Romney grants rights to foreigners that he denies to Americans

The juxtaposition of two stories on the front page of today's Oneonta Daily Star caught my eye: "Romney declares Jerusalem capital of Jewish state" and "Area gun enthusiasts take aim at critics."

The latter was the usual mainstream media story run in the aftermath of a mass shooting tragedy in which interviewees claimed that we didn't need more gun restrictions. It's shocking that the group interviewed, participants at a southern New York gun show, would come to that conclusion. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has agreed with this position.

The former was a story about Romney's visit to Israel. There, Romney said he would back an Israeli military aggression to knock out Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, which played well with the militaristic government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Republican said that Israel had the 'right' to live next to a non-nuclear Iran.


At home, conservatives claim that everybody being armed makes things *more* safe.

Abroad, they claim that everybody being armed makes things *less* safe.

They need to pick a propaganda line and stick with it.

Additionally, Romney is claiming that Israelis have the 'rights' to live next to an unarmed neighbor and to aggressively disarm their neighbor to achieve that 'right.'

But he denies that Americans don't have any such rights.

Why does Romney claim a right for foreigners that he denies to Americans?

What country is Romney running to lead?

Update: One gun enthusiast interviewed in The Daily Star piece noted "In a free society, you are going to have crazies and there is no way to stop them." Can you imagine a conservative agreeing with that statement if the word 'crazies' was preceded by the word 'Islamist'?

Liars and the lies militarists tell

So let me get this straight. In 1979, militarists in the US said we needed to impose an arms embargo against the theocratic regime in Iran. By 1986, they were saying we needed to sell arms to theocratic Iran, in violation of the embargo they demanded, so we could use the money to destabilize Central America. Now, the militarists who armed theocratic Iran saying we need to launch some sort of aggression against them, to use that Orwellian phrase, in order to 'preserve peace' because... they allegedly won't disarm. Why exactly would anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills still be listening to these people?

Iran not a threat to Israel, but olive trees are

The former head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet has denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Deputy PM Ehud Barak for misleading the public on the threat posed by Iran and for having their feelings clouded by "messianic judgment." He also said that "I don't have faith in the current leadership of Israel to lead us in an event of this magnitude."

A few days earlier, the current head of the Israeli armed forces also veered from the militaristic Script and said he doubts Iran will really try to build a nuclear bomb. He rightly described the Iranian regime as vile but not suicidal.

I assume both of these men are anti-Semitic and hope for the death of the Israeli state, like we're told all critics of the Israeli government's policies supposedly are.

Meanwhile, fanatical settlers launched an operation against an apparent grave threat to their security: olive trees. Or perhaps their real enemy is rationality and civilized behavior.

Update: Former justice and foreign minister Tzipi Livni recently resigned Israel's Knesset (parliament) denouncing the country's leadership. She said that the 'existential threat' to Jewish state comes not from Iran but from Israel's own government.

Who said it: Khamenei or Santorum?

Foreign Policy magazine had an interesting little quiz: quotes from Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former US senator Rick Santorum. You had to figure out whether the comments were made by by the leader of Iran's theocracy or the Republican presidential candidate.

The media's complicity in the rush to war against Iran

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has an article about the militaristic establishment's preparations for another military aggression, this time against Iran, and the media's complicity with this insanity.

The below graphic lists the dozens of US military bases in the region that surrounds Iran (the country in blue in the middle), thus showing how Iran is a threat to America.

Iran, Honduras, Niger and the knee jerks

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

ZNet has a good piece critiquing leftist knee-jerk reaction to the popular uprising in Iran. Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi may be no progressive, having been the Ayatollah Khomeni's prime minister for most of the 1980s. The mere fact that the religious elite allowed him to be on the ballot in the first places means that he was never going to be a transformational figure.

And there is some question whether international reporting is overstating the extent of the protests because they seem concentrated in large cities and done by people with access to Twitter and cell phone cameras. By most accounts, the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains popular in the more conservative rural areas.

But it seems clear that the discontent is real, legitimate and home grown. And it also seems clear that the politicians, Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, have become almost incidental to the uprising and that the entire theocratic system is being called into question. The brutal overreaction of the system's forces of disorder seems to back up the wounded bear theory.

If the mostly secular western left can't support group of liberal minded citizens rising up against the oppression of a regressive, hypernationalistic conservative theocracy, then who can it support?

