Psycho talk: Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who wears size 9 on one foot and size 11 on the other, allowed himself to get carried away by his enthusiasm to criticize President Obama, conveniently forgetting 9/11 and the other acts of terrorism that occurred when George W. Bush was president.
Joe ConasonWrites: “Why Do We Listen To Rudy ’9/11′ Giuliani?” — A big blunder today reinforces the sad fact: “America’s mayor” now has badly tarnished cred.
Why does the mainstream news establishment continue to present Rudolph “9/11” Giuliani as a leading expert on terrorism and national security? Rather than scrupulous analysis or fresh insight, he offers hyper-partisan spin, unburdened by basic facts or even a working memory. On “Good Morning America,” the former New York City mayor sought to draw an unflattering comparison between President Obama and his predecessor with an outlandish claim.
“We had no domestic terror attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.” This is now the Republican propaganda line, insulting to any American of normal intelligence, which only omits the largest terrorist attack ever on American soil — and the event that restored Giuliani’s fortunes and allowed him to mount an ill-fated presidential campaign in 2008. (Sometimes he forgets shoe bomber Richard Reid, and sometimes he pretends that the Reid attempt occurred before 9/11.) — [ READ MORE ]
In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.
By: Chris Hedges The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.
It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls–the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads–personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.
“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.”
In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.
Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.
Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war–who have corrupted Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution–must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.
Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.
Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.
Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation’s infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.
The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.” Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.
Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.
The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote “Notes From the Underground” to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in “Notes From the Underground” carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.
“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”
We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems–economic, social, environmental and political–that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.
About The Author: Chris Hedges, who writes a weekly column for Truthdig that is published every Monday, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than 50 countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. Chris Hedges’ new book, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will be out in July and can be preordered on Amazon or at your local bookstore. More About Chris.
The press probably will give Palin credit for not falling down on stage. She couldn’t deal with many of the questions directly or most of the facts, so she bloviated according to plan. She winked at us; the voters won’t wink back at her. I think people still have a bullshit factor — and that means she survived even as she met the low expectations she’s created. McCain gained nothing; he was the loser — in the first presidential debate, and the vice-presidential one. Palin relied on topline phrases and had little command of facts. Why, she even memorized the name of the President of Iran. But it was mostly blah, blah, blah. At the end, the Obama-Biden ticket is far ahead on the big issues — and Palin’s a parrot repeating memorized phrases, not a plausible vice-president. Biden called her on it every time. — Robert Shrum, Political Consultant.
The “Killa From Wasilla” came to the debate armed to the teeth with Republican talking points. She wasn’t afraid, she had the confidence — that of a robot programmed to “Vomit Policy.”
“Sarah The Barracuda” was pesky, scripted, loud, shrill and incoherent, as she rattled whatever her coaches had crammed into her head, with abandon.
For the entire ninety minutes she shuffled her “cheat sheets,” as if she were taking an “Open Book-Open Notes” Exam or participating in a Spelling Bee contest. She scraped and fought hard, spewing “Gibberish” by the bucket.
Ms. Palin exhibited little spontaneity and looked thoroughly rehearsed — sometimes avoided answering questions directly, instead slid into irrelevant sound-bites about her tenure as mayor of “tiny-town” Wasilla, Alaska.
On foreign policy, Palin stalled — giving generic non-specific answers, and when she resorted to her juvenile chants — “Maverick!,” “We are mavericks!,” “We are a maverick team!,” Biden promptly shot her down: “McCain wasn’t a maverick on ‘the things that matter to people’s lives,‘ citing issues such as health care, education and the war.” “He’s not been a maverick on virtually anything that genuinely affects the things that people really talk about around their kitchen table,” Biden said.
The debate format was not confrontational, and Joe Biden avoided engaging her, for fear of being labeled sexist. Had he forced her to deviate from her script, the results would have been disastrous. She would have forgotten her lines and gone off on some of her moronic, meaningless rambles.
CNN’s political analyst Bill Schneider was critical: “Palin’s answers do not lack confidence, they lack coherence.”
Newsweek’s Harold Fineman: “Palin was like ‘A Wolverine’ Attacking The Pant Leg Of A Passerby.”
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Joe Biden on the other hand was remarkably restrained, awash with policy and his vast knowledge and experience clearly showed. He offered much more detail on a range of topics, from national security to domestic issues, and relentlessly lumped McCain with Bush.
While Sarah acted like a “frisky” freshman debater, Joe was polished and presidential in his delivery.
Per Bob Shrum, Palin did not fall down on the stage — she survived.
Her performance was much better than I expected, because of one and only one reason — the debate format allowed her to stick to her rehearsed script. There were barely any follow-ups by the moderator, unlike in the first Obama-McCain debate, when vigorous follow-ups revealed the stark differences, weaknesses and strengths of the two candidates.
In this debate, Palin was allowed to verbally diarrhea “crammed policy,” like an express train without brakes, spewing useless garbage, winking and giving a “shout-out” to some high school in Alaska!
