Category Archives: History and Politics

Support Our Troops

Once in a while I get an email from an old friend, a patriotic and conservative woman, that shows some aspect of the military and asks people to forward it to support our troops.   We have, after a rancorous period, agreed to avoid discussion of politics, but once in a while she sends me one that provokes a response, which I try to make as measured and non-argumentative as possible.

The other day it was an email with three photos.  A small group of Marines in full dress uniform,  in the open cargo hold of a commercial airliner, draping an immaculate American flag over a coffin.  Above them were passengers looking out the windows.  The narration stated that they watched this in silent respect and waited for the coffin to be removed, showing respect for the troops in a long moment that none of them will ever forget.   It’s unclear from the photo how the passengers above could have possibly had a view of something that was happening inside a hatch in the round bottom of the plane while their small windows looked out on to the tarmac.

The second photo was of a woman on a mattress in front of the flag draped coffin of another Marine, her dead husband.  Her face was illuminated by a laptop that was playing her husband’s favorite music the night before his funeral.  The Marine honor guard standing at attention by the coffin stayed through the night, at the woman’s request, watching her sleep as the Marines honored their fallen comrade.

The third photo showed a military man pinning something to the tiny chest of a young boy who had recently lost his father in war.  Under that was a long piece about the majority of Americans silently supporting our troops and wearing blue every Friday to quietly and firmly show that support.  God was also brought in, and our faith in God and our love and respect for the young men who give their lives in defense of our liberty.

My first thought was to let it pass, just an email.  Then I wrote and sent this:

Sure, I’ll wear blue every Friday, but I’ve got to say, there’s something here that mystifies me.  These brave young men who are sent to fight and die in wars politicians cannot explain— how do we support them by honoring them in death exactly?

 
Are we to ask no questions about why they are placed in harm’s way in the first place?  Isn’t truly supporting our troops first and foremost  a matter of only asking them to sacrifice life and limb in defense of our country?  I realize some Americans made billions on the war in Iraq, and I suppose nobody can discount that, but how do we support our troops by sending them to die, suffer traumatic brain injuries, amputations, dozens of plastic surgeries to reconstruct destroyed faces, in aggressive “pre-emptive” wars of choice waged for dubious reasons at best?  Was a single American death in Vietnam justified?  In Iraq?
 
I really don’t get it.  How God could possibly be involved in this ritual sacrifice of honest American boys mystifies me too.  I wonder if “support our troops” would be the patriotic mantra if Obama sent some of America’s most idealistic and bravest young people to die somewhere for reasons he could not explain, beyond slogans like “freedom is on the march” or “smoke them out” or based on what turned out to be misinformation, cynical distortions of shaky intelligence or outright lies.  WMD?  uh, no.  Ties to Bin Laden?  uh, not really.   Freedom!
 
I hate Woodrow Wilson for drumming up American enthusiasm for the senseless slaughter that was WW I.   Beyond the fact that American bankers would have lost the equivalent of billions in today’s dollars had Germany won, no explanation for America’s entry to that war makes the slightest sense.  Do we honor the thousands slaughtered in that war by draping their coffins with flags and saying they died heroically defending American freedom?   Or do we honor our troops by making sure they never are called on to spill every drop of their blood defending the profits of banks, oil companies or defense contractors?  I vote for the latter way of supporting and honoring them.

Torture– drop the word casually, it means little

People who know me, who’ve been to this untidy, dilapidated place where I live, would all agree I have many more important things to do right now than stew about politics.   I know it is a symptom of something else, but I can’t clear my throat sometimes.  There are things that stick there like poisoned steel wool, irritating to no end.   So let me try to pump this one up, like a cat with a hairball, and get on with my life today.  

President Change You Can Believe In (you can also believe in the tooth fairy or the patriotism of men willing to torture suspects– so he’s not really misleading anyone)  casually spoke the word “torture” the other day, I heard the sound bite.  He admitted explicitly, for the first time, that our great nation had descended to torture in the so-called War on Terror.  Torture was committed in secret, in our names, against people who are abstractions. It was authorized and justified, under a changed name, in secret memos, with surprisingly little legal support, that were authored by Bush Administration lawyers, one now a federal judge for life, the other a tenured professor of constitutional law at Berkeley.

It’s not like there were witnesses as actual people we know were hung by their arms for hours at a time, forced to soil themselves, stripped naked, kept in freezing cold or boiling hot cells, kept awake for days at a time, kept in airless cells too small for them, thrown against walls (harmless, just to get their attention!) shaken, punched, slapped, kicked, water-boarded.   Some of these people were guilty as hell, even if many were not.  At any rate, full disclosure, agents of We The People tortured people, we’re not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.  There’s no point prosecuting anyone, heck, we’d probably have to prosecute ourselves too, which would suck!  In addition to posing an uncomfortable conflict of interest.