(Who knew that left-wing media whore Hugo Chavez was such a fan of conservative religious states? Then again, the cult of personality Chavez has erected around himself has some distinctly messianic characteristics)

Sadly, this seems to bolster my contention that some of the left are entirely preoccupied with who and what they're against, rather than who and what they are for.

And speaking of bloody power grabs, ZNet also has a good analysis of the illegal military coup in Honduras that exiled left-wing president Manuel Zelaya. Both Chavez and President Obama have denounced the coup. Since the knee jerks don't have independent thoughts of their own, I wonder how they'll react.

Though Ethan over at My Heart's in Accra blog ponders why the protests in Iran and the coup in Honduras got a wildly different international reaction than the coup in Niger. Then again, yellow cake controversies aside, the CIA has historically played little role in Niger so the knee jerks don't have a template, democracy and human rights not being a real factor for them.

Which coups count?

Ethan at My Heart's in Accra muses on the wildly differing international reaction to the protests in Iran, the coup in Honduras and coup in Niger.

Obama and Iran

President Obama's handling of the Iran uprising has been very tricky. Not surprisingly, the US far right is not happy with his approach. Though it is heartening to see these people stand in solidarity with modern young liberals fighting against a conservative theocracy that wishes to control every aspect of people's private lives. I'm sure the irony will be lost on them.

US meddling in Iran is what helped cause the theocratic revolution in the first place. The CIA-engineered coup which removed Iran's last democratically leader and installed a repressive absolute monarch may have been all the way back in 1953, but it's seared into the Iranian national consciousness... especially when the US lectures on democracy. That makes this situation particularly tricky.

I've been critical of Obama on many things but he's struck the right tone here. Iran's de facto leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his allies are desperately to paint the uprising in nationalist tones. They are trying to characterize it as being provoked by evil foreigners rather than acknowledging what it really is: oppressed people standing up for themselves against a repressive religious elite.

So far, the theocrats' line hasn't stuck because Obama has criticized the repression without taking sides in the electoral dispute. He is putting his vanity aside in order to not screw things up. That's how real leaders act. They are more concerned with the right outcome than the praise of the ninnies. If the last eight years have shown us anything, a leader without followers is no leader at all.

The second Obama takes the militarists, he hands the initiative to the theocratic oppressors by essentially validating their criticism and in turn discrediting the opposition. There's a reason most of the criticism of Obama's approach is coming from the US far right rather than from the Iranian opposition themselves. One side wants freedom to prevail. The other is more interested in Obama failing if they can't get the war they want. One side actually has to live up close and personal with the consequences of what ends up happening. The other will just sit in their comfortable air conditioned houses and wait for the next crisis to ignorantly beat their chests about and formulate war propaganda.

Only a few weeks ago, Obama's secretary of state green-lighted an unprovoked Israeli military attack on Iran. This followed on the heels of years of by both the Obama and Bush administrations to isolate Iran for pursuing what it calls a civilian nuclear energy program; attempts designed to pave the way for just such a military aggression.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will expand the sensible approach he's taken to the Iranian electoral dispute or whether he will revert back to the kind of belligerent arrogance that has disastrously fostered anti-Americanism all around the world and ultimately cost hundreds of thousands American lives.

Obama is right to reject appeasement of the militarists and focus instead of the success of freedom and democracy. Let's hope he continues this in all areas of his foreign policy.

Fanatics: they're not just for Republicans anymore

Hillary Clinton has decided to prop up her floundering coronation march by trying to out-Bush John McCain. The New York senator recently promised to 'obliterate' Iran if they tried 'launching an attack on Israel.'

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," AFP quoted the senator.

No, she doesn't specify what kind of attack would meet her standard. Would bombing raids on Tel Aviv and, say, kidnapping an Israeli sailor at sea both meet Clinton's threshold for launching a nuclear holocaust?

And yes, that's the same Israel that has a nuclear arsenal of its own as well as the region's most powerful and well-funded military.

But heaven forbid you criticize Clinton's militarism or anything else about her slimy campaign. It's okay to attack McCain's fetish for perpetual war as reckless and a frightening trait in someone in charge of this country's nuclear arsenal. But apparently it's sexist to ask the same question of Clinton.

And the winner of the Iraq Aggression is...

What does it say that every time G. Walker Bush or R. Bruce Cheney or J. Sidney McCain or the War Secretary of the day goes to Iraq, it's secretive, unannounced and cocooned by a massive security detail.

