false dichotomy by charles davis

New game: Is it Fox News or Center for American Progress?

2009-11-11T21:14:00.001-05:00

David Swanson recently noted that the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, issued a report arguing that the U.S. government should delay the closing of Guantanamo Bay and transfer some of its prisoners to the Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan -- habeas corpus only applying to a select group of human beings born in certain arbitrary geopolitical regions. Now the think tank's deputy research director Amanda Terkel is casually referring to "Iran's nuclear weapons program" in posts on the popular Think Progress blog, which one would think a research director would know is a claim that's rather hotly disputed, with the IAEA (the folks actually on the ground inspecting Iran's nuclear facilities -- and the ones who were right about Iraq) to the U.S. intelligence community and Obama's director of national intelligence Dennis Blair all reporting that there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Perhaps if Terkel and other professional liberals in Washington focus a little less on how crazy stupid the Tea Party protesters are and a just a little bit more on who is actually in power and the claims they make -- and remember how we all still hate that whole distortion of intelligence thing, right? -- further embarrassing inaccuracies can be avoided in the future.

A final word on the 'U.S.S. New York'

2009-11-06T12:34:00.001-05:00

Not that there was much need for further evidence, but this tribute from musician Charlie Daniels (using the term loosely) to the U.S.S. New York -- the warship built using salvaged steel from the World Trade Center -- pretty much proves what I suspected those cheering the vessel were really applauding: mindless retaliation against an ill-defined Other.

As Daniels puts it, the ship's "a bringer of vengeance" and "she's armed and she's ready for war." How a $1.2 billion warship will help guard against men with box cutters hijacking planes is not explored. But similar to a child cheering along a team in a sport they don't really understand -- like a Daily Kos diarist on election night -- uber-patriots of Daniels' ilk embrace a knee-jerk, violent militarism because it just feels right, the way shouting "fight! fight! fight!" does to a group of teenage boys witnessing a scuffle, nationalist pseudo-patriotism and a gut-desire to kick ass taking the place of critical thought and a consideration of the bigger picture. Indeed, the mere process of thought -- like hey, how again does a warship help bring to justice non-state actors who planned their crimes in places like Florida, all of whom are already dead? -- is itself bordering on unpatriotic and a tad effeminate, no?

As if the awful, offensive music wasn't enough, reader "Pangloss" points out that the warship has its very own website -- with a blog! -- where one can buy cheesy commemorative merchandise.

Never forget (for only two easy payments of $19.95)!

The latest (and surely not last) grotesque exploitation of 9/11

2009-11-03T14:36:00.000-05:00

Violence and perpetual war are the defining traits of America, so when I read that the U.S. Navy has built a massive, $1.2 billion warship “containing 7.5 tons of steel salvaged from the fallen Twin Towers”, I found the news as fitting as I did revolting. After all, within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center government officials such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were eagerly seeking a number of dubious ways to tie the events to Iraq in order to justify an invasion the Bush administration began planning as soon as its first National Security Council meeting (with key principals beginning much earlier). And since that fateful day in 2001, the U.S. government has been bombing poor people around the globe – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia – in a war of terror that has succeeded at little more than sowing the seeds of the next instance of blowback.

I do wonder about the families of the victims of 9/11, though; the ones the president of the September 11th Families' Association tells Newsday were “smiling through [their] tears” at the sight of a floating fortress of death pulling up alongside the shores of New York City, “escorted by four NYPD helicopters and a phalanx of Coast Guard and police boats as sailors and Marines manned loaded machine guns around the decks.” Given that millions of people have either been killed or forced to flee their homes as a result of the U.S. response to 9/11, while Osama bin Laden and his cohorts – the purported targets of the response – roam free, what exactly are these people cheering other than vengeance, a mindless lashing out at those abroad for the crimes perpetrated by 19 terrorists armed with box cutters?

And what does it say about a culture that commemorates – or permits its government to commemorate on its behalf with nary a critical world – the slaughter of 3,000 of its own, not by using scraps from the Twin Towers to build a monument to peace or a school to promote tolerance and understanding, but by building a machine designed solely for inflicting death and destruction on others? To ask, as the saying goes, is to answer.

The pathetic display of gaudy machismo that is the U.S.S. New York is no more sophisticated an expression of masculinity than attaching a pair of truck nuts to an F-150, but its bad taste is compounded by the fact that when the U.S. military builds a warship, you can bet it's not just for display purposes. As Democratic luminary and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once put it, “What's the point of having this superb military . . . if we can't use it?” And so the tragedy of 9/11 will be answered with numerous tragedies still to come, those in far-off lands unfortunate enough to experience the brunt of the American brand of justice at least comforted by the fact that their suffering may provide a sense of closure for the ignorant, exploited domestic victims of U.S. foreign policy.

Your Final Dose of Bad Taste and Criminal Waste of Tax Dollars:

Many on board [the U.S.S. New York] had stayed up late Sunday to watch the World Series with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had ridden out in one of the New York's troop transport hovercrafts to the ship cruising 10 miles offshore.

Nonetheless, the day began as usual with the announcement of "reveille, reveille" and the trill of the bosun's pipe at 4 a.m. But there was also something special, a fitting tribute to the ship's heritage: a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "New York, New York."

Where am I?

2009-10-28T06:59:00.001-04:00

The not-so-secret proxy war on Iran

2009-10-20T16:15:00.002-04:00

Iran is accusing foreign powers -- Britain, Pakistan and the U.S. -- of being behind a recent bombing in its increasingly unstable Sistan-Baluchistan province that killed over 40 people, including at least five commanders of the Revolutionary Guard. Now, the Iranian regime -- like any other government -- has every reason to blame internal unrest on the meddling of some foreign enemies, but in this case their argument is at least plausible.

The New Yorker’s Sy Hersh reported last year that Jundullah, the Pakistan-based group that launched the attack on Iran, was receiving U.S. support -- with the knowledge of the Democratic Congress. According to Hersch, $400 million was dedicated to efforts “designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations.”