It was as shocking hearing the president finally say “torture” as it was hearing the word “poverty” come out of his mouth for the first time in public during his second inauguration.  I heard it like this “we murdered some people, frankly, we did,  in cold blood and without any real legal defense for our actions.  We also engaged in systematic rape, of men and women, some admittedly quite young, and other atrocities.  We killed babies, and old women, we broke down doors and beat up and sometimes slaughtered people in far away lands who had nothing to do with terrorism.   We grabbed people in airports that we sent to savage regimes to be tortured and found out only years later that many of them were innocent.  Guilty as charged.  These things are terrible, unforgivable, and we abhor them to our core.  I say, not without some personal sadness, that as a practical matter we will never hold anyone accountable in any way for any of these policies.  We made sure that our contractors are immune from prosecution, and we sure as hell are not going to prosecute the wealthy and powerful men who created the secret torture program.  Get over it, America.”

“After all, we are wealthy beyond counting, as a nation, but 21 million of our children go to bed hungry every night, is that not in some ways a greater national shame than torturing people we don’t even know?    We have neighborhoods where the death rate is as high as in third world nations engaged in civil wars.  Shit happens, people.  I say these things not because I will hold anyone accountable for crimes we committed in the past, for the crimes we continue to commit or for a system that allows the wealthiest to increase their wealth beyond the wildest imaginings of the greediest while children, by the million, are asked to eat shit and die.  I mention these things only because I am a man of conscience and an expert in constitutional law.  If you think it is easy to be an expert in constitutional law, think again.  I challenge you, for example, to find the three discreet phrases buried in that succinct document that formed the constitutional basis for human slavery and its strict legal protection for almost a hundred years.”

“We do some very bad things, I will admit.  Most of these terrible things we keep secret.  You have 1,000 channels of TV programming to distract you, a fantastic network of professional sports where some of the greatest athletes in the world compete for your enjoyment, many fake news channels, a hundred Darwinian contests, scripted reality TV shows with colorful people in many cases even dumber than you are.  You have great stores full of wonderful products and you can buy anything you like on-line, from the comfort of your favorite chair.  You have everything you need, unless you’re really poor, or working class, in which case you may feel left out of the American Dream.  I pity you, I really do, it’s really a great dream.”

“But I must also point out that I will be very, very strict with anyone who tries to make public things that the public must not know.  If the U.S. military has a digital video of an American helicopter crew getting permission to gun down unarmed Iraqi civilians who come to try to rescue other civilians shot down by that same American helicopter crew, that is their business.  The military knows best how to deal with these things, it has been doing so for over two hundred years.  Things like this are classified for a reason and anyone who releases such information is a traitor and enemy of the state worthy of death.  And guess what?  As we’ve already shown, we no longer need to even accuse you of a specific crime or have any kind of due process before we take you out with a flying remote control death machine.  Thank you for listening and God bless these United States of America.”

“Oh, and one more thing.  Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a shady character out of the Iran-Contra scandal and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Reagan, was pitching a data mining system that could be used to keep tabs on the activities of conspiracies to undermine America.   It could be used, for example, to get the names of everyone opposed to a specific government policy, the phone numbers of everyone involved in street protests or petitions, those subscribing to internet lists or those organizing for any purpose that might run counter to the best interests of America as defined in secret by unaccountable persons.  I am not at liberty to say if the NSA data mining program recently revealed by a traitor worthy of death, a reckless and dangerous young man named Edward Snowden, is that same program Poindexter was peddling or not.  Does it make any difference to you?  God bless America.”

“And goodnight, Gracie.” 

Want to Feel Sick?

Here’s a cued up portion (9:00 for mac users) of one of the videos Bradley Manning is on trial for turning over to Wikileaks.  He’s already been locked up since May 26, 2010, his right to a speedy trial notwithstanding, facing a death sentence under the 1917 Espionage Act.   My father is shaking his head in his grave, uttering his famous “doesn’t it make you glad to be an American?”

Collateral Murder

Freedom and Politics

My nephew had a good point to a teacher in Florida recently who was pressuring him to speak the words of the Pledge of Allegiance along with his 17 year-old classmates.   “What kind of pledge is it if you have to repeat it every day, year after year?  Once you make a pledge, you’ve pledged.  What kind of bogus, insecure pledge has to be repeated daily?”  The teacher’s reaction is unknown, though my nephew was excused from final exams because his grades were already too high to calculate.

