News of the Restless

Heroes for Today: Anonymous

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Sabina Becker

Preventing yet another crazy fucking Repug election theft isn’t all that these guys can do. They also pooped all over Israel’s crapaganda machine, and saved a bullied girl’s life from the cyberstalkers trying to get her to kill herself. Whatever will they do for a encore?

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Posted in Heroes for Today | 1 Comment

Music for a Sunday: In which we go Gothic for Gaza

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Sabina Becker

Yes, that one’s actually about Pompeii and Herculaneum. But I think it fits for war destruction, too. In light of current events, it was the first thing that came to mind. (It also fits, ghoulishly, for the white-phosphorus attack from the last time Tel Aviv threw a tantrum.)

And just for good measure:

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Posted in Angry Pacifist Speaks Her Mind, Gazing on Gaza, Music for a Sunday | Comments Off

Wankers of the Week: Petrenisgate

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Sabina Becker

Crappy weekend, everyone! How’re you all enjoying the convoluted unfolding of the Adventures of General Petraeus and his Penis? Are you still following this soap opera, or have you given up trying? Are you only clicking on the salacious highlights now? (Not that it helps; every new chapter IS a salacious highlight.) It could all make you weary of life, and so could these people, in no particular order:

1. Grover Fucking Norquist. When, oh when, will he finally go drown himself in the fucking bathtub? Yes, voters thought Mittens was a poopyhead; but really, he didn’t need Barack Obama to point that out. His own actions and words did the job. And let’s face it: Most people in the world, never mind the US, are NOT rich. So of course a higher tax on the wealthy sounds good to them. That was the basis for the post-war period of prosperity, when the New Deal finally showed just how fruitful it could be. It scared the piss out of the rich then, and it still does now. Imagine, workers being able to afford a decent living! Proper hospitals, roads and schools for everyone, not just those who could afford to pay! No more virtual slavery! Dear God, what is the world coming to? Must lower the taxes on the rich NOW!

2. O’Neal Fucking Dozier. Another variation on “love the sinner, hate the sin”: “Muslim people are beautiful people, but their religion, which is Islam, is not good. It’s very violent and evil.” Well, the same could be said for Christianity. Especially when the same Christian who uttered that also said that gays “make God want to vomit.” No, I’m not gonna bother loving that sinner. I think I’ll leave that up to Jesus and just call this preacher a fucking wanker.

3. James Fucking Dolan. So let me see if I got this straight: Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy, with large swaths of New York and New Jersey still without electricity, and/or phone service, and those affected are supposed to call to get their cable service charges reduced for the time the power was out, or still pay full price? What, doesn’t your corporation have computers? Don’t you get weather reports? Maps of power outages? What do you need people who can’t call to call you for, exactly? And more to the point: Why not drop the charges for the duration without being asked?

4. Ronald Fucking Kessler. It’s kind of hard to be convincingly furious about the national security implications of Petrenisgate when the FBI is (allegedly!) leaking details of it to you. Don’t you agree, Mr. Kessler?

5. Paul Fucking Ryan. He lost the vice-presidential election, so what does he go and do? Tries to boss around the re-elected president AND lets fly with veiled racism (“urban” is the politically-correct New Black, apparently). He’s not from the south, so he can’t drawl “Boyyyyy” convincingly, but damn if he ain’t thinking “nigger-nigger-nigger” — and dog-whistling his dwindling followership to do so as well. Dude, please — stick to playing with your dumbbells and stop being one. The Red States LOST. Get the fuck over it!

6. Pat Fucking Robertson. Hey, Dirty Old Men gotta stick together, right? Right. And a man’s just a man who can’t help himself. Right? Right! That’s why Patwa (no slouch himself in the Department of Senior Male Creepitude) will never give David Petraeus a morality lecture on the virtue of keeping one’s Petrenis in one’s pants. Nope, it’s easier to just blame that fucking jezebel who just reached in and ripped said pants off before the poor devil could protest. Sin of Eve and all that cal, eh? PS: Ha, ha. Now we know who the REAL weaker sex is. And it ain’t women, bitches.

7. Holly Fucking Solomon. Don’t like the outcome of the last election? Think Obamacare is gonna leave you in the poorhouse? Well, here’s a bang-up solution to all your woes: Run over your non-voting husband with your car! That way, he’ll run up huge hospital bills while you rot in jail hammering out licence plates for pennies. Win-win!

