Uh-Oh, Brian

Seems that Brian Williams' exaggerations are continuing to be rooted out, the latest catch pertaining to his presence at the Arab Spring protests in Egypt's Tahir Square back in 2011.

Actually, the details don't matter too much, it's the bigger picture that matters, so I really appreciated this analysis over at First Draft:

Again, this isn’t nothing. Brian Williams had a very big chair with a very big microphone in front of it. But the stories we’ve heard about aren’t exaggerations on the facts of the story as they related to the story or anyone in it. They’re exaggerations on how fucking cool and badass Brian Williams is, and about all the crazy shit he’s seen, man. They’re basically a guy in a bar, telling war stories, only he’s on TV.

That’s not okay, but it’s not the UVA rape story. It’s not Judith Miller’s Iraq reporting. Nobody died. And more attention is being paid to these fabrications than the ones that did lead to deaths. To wars

So we are arguing about who fucked up the color of the bunting on the runaway train. Yeah, let’s fire that guy, because he screwed up. But let’s also find out why the brakes failed and the cargo’s flying off and oh, up ahead, is that a hole? A big one? Well, shit. Guess we’re going straight in.

All lies are lies and all lies on this scale are wrong and should be rooted out. But not all lies lead to the same place.

Seems that the hapless Brian is the only one being held accountable for lies pertaining to Iraq (yes, I realize this story is about Egypt) but it does certainly beg the question as to why "the media" isn't conducting a massive analysis of how the war in Iraq was sold and prosecuted.  Sure, President Obama made quite the point about looking forward, not backward, when it came to war crimes...but I think that he was trying to set a self-serving precedent for when his actions might later be scrutinized.  

In other words, rather than do the right things as president and thus NOT be at risk for crimes, he instead chose to tee up an established precedent for future presidents to have a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Think about the drone war and how that'll look in hindsight.  Oh wait!  Hopefully the next president won't want to look back either!

The bride and I (in truth, me much more than her) used to be news junkies, but of late we've pulled back.  And you know what?  The world keeps on going, minus some of our outrage.

An Interesting Parallel

Via Digby, who points us to an interesting post by Steven Walt.  Mr. Walt draws a parallel between the (failed) war on drugs and our (failed) wars of intervention in the Middle East:

The final reason for recurring failure is the tendency to rely on the same people, no matter what their past track records have been. We’ve seen a revolving door of (unsuccessful) Middle East peace negotiators who then spend their retirements giving advice on how future peace negotiations should be conducted. We’ve got a CIA director who’s been centrally involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy since the early 1990s, and who continues to enjoy the president’s confidence despite a dodgy relationship with the truth and a conspicuous lack of policy success. We’ve got famous generals who were better at self-promotion than at winning wars, yet whose advice on what to do today is still eagerly sought. And of course we’ve got a large community of hawkish pundits offering up the same bellicose advice, with no acknowledgement of how disastrously their past recommendations have fared. The result is that U.S. policy continues to run on the same familiar tracks, and with more or less the same unhappy results.

Just like the war on drugs.

I can't speak for the personnel of the war on drugs, but I know that some of the biggest cheerleaders for war with Iran (think Dick Cheney)--instead of being disgraced as war criminals and emptying bedpans in VA hospitals for the rest of their miserable lives--are somehow considered elder statesmen whose opinions on the matter, matter.

Without a Trace of Irony....

Update: being a nonviolent person, I do not actually endorse The Rude Pundit's solution at the bottom.  It does sound quite satisfying, however.

Earlier this week, former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, had an editorial published in The Wall Street Journal.  Talking Points Memo sets the tone:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, the one-time Senate candidate and ex-State Department official, took to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday to blast President Barack Obama on Iraq.

The Cheneys set a bleak tone right off the bat: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many," they wrote. "Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is 'ending' the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality."

From the editorial itself:

Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America. 

When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. 

My mind, it is boggled.  It is utterly incomprehensible to me why this war criminal, who possibly more than any other Bush administration figure, helped to conjure up a war based on lies and falsehoods, and in which thousands of Americans died or were maimed for life, should have any sort of public forum.  He should be shunned, disavowed, and laughed at for all time.  Oh, and should be emptying bedpans in a VA hospital for the rest of his life.

Cheney and his cohorts basically sh*t the bed in Iraq.  And now he has the audacity to criticize Obama's actions, when Obama's options range from bad to worse to worst.  See, you can't unsh*t the bed, no matter how much Cheney tries to deflect blame onto his successor.  Iraq--just like Afghanistan--was never going to have a happy ending.  Never.  It was only a matter of when it would unravel.

Earlier this week, The Rude Pundit's head was also spinning about the Sunday news shows.  These featured an array of former Bush administration war cheerleaders...as though the same people who started those wars should now be listened to about what to do now.  