Meanwhile, following earlier reports in 2007 from Hersh and others that the Bush administration was backing such militant groups to destabilize Iran -- and doing so in such a way as to avoid congressional oversight -- I asked then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), one of the richest and most powerful lawmakers in the supposedly co-equal branch of government known as the U.S. Senate (ha!), what he made of the news. While saying he'd “seen no intelligence that would verify" claims of covert U.S. support for anti-Iranian terrorist organizations, he conceded the Bush administration would "go to any lengths" to avoid the oversight of his committee, citing the White House's concealment of its illicit warrantless wiretapping program.

When I inquired what he was, you know, going to do about that, Rockefeller became condescending -- while revealing the extent of the executive branch’s control over the state and the Congress' inability (or rather, its unwillingness) to challenge the centralization of power (listen to an mp3 of the exchange):

ROCKEFELLER: Don't you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I'm Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say 'I want it', and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.

DAVIS: Is there any way someone, maybe not you, they can somehow press the administration to find something—if they're doing something that may be illegal—

ROCKEFELLER: I don't know that. I don't know that. I deal with Intelligence. That's it. They tend to avoid us.

DAVIS: Well, what do you think about these allegations?

ROCKEFELLER: I'm not—I don't comment on allegations. I can't. I can't afford to.

Though Rockefeller couldn't "afford" to comment on the allegations in 2007 -- and claimed he was powerless to investigate possible lawbreaking on the part of the Bush administration -- he nonetheless agreed to fund just the sort of covert activities we were talking about a year later, if Hersh's reporting is to be believed. And according to former National Security Council staffers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, such activities continue to this day under the benevolent reign of Nobel laureate Barack Obama. In addition to support for Jundullah from Pakistan's intelligence service, they write that "President Obama inherited from his predecessor a number of overt programs for 'democracy promotion' in Iran, as well as covert initiatives directed against Iranian interests. Obama has done nothing to scale back or stop these programs - a posture that has not gone unnoticed in Tehran."

At the same time, members of both parties -- including the Congressional Progressive Caucus' Bob Filner (D-CA) -- publicly proclaim their support for the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a "cult-like" terrorist organization that sided with Saddam Hussein against their fellow Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, as I reported for Antiwar.com. In other words: while the Iranian regime may in general be no more trustworthy than any other government when it blames foreign meddling for its internal problems, in this case there is plenty of evidence to suggest the U.S. has supported -- and very well may be continuing to support -- groups like Jundullah.

To his credit, though, Obama has yet to label the Jundullah militants "freedom fighters", in keeping with the generally more subtle approach to empire management that characterizes liberal administrations. Who says there's no difference between the parties?

On the need for double standards on human rights

2009-10-20T11:37:00.002-04:00

Robert Bernstein has a very silly Op-Ed in The New York Times this morning blasting Human Rights Watch, the organization he once headed for two decades, for the sin of “issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” Now, one could argue that it is the Israeli government and its penchant for bombing densely populated urban centers that it is turning Israel into a pariah state, but Bernstein never gets around to actually examining the factual basis for Human Rights Watch's reports, instead arguing it improper to speak of the war crimes committed by the U.S. and its satellite Israel – nay, to even examine those crimes – in the same breath as those crimes committed by Official Enemies. We should “draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity on human rights,” Bernstein says, deploying the phrase “moral equivalence,” a favorite of neoconservatives and their liberal interventionist allies intended to demonstrate the absurdity of holding powerful Western countries to the same standards they seek to impose on others. Of course, at other times these very same folks bemoaning “moral equivalence” are busy bashing “moral relativism” – holding people to different standards because of their country or culture – so it's all very confusing.

Bernstein, meanwhile, rather than engage in the laborious process of actually fact-checking the credible claims of Israeli war crimes made by Human Rights Watch and others, or address the fact that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israeli bombardment of Gaza (about a dozen Israelis died, mostly soldiers), instead chooses to trot off a list of tired talking points about Israel as a shining beacon of liberal democracy – did you know that Israel has “probably more journalists per capita than any other country”? Bernstein doesn't present actual data, but it's “probably” true! – beset on all sides by brutal, despotic Arab regimes. And Iran, one mustn't forget about Iran, which according to Bernstein “has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

It's at this point one must conclude either Bernstein is either 1) an ignorant hack or 2) just plain stupid. For one, the Iranian regime – despite the often harsh rhetoric from its leadership and the ugly Holocaust denial of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – has never threatened to destroy Israel (intentional mistranslations aside), while the Israeli government and its allies like former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton publicly fantasize about obliterating Iran almost daily, ostensibly over its nuclear program.

But above all, Iran is home to the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel, with Tehran home to more than a dozen synagogues and roughly 25,000 Jews. “In fact I feel deep tolerance here toward Jews,” says Morris Motamed, a Jewish member of Iran's parliament. This suggests that if Iran's leadership really intends “to murder Jews everywhere”, as Bernstein asserts, they're not doing all that good of a job. Bernstein might have known this had he read the paper that published his essay.

It's a bit ironic that an essay implying Human Rights Watch's reports critical of Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon are inaccurate is itself based upon nothing but the author's own biases and pro-Israel talking points, but that's kind of the point. Nasty things said about those who refuse to accept U.S. hegemony need not be sourced, that they feel true is reason enough to repeat them. Claims of war crimes made against Israel or Western governments, on the other hand, most be proven beyond all doubt – every civilian casualty personally confirmed by a team of writers for The Weekly Standard – and, even if confirmed, are only allowed to be discussed in the context of Arab or Persian crimes. But covering up, downplaying or -- as is usually the case -- simply ignoring human rights abuses committed by Western democracies is the price of providing “clarity on human rights.”

Uncle Sam wants your kids

2009-10-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

The AP puts it best: “The U.S. Army wants middle school students.” And indeed they do. According to the article, “The Army is collaborating with the National Association of School Boards to develop a so-called JROTC-plus program that would use the high school JROTC curriculum as a basis for a middle school program.” But the latest effort to instill the value of militarism in today’s youth is more subtle than in the past; rather than training kids to kill “gooks”, for instance, children are taught to kill “our brothers and sisters of the Orient.” Progress.

Still, some parents -- damned Naderites, most likely -- caught in the feverish grip of commonsense are likely to question whether the military’s interest in expanding its Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to 6th and 7th graders might have some ulterior purpose, some raison d'être other than the stated goal of instilling the “values” of “citizenship, service to the United States, and personal responsibility and a sense of accomplishment.”

