I.
The political-media-blogospherical establishment is currently working
itself into a lather over the elevation of a "nutty" Tea Party woman to
the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Delaware. The selection
of Christine O'Donnell by a tiny sliver of voters in a closed primary in
a tiny state whose main claim to fame is its decades of whorish service
as a protective front for rapacious corporations is, we are told, an
event of world-shaking proportions fit for endless analysis and scary
headlines all over the world.
It's true that O'Donnell has taken the politically risky step of
denouncing America's national pastime -- masturbation -- and has, over
the years, supported any number of positions that put her on the far
side of common sense. But one struggles in vain to find that she has
advanced anything remotely as radical -- or lunatic -- as the idea that
the President of the United States is some kind of intergalactic emperor
who holds the power of life and death over every living being on earth
in his autocratic hands. Yet this is precisely the position proclaimed
-- openly, before Congress, God and everybody -- by the highly educated,
intellectually sophisticated, super-savvy Laureate of Peace currently
residing in the White House.
This same president has also fought tooth and nail -- often in open
court -- to shield torturers, escalate pointless wars of aggression,
relentlessly expand a liberty-stripping Stasi-style security apparatus,
give trillions of tax dollars to rapacious financiers, health-care
corporations, insurance companies and bloodstained war profiteers, while
launching cowardly drone missile attacks on the sovereign territory of
close ally, killing hundreds of civilians in the process - and has just
signed off on the biggest arms deal in history with one of the most
viciously repressive tyrannies on earth.
Do I want to see Christine O'Donnell in the Senate? No, of course
not. Not only because in her freely chosen ignorance she has embraced
the most primitive, bleakly reductive understandings of religion,
politics, power, sexuality and human reality in general, but also -- and
mainly -- because she will support all of the policies delineated
above: the imperial wars for loot and domination, the presidential power
to kill and incarcerate at will, the slavish support for Big Money in
all of its destructive manifestations, the perversion of every single
public program into an engine of private profit for the elite, and so on
down the line. But as her Democratic opponent will do the same thing if
he is elected, I don't see why we should be all het up about
O'Donnell's corporate-funded victory in the teeny-tiny Republican
primary in little bitty Delaware.
But hey, it's all good fun, right? The tribal partisans get to jerk
their knees in orgiastic spasms, drawing oceans of newsprint and TV
airtime, while the real business of empire -- slaughtering, torturing
and repressing human beings -- goes on unnoticed and unabated.
II.
But a hardy few out there are still trying to draw attention to the
actual crimes and moral atrocities being committed by the actual holders
of actual power. One of these is Andy Worthington, who is beginning an eight-part series on
the remaining prisoners still being held in the still-unclosed American
concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. As Worthington says, the series
will...
help explain how few of the remaining prisoners have any connection to terrorism, how some are civilians, and how others were foot soldiers for the Taliban, in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that had nothing to do with 9/11, and very little to do with al-Qaeda. I also hope that it may contribute to the almost non-existent debate regarding the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and the administration's misplaced use of it to hold foot soldiers in Guantanamo, as well as highlighting other aspects of the habeas litigation, the military commissions, the moratorium on releasing Yemenis, and the decision to hold 48 of the prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.
Hey, but you know what's more important than that, Andy? The fact that
someone who won the votes of a sliver of the electorate in a tiny state
doesn't think people should masturbate! Let's get our priorities
straight here.
Another campaign now underway is a major effort to free Bradley
Manning, the young soldier who committed the cardinal sin of trying to
unearth a few nuggets of truth about the murderous reality of the
American Terror War, now being prosecuted and expanded so assiduously by
the Continuer-in-Chief. On Thursday, filmmaker Michael Moore and
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg launched "The Campaign to
Free Manning" in Oakland. The Guardian reports:
Demonstrations are planned in the US, Canada and Australia over the next three days in support of Manning, an army intelligence analyst who is being held at a military prison in Virginia ...Manning, 23, is also accused of involvement in WikiLeaks' exposure of a video of a US helicopter attack on apparently unarmed Iraqis in a Baghdad street. Two Reuters employees were among those killed.
Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times that laid bare the extent of US government duplicity in its claims to be winning the Vietnam War, said Manning was defending the constitution in revealing the truth about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Soldiers' sworn oath is to defend and support the constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our constitution," he said.
Moore ... said the US military was being hypocritical in its attempts to discredit Manning and accuse WikiLeaks by asserting that making the secret documents public endangered the lives of Afghans collaborating with coalition forces.
"To suggest that lives were put in danger by the release of the WikiLeaks documents is the most cynical of statements," Moore said. "Lives were put in danger the night we invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq, an act that had nothing to do with what the Bradley Mannings of this country signed up for: to defend our people from attack. It was a war based on a complete lie and lives were not only put in danger, hundreds of thousands of them were exterminated. For those who organised this massacre to point a finger at Bradley Manning is the ultimate example of Orwellian hypocrisy."
Below is a quick roundup of a few other recent stories that aren't
nearly as important as the selection by a minority party of a candidate
who doesn't approve of masturbation. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1. Seven Civilians Killed in US-Iraqi Raid
That was the original headline for the New York Times story
about the raid in Fallujah; within a few hours, however, the Pentagon
PR units had rolled into action, and the seven civilians killed at the
site of perhaps the most savage American campaign of the war had
suddenly morphed into figures of vague menace. The story did note that
of the dead, four were brothers "between the ages of 10 and 18." So
America's non-combat soldiers killed a 10-year-old boy in a non-combat
raid in the brave new era of non-combat service that has opened for the
50,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq.
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