Intellectual cowardice

Angry pro-Rumsfeld email in San Diego

This post by Chris Reed from a blog at the very conservative San Diego Union-Tribune popped up in Google News yesterday while I was looking at reaction to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's garrulous speech before the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City:

Rumsfeld's despicable tirade
Oh, yeah, people like William F. Buckley and George Will, they're akin to Nazi appeasers.

Rumsfeld should be ashamed. Lots of people, me included, loathe the Daily Kossacks for comparing Bush to Hitler. Now Rumsfeld compares critics of Bush's record running the Iraq war -- a group that includes not just lefties but Buckley, Will, major right-wing think tanks, John McCain, Chuck Hagel and much of Bush Sr.'s foreign-policy team -- to Nazi appeasers.

This is disgraceful.

Now Reed has attracted an ``angry email reaction'':

why don't you go live in Iran? Join up with the terrorists that will eventually try to murder you, your wife and children. Then we'll see how nice they are. To bad there is not some immediate consequence for liberals like you who try to lead our county into chaos. I guess that's free America in lieu of YOUR Iran! You are disgraceful!

When literate conservatives like Reed are piled on by an unwashed reactionary rabble who screech that ``you're either for Bush or for terrorism'', this tells you something about how Cheney and Rumsfeld think they can get away with their dishonest discourse. The mob to which they appeal possess an ``intellectual cowardice'' for saying that ``all critics are commies'' while being unable to accept that ``giants of the right'' like Will and Buckley are turning sour on the president. Sheesh...

Meanwhile, Fred Kaplan at Slate has a detailed and useful analysis of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's week of maddness, with special reference to the ``four questions'':

Kaplan: The fifth anniversary of 9/11 looms before us, and it's hard to say which artifact is gloomier: the awful memory of the attack itself (especially to those of us who witnessed the towers crumbling) or the spectacle of our leaders wrapping themselves in its legacy as if it were some tattered shroud that sanctifies their own catastrophic mistakes and demonizes all their critics.

I can't wait for President Bush to bring his own special kind of vapid intellectual cowardice to the American Legion convention later today.

Update: Ooops. Below I had Rumsfeld speaking to the VFW. The speech actually took place at the American Legion convention. Appropriate corrections have been made. Second update: I think I finally fixed all of the misinformation about the location of Rumsfeld's speech.

Read and cry

Flat daddies and mommies ease children's pain


Bangor Daily News photo by Bridget Brown

I should have posted this when I saw it yesterday morning on the front page of the Bangor Daily News. Steve Gilliard has an item on it today.

Real stand-up parents
Tuesday, August 29, 2006

By Jackie Farwell
Bangor Daily News

Mary Holbrook's husband, Lt. Col. Randall Holbrook, goes everywhere with his family - to the grocery store, out to eat, camping, and even to Mary's most recent gynecologist appointment. The doting Hermon family man just waits and grins as Mary and their two sons, Justin, 14, and Logan, 5, go about their days.

He doesn't say much, and he doesn't have any legs. That's because the ever-present Randall is actually a life-sized, foam board likeness of the real Randall from the waist up. He's a " Flat Daddy," one of many two-dimensional service members created through a National Guard program designed to ease the pain of separation for families of deployed troops.

"It's comforting," Mary Holbrook said. "It did help me adjust a lot."

The Flat Daddy - and Flat Mommy - effort geared up in Maine at the beginning of the year with the January deployment of the Brewer-based B Company, 3rd Battalion of the 172nd Mountain Infantry. The Guard pays to have a photo of the troop member blown up and provides supplies to families to attach the photo to foam board.

The cutouts also are provided to parents and family members of childless service members.

Spearheaded by Barbara Claudel, coordinator of the Maine National Guard's family program in Augusta, the endeavor has since provided more than 100 cutouts to service members' families.

Randall Holbrook's family made his Flat Daddy likeness when he deployed to Afghanistan in January with the Maine Army Guard's 240th Engineer Group of Augusta. He is scheduled to be gone until April, his wife said Wednesday evening in the driveway of her Hermon farmhouse.

"Where do you want to take Flat Daddy, Logan?" Holbrook asked her son.