$150,000,000 a year to keep the remaining 166 prisoners (of a total of 779 at one time incarcerated there) locked up at Guantanamo.   This includes 86 cleared for immediate release, people not currently charged with being anything like the worst of the worst, many charged with nothing.   Also at Gitmo is a group of 48 who are probably dangerous haters of our freedom, capable of exacting bloody revenge and even more motivated now than a decade ago when they were first grabbed.  

The problem with these dangerous haters is that they have been tortured by agents of our great democracy and so any trial or attempt to prosecute them would  bring what was done to them into the harsh light of public scrutiny.   So we can’t really try them, or release them.   They truly, truly hate us.

The president, quoted in June 10, 2013 TIME magazine: 

[History] will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it

An eloquent echo of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about how he trembled to consider the harsh punishment a just God would rightfully inflict on those, like him, who owned human beings as part of their personal wealth.

And, like our current eloquent president, Jefferson was instrumental in not ending the practice he deplored.  

Jefferson would have been just as tormented, I’m sure, by the innocent children killed in the targeted drone strikes the president continues to order.  He would have been as concerned about the 100 hunger strikers at Gitmo, 35 of whom are being restrained and force fed twice daily in what the UN Commission for Human Rights has condemned as a violation of international law.  The World Medical Association has declared doctor supervision of involuntary force-feeding unethical.   I suppose they would say the same of physicians who made sure prisoners were not accidentally killed while being subjected to a technique that made them experience drowning in a most visceral and convincing way.  In spite of our best efforts to keep these people alive, nine of them died in Gitmo.   Things happen during war.

I can hear the chorus of freedom loving Americans, and I understand.  Not our fault!  They hate our freedom!  And what about all those innocent people the terrorists they might well be associated with, or are at least sympathetic to, killed?  The UN, bah!  World Medical Association, foo!  How easy it is for the world to cast its judgments down on us, the hypocrites!

I also understand why the trial of Bradley Manning must be kept as quiet as possible.  He will be given a fair public trial, even if much of it will be in secret, and then convicted of betraying this great nation.   Manning disclosed some documents and videos that made the American military look very bad.   Such behavior must be punished harshly and publicly (even if the trial is not) to deter any other would be “light shiners” and people of “conscience”.  

What business was it of Manning’s if a helicopter crew laughed after killing some unarmed civilians in Baghdad, reacting like the machine guns and tiny humans sited in their scope were part of a video game?   Who is Manning to judge that Americans in harm’s way can’t blow off a little steam once in a while?  It’s not like plenty of other civilians weren’t being collateral damage while this particular, insignificant accidental killing of an unfortunately located Reuters camera crew and unarmed Iraqis coming to rescue wounded civilians happened.  The incident was marked classified for a very good reason– WE DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK BADLY OF AMERICA.

I heard recently from the author of a book about soldier misconduct in Vietnam that the My Lai Massacre, for which Lt. Calley, for his part in the slaughter of hundreds, was famously court-martialed (and eventually served 3 years under house arrest), was one of dozens, if not hundreds of such slaughters of Vietnamese villagers during the years that American soldiers fought an endless war against a popular underground army.  

American boys were subjected to terrible things in that war, by a merciless and cunning enemy, things nobody should ever see.  If a few of them snapped and murdered civilians from time to time, well, the Army considered that something we should take care of in-house.   It was taken care of, in all cases but My Lai, by classifying the reports.  And it worked, the accounts of these mass murders remained secret for 40 years or so.  

The author persevered and after a long, grim dance, got these classified reports of other massacres.   He visited the villages decades after the atrocities to interview those who remembered.  There were plenty of Vietnamese who remembered.  The author reports he was struck by the absence of hatred toward him as an American.  The survivors seemed grateful for the chance to tell an American their stories.  It took more than a year for the slaughter at My Lai to come to light, after some traitor or another made it public, after choking down the memory of it night after night, month after month.

It is amazing that the reports of these massacres that the author eventually read were not destroyed, as is routinely done now with compromising evidence (think air controller tapes from 9/11, secret non-sworn testimony given by president and vice president to the 9/11 Commission  that was not allowed to take notes or reveal what they’d said, video of detainee “enhanced interrogation” etc.).

Let us all be prudent, then, and patriotic, and wait 40 years or so before opening the can of worms that this private, entrusted with keeping classified information secret, prematurely and disloyally pried open.   To paraphrase Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of our highly successful overthrow of a brutal and secretive dictator in Iraq to build a free nation in the Middle East, a bulwark against hatred of American freedom and a beacon of democracy to a world mired in ignorance, superstition and poverty:  What we don’t know can’t hurt us.  Or, at least we won’t know what what we don’t know did to us, since we didn’t know it was even there, really.

