Bad American

i.e. to be kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

Glenn Greenwald

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”
Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”

Of course one looks for solutions. There are few. How do essentially powerless people destroy the power of the media and the military-industrial complex through a rigged ballot box? Many have brought up how easy it is for the media to marginalize candidates like Kucinich, Gravel and Paul. The American people do exactly what they are told. They are allowed to grumble, but they are kept powerless.

Katrina VandenHeuvel is trying to speak truth to the totally bought child of privilege Cokie Roberts and George Will on my TV. Good luck with that. Cokie says America wants to win. Will wants Iranian blood. And VandenHeuvel is the only real voice of sanity and is outnumbered 3-1 on this panel. And even she doesn’t go far enough.

We are all complicit in this when we keep silent.

When the blood is spilled in Iran, we will deserve what we get. We have opted to remain willfully ignorant. We have opted to remain greedy and stupid.

There is no solution short of absolute catastrophe. I wish it were otherwise but I see no hope for any reasonable, rational, peaceful solution. The powerful want what they want. And they will not go down without a fight.

I’m watching Lindsey Graham lie through his teeth on ABC News with George S. “Winning outcomes.” War War War. It’s what we do. We enjoy it, it’s profitable for the right people, and it makes us feel all warm and runny inside. Graham want to kill Iranian woman and children so bad he can taste it.

And I don’t exactly consider Jim Webb to be a ‘opposition’ figure. He’s just as big a militarist as Graham but he’s a ‘kindler, gentler’ enabler of the military-industrial state.

Jacob G. Hornberger writes a great column pointing out that the doyenne of Democratic foreign policy, Madeleine Albright, was a butcher too. Both parties love their war money.

And so does America. Good Christian America.

According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, at the outset of the invasion the U.S. military dropped bombs on a palatial compound in which Saddam Hussein was hiding. The article states:

“But instead of killing the Iraqi dictator, they had killed Mr. Kharbit’s older brother, Malik al-Kharbit - the very man who had led the family’s negotiations with the C.I.A. to topple Mr. Hussein. The bombings also killed 21 other people, including children, and the fury it aroused has been widely believed to have helped kick-start the insurgency in western Iraq.”

And so:

The fact is that U.S. officials didn’t care whether there were innocents, including children, in that compound. Those children and their parents were obviously considered a small price to pay if Saddam Hussein had been killed at the outset of the war.

Of course, this attitude would match the attitude taken by U.S. officials throughout the period of the brutal sanctions that were enforced from 1991 to 2003. As tens of thousands of Iraqi children were dying year after year from the sanctions, the U.S. attitude was that those deaths were a small price to pay for ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein. That’s why UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, upon being asked whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi from the sanctions were worth it, she replied that yes - they were “worth it.” She was expressing the sentiment of the U.S. government, a sentiment that manifested itself again in the bombing of the compound in which those Iraqi children and their families were killed.

Second, the killing of those children and their families is just one example of how U.S. foreign policy has engendered anger and hatred for the United States, which produces the threat of terrorist retaliation, which brings about the “war on terrorism,” which results in more interventions, more massive military spending, and ever-increasing loss of liberty at home.

Hornberger finishes with this:

To state what I consider self-evident moral truths, it was morally wrong and a grave violation of God’s laws to:

(1) attack a country whose government and citizenry had never attacked the United States;

(2) kill Iraqis, including children and their families, in order to achieve regime change in Iraq; and

(3) kill Iraqis, including children and their families, in order to spread “democracy” to Iraq.

One can only wonder whether the American people, in crises of conscience, will ever confront such issues.

No they won’t. For the Christofascists that support this bloodletting, God’s merciful grace does not extend to the brown heathen hordes of the world. In that way, we behave no better than the Conquistadors.