The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility.
Hillary Caesar
“We came, we saw, he died.”
Dubya was mocked, justly, for his weird little nervous chortle when he bragged about takin’ out the bad boys. But lately we’ve seen that getting the giggles over a political assassination is a bipartisan affliction.
It’s a trifle unseemly.
Hillary’s gloating comes on top of the president’s joke last year about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Thursday, last week the joke became a reality, when a drone-fired missile vaporized Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, like his father (and the Jonas Brothers) an American citizen.
And then there’s this guy Sullivan:
To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. And this time, the Arab world loves us as well.
The presumptions and non-sequiters in this are mind-boggling.
I will go out on a limb and call bullshit on the “Arabs loving us” part.
Finally, Jon Stewart pouts because the Republicans won’t give Obama high-fives. “[W]e don’t know what these rebels are going to do” is one of the Fox News positions mocked by Stewart.
For perhaps the first (and probably the last) time in my life, I’m with Fox ….
Stewart:
We removed a dictator in six months, losing no American soldiers, spending like a billion dollars rather than a trillion dollars and engendering what appears to be good will from people who now have a prideful story of their own independence to tell — not to mention, they have oil.
That last part? It makes it all OK?
Disappointing but not all that surprising, if you have a (selective) elephant’s memory like me, and recall Stewart’s sucking up to Colin Powell in 2005: “the Afghanistan war, man did I dig that. I’d like to go again.”
This is a rather negative post, I know. I have one positive thing to say. Pepe Escobar’s How the West won Libya has just the right blend of perceptive analysis, anger, and resignation. When the world celebrates with near unanimity the disfiguring of a corpse, it’s safe to assume things will get a lot worse before they get better.
Let me see if I have this straight …
Eight Israelis, six soldiers, and two civilians, were attacked and killed in a bus near the Sinai border. It’s not clear who carried out the attacks. Hamas denies responsibility.
Nevertheless, Israel has been hitting Gaza hard with air strikes (American F-16s, naturally) for the past two days, with the results you see below (I caution you about the image at the bottom).
How is this not collective punishment?
Richard Silverstein offers the story behind the picture:
Today, an Israeli drone performed heroically for the fatherland by incinerating a car (or in other reports a motorcycle) carrying a Palestinian doctor and his family to hospital seeking treatment for a sick child. The doctor, his brother, and the doctor’s little boy were killed in the attack. Ynet announced: Oops, we missed. The drone was aiming for a terrorist cell traveling nearby. WAFA says the doctor’s brother was an Al Quds commander, which would mean that the IDF is willing to kill sick 2 year old children in order to get alleged terrorists as well.
In a galaxy far far away
“Reading the news and it’s all bad,” mused Joni in a different context.
Perhaps paralyzed by the cornucopia of awful things to comment upon, I’ve been fixated on some old news the past couple days.
From the Guardian: Dag Hammarskjöld: evidence suggests UN chief’s plane was shot down.
Chalk another one up for the conspiracy theorists. In fifty years will conclusive proof finally emerge that Paul Wellstone was offed? That seems to be how it works.
Pretty much completely ignorant of the context and controversy surrounding Hammarskjöld’s crash, I’ve gone to Wikipedia U to get modestly up to speed. So, the Dagster. Congo. Belgium. Lumumba. Mobutu.
Operation Morthor is a name right out of Tolkein. And, to borrow another fantastic reference from pop culture, the Kantangan secessionist rebels, who sound ever so Star Wars.
So there must be an Evil Empire. But there it breaks down a bit. Was it the Belgians? Plenty evil, but facing the twilight of their long, brutal colonial reign in 1961. Or was it the rising empire, just coming into its Don Draper heyday, whose tension with its other imperial rival gave birth, passively, and actively, to the tragedy of the Congo.
In some respects, Hammarskjöld’s death was just a footnote in the history of the Congo and the entire continent. A white man dies, and gets all the ink. Tempting to think that. But just this small glimpse of the force of Hammarskjöld’s personality leads me to think about what was lost when his plane went down.
To today’s eyes, such idealism in the UN’s secretary general seems to come from another world entirely–from, yes, a galaxy far far away. (See what I did there?!)
Hammarskjöld thought that this was a problem the UN should, and could, solve. He was convinced that this was his job. He thought he could fly in and sort it all out by himself, being fully aware of the Belgian, British and Yankee feathers he was ruffling in the process (and the Russians were no fans either, for different reasons). In 1961 the secretary general took the UN charter seriously. He actually took the side of the developing nations against the might of the Security Council. This stands in stark contrast to the current state of affairs, when the UN’s function is to lend grudging legitimacy to whatever questionable military operation the US has in mind.
From that Guardian article:
Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had, by then, enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation, but support from developing countries meant his re-election as secretary general would have been virtually guaranteed at the general assembly vote due the following year.
Can you imagine? How far have we come from this time, entirely in the wrong direction?
