Category: Politics

Europeans aren’t just being obstructive. Paul Krugman points out that it’s just that they can see what is being kept from us. [That man is asking to be sacked!]

There has been much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds. Is it about culture? About history? But I haven’t seen much discussion of an obvious point: We have different views partly because we see different news.
. . .
So why don’t other countries see the world the way we do? News coverage is a large part of the answer. Eric Alterman’s new book, “What Liberal Media?” doesn’t stress international comparisons, but the difference between the news reports Americans and Europeans see is a stark demonstration of his point. At least compared with their foreign counterparts, the “liberal” U.S. media are strikingly conservative — and in this case hawkish.
I’m not mainly talking about the print media. There are differences, but the major national newspapers in the U.S. and the U.K. at least seem to be describing the same reality.
Most people, though, get their news from TV — and there the difference is immense. The coverage of Saturday’s antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.
What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as “the usual protesters” or “serial protesters.” CNN wasn’t quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network’s Web site read “Antiwar rallies delight Iraq,” and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.
This wasn’t at all the way the rest of the world’s media reported Saturday’s events, but it wasn’t out of character. For months both major U.S. cable news networks have acted as if the decision to invade Iraq has already been made, and have in effect seen it as their job to prepare the American public for the coming war.
So it’s not surprising that the target audience is a bit blurry about the distinction between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. Surveys show that a majority of Americans think that some or all of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi, while many believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11, a claim even the Bush administration has never made. And since many Americans think that the need for a war against Saddam is obvious, they think that Europeans who won’t go along are cowards.
Europeans, who don’t see the same things on TV, are far more inclined to wonder why Iraq — rather than North Korea, or for that matter Al Qaeda — has become the focus of U.S. policy. That’s why so many of them question American motives, suspecting that it’s all about oil or that the administration is simply picking on a convenient enemy it knows it can defeat. They don’t see opposition to an Iraq war as cowardice; they see it as courage, a matter of standing up to the bullying Bush administration.

Breslin says that George Bush, the Mayor and the Police Chief’s “only excuse could be that they were practicing for the Republican National Convention. That one is going to be the great one.” And, “They penned in throngs [Breslin says “almost a million,” while Chief Kelly still insists it was only a hundred thousand] of smiling people as if they were cattle. It wasn’t the cops’ idea to do it. All they did was carry out orders as poorly as possible.”

The idea of rebuffing and then penning people up is the responsibility of Mayor Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly. They decided to suffocate free speech and right of assembly and block the march. They did it to stop the one picture that would have had the most impact of any in the world, that of an immense crowd in New York walking against war.
It was done to help George Bush have his war. Deny it if you can.

Is it really so dificult to get a picture of the man that doesn’t shout his stupidity? Or, is the media finally trying to warn the world? [Make sure you click onto the image for a larger, more delicious version.]
Oh yeah, this is from the story that accompanies the wonderful photograph:

In a huge wave of demonstrations not seen since the Vietnam War, more than 6 million peace protesters took to the streets in 600 towns and cities from Cape Town to Chicago on Saturday.
Bush told reporters that “democracy is a beautiful thing and people are allowed to express their opinion” but that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a risk to peace.

He’s a Brit addressing the Brits, but the argument and the message is the same for us Yanks. John Pilger [excerpt]:

