The Next Hurrah

Just once, the truth?

By Meteor Blades

Tomorrow, Mister Bush, I've planned to put as much distance as possible between myself and any device capable of carrying your image or voice. The sorrow and rage I feel every time I see one of your calculatedly stumble-tongue performances is bad enough. I usually pay attention anyway, since one never knows when you might announce the start of another war or two. But during the remembrance of the day on which "everything changed," no way will I listen to you sanctify five years of international outlawry, torture and slaughter on the blood of those who died in Manhattan, Washington and Shanksville on September 11.

In the PR run-up to the Fifth Anniversary (and, of course, to the November elections), you've pummeled us with your "war on terror" prattle from the Salt Palace, the Capitol Hilton, the East Room, the Cobb Galleria Centre, and wherever the hell it is you tape your Saturday radio addresses.  I feel like the guy who fell onto the conveyor belt at the sledge hammer testing center. So, when I heard you would be visiting the three attack-site memorials on Monday but not giving speeches at any of them, I feeblemindedly hallelujahed that your handlers had chosen to exhibit a sliver of mercy, to let us keep one day untainted to do our mourning and meditating without encountering your bad imitation of a nuclear-armed Lonesome Rhodes. A single day with the conveyor belt off. Thank gawd for a small favor.

Which was soon scrogged by the announcement that you would deliver a televised Nine-Eleven address from the Oval Office. No surprise. The one thing I've been able to depend on since January 20, 2001, is that whenever I catch the slimmest glimmer of hope, you or one of your mentors or minions soon will trample it.

Only one speech would I listen to on Monday, Mister Bush: Your confession.

Global Warming Walk: Five Qs&As with Bill McKibben

By Meteor Blades

I sure wish I were in Vermont this week. I could join writer/environmentalist/deep thinker Bill McKibben and whoever else shows up for a four-day walk seeking to kindle federal action against global warming.

Billed as "The Road Less Traveled, Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future," the march will begin Thursday noon at Robert Frost's old writing cabin near Ripton, stop in cities along the way for Conversations on the Green, and end 43 miles up the road in Burlington. Knowing McKibben's work and the kind of people he attracts, I imagine those are going to be eye-opening conversations for participants and bystanders alike, a traveling teach-in, if you will. You can get a taste of this in my five-question interview with McKibben below.

Many, I know, downplay the value of a public demonstration, even public action of any kind outside the realm of lawsuits and legislation. Sooooo '60s, they say. Doesn't work anymore. If it ever really did. I couldn't disagree more. Perhaps the reason people say this comes from their being so comprehensively saturated with a megamedia caricature of the era. They don't believe most or any of what the megamedia tells them about the times they themselves live in, but they accept as gospel what's been told them regarding one of the periods of greatest social change since the Civil War.

The public intellectuals and other activists who spurred that change worked inside and outside the governing system, using whatever megaphone seemed proper at the moment to capture public attention and increase the pressure on public policy. What you mostly hear about that era today is the media-mediated version, a distorted fraction of the story. That's not my way of trying to sanctify the "protest" movements or say that we made no mistakes, no strategic blunders, or engaged in no counterproductive activism. Surely, we did more than enough of that and were paid for it with half-victories and outright defeats, some of them long-lasting. But, please, most of the focus, even most of the public events, had nothing to do grubby street demonstrations.

Is You Is, Mister Bush? Or Is You Ain't?

By Meteor Blades

Could you just tell me now, please? Are you going to blow up Iran? If so, are you going to do it before November 7?

Or not?

Are you waking up and staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night agonizing? Or are you sleeping straight through as a result of having already decided one way or the other? Because, frankly, sir, I'm tossing and turning. A couple of nights ago, I lay in a cold sweat, thinking about you and what you're thinking about Iran. So, tell me already. Is you is? Or is you ain't?

There's this fellow named Atrios who also says he "...can't really figure out what the administration is doing with Iran. Maybe there's a master plan, maybe the crazies are all fighting for control in the background, maybe there's nothing going on."

Short of telling me directly, I don't suppose you'd give me Judith Miller's old security clearance so I can poke around on my own? Better yet, forget the security clearance and just have Dick Cheney perform his instant declassification magic? (No forgeries, please.)

Dems Cannot Afford to Be Silent on Iran's Refusal

By Meteor Blades

Even before Tehran was (perhaps) emboldened by Hezb'allah's (Pyrrhic) success against Israel in southern Lebanon, it seemed clear that it would not give in to the Security Council's soft-edged ultimatum that expires August 31. Sure enough, today, hours ahead of Iran's self-imposed deadline, the reply came, not from President Ahmadinejad, who is apparently too busy with his new blog, but from the real boss:

Khamenei: No letup on Iran nuclear program

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest authority, said on Monday the Islamic Republic had decided to press ahead with its pursuit of nuclear energy, suggesting Iran will not heed a U.N. demand to stop enriching uranium.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has made its decision and, in the issue of nuclear energy, will continue its path powerfully ... and it will receive the sweet fruits of its efforts," Khamenei said on state television, Reuters reported.

Punctuating this announcement was another:

Seize My Gatorade. Ignore My Semtex.

By Meteor Blades

I didn't think about gel-filled shoe heels when the government tightened the latest air travel rules after the Brits made everybody's eyes go round with their raids and arrests on Thursday. Lousy consumer that I am, I didn't even know there was such a thing as gel-filled heels. Little cushions. Will wonders never cease?

No matter, while hair gel is now banned from carry-on luggage, you're still allowed to wear your gel-heels. They'll get the same treatment as all shoes from now on - off your feet and onto the conveyor belt for an X-ray screening. Apparently, the amount of explosive gel that can be contained in a couple of shoe heels isn't enough to bring down a passenger jet.

