From 1991
The gay-bashers are at it again, freaking out at Judge Vaughn Walker’s pro-gay marriage Proposition 8 decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The attacks claim, among other things, that:
The ruling is a travesty of justice because Walker himself is reportedly gay - and because he’s gay, he should’ve removed himself from the case!
Boy, am I glad I never parlayed my law degree into a judgeship. Because, based on this “reasoning,” I would have been duty-bound to recuse myself from any case involving women, Jews, short people, straights, New Yorkers, satirists, versifiers, lawyers, oboe players, agnostics, and people older than … uh … never mind.
That brings me to my latest limerick:
Judge Walker’s Critics — Divorced From Reason
By Madeleine Begun Kane
Judge Walker’s well-reasoned decision
Has been met with gay-bashing derision:
He’s “reportedly gay,”
So was biased their way.
Oh, just straight guys have unbiased vision?
Strategic level spiritual warfare (SLSW) is the ideology behind the growth of "prayer warrior" networks across the nation. [...]
Stategic Level Spiritual Warfare"A term that pertains to intercessory confrontations with demonic power concentrated over given cities, cultures, and peoples." - Otis
According to C. Peter Wagner, there are levels of spiritual warfare. Ground level spiritual warfare is casting out demons from individuals. Occult level spiritual warfare is confrontations with demons operating through witchcraft and esoteric philosophies (examples are Freemasonry and Tibetan Buddhism). Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare is the highest level dealing with confrontation of territorial principalities that control entire communities, ethnic groups, religions, and nations.
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability? Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.
Emmylou Harris and (most of) the Nash Ramblers (Sam Bush, Roy Huskey, Al Perkins and Jon Randall) along with Steve Earle perform 2 songs "Sweet Old World" and "You Know the Rest" at the Opry on January 27, 1996.
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Only in Washington would a resume that says “consumer advocate” be considered a negative for someone running a Consumer Protection Agency.
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Target and LL Bean Butcher Progressive Musical Legacy
We all remember Nike using The Beatles' Revolution in a commercial, or when Wrangler used Creedence Clearwater's Fortunate Son (to make it look like a patriotic song, not the antiwar ballad it is). Now Target and L.L. Bean have co-opted 2 more progressive classics.
Possibly worse is the new L.L. Bean TV Ad which plays a Smithsonian recording of Wobbly Haywire Mac McClintock singing his original version of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. A member of the radical Union The Industrial Workers of the World during it's height during the early 20th century. He was a contemporary of song writer and organizer Joe Hill, and among the first to publicly sing Hill's The Preacher and the Slave. The recording of McClintock Singing was taken from an interview with him at the end of his life. He talks of the Wobblies and that the original meaning of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" (the more commercial version was rewritten by Burl Ives). It was a ballad of how older Hobos would trick younger ones to help them survive with stories of the Candy Mountain where there are cigarette trees and alcohol springs. These stories were based in part on springs with lemon flavored carbonated water in the Western United States. Haywire Mac is also known for Hallelujah I'm a Bum. These songs humanized the homeless, now The Big Rock Candy Mountain is being used to sell expensive, yuppie, camping equipment; in Haywire Mac's own voice. He must be rolling in his grave.
It's OK to tell police officers to 'f*ck off' *
The curse of John Mitchell: How a middle of the road guy like me became a raving leftist — without changing any of my political opinions
I still favor almost exactly the same things today. So how come I'm suddenly considered a raving leftist in my dotage?
I haven't found support for this during a quick dive into Google, but I distinctly remember John N. Mitchell, who was Nixon's attorney general, venomously telling a TV interviewer, "This country is going so far to the right you're not going to believe it." I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining that I saw the old sourpuss says this, some time before he did time for his participation in the Watergate scandal.
Well, the vindictive SOB was right. We moved so far to the right that we're even to the right of John N. Mitchell, who while a New York State official tried to borrow money in defiance of the voters with something called "moral obligation bonds."
Mitchell's dead. But his
evil curse lives on.
