Wrapping themselves with the Israeli flag

nytimes.com

Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi should be ashamed of themselves. While Lebanon burns and fellow shiites call for a ceasefire, Dean and Pelosi make statements condemning the Iraqi premier Nouri al-Maliki for statements he had made against Israel.

The supposedly leftist Dean had this to say:

The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite,' the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. 'We don't need to spend 200 and 300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hizbullah.

Meanwhile, consider what the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora had to say while pleading for a cease-fire:

Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?

Israel -- the callous state

smh.com.au

So, yes, it is beseiged by states which sponsor terrorism against it. But terrorism is simply the flailing of marginalized groups. Agreed, people do die, but in the name of moral equivalence -- you kill mine, and I will kill yours -- the jewish state is indifferent to the loss of civilian lives on the other side. The hypocrisy is stunning -- our civilians are so precious. But yours, we can attack and kill in great numbers without conscience.

This past week, Lebanese fatalities number in the 100s, while Israeli civilian casualties is about a dozen. A telling statistic.

An LA Times editorial posits that Israel is uninterested in a ceasefire because it wants to destroy all Hezbollah infrastructure even if civilians are caught in the crossfire. The reason: Hezbollah will then be incapacitated to retaliate when Israel attacks Iran...which is supposedly what the military is strategizing for.

If true, this loss of civilian lives is all the more cruel and it borders on terrorism itself, the only difference being that terrorism squarely targets civilians whereas for Israel it is a by-product, a side effect that raises no moral eyebrows.

Our tax dollars at work to blindfold us

secretservice.gov

Gee, whiz...how can we screw the public with their own money:

The federal government will pay a Texas law school $1 million to do research aimed at rolling back the amount of sensitive data available to the press and public through freedom-of-information requests.

Who knows what will be discovered through FOIA requests? Embarrassing stuff like, Bush sat on his ass when he could have done something to prevent 9/11? Or incriminating stuff like perhaps, the President lying through his grimaced face about Iraq's WMDs.

Wouldn't want that now, would we?

Powerful piece from George Lakoff

betterworldheroes.com

It is time to tell an inconvenient truth about Iraq: it is an occupation, not a war.

Our nation has been held trapped in a fallacious War Frame that serves the interests of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. The term “cut and run,” used to vilify Democrats, is defined relative to the following frame:

There is a war against evil that must be fought. Fighting requires courage and bravery. Those fully committed to the cause are brave. Those who "cut and run" are motivated by self-interest; they are only interested in saving their own skins, not in the moral cause. They are cowards. And since those fighting for the cause need all the support they can get, anyone who decides to “cut and run” endangers both the moral cause and the lives of those brave people who are fighting for it. Those who have courage and conviction should stand and fight.

Once the false frame is set, it is hard to use any pure self-interest frame that ignores the just cause of fighting evil. That is the trap the Democrats have fallen into. Their proposed slogans evoke self-interest frames: John Murtha’s “stay and pay and ”John Kerry’s “lie and die” have an X-and-Y structure that evokes, and thus reinforces, “cut and run.”

Independence day bahstard

Firedoglake

New Haven Independent: Lieberman Launches "Cut & Run" Campaign:

In a sign that he fears for his political future, three-term U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman announced outside the state Capitol Monday that his reelection campaign will take out petitions to get his name on the November ballot as an independent -- just in case challenger Ned Lamont beats him in an Aug. 8 Democratic primary. Lieberman's brief announcement signalled both the spin he'll use to try to limit the political fallout of the move, as well as the main tack he'll use to try to blunt Lamont's challenge.

I never did like Lieberman, a slick slimy politician, the kind that this country could do well without. In addition, squatting in a Democratic seat, he dilutes the Democratic message. I mean, do we really need a Democrat who sounds marginally different than Dick "I like torture" Cheney!

Military medics participating in torture

cbs.com

Dr. Steven Miles is the author of "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror.” He researched government documents to come to the conclusions in his book, where he clearly documents the multiple cases of medical complicity in torture.

On Tavis Smiley (PBS -- June 30th) he had this to say:

"This breaks my heart because, first off, I'm a doc, so these are my colleagues. When I look at the way that military medicine acted in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War I, I can't find anything that looks like this. This is a non-recognizable military medical system to me and it wasn't just Iraq. There are multiple prisons in Iraq, multiple prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo."

He goes on to say:

Because the problem is that the Congress allowed the president to suspend the Geneva Conventions and we allowed our Congress to suspend the Geneva Conventions. At some point, we have to assume a national responsibility as citizens for what our government does on our behalf. This is not a book about the rightness or wrongness of the war, but it is a book about what we as a society have tolerated. We built the Geneva Conventions to protect prisoners of war and we have stood by as those standards have been taken down.

Frank Rich of NY Times, on Rep. Peter King

When the NY Times, LA Times and WSJ broke the banking scandal, Congressman Peter King most strenuously called for a criminal investigation of the NYT.

In a fitting response, Frank Rich heaps scorn on King:

'Representative King, so eager to label others treasonous, has humiliating headlines of his own to counteract: he's the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who has so little clout and bureaucratic aptitude that he couldn't stop the government led by his own party from stripping New York City, in his home state, of 40 percent of its counterterrorism funding. If there's another terrorist attack, he may be the last person in New York who should accuse others, as he did The Times on the House floor on Thursday, of having blood 'on their hands.'