Gates of Hell open, White House considering “all appropriate actions”
Really, really good to hear.
I am watching Aljazeera Arabic, which is calling people in Tripoli on the telephone and asking them what is going on in the capital. The replies are poignant in their raw emotion, bordering on hysteria. The residents are alleging that the Qaddafi regime has scrambled fighter jets to strafe civilian crowds, has deployed heavy artillery against them, and has occupied the streets with armored vehicles and strategically-placed snipers. One man is shouting that “the gates of Hell have opened” in the capital and that “this is Halabja!” (where Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered helicopter gunships to hit a Kurdish city with sarin gas, killing 5000 in 1988).
Two defecting Libyan pilots who flew to Malta confirmed the orders to strafe the crowds from the air and said that they declined to obey the order. Other pilots appear to have been more loyal.
YouTube video shows buildings on fire or burned out in the capital, or with holes in the walls, evidence of violence through the night and into the morning. There are reports of a massacre of protesters in the central Green Square of Tripoli, with “too many bodies to count.”
Jacques Cousteau! Baguette!
“Bonjour, mon petit bureau de change.”
Timeless: “Love vigilantes”
“Love vigilantes” came around on my ITunes while I was fixing dinner. A Laura Cantrell song I must have downloaded ages ago, but only tonight popped into the foreground. It was haunting, about a homesick soldier who finally gets his “leave” and flies home–to find his wife on the floor clutching a telegram that “said that I was a brave, brave men but that I was dead.” It was strangely familiar, but weirdly hard to pinpoint, as if from some distant era. World War I? The Korean War? Vietnam?
Actually you only have to go back to 1985. The band: New Order. I didn’t recognize this stripped-down version. I had heard it countless times before, but never, to my shame, paid much attention to the lyrics. At first I thought Persian Gulf War, but the years didn’t line up. The Falklands seems the most likely, though it could be any war.
It took Laura Cantrell (much beloved of John Peel, who of course also loved New Order) to find the beautiful, sad, ghostly ballad inside New Order’s Wall o’ Sound.
What an unearthly, powerful song, in both versions.
New Order, live in Japan 1985
Laura Cantrell, 2008
Rahm sez: “NAFTA = Good Times!”
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls.
In an only slightly different context a wise person said, “It’s scary to think that people this obscenely stupid are running the country.”
“Obama’s Anti-MacArthur moment”
Tom Englehardt has a spot-on analysis of what went down last Tuesday night. Obama’s West Point speech announcing the Afghanistan escalation was a Big Moment in America’s recent history, and one that shows just how desperate straits we’re in. Who among us thought that when the Democrats swept into power in the 2006 midterms, presaging their control of everything in the 2008 election, that the Dems would not only NOT end Bush’s wars and Constitutional crimes, but that they would extend them?
But nobody talks about it. I see and hear a lot of chatter about the last spasms of health care reform, Wall Street excesses, and New York state’s gay marriage doublecross, but I’m not hearing a lot of “what the fuck is he doing with this Afghanistan bullshit?”–in spite of the fact that no one–NO ONE–thinks there’s a chance in hell of this mini-surge succeeding.
With my usual gratitude for Englehardt’s keen powers, but with an unusually heavy heart because what he says is so fricking depressing, I present “Meet the Commanded in Chief”, in which a very convincing case is made for this being Obama’s “anti-MacArthur moment”:
In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of American forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or Centcom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman’s plans to “limit” the war after the Chinese intervened.
Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a “generals’ revolt” — amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who might well have presidential ambitions, and who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed “dithering” and supporters called “thorough deliberations,” Obama dealt with the problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit for doing so, of course.) This is called “politics” in our country and, for a Democratic president in our era, Tuesday night’s end result was remarkably predictable.
The dysfunction here is quite intense. There is an unquestioned trend toward increased presidential power in the last half century or so, but not for a president who wants to buck the consensus in Washington. I’m not defending Obama, but I also really can’t imagine ANY president doing the right thing and sacking his insubordinate subordinates in the Pentagon for their brazen challenge to his authority. One wishes for more from the guy, but he never led us to believe he’d do anything different than what he’s doing. Still, the landscape is pretty dismal.
Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s here in the United States, in Washington, where knowledge is slim, egos large, and national security wisdom is deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.” He then chose as advisors — in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and over-identification with the powerful could easily be compiled — a crew who had never seen a significant change, or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with — and still can’t.
As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantanamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush’s wars will, despite promises otherwise, soon enough be made.
A stale crew breathing stale air has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of Bush’s disastrous wars, is now truly Obama’s War; and the news came directly from West Point where the president surrendered to his militarized fate.
Camera Obscura: More lush, orchestral melancholia …
… and it adds up to the sweetest thing.
Not to mention the fact that this video is absolutely wonderful. Attending a costume do at a country house as Simon & Garfunkel, and meeting friends there dressed as the cover art from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors?! Someone please invite me to these parties!