First, let us stop calling it a “war”. The last time “war” was used in the Gulf was in 1991 when the truth was buried with more than 200,000 people. Attacking a 70-mile line of trenches, three American brigades, operating at night, used 60-ton armored earthmovers to bury alive teenage Iraqi conscripts, including the wounded and those surrendering and retreating. Survivors were slaughtered from the air. The helicopter gunship pilots called it a “turkey shoot”.
Of the 148 Americans who died, a quarter of them were killed by Americans. Most of the British were killed by Americans. This was known as “friendly fire”. The civilians who were killed, whose deaths were never recorded by the American military because it was “not policy”, were “collateral damage”.
Today, after 13 years of an economic blockade that has been compared with a medieval siege, Iraq is defenseless, no matter the discovery of an odd missile that can reach barely 90 miles. Its ragtag army is woefully under-equipped and awaiting its fate, along with a civilian population of whom 42 per cent are children. They are stricken. Even the export of British manufactured vaccines meant to protect Iraqi infants from diphtheria and yellow fever has been restricted. The vaccines, say the Blair government, are “capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”.
This is the nation upon which the Bush gang says it will rain down 800 missiles within the space of two days. “Shock and awe” the Pentagon calls its “strategy”. Meanwhile the weapons inspectors and their morose Swedish leader go about their treasure hunt and a cartoon show is hosted in the UN by General Colin Powell (who rose to the top by covering up the notorious My Lai massacre in Vietnam).
It is all a charade. The Americans want Iraq because they want to control and reorder the Middle East. Their once-favorite dictator, Saddam Hussein, made the mistake of misreading the signals from Washington in 1990 and invading another favorite American oil tyranny, Kuwait. So belatedly, Saddam must be replaced, preferably by another Saddam, though more reliable and less uppity. There is no issue of “weapons of mass destruction”. That is a distraction for us and the media.
The wider significance of the promised attack is the rapacious nature of the American state. As Tony Blair has confirmed, North Korea is likely to be “next”. I think he is wrong and that Iran will be next. That is what the Israeli regime wants and Israel’s wishes are as important to influential members of the Bush gang as oil. Thereafter, there is China. Says Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Institute in Washington: “What radical US nationalists have in mind is either to ‘contain’ China by overwhelming military force or to destroy the Chinese Communist state.”
ONE of the Bush gang’s planners, Richard Perle, has said: “If we let our vision of the world go forth and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war … our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

Barry and I saw soldiers in the subway on Valentine’s day, in “camouflage” [no, they weren’t wearing tar paper] and armed with assault weapons, but we thought they were, what, just window dressing for the White House’s orange alert games? Or, whatever. Nothing surprises us any more. Tonight we heard in a blog from a friend who found out, the hard way, that we are actually under an occupying army. Dan’l describes his evening in his own words:

if you live in new york city you’ve probably seen the (hot) national guardsmen taking up residence in our subway stations lately… i have to admit that i was a little unnerved the first time i saw assault rifles on the platform, but i was just starting to get used to it… until…
tonight i entered the ACE station at 34th street carrying an overnight bag (containing my computer, clothes, and personal hygiene products) and a shopping bag with groceries i’d just bought for the making of peach cobbler… i was gonna travel up to 103rd street to stay the night with charlie… we’d be waking up late, cooking all day and eventually going outside to play in the blizzard that’s hitting the city right now… anyway, as i approached the edge of the platform, one of these camouflaged yummies steps in front of me and asks me to step aside… “we’re going to ask you to set your bags down and remove your coat and hat…”
[hmmm,] i think, [are we doing random security checks now like they do in airports???] yes sir, of course…
i do as instructed and then am handcuffed… now i’m a little freaked out…
what’s going on???
“sir, we’d like to examine the contents of your bags… will we find any weapons inside???”
no… i have some clothes and my computer…
i looked down at my bag and saw that the power cord and battery were hanging out of the top… [of course that looks suspicious, you idiot!!! not to mention i had a bunch of metal cans and flour in my food emporium bag…] to make what is a very long (an hour spent with these guys) story a little shorter, i had to:
explain traveling uptown so late…
explain my computer and cell phone cords…
explain the workings of a laptop computer
explain the workings of a sprint phone…
explain pajamas with monkey print and two pairs of socks…
explain what q-tips are used for…
explain what it takes to make a peach cobbler…
prove that i’m not a terrorist and that i have no intention of building any kind of weapon…
do i look like him or him or him??? what the???
anyway, i have to say that i feel safer after all this than i did before…

Yipes! I hope Dan’l is just being sarcastic, but the important question is, does anyone know this shit is going on?
Ok, for the curious, and for those who want to know what a terrorist suspect looks like, here he is. Oh, and our monster is 5 feet 6 inches tall and 130 pounds. Cute as the dickens, but don’t let that fool you.