8. Sandy Fucking Rios. Yay, the head of Concern-trolling Women for Amurrica has squawked up again! And this time she’s comparing gay relationships to slavery. Don’t ask me how she drew that comparison; I don’t speak Feckineejit. It’s just as absurd as her idea that you can catch Teh Ghey from watching two gay TV characters kissing.

9. Dick Fucking Morris. Dude. Seriously. Get back to toe-sucking. It’s what you do best.

10. Luke Fucking Russert. Nancy Pelosi is no fave of mine (I remember how she dissed Chavecito for criticizing Dubya; NOT SMART!). Still, it’s funny that her age should be an issue to a dude. Why are youth and beauty never up for discussion if leaders are male? It’s not as if we women have no eyes, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so, what with all the past week’s sex scandals and all.

11. Larry Fucking Klayman. He thinks Hurricane Sandy was God’s punishment for voting Obama? Even though it happened BEFORE the election, and there was actually concern that the power outages and debris would hinder the voting and maybe even alter the outcome unfairly? Not to mention that most hurricanes that strike the US do so in the so-called Red States, where it’s practically considered immoral to vote for anything with a D after its name, especially if it’s BLACK? And, really: If God is so mighty as to wipe out the Earth with more than one flood (!), and capable of speaking directly out of burning bushes and the like (!!), why would he bother sending such inanely coded messages? I already knew Loopy-Logic Larry was nutso for calling Chavecito a tyrant, but this is a whole ‘nother level of pants-wetting lunacy. He is literally one blown cerebral artery away from meeting his maker, and contrary to what he thinks, it ain’t God or Jesus. Please, Cthulhu, call him the fuck HOME, already.

12. Ann Coulter. And in other batshit far-right lunacy gone bad, we have the Coultergeist, who has become so repugnant that even the arch-Catholic Fordham University College Republicans are no longer booking her to speak at their little echo-chamber shindigs. Awwwww.

13. Glenn Fucking Beck. Never mind that the Broadwell/Petraeus affair didn’t come to light until just recently. No, Biff thinks His Barackness knew about it all along, and still put Petraeus in as director of the CIA just to discredit the military! As though doing such a thing wouldn’t somehow jeopardize national security. And if the military and the CIA are discredited, it’s their own doing and not any baroque manipulation from the White House that’s to blame. They’ve both been dysfunctional for decades; ask any country that’s ever been on the receiving end of their romantic attentions. I bet that’s news to Biff, who is forever cowering in his bunker with a warm stream of pee rolling down his leg.

14. Fred Phucking Phelps. And speaking of pee rolling down the leg (and please-Cthulhu-call-him-home), guess who’s gonna be raving like a fucking loon at some big car race in Austin? Yup, none other. Isn’t it time they carted him off to a home for senile fundie wackos, or something?

15. Mitt Fucking Romney. Boy, I sure wasn’t expecting to have to list Mittens again this week. But dang me, he did accuse Obama of basically buying the election, which I guess was to be expected from someone who was rich enough to do so himself, and couldn’t. Not to mention CHEAP.

16. Thomas Fucking Mulcair. Yes, it pains me to list him, as he is the head of my party. But his position on what Israel is doing to Gaza and Syria is fucking reprehensible. If the NDP isn’t pro-peace, then who in Canada is?

17. Chris Fucking Brown. He needs to go away. NOW. And seriously: An ugly dude like that, modelling? The only products I can see him advertising are wood alcohol and brass knucks. (And maybe crystal meth.)

18. Derrick Fucking Belcher. He wants Alabama to secede from the union because his local government shut down his topless car wash? Pfffffffffft. Sexist piggery aside, it’s like blaming the apple tree for the squirrels dropping acorns down your drainpipe. Wonder what this intellectual giant of the Working Poor will do when his red state (one of the US’s have-nots, in case you didn’t realize) is cut off from federal funding, and other states start to boycott his trucking business because Alabama’s not a state in the Union anymore.

19. John Fucking Metz. Hey dude, ever hear of a consumer boycott? In the age of the Internet, they’re remarkably easy to organize. Just as it’s easy for people to get wind of what a shitty boss you are and decide they’d rather work at some other fast-food franchise. If you’re smart (and I can see you’re not), you’ll eat the modest cost of Obamacare and stop being such a fucking dick. It’s not as if you’re not raking in the profits hand over fist, anyway.

20. Charlie Fucking Webster. OMFG, black people turned out to VOTE! In MAINE! Dozens and DOZENS of them! The horror! The HORROR!!!

