Going nuts in Tampa, and CNN has a major fail.

Everyone in new media is talking about how two republicans at their convention in Tampa threw nuts at a CNN camerawoman (yes woman, stay classy wingnuts) and called her an animal. This, of course, is not news. We have come to expect this type of behavior from the Neanderthals on the right.

But this post isn't even about the knuckle dragging bunch in Tampa and their frat boy like and ignorant behavior. This is about the main stream media,-- CNN in particular---and how they have bent over backwards to avoid real stories in order to make this election about two viable candidates for president.

The fact that a CNN camerawoman was harassed and CNN hardly reported it is a disgrace. But we have come to expect this. No wonder their ratings are tanking.  We haven't heard, for instance, any questions about Mitt's church and their pre 1978 view of blacks. We haven't heard any questions about Paul Ryan co-sponsoring a very draconian bill towards women with Congressman Todd Akin, and let's not forget his bill which specifically calls for cuts in Medicare.

What we have seen and heard, was a disgraceful report from CNN's Gloria Borger. ( I am no Ron Paul fan, but good for him for walking out on her interview)

“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.” — CNN

Come again?

That, my friends, is what some are calling the "most ridiculous statement" ever on television.

I will let Tommy Christopher tell it:

When a friend tweeted me about a line from CNN’s Romney Revealed documentary, I thought he must have misheard or paraphrased it, but as it turns out, Gloria Borger’s narration of the Mitt Romney profile really did contain the most ridiculous sentence I’ve ever heard on television, so ridiculous that I’m half-suspicious CNN is actually a cabal of master satirists who are making fun of the Republican presidential candidate.

The portion of the documentary in question covers Mitt Romney’s stint as a door-to-door Mormon recruiter in 1968 France, a duty which helped him to avoid military service in Vietnam. Earlier in the doc, narrator and interviewer Gloria Borger glossed over the fact that Romney sought, and received, four deferments during the Vietnam War (and later lied about it), instead saying simply that he was “exempt as a student, and with a high draft number.”

The doc also notes, as an example of Romney “becoming his own man,” that he protested in favor of the draft that he so skillfully avoided, before moving on to the time he spent in France, a time that Romney once described as “tough” because the French were “not happy to see Americans, because we were in Vietnam at the time.”

Yes, you heard that right. Not only did Mitt Romney protest in favor of sending other people’s children to die in Vietnam, even as he avoided service himself, he then complained about how those dying Americans made it “tough” for him while he was in France avoiding service." [Source] 

Folks, all I can say is that you get what you deserve in this country.You can thank your friendly neighborhood cable network and their corporate masters for that.




     

Passing on the Taliban.

When the frat boy was in power I was so much angrier. I was always fighting with my ideological enemies because with the war raging in Iraq and American deaths mounting every day, the stakes were so much higher.

Now here we are in the age of Obama and I have mellowed. But that could change. What will change it is if his O ness makes the same mistake the president before him did and try to nation build again in the name of fighting the "war on terror".

First, I agree that right after 911 if we were going to go anywhere it should have been to Afghanistan and not Iraq. It is where Osama bin Laden (OBL) launched his terror network and where he found a safe haven while the Taliban was in control. But in my humble opinion, OBL is probably now on his sixth or seventh virgin and will never be heard from again. The frat boy missed his chance to display his head on the evening news and the guy probably died in his sleep.

Now what we have in Afghanistan is a mess of a problem. And unfortunately his O ness won't get around to it until health care passes.- Or doesn't pass depending on the politricksters in Washington and how they are reading the polls- Instead of committing our troops there when the man we wanted was still alive, the frat boy was giving billions of dollars to the Pakistani,dictator, Musharraf. (Who should be right up there with Valerio Viccei as one of the greatest thieves of all time.) All those billions to fight terror and helps us catch OBL and he was building his military to fight my cricket loving friends in India the whole time. Nice.

Can't say I really blame him, though. Who wants to fight the Afghans? Here in A-merry-ca baseball is our national past time. In Afghanistan it's fighting wars. Just ask the Russians how that little campaign over there worked out for them. Those cats over there have been fighting wars for centuries, it's all they know, so why we would try to nation build in a country like that is beyond me. Talk about getting medieval, they are medieval.

