Maureen Dowd — Moral idiot

5.8.2011 1 Comment

Dowd’s latest sees her opining:

I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy.

I want memory, and justice, and revenge.

When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

We briefly celebrated one of the few clear-cut military victories we’ve had in a long time, a win that made us feel like Americans again — smart and strong and capable of finding our enemies and striking back at them without getting trapped in multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day occupations.

But for the nay-sayers, Dowd would be all aglow with the sense of entitlement and efficacy she believes to be her due as a member of the American elite. She thus takes after the Republicans here and the leaders abroad for criticizing the bin Laden assassination. What she fails to grasp is that killing the Boogeyman was a political spectacle that will only justify the “multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day operations’ she dislikes and the kind of Presidents that will start them and see them through to the end. The bin Laden assassination was an instance in which the American empire practiced the propaganda of the deed.

Capturing and trying bin Laden was the only civilized response, at least for those individuals for whom the rule of law is a key component of a civilized society.

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Noam Chomsky evaluates the bin Laden assassination

5.7.2011 3 Comments

Chomsky’s gloss on is rather apt if not amazing in what it reveals about the United States:

….Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

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Quote of the day

5.4.2011 Leave a comment

This one issued from Mike Whitney‘s keyboard:

What does the assassination of Osama Bin Laden have in common with Guantanamo Bay?

They’re both intended to send a message that the United States has sunk deeper into savagery and abandoned any commitment to conventional norms of behavior. That’s the message, and we hear it “loud and clear”.

We don’t need our Harvard-educated president to crow about his latest gangland “hit” to know that America has turned into a moral swamp. That’s obvious in every area of policy, foreign and domestic. It’s just that certain incidents draw more attention than others, like when a drone incinerates a home full of women and children in the Pakistani outback or when F-16s reduce a city of 300,000 (Falluja) to rubble leaving behind a legacy of birth defects, cancer and grinding poverty. These are the real “headline grabbers”, like shrugging off the sovereign rights of an ally, invading their airspace, and deploying special ops to conduct a Rambo-style massacre in a civilian section of town.

Booyah. You go America! U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.

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An ironic consequence produced by the bin Laden assassination

5.3.2011 Leave a comment

(Some) Americans have danced in the streets in celebration of a political murder. Bin Laden is dead, the Boogeyman is dead, and Uncle Sam killed him. Once more America is whole…vital…effective…. The blood of “the other” has unburdened Uncle Sam of his many failures. From blood comes purity, perfection, unity.

And yet, David Swanson offers this caveat:

Imagine the propaganda that the U.S. media could make of video footage of a foreign country where the primitive brutes are dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of a tribal enemy. That is the propaganda we’ve just handed those who will view bin Laden as a martyr. When their revenge comes, we will know exactly what we are supposed to do: exact more revenge in turn to keep the cycle going.

We need not use our imaginations for this. We only need to do an internet search where we will find this footage:

It seems America and Americans are not at all exceptional. We are like “the other” we despise. Blowback awaits Uncle Sam. By now he has to expect consider blowback normal. Surely he does not expect to win this endless, expensive and repulsive war?

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Rumors of Osama bin Laden’s death were greatly exaggerated… (updated)

5.1.2011 Leave a comment

…until now, according to the New York Times.

Sadly, one part of the world, the Potemkin Village some call the United States of America, will be amazed to find that bin Laden’s demise will change nothing of importance, just as Saddam Hussein’s execution changed nothing.

Updated (5.2.2011)

Glenn Greenwald takes a position akin to mine:

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse.

And:

And then there’s the notion that America has once again proved its greatness and preeminence by killing bin Laden. Americans are marching in the street celebrating with a sense of national pride. When is the last time that happened? It seems telling that hunting someone down and killing them is one of the few things that still produce these feelings of nationalistic unity. I got on an airplane last night before the news of bin Laden’s killing was known and had actually intended to make this point with regard to our killing of Gadaffi’s son in Libya — a mere 25 years after President Reagan bombed Libya and killed Gadaffi’s infant daughter. That is something the U.S. has always done well and is one of the few things it still does well.

There is, it seems, real political value in killing the Boogey Man. The men and women living in the Village can enjoy their servitude and celebrate their fate when someone different dies horribly. Blood flows and the guileless are intoxicated by it.

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