21. Scott Fucking DesJarlais. Back again, back again, piggity pig. Seems that Dr. Pro-Life Values has a history of pressuring women to get abortions. One of them was his own ex-wife. This along with at least one extramarital ladyfriend. And it’s right there in the court records! Which begs the question: Hasn’t this guy ever heard of birth control? How about condoms? A vasectomy? Leaving it all up to the women seems a mite irresponsible, don’t you think? And another thing: How desperate do women have to be to sleep with such a sexually unappealing fucking hypocrite, anyway? Poor things.

22. Don Fucking Cherry. You know your mouth is too big when bees try to sting it shut for you. But hey! Now at least both the NHL and its worst-dressed broadcaster are warming the benches. That’s good news for those of us who are sick to death of hearing nothing but hockey all year fucking round, punctuated heavily by pro-war rah-rahing.

23. Justin Fucking Bieber. Yes, please do show all the world why Selena dumped you, little boy. It will serve as a fair warning for anyone else contemplating a date with you. (I guess it’s never too early to start being an ostentatious douchebag, either.)

24. Bill Fucking Bennett. Wow, that is the most pompous expression of butthurt I’ve heard all week. And I’m totally loving that “lost the culture war” meme. Alas, I’m all out of ointment. And I’m not sorry.

25. Vladimir Fucking Putin. Wow, Old Saggy Man-Boobs really must have it in for Pussy Riot. He just essentially made it illegal for Russian dissenters to have any interaction with supporters from other countries. I imagine that has something to do with the fact that there is an internationally financed legal support fund for the imprisoned Pussy Rioters, not to mention numerous petitions on their behalf with signatories from all over the world. Or, to put it in Yakov Smirnoff’s terms: In Pooty-Poot’s Russia, treason commits YOU! PS: This, too, is a major nyet-nyet.

26. Rush Fucking Limbaugh. Yes, he’s right about being part of the reason the Repugs lost. But then he goes right back around and tries to pin the blame on the Democratic donkey. STFU, Rush. When your policies are anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-worker, anti-immigrant, anti-minority, and just plain anti-human, THAT is why you lose, and why you deserve to lose. And why you will go on losing until the end of time…or those awful policies, whichever comes first. PS: And this is why you will forever lose, Rushbo. I doubt any Hostess workers will continue listening to your shitty show, at work or home.

27. Bryan Fucking Fischer. Singing songs conflating patriotism with patriarchal religion won’t shield you or your country against anything. They just make you look like a bigger fucking zealot than the Taliban, when all’s said. And as for Hurricane Sandy being a sign of God’s judgment, I’ll be sure and drag that canard out the next time a hurricane devastates a half-dozen Red States where the Religious Reich holds sway.

28. Mike Fucking Ritze. Spending $10,000 of one’s own for a misspelled monument that has no business on public property is rather a costly wank. But hey, he’s paying for it. Perhaps it should be left as is so people can see what you get when you elect imbeciles to public office.

29. Cope Fucking Reynolds. Good for you, you sure showed them pesky Obama voters, you sore loser. You now stand to lose hundreds of potential customers for your shitty gun shop. Not that there aren’t plenty of others in the area that will be more than happy to accommodate them. After all, they’re gonna need protection…and AMMO…should any other sore losers decide to come around their homes and give them a hard time.

30. Brian Fucking Kilmeade. FUX Snooze hires its female talking heads from the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and its male talking heads from the baboon cage at the zoo. Any questions?

And finally, to the Fucking IDF. I don’t know which nauseates me most: your self-righteous leafleting of Gaza while bombing the living shit out of it, your self-justifying tweeting, or your self-congratulatory Instagramming. You people are more tasteless than Kim Fucking Kardashian, and that’s really saying something. While you’re busy trying to starve the Palestinians out, I’m gagging on your obnoxious fucking egotism and hypocrisy. And I am far from alone in that.

Good night, and get fucked!

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Posted in Wankers of the Week | 2 Comments

Festive Left Friday Blogging Too: Rafael Correa visits Seville

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Sabina Becker

Rafael Correa meets with the Mayor of Seville, in Spain. And that’s not all he’s up to over there:

Rafael Correa arrived yesterday afternoon at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, accompanied by crowds.

He came to tell how Ecuador emerged from its debt crisis or, as he puts it, “the long neoliberal night” that submerged his country in the 1990s: the joint actions of insatiable bankers, corrupt politicians, and governments blindly obedient to the deregulatory formulae of the IMF and World Bank.