Give me a break! How stupid does one have to be not to read through this nonsense?
She is a total embarrassment — an affront to intellectualism, a trait I insist must be part of the package of a serious contender for the presidency of this great land.
“Hockey Moms” stay home and manage their families, they do not run for an office where they might be required to manage the largest stockpile of nuclear and biological weapons on earth.
My assessment is that Sarah Palin is not ready. She still knows nothing. Go Home Sarah!
“This is going to help stop the bleeding,” said Todd Harris, a Republican consultant who worked for Mr. McCain in his first presidential campaign. “But this alone won’t change the trend line, particularly in some of the battleground states.”
Partisan right-wing THUGS had other ideas:
“Sarah Palin was sensational tonight,” roared White Nationalist Bigot Pat Buchanan, in a post-debate comment on the MSNBC cable network. “She regained that magic she had at the convention.”
Joining the maniacal squealing, were the SYPHILITIC NATIVIST NAZIS at Fox News. Festooned around their racist brains is the falsehood that Sarah Palin won the debate hands down.
Sarah’s “Spelling-Bee Performance” must have injected a shot of liquid cannabis into their soiled veins.
Morons!
Well, ALLpost-debate polls indicate that Biden thrashed her decisively, while holding back his fire considerably.
But then what’s to be expected of the “FIX” News Channel?
1.Why Some Women Hate Sarah Palin — “Women are weapons-grade haters. Hillary Clinton knows it. Palin knows it too. When women get their hate on, they don’t just dislike, or find disfavor with, or sort of not really appreciate. They loathe — deeply, richly, sustainingly. I do not say this to disparage my gender; women also love in more or less the same way.” — Belinda Luscombe
2.Palin Delivers, but Doubt Not Erased — One debate will not erase doubts that have been building about Palin’s capacity to serve as vice president, but the effect of the encounter may shift the focus away from the sideshow that Palin has become and put it back on the two presidential nominees and what they would do for the country. Thursday’s debate adds to the importance of the two remaining presidential debates, the first of which will be held Tuesday.
3.McCain Lost the VP Debate Too — Today McCain pulled out of Michigan; the economic news worsened. The electoral map is smaller; the economy is smaller; and the odds on McCain are longer and longer. The press probably will give Palin credit for not falling down on stage. She couldn’t deal with many of the questions directly or most of the facts, so she bloviated according to plan. She winked at us; the voters won’t wink back at her. Pat Buchanan thinks she won. I think people still have a bullshit factor– and that means she survived even as she met the low expectations she’s created. McCain gained nothing; he was the loser — in the first presidential debate, and the vice-presidential one.
4.She Still Knows Nothing — Palin proved that she can speak in complete sentences, but not that she understands anything about foreign policy.
5.No debate, Biden won — True, the governor of Alaska did better than many people expected. But Joe Biden showed why he’s in a different class
“A national poll of people who watched the first presidential debate suggests that Barack Obama came out on top.
Fifty-one percent of those polled in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey of Americans who viewed the debate say that Obama won. Thirty-eight percent of those polled say that John McCain did the best job.” — CNN Political Ticker
The focus of last night’s debate was foreign policy and national security, this was supposed to be John McCain’s forte and he was expected to perform better than his much less experienced rival.
But Obama had a confident and relaxed demeanor, and he handled all the questions with the ease of a college professor answering his students’ questions.
Obama didn’t make any gaffe, he looked like a young statesman who is eager and ready to assume the role of commander-in-chief.
McCain, on the other hand, appeared uncomfortable, and he fumbled the names of a couple of international leaders. He repeated a few of the one-liners that he has used throughout his campaign, and they didn’t elicit even the faintest laughter.
McCain looked like an old warrior who is too stubborn and too set in his ways to acknowledge the Young Turk with the right stuff.
McCain never once looked in the direction of Obama; why does he have such undisguised contempt for his adversary? I’m sure there are many who will come to the conclusion that it’s nothing short of racism.
Before the debate McCain was behind in most polls, he desperately needed to win the debate, and he fell far short of his goal.
The McCain camp couldn’t find any Obama blunders, their post-debate spin was to harp on how many times Obama said: McCain is right. Is that the best they can come up with? That only illustrates that Obama is a scholar and a gentleman.
McCain fumbled away his chance to make up ground, and if his pathetic running mate, Sarah Palin stumbles badly in the next debate, you can write them off.
References:
Obama/McCain very similar to Kennedy/Nixon in 1960
Republican Senate leaders — terrified by the prospect of losing five or more seats in November — have freed their members to vote however they need to vote to get reelected, even if that means bucking the president or the party’s leadership.
On at least four votes over the past month — Medicare, housing, the GI Bill and the Farm Bill — Republican leaders haven’t even bothered whipping members to toe the party line or back President Bush’s veto threats. Instead, a GOP leadership aide says leaders have told vulnerable senators that it’s all right to ‘get well’ with voters by siding with Democrats on anything but energy and national security….[MORE >>]