What's happened is, a huge chunk of Americans have gone so far to the right that they're now voting to destroy themselves.
What is now "centrist" — like Barack Obama — used to be considered conservative Republicans. What are now right wing Republicans used to be considered batshit crazy lunatics. And today's batshit crazy lunatics like the "Tea Party" party-goers, Michelle Bachmann, Sharron Angle, and Mitch McConnell, and John Boehner, and this week's version of John McCain would have been locked up in mental institutions because they're a danger to themselves and others.
What the hell is wrong with them? Didn't they get the newsletter? Don't they know how very wrong, sinful, sick and perverted they all so obviously are? Haven't they heard the hoarse wails of the terrified Mormon elders, the raspy screams of the obsolete Vatican, the tightened bowels of confused fundamentalists of nearly every major religion worldwide, all of them absolutely positive that allowing certain kinds of consenting adults who love each other to get married will spell the end of civilization, families, innocence, the military, God's bitter and judgmental love as we know it? Someone should send them a pamphlet.
Meanwhile, back here in the land of fear and rainbow flags and rivers of fundamentalist misinformation flowing like Coors Light at a NASCAR rally, we still can't seem to figure anything out. The stillborn bastard troll known as Prop 8 has finally been overturned by a fine federal judge, deemed unconstitutional by a mile, not to mention unconscionable, unrealistic, not a little bit hateful, and just plain dumb.
This is what we are learning: The U.S. matters less and less in the grand public debate, the global shift, the Great Understanding. In the past few decades we've seen nation after nation fly right by us in many a happy category, from humanitarianism to education, health care to drugs, sexuality to the arts, prison systems to pollution, transportation to spiritual awareness. What a sad, strange trip it's been.
Statler and Waldorf are a pair of Muppet characters. They are two ornery, disagreeable old men who first appeared in the television series The Muppet Show heckling the rest of the cast from their balcony seats ...
UPDATE: Right wing groups slam 'tyrannical, abusive' California gay marriage ruling
AFA: Judge should have recused himself because he's gay
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called the decision "an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution"
"The important point here is that U.S. law cannot be legitimately based solely on moral disapproval. ” by Ornot
Angle: “What’s happening (in America)..is a violation of the 1st Commandment,” entitlements “make government our God.”
If you ever wondered exactly why the Founding Fathers of the United States of America felt the necessity of separating church and state, it most certainly was because they had to know that someday the radical right fundamentalist Sharon Angle would be running for office in order to shove her brand of extreme religious ideology down the throats of Americans nationwide! Keep in mind the convoluted thinking, of this women Angle, is what came up with this fanatical projection---"'...a violation of the 1st Commandment,' entitlements 'make government our God.'” Surely Ms. Angle has lost somewhere in the deep dark recesses of her mind and soul that biblical phrase, "whatever you do for the lest of them, you do for me" (Matthew 25:35-40 - G), surely she has forgotten God's call to administer to the sick, the hungry, and to all those in need!
We won! The federal court has handed the American Foundation for Equal Rights and all Americans a major civil rights victory by ruling to strike down Proposition 8. Though this is a tremendous moment in the battle for equality, the court’s ruling is already being challenged by Prop 8’s proponents.
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Jay Bookman, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says that Newt Gingrich's speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute was full of "hateful, vile garbage [that] makes Joe McCarthy look measured and responsible." Joe Klein, in Time, notes wryly: "Newt Gingrich is clearly running for President. How do I know? He gets dumb and angry when running for office [and] pander[s[ to the yahoos." Amy Sullivan, also in Time, suggests that Gingrich might be encouraged by the "Burn a Koran Day" organized by a kooky, right-wing church in Florida.
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[...] Widely touted as a major address on the failings of the Obama administration on national security, Gingrich's remarks in fact veered weirdly into outright craziness and near-drooling paranoia.