It seemed as though he was describing the situation in Spain and Southern Europe, because the description of the process was almost a carbon copy. So as not to provoke diplomatic conflicts, he warned at the outset of the conference that he “did not come to give advice to the government of Spain as to how to get out of the crisis, but to describe what happened” in his own country.

The conference room was crowded with students, and three more auditoriums in which they followed his speech by videoconferencing. Even so, the crowds overflowed the venues.

Outside, on the campus, a great mass of students who had been unable to get in, were yelling as the conference went on: “Bring out Correa!”

Throughout the speech, Correa avoided referring to Spain directly.

The president of Ecuador dated the origin of his country’s economic problems to the 1970s, in the middle of the oil boom. In that period, Ecuador’s economy grew by 10% annually, faster than China at the time. So, when there was an excess in liquid assets, bureaucrats from the IMF and World Bank began to appear in Quito, preaching aggressive indebtedness. The country began to buy compulsively from the exterior, all sorts of goods, and of course, highly expensive armaments as well.

In 1982, Ecuador could not pay its debt, and the situation exploded. Therefore, Correa said, “the financial logic of the IMF, which prioritizes the payment of the debt above all, came into play”. Successive Ecuadorian governments felt they had to go into debt again and again, just to pay the interest, which kept accumulating, on a debt that also kept on growing.

“The objective of the economy became the payment of debts of the state itself, and of the banks, while the population grew poorer,” added Correa, to fervent applause from the students. “It was the same infernal circle in which Greece and Portugal are now,” said Correa, without mentioning the host country of Spain.

In Ecuador, the president emphasized, “the private internal debt of the banks was paid using external loans, but at the cost of indebting the state.” Again, he did not mention Spain. But he recalled that two years ago, during a visit to Portugal, he advised that government of the risk of the same thing happening there.

The next step Ecuador took is well known: “Then came the privatizations, the deregulations, social spending cuts, all preached by the Washington Consensus, the neoliberal bible for Latin America.” (Something similar to what Berlin and Brussels are now preaching for Europe.)

“They imposed laws on us,” said the president, “which they said would spur competitiveness and flexibility at work, the same which were used to exploit the workers.” The students’ applause and enthusiasm grew. “They demonized public spending when it was to pay the teachers, but not when it was for buying weapons.”

In Ecuador, in the year 2000, 16 banks failed.

“So the politicians, who didn’t represent the citizens, but the economic powers, did everything they could to make the people pay for the crisis.” Again Correa took great care not to mention Spain, but the students in the four rooms applauded wildly.

Correa said that shortly before the collapse, the government put i place the Deposit Guarantee Fund, which would not have been a bad idea, if it had only not been to cover the losses of financial entities that failed immediately afterward. “That’s how they socialized the banks’ losses.”

The Ecuadorian president still made no comparisons with Spain.

The seizure of deposits in Ecuador was known as the “corralito”. It was a prohibition on the part of the government to prevent citizens from using the cash they had in the bank. Then came the dollarization, the suicides (“we came to know a new phenomenon — youth suicide”), and the emigration of thousands upon thousands of Ecuadorians. (Some of whom were present at the conference).

Correa openly criticized the independence of the European Central Bank, “which is not doing what is necessary for Europe to emerge from the crisis”.

“The idea that the economy is not political is not founded in serious analysis, and it’s stupid to argue that the technocrats who dictate are making decisions without concrete political interests, as if they were celestial beings who are not contaminated by earthly evil.”

Then Correa addressed the students, and told them: “The international financial bureaucracy, when it makes decisions, isn’t thinking about solving your problems, it’s thinking of the payment of the debt.” And he said it with the elegance of making the subject the international bureaucracy, not local politicians.

But he was more direct in referring to a sign he had seen in Seville this morning, reading: “People without homes and homes without people.”

“If we follow the logic of financial powers, it will come to the worst of all possible worlds, one in which people have no homes, and the banks will have houses they don’t need.”

The evictions are inhumane, Correa said, and “it’s illogical that someone who loses a house by not being able to pay it off still remains indebted for life.”

The president explained that when he came to power in 2007, he took several immediate measures: eliminating the hegemony of the Central Bank, auditing and restructuring the debt, eliminating illegitimate debt, and buying back debt bonds at 35% of their face value. Later he paid off the rest, “to get free from the conditionalities of the IMF, like Brazil or Venezuela.”

