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“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President [Barack] Obama to be a one-term president,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced after the midterm elections.  Perhaps you were under the impression McConnell’s statement was just hyperbole; his vindictive sentiment, mere posturing for the benefit of the GOP’s reanimated right wing.  If so, this business with Republicans screwing around with the START treaty should put that thought right out of your mind.

From the moment the president signed the nuclear arms reduction pact with the Russians, Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), have “kept moving the goal posts…”

Max Bergmann briefly laid out the history of Kyl’s delay tactics within his Nov. 16 Wonk Room post.

…Last summer, Kyl was whining immensely that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) was rushing the process and that a committee vote should not happen until after the August recess. After the SFRC delayed, Kyl spoke to Reuters who paraphrased Kyl:

It could be difficult to satisfy his [Kyl's] demands before November and thus the vote on New START might need to take place during the lame duck session if the Senate wants to vote on the treaty this year…

The vote was delayed, and Kyl’s demands were met, but…

In September, after the SFRC did hold its vote, Kyl and Senate Republicans argued that having a vote before the election was impossible because it would politicize the process and that a vote should happen after the election…

Predictably, now that the election has passed, Kyl and Republicans say there isn’t enough time in the Senate calendar.

Of course, for Kyl and the Republicans, that was the plan all along, as it has been with every White House initiative since Obama took office.  Playing this game with foreign policy commitments, however, has broader implications than it has with domestic legislation.

The consequences are already presenting themselves.  Steve Benen, author of Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, has been on this all week.  Regarding the risks Republicans are running, Benen wrote (11/17), “They expect this to hurt the foreign policy power of the United States, but they’re fine with that since there’s a Democratic president…” (emphasis added)

When it comes to Russia, inspection of the country’s long-range nuclear bases will remain suspended indefinitely; the country’s hard-liners will be emboldened; and Russia’s willingness to cooperate with U.S. on Iran or on Afghanistan will likely disappear.

But in the bigger picture, countries around the globe will see this as a reminder that negotiating with the United States is pointless, since the country is burdened with a Republican Party that puts partisan hatred above the country’s interests. It hurts American credibility in ways that are hard to even gauge.

Indeed, and as Matt Cooper noted in his Nov. 16 National Journal post, another bilateral agreement – a trade pact with South Korea – initially failed, in part, because “Seoul’s concern about ratification prospects in the Senate.”

Fortunately, there still a chance that Senate Democrats will force a vote on START before the next Congress.  If they do, it will be interesting to see whether or not the Republicans blink.  Only one elected Republican, Indiana Senator Dick Lugar, has called on his party to put national security before politics on this one, and numerous other non-elected officials from both sides have done the same.

I’d like to think Sen. Lugar isn’t the lone Republican voice of reason in the Senate.  Optimism, however, is difficult to muster when there are others, like Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who seems to relish the opportunity to poke the Russians with a stick.

Take Action–> Urge Senators to Support Nuclear Arms Reduction

(This post was originally published on Care2.com’s Political Causes Blog, 20 November 2010)

                          

It reminded me of this, far less appropriate, drawing…

                          

… I cannot prove it, so I’ll estimate it here and if I’m proved wrong I’ll happily correct it: but my intuition tells me I criticized President Obama more **in the last week** than Fox’s prime-time hosts criticized President Bush in eight years.

To equate this network with Fox, as Mr. Koppel did to accuse us of having our own facts is another manifestation of a dangerously simplified understanding of modern news. This guy says the moon is a planetary fragment orbiting the Earth; this other guy says it’s actually the body of the late Vince Foster have them both on and let them debate. It’s fair and balanced.

(video via Countdown | Read the transcript)

                          

Actually, Republicans should consider Zombie Reagan for their leadership.  If I learned anything from the 2010 midterm results, it would be that the only demonstrably functioning appendage of the GOP is its propaganda/fundraising wing.  Whether or not they’ll be able to actually govern remains in serious doubt.