The Rude Pundit's idea was a good one, and a simple one.  Whenever any of them (Paul Wolfowitz; Richard Pearle; Paul Bremer; columnist William Kristol)  tried to sell the idea of heading back to Iraq to stave off disaster, they should have immediately been punched in the nuts.  Not listened to, not respected, just punched in the nuts.

"Journalist" and War Criminal

(Note: I just updated this post from March 2014: I had misidentified Katie Couric, formerly of the Today Show, for Savannah Guthrie.  Oops, and thx to Batocchio!)

[image credit Huffington Post]

I am in the habit of watching the Today Show in the morning, a habit that dates back to 1974 when the bride and I first moved to Franklin County, PA, in the heart of the Cumberland Valley (the northern extension of Virginia's famed Shenandoah Valley).

See, in 1974 we could not afford cable (even if it was available, which it wasn't out in the country), so we relied on what broadcast stations we could receive over the air using rabbit ears.  Nearby Hagerstown, MD, boasted an NBC affiliate station, thus by default NBC became our network of choice.

So...back to the Today Show and the image from the 2014 Super Bowl above: I know it's much more a feel-good social program rather than hard news, but still.  To purport to be a journalist and to tweet a photo of yourself giddily grinning with a war criminal, crosses the line.

Can you now imagine a real interview by Ms. Guthrie Ms. Couric of former vice-president Cheney that would include hard-hitting, probing, deeply uncomfortable questions, taking Cheney to task for the debacle of the war in Iraq?  How about torture?  Me either.

Ms. Couric should be ashamed of herself.  In socializing with the news subjects with whom she may be journalistically interacting in the future, she blurs the line of separation and objectivity that should be there.  It's kinda like the video that gained widespread attention s couple years back of David Gregory of NBC News dancing with Republican strategist Karl Rove.

An Interesting Candidate for a College President....

From the Associated Press on 8 November 2013, an article that rather irritated me:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — An aide to former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she was approached by a firm helping Penn State look for a new president but she was not interested, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (http://bit.ly/HDNfG6) said Rice's chief of staff, Georgia Godfrey, confirmed the overture.

"We received a request about this position through a search firm," Godfrey told the Inquirer. "Our office declined on her behalf since she intends to remain at Stanford. Penn State is a fine institution and Dr. Rice wishes the search committee the very best."

Now, I am admittedly a lefty, undoubtedly a far-lefty, but here we have a person who in her role as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for President George W. Bush, was an avid cheerleader for the war in Iraq.

You know, the war that Bush and company deliberately started for no other reason than they could.  These guys--and Rice--felt it was important to use the cover story of WMD just to kick some middle east butt and to flex our muscles in the region and the world.

Well, that turned out pretty well.

So, far from being what she should be--a disgraced member of society with no credibility on the national stage--for some inexplicable reason Condoleezza Rice remains one of the Very Serious People, a distinguished elder stateswomen of her generation.  One who gets offered college presidencies. 

Penn State should be ashamed.  Why anyone treats her as a knowledgeable public figure rather than a war criminal boggles my mind.  She and the rest of her cronies should be emptying bedpans in Veterans Administration hospitals for the rest of her life. 

PFC Chelsea Manning, In Perspective...and Ultrarunning

Following this lead I was struck by the utter simplicity of this Ted Rall cartoon.

PFC Bradley Manning is sentenced to 35 years behind bars for exposing crimes committed by men who walk free. 

As for Ultrarunning, I got nuthin'.  Folks like those in the cartoon are dealing with life and death issues and I worry about water bottles, fallen trees, and Slim Jims.

 I suppose I should be thankful for that.



 

Emptying Bedpans: An Appropriate Result

My posting plan for today was to go for the trifecta--a third scatological post in a row--by resurrecting a post from a couple of summers ago that dealt with the causes and cure of chafing related to, well, poop.

I will do that reposting below, because it was one of my most popular posts in terms of hits, but first I felt obliged to make a comment about the grand opening on Thursday of the George W. Bush presidential library in Texas.

It strikes me as ironic--or unjust is perhaps a better term--that this joker, who by any sane definition is a war criminal, is walking around today a free man.  He should have a life sentence of community service emptying bedpans in VA hospitals for the soldiers he is responsible for maiming.

[click to enlarge...image credit Daily Kos, Iraq War Ten Years Later]

 

Enough politics.  Without further ado, the repost of Chafing and Pooping:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Chafing and Pooping: An Ultrarunner's Guide

This'll be easy and you'll thank me profusely someday.

Warning: this is somewhat graphic, but hey, we're all athletes here trying to solve a mechanical problem, right? No need to be embarrassed.

