February 21, 2010 archive

You thought I was not serious?

I’m dead serious.  The only way to effect change is through sacrifice (changing your habits) and protest (telling people what you think, publicly).

Plenty of other stuff out on the Hypnotoad.  Just look-

The Hypnotoad.

"Television is a vast wasteland"

Mid-Afternoon Update.

Early Evening Update.

Late Evening Update.

Late Night Update.

What are you doing Update.

Open Thread

“Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community…,” Mayer reported. “Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, ‘Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?'”

“Bring me their skulls!” thundered the Office of Professional Responsibility.  “We have stripped from them all human dignity and autonomy, we have branded them with an absolute sense of self-alienating vulnerability to the agonizing sovereignty of their inscrutable, perverted, and god-like tormentors, we have blocked all avenues of justice, we have forever sealed their grievances in their tormented souls, and now we must fuck their skulls.”

Sometimes I wish I could feel more sympathy for our amiable non-entity of a President, so maybe I should be grateful to the miserable news-whores at Politico.com for inspiring me with a desire to enlist in the Army of Obamabots and bash Politco’s internet servers into smithereens!

Politico begins their smear of President Obama’s new Islamic envoy, Rashad Hussain, with a ridiculously demeaning and dishonest headline…

“Islam envoy retreats on terror talk!”

President Barack Obama’s new Islamic envoy, Rashad Hussain, changed course Friday – admitting that he made sharply critical statements about a U.S. terror prosecution against a Muslim professor after initially saying he had no recollection of making such comments.

Hussain’s reversal came after POLITICO obtained a recording of his presentation to a Muslim students’ conference in Chicago during which he can be heard portraying the government’s cases towards professor Sami Al-Arian, as well as other Muslim terrorism suspects, as “politically motivated persecutions.” Al-Arian later pled guilty to aiding terrorists.

So apparently Obama appointed a sympathizer with confessed terrorists as his envoy to Islam!

Get out your impeachment tools! That born-in-Kenya jigaboo is selling us out!

What Politico “forgets” to mention is that the federal prosecution and brutal detention of Professor Sami Al-Arian deserves special prominence even among the many other blatant and sadistic miscarriages of justice inflicted on the victims of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their gang of goddamned tools in the FBI and DOJ.

Professor Al-Arian was indeed tried by the Bush DOJ…

…after 11 years of Federal Bureau of Investigation investigations, wiretaps and searches, three and a half years of trial preparation and process, time Al-Arian spent in jail, most of it in solitary confinement.[21] Amnesty International said Al-Arian’s pre-trial detention conditions “appeared to be ‘gratuitously punitive’” and stated “the restrictions imposed on Dr. Al-Arian appeared to go beyond what were necessary on security grounds and were inconsistent with international standards for humane treatment.

And after so much investigation and so much brutalization of Professor Al-Arian before he was tried, how did the trial turn out?

The six-month trial featured more than 80 witnesses and 400 transcripts of intercepted phone conversations and faxes. At the end of the prosecution’s case, Al-Arian’s attorneys rested without offering a defense. On December 6, 2005, after 13 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted Al-Arian on eight of 17 counts and deadlocked on the others with 10-2 favoring acquittal.

Unanimous acquittal on 8 charges! 10-2 for acquittal on all the others!

In the context of federal courts where typically about 90% of defendants are convicted, these verdicts in favor of Professor Al-Arian were the equivalent of writing “BULLSHIT” across the sky in flaming letters!

In his diminished role as valet for the economic and military elite he serves, Obama has swept the gross miscalculations, embarrassments, and criminal messes caused by the excesses of the America’s elite under the rug.  

Normally, Obama works discreetly, as when quietly continuing various national states of emergency, or conducting deals with PhRMA.  He may even tell us what he is doing in direct, declarative, candid and politely calculated sentences, as when he reversed himself on illegal wiretapping, offering boilerplate national security justifications.  Occasionally, he will marshal more robust campaign-style intonations, e.g., at his Nobel acceptance, when defending starker imperial prerogatives, offering resolve and stuffed magniloquence  in lieu of remotely credible justifications.

His modus operandi is clearly not change, but carrying on the status quo with discretion, sweeping unsightly things under the rug, or obscuring them as much and as circumspectly as possible.   Keeping up appearances is his special sleight of hand, a Jedi mind trick of a deceitful and morally weak man having grave consequences beyond himself, God, and the fencepost.

By abstracting the purposes of imperial aggression, he robs other humans of their self-determination and their very lives.  By denying due process to Guantanamo detainees and other secret prisoners, he denies justice and humanity.  By hiding the transgressions of previous imperial stewards, he defrauds the Constitution.  By sweeping the banking crisis under the rug, he plunders our wealth, our jobs, our standard of living, and endangers us further, as the underlying debt has still not been resolved.  His pretenses to passing credible healthcare will only make us poorer and sicker.  In his impeccable service to the American elite, he is driving the rest of us into a condition of sub-humanity, making us weaker, poorer, sicker, morally degraded and hopeless.

People will argue that it is unfair to cast aspersions on his motives.  Blame the policy, not the man.  He is just acting in ways he honestly feels are best for the country.  That is the argument for “authentic” perdition.  Heckuva job.