July 31, 2013

Troglodyte Republicon "HEARTS" Bradley Manning, proposes a national holiday

Why are neanderthals like Chuck Grassley, longtime GOP Senator from Iowa, so fond of "whistleblowers" like Manning that they're proposing a holiday to honor them?

note to Grassley: The UK Guardian does not constitute "a proper authority." Neither does Julian Assange, and neither does Glenn Greenwald.

July 29, 2013

Nice footwork, Glenn . . .

but I don't buy it.

July 15, 2013

Ironic, considering that yesterday was the SECOND day of coast-to-coast protests

against the Martin verdict, including massive crowds peacefully protesting in Oakland, DC, Chicago, SF, LA, and NYC to name a few locations:

Hedges is a dishonest FUD mongerer (that's fear, uncertainty, and doubt) who apparently thinks that any protest outside the corporate-sponsored Occupy movement beloved of fake-left libertarians like himself isn't really a protest:



Right Chris, it's all been eradicated, in your dreams. Seriously, why do people still post and rec his RW tripe on DU? He's playing to the TV-news (read low-information) "independent" swing voters in Ohio and PA.

July 15, 2013

Those are really good questions!

Yes I do, and sooner than later, though I'm not confident that the truth will necessarily penetrate the general consciousness. For example, I think we've pretty much figured out what went down on Nov. 22, 1963, including who what and why, but the unofficially official story, i.e. the conventional wisdom taught in school, still has it that LHO acted alone, ditto Sirhan Sirhan.



Now that is a question for the ages, literally. In fact Cicero used to rail about putting down the spear and taking up the toga in the Roman senate, before he was assassinated by Marc Antony that is. Frankly I think it's one of those timeless struggles, like the class struggle, which it probably predates. Thanks for presenting it that way because I'd never really thought about it in those terms.

July 14, 2013

Are patriotic slogans and cartoons all that's left of NSA-gate?

Or is that all there ever was? Snowden didn't expose any treason, that's clear. He exposed a perfectly legal warrant and a legally meaningless PowerPoint. If, however, he also shared classified US information with the Chinese, as both he and Chinese media have claimed, he certainly is a traitor. And he betrayed the US because he hates Obama and everything Obama stands for.



Not exactly hero material in my book but no accounting for tastes.

July 12, 2013

Yes, that's an excellent review and a commendable summary.

I couldn't have chosen a better one. I highly recommend both review and book. Quoting for the journal:

Since DiEugenio has nicely captured Douglass' thesis -- basically that JFK was eliminated by the CIA and Joint Chiefs for what they perceived as his traitorous reluctance to engage in military operations, particularly against Castro and Khrushchev -- and also his account of JFK's role in the Ngo brothers' assassinations, I won't rehearse either here. I'll simply add that Douglass supports his account with meticulous documentation that sets his book apart from even the best JFK bios including my other two favorites, Brothers by David Talbot and Profile of Power by Richard Reeves. I strongly recommend all three.

As to your question about Douglass' connection to Snowden's tale of NSA spying: since the thread is about Ellsberg let me start with him, simplifying a bit to save space. Douglass makes extensive use of the Pentagon Papers and Ellsberg's later work including Secrets, a 2002 memoir, as sources, and does not to my knowledge openly question Ellsberg's bona fides. However he does mention some interesting information, including that as a Pentagon analyst working on the PP in 1967, Ellsberg was greatly perplexed by JFK's steadfast refusal to commit troops to Vietnam when urgently requested by the Joint Chiefs, so much so that he sought out Bobby Kennedy for an interview and confronted him with this question:

Why, Ellsberg asked him, had President Kennedy rejected both ground troops and a formal commitment to victory in Vietnam, thereby "rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials"? Robert Kennedy answered that his brother was absolutely determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam, because if he did, the U. S. would be in the same spot as the French -- whites against Asians, in a war against nationalism and self-determination. (Douglass p. 108, quotation from Ellsberg's Secrets)

That was in 1967. Nixon won in 1968, covertly bombed Cambodia after secretly subverting Paris peace talks, and the Vietnam war roared on. Then in 1971, it as time for reelection, and along came RAND-Pentagon alumnus Ellsberg peddling his Pentagon Papers, parts of which he himself had written, exposing and humiliating not Nixon but LBJ and to a lesser extent Kennedy. Nixon won reelection 1972, and the war rolled on until Nixon tried to end it, at which point Watergate, also featuring Ellsberg in a symbolic but non-speaking role, took care of Nixon.

So the long and the short of my analysis is that Ellsberg is a very dubious character who may or may not be the peacenik he claims to be. He wasn't in 1967, by his own account -- the RFK interview goes on in that vein, with Ellsberg determined to find out what had made JFK tick -- and his glorious deed in 1971 seems to have helped assure Nixon's reelection. Cut to Oct. 2012, and as I've already posted in this thread, Ellsberg was very vocally telling potential Obama voters that he himself did not support Obama, had no intention of voting for him, and furthermore that Obama has earned impeachment:



Since Obama is in my view the most reluctant dispatcher of US military forces since JFK -- or better put, the most successful pursuer of what JFK had called the strategy of peace -- I have to say that in this most recent instance, again, Ellsberg's weirdly wire-crossed pronouncements do not strike me as sincerely motivated.

July 11, 2013

Well well well. The Pentagon Papers end at 1967. Nixon was elected in 1968.

So who got fingered by noble leaker Ellsberg's big self-sacrifice? That's right, the LBJ and Kennedy administrations. Also McNamara who apparently initiated the study as a warning to future presidents against similar debacles. Tricky Dick it seems got a free pass:

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971.[1] A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers "demonstrated, among other things, that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance".[2] The report was declassified and publicly released in June 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

And now Ellsberg is swiftboating another Democratic president for all he's worth, which fortunately isn't much. Funny how that works, isn't it?

July 10, 2013

Yep. Ellsberg is a hero to the Infowars.com crowd it seems. . .

Also NaturalNews.com and Democracy Now!, gee what a surprise:

http://www.infowars.com/daniel-ellsberg-says-obama-should-be-impeached-over-ndaa/

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/5/daniel_ellsberg_ndaa_indefinite_detention_provision

http://www.naturalnews.com/034537_NDAA_Bill_of_Rights_Obama.html



Impeach baby, impeach!

..........

p.s. mahalo Cha!

July 8, 2013

Moby Spark Notes starring Chris "Starbuck" Hedges

In this episode, the great white is played by aptly-named Mr. Snowden, and mad captain Ahab is you guessed it, our demented President, coyly unnamed by Hedges, who also modestly lets you dear reader make the link between himself and the "uncommonly conscientious" Quaker from Nantucket.

Grade: D- and that's for spelling.

July 6, 2013

thanks RavensChick. . .

I know this is a bit off topic but if you haven't seen White House Down and have any patience with big noisy blockbusters I'll bet you might like it... I saw it yesterday and it was better than I was expecting. The politics and plot are pure late night DU, but the characters all live and work in DC. And for a summer action flick it has a lot of



Of course, it's ultimately all pretty silly, but still a lot of fun, in case you or someone you know likes that kind of thing!