Straight Up |: April 2007 Archives

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.

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.

"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."

In case you missed it:

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.

To refresh your memory:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes a magazine cover is perfect. This one, by Christoph Neimann, nails it.

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.