Correa finished up by recalling that “I expelled the World Bank mission from Quito, and for six years the international financial bureaucracy hasn’t come back to my country. Now we are better than ever.”

Translation mine.

I can well imagine the applause he must have gotten from the Spanish students for that. Half of all young Spaniards are currently out of work thanks to the international financial bureaucracies that El Ecuadorable was referring to. The former poverty of Ecuador, and the validity of Correa’s solutions to the conditions that created it, would not have been lost on them…even though he never mentioned Spain directly.

As for the cancellation of debt by buying back debt bonds for a fraction of their face value, this is a strategy now being used by the Occupy movements of the United States on a smaller scale, to cancel medical debts and help people keep their homes rather than losing them to bankers and debt-collection agencies. How much longer before it becomes a large-scale strategy for governments in Europe and North America?

Or in other words: How much longer before we all elect Ecuadorables of our own?

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Posted in Economics for Dummies, Ecuadorable As Can Be, EuroPeons, Festive Left Friday Blogging, Filthy Stinking Rich, Isn't It Ironic?, Karma 1, Dogma 0, Socialism is Good for Capitalism!, The United States of Amnesia, Under the Name of Spain | 9 Comments

Festive Left Friday Blogging: Viva Venezuela!

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Sabina Becker

A new documentary by the Revolutionary Communist Group of Great Britain explores Venezuela’s efforts to build socialism (and re-elect Chavecito) amid the global financial crisis. A crisis which, thanks to anti-neoliberal efforts on the part of Venezuela and the ALBA countries, along with a decoupling from Big International Banking, hasn’t touched Venezuela, let alone clobbered it as it has the US, Europe and Asia. Hmmm, whatever could the reasons for THAT be…?

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Posted in Economics for Dummies, Festive Left Friday Blogging, Huguito Chavecito | Comments Off

What’s wrong with this picture?

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Sabina Becker

Yup, this is in Ireland. That is a man’s hand on a woman’s butt (how charmingly patriarchal!)

And, coming on the heels of this, it makes me want to smack a different kind of bum…the kind that trots around all holy and righteous in cassocks, telling women to be martyrs to Motherhood while they’re busy buggering the altar boys. Only it wouldn’t be in the unfunny-jokey grab-ass sense. It would involve bootprints in places not usually mentioned in polite company.

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Posted in Fetus Fetishists, Irish Stew, Men Who Just Don't Get It, Pissing Jesus Off, Sick Frickin' Bastards, The WTF? Files, Uppity Wimmin | Comments Off

The Petraeus scandal widens

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Sabina Becker

Meet another possible participant in the Petraeus affair…one whose strange behavior came to light in the course of the FBI’s investigation into some other strange behavior:

US general John Allen, chief of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, is being investigated for sending “inappropriate” e-mails to Jill Kelley, the same woman who received threatening messages from Paula Broadwell, the alleged mistress of ex-CIA chief David Petraeus, according to sources at the Pentagon.

This revelation comes a few hours after FBI agents searched Broadwell’s home. Petraeus had to step down due to his extramarital affair. Now the Petraeus scandal has touched the man who was to be chief of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, who was found in the course of the investigation to have exchanged numerous e-mails with Jill Kelley, described as a family friend of Petraeus.

General John Allen, 58, was assigned to the supreme command of the allied forces in Afghanistan starting next spring. Allen was to appear at a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, but the White House has suspended his nomination.

The investigation has been confirmed by the US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, who announced early Tuesday morning on board a flight to Perth, Australia, that he ordered the investigation of the US’s troops in Afghanistan, and that the inspector general of the Pentagon was going through some 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails, according to the New York Times.

Panetta read a communication to the journalists who were also travelling with him to the Australia-US summit, stating that he had been informed by the FBI on Sunday of the investigations surrounding the general and his relations with the woman said to be a victim of cyber-stalking by General Petraeus’s biographer-mistress.

Asked by reporters whether the FBI had decided upon a criminal investigation, the defence secretary said that “that will be up to the FBI to decide”, although he didn’t rule out a possible connection to the Petraeus scandal.

Panetta said that the general, who, like Jill Kelley, is married, denied having behaved inappropriately, and added that he “deserves due process”, also emphasizing his successful leadership in the Afghan war.

Meanwhile, at 9:00 p.m. on Monday, a group of FBI agents entered the home of Paula Broadwell in Charlotte, North Carolina. They inspected the home over the course of two hours, then left the premises without recording any of what had transpired during the search.