"To the movie theater," Logan replied, briefly breaking from crawling on the family sedan.

That's one of the few places Flat Daddy hasn't visited, already having been toted to birthday parties, ballgames, school, the hairdresser, the babysitter's with Logan, and to the funeral of Mary Holbrook's mother. Justin dressed him in a Red Sox jersey and hat and watched a baseball game with Flat Daddy, he said.

People sometimes give her funny looks when she takes Flat Daddy out in public, but many tell her they think it's a great idea, Mary Holbrook said.

"Any time I get invited somewhere, I take it with me," she said.

And the gynecologist?

"He just thought it was really neat," she said.

The cutout is so realistic that it gave her a scare when she returned to her car one day, having forgotten that she'd belted him into a seat, Mary Holbrook said.

One place Flat Daddy doesn't go is her bed. The Guard wife doesn't take it that far, she said bashfully.

Not that the Holbrooks don't have a little fun with Flat Daddy, which the real daddy might not tolerate. On Halloween, they dressed him up in a sumo wrestler costume. When the family first got him, they propped him up in a chair at dinnertime.

"We put plates in front of him the first few days," Mary Holbrook said. "But he didn't eat much."

The idea that a foam board cutout could alleviate the pain of a loved one's absence seems a little silly at first, but somehow it helps, Mary Holbrook said.

"It makes you feel like he's right there," she said, as Flat Daddy rested in a nearby lawn chair.

Sherri Fish of Bangor thought the head-to-toe Flat Daddy likeness of her husband, Maine Air National Guard Staff Sgt. Richard Fish, was a little foolish at first.

She put it up on the door in her son Kevin's room, who was 3 years old when her husband deployed to Iraq in March 2005. Kevin didn't understand why his father had to leave and was so deeply angry that he wouldn't speak to Richard when he called home from Tikrit, Sherri Fish said.

"It was really hard on him," she said. "It was probably the hardest thing I had to go through while Rich was gone."

Then Sherri began hearing Kevin talking while alone in his room.

"One night, I finally asked him, 'Who are you talking to?' And he said, 'I'm talking to Daddy," Fish said. "I just about broke down crying."

"He'd sit at the end of his bed and tell him what went on at school that day," she said.

Despite his anger at his father, Kevin somehow felt comfortable relating to the life-sized likeness, Sherri Fish said. She admits it helped her, too.

"I'd catch myself just standing in Kevin's room, just looking at the picture," she said.

Kevin continued talking to Flat Daddy after Richard Fish returned home in October 2005, chatting with the cutout while his father was working in the morning, Sherri Fish said.

It's funny how a piece of foam board can ease a child's pain so much, "even though it's just a picture," she said.

Like Gilliard says, can we cry now?

Leaders of the fantasy war

Cheney, Rumsfeld take swings in friendly VFW & Legion confines


An important podium for Cheney

Back on August 26, 2002, the Vice President delivered before this same organization the most important paragraph in the run-up to the Iraq invasion:

Vice President Cheney: Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

After that, there should have been ``no doubt'' that the US military would be shocking and awing while it dug itself and our country good and deep into the Iraqi quagmire where we now find ourselves.

Cheney's credibility ought to be zero, even amongst people whose outlook is decidedly military. But he and his bouncing buddy, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, both had full loads to shoot into seemingly-receptive faces.

For his part, Cheney expertly pushed the right buttons on POW/MIAs, flag respect, and vet's health care as he greased the way for Terror War fantasies. As if he needs to remind anyone, ``In just two weeks the calendar will read again September 11th, and our minds will go back to that day five years ago,'' when our enemies used ``stealth and murder'' and their bad ``nature'' in order to fulfil the ``ambitions they seek to achieve.''

Cheney goes on with the usual domino theory of creeping, insideous Islamic ``dictatorship of fear'' that ``rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of our society.''

The goal of the enemy is to impose by ``force and intimidation'' a ``totalitarian empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia.''

And here's what Cheney says they're gonna use to do it:

They have made clear, as well, their ultimate ambitions: to arm themselves with chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, to destroy Israel, to intimidate all western countries, and to cause mass death in the United States.