That’s why the military keeps folks like Colonel John Vanderbleek around. The director of the Army’s JROTC program, Vanderbleek allays parents’ fears, explaining that the program aims solely at inculcating American values in “students at that age before they make decisions that put them at risk.” Like joining the military, presumably.

Also, “If you get into the leadership program and see what it is, you lose suspicion that they are recruiting,” says Vanderbleek, the reason Congress authorized the military to start ROTC/JROTC programs in the 1916 National Defense Act of course being not to recruit officers for the U.S.'s impending involvement in World War I -- heavens no -- but to teach young men basket weaving and how to walk little old ladies across the street.

And the military recruiters that hung around my high school chatting up 14 year olds about the supreme awesomeness that is the U.S. armed forces were there because they just really liked Taco Tuesdays.

Today's mystery

2009-10-16T08:23:00.001-04:00

Why is my orange from South Africa? And does this mean somebody out there in Johannesburg is enjoying a sweet, succulent Florida orange right now?

I'll repeal 'don't ask', just don't tell

2009-10-11T11:32:00.001-04:00

In remarks aimed at reassuring the gay community that the lack of progress under his administration on issues they care about shouldn't be interpreted as a sign he doesn't want their votes, President Barack Obama told an audience at the Human Rights Campaign's Washington headquarters that "my commitment to you is unwavering", promising -- while offering no timeframe for doing -- to repeal the so-called "don't ask, don't tell policy" forbidding gays from serving openly in the military. An as the New America Foundation's Steve Clemons points out, the White House communications office did not hand out embargoed copies of the president's remarks beforehand to the press, breaking with normal procedure, and has yet to post either the video or transcript of the speech online.

It's almost as if Obama wants to reassure an important Democratic constituency -- in terms of financial and electoral support -- that he is on their side, but he doesn't want his potentially polarizing (rhetorical) support for them to be well known amongst the general public. I wonder why?

UPDATE: via Steve Clemons on Twitter: "pleased that White House finally gets out Obama's gay policy speech from HRC dinner - but darn, just in time to miss Sunday news show cycle!"

What an unfortunate coincidence. They really ought to get some professionals over there at the White House to avoid these kinds of . . . mistakes.

The world's gone mad

2009-10-10T14:50:00.000-04:00

Putting aside the peculiar decision of five Norwegians, you know the world has gone topsy-survy when Lou Dobbs, CNN's faux-populist blowhard, is staking out a radical position against the American empire -- calling for "withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and also from their stations and bases around the world" -- while Code Pink's Medea Benjamin is meekly calling for a "responsible exit strategy" from Afghanistan (that is, a drawn out military occupation of that country), arguing the U.S. can't "just walk away from the problem" it created. Benjamin specifically cites the need to protect Afghan women as a justification for a continued U.S. presence, an argument that failed to persuade her when a certain other guy who couldn't talk so good was president.

What a difference an election makes.

As for Dobbs, his entering the anti-war fold could help expand the movement against empire, insofar as there is one, by providing a counter to the easily lampooned ladies of Code Pink, much in the way someone like Ron Paul is able to address conservative audiences more effectively than perhaps someone like Lynne Woolsey or Dennis Kucinich could. On the other hand, I suspect "humanitarian" interventionists and liberals who only oppose Republican military adventures will find it easier to write off opposition to Obama's wars as confined to the nativist Right.

Regardless, whatever his impact on the debate ends up being, the thought of grumpy old Dobbs yelling "war criminal!" while throwing red paint at Hillary Clinton (or Susan Rice, or Samantha Powers, or Dennis Ross or . . .) is reason enough to support his embrace of non-interventionism. The only real downside is that Benjamin's sudden pro-occupation epiphany means she'll probably end up taking over his time slot on CNN.

The speech Obama ought to give

2009-10-09T10:19:00.000-04:00

"I am extremely flattered by the Nobel Committee's decision, but at the same time I can't help but wonder: what have I actually done to deserve it? For far too long these awards have been given to heads of state - people like me - who have more often been obstacles to peace than proponents of it, ignoring the contributions to peaceful cooperation millions of people make in their daily lives; mothers and fathers who teach their children that no, violence is not the answer; the activists fighting alongside the downtrodden for justice; the clergy who commit their lives to helping those less fortunate. These are the people we should be honoring. So while I am flattered by the committee's decision, I must also humbly reject it, asking only that the prize be given to someone more deserving."

Beware the Islamic Republic of Candyland!

2009-10-08T22:35:00.000-04:00

"Fafblog!" -- by far my favorite largely dormant blog -- has a timely rundown of what we know about Iran's covert, super-secret, hidden nuclear Islamo-fascist weapons program, helpfully broken down into a question-and-answer format. A selection:

Q: Is Iran a threat?

A: Oh yes. Even as we speak Iran is potentially starting the beginnings of a very possibly quite almost-real hypothetically nuclear weapons program!

Q: Oh no! How many nuclear weapons does Iran already have?

A: Counting warheads, ICBMs, mid- and long-range missiles, ABMs, tactical nukes, bunker-busters and submarine-based weaponry, the full nuclear arsenal of Iran at this moment is very rapidly just beginning to quite possibly approach a number just short of one!

Q: That makes them almost as deadly as the rogue nation of Whoville or the Islamic Republic of Candyland!

A: And they could be just months away from an actual bomb!

Q: But they've been just months away from a bomb for years now.

A: I know! Which means in terror years, Iran already has a bomb... in your child's precious brain!

Q: But that's where she keeps her sugarplum dreams!

A: That's why it's up to us to already have being stopped them!

Q: What will Iran do with nuclear weapons?

A: Terrible things. For a start, it will have them.

Q: Oh no!

A: And once it has them, it can threaten to use them, if anyone else tries to use them on them.

Q: There would be no defense against their self-defense.

A: They pose an existential threat to our ability to existentially threaten them.

And a question for those of you who have ever spent any time reading the pseudo-scholars at hate sites like Little Green Fascists over the years: "If we say Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's name three times, will the Hidden Imam pop out of our warblog and kill us with his hook hand?"