Stripped to its basics, Gingrich sounded like a psychotic Paul Revere as he warned his listeners—who, it seemed, watching the tape, applauded only sporadically and politely—that "sharia" is on the verge of taking over America. Yes, sharia. "I believe sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States," Gingrich thundered. Not only Obama, but the entire American establishment, is "willfully blind" to the existential threat unfolding right before our eyes. To Gingrich, it's so obvious that it's like saying "two plus two is four," yet the Orwellian monsters who control our government insist that the answer is five, or three, or something else! The threat is so dire that Gingrich even proposed a new law to protect Americans who are one-step away from having full-bearded, scimitar-waving, Koran-thumping Taliban jurists ordering their very limbs to be chopped off and their women stoned. Gingrich, warning that the "fight against sharia" is the defining struggle of our time, intends to propose a law "that no court anywhere in the United States will be allowed to substitute sharia for American law."
Above all, he warned, it's the American left that doesn't get it. It's the left, he said, under the "destructive influence of a secular, socialist system," that sympathizes with radical Islamists and "prefers our opponents to us." It is the left, said Gingrich, which inexplicably fails to understand that sharia "is a direct, mortal threat to every value that the left has." Doesn't the left get it, that women shouldn't be stoned to death? Gingrich wondered. Luckily, we on the left have Gingrich to remind us of the values we hold dear.
On Monday I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain’s genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American society.
We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”
Zinn’s book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is revered because these men intimately know racism, manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this. Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth. And he knew that when these myths implode it is the beginning of hope.
LAST week I got angry on the floor of the House. In this age of cable and YouTube, millions of people evidently saw the one-minute-plus clip. But there has been relatively little focus on why the substantive debate that sparked it matters.
More broadly, while I appreciate the concern over the future of civility in politics, I believe a little raw anger right now is justified. Democrats make a mistake by pretending there is a bipartisan spirit in Congress these days, and would be better served by calling out Republican shams.
Instead of engaging in a real debate about how to address the challenges we face, Republicans have turned to obstruction, no matter the issue, and then cry foul after the fact. They claim to want an open legislative process with more consultation and debate, but the truth is they simply don’t want to pass anything.
Meanwhile, conservative television and talk radio programs are full of false anger, intended to scare Americans. I think some genuine frustration at this misleading tactic is overdue.
That’s why I got mad last week. That’s also why I’m going to fight for this bill when we come back in session in September. I’m still angry. Playing politics on important issues is never right. But on health care for 9/11 responders, it’s an outrage.
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"Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values - and play into our enemies' hands - if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists - and we should not stand for that."
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The best conservatives are always dead; the worst are always alive and influential.
After the way it handled the 9/11 health bill last week, the United States House of Representative has no right to pass ethical judgment on Charlie Rangel or anybody else.
If Rangel broke the law, let somebody with a legitimate badge and bona fide moral authority lock him up.
If he is going to be put on trial, let it be in an actual courthouse, not a political whorehouse.
6 cities to train mail carriers to dispense anti-terror drugs
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An Apology to the Woman Without a Nose on the Cover of Time Magazine
Let's be honest here, too. For women outside of Kabul (and a couple of other places), things sucked pretty badly before the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here, in the United States, Aisha, the Rude Pundit personally knows women who say that their families will kill them if they stray from arranged marriages to get jobs or assert any independence. One says that her male relatives will kill her and make it look like she just disappeared. Are we supposed to bomb Brooklyn to change this?
So, yes, we would like to be the conquering heroes, the knights riding in to save the damsels in distress, God, how we ache to be that, but such fairy tales are not real. Killing dragons would be easier. What's real is an effort that will take decades to achieve, but one that can only begin in earnest once we are gone. We're sorry, Aisha. Most of us can't imagine your pain, your life, your fear. But when you're in a plane that's plunging out of the sky, you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help anyone else put on theirs.
(Note: we're never leaving Afghanistan.)