But when the nutjob in charge of Iran pays a visit to Baghdad, it's a very public, grandiose state visit.

How is this possible?

According to some, the "Surge" has made the country a near paradise. One has to ask: the country or the Green Zone?

Those who actually risk their lives to go to Iraq see a different picture than the ideologues.

So not only has this Aggression been disastrous in human terms (mostly Iraqi, of course), in terms of the physical destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and in terms of the defraying of Iraqi society, but the Aggression has destroyed our own influence and credibility (even in the eyes those we claim to have 'liberated') while dramatically increasing the influence and credibility of those we call not just the Enemy, but Evil.

Anyone with an ounce of understanding of human nature knew this was always going to be the case. But such people have not been running this country for some time.

Ahmadinejad can have a grandiose state visit. Bush has to slink in and out under cover of darkness. Does this sound anything like the portrait of a 2008 Iraq that the militarists presented us back in the day? I thought they'd be giving Bush flowers and kissing his feet.


5 years.

Over 500,000,000,000 of our tax dollars wasted.

Nearly 4000 American soldiers have lost their lives to help accomplish all of the above.

And oh by the way, an estimated 150,000 Iraqi civilians have died during the "Liberation." Some estimates are much higher. But there are at least 80,000 that have actually been documented.

What have the results been?

-The myth of a Saddam-al Qaeda link has been discredited;

-Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction, just like pre-war critics such as the much-smeared Scott Ritter and Hans Blix insisted. (You'll remember that all the 'evidence' of the WMD program presented by the militarists in 2003 dated from 1998 and earlier);

-The Middle East is now far more unstable because of the refugee crisis provoked by the Aggression;

-The number of acts of and deaths from terrorism has skyrocketed since the Aggression was launched in 2003. In fact, the rate of deaths due to terrorism has gone up ten-fold since the Aggression was launched;

-The massive flow of refugees out of Iraq into countries like Jordan and Syria demonstrates that living conditions in Iraq are more desperate than even under a genocidal autocrat.

And ultimately, this is the most damning fact of all because it represents the decisions made by people who are most affected by what the US government has done, by the forces it's unleashed. It represents decisions made by people whose lives we claimed we wanted to improve.

Millions of Iraqis have made the agonizing decision to leave their homeland because of the mess we've created.

Despite the b.s. coming out of some people's mouthes, many hundreds of thousands of people have concluded that they feel safer in an Outpost of Tyranny than in 'Liberated' Iraq.

After all this, it's clear that aside from this country's biggest welfare recipients ("defense" contractors), the biggest winner of the Aggression has clearly been Iran.

And it's even clearer who the losers have been.

The real winner of the Iraq invasion

Who's the real winner of the US aggression against Iraq? According to most observers including The Christian Science Monitor, the winner was Iran, a country routinely condemned by the Bush administration as a threat to every planet in the cosmos.

An illustration: when President Bush goes to Iraq, it's usually secretive, slinking in under the cover of darkness and never leaving the relative security of the Green Zone. Usually these visits are short, because of security fears. This despite the fact that US forces and its allies supposedly control the country.

Iran's president was given the very public pomp and circumstance traditionally associated with state visits. The Iranian leader even felt comfortable enough to travel overland to Baghdad's airport to the presidential palace, a trip that nearly all other dignitaries take by helicopter.

The standard line is that the United States 'liberated' Iraq from tyranny. But if that's really the case, how come Iraqis aren't more grateful?

Or maybe Iraqis know what Americans, well-known to be willfully ignorant (or self-deceptive) about human nature, choose not to see: the main thing that's happened in Iraq is the swapping of one form of tyranny for another.

Prankster nearly provokes US-Iranian conflict

Earlier this month, you may have noticed sensational stories about alleged threats made by the Iranian authorities on American naval vessels. Many were skeptical of the official accounts, simply because a) the Bush administration has no credibility left and b) most people know they are trying to contrive some fake pretext to fabricate a military confrontation with Iran.

Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! contends that the media was complicit in helping make this molehill into a mountain.

It turns out that whole 'incident' may have been provoked by a prankster.

A well-known prankster, apparently.

The Navy Times quoted Rick Hoffman, a retired captain, as saying a renegade talker repeatedly harassed ships in the Gulf in the late 1980s.
"For 25 years there's been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats," he said. "He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship," Hoffman said, reported the Associated Press.

The fact that an apparent prank could nearly provoke a military confrontation between a US administration desperate for one and Iran is pointed illustration of just how irrational and dangerously out of control the fanatics in the White House are.