Ahmadinejad! Ahmadinejad! Ahmadin--

Breaking: The Washington Post publishes an inaccuracy!

2009-10-03T12:03:00.002-04:00

Michael Gerson is not a smart man. A former speech writer for President George W. Bush, his columns for The Washington Post reflect the unthinking acceptance of establishment conventional wisdom that typifies the paper, remarkable only for their consistent, sheer banality -- qualities that make one long for the intellectual ferocity and originality of a Tom Friedman essay. But enough about his qualifications.

In his latest column, a piece that argues President Obama, by "picking public fights on issues such as settlements and adopting a tone of neutrality in other controversies," may be inadvertently encouraging an Israeli attack on Iran. That's right: while his administration hasn't actually pressured Israel to stop it's settlement building on Palestinian lands -- an unambiguous violation of international law -- beyond occasionally noting that the settlements aren't helpful to the peace process (which even the Bush administration asserted from time to time), that Obama's "tone" sometimes implies a greater neutrality on Israel-Palestine issues than his actions would suggest is apparently reason enough for the Israelis to launch a preemptive strike on . . . Iran. That this says more about the aggressiveness and irrationally of the Israeli government is an idea Gerson does not entertain.

In addition to his limited capacity for original thought, Gerson has an extremely limited -- though politically convenient -- knowledge of history. While indicating he believes an Israeli attack on Iran would not be desirable at this moment, he nonetheless repeats a wonderful, fantastically imaginative fairy tale about the 1981 Israeli raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, claiming that Israeli "Prime Minister Menachem Begin had no idea whether the raid would stop the Iraqi nuclear program or merely slow it. But slowing it was reason enough." And in case you didn't get the message, later in the column he writes that "high-ranking Israeli officials have been telling American visitors that buying time may be worth it. The Osirak raid, after all, turned out to be an unexpectedly decisive blow."

When dealing with the Post, particularly its editorial page, it's best to assume whatever you're reading is bullshit. Such is this case here.

Far from "slowing" the Iraqi nuclear weapons program -- much less dealing it "an unexpectedly decisive blow" -- the Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor precipitated that weapons program, according to Iraqi scientists. As the BBC notes, "Dr Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who witnessed the Israeli bombing, says a full weapons programme began only after the Osirak attack." Before the attack, "he recalls, there was some 'dabbling but nothing sophisticated and focused'."

Further, as the Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Betts wrote in a 2006 article titled, "The Osirak fallacy," contrary to "prevalent mythology, there is no evidence that Israel's destruction of Osirak delayed Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The attack may actually have accelerated it." Obliterating the reactor "did not put the brakes on Saddam's nuclear weapons program because the reactor that was destroyed could not have produced a bomb on its own and was not even necessary for producing a bomb", and "the destruction of the reactor probably increased Saddam's incentive to rush the [weapons] program".

Gerson also cites the example of North Korea to claim "meticulous, multilateral cooperation [resulted] in spectacular counterproliferation failure", a fact that may encourage an Israeli attack on Iran. Of course, the alleged failure of diplomacy with North Korea over its nuclear program that Gerson bemoans was in fact brought about by his former boss; North Korea's nukes, after all, were produced after the Bush administration withdrew from bilateral talks and declared the country a member of the "axis of evil". Whoops.

In fairness, for all the mountain of bullshit his column is based on, Gerson does get around to getting a few things right, observing that, "On Iran, the Obama administration, while differing in some diplomatic methods, has adopted the same basic approach as the Bush administration": dangling a few carrots while seeking to build support for crippling sanctions, all the while fearmongering about a nuclear weapons program that the White House has yet to provide evidence even exists.

Gerson also gets this (almost) right: "A virtual blockade of the Iranian economy -- aggressively cutting off shipping, banking and refined petroleum -- would not be a half-measure. It would be an act close to war." Indeed, except it wouldn't be an act "close" to war, it would be a declaration of one. Here's hoping the Obama administration realizes that -- and that it's aware fomenting another military confrontation in the Middle East would be A Very Bad Thing for all involved, but especially for the innocent civilians who always bear the brunt of the consequences for their governments' actions.

Obama the radical?

2009-10-01T15:12:00.000-04:00

Much of the American right is convinced, at least rhetorically, that Barack Obama is something of a radical -- a Marxist, a commie -- intent on fundamentally changing American society in keeping with his far-left vision for the country. Despite all evidence suggesting the opposite is true, that he is a centrist conciliator more interested in aligning himself with the establishment consensus than overthrowing it, a similar phenomenon can be found on the left, with Daily Kos diarists, single-payer advocates and others having convinced themselves that the same guy responsible for ramping up U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, fearmongering about a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program and regularly proclaiming his admiration for Ronald Reagan, is secretly -- deep down inside -- One Of Them: a liberal, a progressive, the second coming of FDR.

The reason for this isn't so hard to understand: Democratic and Republican partisans, respectively, want -- need -- to believe that their votes matter, that there truly are meaningful differences between the parties, that they aren't merely useful idiots for those in power. That Obama is extending the Bush administration's record rather than breaking with it is no matter; those on the left can take solace in small but supposedly signal victories -- that their guy speaks in complete sentences, favors stem cell research, doesn't seem to enjoy bashing The Gays so much (even as he maintains nearly all the modes of state-enforced discrimination) -- while those on the right can point to supposed "radicals" like former green jobs czar Van Jones and Obama's preferences in leafy green vegetables (no, seriously) to convince themselves the president is one of them liberal ivory-tower types bent on destroying the nuclear family and America's defenses. Such is politics.

But as Reason's Jesse Walker writes, "Radicals tear down centers of power." Obama, on the other hand, when "faced with a crumbling institution, his first instinct is to prop it up":

That was most obviously true with the bailouts, a series of corporate preservation programs that began before he took office and have only increased since then. Candidate Obama voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the 2008 bailout for failing financial institutions, and he personally intervened to urge skeptical liberals to support it. After Congress refused to authorize a bailout of the car companies, Obama followed George W. Bush in ignoring the plain language of the law and funneling funds to them anyway. Like Bush before him, Obama took advantage of such moments to adjust the institutional relationship between these nominally private businesses and the state: firing the head of General Motors, urging the company to consolidate brands, pushing for new controls on Wall Street pay. But the institutions themselves were preserved, in some cases enriched. The radical thing to do would have been to let them collapse.

