The Mound of Sound

Contemptus Stultus

We’ve all heard the story of George w. Bush’s thinly veiled slight of Barack Obama over the Senator’s statements that he would talk to America’s “enemies”, namely Iran and Syria. Without naming Obama directly, the frat boy who has miserably failed the American people every day of his administration, even back before 9/11, was obviously exploiting the opportunity of a speech to commemorate Israel’s 60th anniversary in order to get in a few partisan digs for John McSame.

Bush ought to appreciate appeasers, not condemn them. He’s relied on a gang of spineless appeasers in order to get his way and drag America down ever since 9/11. Without appeasers (yes, including Her Ladyship, Dame Hillary), George might have had to wait a few more months before invading Iraq by which time Hans Blix would have given Iraq a WMD Clean Bill of Health. Without appeasers, Americans wouldn’t be living under the scourge of the Patriot Act. Without appeasers, Bush and Cheney would have been impeached and probably indicted by now. Without appeasers America might not remain at the feet of Big Oil today. Without appeasers, America might not have tolerated the privatization of war itself.

The appeasers did more than just prostrate themselves before their self-proclaimed emperor. They empowered him with tools to intimidate and coerce those who refused to appease the puppet prince. These appeasers even allowed Bush to twist and pervert their Constitution to suit his will. These appeasers allowed Bush to institutionalize torture, to dishonour their own military, to arrest and imprison anyone, indefinitely, without charge – to fly them to some of the most vile nations on the planet where their dirty work could be carried out unseen, unheard.

Mister Bush ought to appreciate appeasers. Without them he’d be nothing – and wouldn’t the world be an infinitely better place for that?

Okay, I know better, it’s my fault. I know that if something sounds too good to be true, chances are it is.

Like the announcement yesterday that the US had declared the polar bear a species in imminent danger of extinction. Yippee, it’s “Save the Bears Day!” Not.

What was I thinking? This is the Bush regime, the same pack of bait and switch clowns the world has had to endure for seven and a half years already. Surely if we’ve learned anything it’s that, when these creatures say anything, you can bet they mean something else altogether.

Yes, Washington has declared the polar bear in imminent danger of extinction. But the Bushies have also effectively said “so what?” The Independent sums it all up very nicely:

“Yesterday marked the first time the US Endangered Species Act was used to protect a species threatened by climate change. The US Geological Survey says that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could be gone by 2050.

The bears will only be protected from the direct effects of hunting, and some other activities, because of limits imposed by the Interior Department. It invoked a seldom used loophole to make it easier for the energy industry to actually expand activities that already threaten the bears and their habitat.

The Interior Secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, who spent much of his political life opposing the Endangered Species Act, said it would be “inappropriate” to use the polar bear listing “to regulate global climate change.”

American scientists believe that sea ice loss will likely result in two-thirds of the polar bears disappearing by mid-century.

The plight of the polar bear has also caused vehement disagreement within the Bush administration and last month the conservative Canadian government refused to list the polar bear as endangered. Canada has some 15,500 polar bears and it has given the polar bear its weakest classification, that of “special concern”, saying the animals were in trouble but not at risk of extinction.

President Bush is publicly committed to the rapid expansion of oil and gas exploration along the Alaskan coast, even at the cost of the polar bears’ habitat and opposes any moves to combat global warming through regulation.

But faced with overwhelming scientific evidence that already rapid loss of sea ice is accelerating, Mr Kempthorne said and he no choice but to declare the species threatened. “Sea ice is vital to polar bears’ survival,” he said. “This has been a difficult decision. But in light of the scientific record, and the restraints of the inflexible law that guides me,” he had made “the only decision I can make.”

So, kids, what’s the lesson from all this? It’s that these right-wing governments will follow the law when it’s “the only decision [they] can make” but then they’ll do everything in their power to make sure their decision is virtually meaningless.

The North American Oil Lobby, also known as Bush/Cheney/Harper, know that, so long as they’re at the wheel, Big Oil rules baby!

French divers have recovered a bust of Julius Caesar from the bottom of the River Rhone.

What makes the bust special is that it’s the only known example that predates Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. The scupture was carved two years earlier in 46 BC. It’s believed that it was dumped hastily after Caesar’s death lest it offend the new powers in Rome.

The “Phoenix Programme” is straight out of Vietnam. It entailed covert, US special forces assassination squads that raided country villages to execute suspected Viet Cong officials and sympathizers. Postwar analysis revealed their targeting information was routinely poor and they wound up murdering a lot of innocents.

Now a United Nations official is sounding the alarm about something that sounds remarkably similar underway in Afghanistan. UN rights official Philip Alston met with reporters today to disclose at least three recent raids in the south and east by foreign (“western”) intelligence agents that led to the deaths of innocent civilians.