Immigrants and Islam: We're All Rednecks Now (Part 1: Mosquemania)
Let us mourn now for the passing of the days when we could mock the rednecks. As backwards ass country fucks, these assholes wore their stupidity and ignorance as badges of pride, penning songs to celebrate how immune they are to progress and how much they love white racist governors. Whether we lived among the rednecks in South or Midwest or West of the United States, or if we sat in our liberal brownstones of the wicked Northeast, we whose necks remained unburned could feel vastly superior to the rednecks and scoff as they wallowed in the mud of their own inbred pool of devolutionary thinking. When George W. Bush was elected, "Quel horreur," we thought as we ironically drank our Pabst Blue Ribbons and got into alt-country music, as if overcompensating for being made to feel unAmerican in the reflection of the redneck uber-patriotic mirror. Sure, we could dismiss the Bush election as the primal yawp of the yahoos. We didn't vote for him. They did. Our little island of tolerance was shrinking, though. Oh, for the comfort of the myth of geographical identity.
But now, with the surge in Islamophobia and the anti-immigrant tear the nation is on, we cannot deny it anymore: we are a redneck nation, even here in the supposed bastions of liberality.
Here's the deal, rednecks of all income levels and corners of the country: you want freedom of religion? This is what you get. You want unregulated capitalism? Well, motherfuckers, telling someone what property they can buy and where they can build is pretty much as anti-capitalist/government-interferin'/fascist/communist/whatever-the-fuck-you-idiots-call-it as you can get. And if you really think that the growing Muslim population is gonna bring Sharia law to America, then you should probably stop trying to create laws against things like gay marriage based on your Bible and get on board with the separation of church and state. 'Cause, see, that works for all faiths, not just the ones you choose.
The thing about rednecks, though? They don't learn. As far they're concerned, they're right, you're wrong, and fuck you for thinking differently and using "facts" and "logic," you elitist pussy. Grunting, heaving emotion is what works. Shit-tossing instead of dialogue.
Tomorrow: Oh, so many Mexicans.
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Lindsey Lohan got out of jail.
This country is seriously fucked up when that is a major news story.
The gelling conservative view is that the recession happened because in 2007 businesses started worrying that future President Barack Hussein Marx Stalin Obama would implement economy destroying regulations so they all went Galt to destroy the economy ...
Yeah, we know, readers say
One in five Californians say they need mental-health care, thus confirming what we East Coast transplants have been saying for so long.
Just kidding.
Don't hurt me.
[...] We got plenty of interesting discussions and clever quips in our comments section.
Fluster: The mere fact that anybody chooses to live in California tells me they are in need of some form of mental, or emotional, therapy.
At the same time, the Republican Party in Arizona has moved to the right on all sorts of issues. Susan Gerard, a former GOP state senator who also worked for former Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, was one of more than a dozen Republican moderates in the Legislature at the start of the decade. Now, she said, there are none.
"The Republican Party in Arizona, and really throughout the country, has taken giant leaps to the right," Gerard said.
Dove World Outreach Center has been featured on Talk2Action before for their visible anti-Islamic protests. In an ironic twist, their pastor, Terry Jones, testified in 1997 U.S. congressional hearings on religious freedom in Europe, where he complained of intolerance and revocation of the tax-free status of his charismatic church in Cologne, Germany.
In a press release the National Association of Evangelicals has urged Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, led by Terry and Sylvia Jones, to cancel their International Burn a Quran Day to be held on September 11. [...]
Terry Jones is an apostle in the "apostolic and prophetic" movement which teaches the "five-fold ministry" preparing the church for the end times. (Note that Jones is not one of C. Peter Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles members.) Jones is also author of the book Islam is of the Devil which can be purchased along with matching coffee mugs. The church provides instructions by Pastor Wayne Sapp on how Christians should go about burning the Quran, complete with a test run.
Jones founded and pastored a large independent charismatic church in Cologne, Germany, and was serving there when he testified in U.S. Congressional hearings titled "Religious Intolerance in Europe Today" before the Commission on European Security and Cooperation. The hearings were chaired by Senator Alphonse D'Amato on September 18, 1997, and other witnesses included John Travolta for the Church of Scientology.
The Dove World Outreach Center has also been in the news for their protest against a gay mayoral candidate, and coincidentally, risking their tax exemption status. Student members have drawn attention in the press for wearing their "Islam is of the Devil" t-shirts to local public schools. On August 2, the church will be holding a No Homo Mayor protest in front of the Gainesville City Hall.