Read the rest.

The Cuba Wars

2009-09-22T10:51:00.000-04:00

Inter Press Service has published my latest piece examining U.S. policy toward Cuba in the age of Obama as well as a recent book, The Cuba Wars, by Daniel Erikson, a fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC, detailing the bipartisan support for the long-running economic war against the island nation. An excerpt:

WASHINGTON, Sep 21 (IPS) - U.S. citizens of Cuban descent are once again free to travel to Cuba and send an unlimited amount of money to their relatives on the island, but for the most part U.S. policy toward the communist nation hasn't changed under President Barack Obama.

Since taking office, Obama - who called the nearly half-century U.S. embargo on Cuba a "miserable failure" as a candidate for Senate - has largely followed the lead of his predecessors, extending just this month a near total prohibition on trade and travel with Cuba for most U.S. citizens, declaring the embargo "in the national interest of the United States".

Read the rest.

Iran not building nukes, U.S. intelligence agencies tell Obama

2009-09-18T13:05:00.000-04:00

Newsweek reports:

The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK. U.S. agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003.

The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that U.S. intelligence agencies have informed policymakers at the White House and other agencies that the status of Iranian work on development and production of a nuclear bomb has not changed since the formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's "Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" in November 2007. Public portions of that report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that, as of early 2003, Iranian military units were pursuing development of a nuclear bomb, but that in the fall of that year Iran "halted its nuclear weapons program." The document said that while U.S. agencies believed the Iranian government "at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," U.S. intelligence as of mid-2007 still had "moderate confidence" that it had not restarted weapons-development efforts.

Keep this in mind the next time White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs -- taking his cue from U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President Obama himself -- insists Iran needs to "walk away from their . . . ballistic nuclear weapons program."

(h/t to reader Antonio)

The latest in lies on Iran

2009-09-12T18:07:00.002-04:00

The Obama administration has agreed to engage Iran in six-party talks with Iran over a range of issues, which, insofar as it serves as a substitute for air strikes, is a good thing. But any hope these talks will promote serious change in U.S.-Iran relations is tempered by the Obama White House’s insistence that Iran’s IAEA-inspected nuclear activities are cover for an active weapons program, a stance taken right from the Bush-Cheney playbook that is even more indefensible in light of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (pdf) -- which continues to be the official consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies -- that any weapons program Iran may have had ended more than five years ago.

That Dennis Ross, the administration’s “senior Iran policy maker”, according to The New York Times, who was recently promoted from this position at the State Department to serve on the National Security Council in the executive branch, has argued in the pages of Newsweek that the “more Washington shows it’s willing to engage Iran directly,” the greater the chance the Europeans and “other parties, will feel comfortable ratcheting up the pressure” -- a euphemism for another euphemism, “smart sanctions” -- providing yet another reason to doubt these upcoming talks will yield much progress.

Consider that just a day after the administration announced it would accept Iran’s offer of talks, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs declared that the “Iranians have responsibilities to the international community to walk away from their . . . ballistic nuclear weapons program”, adding, “That's what the focus from our side will be in these talks and that's our goal." This isn’t the first time Gibbs, who one presumes chooses his words carefully when it comes to sensitive foreign policy issues, has referred to an Iran “nuclear weapons program” either -- see here, here and here.

Meanwhile, on Friday State Department spokesman Philip Crowley asserted that Iran is “out of compliance with their obligations under the NPT, IAEA, Security Council resolutions," a curious claim given Iran's absolute right under the NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to develop civilian nuclear technology. Additionally, over the past few months, top ranking U.S. officials -- including ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the president himself -- have all asserted Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Now, this would all be very strange behavior if one believed the administration is sincere in is stated to desire to open a new chapter in U.S.-Iran relations. After all, the IAEA, which inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities, declares in its most recent report that there’s no sign Iran is diverting its nuclear fuel to a weapons program (pdf). And the incoming head of the agency has said he’s seen “no evidence” Iran is pursuing nukes. Further, Obama’s pick to be Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year when asked whether Iran was seeking to produce highly-enriched uranium for a bomb that “Iran has not yet made that decision” in the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. In addition, despite Gibbs’ linkage between Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, Blair explicitly rejected the notion that Iran’s ballistic missiles were intended to someday be outfitted with nukes, noting that these “same missiles can launch vehicles into space”.

Rather than a breakthrough, it appears the Obama administration is angling to use talks with a Iran as a show of good faith intended as a pretext for the "crippling sanctions" Secretary Clinton and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are seeking to impose on Iran. In late 2007, based on an interview I conducted with House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (CT), I reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had reneged on her promise to hold a vote on a measure declaring it the sole right of Congress under the U.S. Constitution, not the executive, to authorize military action against Iran. Perhaps now would be a good time to bring that bill back up for consideration, if only so the Democratic leadership could soothe concerns its anti-war rhetoric during the Bush administration was motivated more by partisanship and a desire to win elections than principle or humanitarianism, while also reasserting Congress' role in guiding foreign policy.

Any bets on whether that will happen?

WSJ: Iran & Venezuela fight U.S. imperialism . . . and Ecuador?

2009-09-10T11:30:00.001-04:00

Rupert Murdoch has made noises about eventually charging for all of his news outlets’ online content. Perhaps he’s planning on using some of that hypothetical money on s fact-checker or two?

Writing in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, the distinguished Robert Morgenthau, district attorney of New York City since 1974 (jurisdiction: the world), warns of an incipient Iran-Venezuela “axis of unity” -- the word “axis”, or “an imaginary line about which a body rotates”, being super scary -- in a column that fails, in often hilarious ways, to fulfill its overheated rhetoric.

To begin with, Morgenthau writes that signs of an “evolving partnership” between Venezuela and Iran “began to emerge in 2006” and that, a year later, “during a visit by Mr. Chávez to Tehran, the two nations declared an ‘axis of unity’ against the U.S. and Ecuador.”