Another word about the so-called IRS Scandal

As always, the truth is a bit more complex (dare we use that freedom-hating word nuanced?)  than the headlines.  The headlines in mass media are often framed by the more aggressive, better financed, more media savvy group.   The apparent spinelessness of our cringing majority party aside, there would seem to be something to this assertion:

No one was singled out. The IRS net for possibly political organizations caught some 300 applications. Of these, no more than a third were “conservative” or “tea party” or “right-wing.” The rest were something else, including “liberal” and “left-wing.” None of the so-called conservative group applications were denied. Some were delayed, deservedly so, but a group can function as a 501(c)(4) with an application pending, so it’s hard to see how much damage a delay would do, if any.

You can read the rest of the discussion here

 

Social Welfare Nonprofits 501(c)(4)

A friend and I started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit a little over a year ago.  True to our charter, no profits whatsoever have been made.  Any money we do one day raise, over $25,000, I think, requires us to file what I’ve heard is literally sixty pages of paperwork with the IRS to show that we have complied with the complex laws that govern charities.

Part of the application for nonprofit status with the IRS was promising that we would undertake no political advocacy of any kind in connection with our educational activities.  Fair enough, I thought, I don’t support any of these political candidates anyway.   Obama’s voice has become as foul and disturbing to me as Dubya’s, as Rumsfeld’s.  My only political aim is a much broader one— let children think, voice their opinions, teach themselves how to learn what they need to know.  Don’t be sheep jerking your knee in a Rockettes like chorus line of high stepping party line robots.

That’s what 501(c)(4), the Social Welfare Nonprofit, is for– political activity disguised as charity.  Why they put it into law is probably the same reason a dog licks its privates.  Check it out.  You can raise millions for political “education”, even spend tens of millions on direct political advertising (as was done in the last election), as long as you are coy and couch your activities as educational.  For example, Karl Rove raised and spent tens of millions on political TV commercials with his 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS or whatever the non-profit 501(c)(4) analogue to his for-profit political money machine is.  Those commercials were for educational and social welfare purposes first, influencing the outcome of elections second.  And that urine running down your leg is really rain, pure mountain rain.

Was it wrong for the IRS to target right-wing sounding 501(c)(4) groups for extra scrutiny?  Yes, it was wrong.  Heads rolled, apologies were made.  Calls for prison time for the authors of the nasty questionnaires the IRS sent out were made by the man with the strange orange suntan.   It’s not time to compare the crimes of the two criminal conspiracies, Democratic and Republican, that vie for control of our great nation.   One reason is that I don’t have ten hours to spend listing the most recent ones.  Another is that it’s like arguing about who is worse, Mao or Stalin.

But here’s my question– why are the targeted 501(c)(4) groups so outraged that the IRS sought lists of donors?   Transparency is desired by everyone but the criminals opacity protects.   If you give money to a nonprofit, why is that a secret protected activity in an arena where money supposedly equals speech?  I have no idea.  But I do have another idea.

Get rid of 501(c)(4), it’s complete bullshit.   If you want to teach your children that God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh and that all this was 5,000 years ago, go right ahead, God bless you.  If you want to teach your children that homosexuals should be put to death in a hail of fist sized rocks, it’s your right as a free citizen.  Just don’t demand the right to raise millions in tax-exempt money from secret donors to influence the outcome of elections and call it Social Welfare.   

Two minute drill

If no consequence is attached to evil practices such practices will continue.  If you don’t raise an eyebrow when your predecessor redefines torture to allow it to be practiced at will, nobody should be surprised when you do the same.  If you find remote control killings of enemies and innocent alike preferable to boots on the ground, you’ll do it.   If you’re cool with a government that prosecutes whistle blowers and tries them in secret, well, you’re cool with it.  It doesn’t make you a bad person, necessarily, to wink at evil, but don’t put your arm around me, brother.

What I sent her instead

Well, you know what they say about statistics, particularly when spun by partisans like this NRA speaker.  If you throw in every third world sink-hole, countries in poverty with violent gangs, repressive governments, a lot of guns and low value on human life, yes, the US looks relatively OK.