Ariz. Churches Mobilize Against Immigration Law
O'DOWD: On the day the watered-down law went into effect, demonstrations against it still went ahead, beginning here at the Episcopal Trinity Cathedral. Religious leaders and politicians stood in the pulpit and roused about 400 people to continue the fight.
(Soundbite of congregation chanting in Spanish)
Ms. PRISCILLA AUSTIN: Christ going to the cross was the very presence of a brown man being sent to the execution chamber on some trumped up charges.
O'DOWD: This is Priscilla Austin. Shes a vicar at a local Lutheran church, who says the merger of religion, justice and politics goes way back to the beginning of Christianity. Austin says modern politics has forced her congregation into hiding. Attendance has been cut in half at Hispanic prayer services since Arizonas immigration controversy began. Nearby Episcopal and Catholic churches report similar drops. Austin believes people are afraid to be in public.
But it's really not funny, or odd, at all: Dean and Sherrod have a similar message: Throughout our history, powerful forces have pitted black and white folks against each other, and white ethnics against each other, to obscure the fact that we have more in common than not, and to keep the have nots from banding together against the haves. That is a subversive, dangerous message to the people who have wealth and power in this country. It always has been, and it always will be. Maybe that's why no one is interested in talking about it.
If Fox Fraudcasting is the Television Voice for the American Corporate-Sponsored Taliban, Glenn Beck is Mullah Omar
CHELSEA CLINTON WEDS
The Clintons, with new son-in-law Marc and his dad, pose at ultra-private nude wedding held in upstate New York.
Afghans Complain Current Government Worse Than Taliban
Cost of bribing officials has more than doubled.
Rep. Rangel Faces House Ethics Trial
First of 435 ethics trials.
Colorado Newspaper Hires Marijuana Critic
He's chosen from among 131,000,000 applicants.
GM Rolls Out Second Electric Car
Like first one, $41,000 Chevy Volt will be available for three years, then destroyed.
GOP Congressman Pulled Over While Doing a Radio Interview
For driving under the influence of banks.
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The American worker has been kicked out in the cold, and the door has been locked and bolted behind him. Now the question is this: What, if anything, can we do about it, other than what the American worker has been doing for the last 30 years -- voting Republican and beating up on their scapegoat-du-jour.
He let the fiscal fiasco known as Republican tax and budget policy gut the finances of the US, former Fed President Mr. Andrea Mitchell finally says tax cuts do not increase revenues.
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(CNN) -- In protest of what it calls a religion "of the devil," a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, plans to host an "International Burn a Quran Day" on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The Dove World Outreach Center says it is hosting the event to remember 9/11 victims and take a stand against Islam. With promotions on its website and Facebook page, it invites Christians to burn the Muslim holy book at the church from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
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Mr. Obama's performance to date has not lived up to expectations, to be sure. He simply must do better - and, pssssst, Mr. President, your best move might be to forego this nonsense about compromising with the GOP and just get stuff done through reconciliation, filibuster reform and the ever-handy Executive Order - but the public's collective impression of his performance to date has been thoroughly skewed by the absence in our national discussion of the last guy to occupy the Oval. The media wants you to forget George W. Bush ever happened.
Don't fall for it.
Roy Rogers' iconic horse lives on, stuffed and high-priced. We take a look inside his recent bizarre auction
All week long, city slickers, tourists and fans moseyed in off 49th Street to see Trigger (and Bullet, Buttermilk and Trigger Jr.) and to preview the movie star's memorabilia before the big auction on July 14. The powerful steed reared on hind legs in Christie's atrium in the pose made famous on the July 12, 1943, cover of Life magazine. "The Smartest Horse in the Movies" could hula dance, shoot a gun, and untie ropes — everything, it seemed, but read his fan mail (100 letters a week).
