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April 30, 2007
Mission Impeachment
Nobody mentioned "Mission Accomplished" -- Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of that infamous photo op -- but when Chris Hedges called for the impeachment of the President With His Head Up His Ass during a panel on the Iraq war at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, he got a standing ovation.
Hedges read a short speech, "No One Should Be Above the Law," which he'd given earlier last week in Washington at a large gathering of activists, politicians and others to launch an impeachment initiative.
The speech began by pointing out that Prez Huha "has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. ... Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public."
This president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression." And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.
As noted last week, Dennis the Menace has already introduced a bill to impeach Prez Huha's Attack Dog. The Democratic leaders in the Congress have said that bill is going nowhere, however, and I don't think Hedges expects the impeachment initiative against Huha himself to go anywhere either. What it will do, he hopes, is show the world that not all Americans are complicit in the BananaRepublic's war crimes.
Posted by jherman at 9:46 AM
April 27, 2007
Grrrr...
It was unanimous. When asked for a show of hands not one went up to support impeachment proceedings against Prez Huha's Attack Dog. Thus did last night's lineup of Democratic presidential candidates distinguish itself.
Make that unanimous minus one. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who introduced the impeachment bill -- House Resolution 333 -- was apparently too modest to raise his own hand.
Here he is in a video interview about HR 333 earlier this week, as posted on YouTube. And here's a synopsis of the three articles of impeachment with supporting documents.
Missing from the documents is "Buying the War," the debut program of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. If you didn't catch it Wednesday night on the tube, you can watch it online. The program doesn't just indict the press, as advertised, for its contemptible submissiveness in the run-up to the Iraq war. It indicts all the president's men for a crime as serious, according to my Staff of Thousands, as Watergate and Iran-Contra combined.
Postscript: Essential reading from Greg Palast.
Posted by jherman at 10:20 AM
April 25, 2007
Welcome Back, Bill Moyers
"You can't keep asking young people to die for a lie," he said this morning on Democracy Now!, where he talked about his return to public television with a new weekly series called "Bill Moyers Journal." (Have a look at the DN! interview.)
The first program in the series, "Buying the War," debuts tonight. Variety's Bryan Lowery describes it as "a methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap of mainstream journalism's collective failure to challenge the Bush administration [a k a the BananaRepublic] in the run-up to the Iraq war."
He quotes Moyers as saying, "The press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration [again, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass] to go to war on false pretenses." Which dovetails with this from yesterday's item, dontcha think?
Tom Shales raves about the program: "Perhaps the truth shall eventually set you free, but first it might make you very, very depressed." He calls tonight's program "one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year." He also notes, "It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort."
(Gee, Tom, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dead, dying, and displaced Iraqis. You forgot them.)
Meanwhile, here's something else Moyers said this morning on Democracy Now! (not that you haven't heard this before either): "Let's just face it, democracy has become a racket when it comes to politics and the media. ... This is contempt -- contempt for democracy and freedom. We cannot rightly claim to have a democracy as long as money is sovereign. ... There is a cancer eating at the heart of democracy, and it's money in politics."
Finally, congratulations to Sen. Harry Reid for calling Huha's vice president by the right moniker. "The president sends out his attack dog often. That's also known as Dick Cheney."
I've never really decided how best to refer to the vice president. I've called him everything from the chief crony, Assistant Maximum Leader and the oily conman to the wayward shooter, Cheney Boy and Mr. Sourpuss. But this settles it. Henceforth he will be called Attack Dog.
Posted by jherman at 10:04 AM
April 23, 2007
Bulletin From Harm's Way
Statements made by the chain of command [during an investigation of the Haditha killings] suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to "get the job" done no matter what it takes.
The killings in Haditha, in Anbar Province, began with a roadside bombing that killed one American marine and wounded two. Several marines then began methodically killing civilians in the area, eventually going door to door in the village and killing women and children, some in their beds, according to a Naval criminal investigation.
So don't forget to do the patriotic thing: Support the troops.
Postscript: A reader writes:
Yes, the linked mainstream media reports about the military investigation deflate the "support our troops" propaganda, at least in part, by showing that a tiny fraction -- a few rogue Marines -- have behaved like murderers. But at the same time another propaganda tactic seems to be presented, which banalizes evil under the guise of journalistic neutrality.The reports leave the impression we are concerned with justice when, in fact, we're engaged in an unjust war in Iraq that, along with an embargo, has killed around a million people and has so thoroughly decimated the country that the effects will last for a century.
But America's mainstream media never (or rarely ever) publishes articles that mention, much less discuss in detail, that several of our highest leaders are seen as war criminals by many, many very reasonable people throughout the world. It is just some rogue Marines killing 24 Iraqi civilians. Glad to see the media has its priorities straight.
Posted by jherman at 8:05 AM
April 20, 2007
Dummied Up
Is it any surprise the ventriloquist's dummy had so many memory lapses? Or that the President With His Head Up His Ass let it be known he was pleased with the dummy's testimony? Of course not. Nobody is fooled. Certainly not the news photographers who covered the hearing, Don Mills among them.
Meantime, John McCain offered his quippy version of truth on the campaign trail in South Carolina. "Remember that old Beach Boys song 'Bomb Iran'?" he joked, in answer to a question about sending "an airmail message" to Teheran. "Bomb, bomb, bomb," he sang, aping the song "Barbara Ann."