From the looks of their freshman class, the famed Republican unity-of-message, lockstep discipline is a thing of the past.  Their leadership is in for a frustrating experience, akin to what the Democrats dealt with during the last Congress (noteworthy exceptions being the complete lack of empathy, and despite the inherent contradiction, a lot more Jesus).

Zombie Reagan?  They could do worse.

(WARNING:  Some will find the video to be disturbing and/or offensive…)

Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

                          

Once I tracked down the above, I was happy to discover it wasn’t Bennett’s only effort on the subject:

And that’s not all I found.  Bennett’s take on the 2010 midterm results is spot on.  He also has, not one, but at least two, absolutely brilliant tea party drawings.

                          

JOHN PARTIPILO / FILE / THE TENNESSEAN

That’s how many dollars Emerson’s for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they’re in imminent danger from Muslims.

Emerson is a leading member of a multimillion-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances.

Leaders of the so-called “anti-jihad” movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. And they’ve found an eager audience in ultra-conservative Christians and mosque opponents in Middle Tennessee. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque…

That ‘national consultant’ is the subject of the below.

Crossposted from Care2.com ~ Originally published 6 October 2010

AARON THOMPSON / FILE / GANNETT TENNESSEE

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration Frank Gaffney appeared in a Tennessee courtroom Monday, Sept. 27, to offer his “expert” testimony on behalf of four plaintiffs seeking an injunction to prevent the construction of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, commonly referred to as the Murfreesboro mosque.

From the Murfreesboro Post:

“I’m here to warn this community of seditious acts of Sharia Law,” Gaffney said.  “And that threat has trickled down to local governments.”

Gaffney’s testimony carried little weight with the Judge, the witness having clarified the true nature of his expertise to the court:

“I don’t hold myself out as an expert on Sharia Law,”  Gaffney told the court on the witness stand.  “But I have talked a lot about that as a threat.”

This is exactly what Gaffney is an expert at — scaring the crap out of people regarding a topic, on which, he is decidedly NOT an expert.

Two days after his court testimony, Gaffney went on CNN to discuss the Murfreesboro case with Anderson Cooper and Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistani diplomat, presently the chair of Islamic studies at American University (h/t TPMMuckraker).  In the below clip, Cooper starts with Gaffney, asking the  president of the Center for Security Policy to elaborate on the “red flags” signaling the onset of Sharia infiltration.

Gaffney’s opening was curious.  “Well, several were introduced into evidence during the court proceedings,” Gaffney told Cooper.  While such items may have been introduced into evidence, it doesn’t mean they’ll have any bearing on the Court’s conclusions.  And, as the Murfreesboro Post reported, much of Gaffney’s testimony was objected to by the County attorneys and their objections were subsequently sustained by the Judge.

What follows from Gaffney is the standard neoconservative misrepresentation of Sharia and overstatement of the threat, which, in Gaffney’s warped view, poses an existential threat to America by way of “stealth jihad.”

Watch the clip or read the CNN transcript for the details of Gaffney’s foolish paranoia.  Also be sure to read Rachel Slajda’s Sept. 23 TPMMuckraker piece recounting the origins of the neoconservative war on Sharia.  Here, however, consider Ahmed’s response to Gaffney on CNN as he puts the likelihood of Sharia replacing the U.S. Constitution in its proper perspective:

If every Muslim in the United States of America, which is about 2 percent of the population, wanted Sharia — which is not the case at all — even if they wanted it, could they impose it over a population of 98 percent who are not Muslim in a democracy?

In my country where I come from, Pakistan, 98 percent of the population is Muslim. There is no Sharia law. I’ve been a commissioner in charge of large parts of the country. Our laws are criminal and civil procedure codes derived from British colonial law which go to Westminster, which in turn has influenced the U.S. Constitution.

So the notion of Sharia being implemented in America with about 2 percent of the population, to me, is mathematically absurd.

