Free the shoeman! Iraqis took to the streets to hail Bush protester a hero. A daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, reportedly has awarded the shoe thrower, Muntader al-Zaidi, a 29-year-old journalist, a medal of courage. It has also been reported that — Muntader has been offered representation, free, by more than 100 lawyers from around the world, including one who had represented Saddam Hussein.
Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets today(12/15/2008) to demand the release of the journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush.
Arabs throughout the Middle East hailed Muntadhar Al-Zeidi as a hero and praised his insult as a proper sendoff to the reviled U.S. president, who was paying a farewell visit to the country his forces invaded.
Mr Zeidi had yelled: ‘This is a farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq,‘ as he hurled the footwear during a press conference in Baghdad on Sunday. …[MORE]
2.Flying Shoes Create a Hero In Arab World — After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Zaidi was distraught over the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He interviewed widows and orphans in his work as a journalist, once telling an editor that he hoped to meet Bush “and hit him with my shoes.” Earlier this year, Zaidi was arrested during an American raid in his neighborhood and released a day later. And in March he covered a U.S. airstrike in which children were trapped under the rubble. “This incident made him very angry against the American forces,” recalled Maithan al-Zaidi, 28, his brother.
Columnist – John Sammon John McCain said Obama doesn’t seem to understand the price of failure in Iraq.
The price of failure in Iraq?
Let’s dissect this one statement. The price of failure? That means we can still fail. I thought McCain said the surge was a success. If we can still fail in Iraq, that means it (the surge) wasn’t very much of a success. Not a decisive success. It was a success, but not decisive. If it wasn’t decisive, how good was it? Let’s be generous to McCain and his philosophical mentor Bush and say the surge (flooding Baghdad with more troops) temporarily tamped down violence. In that one area.
A kind of band aid, it gives one the allusion temporarily that things are better, in one area of the country. Temporarily, it makes Bush and McCain look good. Or at least, better. The bad guys either lay low, or move their act somewhere else until the surge goes away.
If we can still fail in Iraq, if Obama is elected as McCain suggests, then how on the other hand can we achieve success? Though he hasn’t spelled anything out specifically because he doesn’t know himself, let’s once again be generous and assume McCain means “success” to mean a happy and prosperous and peaceful Iraq with a stable government.
When will that happen and how will it happen? Nobody knows.
McCain’s answer clearly is to achieve the middle. At least for the future. Keep troops in the country for the next fifty years. If we keep troops there, we haven’t succeeded, but we haven’t failed either. We’re still supposedly in control.
It’s the middle option. Neither success or failure. The status quo.
Like the surge, avoidance of failure gives the false impression we’re in control of the country, though not in compete control.
It’s an allusion, smoke and mirrors.
• McCain says he is the candidate for “change” (the new in-word).
• McCain is for offshore oil drilling in scenic areas (so is oil man Bush).
• McCain is the candidate for change.
• McCain is for a permanent occupation of Iraq (so is Bush).
• McCain is the candidate for change.
• McCain wants to let the free market somehow take care of global warming (so does Bush).Bush ignored global warming for eight years and finally last week admitted it’s a reality.
McCain is for change?
Where’s the change? Maybe McCain means pocket change.
McCain speaks in that humorless low monotone that hints he’s a determined man’s man (if you’re a hero singled out by destiny, you talk in a very serious manner). He drones on endlessly about how he was right in the very beginning and knew all the time the surge in Iraq would work even though Iraq was originally launched as a war to take out false weapons of mass destruction and is now explained as a war to end violence (the truth is whatever McCain says it is).
To McCain and Bush, change is to do nothing different, and success is simply to avoid failure, by failing from the very beginning and saying it isn’t (failure).
President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil-company executives, have long tried to tell us this war(Iraq War) was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.