The scandal blew open when the FBI began to investigate some menacing e-mails allegedly sent by Broadwell to Jill Kelley, a Washington socialite and family friend of Petraeus.

Kelley and her husband, Scott, sent out a press release stating that they have been friends of the Petraeus family for the past five years, and asking that their privacy be respected. Sources of CNN described Kelley as an “innocent victim”. After the scandal broke, Petraeus was forced on Friday to go before the media to acknowledge that he had had a love affair with Broadwell, a 40-year old “journalist” who had written his biography, and to tender his resignation.

Translation mine.

Suddenly, we have a pretty good idea of why Jill Kelley lawyered up with a very high-powered attorney yesterday. I guess this answers Gawker’s question! If Jill Kelley has been carrying on with a general — not Petraeus, but another commander in the Afghan war, this one much more recent, and tapped to head the entire NATO mission come next spring — it would explain a lot. There is a lot more at stake here than just some titillating extramarital hanky-panky; we are now looking at more than one possible very high-level national security breach. At the very least, this means two generals will be under investigation, and an exhaustive search of their e-mail correspondence, both personal and professional, is in order. Might as well inspect them all, say I…and do a radical rethink of why the CIA and the US military have so much power to begin with, while you’re at it. All this military hagiography is surely NOT good for the country.

Now, the only thing I still wonder is who was the FBI agent who sent shirtless pics of himself to the glamorous Mrs. Kelley, who looks like she could be a cousin of the Kardashians (albeit a much more tastefully dressed one.) Josh Marshall says he makes Petraeus look like the sanest of the bunch, and I’m inclined to agree. Hey, who’s to say we can’t enjoy the theatricality of this whole spy circus a bit? There’s gonna be plenty of serious shit surrounding the Benghazi débâcle before long. Might as well enjoy the comic relief while we can get it, kiddies…

PS: The plot thickens. Perhaps we should call our new soap opera As the Pentagon Turns? Also, oops!

PPS: And more thickening! NPR reports that Paula Broadwell is NOT the actual author of All (Up) In (My Vagina), the hagiography of Fmr. Gen. Petraeus. That honor goes to a WaHoPo columnist, Vernon Loeb. Which begs the question: Just exactly what WAS she doing the whole time she was with the general? Clearly not just compiling research files, ha ha.

PPPS: And back to Jill Kelley. Think I should wank-list her for not understanding what “honorary” means?

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Posted in Angry Pacifist Speaks Her Mind, BushCo Death Watch, Crapagandarati, Fascism Without Swastikas, Isn't It Ironic?, Isn't That Illegal?, Spooks, The 'Stans, The United States of Amnesia, The War on Terra, The WTF? Files | Comments Off

Safer sex: Good idea.

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Sabina Becker

This ad: Not so hot.

Come on, people, Honey Boo Boo is not a natural disaster. Whatever’s wrong with her is a product of the environment she was raised in. And the sick, creepy, crazy world of child beauty pageants. Ain’t nothin’ natural in there.

But if you must use children as an ad for condoms, this one’s hard to beat:

Oh yeah: I guess I should warn you to crank your speakers WAY DOWN.

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Posted in Madvertising, Teh Heterostoopid | Comments Off

A few random thoughts on a former general

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Sabina Becker

I have a terrible confession to make: When the news of the Petraeus sex scandal broke this past week, my first reaction was to chuckle. Not in the usual “ha ha, another cheatypants got caught, serves him right” sense (although there was no small amount of Schadenfreude there, either); it was more out of a sardonic sense of irresistible metaphor. It was all about an irony that had been hiding, as all such ironies do, in very plain sight.

And yes, I have to admit, the embarrassment of it all tickled me, too. Aren’t intelligence agents constantly being warned about the dangers of seduction, when they’re not being instructed to use it to gain information they can’t get any other way? How delicious, then, to see the head of the world’s most feared and hated spy agency caught in the same trap his covert agents have set repeatedly, all over the world. And how hilariously ironic that the same terrorist traps the FBI keeps setting in vain, under the auspices of the so-called Patriot Act, ended up catching not some obscure cell with nefarious world-takeover plans, but a four-star general who’d at one point led the war against precisely such insurgencies. Or so we’re told by our lovely presstitutes.