WMD again... he didn't have to say ``Iran,'' evidently the next target for preventive war against its infrastructure and population. And what about Iraq? Well, only the worst could happen if the US withdrew its occupation force:

Cheney: And they believe they can frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.

I realize, as well, that some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone. But the exact opposite is true.

Cheney seems not to have noticed that Iraq has already devolved into hysterical violence and hatred of America unimaginable even three years ago after a dozen years of brutal US-imposed sanctions.

The next day (Tuesday), Rumsfeld went to the American Legion convention in Salt Lake to fire some more shot. A mood uglier than normal seemed to possess him as he railed against his opposition while playing the Hitler card:

Rumsfeld: Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated -- or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace -- even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

There was a strange innocence in views of the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. Senator’s reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II.

He exclaimed, ``Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.''

Think of that! I recount this history because once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism. Today, another enemy -- a different kind of enemy -- has also made clear its intentions -- in places like New York, Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, and Moscow. But it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons. We need to face the following questions:

With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?

Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply ``law enforcement'' problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches?

And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America -- not the enemy -- is the real source of the world’s trouble?

These are central questions of our time. And we must face them.

Scoldings over the ''lessons of history'' from Rumsfeld's vaporous mind and grandiose notions of centrality should engender great skepticism in his listeners. He simply can't be serious that the destructive potential of a very few tiny cadres of stateless actors who ``wear no uniforms'' are even comparable to the state-sourced violence and real fascism of the last century. All this talk of a ``new enemy'' and a ``different war'' should be seen as comical when compared to the threat of superpower nuclear exchange that characterized the Cold War we experienced (and in essential respects continue to experience) for the last five decades.

Saying this does not minimize the tradgedy of the attacks that have occured, including the outrageous murderous spectacle of September 11, 2001. But even this very significant level of realized terrorism can in no way compare to total war in Europe and the Pacific during WWII, or the potential for global destruction of the Cold War -- or even some state massacres, like the perhaps two million people killed by the US-supported Indonesian regime of General Suharto beginning in 1965 and including a brutal blockade and attack on East Timor that killed 500,000.

More examples continue to this day. The period of US attack, invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq under the state direction of Cheney and Rumsfeld have resulted in an unknown number of casualties, at least 100 innocent civilians per day averaged over three years for a total of more than 100,000 dead. Just today, over 100 were killed in a pitched battle at Diwaniyah.

That's more than 30 September 11s in a country the size of California. Somehow for Cheney and Rumsfeld that is a different kind of killing, a justified kind. There is no looking in the mirror. Doing that means you have failed history's lessons and blame America first.

I suspect that Rumsfeld & Cheney's brand of killing does something quite opposite from the stated intentions of quelling terrorism. It breeds the hatred, indeed creates the enemies to whom Cheney ascribes this hatred. The only strong suit of the American Terror War is in the dropping of bombs on people's heads and waging war on what amounts to entire populations of countries. No scorn from Rumsfeld and Cheney can fix the morality of that.

At one point, Cheney spent a bit of time defending warrantless wiretapping and surveillance. His assurances about legality and civil liberties sound like bald-faced lies to me. Communication surveillance is utterly useless in tracking down the very rare genuine, committed, sophisticated terrorist Cheney puffs up so much. The extraordinarily rare persons who plot such attacks (not the ridiculous airplane scare of the last month, or the shlubs who were rounded up in Miami a couple of months ago) can easily disguise communication so that the NSA would never in a million years be able to decrypt it. Tools freely available on the internet can do that for anyone. The only purpose of such surveillance is the restriction of civil liberties and the right to dissent from the deadly policies Cheney and Rumsfeld execute.

Meanwhile, the Terror War is an utter failure at removing terrorists from their holes, and it has united disparate swaths of the globe against us. Often the very people we need to have as friends and allies if we are serious about reducing the threat of attacks find themselves struggling for survival and resistance against the powerful artillery of America and its clients.

Rumsfeld and Cheney both dismiss the law enforcement model of eliminating terrorism. In doing that, they implicitly dismiss the rule of law. This means abuse, murder, rape, harsh imprisonment, rendition, secret prisons are open for free-for-all -- essentially throwing out nine centuries of enlightened human rights, criminal procedure, and laws of war.