It would be silly to expect absolute fidelity to the truth from a publication like the WSJ, but errors as glaring as these shouldn’t have gotten past the paper boy, much less the editors. That Morgenthau thinks Venezuela has declared itself in an axis against Ecuador -- whose president, Rafael Correa, was accused in a recent WSJ editorial of being an agent of both Hugo Chavez and the FARC -- is truly stunning in its ignorance. The rest of his piece isn’t much better.

We are all supposed to be very afraid, Morgenthau argues, because “a number of Iranian-owned and controlled factories have sprung up in remote and undeveloped parts of Iran”. We are told these factories are in “ideal locations for the illicit production of weapons,” though he concedes that actual evidence of such production “is limited.” I believe he means nonexistent, otherwise he probably would have led with it.

Moving on, Morgenthau claims that “[i]ntelligence gathered by my office” suggests “Hezbollah supporters in South America are engaged in the trafficking of narcotics.” Repeat: not Iranian agents, not members of Hezbollah (which, by the way, enjoys popular support in Lebanon, suggesting its not merely an Iranian proxy), but merely “Hezbollah supporters”. To propagandists like the New York DA, no doubt drunk off the power of throwing people in prison for more than 30 years, “Hezbollah supporter” = Hezbollah = Iranian government. Back in the real world, though, I can't help but wonder: this is really the best they've got?

A “GAO study also confirms allegations of Venezuelan support for FARC, the Colombian terrorist insurgency group,” Morgenthau continues. And indeed, a July 2009 GAO report (pdf) does state that “Venezuela has extended a lifeline to Colombian illegal armed groups, and their continued existence endangers Colombian security gains achieved with U.S. assistance”. This is, of course, “according to U.S. and Colombian government officials.” Moregenthau’s assertion that a government report citing government officials “confirms” the government’s claims is about as dishonest as Bush administration officials planting a story about Iraqi WMDs in The New York Times and then trotting out Dick Cheney to cite said story as proving the claims they planted.

But as Reuters reports, Morgenthau's apparent lack of evidence -- or a basic understanding of Latin American politics -- is proving to be no obstacle to his plan to investigate Venezuelan banks for allegedly allowing Iran to circumvent economic sanctions (heaven forbid). "The ostensible reason the Iranian-owned bank Banco Internacional de Desarrollo was opened in Caracas was to expand economic ties with Venezuela," Morgenthau said in a speech this week. "Our sources and experiences lead me to suspect an ulterior motive. A foothold into the Venezuelan banking system is a perfect 'sanctions-busting' method -- the main motivator for Iran in its banking relationship with Venezuela."

So again, while there appears to be no firm evidence, Morgenthau nonetheless leaps in one sentence from a suspicion there is “an ulterior motive” in the Iran-Venezuela financial relationship – to beat the sanctions regime – to an unqualified assertion that beating said sanctions is “the main motivator” behind Iran's dealings in Venezuela. Between the two statements is where one would expect to find the facts behind Morgenthau's argument; that they're not present is perhaps indicative of the strength of his case. Like the Obama and Bush administrations' fearmongering about an Iranian nuclear weapons program their own intelligence officials say doesn't exist, there isn't much to Morgenthau's claims beyond speculation and innuendo. But then scaring Americans about the purported threats posed by swarthy and troublesome foreigners has always been a fact-free endeavor.

I fought the law, but . . .

2009-09-07T18:45:00.001-04:00

Under the impression that the American justice system treats all who come before it equally? You haven't been paying attention:

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn't hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

According to the Associated Press, Mr. Payne was unarmed when one of the seven cops -- 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 -- in the courtroom shot him in the back, grazing the finger of another officer. Since this is America, after all, surely there will be some repercussions for this loose cannon unworthy of calling himself one of Jericho's finest . . . right?

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn't plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city's judge. He said he didn't remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

To recap: The prosecutor has no plans to file charges against the police officer that shot an unarmed man in the back, claiming he doesn't even remember the cop's name, so inconsequential were his actions. The guy complaining about unfair tickets, though? He faces a possible "misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle."

America has long had a multi-tiered justice system, with agents of the state and the wealthy and politically connected generally afforded leniency (think of the establishment outcry whenever there's even talk of holding political elites accountable for their actions), while those not fortunate enough to have the right friends, attorneys or occupation fill America's prisons -- which along with missiles seem to be the only thing this country makes anymore. In the past, though, declaring that the state was stabbing -- or shooting -- its citizens in the back with its policies was always intended more as a metaphor than a literal reference.

Elite journalists stick up for their friends

2009-09-04T08:15:00.001-04:00

David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post, has been a faithful defender of the ruling elite -- pardon the redundancy -- and criminal immunity for the powerful for the past four decades. Indeed, he boasts of his support for Gerald Ford’s “courageous” pardoning of disgraced war criminal Richard Nixon in his most recent column, and openly sides with former Vice President Dick Cheney (also a disgraced war criminal . . . noticing a pattern?) and his belief that it is “a dangerous precedent when a change in power in Washington leads a successor government not just to change the policies of its predecessors but to invoke the criminal justice system against them.” Expressions of extreme sycophancy like this are why Broder maintains his tremendous access to power, and helps explains why he’s considered “the most respected and influential political journalist in the country” -- by the groups and corporations that pay him thousands of dollars to hear him share his banal observations live.

But even a soon-to-be octogenarian like Broder doesn't know everything about life and still needs to ask questions. Here he is perplexed by what might happen should CIA torturers and murderers -- over 100 people died in U.S. custody -- be prosecuted for their crimes:

If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

Um, yes? And get Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush while you’re at. Somehow I doubt locking up a few powerful people who committed and/or authorized violent crimes -- notice Broder doesn’t spend much time challenging that latter fact -- will adversely impact the lives of 300 million Americans. Not prosecuting powerful people who commit crimes (“the Broder rule”), however, seems like a fine way of ensuring future members of the ruling establishment flaunt the law with impunity. You certainly can’t argue that Ford’s courageous pardon of Nixon, for whom Cheney once worked, did anything to make future crimes by the executive branch less likely.