After all, the former general and CIA director wasn’t just boinking some boring little bottle-blonde secretary; the Other Woman was his chief hagiographer. She was a military veteran and West Point grad herself. Just like him, she was in the business of selling neoconservatism, bad ideologies, and wars that cost a fucking fortune in every conceivable sense. She did not keep a low profile, as Other Women are wont to do. She was constantly thrusting herself into the spotlight to sing his praises (and promote her magnum opus). She was the person who spit-shined his medals to a high gloss in a “biography” that seemed to be written, at times, from straight inside his pants. There was no pretense of objectivity, only a constant, unremitting effort to elevate David Petraeus to divinity. A divinity which, even then, we peaceniks and Dirty Fucking Hippies knew he did not deserve.

But the media brushed right past us. It ignored what the former intelligence professionals were saying, too, about the BushCo wars being unwinnable. They hopped right on the pro-war bandwagon. They praised the “brilliant” strategy and lost sight of the reality on the ground. Gosh oh golly gee wow, isn’t David Petraeus wonderful? Yeah, that Iraq surge went great. So great that Iraq is now permanently fucked. Petraeus made that.

And that’s not all he made. He damn near dragged the Obama administration into yet another unwinnable neo-con war, this one with Iran. And on the flimsiest and dumbest of pretexts, too:

One person familiar with the Obama administration’s thinking said President Obama was never close to Petraeus, who was viewed as a favorite of the neoconservatives and someone who had undercut a possible solution to Iran’s nuclear program in 2011 by pushing a bizarre claim that Iranian intelligence was behind an assassination plot aimed at the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

As that case initially evolved, the White House and Justice Department were skeptical that the plot traced back to the Iranian government, but Petraeus pushed the alleged connection which was then made public in a high-profile indictment. The charges further strained relations with Iran, making a possible military confrontation more likely.

At the time, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a favored recipient of official CIA leaks, reported that “one big reason [top U.S. officials became convinced the plot was real] is that CIA and other intelligence agencies gathered information corroborating the informant’s juicy allegations and showing that the plot had support from the top leadership of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the covert action arm of the Iranian government.”

Ignatius added that, “it was this intelligence collected in Iran” that swung the balance. But Ignatius offered no examples of what that intelligence was. Nor did Ignatius show any skepticism regarding Petraeus’s well-known hostility toward Iran and how that might have influenced the CIA’s judgment.

As it turned out, the case was based primarily on statements from an Iranian-American car dealer Mansour Arbabsiar, who clumsily tried to hire drug dealers to murder Saudi Ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir, though Arbabsiar was actually talking to a Drug Enforcement Agency informant. Arbabsiar pled guilty last month as his lawyers argued that their client suffers from a bipolar disorder. In other words, Petraeus and his CIA escalated an international crisis largely on the word of a person diagnosed by doctors of his own defense team as having a severe psychiatric disorder.

Despite the implausibility of the assassination story and the unreliability of the key source, the Washington press corps quickly accepted the Iranian assassination plot as real. That assessment reflected the continued influence of neoconservatives in Official Washington and Petraeus’s out-sized reputation among journalists.

The neocons, who directed much of President George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy and filled the ranks of Mitt Romney’s national security team, have favored a heightened confrontation with Iran in line with the hardline position of Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the post-election period, it is a top neocon goal to derail Obama’s efforts to work out a peaceful settlement of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. The neocons favor “regime change.”

If ever there was a reason to be glad Mitt Romney lost the election, there it is. One more foreign policy disaster. Brought to you by the same PNAC/Likud faction that brought you the Afghan and Iraq catastrophes. Let’s not forget that Iran was always on the keeker; it was part of the “Axis of Evil”, remember?

Thankfully Barack Obama wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that flimsy tale. (You can see now why he was wise to end the Iraq invasion, too, can’t you? We’ll talk more about Afghanistan when he realizes it’s past time to shut that one down, too. Maybe now he’ll finally start firing all those BushCo leftovers on his team and start fresh with sane people. Hope ‘n’ change, people — get the fuck ON with it.)

Meanwhile, the same media imbeciles who were so busy promoting every highly-polished Petraeus turd that they couldn’t even look up for an instant, are in mourning. The same David Ignatius who took the Iranian lunatic’s lie and ran with it is now weeping tears of blood. Too bad he forgot something:

Ignatius adoringly adduces the following quote from Petraeus as proof of the ex-general’s acute vision: “As I see it, strategic leadership is fundamentally about big ideas, and, in particular, about four tasks connected with big ideas. First, of course, you have to get the big ideas right — you have to determine the right overarching concepts and intellectual underpinnings to accomplish your organization’s mission.

