Tag: Arthur Silber

I do not discount the opinions of Arthur Silber & Chris Floyd in the least with respect to the fact that the billionaire P. Omidyar is funding the new investigative journalism venture at First Look.  My basic understanding of Arthur’s objection is that Snowden, Greenwald et al have no right to declare themselves gate-keepers of information.

That criticism is unassailable in a true democracy.  I let it stand, pretending that we live in one.

At the same time, should Greenwald’s, Scahill’s, Wheeler’s, Poitras’s and Taibbi’s integrity hit rock bottom simultaneously, as a result of being funded by a billionaire patron, as Bob Woodward’s certainly did, I will be publicly kissing many asses on the courthouse lawn.

Arthur, if you’re right (and I’m not certain he isn’t), I will kiss your ass on the courthouse lawn and consider it a privilege.

With Love,

CF

Holy Piccolo Pete and my blood-curdly-caked external meatus in the ululating shrillness of the dark wilderness where the straight way was lost!  Sending Arthur money was the best hundred bucks I ever spent!   I’m actually considering getting some sort of job to proceed with regular tithing to his cathedral of tears.

Obviously, we all owe Matt Taibbi an eternal debt of gratitude for his ongoing savage humiliation of the Nancy capitalists who continue destroying our lives.  It’s fair to say he got under the flinty thin skin of these epicurean dealmakers.  I bow deeply in Taibbi’s direction for his regular savagery against their felonious assaults upon democracy, and for writing one of the best extended phrases ever written in the Mother Tongue.

However, Arthur Silber rightly castigates Taibbi for parroting the official US/Israeli government lines that “Ahmadinejad is nuts.”  “He can’t be allowed to have nukes!”  “Something must be done!”  If you ever actually listen to, say, an interview of Ahmadinejad by Charlie Rose, you would rightly conclude that “Charlie Rose is nuts.”  

Also, if you pay any attention to such news, you would also rightly conclude that “Uncle Sam is nuts,” “The New York Times is nuts,”  “Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross are nuts,”, “Erin Burnett is nuts,” and so on.  Any casual brush with history would inform you of these elementary facts.

I urge you to read Arthur’s spat-out of Taibbi’s harmful Pavlovian regurgitation of neoconservative crop milk.

It’s been harder and harder for me to pay attention to “politics” such as it is. I don’t really see anything happening other than a kind of mopping up operation by the oligarchy. The deed is done the Republic can be buried now.

The most consistently accurate commentator of the left (I regard the “left” to mean opposition to the current power structure not an ideology) has probably been Arthur Silber (his blog is here). I suggest you read his stuff, not just the new stuff. Sometimes he’s a bit pedantic and self-righteous but he’s earned the right to it as far as I’m concerned.

To all those who repeatedly claimed that, no matter what “mistakes” he might make and regardless of the scope of the devastating effects of those errors, Obama had to represent a markedly better choice than McCain, take note: in certain respects, Obama is far more dangerous than McCain could have been.

Why is this?

Crossposted at Invictus

More than one author has described writing about the intelligence world as akin to walking into a hall of mirrors. It’s difficult to know what’s what, who to believe, or even know where you stand. Truths are fungible. Lies are opaque versions of tomorrow’s news.

When the U.S. released its limited version of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the revelation that Iran does not have a working nuclear arms program landed with a thud upon the collective heads of the D.C. pundits. Bush’s pugnacious news conference which followed, wherein he repeated ad nauseaum his intention that Iran never get the “knowledge” to construct a nuclear weapon, signalled no real change in direction from the administration that was only weeks before dangling World War III before the glazed eyes of a fearful electorate.

In discussions with colleagues, I was struck by the fact that the authorship of the new NIE was from the same man who wrote the previous NIE, and the same man who assured the administration that there was a nuclear weapons program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, CIA stalwart, Robert Walpole, who was (if he in fact is still), according to the Washington Post, “chief CIA officer for nuclear programs”. In other words, I smelled a rat.