Perplexingly, Broder and his fellow media stars are consistently more incensed over the prospect of the rich and powerful going to prison than the scandalous fact that the U.S. is home to the largest prison population in the history of the world. One in 100 Americans are incarcerated, or 2.2 million people, many for the non-violent drug offenses. Yet the tangible harm inflicted by the state via the prison-industrial-complex on millions of families torn apart because of punitive (and profitable!) laws criminalizing peaceful behavior is of much less concern to the Washington establishment than the hypothetical harm that may befall lovely people like Dick Cheney. That's probably because all their friends are the powerful, who as we know don't go to prison as easily as the rest of us -- the very idea that they might is shocking to the Washington power structure.

Broder and his ilk's willingness to defend those who have everything from the specter of accountability -- and the prospect of facing the same justice system that regularly tears apart those who have nothing -- is merely another way of saying thanks for last weekend's dinner party.

Capitalism: A Love Story

2009-09-02T09:43:00.005-04:00

Whether you agree with every one of his policy prescriptions or not, one thing is for sure: Michael Moore consistently manages to enrage both wings of the respectable Washington political establishment, so he must be doing something right. His new film on the bailout of Wall Street and the state capitalist system, a favorite topic of discussion 'round these parts, comes out October 2nd. I have reason to believe it will be quite good.

Here's a preview of what to expect:

The AP vs. the AP

2009-08-28T11:00:00.005-04:00

The Associated Press, like many old media outlets, is struggling to adapt to the Internet and a world where the public appears increasingly unwilling to pay for news content in general, much less bland and unremarkable wire reports. Like the recording industry, however, the AP's approach to this development has not been to reassess its business model, but to threaten legal action against those nefarious news aggregators like Google who send traffic to the AP without first paying them for the privilege.

Just this month, AP's general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, claimed that the news organization has no problem with people coming up with innovative ways of distributing its content -- so long as the AP pockets any money the innovator makes. “If this becomes a runaway success, I want to be part of this kind of business arrangement with you," Kasi said, addressing a hypothetical iPhone developer. "In the meantime, if you want to experiment, go at it.” That is, you do the hard work of figuring out how the AP can make more money from distributing its content electronically and, if you're successful, the AP will reward you by using the long arm of the state to confiscate whatever money you make, entering into a coerced “business arrangement” akin to the type of partnership the mafia might enter. If you fail? You're on your own, bud.

But AP's hubris regarding its “intellectual property” doesn't end there. If the copyright disclaimer at the end of many of its stories is to be believed, the wire service also claims that none of its material may "be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed" without prior consent. Since many of its stories merely restate facts one can find elsewhere, AP's claim that one cannot rewrite their material has provoked an understandable mix of ridicule and outrage. Given the company's own method of news gathering, it's also rather hypocritical.

Consider this AP account of the story this week of the head of an anti-animal cruelty organization in Virginia accidentally leaving her dog locked in a hot car, causing it to die. At the bottom of the 150-word article is this line: Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, http://www.timesdispatch.com

If you go to the Times-Dispatch website it's clear the AP based its entire story on this article, "Dog of Richmond SPCA CEO dies after being left in car for 4 hours". While I have no problem with this – no one should be able to claim ownership over information and the AP did credit the Richmond paper – this is just the sort of activity to which those running the company and other major news organizations have so vociferously objected. Remember: the AP's piece contained no actual new reporting and merely leeched off the work of others. If anything, the AP merely acted as an aggregator of information, taking a news item from an obscure publication and dispersing it to a wider audience.

There is nothing wrong with what the AP did, of course. It allowed a broader audience to discover a news story they probably otherwise would have missed (even if it wasn't the most newsworthy), and it undoubtedly drove some traffic to the Times-Dispatch's website. Since AP journalists see the benefit of building on -- and sometimes just taking -- information reported by others without any apparent prior consent, perhaps they should explain their reasons for doing so with those running the company. Rather than using the state to enforce their revenue stream by threatening lawsuits over a legal fiction -- "intellectual property" -- maybe they can begin to shift their focus to building a business model appropriate for the 21st century.

War: just another policy option

2009-08-26T10:50:00.003-04:00

Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress blogger we last saw offering a damning (albeit unintentional) indictment of the unshakable liberal faith in electing Democrats to improve America’s “quality of governance”, has uncovered a problem. And it's a big one.

You see, if one holds the U.S. government to the same standards it applies to other, less powerful countries, and if in the grips of some far-left ideology you go so far as to say wars should only be fought as an absolute last resort – and only in self-defense – then one soon discovers there are very few instances where American military action has been justified. One might even conclude that many of the wars fought by the U.S. have been unjust given that, as Yglesias notes, “For the United States, which is conveniently located on the North American continent adjacent to two friendly and relatively weak countries, it’s going to be very hard for anything to meet a strict necessity test.”

As a serious member of the Washington punditocracy, this fact concerns Yglesias -- not because it eviscerates the moral case for the American empire and an obscenely bloated military budget, but rather because applying such a strict criteria to U.S. actions would preclude the righteous humanitarian interventions left-leaning hawks like himself imagine their government engaging in. And like any good establishment liberal, Ygelsias cites disgraced war criminal Harry “Hiroshima” Truman to boost his case, “happily” granting the war in Korea “as a great example of a 'good war'” that may never have been – perish the thought – had the intrepid Truman abided by the “just war” theory popularized by that sissy theologian, St. Augustine.

“You have a country friendly to the United States becoming the victim of unprovoked aggression from an unfriendly country,” Yglesias writes. “Pretty much everyone believes that South Korea has a right to fight back in its own defense. And it’s only a very small leap from a belief in self-defense to a belief in the idea of 'collective self-defense' whereby countries who are friendly to South Korea should help it out in its hour of need. That’s how Harry Truman saw it and that’s how I see it decades later.”

What I find interesting about this paragraph is not only Yglesias' laughable stance that it's but “a very small leap” from a belief in legitimate self-defense to a belief in the U.S. as policeman of the world, but what he lays out as one of his chief criteria justifying American intervention: that South Korea's government was “friendly to the United States,” which was sort of a given at the time considering it was installed by the American government. This was of course exactly the criteria Truman used to justify U.S. involvement in the Korean civil war, rather than any concern about civilian life. “Unprovoked aggression” is only a concern to U.S. political leaders if aimed at an American proxy state, and the killing of innocents but a propaganda point if committed by an unfriendly power.