The Cheney/Rumsfeld arguments mean perpetual war. If we will never ``let down our guard'' in the style of war these un-peaceful men have designed, we (or our clients) will be making and dropping bombs until someone decides to stop us. Cheney and Rumsfeld have led us into a much more dangerous destabilzed world -- a fiasco, an utter disaster. We have not ``been protected by sound policy decisions by the President'' or by ``decisive action at home and abroad.'' That's laughable. What seems to keep us safe for the moment is the initial though not permanently contining rarity of enemies with the means and desire to harm us. However, as America and its clients drop more bombs on people every day, that reality will one day catch up with us.

US-Canada friendship

Wednesday when we crossed into Canada, the border guard at Sault Ste. Marie handed us a survey for American visitors. One question asked how many times we'd been to Canada in the last five years. We counted fifteen in our travel log! We love Canada and greatly look forward to our next visit.

Travel photo blogging

Scenes across NE North America


August 22


August 22


August 24


August 25

Garden blogging gets a vacation this week so I can post some general travel photos. I did look for a good farm scene in Vermont with mountains and cows, but I came up empty. We did see some cows along Rt. 2 near Plainfield, but the light was no good and the location along the winding road made shooting difficult.

Farther up the road, near St. Johnsbury, there are a lot of old barns. But where are the cows? Over and over again, we saw old dairy farms lacking livestock and evidently no longer operating.

We're back in Maine now. Regular postings will resume shortly.

Special garden blogging

Clemens gardens


Long view of four lower tiers


Bench detail and main fountain


Hibiscus


Middle tier


Upper tier


Specimen in the Virginia Clemens Rose Garden


Well-worn monarch on buddleja


The white garden


Lower tier

This is just a sample of the 50 or so frames I shot this morning, posted by popular demand. If I post some more, they will be on flickr here. Thank you Avedon, and other readers, for letting me know that you enjoy these.

10th Street Bridge

Monument to traffic in Saint Cloud


The 1890 bridge over the Mississippi from Munsinger Gardens


Before and during destruction of the Works Progress Administration 1935 embankments


New 10th Street Bridge, also from Munsinger Gardens

Before I post some more garden photos, I'd like to show readers some revealing history about my home town of Saint Cloud, Minnesota.

For over ninety years, a fine, sturdy bridge spanned the Mississippi River from the area near the state university over to the southeast part of town. I grew up in a house near the bridge and right across the street from what is now the Clemens Gardens. The Munsinger Gardens are just down a hill and along the river bank. The old bridge was destroyed and replaced by a monstrous structure. The new bridge was finished in 1985.

Of course, there were compelling reasons of traffic engineering for doing this. The old bridge did suffer damage and closures quite frequently. It was not intended to carry the traffic load that it did. But no creative solution other than making a traffic monster was ever considered.

Indeed, the new bridge is a race course. We were just up there, crossing it while dozens of gas guzzlers sped by at 40 or 50 mph. The pace of the old bridge never was like that. The new bridge is more like the whole of Saint Cloud--an arm pit of fast food and fast cars rarely slowing down to see the flowers.

Some of the WPA stonework still exists along Riverside Drive. There is another WPA 1935 cornerstone about six blocks up stream. But the destruction of the historic bridge and embankments is a blemish on the total experience of peace and quiet that the gardens should offer. The ugly, ultra-growth mindset prevalent in Saint Cloud has made that impossible.

Friday Garden Blogging

Munsinger & Clemens Gardens


Part of Clemens Gardens, Saint Cloud, Minnesota


Original fountain in Munsinger Gardens, Saint Cloud, Minnesota

My home town is in many ways an arm pit on the surface of Earth. It is therefore amazing that along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River the city has a set of gardens that are renowned for their beauty.

The original site is called Munsinger Gardens. The stonework you see in the second photo above is a legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The Clemens Gardens were an addition of the 1990s.

We arrived a little late, so what you see here were shot in fairly low light. I'll try to add a garden blogging special edition on Clemens and Munsinger Gardens if there is time before we leave town.