Let's throw in the fact that we are supporting a guy that was probably not even fairly elected and we have a real hypocrisy problem on our hands. But field, if we don't support Hamid Karzai who else are we going to support ? the Taliban? How about none of the above?

The death toll is starting to mount in Afghanistan, and American generals are asking for either more troops or a total withdrawal. The wingnuts and chicken hawks are still saying that we can't "cut and run", that we will look like cowards to the rest of the world. I disagree. American could nuke that entire region with just just a head nod from the chosen one. No one questions our military might. And only a fool would. But the Afghan fighters and Taliban are digging in, and they have been down this road before. Of course, we have too, and it took us years and thousands of lives to get out of places like Vietnam and Iraq. In the case of Iraq, we are still there. Nation building and fighting a war are two entirely different things. We should be nation building our own damn country and fighting the urban terrorist there before we go half way around the world to a bunch of religious fanatics. (Hell we have enough fanatics here that we should be worried about. One of them is on the radio every damn day screaming about the government plot to take over our lives.)

Let's just hope that his O ness sticks to his original script, or even better, scrap the script and get his troops the hell out of there. What we can't have happen is him following the wingnuts and the crowd calling for more troops. We have seen that script before, too, and unfortunately we all know what the final chapter will look like.

"Freedom isn't free."

This election season we have heard over and over again, how a certain presidential candidate spent over five years of his life in a North Vietnamese prison. We have heard, time and time again, how brave and courageous he was, and how he was tortured and refused medical treatment by his captors, the Viet Cong. We heard about how he gave up his own freedom when it was offered, all so that he could suffer with his fellow American prisoners of war. That was courageous, and no doubt a certain presidential candidate deserves all the accolades that he has gotten. Senator, thank you for your service. I mean that.

But Senator (you know the but was coming, so don't trip), with all due respect, A-merry-ca has done alright by you, don't you think? This country we love so much has given you two of the things it cherishes most: blonds and money. Yes Senator, not only do you have the blond, but she came with lots and lots of money. That's one hundred million ways we have said thank you senator, and I think you deserve every penny of it.....

Now Senator, I know of some other men who have spent some time in prisons that they didn't deserve to be in as well. In fact, there are quite a few of them. One poor guy, Walter Swift, did 26 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Now I know he wasn't tortured like you senator, and I am sure the conditions he was under were much better than what you had over there in the Hanoi Hilton. But 26 years of state time in Michigan? Hmmmm, let me see now; 26 years as opposed to five. I don't know, that kind of evens it out a little, don't you think? The thing is, and here is the irony of it all: You were fighting the Vietnamese to protect us from Communism, you were fighting for our A-merry-can ideals, our A-merry-can way of life and everything we stand for. And yet people like poor Mr. Swift keep ending up being victims of an imperfect system of laws which those ideals you were fighting for, created. Unfortunately for Mr. Swift, he doesn't have the pedigree like you do senator. You are the son of a four star admiral... Hell, you are the grandson of a four star admiral as well. You went to prep schools and the Naval Academy, you are an A-merry-can hero. Mr Swift's ancestors were slaves. So he was not given a heroes homecoming when he walked out of The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit. And he sure as hell will not eventually end up being something as prestigious as a senior senator from one of these divided states; succeeding a man like the the famous (or infamous) Barry Goldwater.

"My incarceration of 26 years was just that - my personal adversity,... And to harbor any ill feelings toward anyone because of it would not only cheapen me as an individual, but it would put a remarkable blemish upon the excellent work and the struggle of these people who labored so hard on my behalf."

Well said Mr. Swift. A-merry-ca owes you as well. Unfortunately, all we can give you is your freedom back. It's not much but at least you live in a country where you can be free. I think you are supposed to thank a certain presidential candidate for that.

I have your "Surge" right here!

I rarely post about the war in Iraq anymore, because quite honestly, this country has hardened into two camps. And if the Bush supporters saw him cut off the head of a little baby, they would say that the sacrifice was needed to keep us safe from Islamic terrorist.