Britain to go nuclear

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -Theodore Roosevelt

It's no secret that the Bush administration is hell bent on inventing pretexts for a military confrontation with Iran. This is cause for great concern. When two belligerent, theocratically-based regimes of different sects collide, the results are rarely pretty.

The main fake pretext for militaristic posturing against Iran is that country's nuclear program, which it claims is designed to provide energy to its exploding population. Washington counters that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. I'm not sure if this is true but even if it is, can you blame them? Nuclear weapons are the only proven deterrence to Bush administration belligerence. Contrast the different fates of Iraq and North Korea.

That the nuclear question is a fake pretext is pretty transparent. Take the British government recent decision to give the green light to a new generation of nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom. They even tried to couch it in environmentalism by invoking green buzzphrases.

Britain's energy minister told Parliament: "Nuclear power has provided us with safe and secure supplies of electricity for half a century. It is one of the very few proven low carbon technologies which can provide baseload electricity. Nuclear power currently provides us with around 19% of our electricity. Nuclear power will help us meet our twin energy challenges - ensuring secure supplies and tackling climate change."

In fact, the minister said that limiting the amount of power produced via the nuclear route "would not be consistent with [Britain's] long term national interest."

This drew no reaction at all from Washington.

It's in Britain's national interest that it have nuclear power but a threat to world peace if Iran does.

It's in America's national interest that it have nuclear weapons but a threat to world peace if Iran might... even though the only country ever to use nuclear weapons against a civilian population was not Iran, but America.

And yet many are still under the delusion that "they hate us because we're free."

Whew! I'm glad it's not the hypocrisy.


Aside: this really raises an interesting question. Pro-gun types contend that if everyone had a gun (or several), the world would be safer because there would be so much 'deterrence' from reckless or aggressive use. According to this logic, wouldn't it stand to reason that the world would be safer if every country had nuclear weapons?

Iran has no nuclear program: US intelligence

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -Theodore Roosevelt

In a devastating blow to neo-conservative militarists desperate to invade yet another country, US intelligence agencies have conclude that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program way back in 2003. This despite the fact that Vice-President Dick Cheney and other belligerents have spent the last two years fanatically to whip up another round of war hysteria to support an aggression against Iran. This report surely won't stop their efforts. They've never been deterred by reality in the past. But hopefully the public, already burnt by having believed the deceit about Iraq, won't bite again.


Update: To the surprise of no one, the Bush administration (author of wars that have destabilized two regions) is trying to spin the report to suggest that Iran still remains a threat to global security. But by now, their credibility is nil. This administration has been deceitful for so long that they no longer know how to recognize or tell the truth. The fake FEMA press conference is a great example. By most accounts, FEMA did a GOOD job in the San Diego fires recovery. They didn't need to lie or deceive. But the habits have become so ingrained in the Bush administration that they simply don't know any other way anymore. And that's why no one believes a word they say anymore.

Contrived hysteria about Ahmadinejad's visit

Militarists were cackling with glee about the visit of Iran's president to New York for a United Nations' meeting. They were ecstatic because it gave them an excuse to ratchet up their demonization of the "Hitler of the Middle East" (this week's version) to unprecedented levels.

Their incessant attacks against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, punctuated by waves of manufactured righteous indignation, are the latest effort in laying the ground work for the military attack against Iran that the militarists have for several years longed for.

Some like to disingenuously claim that progressives are in love with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It probably doesn't help that leftist icon (in some people's eyes) Hugo Chavez has gotten in bed with the Iranian leader. That an atheistic socialist can make nice with a theocratic hyperconservative says as much about the shallowness of their ideological pretenses as their egomania.

But for the most part, the moderate left recognizes that a theocrat is a theocrat and that they are all a threat to rational societies.

I hear people in this country say stuff like, "Nuke 'em all and let Allah sort 'em out." There isn't a dime's worth of difference between people with that mentality, some of whom hold high ranking positions in this administration, and Ahmadinejad's calls to wipe Israel off the map.

Make no mistake about it, Ahmadinejad is a populist demagogue. Does he bearing watching? Absolutely. Should his calls for Israel's annihilation be condemned? Without question. Is he "Hitler of the Middle East"? Give me a break.

Militarists went into full-scale contrived hysteria mode when Columbia University invited Ahmadinejad to speak there. Originally, I thought it was a good idea. President Bush can say Ahmadinejad is a loon but few people are going to believe him because few believe anything Bush says anymore.

