US politics

I guess No Man’s Land wasn’t that silly

Racism, US politics
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New Orleans under water

A couple of years back, there was this year long crossover in the Batman comics, called No Man’s Land. In this crossover, after Gotham City had been hit by an earthquake, the US government decided to cut its losses and abandon the city. At the time this was widely ridiculed as completely unrealistic; no government would act that way in reality.

This week New Orleans was hit by the worst disaster in its history, one of the worst natural disasters in the US in recent memory. Judging by comments made by Dennis Hastert, a senior Republican representative, the No Man’s Land scenario is not that silly anymore:

Despite the haste involved in congressional action, one senior GOP leader seemed to express some ambivalence about the extent of longer-term recovery efforts.

Asked in an interview with the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago paper, whether it makes sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, a reference to New Orleans, Hastert replied, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

He added it was a question “that certainly we should ask. And, you know, it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Unspoken: “Hey, the victims are all poor and Black; they won’t vote Republican anyway. We already took away the money needed to improve the hurricane defences of New Orleans to pay for our war in Iraq. What makes you think we’d want to spent a single dime to help you now?”

Hence the demonisation of the victims, as Bionic Octopus explains:

This is how they’re going to play it. They’re going to try to blanket-criminalize the victims they can’t even be fucked to rescue. The tens of thousands of people they fucking abandonedVastly, vastly more have quietly waited to be rescued, in vain, or have taken provisions from stores to feed and clothe themselves, their neighbors and their children after waiting days to be given food, water, medical care. Tarring these victims as ‘a criminal element’ and using ‘looting’ as an excuse for the monumental, unforgivable cockup that is
this shambolic rescue effort is beyond outrageous. That is what’s criminal.

That’s Bush’s America for you. A country where the ruling elites have largely even given up pretending to care.

Just hazing? The US and torture

American Gulag, torture, US politics
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Tom Engelhardt over at
Mother Jones has written an excellent article about the Untied States’ use of torture, the way it has become a religion with the current administration and the wider Republican establishment and how it intersects with the wider politics of the Bush administration.

A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee’s shoulders, so that the man “danced as he was shocked”; mock drowning or “waterboarding”; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee’s head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA’s secret prisons around the world.

Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses.
Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those “bad apples” manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.

The warmongers and the pro-war socalled left have from the first tried to deny both the truth of these
tortures and its severity, claiming, in the words of at least one well-known rightwing radio commentator, that these are little more than frat hazings. Having had Misha Glenny’s excellent book on the Balkans and its history for reading material lately though, I cannot help but notice the simularity between the above list and some of the descriptions of torture in that book. It’s easy to minimise these tortures if you’re not the one who has to undergo them, but I doubt any of these scoffers would like to trade places.

The larger point Tom Engelhardt raises is that the use of torture by the US government, either directly or indirectly is not new to the Bush administration; succesive Democratic and Republican presidents both had no qualms to use it when convenient. What is new however is the institutionalisation of torture as a political instrument and the legalisation of it. There is the Gulag Archipelago the US has now finished constructing in Guantanomo, Diego Garcia and in client states in Central Asia. There is the legal ass covering done by the man Bush now wants to be his attorney general, head of the department of justice. There is the propaganda that lies about the severity of the torture while not so subtly implying these people deserve it anyway.

It all seems like classic fascism, doesn’t it: the insistence that might makes right, that the leader
should be followed unquestionably, the idea that the current (neverending) crisis justifies extreme behaviour and above all the idea that there is an omnipresent enemy, easily identifyable yet shadowy, that is out to do us harm. It’s only a matter of them, I fear, before torture is going to be used against Bush’s internal enemies…

Michael Moore and the Democratic Party

Decentists and other ex-lefties, US politics
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Michael Moore is the creator of the most succesful documentary ever released in the US, a movie that grossed more on its opening weekend than any other documentary did during its entire theatrical run and which did so while being run in less than 900 theatres.

This documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first documentary to gross over 100 million dollars, was the first to sell more than 2 million copies of the DVD on the first day of release.

More importantly, it was the first mass media examination of many of the important issues surrounding
the war in Iraq.

The man himself is one of the few unwavering left wing voices in the US mass media, somebody who has never sold out to the Republicans, never attempted to be a Republican-lite.

Why then should the Democratic Party disassociate itself from him?

The answers can be found easily when you read Peter Beinart’s nasty little piece of scaremongering: he longs for the good old days of commie-bashing:

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington’s Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that “the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction.” Liberals, they argued, “consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West.” Unless that changed, “In the spasm of terror which will seize this country … it is the right–the very extreme right–which is most likely to gain victory.”

[…]

But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism,
anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA’s help, Truman crushed Wallace’s third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: “Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped … by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism.”

A sort of noxious anti-communism then, updated for the 21st century. Peter Beinart is one of those though, realistic no-nonsense foreign hawks at the New Republic whose main achievement seems to be helping Bush confuse the “war against terrorism” with invading Afghanistan and Iraq, with Michael Moore and MoveOn.org substitute for the communists as the enemies of liberalism ™:

When liberals talk about America’s new era, the discussion is largely negative–against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America’s worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions–most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn–that do not put the struggle against America’s
new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party
boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to
look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America’s new struggle as
a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American
liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

It is disgusting to see somebody who has been so wrong on so many occasions in the past four years to be accusing one of the few effective American leftwing people of well, being a traitor. This is why the Democratic Party is in trouble, because of this elitist cliche of idiots, shut away safely inside the
Beltway or in the Ivy Leagues, who have no clue about the real world and who don’t really care about what is happening there, as long as their cozy lives are not disturbed. It’s sickening.

Colin Powell resigns

US politics, War on Iraq
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The news did not come as a surprise and the tributes have been flowing thick and fast, even if it is doubtful Powell actually deserved them. One of the most succesful unchallenged lies promulgated by the Bush administration has to be that Powell was any kind of moderate. True, in comparision with moonbats like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or general incompetents like Condi Rice Powell looks moderate, but his behaviour refutes this. He had drank of the neocon kool-aid just as much as any other Bush crony. He has always had something dodgy about him, as even a perfunctionairy look at his career shows.

After all, who was Colin Powell? A career soldier who first gained notoriety for his role in whitewashing the My Lai massacre, who was involved in the Iran Contra scandals and last but not least, who lied to the UN about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify an unnecessary war that may have cost more than 100,0000 civilian lives already. Every time it mattered, he was more than willing to help cover up US government crimes.

Therefore I don not think it matters much that Colin Powell has finally resigned; supposing he truly was a moderate influence within the Bush cabinet, he was remarkably ineffectual. Truly, nobody could do his job any worse, unless it would be Condi Rice.

Oh.

Too close to call and the twat concedes!

US politics
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You cannot know how absolutely fucking angry I am right now. After four long years of incompetent leadership, after the biggest terrorist attack in the history of the US, one that could’ve been prevented, after four years of plunder, two years of an unnecessary war, an absolutely despicable election campaign waged by the Republicans, filled with more fraud then even 2000 saw, John “twat” Kerry thinks it’s a noble thing to concede before all the fucking votes are counted! Better for Kerry to have died forgotten in Vietnam than this shameful charade.

Kerry and the Democratic leadership have betrayed their party, their activists and their voters. Those who said Kerry was a false choice, who urged to vote third party, were right. Once again, when it comes to the crunch, the Democrats rolled over and died.

Thank you fucking much.