America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill: On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders. Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could ...
The Afghan Syndrome: Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words -- both eulogies and curses -- have been offered too ...
Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World
Crossposted from TomDispatchI was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth. On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, ...
The 0% Doctrine: Obama Breaks New Ground When It Comes to War With Iran
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was: ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchIn the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles. When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchMake no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning. Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut nuclear arsenal. Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint ...
Iranian Aircraft Carriers in the Gulf of Mexico
Crossposted from TomDispatch Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S. (Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as ...
Obama's Mission Accomplished Moment?
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC. Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact. It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana. It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way. And then, of course, it wasn’t. And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta). ...
The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
Crossposted from TomDispatchOn the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words ...
How to Turn Election Year Into Election Life
Crossposted from TomDispatchSometimes words outlive their usefulness. Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us. “Election,” “presidential election campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for name-change. I ...
Crossposted from TomdispatchHe was 22, a corporal in the Marines from Preston, Iowa, a “city” incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949. He died in a hospital in Germany of “wounds received from an explosive device while on patrol in Helmand province [Afghanistan].” Of him, his high school ...
Crossposted from TomdispatchEvery childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face ...
Crossposted from TomdispatchHow about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream? M.R.I.C. (May it rest in carnage.) No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchOnce the Arab Spring broke loose, people began asking me why this country was still so quiet. I would always point out that no one ever expects or predicts such events. Nothing like this, I would say, happens until it happens, and only then do you try to ...
Is the National Security Complex Too Big to Fail?
Crossposted from TomdispatchThink of Iraq as the AIG of wars -- the only difference being that the bailout there didn’t involve just three payouts. More than eight years after the Bush administration invaded that country, the bailout is, unbelievably enough, still going. Even as the U.S. military withdraws, the State ...
Crossposted from Tomdispatch[Note to Readers: Who hasn’t received one -- or 100 -- of those “Nigerian” letters offering you, in florid prose, millions of potential dollars and with nary a catch in sight? But who knew that the highest officials in Washington have been receiving them as well -- and ...
Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death?
Crossposted from TomdispatchPut what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular paragraph should also have sent chills through the body politic, launched warning flares, and left the people’s representatives in Congress shouting about something other than ...
Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage ...
Crossposted from TomDispatchGeorge W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from ...
The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt’s already gone, having barely outlasted its moment -- just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added up to much. Okay, it was a little more than the military wanted, something less than Joe Biden would have liked, not enough for the ...
Nine War Words That Define Our World
Crossposted from TomDispatchNow that Washington has at least six wars cooking (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and more generally, the global war on terror), Americans find themselves in a new world of war. If, however, you haven't joined the all-volunteer military, any of our 17 intelligence outfits, the Pentagon, ...
Here’s a scenario to chill you to the bone: Without warning, the network -- a set of terrorist super cells -- struck in northern Germany and Germans began to fall by the hundreds, then thousands. As panic spread, hospitals were overwhelmed with the severely wounded. More than 20 of the ...
Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. ...
Bored to Death in Afghanistan (and Washington)
One day in October 2001, a pilot for Northwest Airlines refused to let Arshad Chowdhury, a 25-year-old American Muslim (“with a dark complexion”) who had once worked as an investment banker in the World Trade Center, board his plane at San Francisco National Airport. According to Northwest’s gate agents, Chowdhury writes ...
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May 13th, 2012
America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill: On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what ...
April 10th, 2012
The Afghan Syndrome: Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for ...
April 3rd, 2012
Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World
Crossposted from TomDispatchI was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, ...
March 12th, 2012
The 0% Doctrine: Obama Breaks New Ground When It Comes to War With Iran
Crossposted from TomDispatchWhen I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble -- dangling by his fingers, say, ...
February 23rd, 2012
Crossposted from TomDispatchIn the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally ...
February 6th, 2012
Crossposted from TomDispatchMake no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning. Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every ...
January 30th, 2012
Iranian Aircraft Carriers in the Gulf of Mexico
Crossposted from TomDispatch Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S. (Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American ...
June 30th, 2011
The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama
Crossposted from TomDispatchIt’s already gone, having barely outlasted its moment -- just long enough for the media to suggest that no one thought it added ...
July 12th, 2011
Crossposted from TomDispatchGeorge W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a ...
May 31st, 2011
Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen ...
August 3rd, 2011
Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time. ...
August 11th, 2011
Could the Pentagon Be Responsible for Your Death?
Crossposted from TomdispatchPut what follows in the category of paragraphs no one noticed that should have made the nation’s hair stand on end. This particular ...
April 19th, 2011
Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
This can’t end well. But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they ...
January 12th, 2012
Obama's Mission Accomplished Moment?
Crossposted from TomDispatchHere’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will ...
'The Rich & the Rest of Us' by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West and 'Drift' by Rachel Maddow
Mike, was the triple overtime Outback Bowl come-from-behind win the greatest Spartans game ever?
Yes -- or at least it will be until their appearance in next year's Rose Bowl, a game which... Continue Reading
Michael Moore on MSNBC, Super Tuesday, 3/6/12
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Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow Show, 2/27/12
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Michael Moore on Conan, 12/8/11
