? With tens, if not hundreds of US, UK and other coalition of the bribed soldiers already dead and many more Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed we’re supposed to get all teary eyed about the death of one overpaid journalist? Why?
Silver Rights is a newish blog focusing on civil rights issues. In two recent posts it focuses on the other missing female US soldiers in Iraq:
[…] Lynch’s African-American comrade in the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, Specialist Shoshana Johnson, has virtually disappeared from the news. In another week, she will probably be as forgotten as Osama bin Laden is with the focus on Saddam Hussein.[…]
I don’t know why Piestewa became invisible. For most of the period involved, Pfc. Jessica Lynch and she were both MIA, but it was Lynch who attracted attention.
Can you guess why it was the “pretty blonde” Pfc Lynch who got all the attention?
Ethel the Blog on where the hatred is coming from:
I’ve been saying this (intermittently) since 1992, when I was quite frankly shocked at the sustained vehement and vicious reactions of the locals here at 90% GOP University to Clinton having won a presidential election the old-fashioned way. It was as if the divine right of the royal, ruling class to the oval office – which had been held by the GOP for 16 of the 20 years between 1972 and 1992 – had been usurped by satan himself. I distinctly remember one mouth-breather ranting over and over, “I’d kill that motherfucker with my bare hands if I had the chance!” immediately after the election. And the palpable and vocal hatred barely diminished at all over the next 8 years. My shock wore off when I realized where most if not all of the gasoline for the fire came from. These people were damned near all dittoheads. They ate lunch at places where rant/hate radio was played, and they listened to more rant/hate radio in their offices all afternoon. I wasn’t exposed to this in my department (oceanography being populated by a pack of godless, hellbound commies who don’t feel the need to impose hours of talk radio on their officemates), but found out about it from sane friends in the engineering school, wherein most of the denizens owned well-stained copies of Heinlein and Pournelle, were convinced that being able to solve a static beam problem made them uber- gods, and – most of all – knew everything Rush told them was not just the absolute truth but God’s absolute truth. (And it wasn’t just the engineering school: a friend in the econ department had some family and financial problems that were intruding on academics, and when he went in to discuss them with the department’s counselor, the counselor actually had the radio playing Limbaugh’s show loudly for the entire appointment.)
Digby on those geniuses in the Bush administration preparing for the occupation of Iraq:
There is no excuse for not planning this adequately before this war. They had months to work out plans for every contingency and have a team in place ready to go. Instead, they are infighting between State and Defense on this, as with everything else in Bush foreign policy.
When does this become the big story? The Pentagon and the State Department have been at each other’s throats since the beginning of Bush’s term. All the ups and downs of the past year with diplomacy and the UN and the alienation of our allies and the erratic and inconsistent lead-up to this war have been the result of the two factions of the Bush foreign policy team fighting for dominance.