Said Mr. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, American troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target — the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
Being a Western oil giant with a no-bid contract in Iraq is a prize, yes. But at what cost? …[MORE >>]
Assata Shakur Assata Shakur, (b. 1947 in New York) of the Black Liberation Army was captured in May 1973. She is a US Political Exile and former US Political Prisoner now living in Cuba.
‘The price of the beef is higher than the dope in the street’
Curtis Mayfield, Future Shock
When Chicago’s music wizard Curtis Mayfield produced an album called Future Shock thirty five years ago, lean times were forecast. As the cost of feeding, clothing and sheltering ourselves explodes currently, his lyrics ring true. Indeed, the season of the thick woven sweater, belted and with a hip length, was upon America during the Gregorian year of 1973.
A government’s internal cold war on several fronts advanced when on 8 January the Watergate hotel break in trial began. By months end, charges were brought and two Richard Nixon Republican soldiers, Liddy and McCord were convicted.
A bloc of oil exporting nations such as the gigantic petroleum basin Saudia Arabia would accent a military offensive by Egypt against Israel. Israel encroached further and Palestinians battled on. London, Washington, Amsterdam and Paris recoiled from a coins and gun rich ascendancy. Since the half dozen OPEC nations included formerly dominated Tehran, Iran and Baghdad, Iraq among them, two decades of puppet governments had revolted.
All of a sudden, Europeans and Canadians, Americans and the White elite of the Caribbean and Central and South America called on societies to become aware of energy use. Expanding oil exploration and drilling in nations more easily manipulated began. Nigeria, for instance, was visited by Ashland, Agip, British Petroleum, Elf, Gulf, Shell-BP and Texaco- all supposedly equitable partners with the national oil body Nigeria had built after a devastating Biafra conflict.
The lesser known war against the dissident actors/impoverished spiraled also in the Americas. On the US domestic level, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover’s (1895-1972) federals still terrorized. Head of the FBI for half a century, Marcus Garvey, Emma Goldman, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Claudia Jones and even the assassinated John Kennedy the American president, 1960-63, had suffered from his goons. Only symptomatic of the racist and exploitive system, James O. Eastland of Mississippi, Democratic Party, had risen to serve as Nixon’s president of the US senate. Outrageous as he or Hoover were, the mechanism, not a screw loose, is the issue.
Capital, stirring its oil pot with one hand, used another hand to enforce via Augusto Pinochet and the US CIA, destruction of an admittedly socialist Chile government led by Salvador Allende. With another hand, the imperial octopus drove into the subterranean any of the Black Movement for Justice who had not hurriedly gone there. Beginning with the American public learning of the spying on Viet Nam war protesters, activist break in (Media, Pennsylvania) of government offices (FBI COINTELPRO discovered) to reveal a mass of civilians under surveillance in ‘71, there was panic. The chill was not just from thermostats down low. The tape recorders, ‘bugs’ and wiretaps led to the White House. And through 1973, fragile trust in authority, including Nixon, the ‘Nation of Laws’ candidate in ‘69, crumbled even more. Even the English feared America’s lashing out at Soviet and OPEC forces.
Nixon, the conservative anticommunist Quaker, had visited China and met Mao Tse Tung in 1972, the first US president to compromise since the Revolution of 1949 which ran the British and American influence out. In the shadow of armament agreements being made, a new time was unfolding. Both were isolationist governments and the interlocking future of rulers joined over exploitation one day would be revealed. Pakistan, for one regional power, had already been in the Pentagon’s pocket and 1971 horrors were glibly minimalized by Henry Kissinger’s baritone voice. Nixon’s feat, that of the Americans striving for capitalist reaches in Asia and everywhere ‘foreign’, fell deaf on domestic ears by the end of 1973. Gas stations had closed or lines for service stretched for a mile.
Although time has proven that the crooner was singing of the withering nature of state power on the ordinary person (inspired by Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock book), Curtis Mayfield was on point. Until there is a people power that can withstand tyrants, that which pacifies the people will be close at hand.
Even as the substance of life, food, is violently kept at arm’s length