Alston said the raids involved US personnel from a special forces base in Kandahar.

What’s particularly troubling to Alston is that no one is taking responsibility and the killers are operating with total impunity, two other characteristics of the Phoenix programme.

Alston said government officials confirmed the victims had no connection to the Taliban.

Okay, the guy who wants to be America’s Commander in Chief first and president second can’t tell a Sunni from a Shiite but, does it really matter? America winds up fighting each of them by turns. Saddam’s Iraq was a Sunni outfit, remember? It was the mortal enemy of Shiite Iran, ring a bell?

But there is further reason to question John McCain’s faculties in his speech announcing his latest turnaround – the withdrawal of most American forces from Iraq by 2013. Here’s what Senator McSame had to say about that:

“By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,” the Arizona senator said.

He described his hopes for the scenario in the country by the end of his first term in office: “The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering form the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension.”

Now of course, Iraq was created “centuries” ago – by the Brits and French – in the wake of WWI. The basis for the sectarian tensions is largely external and primarily Western.

It was the Allies who promised the Kurds their own homeland when the Ottomans were crushed and then reneged with the Treaty of Sevres.

It was the Allies who divvied up the Middle East between the French and British, drawing neatly surveyed straight lines without regard for the inevitable consequences of coralling conflicted ethnic and religious groups within the same territorial structures.

It was the Brits who chose the minority Sunnis to run the place, considering them the most effective, most reliable for British purposes.

If McCain doesn’t understand these realities, he’ll never be able to comprehend the powerful secessionist forces maneuvering in today’s Iraq. Maliki is backed by the Badr organization which supports the division of Iraq into an oil-rich Shia south, an oil-rich Kurdish-north and a comparatively impoverished Sunni centre.

It is America’s chosen foe, Muqtada al Sadr, who represents the nationalist force within the Shiite population. However the guy who most wants to hold Iraq together also insists on complete withdrawal of American forces. This leaves Washington in a horrible double-bind that politicians like John McCain ignore at America’s peril.

If Washington wants America’s agenda to prevail in Iraq, as McCain suggests, it can only perpetuate the Shia-Sunni divide which, ultimately, will extend to an Arab-Kurd divide. That instability will ensure that American troops will be there en masse far beyond 2013.

At some point John McCain will have to realize that you can’t get out of Iraq until you disarm the sectarian landmine left by the French and British in 1920 and you can’t do that with grade-school perceptions of reality.

HIllary Clinton has a good grip of politics, politics past that is. In many ways she appears like just another rich, old white man; the kind that has ruled the United States since the Revolution. The ranks of those people have been full of reformers who’ve done remarkably little to transform their country into a nation for the 21st century.

Hillary Clinton meant it when she claimed to be the candidate to appeal to “hard working Americans, white Americans.” That was no gaffe. That was her specialty, outright pandering and wedge politics, the kind that ought to be reviled. Her loyalty to black America was always feigned which is why black support for Clinton quietly bled out as this campaign wore on. Yet her support from working-class white Americans hasn’t been as universal as she would like to crow. She’s done well where racism still smoulders but where those embers are dying out, it’s a different story.

As Timothy Egan writes in today’s New York Times, Hillary’s “white America” is becoming yesterday’s news:

“…on May 20, when [Oregon] voters… could finally end the Democratic presidential marathon by giving Senator Barack Obama an outright majority of pledged delegates, don’t expect to hear much about how a black man has broadened the playing field for his party by winning a heavily white state. Apparently, white people in Gore-Tex country don’t count as much as white people in Appalachia. Nor, if you look at Colorado, a Bush state that Obama won this year, do white people who sing “Rocky Mountain High” matter as much as white people who sing, “Almost heaven, West Virginia.”
It’s absurd, of course, to tout the implied superiority of “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” as Hillary Clinton said last week of her core supporters. And those other white Americans, in Iowa, Wisconsin, or here in Oregon — all heavy Obama supporters — are slackers? Not to mention black supporters.

The map of counties that Hillary Clinton won big this year shows a broad swath of Appalachia and rural America, places where a Democrat is unlikely to prevail in the general election. The scab of racial animus can be thick in those counties, judging by exit polls of Clinton supporters who say they would never vote for a black man, and by anecdotal reporting.

The political math of the future lies with the new America — fast-growing communities in Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and elsewhere, where people are trying to step out of the cement shoes of race. Yes, race is still a factor there — it’s coded and complex — but not as raw as in other states. The transient nature of these places, where nearly everybody is from somewhere else, makes it difficult for old biases to harden.”

And that’s why Hillary doesn’t have a hope in hell of a comeback in 2012. She’s yesterday’s news and that’s just the way she likes it.