As The Wall Street Journal said last week in "McCain's Finest Hour," an adoring editorial defending his support for the war escalation in Iraq, "he has demonstrated that his views on the subject are serious and born of belief, not of polls."
Uh-uh.
We are supposed to measure McCain by the seriousness of his belief, not by the empirical reality of Prez Huha's so-called "surge." As if "belief" exempts McCain from the stupidity he shares with Huha, let alone the cynicism of overweening political ambition.
Postscript: Moveon.org has just put out an apt video ad: Bomb Iran. Bomb. Bomb. Bomb.
Posted by jherman at 8:46 AM
April 16, 2007
It's All in the Clicks
Be a good citizen and don't forget: The deadline nears for "la machina de guerra," as a friend puts it. This is what he means, of course.
Another essential click is this equation from James Fallows: Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1.
Posted by jherman at 5:27 PM
April 6, 2007
Eptitudes
This image -- received from a reader who writes, "I am surprised, too!" -- has been making the rounds of the Internet for a long time as a theme with variations (and in many iterations from left, right, and elsewhere):
Although we know what it means, the caption does not parse. It's grammatically inept. But -- I'm switching gears here -- Sam Zell's grammatically ept "I've never read online" also fails to parse and is truly scary, given his winning bid for the Tribune media company.
Since I'm parsing, have you read the LA Times drama critic Charles McNulty lately? Here's what he wrote the other day: "Redgrave honors this journey not by mimicking it but by processing it through her own sublimely empathic instrument." Whoa! The Times would be doing its readers a service by processing empathetically inflated criticspeak like that through a flapdoodle strainer.
Postscript: April 7 -- And now for a caption that parses all too well:
Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM
April 3, 2007
'Ten-Forty'
Sometimes a magazine cover is perfect. This one, by Christoph Neimann, nails it.
Click that thang.
Posted by jherman at 2:02 PM
April 2, 2007
Corporate Artists
Remember when Jay Critchley was blowin' in the wind with his proposal for "Martucket Eyeland,'' a Disneyfied Vegas-style Resort & Theme Park in Nantucket Sound? It was designed to help scuttle the plan for an offshore wind farm of 130 giant wind turbines, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, to stretch across roughly 25 square miles of the Sound from Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. And scuttled it was. Or so it was thought. Well, a year later the wind farm is back.
So is Critchley. Only this time he's up to no good with a new twist on an old project: "TransAmerica -- Condoms with a Conscience." It's part of an exhibition, Corporate Art Expo '07, at THE LAB in San Francisco featuring artists who, in the curator's words, "package themselves as corporate entities" with "whimsical" (read: subversive) agendas.
The exhibition includes Critchley's 3-foot scale model of the TransAmerica Building made out of condom boxes with the logo of his patriotically named Old Glory Condoms Corporation on them. The condoms are imprinted with an American flag. Company motto: Worn with pride country-wide.
Critchley says he wants "to initiate a public dialogue on the role of global corporations in the fight against HIV/AIDS."
As Shane Montgomery, who curated the show, puts it (in corporate-style artspeak, naturally):
Over the last few years, a new group of artists have emerged that package themselves as corporate entities. They develop a company name, a branding scheme, and utilize the language of advertising and marketing. These individual artists and collectives create art objects, marketing materials, and performative event-based pieces that can exist in a gallery setting as well as in the public sphere. Much of this work centers around issues of capitalism and consumerism. By putting this work within the context of fictional products or alternative services, we are able to engage in a more enhanced conversation around topics ranging from globalization, immigration reform, and health care in a way that is whimsical and visually inspiring.
Other artists in the show include the Anti-Advertising Agency, Acclair, C5 Corporation, Davis & Davis Research, Meaning Maker, My Death and Taxes, PP Valise, SubRosa, Slop Art, TDirt, Tectonic Corporation, and We Are War. Among the products on exhibit are "psychological prosthetics, self-help services, psycho-geographic mapping, research and development services, neurotransmitter security services, safety educational materials, and product placement services."
Sidebar
"Old Glory was launched in 1989 at MIT List Visual Arts Center," Critchley writes in a press release. "[It was] inspired by Bush I and the US Congress' attempt to amend the Constitution to ban flag desecration, and the invisibility of HIV/AIDS in the government. Although I had often utilized the corporate structure to create a media platform for ideas and interventions, Old Glory was the real thing -- shareholders and marketable products."
He continues:
My strategy was to challenge the government's silence and redefine patriotism -- it's patriotic to protect and save lives. My US Trademark application was rejected as "immoral and scandalous to associate the flag with sex," but the Center for Constitutional Rights' lawyer, David Cole, represented me pro bono, and we won a three-year legal battle. As a business, it was less successful because the FDA did not approve multi-colored condoms − over concern for the effect of inks on latex. Our successful Latex is 4 Lovers campaign brought attention to lambskin condoms' ineffective prevention of HIV transmission. Senator Jesse Helms, ironically, created the first global safer sex ad, holding up the Old Glory logo in the Senate on CNN, denouncing the trademark designation. Old Glory is now in standard law school textbooks on trademark, copyright and patent law. Long May It Wave.
Hail to the condom.
Posted by jherman at 10:18 AM