Best let the American people hear the loon in his own words so they can draw their own conclusions. Give Ahmadinejad enough rope to hang himself.

Then I saw reports on the speech and became even more convinced that not only was Columbia right to invite Ahmadinejad, but that they should invite more autocrats.

"You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," one audience member taunted the Iranian leader.

The president of Columbia University denounced Ahmadinejad as a 'cruel dictator' and called him 'simply ridiculous.'

Can you imagine anyone daring to say that to Ahmadinejad's face back home? Imagine how he boiled with rage.

Here you had the head of a religious totalitarian state facing tough questions from a hostile audience. There were people calling him on his b.s. There were people jeering his ridiculous responses. There were people mocking his denial that homosexuality existed in Iran. He had to run the gauntlet of angry protesters to and from the hall. For once, he was subjected to a situation where he didn't have absolute power.

(To give him a microgram of credit, at least Ahmadinejad accepted to speak at Columbia under such circumstances. I'd like to see President Bush speak there. It would be revealing to see how he faced questions from an audience that wasn't packed with specially chosen sycophants, in sharp contrast to nearly all of his events with the public.)

Far from attacking Columbia, I think the university should invite more such leaders. Invite Mugabe. Invite Putin. Invite the head of the Burmese junta. Let them face the tough questions and scorn that they brutally repress with such cowardice at home. Allow Americans the chance to tell these megalomaniacs to go to hell.

Hitler was an evil genius. Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia made him look like the rambling idiot that he is.

And that's precisely what militarists were afraid of.

It's easy to whip up war hysteria against an evil genius. But selling a war of aggression against an incoherent buffoon is a much harder task.

Israel's attack on Syria

Adirondack Musing reports on something the mainstream media in this country seems to have missed: Israel's military attack against Syria. So reports both The Washington Post and the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London.

The Post speculates that it might have been a dry run for an attack against Iran.

You'd think the broadcast media might be able to cut a minute or so of their OJ Simpson coverage to report on this serious event, but their only responsibility as corporate conglomerates is to 'give people what they want.'

How the CIA protects America

In a moved designed to pave the way for a military aggression against Iran, the Bush administration has declared the country's Revolutionary Guard, essentially its domestic morality police, as a terrorist organization.

But obviously its threats against America are greatly exaggerated if the CIA has nothing better to do than screw around with Wikipedia entries.

Update: Looks like the Australian government is busy doing the same.

Bush threatens Iraqi leader, grovels to UN

Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki caused waves recently when he took an opportunity to praise Iran. He said discussions with Iran's loudmouth president had been positive and that that, "Even in security issues there is no barrier in the way of co-operation" between the two countries.

This politically incorrect comment infuriated Iraq's American overlords. President Bush threatened that if the Iraqi prime minister dared disagree with his declaration of Iran's inherent Evilness, then the US leader would be forced to have a 'heart to heart' talk with him. If the prospect of having to listen to president's voice for an hour doesn't bring Maliki into obedience, then nothing will.

The US president might finally be realizing how disastrous the situation in Iraq is. Despite being right about Saddam's mythical weapons of mass destruction, the UN went into Iraq to help rebuild the country following the US aggression. This decision, by then secretary-general Kofi Annan (one of the few truly great world figures of our time), was extremely controversial among UN staff but gained him no favor with a US administration determined to whip up anti-UN fervor. It's a sad example of doing the right thing and pissing everyone off anyway. The UN withdrew its staff from Iraq's Eden when a car bomb killed 22 staff members at its Baghdad headquarters in 2003.

But after spending most of the last five years attacking and undermining the international body at every turn (and then blaming it for everything else), Bush is now on his hands and knees grovelling to the United Nations to return to the country. Washington got the Security Council to approve an expanded UN presence in the country.

The UN actually knows something about the difficult and complicated task of nation building, having successfully contributed to such efforts in places like Mozambique. This is a lot harder than the task of nation destroying, so perfected by the Bush administration. The neo-cons have struggled with nation building because it's not something that can be achieved with belligerent rhetoric, religious fervor and dropping random bombs.

In crawling back to the only body (however flawed) with any real international legitimacy, perhaps the White House has finally realized how discredited America is in Iraq, how that discredit is paralyzing progress and that only the UN has even a marginal hope of helping to clean up the gargantuan mess it created.

Perhaps.