But as September approaches, and we await the report of General Petraeus with rapt anticipation, I feel I need to throw my two cents into this debate about the fiasco in Iraq once again.

You might have heard the frat boy declare recently that we cannot repeat the mistakes of Vietnam by abandoning the people of Iraq. He passionately invoked the memories of the "killing fields" in Cambodia, the prospects of "boat people' and re-education camps. He even implied that leaving Iraq would jeopardise the lives of millions of our friends who we would leave behind to the enemy, just like what happened in Indochina in 1974. That might or might not be true. But isn't this the same George Bush who declared just months ago that there was no comparison between Iraq and Vietnam? Sure it is. But what else would you expect from the flip flopper in chief. The frustrating thing is that Americans aren't even paying attention. Our attention span is so short, and our ability to engage and understand this war is so limited, because sadly, we spend all of our time worrying about things like Lindsey Lohan's DUI arrest, or Michael Vick and his fucking dogs. Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of people are being killed in Iraq, and hundreds of our soldiers continue to die in a foreign country in the middle of Arabia. All while the frat boy and his minions continue to lie to us and pretend that the fucking surge is working.

"I don't see any progress, just us getting killed" That's not some field Negro writing from the comforts of his home in Northeast Philadelphia, that's Army Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, who is on the ground with our proud men and women in Iraq. Just ask the respected Senator John Warner. He recently said that we should be bringing our troops home now. (see link above) Yes, that tree hugging liberal, and softy Warner, is joining the chorus of the bring the troops home crowd. Even some of the frat boy's generals are now having misgivings about this misguided and immoral war, and are calling for troop reductions. And another General, Colin Powell, tried to warn the frat boy before we even got into this mess. (where is Colin these days?) He tried to draw the analogy with Vietnam to his republican colleagues. He tried to explain that you cannot invade a country like that without having an exit strategy. But shockingly, we did, and we did it with no exit strategy in place. We listened to the neo-cons (operative word being con) and their exulted leader, the "chicken hawk" de jure, Dick Cheney. Now they tell us we just can't pull out, that it would leave the country in an even worse position than when we went in there. Let's see now, that's kind of like saying that I raped this woman, but she can't terminate her pregnancy because the baby will be severely retarded. Think about this for a minute. Just think about what these people did to our country, to the poor people of Iraq, and how it will affect our standing in the world and our foreign policy for years to come. Now we have Iran rubbing their hands together and salivating over the prospects of a little Iran right there in the region.

So as we await word from the new hero of the right, General Petraeus, who will no doubt report that we need more time because the "surge" is working. Let's remember why they think it's working. Let's remember that we are arming local militias in places like the Anbar Province. Let's remember that we are working with former Sunni insurgents who were themselves killers of our own soldiers. Let's remember that while we strengthen the local governments and militias, we are weakening the central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a man who is so incompetent, he makes Saddam look like Winston fucking Churchill. "He is a good guy". Sure he is George, and "Brownie was doing a heck of a job". "George Bush doesn't care about black people." I know Kanye, but he doesn't care about Iraqis, or white people either.

I guess this wouldn't piss me off so much of there was a draft, and this sacrifice was truly shared. But there is no draft, and people like Mitt Romney can run for President while his five military ready sons drive around Iowa in a fucking Winnebago, and act like they are serving the country. In the mean time, one family in California just sacrificed two of their sons for this fucked up and misguided war.....don't even get me started. -See, this is why I don't like to talk about this war, because I get so worked up. We have all been touched by the horror and the lunacy of it, yet we continue to debate this war like there should even be a debate. Like it's even a question whether we should get out now or not.

Well, I guess if you have a vested business interest like the folks at Haliburtun, and Black Water; or, one of those defense contractors raking in the millions, there should be a debate. But if you are like the rest of us,-at least the sane ones left in this country- you will see this war for what it is, and what it always was; a politically expedient ploy to make a few people very wealthy, and to keep a party in power by playing on the fears and patriotism of the American people.