 
Compared to other wealthy nations, not so good, as a glance at the attached chart compiled by the UN will show you.
Image

American mass-killing gunman doesn’t even get Bronze

There are plenty of proofs that America has no real problem with gun violence compared to the rest of the world.   Here’s one:

The Top 5 Worst Gun Massacres by an Individual

Perpetrator Location Date Victims
1
 Anders Behring Breivik
(aged 32, captured)		 Utøya Island, Norway 22 Jul 2011 77 killed,
(151 wounded)
2
 Woo Bum-Kon
(aged 27, suicide at scene)		 Sang-Namdo, South Korea 26 Apr 1982 57 killed,
(35 wounded)
3
 Martin Bryant
(aged 29, captured)		 Port Arthur, Australia 28 Apr 1996 35 killed,
(21 wounded)
4
 Seung-Hui Cho
(aged 23, suicide at scene)		 Blacksburg, Virginia USA 16 Apr 2007 32 killed,
(25 wounded)
5
 Campo Elí­as Delgado
(aged 52, killed at scene)		 Bogota, Colombia 4 Dec 1986 30 killed,
(15 wounded

When she sent me another proof, a speech delivered the other day at an NRA convention in Texas, I wrote:

Thanks, but I thought we agreed not to argue about politics. 
And if you’re going to raise politics, can there be any good reason to send me a purely partisan email?   This speech was delivered by a true-believer to a partisan NRA crowd in Texas in defense of “our way of life”  (different than those weird “other” Progressive Elites in NYC and Hollywood).  Even before I read it I was backing away from this particular speaker.   His arguments notwithstanding, I remain  unconvinced that guns are as harmless as butter, even if  they are as American as apple pie.
Why do ABC and other corporate media (and virtually any other non-NRA source) state numbers about America leading the wealthy world in gun violence by a clear margin?   Do you think they might be fronts for people who want to take our American gun rights from us– people who hate our freedom?   
 
There are two sides to every argument and the truth is often a shade of grey neither side will agree to.   So, as the NRA speech says, if you subtract the 65% of American gun deaths that are suicides (and these 95% successful suicides were not even counted as gun deaths until very recently) and then subtract all the “urban” gun killings– you know, as you sent me recently, black inner-city gangsters killing each other at rates dis- proportionate to their numbers, liberal perverts killing each other — then America is actually the most peaceful country in the world.   I agree 100%.
That only 500 or so were slaughtered in free-lance American gun massacres in 30 years would seem to clinch it.  A gun is no more dangerous than a bar of soap.   Certainly less dangerous, statistically, than lightning (according to the speech anyway, I didn’t check it) or a lawyer’s crooked mouth.
In retrospect I’m sorry I opined that it’s criminal that a small well-funded group of gun rights activists can override the will of  90% of the population.   But you know, I guess if that small group of gun lovers ever got really mad, it would be worse for everyone.  So I agree 100%– no laws against any type of firearm!   Freedom for all, that’s my motto.
I went too far with the P.S. that follows, but I read a bit more of this decent, compassionate, non-racist, Christian NRA fellow’s flowing speech and eventually I’d swallowed enough of his gas.   I’ll delete the PS when I write back to her, if ever, on this subject.
gun homicide chart
 
P.S.  
And I wish educated speechwriters like this guy speaking to his NRA friends in Texas would stop reminding people that the KKK is a Democratic party apparatus (ignore the eerie irony that this party is now silent in the former Confederacy, now solidly Red, since traitorous double-talking Democrats passed the Civil Rights legislation of the late 60s) and that Liberals and Progressives hate blacks and freedom so much.  Most inconvenient truths!!!

 I think we can all agree, as the speechifying NRA member says:

 We will work together side by side, white, black, Hispanic or native-American.  It doesn’t matter because we don’t see those divisions.   WE will work together as Americans not only to preserve our rights, but the rights of our children to be safe, our wives and daughters to not be held at knife or gunpoint by a rapist and our most precious and vulnerable little ones to have the right to survive a simple walk down a city street or, God forbid, survive a day of public education.

WTF — is this really the America that God Blessed?

The detainees [at Guantanamo] who are refusing food have been stripped of all possessions, including a sleeping mat and soap, and are made to sleep on concrete floors in freezing solitary cells. “It is possible that I may die in here,” said Shaker Aamer through his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. “I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have been cleared for release.” Aamer, a British father of four, was approved for release more than five years ago.

Col. Morris Davis, who served as Chief Prosecutor for the Terrorism Trials at Guantanamo, personally charged Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan, Australian David Hicks, and Canadian teen Omar Khadr. All three were convicted and have been released from Guantanamo. “There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home,” Davis wrote to Obama.

The above was written by a lawyer, and law professor, a former president of the National Lawyers’ Guild, an organization that once defended, and included, American Communists (neither a problem in my book, where, in one chapter, actual Nazis get a pass, a nice salary and generous pension, from the US government because of their staunch anti-Red credentials) so you can take that into account if you like.  But, I mean, WTF?!!  The rest of the piece is here.