bmaz, thanks for pointing everyone to todays Greenwald post. It was an excellent yet depressing post. Like you, I added a link to it on my Facebook page earlier today just to point others to it.

Someone needs to draw up a pic of an elephant pissing the word coward down its leg and a donkey lapping it up.

you’re getting a reputation, bmaz.

(one I wish our president had).

Actually, Greenwald misses the bigger picture. In our rush to “escape” the need to be a just and free country, we have started wars from Vietnam to Panama and then on to Iraq and Afghanistan and recently Yemen. We are in war with our latest invented enemy no matter what year it is. Terrorism is just one of our war flavors. Meanwhile, we the citizens are enslaved to Goldman/Sacks, Big Pharma, health insurance companies, gas companies and what have.

And if anyone is on Digg, could you please Digg Glennzilla’s post here:

http://bit.ly/beRI4g

Thank you!!

In a little over 230 years this experiment in democracy and capitalism have failed. I am ashamed to be among the living generation who let it die.

Any one notice that it ended as the last of the WWII generation has passed?

Interestingly it can be argued that the last generation fought and died to preserve both concepts in Europe and elsewhere, but the PTSD they brought home sowed the seed of their destruction here.

This election and therefor Obama was our last hope. Too bad the ruling class was one step ahead of us.

One side note: Rover talked about a permanent Repug majority and we all thought he meant through election fraud and manipulation of the gov to campaign. Could he really been talking about the (then) impending SOTUS ruling that destroyed democracy? Do we really believe that Roberts wasn’t installed explicitly for this purpose?

Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Fortunately, the economic situation is likely to catch up with all the wishful thinking. Unfortunately, isn’t this how the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s?

EW know this is one of your strong interest expertise.

What they are talking about on the Diane Rehm show now
10:00U.S. Auto Industry

Toyota, the world’s largest car company, issues a massive recall and suspends production of some of its popular models. Ford posts a profit for the first time in four years. An update on safety issues and economic trends in the auto industry.
Guests

David Shepardson, Washington bureau chief, The Detroit News.

Paul Ingrassia, journalist and author of “Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry.”

Bill Visnic, senior editor, Edmunds AutoObserver.com

Jordan Ziprin, retired federal attorney

O/T, more news about Wetmore and the Landrieu telephone matter.

Thanks for the heads up, bmaz. But I doubt I’ll weep for my country over Greenwald’s words. I’ll bet he doesn’t raise the issue of how we got here.

That didn’t take long. He’s repeating, in a much narrower context, what Chomsky wrote 2 years ago, about the “need” to violate our principles if we are to “survive.”

Excerpted from Cold War II
Noam Chomsky
ZNet, August 27, 2007

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its energies to the demanding task of “containing Iran” in what Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II.” [1]

During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” Hence “if the United States is to survive,” it will have to adopt a “repugnant philosophy” and reject “acceptable norms of human conduct” and the “long-standing American concepts of `fair play’” that had been exhibited with such searing clarity in the conquest of the national territory, the Philippines, Haiti and other beneficiaries of “the idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the newspaper of record describes our noble mission. [2]

[…]

In the face of the Kremlin’s unbridled aggression in every corner of the world, it is perhaps understandable that the US resisted in defense of human values with a savage display of torture, terror, subversion and violence while doing “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” as Tim Weiner summarizes the doctrine of the Eisenhower administration in his recent history of the CIA.

And now, Greenwald:

In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately: ongoing preservation) of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism: that because we’re “at war” with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated. To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad lingering taste left from having such discredited and unpopular leadership for eight years, we collectively pretended for a little while to regret the excesses of the Bush/Cheney approach to such matters. But it’s now crystal clear that the country, especially its ruling elite, is either too petrified of Terrorism and/or too enamored of the powers which that fear enables to accept any real changes from the policies that were supposedly such a profound violation “of our values.”

They’re terrified, or megalomaniacs. Nice psychologism ya got there, pal.

Here’s another thought: In an effort to remake the world in our own image, just like our god did with formerly god-forsaken dirt, we’re here to assert full-spectrum dominance over the natural world. Just like our god does. I wonder if Greenwald ever noticed how every president ends every major address: “God bless you, and god bless the United States of America.”

There’s a whole lot of myth-making and myth-jacking going on, but not in Greenwald’s world.

Why are we torturing and not investigating? Because we can. Our nukes give us the might that makes it “right.” It’s a bipartisan consensus going back at least to WWII. The National Security State is now the real American government, with never ending cover stories of bogus holy wars spun as strategic domestic disinformation campaigns.

Where does Greenwald mention that our official policy is full-spectrum dominance, not global good buddies? He doesn’t. It’s as if these political developments, going as far back as three whole decades, come out of a vacuum.

So Greenwald complains that Obama is looking just like Bush/Cheney. Who do we think rules this place, public servants? Do we really think people, who will invade another nation based on lies, are going to place nice on their home turf? Can Obama switch off the MIC, even if he wanted to? Or would they just kill him and replace him with a chastened Joe Biden?

‘Wow, look where we are, everything’s backwards’–yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Tell it to the Indians, we’ve been getting this schtick for centuries now. See also “Manifest Destiny:”

Manifest Destiny is a term that was used in the 19th century to designate the belief that the United States was destined, even divinely ordained,[1] to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes Manifest Destiny was interpreted so broadly as to include the eventual absorption of all North America: Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Central America. Advocates of Manifest Destiny believed that expansion was not only ethical but that it was readily apparent (“manifest”) and inexorable (“destiny”). Although initially used as a catch phrase to inspire the United States’ expansion across the North American continent, the 19th century phrase eventually became a standard historical term.

There’s a mythological component to our efforts to assert full-spectrum dominance over the natural world, an effort centuries in the making, but you wouldn’t know that by reading Greenwald.

bmaz,

Your invite to read and weep reminded me of a photo I saw as a boy depicting grown men and women weeping beside the road as German troops marched into Paris. I didn’t understand if they were agonized by the loss of their republic or dreading what they imagined was to come.

While here, let me rant a bit about something that is commonplace and I regretably see repeated by Greenwald. That is this notion that we “give trials” to accused criminals. This allows some to question whether some accused actually “deserve” such trials. This way of thinking is sheer nonsense. The constitution limits the authority of governments to deprive persons of life and liberty without a standard exercise of due process. This is considered a human right, not a gift to be reconsidered, depending on circumstances. We do not give trials; we demand them.

When Greenwald reads this, I’m sure he will agree. This way of talking about “giving someone a fair trial” is euphemistic, and for most of us, merely a shorthand way of talking about what we all take for granted, the right of due process. But that right obligates the state to prove it’s assertions in a regimented tribunal, not on a whim of generosity, not a quaint gesture of civility, that under some circumstance can be abridged when convenient. It is our standard of conduct demanded of our elected overseers.