South Korea's “U.S.-backed regime,” after all, killed “untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in the summer of terror in 1950,” often under the watch of American military advisers, as the Associated Press reported last year. According to South Korea's government-sponsored Truth and Reconciliation Committee, a “very conservative” estimate would place the number of civilians executed by the South Korean regime at 100,000, and likely at least double that. And that’s on top of the thousands of civilians who died at the hands of the South Korean military on Jeju island well before the war started.

But these facts aren’t mentioned by Ygelsias since they don’t seem be relevant to his mode of thinking on foreign policy, much as civilian deaths weren't relevant to Harry Truman, who considered dropping nuclear weapons on North Korea -- after destroying its dams, cities and industrial infrastructure, killing one out of nine North Koreans. All that does matter is the fact that the U.S.-backed regime was friendly to the U.S. and was invaded, which is a neat little rationalization to justify a war that killed three million people all so South Korea could be ruled by a nationalistic capitalist dictator friendly to America rather than a nationalistic communist dictator who wasn’t.

Also, seemingly left unconsidered by humanitarian interventionists like Yglesias -- who seems intent on proving that his backing for the Iraq war was no one-time error in judgment -- is what to do with, or how to restrain, the massive military-industrial complex a policy of global intervention requires. So Korea was justified (it wasn’t), what about Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia? Or Iraq? What about U.S.-backed coups in Chile or Iran? Not mere aberrations, these unnecessary interventions are the inevitable consequences of anointing the United States government the defender of the world and establishing a permanent class of mercenaries and munitions makers whose interest it is in to agitate for conflicts and cold wars.

Consider how the U.S. military describes the aftermath of the national security state brought about by its involvement in Korea:

While Eisenhower did reduce military spending after the war, the U.S. armed forces remained much larger than they had been in 1950, possessed many more and increasingly powerful nuclear weapons, and were ensured a steady supply of manpower through the retention of conscription. The American military, after the humiliating and bloody defeats of the war’s first six months, shifted its focus from preparing for a World War II–type mobilization to maintaining forces ready for immediate use. This larger military, eager to put the frustrations of the Korean War behind it, now was widely dispersed around the world, including Indochina, where American advisers assisted the new Republic of Vietnam.

Advocates of humanitarian intervention can't live in a fantasy world where a massive U.S. military can be restrained and limited to intervening in places like Rwanda and Darfur for pure, good reasons. Even if such interventions were desirable or likely to succeed, they would be the exceptions to a long record of U.S. military actions since World War II motivated by much less wholesome desires. And sometimes those in charge of the military won't be progressive saints subscribing to the RSS feeds of their favorite liberal bloggers, which shouldn't be too hard to imagine even for partisan Democrats given the fact this country did elect George W. Bush -- twice (well, kind of . . .).

If the U.S. government is not going to abide by the "necessity" standard for war it holds other countries to, one shouldn't be surprised when said government fights a number of wars that are unnecessary and unjust. And given the record of human history, it would appear liberal interventionists of even the most earnest sort have not figured out a way to prevent that.

A curiosity

2009-08-25T23:40:00.006-04:00

Compare the relative ease with which a Democratic Congress and a Republican president passed a $700 billion bailout for failed Wall Street investment firms with how difficult it appears to be for a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president to pass a healthcare proposal many Democrats campaigned on.

What does that tell you about the interests the government serves? Discuss.

If Chris Matthews only had a brain

2009-08-21T16:30:00.005-04:00

Chris Matthews is paid around $5 million a year by the kind folks at General Electric/MSNBC to pontificate on politics and to essentially act as a guardian of the establishment. So it makes sense that he would be not only stunningly, offensively ignorant of American history, but that his ignorance would be displayed in such a way as to flatter the ruling elite. In that respect, Matthews is typical of the DC commentariat -- he makes up in blind worship of power what he lacks in actual knowledge -- as he displayed during his most recent appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, where he claimed that not only had the Kennedy clan saved us from nuclear war (after bringing the world to the brink of it due in part to the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion), but that they actually "created the civil rights movement." Sorry Rosa Parks!

Though the stupidity starts at the beginning of the clip, the mind-numbing, make-your-brain-hurt ignorant adulation of the political class begins about three minutes in:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Chris Matthews

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Protests

The problem with folks like Matthews, and the very thing that makes him so attractive to politicians and his corporate paymasters, is that they envision all social progress as something bequeathed to us mere peons by the state and our betters in the halls of Congress and the White House. Our benevolent political leaders -- presidents and senators, kings and queens -- in the view of the these courtiers are the drivers of history, with we serfs merely along for the ride.

That it was the people, through protests, boycotts and open defiance of state-backed discrimination that forced the government to grant concessions to basic human decency if only to head off the prospect of an actual revolution (and to counter anti-American Soviet propaganda) is apparently lost to this class of professional flatterers. To claim the civil rights movement was “started” by a bunch of white aristocrats from New England reveals an incredible historical ignorance and bias in favor of the powerful, and ignores the fact that watershed events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins, all aimed at protesting government-backed segregation, occurred while John F. Kennedy was busy hanging out at country clubs enjoying the favored pastime of the idle rich and years before he became president.

That history is comprised of little more than the actions of elites is a view held not merely by U.S. officials and media sycophants, mind you. For instance, a few months ago I attended a luncheon here in DC where an aide to a Canadian premier remarked to those around him that Lyndon Baines Johnson had gotten a bad rap from ungrateful Americans given all he had done for minorities in this country, evidenced by the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Since it is rude to eavesdrop -- and ruder still to call someone a f_cking idiot from across the table at these sorts of functions -- I held my tongue, but couldn’t help but wonder if this official had ever considered the civil rights of those tens of thousands of African-Americans and other minorities drafted and sent off to kill and be killed in the jungles of Vietnam, much less the millions of Vietnamese who suffered the liberatory aftermath of the U.S. munitions dropped on their homes and schools.

Pondering these sorts of questions is probably why I’m just some small-time reporter with a blog, though, rather than a highly paid celebrity commentator. That said, here’s what a I propose: that from here on out, the term “Chris Matthews” become synonymous with “pompous, historically ignorant windbag” -- if it isn't already. Come on folks, through the power of the people we can make this happen.