(CNN clip via Media Matters Action)

The court battle over the Murfreesboro mosque is in recess until Oct. 20, but its outcome is a foregone conclusion.  The legal arguments presented by opponents of the project — that county officials didn’t provide sufficient public notice during the approval process — are baseless.  The whole sorry episode, much like the inflated controversy over the Park 51 community center in lower Manhattan, is sideshow propaganda from one group of clash-of-civilization types directed at another.  For a sideshow, however, as Glenn Greenwald, Greg Sargent, and Jonathan Chait argued last month, its pursuit could have significant, possibly dire, consequences for America.

Most concerning at present, though, is that Gaffney’s convoluted conspiracy spew, once relegated to the neocon fringe, is now treated as plausible.

Salon’s Joe Conason recalls Gaffney’s 2003 alarmism aimed at prominent conservative Grover Norquist and the Bush administration for “… engagement with Muslim groups that [Gaffney] and others [anti-Park51 crusader Pamela Geller among them] had identified as jihadist or radical.”  Few conservatives paid them any mind back in the day.  ”All that has changed since the inauguraton of a president whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim,” Conason writes, “because he provides a central focus for a politicized campaign against Islam…”

Now, potential 2012 GOP candidates for president seem content to wear their hatred of Islam on their sleeves.  Whether it’s Sarah Palin’s petty invocations of the president’s middle name, or Newt Gingrich’s steadfast adherence to the neocons’ fear mongering message, Islamophobia stands to be a prominent feature on the Republican policy platform for the foreseeable future.

Related on Care2:

• Tenn. Mosque Opponents: “Islam Is Not A Real Religion”
• Mosque That Was Hit By Arson Now Attacked Via Bureaucracy

Related Elsewhere:

• TIMELINE: Nine months of the right’s anti-Muslim bigotry | Media Matters for America
• Confronting Islamophobic Conspiracy Theories | The Plum Line

                          

A gigantic tip of my most enormous hat to Steve Benen and Bill Simmon, whose concept and film-making skills, respectively, resulted in the following clip.

                          

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(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: slagheap, Nicholas Vinacco, Phillip Capper)

I moved into a new apartment last week, and I’ve since noticed that when there are low clouds in the sky, the airplanes out of Logan fly low over my new neighborhood as they depart for wherever. It is cloudy today and I can hear them overhead, roaring by every few minutes, hidden in the gray weather above.

I think about that day when I hear the engines. Of course I do. It was nine years ago, but still, for me, it is the sound of airplane engines that brings it all back, if only for a moment.

Everyone has a story about where they were on that day. One friend of mine, a cook, was buried in the kitchen for the breakfast rush and had no idea what was going on until the orders dried up. He walked out of the kitchen wondering what was going on to find everyone staring dumbstruck at the television. Another friend of mine was working at a brokerage house in San Francisco. He didn’t have a television and liked to listen to music on headphones during his commute to work. He got to work and started calling various extensions at the New York home office in the World Trade Center, but nobody was picking up. It wasn’t until his boss came in and told him what had happened that he realized he had been calling dead people.

I was a teacher, and it was the first day of school. I was the first person in the building to find out what was going on, and I ran around from teacher to teacher letting them know what had happened before hauling two televisions out of the library closet so we could all watch together. I was shattered, but the children were terrified, and so I had to hold myself together and reassure them, even as the sound of fighter jets started roaring overhead. One of my students heard the news and turned white, because her father was supposed to be at a meeting in the Trade Center that morning. He survived, many others did not. That night, I bought a bottle of brown liquor on the way home and drank it off in front of my own television as those images were seared into my memory forever.

When all is said and done, someone once said, there’s nothing left to do or say. There are 300 million versions of this story in America, and billions more around the world. Everyone remembers where they were, and what they were doing, on that day. Give anyone you meet a chance, and they’ll tell you all about it.