Friday Garden Blogging

Trans-Canada Highway


Mackey Lake


Shield rock in the Nickel Belt

These scenes were photographed while driving Rt. 17 across Ontario today. That second shot was taken out the car window while at a speed of about 80 km/hr. The rock is that close to the road.

Terror plot drumbeat in Canada

CBC outlet for aviation mongering

This morning we find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Ontario. At the motel last night, on the CBC National program the normally stayed Peter Mansbridge was electric with news of the UK "liquid explosives against airplanes" terror plot roll-up.

Red Alert! Red Alert! Women, dump your pocketbooks of your "$80 worth of make-up" before you can board. I wish I had the tape to do some screen grabs. The reporting was all terror, and no political analysis.

For such analysis, I will point to Kurt Nimmo, who I think has it just about right: Fake Terror Obfuscates Lebanon and Iraq Failures:

Finally, as attention has now shifted to Muslim bad guys (either imagined or a parade of patsies), Israel will likely increase the severity of its criminal behavior against the civilians of Lebanon and those of Gaza as well, as the American public will be navel gazing video footage of inconvenienced air travel passengers.

And don't we have Congressional elections or something happening in the fall? I noted yesterday that NY Times quoted Vice President Cheney on the recent victory of Iraq withdrawl proponent Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate primary, ``Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage 'al Qaeda types.'''

Today, Lieberman himself had this to say,

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.

The War Party sees the panic button as the path to squashing political interference from the American people.

You made us kill your children

On CNN Larry King Live...


ALAN DERSHOWITZ: "We can forgive you for killing our children but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children"

He attributes that to Golda Meir, but clearly he thinks that is the proper logic of Israel's destruction of Lebanon with the inherited hyperpower of the United States and boat loads of the explosives the US rushes to supply.

Last fall, I heard Dershowitz say, ``I just love targeted assassinations.''

And look here. This is the result when Israel tries ``not to kill civilians''.

Zogby had it just about right in this little sideshow:

JAMES ZOGBY: ...the point you were making was not dissimilar to the point that terrorists always make and that is that in a war there are no civilians. Everyone on the enemy side is culpable.

Dershowitz is a toxic man.

Fuel prices soaring again

Just in time for our cross-country vacation


This local station is one of the cheapest around here. From this starting point, what happens if we have a hurricane?

Good time for BPs Alaska pipeline operation to be shut. We're only going as far as Minnesota. The west coast could have the biggest problem, according to the story cited. Small comfort.

We'll travel round-trip 3750 miles and put 150 gallons into the old Subaru, so our budget will push $500 for fuel this time. Oh for the days when we could do it on $200. But you see, that extra $300 is not stopping us from going. What would it take to cancel? Maybe a near doubling to $5 or $6/gal would stop us, maybe.

Greg Palast says today,

Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back — say, after Dan Lawn’s tenth warning — the oil market would have hardly noticed.

But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP’s shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum.

BP could have fixed the pipeline problem this past winter, after their latest corrosion-caused oil spill. But then ARCO would have lost the summertime supply-squeeze windfall.

Doubtless BP and friends are up to no good on this one. But I'm of two minds on Greg Palast's reporting on oil and the multinational oil companies--especially with respect to Iraq. On one hand, he does some excellent muckraking, as shown above. On the other, he is dismissive of peak oil, and this is discrediting of his entire analysis, to my mind. He sees big oil in an epic struggle to maintain high prices by preventing the huge natural oil glut from crashing the market. But, as Richard Heinberg pointed out in a long letter concerning Palast's ``potshot'' at peak oil in Armed Madhouse, Palast has a lot of his facts wrong.

Sure, monopoly practice is strongly extant. However, if natural, geological limiting conditions were not beginning to be felt, it would be much more difficult for oil interests to engage in the manipulations we are seeing.

Iraq: US ``joining'' civil war

Patrick Cockburn: Baghdad is dying

...Into this maelstrom, President George Bush is ordering 4,000 extra American troops in a bid to control the civil war in Baghdad (absurdly, Bush and Tony Blair reject the phrase "civil war" despite the all-too-visible sectarian carnage). Many embattled Sunni districts will welcome the Americans, but the majority in Baghdad are Shia and they already see the US as playing sectarian politics in order to shore up imperial control.