On long runs, particularly in warm weather when your clothing gets wet from sweat, some chafing is inevitable. Such chafing usually affects the inner thighs, the butt crack, the nipples, and/or the armpits.

Chafing: Possible solutions that work for me. Your mileage may vary, and you may feel free to mix-n-match my solution with other body parts. Repeat as needed.

1. Inner thighs: I now use biking type running shorts in the summer for long runs--chafing problems are eliminated. If you use traditional nylon running shorts with a built-in brief or panty, lube up with a roll-on product like Body Glide.

2. Butt crack: Apply Body Glide, and also lube up with a 1" dab of A + D Ointment (see here where I call it the Magic Elixir)

3. Nipples: Forget lubes, slap on a waterproof Band-Aid. Done!

4. Armpits: Lube up with a 1/2" dab of Vaseline or A + D Ointment.


Pooping: This stuff is caustic. Ever see a baby's butt with diaper rash? You probably will need to poop in the woods sometime. While it really is no big deal, you do want to minimize any possibility of rash. So do this: forget carrying toilet paper, just do your thing and then use a stick or leaves to scrape off the excess. Then wash your butt with water from your bottle or a mud puddle (your hand will obviously then also need washed). Then apply a 1" dab of A + D Ointment. Repeat as needed.

 

 

Bush to Baghdad?

This post is actually a serious proposal, although it may come off as tongue-in-cheek.

March 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.

There have been many, many retrospectives and analyses over whether the Bush administration lied about the real reasons for the war, whether that war was a good idea, how it was managed, etc. 

But by and large, 10 years later, most senior Bush administration officials remain unapologetic over the war, even while most Americans now view it as a mistake.

However, I have heard relatively little from the Iraqis themselves.  I'm sure their commentary is out there, but not making it into U.S. consciousness.  Perhaps here they have not been afforded much of a venue for making public comments.

So that is one of the reasons I am asking President Obama to tap former president George W. Bush to head up a special diplomatic mission...to Iraq.  Think of it as a listening tour or a series of town hall meetings, across the length and breadth of Iraq, to explain our justifications for going to war in 2003 and to listen firsthand to the Iraqi feedback.

After all, if you are going to throw this nation's blood and treasure into something like a large scale war, doesn't it deserve a full accounting to flesh out all the lessons learned to avoid repeats of any errors?

Of course, former president Bush could not refuse, for when a sitting president asks a former president for help, the answer is always, "Yes, Mr. President."

To assist Bush in his diplomatic mission, an entourage of experts would be required who were instrumental in war planning and management: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, George Tenet, Colin Powell, John Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Brennan, just to name a few.  Oh, and some generals, and the key cheerleaders in Congress at the time.  Plus there would be other individuals and disciplines not named here whose expertise should be represented as well. 

The press corps must, of course, include Judith Miller and Thomas Freidman of the New York Times as the senior correspondents.

Security would be provided by Haliburton or X-something.

It would be an interesting mission.

 

"Wars are Bad"

A succinct post from Duncan Black, reproduced here in its short and sweet entirety.  Because I can't improve upon a single word.

Wars Are Bad

And if for some reason the people who run the United States feel the need to start one, it means they've failed. It means they should all resign in shame and let someone else clean up their mess. This country has immense power - military, economic, political - and if you can't use the latter two, along with the implicit threat of the first one, to make war unnecessary then you've fucked up and it's time to go home.
 

Apologists for the Iraq War, Part 2

And this cartoon fits nicely with yesterday's post.  This cartoon is from September 11, 2002, six months before the war started.

Click to enlarge, then ESC to return:

Credit to Tom Tomorrow, who is still cartooning after all these years.  I wonder why his head has not yet exploded from all the sheer stupidity he sees and draws about.

 

Apologists for the Iraq War

Here we are on the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. attacking Iraq over alleged weapons of mass destruction.

A majority of Americans now say the war was a mistake, and those in charge at the time are mostly making noises about how they had some private doubts but the country got swept along.

In a great post she called "If Only Someone Had Said Something," about the despicable Paul Wolfowitz, Allison Hantschel makes some sadly true points about these guys in general, of whom PW is but one example:

And yet imagine if you had spoken out, as you are now so bravely doing in an attempt to keep food on your table. Imagine if you had said you know, this guy is kind of an assclown, and we’re rushing into war on the basis of his say-so, and who the fuck knows if it’s going to work. Imagine that.

I mean, we probably would have gone to war anyway. And you’d have been scorned, of course, and treated like a filthy hippie. AS WAS EVERYBODY ELSE WHO WAS FUCKING RIGHT. You might have been kicked out of the best restaurants and all the good parties. You might have missed some meals. Might have been forced to take a temp job in some congressional district office somewhere.