We have to gasp involuntarily, both for our history and for our future, reading Maureen Dowd today as she attempts to describe why we will be going to war in Mesopotamia.

The painful parts of Washington history have often been about men trying harder to save face than lives.

This sentence, which already looks like an old maxim, appears in the middle of the concluding paragraphs of an essay arguing [perhaps not convincingly] that the administration is pursuing its Iraq war course only to avenge what the Right thinks was the emasculating legacy of its withdrawal in ’91.

I realize that my blogs about the antiwar events of yesterday may have sounded a bit grumpy all around, so I want to take this opportunity to say that we had a blast!
Demonstrations are always good for both the body and the soul, but this was one of the most exhilarating experiences in my memory, being out there in the streets with so many kinds of magnificent, happy people [we spent much of the day in the block Jimmie Breslin describes, though we did not see him], and I believe actually making a difference this time, because we were so many.
I can understand a thinking American’s considered decision to not cast a vote in the elections which have been entirely arranged for us by undemocratic process, especially in recent years, or recent decades. Our democratic institutions are an absolute mess right now. What I do not understand is the refusal of that same person to walk into the street on an occasion like yesterday, in the purest form of democratic expression. If I walk to the barricades, literally and figuratively, I’m walking with millions; if I stay away, no one is there. I cannot expect my neighbors to save the world for me on their own.
At the end of the day, we went to a performance of “Brundibar,” Hans Krasa‘s charming children’s opera which was performed dozens of times at Terezin, until the child performers were sent to the gas chambers. The opera is about the strength of numbers overcoming evil. Unfortunately those numbers never accumulated in the 1930’s. We can have them today, but we’re not there yet.
There I go again, grumpy.

That’s it? That’s the story?
The subject of the lead story at this very moment on the CNN site, which is viewed all around the planet, is the millions of people around the world protesting the imminent American war against Iraq. The CNN site’s headline reads,

ANTIWAR RALLIES DELIGHT IRAQ

It looks like Rupert Murdoch’s NYPost!
The first paragraph:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraq was gloating Sunday over the global outpouring of opposition to a possible U.S.-led war against the country, saying the rallies by millions of people signaled an Iraqi victory and “the defeat and isolation of America.”

For any sceptics about the political agenda or incompetence of the American media, does this finally send a message? [CNN is actually a world news medium, but it’s still the creature of its commercial American birth.]

Whether there were half a million or a million out there in the sub-freezing wind of the Manhattan canyons today, we should be enormously proud of the achievement, but we can only be horribly ashamed of the city’s role in diminishing that achievement.
First “they” decided that the people could not walk past the U.N., then that the people could not get near the U.N., then that the people would be put into animal pens, then that the people would not be permitted to bus all the way into the city, then that the people could not be trusted with portable toilets. [When I heard that piece of news at home this morning, I was ready to piss on a police officer’s shoes, even though I would eventually remind myself that decisions about porta-johns were not made by the rank and file.]
Governments and police are only too eager to tell us where to go and what to do, but if you were out on the street for the incredible anti-war demonstration today, or trying desperately to get to it, you saw how far they went this time and you probably have an idea of how much farther they will go the next time. In the rest of the civilized and democratic world, and even in those parts which are regarded as neither, huge numbers of people were able to assemble freely today where they chose to. They were not restricted and discouraged by the obsessive minutiae of bureaucratic and police concerns about order–and control. Americans in New York City today were confronted by a significant threat to their rights of assembly and speech.
This was a massive grassroots, democratic, political demonstration of the highest order and probably of the greatest consequence for the history of the world. It was not a sports event attended by mindless yahoos and it was not a arbitrary holiday driven by a drunken, nativist mob. Assigned and barricaded pens, totally inappropriate movement restrictions, and the threat from the visible presence of thousands of armored and helmeted police were totally out of order.
Do not trust a government which does not trust you.
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For more on our own experience of today’s events, see Bloggy‘s, “DISSENT IS HOT.”

I’ll be starting here.
If you’re interested in getting a Blue Button, we just updated the web site with more information on how to get one, including a list of galleries that have them. More to appear on the site soon.