"The Americans are not honest brokers," one former minister told me. "They switch their support between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds in order to serve their own interests." Already, US forces are attacking offices and arresting officials of the main Shia militia the Mehdi Army, followers of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The US may be joining, not ending, the civil war....

Hiroshima/Nagasaki event

Recording available at peacecast.us.

War parties

Democrats just as committed to war as Republicans

And that goes for Connecticut Democratic US Senate primary challenger Ned Lamont every bit as much as it does for the fifth-column, pro-Bush Democratic incumbent Joe Lieberman.

I wrote about the letter signed by Democratic senators opposing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's statements condemning the Israeli attack on Lebanon here.

After that post, it came out that DNC Chair Howard Dean in Palm Beach had called Malaki an "anti-Semite". This Monday article by Stanley Rogouski on Counterpunch is a particularly good read on the pro-war nature of the Democratic Party:

Let's look at what Maliki actually said.

"The Israeli attacks and air strikes are completely destroying Lebanon's infrastructure. I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers' meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression."

What's striking about this statement is not that it's anti-Semitic but that it's decidedly not anti-Semitic. If this is the most anti-Semitic thing that the Democratic Party could dig up from the Arab world than the problem of "anti-Semitism" we here about so much in the Middle East is a lie. Indeed, for an Islamic theocrat and Shiite politician, Maliki sounds an awful lot like a secular leftist politician in Western Europe, and that was what so angered Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin. Any of them could have easily gone to the Memri (an organization set up by Israeli intelligence to publish the most inflammatory anti-Semitic and anti-American statements coming out of the Arab world) website and picked out something from the platform of the Dawa party about the status of women or gays, or about the Sunni minority in Iraq that would make your hair stand on end. So why pick out a rare statement by an Arab politician which denounces the Israeli government but says nothing about Jews or Zionism or anything else we'd find offensive?

Rouguski writes this about Ned Lamont and the Israeli war on Lebanon:

Ned Lamont is safely pro-Israel. The statement on his website leaves no room for doubt. "At this critical time in the Middle East," Lamont says. "I believe that when Israel's security is threatened, the United States must unambiguously stand with our ally to be sure that it is safe and secure. On this principle, Americans are united." But the Democratic party rank and file that's behind Lamont's campaign, the grassroots, or "netroots" as they are popularly known, is not. In fact, they're exploding with anti-Israel sentiment. For the first time in recent memory, the American people are not united and don't stand unambiguously with Israel.

Curious. On the netroots point, I'm not sure who Rouguski is talking about. As far as I can tell, Atrios, the biggest major-blogger Lamont supporter, has had very little to say about Lamont's strong pro-war stance with respect to Israel.

Update: I'd actually found this before I posted, but I forgot to mention... Billmon had a great piece on the ``War Party'' a couple of days ago. This is an excellent critique of the true lack of any meaningful anti-war positions to be found amongst Democrats:

But there's one big problem with all this hyperventilating: It wildly exaggerates the anti-war fevor that Ned Lamont supposedly represents. Oh I know Ned says he's anti-war, but he only means the war in Iraq. The war in Lebanon, on the other hand, is just fine by him. And he's already pledged he'll be just as staunch a friend of Israel and the Israel lobby in this war as Holy Joe ever was or ever could be. So bombs away.

Thanks, Billmon.

To the News Dissector...

Thanks, Danny.

Aid cut off in Lebanon

Imagine a month of 9/11s




CNN: ``'This is Lebanon's umbilical cord'"

Then imagine that the terrorist force ``smashes bridges, roads into New York Beirut''. All the routes that rescue and aid workers need to help the sick and wounded and re-supply the population are cut off.

The Angry Arab says: ``Israel loves to kill poor people.''

Looks like they're going to do a lot of that before this is over.

Friday Garden Blogging

Lunkers


Yellow crookneck summer squash (Cucurbita spp.)

We've been pulling up these things for a couple of weeks now. They've pretty much taken over the whole place (spread out much, much bigger now than here).