And now you wouldn’t be forced to go around talking about how you knew all along that this was a terrible idea, as if this makes it better that you didn’t speak up.

Everything was just fine, when everything was just fine. Now that it’s universally acknowledged to have been a colossal clusterfuck, it was always going to be that way and nobody listened to you about the right way to do it. Yet I am wracking my brain for the memory of the op-ed piece or blistering speech Paul Wolfowitz gave warning of dire consequences if we didn’t listen to his plan instead of the president’s.

These people all act like there was nothing they could do. Nothing they could do to stop the war. And maybe they couldn’t have stopped it, but they could have done plenty. They chose not to.
 

I maintain that the only fitting punishment for these war criminals--for that's what they were and are--would be to perform community service for the rest of their lives, in VA hospitals, emptying bedpans and performing personal care for the maimed veterans that they created.

 

War Crimes...and Ultrarunning

Diane at Cab Drollery on 31 May nails the hypocrisy.  She first discusses the sentencing of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, by an international war crimes court, to 50 years in prison.  This for his conviction for "...supporting rebels in Sierra Leone who murdered and mutilated thousands during their country's brutal civil war in return for blood diamonds."

Imagine that: a guy is tried and convicted of war crimes for facilitating a war in another country in which hundreds of thousands are killed, maimed, raped for personal aggrandizement and increased wealth. And he will actually go to prison.

Of course, none of this has any relevance to our country. I mean, oil and rare earth minerals are different than diamonds, and crazy militias are different than mercenaries and private contractors with connections to the White House. Water boarding and forcing prisoners to stand naked for hours are totally unlike rape and the terrorizing of innocents. Furthermore, our new high tech weaponry is surgically precise, not like lopping off limbs indiscriminately, which is just savagery.

Most importantly, we are not Africans. We are Americans, the beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.

Thank goodness we are looking forwards and not backwards, otherwise we'd have that whole pesky war crimes issue to deal with for high ranking members of the Bush regime.

Oh, and the link to Ultrarunning?  Again I have to point out how lucky we are in this country.  Despite our moral selectivity on war crimes, at least we have the leisure time and the freedom to pursue trail running when we wish to, without fear of armed bands of rebels or civil war.

 

 

Urinating Upon the Dead

I've consciously refrained from comment upon the story of the 4 Marines urinating on dead Taliban bodies, but it's time, because I have a somewhat different take on the story.  See here for a network news story.

Couple observations to set the stage:

• When you send young guns to war, it's hard to shut off that kill-or-be-killed instinct and be "respectable" and play by the rules.
• Desecrating the bodies of your enemies is a time-honored tradition and is nothing new (it's still wrong, wrong, wrong).

That said, I find it remarkable that so much rage and disapproval is being heaped upon these 4 Marines for an act that I find understandable, though not appropriate.  They knew better--especially in the digital age--and deserve some reprimand, but not a destroyed career.

But what I really find totally and strangely absent from the dialog is any disapproval of the fact that there are bodies in the first place to be urinated upon.

It's like the 800 pound gorilla in the room peed (to continue the theme) on the floor, and everybody says, "Ewww--there's a mess over there!" and go on at great length about 1) how uncouth that gorilla is, or 2) how it's only doing gorilla things.  Yet the puddle on the floor is only the proximate issue...and nobody bothers to address the ultimate issue of why the gorilla is even there in the first place. 

Let me try another analogy about cause and effect that applies here.  It's kinda like a post I did here, linking to a great post by the Earth Bound Misfit, regarding moaning over how much our military vets would cost us over future years.  She said:

If we, as a nation, are unwilling to shoulder the financial burden of caring for our military retirees and veterans, then this is what we should do: Stop making so many veterans by getting into wars. When the shooting starts, there are going to be maimed veterans who will need care for the next eighty years. If that cost is unacceptable to the politicians, then stop sending men and women off to fight. No fighting, no combat veterans to care for-- that should be a simple enough equation for even most politicians to grasp.

How long have we been in Afghanistan--10+ years, right?  Shouldn't that have been more than enough time for the Very Serious People in DC to have wrapped this thing up and gotten us out of there?

Now we have the Secretary of State--and normally I am a Hillary Clinton fan--making noises about possible war crimes?  War Crimes?  Are you serious?  Before we do that, where's the prosecution of President Bush and his minions for deliberately taking us, under false pretenses, into an unnecessary war in Iraq?  Oh, and for the torture, too.  There's your 800 pound gorilla, not the actions of 4 Marines.

I am reminded of a recent comment I read somewhere, about a guy in his early 60s who fervently hoped he would outlive President Bush.

Why?  The thing that kept this guy going was the goal of being able to urinate on Bush's grave.