Category: Politics

Oh, don’t we wish someone would just wake us when it’s over, but this is all too real, it involves us, not some people on the other side of the planet, it involves the future of this planet, and there is nowhere and no way we’ll be able to sleep through it.

We were somewhere near day 600 of the Bush administration on the edge of sanity when reality began to take hold… And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the future was full of bombs and Enrons and Cheneys, all swooping and screeching and diving around the SUV, which was going about a hundred miles an hour straight into a brick wall. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! How did we get here?”
….
If this were simply madness it would be scary enough – but the coldly calculated method behind the madness confirms this administration is on a suicide run, taking us pedal to the metal down their dangerous dead end street.

You tell ’em, Bushie!
Insufferable arogance, especially since, regardless of what one thinks of either individual, the facts are that our executive was selected, and Arafat was elected!

And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state …. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror — it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.

“We” have just stood in the Rose Garden to tell a people denied a place in the world for 54 years that they have to throw out their elected president and create the oh-so-perfect political and economic system that we have before we can consider letting them exist as a nation. Can one suggest that at the very least the Administration apply that criterion to our friends in the “War on Terrorism,” including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan, and virtually all of the nations north of Afghanistan, just for starters?
In any event, the Administration’s plan for the Middle East is actually only a “vision,” and that is the word it seems to prefer, with good reason. It will please the Israelis and anger the Palestinians

Normally, when you grant people statehood, you deal with the leaders those people have chosen. Not in this case.
….
[Bushie] asked the U.S.-friendly dictators of various Arab countries, whose statehood he doesn’t dispute, to “work with Palestinian leaders to create a new constitutional framework and a working democracy for the Palestinian people.”
….
Why is Bush’s plan so vague? Because it was conceived as a pretty picture, not as a solution.
….
That’s what the offer of a “state” with no defined borders, powers, or timetable (and no right to be represented by its present leadership) is. It isn’t even a bone thrown to the Palestinians. It’s a picture of a bone.

Advisory to the world [probably unnecessary]: Do not believe a word “we” say!

This alarming short comment was an introduction to an alert from FAIR about a talk* by Crispin Miller, author of “The Bush Dyslexicon.”

George W. Bush’s broken English and his ignorance about the world are certainly unprecedented for a U.S. chief executive. Remarks like “I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy” and “Is our children learning?” are all too typical. Yet even before September 11, the U.S. mainstream media have bent over backwards to make excuses for him.
In the newly updated “Bush Dyslexicon,” media critic Mark Crispin Miller
catalogues Bush’s strange and sometimes frightening utterances, along with the press’s Pravda-esque portrayal of Bush as a statesman of Churchillian stature. For Miller, the media’s response to Bush’s mistakes isn’t simply funny or embarrassing– rather, it’s a sign of how much power has been amassed by Bush’s corporate sponsors. “We Americans have been tricked out of our democracy,” writes Miller, “by a vast and very smart conspiracy of stupid talkers.” Now more than ever, he insists, we must stop merely laughing at this dangerous president, whose errors tell us all we need to know: “We are resolved to rout out terror wherever it exists,” Bush said on January 31, “to save the world from freedom!”

* Thursday, June 27, 6:30 PM
Housing Works Used Book Café
126 Crosby St (between Prince and Houston), New York
Free and Open to the Public

Telling us what they are telling us what is good for us.

[I’ve been trying to get a link to this for days, but while Bloggy beat me to it, I’m not going to let that discourage me] Bushie defines “down” and “up” in his own way.

It took some time before the Gay City News interview with Steve Quester, who joined the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine this past April, was put on line, so I have been unable to send this until now.

While the internationals are pledged to take only non-violent actions they do support the right of the Palestinians to use force.
“If somebody invades your town you have the right to shoot at them,” Quester said. “No one element alone –– armed struggle, diplomacy, non-violent resistance –– is going to free the Palestinian people.”

Steve, who is a dear friend, had written the following note at the time the article first appeared, about a week ago, and it should be included here, together with the Frederick Douglas quote he appended:

The issue of Gay City News that came out today
includes a profile of me on the front page. It’s long
on me and short on Palestinians, despite my best
efforts. It also completely ignores the role of women
activists–see my response, below.
–Steve

To the editors:
I was glad to have an opportunity to speak with Duncan
Osborne about the dire situation faced by Palestinians
today, and their heroic resistance to oppression
(“Zionism to Palestine, via ACT UP”, Gay City News,
June 7-20, 2002). I was disappointed, though, that
the (mostly male) editors of Gay City News chose not
to include information from Mr. Osborne’s interview
with a lesbian who was in Palestine with me. As I
noted in my correspondence with Mr. Osborne, the
movement for freedom and justice for Palestinians is
led by women, many of them lesbians, in Palestine,
Israel, and the U.S. Men in the movement, like
myself, are too often forefronted to the exclusion of
the women doing the work.
I hope Gay City News will do features in the future on
queer women and the struggle for Palestine.
Steve Quester
Jews Against the Occupation (JATO),
Palestine Activist Forum of New York (PAFNY),
International Solidarity Movement (ISM)

=====
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass

Henry Siegman has credentials. He should be able to participate in the argument, but he has been more than marginalized by those who dominate the discussion in the U.S. of the fate of Palestinians and Israelis. Henry Siegman is a pariah.

The Korean War [where he served with combat troops as a chaplain], coupled with his own childhood experiences in Europe, inclined him to those in Jewish life who saw social justice as central to faith. He went on to become the head of the American Jewish Congress for 16 years, before joining the council [the Council on Foreign Relations].
But for many Jews, he says, there came to be new definitions of faith, ones that he says turned the ideology of the Jewish state into “a surrogate religion.”
“The support for Israel fills a spiritual vacuum,” he said in his corner office on Park Avenue. “If you do not support the government of Israel then your Jewishness, not your political judgment, is in question.”

Fortunately, it only takes a few good words to totally destroy any “rationale” offered by the current intellectually-challenged Administration for its insufferable deeds, attacks on the environment no less than any other crimes.

Our understanding of what affects global warming far exceeds our knowledge about the consequence of the president’s so-called war on terrorism, his trillion-dollar tax gift to the wealthy or his “Star Wars” defense system. Ideology rather than knowledge or science is what drives the policies of this administration.

Unfortunately, intelligent words don’t stop thugs.

So, if everything the Administration is doing is not going to protect us from terrorists, why do we accept what the Administration is doing to protect us from terrorists?

Three weeks have passed since government officials unleashed dire warnings that the United States is destined to suffer future terrorist attacks and, incredibly, there has been little public outcry.
Perhaps the full meaning of the doomsday rhetoric emanating from Washington is not clear: our national leaders have said we are bound to lose the struggle against terrorism. Imagine Franklin Roosevelt saying that there was no way of turning back the Japanese navy, or Winston Churchill proclaiming that the British would not be able to stop the Nazi onslaught.

I can’t remember more exciting times! Every day brings such extraordinary treasures in the form of simply incredible news. It’s all so stimulating.
But Robert C. Fleming Jr. Sub-Sub-Basement and Utter Jackass Emporium, as they realized the incessant wave of ongoing disinformation, false terrorist warnings, and general sniveling alarmist fear tactics aimed at the US populace are working beautifully. About one-third of those polled favor making it easier for authorities to access private e-mail and phone conversations. More than 70 percent are in favor of requiring U.S. citizens to carry ID cards with fingerprints. 57 percent have pretty much given up hope and don’t really care anymore that GW Bush has the intellectual acumen of a garage door, 37 percent actually believe Carrot Top is “sorta funny,” and a very horrifying 19 percent actually think Celine Dion is charming and way talented.