They're great for the grill--slice & wrap in foil with some cut onions.

Accidental targeting

Intentional accidents


Following its ususal practice (adopted by the US in Iraq), Israel ignores the Geneva Conventions and targets ambulances. See Dahr Jamail for details about this photo.

According to Human Rights Watch (via Angry Arab), a new report, Fatal Strikes, Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,

documents serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. During this period, the IDF killed an estimated 400 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and that number climbed to over 500 by the time this report went to print. The Israeli government claims it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have consistently launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military gain but excessive civilian cost. In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.

Perhap Gwynne Dyer should peruse this information, when pondering that awful-looking ``40:1 kill ratio''.

A ``devastating official assessment''

While Israel is on a rampage through Lebanon, Roger Payne points to the latest ``offical'' word on that other war:

The British ambassador to Iraq has returned home, but William Patey's last official confidential diplomatic telegram provides...``a "devastating official assessment of the prospects for a peaceful Iraq"... the pessimism reflected in the leaked memo "stands in stark contrast to the public rhetoric"

This leaked memo joins a parade of behind-the-scenes reports and cables about what is really going on in Iraq--nothing short of a complete breakdown of the society and a civil war spiraling out of control.

This should be blockbuster news because it reveals that the rosy public rhetoric President Bush likes to use on Iraq is contradicted internally within the occupation coalition. Will the mainstream media treat this news with any urgency? Not if they treat it like they have before, when similar information became availble.

Beirut neighborhood crushed

Israelis merciless


Before watermarked ``Google Digital Globe", after watermarked ``Digital Globe''; see http://bloggingbeirut.com/ for more information

To her credit, CNN's Paula Zahn last night did show this massive destruction of civilian areas of South Beirut by Israeli bombardment. But, naturally, Zahn had to speak for Israel, ``And, of course, the Israelis would argue that they had actionable intelligence that would make them want to bomb that part of Beirut, because that's where Hezbollah is operating from,'' and ``But the Israelis would argue, they wouldn't be targeting these parts of Beirut if Hezbollah wasn't operating among the civilian population. You have to concede that Hezbollah is blended in to that part of life in southern Beirut,'' in response to a desperate Lebanese official.

Last night Zahn did not mention Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention prohibiting collective punishment. Her Lebanese guest did point out that, ``Article 50 of Protocol 1 of Geneva Conventions, the presence of individuals within the population which doesn't come within the definition of civilians doesn't deprive the population of its civilian character.''

In my opinion, this is far beyond a ``war on Hezbollah.'' The Israeli aggression is a salvo in the US neoconservative plan to apply US power to ethnically cleanse and reshape the world to neoconservative liking.

Awful

Israeli attack on Lebanon not about captured soldiers and rockets

President Bush speaking in Miami yesterday said it's ``awful'' that civilians have to die during Israel's noble effort to clean up their bad ``neighbor'' where ``tyranny and terror to thrive''. He even uses the time-tested rhetorical construction of invoking the events of September 11, 2001 so the public gets a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down:

And as we saw on Sept. 11, the status quo in the Middle East led to death and destruction in the United States, and it had to change.

Awful? Sure. But we expect this from Bush. So let's talk about something truly awful--the pro-Israel stance of supposed guardians of the left. Don't get me started on the insufferable Al Franken. I'll just quote a column by the Canadian-born intellectual and humanist historian Gwynne Dyer that appeared in today's Bangor Daily News:

The kill ratio is becoming a problem: Israel has been killing about 40 Lebanese civilians for every Israeli civilian who is killed. They are all killed by accident, of course, but such a long chain of accidents begins to look like carelessness, and even in Israel and the United States many people are getting uneasy about the slaughter.

This interpretation of events is incredible. What? It's getting harder to see that a very small military skirmish and two soldiers captured for trade for numerous Lebanese the Israelis have rounded up over the years justifies a ``40:1 kill ratio'' and devastation of an entire population? Maybe these liberals should start asking if it's pre-planned ethnic cleansing and genocide that's going on.

Israel has declared everyone in its free-fire zone ``terrorist''. That hardly squares with calling the slaughter accidental.