Nine years, four national elections, two wars and two presidents since that day, and where are we now as a nation? Broke, deranged and dangerous pretty much sums it up. We have Christian-Taliban pastors in Florida with filthy souls threatening to burn the Qu’ran, as if such an act had any meaning beyond a desire to make money, and a national news media apparatus all too happy to give them all the ink and air time he could ever wish for. We have seething crowds threatening arson and murder because a Muslim community center might get built next to a strip club on the site of a defunct coat store. We have national caricatures like Sarah Palin charging people more than $200 for the chance to meet with her on that day, as if she has any significance at all. We’ve got stabbings and beatings and firebombings, and this is nine years later.

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We are a nation of euphemisms now. It’s not spying on the American people, it is “national security.” It’s not holding someone in a hellhole without charges or trial, it is “indefinite detention.” It’s not kidnapping, it is “extraordinary rendition.” It’s not murder or assassination, it is “targeted killing.” It’s not torture, it is “enhanced interrogation.” It’s not wildly and patently illegal and immoral on its face, it is “war.”

We are a lessened nation nine years later, and much of the damage has been done by our own hand. It is one thing for people to react with fear and rage after an outrageous act of violence. It is quite another for the leaders of those people to exploit that fear and rage for their own dark and greedy purposes, and nine years later, we are down in the ditch thanks to exactly that sort of behavior. Thousands of American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more have been grievously maimed. Millions of civilians in those two countries have been slaughtered or shattered, but we may never know the true scope of the carnage, because “we don’t do body counts.”

It is not all darkness, however, because we also have this, from the second president to take up residence in the White House since that day:

President Obama concluded his press conference today with a statement on the importance of protecting the rights of American Muslims. “We don’t differentiate between them and us,” he said. “It’s just us. And that is a principle that I think is going to be very important for us to sustain.”

Obama was asked about the controversial Park51 Islamic center, and said: “I think I’ve been pretty clear on my position here. And that is: This country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights, and one of those inalienable rights is to practice their religion freely.”

“What that means,” he continued, “is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site.”

“We’ve got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens in this country,” Obama said. “They’re going to school with our kids. They’re our neighbors. They’re our friends. They’re our coworkers. And when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?”

That’s about exactly right, despite the sorry fact that it comes from the same president who has been helpless to refrain from perpetuating – or all too eager to perpetuate – the barbaric and anti-American practices that have become all too commonplace in the nine years since that day. In this, he must not be allowed to lead us, because the grooves of this manner of leadership are too deeply cut into the road for him to easily deviate. In this, we must lead him, and I suspect he will follow if given the chance.

Nine years later, one truth remains: America is an idea, a dream, a hope that has yet to be realized. Take away our people, our cities, our roads, our crops, our armies and navies and bombs and guns, take all of that away and there is still the idea, as vibrant and vital as it was when the Founders first put ink to parchment and changed the world. Everyone you know owns a heritage that began somewhere else; we are all different in so many ways, and all that binds us is the ink on that parchment and the ideas therein contained. We are all our brother’s and sister’s keeper, beholden to one another, all of us children of that idea.

Nine years ago, we were forced into an accounting of how dear that idea is to us, and were found wanting. Nine years later, we still are. The idea deserves better than what we have given to it. We can continue in this fashion, or we can summon within ourselves the will and wisdom to locate those better angels of our nature that are surely there, waiting for us.

Let us try, at least, to locate them, and make them sing. 365 days from now, we will be marking the passage of a decade since that day. What a proper moment to celebrate a new beginning, a renewed focus on how we can dedicate ourselves to the daily creation of that more perfect union we know is possible. What a chance to transform a day of sorrow and hatred into a day of somber recognition of our flaws, our faults, and the boundless possibilities of the idea that is, still, us.

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What Newt Gingrich is trying to say is that Islam, like all religions, has to be responsible for its biggest assholes.

— Senior Religion Correspondant John Oliver regarding Gingrich’s comments likening the organizers of Park 51 community center to “Nazis” putting a “sign next to the Holocaust museum.”