It wasn't Trigger alone that moved people but what he represents: an era when the good guys wore white, the bad guys never smiled, and cowboys defined and defended America. "This is one of the most iconic pieces I've ever sold," said auctioneer Cathy Elkies. "And I've sold John Travolta's 'Saturday Night Fever' suit, Rosebud from 'Citizen Kane,' and the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang 'Happy Birthday' to JFK."
Phyllis Zavasky, of the Upper West Side, examined Trigger's proud arched neck, his perked ears, docile eyes, and the way his muscles were articulated, and gasped, "This is a new level of stuffication."
"Back in the Saddle Again"* played on auction night as Gil the doorman, in full cowboy attire, welcomed guests. He was Roy's size and was modeling the "Yellow Rose of Texas" shirt, a flamboyant number with pearl buttons and rhinestone fringe designed by Nudie Cohen, "Rodeo Tailor to the Stars."** Nudie's granddaughter Jamie (in a Gram Parsons' marijuana jacket) posed for a photo with Trigger. "It's very sad. I could never do this. I'd live in one of Nudie's cars before I'd sell it," she said.
About the only prominent figures who found serious parallels between then and now were Ellsberg and the WikiLeaks impresario, Julian Assange. They are hardly disinterested observers, but they’re on the mark — in large part because the impact of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War (as opposed to their impact on the press) was far less momentous than last week’s chatter would suggest. No, the logs won’t change the course of our very long war in Afghanistan, but neither did the Pentagon Papers alter the course of Vietnam. What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.
What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president. [...]
The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress. Though Nixon was another liar, none of this incriminated him. His anger about the leak would nonetheless drive him to create a clandestine “plumbers” unit whose criminality (including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist) would lead to Watergate. Had Nixon not so violently overreacted that June — egged on by Henry Kissinger and fueled by his loathing of The Times and the antiwar movement — the story might have ebbed. Yes, the Pentagon Papers were labeled “top secret” — as opposed to the Afghanistan war logs’ “secret” status — but, as Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Nixon,” some 700,000 people in and out of government had clearance to read “top secret” documents. Compelling as the papers were, they were hardly nuclear code.
Most Americans knew or guessed the crux of the Pentagon Papers, too. A full year earlier the Senate had repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution; no one needed a “top secret” smoking gun by 1971 to know that L.B.J. had lied about the Tonkin incident. The papers didn’t change administration war policy because we were already pulling out of Vietnam, however truculently and lethally (the Christmas 1972 bombing campaign, most notoriously). In 1971, the American troop level was some 213,000, down from a peak of 537,000 in 1968. By 1973 we were essentially done.
Unlike Nixon, Obama is still adding troops to his unpopular war. But history is not on his side either in Afghanistan or at home. The latest Gallup poll found that 58 percent of the country favors his announced timeline, with its promise to start withdrawing troops in mid-2011. It’s hard to imagine what could change that equation now.
Certainly not Pakistan. As the president conducts his scheduled reappraisal of his war policy this December, a re-examination of 1971 might lead him to question his own certitude of what he is fond of calling “the long view.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1971 Pentagon Papers coup. But another of the Pulitzers that year went to the columnist Jack Anderson, who also earned Nixon’s ire by mining other leaks to expose the White House’s tilt to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War. The one thing no one imagined back then was that four decades later it would be South Asia, not Southeast Asia, that would still be beckoning America into a quagmire.
Unplug the drain and the ring around the tub is we’ve been there 8 years and things are so not getting better. As a matter of fact you could say the movement more resembles whatever is the opposite of getting better. Don’t even mention quagmire. Hah. Hah. We sneer at your quagmire. Our Afghanistan participation makes a quagmire look like a refreshing dip in a spring fed pool with buckets of frosty beer within reach and cold cucumbers slices on our eyelids. Spa spangled bog.
If this leak tells us anything, it’s that this is not a winnable war. Right now, America has a lot of stuff on a lot of plates and keeping them all spinning is neither cheap nor easy. Afghan plates, on the other hand, are not very full and they seem to like it like that. Especially when deep- dish pizza crumbs can get them beheaded. As they say in Animal House, “If I were us, I’d be… leaving.”
"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