“Second, you have to communicate the big ideas effectively through the breadth and depth of the organization. Third, you have to oversee the implementation of the big ideas. And fourth, and finally, you have to capture lessons from the implementation of the big ideas, so that you can refine the overarching concepts and repeat the overall process.”

Got that? That’s probably right out of Petraeus’s PhD dissertation at Princeton, or from a how-to book that might be called “Management Rhetoric for Dummies.”

If only Petraeus and his colleague generals remembered the smaller – but far more relevant – ideas inculcated in all of us Army officers in Infantry School at Fort Benning in the early Sixties. This is what I recall from memory regarding what an infantry officer needed to do before launching an operation – big or small – division or squad size.

Corny (and gratuitous) as it may sound, we were taught that the absolute requirement was to do an “Estimate of the Situation” that included the following key factors: Enemy strength, numbers and weapons; Enemy disposition, where are they?; Terrain; Weather; and Lines of communication and supply (LOCS). In other words, we were trained to take into account those “little ideas,” like facts and feasibility that, if ignored, could turn the “big ideas” into a March of Folly that would get a lot of people killed for no good reason.

Could it be that they stopped teaching these fundamentals as Petraeus went through West Point and Benning several years later? Did military history no longer include the futile efforts of imperial armies to avoid falling into the “graveyard of empires” in Afghanistan?

What about those LOCS? When you can’t get there from here, is it really a good idea to send troops and armaments the length of Pakistan and then over the Hindu Kush? And does anyone know how much that kind of adventure might end up costing?

To Army officers schooled in the basics, it was VERY hard to understand why the top Army leadership persuaded President Barack Obama to double down, twice, in reinforcing troops for a fool’s errand. And let’s face it, unless you posit that the generals and the neoconservative strategic “experts” at Brookings and AEI were clueless, the doubling down was not only dumb but unconscionable.

Small wonder all the talk about “long war” and Petraeus’s glib prediction that our grandchildren will still be fighting the kind of wars in which he impressed the likes of David Ignatius.

Ike Eisenhower wasn’t kidding when he talked about the Military-Industrial Complex. And Smedley Butler wasn’t talking out his hat either when he said that war was a racket. What Ray McGovern, the veteran intel pro who opposed these wars from the outset, understands that the media doesn’t, is that wars are not won or lost on the basis of who’s got the “big ideas” and “overarching concepts”. The people on the ground don’t give a shit for those. And the locals will only see foreign invaders and oppressors, NOT Big Ideas And Overarching Concepts. They’re not stupid; they know what a foreign uniform and gun mean. Their hearts and minds are not winnable with big talk; you might as well be tossing cluster bombs to their kids as candy from the tank turrets.

The salesmanlike bullshit of Petraeus ought to be apparent even to those of us who don’t have the privilege of a West Point officer-training course. If you’ve heard similar things from some civilian in a cheap suit and dismissed it accordingly (and I have, and I bet you have too), why buy it when it comes courtesy of some big-brass guy with a folksy-shucksy grin and a chestful of medals?

Oh yeah, that’s right: the only bright spot, if you can call it that, in the Bush Recession, was that there were plenty of job opportunities for young, poor, barely-educated cannon fodder. It’s the economy, stupid! At a time when well-paying manufacturing jobs are being cut and shipped overseas to where labor is so cheap that at times it amounts to outright slavery, what’s left at home? The so-called service economy. Which is also so poorly paid that it might as well be slavery. You can’t afford rent, much less a starter home, on a McJob paycheque. So when the handsome young guys in the spiffy uniforms approach you, ever so personably, at the mall, trying to interest you in the Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines, and tell you you can get your college education and better job opportunities that way, you start to think of entering a different kind of service opportunity, one that will glorify you some day as a Veteran. Assuming that you come out alive. Would you like fries with that?

So yeah, the snickering from my corner is full of a sense of vindication. What has the whole neo-con project been, if not a vast international fuckfest replete with lies, deception, doubletalk and crapaganda? One in which the media whores focused with lover-like intensity on the well-polished turds falling from the lips of “institute” hacks and four-star generals alike, while troops on the ground were killing and dying for, well, nothing?

Ah, maybe I shouldn’t say nothing. They killed and died, committed atrocities and fell victim to atrocities, for something, all right.

They did it all for bullshit.

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