                          

Crossposted from Care2.com ~ Originally published 29 July 2010

President Barack Obama took to the Rose Garden July 19 to urge Congress to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits.  Obama had some harsh words for Republicans regarding their filibuster of the measure, and the minority’s curious advocacy for the failed economic policies of the Bush administration.

From Obama’s remarks (full transcript/video):

I have to say, after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, the same people who didn’t have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn’t offer relief to middle-class Americans like Jim or Leslie or Denise, who really need help.

Thankfully, the Senate cleared the Republican’s procedural bloc the following day, and jobless benefits will soon be restored for 2.5 million jobless Americans.

It’s a win for the Democrats and for the administration, but a temporary one, and if they’re smart, they will continue to feature the tone and content of Obama’s Rose Garden speech.  They should keep the spotlight on Republicans and what has emerged as their economic platform:  Extend the Bush tax cuts of 2001 & 2003 — an initiative which would deprive the government’s balance sheet of $678 billion over the next ten years — while simultaneously screaming about the perils of the budget deficit.

The hypocrisy is apparent; but, more importantly, when Republican lawmakers publicly defend these policies they put their insincerity on display along with their flippant disregard for the facts.  Read on for examples of both.

Falsehood #1 – Republican Politicians Are Worried About the Deficit

Keep in mind that the budget deficit ranks as a top concern for both Democrats and Republicans when either finds themselves in the minority.  However, the present field of GOP officeholders and hopefuls has brought an unprecedented level of disingenuousness to this time honored political tradition.

Matt Yglesias made it plain within his fourth installment of “Conservatives Don’t Care About The Deficit.”

…there are zero historical examples of conservatives mobilizing to make the deficit smaller. What is true is that most conservatives oppose increases in non-military spending when those increases are proposed by Democratic presidents. A minority of conservatives are more consistent opponents of increases in non-military spending. But the key element of conservative fiscal policy is that tax revenue as a percent of GDP should be made as low as possible. This isn’t a goal they pursue that stands in some kind of balance with concern about the deficit, it’s the only goal they pursue…

Barry Ritholtz offered some particularly stinging commentary regarding “these new deficit chickenhawks” within his July 13 post.  Ritholtz raises an important question:  would those preaching austerity to the Obama administration have said the same to Reagan?

The current president, who obviously has very different priorities than RR, is in many ways following his path: Huge deficits, tax cuts targeted to his electoral base, allowing policies of his predecessor to expire.

I find it terribly amusing that some conservatives have latched onto the deficit as their key issue, when they took the idea of deficit spending to great new heights! Whether you are looking at the economic policies of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, reining in the deficit was clearly of no concern. (Forget speechifying, I refer to actual policies).

Having already weighed in on conservatives’ misplaced reverence for Reaganomics, I won’t bother with it here.

Bush’s economic policies, however, were largely emulative of Reagan’s, and are doubly relevant.   First, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have contributed greatly to America’s budgetary woes.  Second, “the new deficit chickenhawks” have flatly misrepresented the economic impact Bush tax cuts in order to rail against Obama, whose administration is tasked with cleaning up Bush’s mess.

Falsehood #2 – Bush Tax Cuts Increased Revenue, Paid For Themselves:

This particular falsehood is exhibited in various forms.  Perhaps the most vivid of these comes from Fox Business Channel; the Republican propaganda outfit’s “Largest Tax Hike Ever” countdown clock is representative of the GOP’s argument that the Bush tax cuts should be extended.  But this is generally in line with the rest of Fox’s “news” products:  Flashy, yet fictional.  More significant are the claims which have recently spewed from the politicians, themselves.