These new rules don't upset me. I'm all for "better safe than sorry." On the other hand, while I'm being deprived of carrying my preferred swill and my eye drops into the passenger compartment, a clever terrorist can still ship a crate full of explosives in the cargo hold beneath me because the Republican-controlled Congress won't pass the Safe Skies Cargo Inspection Act.

The fear being amplified by the pundithuggery this weekend about the liquid-bombs-in-the-sky plot has forced me several times these past few days to put the wet-vac to work sucking up the deluge of sludge pouring from our television onto the living room carpet. That and the fecal scribblings of the New McCarthyists about "Defeatocrats" and the Dems' "Taliban wing" and how we're all terror-symps has spurred me to stop paying attention to the megamedia for the rest of the weekend. If I wanted this kind of ferocious spew, I could just stick V for Vendetta in the DVD player and watch John Hurt do his number.

Speaking from experience, Billy boy?

By Meteor Blades

Selecting the contemptible, feeble, outrageous, inaccurate, intellectually destitute, villainous, morally upsidedown, false, stupid or depraved comments that emerge from the mouth of Bill O'Reilly on the Foxaganda label is a turkey shoot. Pick a date. Any date. Bullseye. Olbermann does it and Mike Stark does it and so do the folks at this site and this one.

For August 2, Billy boy managed to combine all those categories into one typical scurrilous comment, condescendingly delivered in his faux homespun imitation of Lonesome Rhodes. I had missed the broadcast, but it was captured by those fine deconstructors over at Media Matters:

Yet Another Evil Tale of Rendition and Torture

By Meteor Blades

Since the megamedia began their belated awakening, it's become an all-too-familiar horror story. Police show up at the door, arrest a family member, drive somewhere and hand their prisoner over to often-masked English-speakers who transport him to a secret location where he is held incommunicado for months or years, during which he is tortured in various ways. If he survives - he may not - he is released without apology or explanation, or transferred from prison to prison, or carted off to Guantánamo for an extended stay. Or, as happened in Italy three years ago, U.S. intelligence agents collaborate with their foreign counterparts to kidnap the fellow right off the streets and fly him wherever they like: Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Thailand, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe.

Rendition. How many of these cases there are we may never know.

The New York Times reports on another one this morning:

[An Algerian named Laid Saidi who was living in Tanzania] is one of a handful of men to publicly claim they were seized in the [U.S.] rendition program and then mistreated or tortured, before being released without charge or explanation. Like prisoners released from the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, they represent not only a mounting political problem, but a potential legal problem for the United States and its allies that have participated in the extrajudicial abductions.

After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.

Bin Laden and al-Zarkawi: 'Loathing at First Sight'

By Meteor Blades

The Associated Press (via CNN.com) is reporting that Abu Musab al-Zarkawi's first wife says he was set up by al-Qaeda in a deal with Washington:

Meanwhile, al-Zarqawi's wife told an Italian newspaper that al Qaeda leaders sold him out to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden.

The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife, said al Qaeda's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al Zarqawi had become too powerful.

She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal.

"My husband has been sold to the Americans," the woman said in an interview published Sunday. "He had become too powerful, too troublesome."

She was identified only as "Um Mohammed," which means "mother of Mohammed" and would be a nickname, not her full name.

The Rome-based newspaper said the interview was conducted in Geneva and described her as Jordanian and about 40 years old.

'It's a number.' Saying the Names of the 2500

By Meteor Blades

In 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson set the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Not coincidentally, it was the same weekend that twenty of us chose to read aloud the list of the American dead in Vietnam from the steps of the state capitol building in Denver. There were, at the time, 5000 dead from that murderous, useless war, dating from December 1961 by Army count. Nine Father's Days later, there would be nearly a dozen times as many. On that cusp-of-summer weekend, forty years ago, one name I read out was of my close high school friend: Manny Miller, aged 19, killed in action October 19, 1965.

Today, we reached another "milestone" in Iraq. Twenty-five hundred American military personnel have died or been killed, every one of them thanks to the avarice, cold-blooded ruthlessness and corrupt ineptitude of the Bush Regime. Of the 2500 dead, White House press secretary Tony Snow said today: It's a number."

Proving what a perfect spokesman he is for the chickenhawks who concocted this war and murdered the 2500 as surely as if they made them kneel with their thumbs tied behind their backs and personally beheaded them. The Bush Regime would surely prefer these 2500 to be just "a number." Nameless statistics. Known only to their friends and kin, not the wider community of America whose future and freedom they were supposedly sent off to kill and die for.

Speaking the names of these dead men and women will not end the war in Iraq, nor American involvement in it, anymore than did our read-out of names in 1966. More than symbolic activism is required. But some things are worth doing regardless. So, on this Father's Day, I and five friends will publicly pronounce the 2500 names of the American dead from this list below. Plus however many more are dead by then.

A Thousand #@@@#%!!&#*@!! Days

By Meteor Blades

A little later than this time tomorrow evening, George W. Bush - or, as I used to call him before I reacquired my childhood manners, Dubyanocchio - will have 1000 days left to botch, bash and butcher whatever he didn't get his hands on in the first 1920 days of his term as President. One thousand days to redistribute to his pals what they haven't already snatched. Keith Olbermann can begin a real countdown.

1000 days.
Cripes. I could, if I wished, begin collecting retirement benefits from Social Security before Mister Bush's scheduled departure. The very system he tried to shove down the slippery slope to destruction as his first domestic priority in 2002. Before he's out of the Oval Office, I'll also be eligible to get into a movie for a 25% discount, which is a good thing because who knows what the Decider's decisions may do to my family's income or the economy in general over the next 1000 days.

1000 days. Twenty-four thousand hours. One million, four hundred-forty million minutes. Eight-six million, four hundred-thousand seconds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Sigh.