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) articulated the argument June 11, claiming that unemployment benefits are a “necessary evil” which must be paid for by cutting spending or raising taxes.  When asked the following day how an extension of the Bush tax cuts should be paid for, Kyl responded, “My view, and I think most of the people in my party don’t believe that you should ever have to offset a tax cut …”

That this is a commonly held belief among Republicans was confirmed by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during a July 13 press conference (via TPMDC, emphasis added):

“That’s been the majority Republican view for some time,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told TPMDC this afternoon after the weekly GOP press conference. “That there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”

Not so, says economist and Times columnist Paul Krugman.  Justifiably dismayed by McConnell’s assertions, Krugman published a couple of relevant blog posts –  “Invincible Ignorance,” July 13 and “Carter, Reagan, Revenue,” July 15 — dispelling the ‘tax cuts increase revenue’ claim.

Following the Bush tax cuts, Krugman explains, there was a predictable drop in government revenue which regained its ascent as the economy grew.  After bottoming out, revenue never caught up to what had been the projections had the tax cuts not been enacted.

Krugman’s blog posts culminated in his Friday Times column, “Redo that Voodoo,” invoking the phrase coined by George H.W. Bush while campaigning against Reagan for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination:

Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the [housing] crash.

But we’re talking about voodoo economics here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that belief in the magical powers of tax cuts is a zombie doctrine: no matter how many times you kill it with facts, it just keeps coming back. And despite repeated failure in practice, it is more than ever, the official view of the G.O.P.

Krugman stresses that our present economic predicament, while serious, is not yet a crisis, thanks, in part, to “the perception that the deficit is manageable has helped keep U.S. borrowing costs low.”  Should Republicans make significant electoral gains in 2010, and should they attempt to put their talking points into practice, Krugman warns, a fiscal crisis is exactly what we’ll have.

I’ve included a relevant clip from the Rachel Maddow Show below, but if you’re interested in reading more about the history of voodoo, supply side, trickle down, or whatever you want to call it, economics, here are a few solid links:

• Hale “Bonddad” Stewart, “The Stupidity and Hypocrisy of the Austerity Movement,” fivethirtyeight.com, 18 July 2010. - Stewart provides a brief history of both, the deficit and the austerity movement, and concludes, among other things, that the GOP’s deficit alarmism is purely political.
• Mike Kimmel, “Presidents, the Tax Burden, and Economic Growth,” presimetrics.com, 13 June 2010 – Kimmel provides a dispassionate, data driven analysis of how the tax policies of Democrats and Republicans have impacted economic growth.  Kimmel’s results may surprise you.
• Thom Hartmann, “Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years,” CommonDreams.org, 26 January 2009 - When Paul Krugman mentioned, “flirting with crisis was arguably part of the [Republican] plan,” this is what he was talking about.  Hartmann traces the history of the supply-side, “starve the beast” Republican strategy to just after Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential run.  As I noted in a relevant post from last year:

“Two Santa Clause” theory, Hartmann explains, was constructed as a means to consolidate Republican power.  Briefly stated, its adherents reasoned that Republicans could cut taxes, increase spending, and increase government revenue in the process.  If successful, the only way Democrats could counter would be to argue for higher taxes, effectively ‘shooting a Santa Clause.’

                          

(Image: City Lights Publishers)

The late Howard Zinn’s new book “The Bomb” is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society. Those who’ve read “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. know that this is a year for publishing the stories of horrible things that the United States has done to French towns. In that case, Albarelli, describes the CIA administering LSD to an entire town, with deadly results. In “The Bomb,” Zinn describes the U.S. military making its first use of napalm by dropping it all over another French town, burning anyone and anything it touched. Zinn was in one of the planes, taking part in this horrendous crime.

In mid-April 1945, the war in Europe was essentially over. Everyone knew it was ending. There was no military reason (if that’s not an oxymoron) to attack the Germans stationed near Royan, France, much less to burn the French men, women, and children in the town to death. The British had already destroyed the town in January, similarly bombing it because of its vicinity to German troops, in what was widely called a tragic mistake. This tragic mistake was rationalized as an inevitable part of war, just as were the horrific firebombings that successfully reached German targets, just as was the later bombing of Royan with napalm. Zinn blames the Supreme Allied Command for seeking to add a “victory” in the final weeks of a war already won. He blames the local military commanders’ ambitions. He blames the American Air Force’s desire to test a new weapon. And he blames everyone involved — which must include himself — for “the most powerful motive of all: the habit of obedience, the universal teaching of all cultures, not to get out of line, not even to think about that which one has not been assigned to think about, the negative motive of not having either a reason or a will to intercede.”

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When Zinn returned from the war in Europe, he expected to be sent to the war in the Pacific, until he saw and rejoiced at seeing the news of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 65 years ago this August. Only years later did Zinn come to understand the inexcusable crime of the greatest proportions that was the dropping of nuclear bombs in Japan, actions similar in some ways to the final bombing of Royan. The war with Japan was already over, the Japanese seeking peace and willing to surrender. Japan asked only that it be permitted to keep its emperor, a request that was later granted. But, like napalm, the nuclear bombs were weapons that needed testing. The second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was a different sort of bomb that also needed testing. President Harry Truman wanted to demonstrate nuclear bombs to the world and especially to Russia. And he wanted to end the war with Japan before Russia became part of it. The horrific form of mass murder he employed was in no way justifiable.

Zinn also goes back to dismantle the mythical reasons the United States was in the war to begin with. The United States, England, and France were imperial powers supporting each other’s international aggressions in places like the Philippines. They opposed the same from Germany and Japan, but not aggression itself. Most of America’s tin and rubber came from the Southwest Pacific. The United States made clear for years its lack of concern for the Jews being attacked in Germany. It also demonstrated its lack of opposition to racism through its treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt described fascist bombing campaigns over civilian areas as “inhuman barbarity” but then did the same on a much larger scale to German cities, which was followed up by the destruction on an unprecedented scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — actions that came after years of dehumanizing the Japanese. Zinn points out that “LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: ‘This is the only way.’” Aware that the war would end without any more bombing, and aware that U.S. prisoners of war would be killed by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the U.S. military went ahead and dropped the bombs.

Americans allowed these things to be done in their name, just as the Germans and Japanese allowed horrible crimes to be committed in their names. Zinn points out, with his trademark clarity, how the use of the word “we” blends governments together with peoples and serves to equate our own people with our military, while we demonize the people of other lands because of actions by their governments. “The Bomb” suggest a better way to think about such matters and firmly establishes that:

• What the U.S. military is doing now, today, parallels the crimes of the past and shares their dishonorable motivations;
• the bad wars have a lot in common with the so-called “good war,” about which there was little if anything good;
• Howard Zinn did far more in his life for peace than for war, and more for peace than just about anybody else, certainly more than several Nobel Peace Prize winners.

This piece originally appeared on WarisaCrime.org.

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Only 13 percent of you all out there think I’m doing a good job. So [expletive] all of you.

That’s right!  Blago told me and all of my fellow Illinoisans to go f#ck ourselves.  I still can’t believe I voted for that douchebag – (sigh) – twice.

That said, the walking, talking embarrassment that is Blago was still preferable to the alternative.

                          

I had occasion to link to some of Rodda’s latest work in my July 8 Care2 post:

For much, much more regarding Barton’s crimes against history be sure to check out the extensive works ofTalk to Action blogger (and also at The Huffington Post) Chris Rodda, Senior Researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the author of Liars for Jesus:  The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.  Rodda’s “No, Mr. Beck…” series is instructive for understanding Barton’s tactics; like misrepresenting the work of actual academics in order to suggest that the Constitution was based on the Book of Deuteronomy, or cropping a quote from John Adams in order to claim that the second American President thought “Governments must be administered by the holy ghost.”  (Sigh…)

Barton, clearly, has no shame.  And as you’ll see in the clip from the July 8 Countdown broadcast, he is in serious need of some fashion advice.  (I know… It’s a petty observation. But that  jacket is tragic.)