Last Straw

Onegoodmove has a clip of (ahem) Hardball’s Chris Matthews interviewing Norm Coleman (the schmuck Senator who thought it might be a good idea to slander Gorgeous George), who then has Galloway respond. As Norman Jenson of onegoodmove puts it, “once again Galloway hands him his ass.” Or as one of Norman’s American readers writes, “Why can’t the Democrats talk like this?”

John Nichols, a well known American writer, offers his analysis:

The problem for Coleman is that Galloway is not a standard-issue American politician — the kind who has nothing to say and says it poorly. He is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble politics of Glasgow and the equally rough-and-tumble politics of the British Parliament. In other words, Galloway comes from places where voters and politicians do not suffer fools. And anyone who has ever followed British politics knows that George Galloway has beaten every political challenge he has faced — even those posed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

I agree with his analysis of Galloway, but when, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, your Prime Minister commits the “supreme war crime,” and you re-elect him, I’d say there’re a few voters in Britain willing to suffer fools.

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
—Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, 30th September 1946

And back to weasle world, Greg Palast, recently awarded the George Orwell Prize for Courage-in-Journalism, hands out his own Cowardice in Journalism Award to Newsweek and a Goebbels Award to Condolleezza Rice for their efforts in castrating Newsweek after one of Newsweek’s journalists did something highly inconvenient, and reported news critical of the U.S. government! Well, it’s hardly news, allegations of Quran abuse have repeatedly been made by former Guantanamo prisoners (Washington Post, 3/26/03; London Guardian, 12/3/03; Daily Mirror, 3/12/04; Center for Constitutional Rights, 8/4/04; La Gazette du Maroc, 4/12/05; New York Times, 5/1/05; BBC, 5/2/05; cites compiled by Antiwar.com, 5/16/05). It appears, however, that this story broke the camel’s back, culminating in deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan, now called the “The Newsweek Riots” by spineless American media outlets. Palast concludes:

Newsweek has now publicly committed to having its reports vetted by Rumsfeld’s Defense Department before publication. Why not just print Rumsfeld’s press releases and eliminate the middleman?

FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) offers this angle:

Newsweek’s retraction of the Quran story, contrasted with the lack of any correction of its “green mushroom” claim and other similarly erroneous WMD coverage, is quite illustrative of the actual rules—quite different from the ostensible rules that are taught in journalism school—that govern contemporary journalism:

Anonymous sources are fine, as long as they are promoting rather than challenging official government policy.

It’s all right for your reporting to be completely wrong, as long as your errors are in the service of power.

The human cost of bad reporting need only be counted when people who matter are doing the counting.

I was sitting right up the back of the bus this morning on my way to work, one of those buses where the second-to-back seat faces toward the back one. To my left was some other bloke and sitting on the seat facing us were two of route 29’s many goddesses, a joyful morning’s bus ride to be sure. Until, that is, someone farted. It was pretty average, nothing too offensive, but definitely male. There was a bit of nose-screwing and eye-shifting until one of the girls went for the window. I was attempting to ignore the escalating situation, continuing to read my book, when, out of the corner of my eye, I see the bloke shoot me a quick glance. And then another. I can’t believe it, the cheeky fucker. A smile breaks across my face at his audacity. I’m starting to laugh now, but its too late, the goddesses won’t have a bar of it. I’m left carrying the can. As I get off at my stop I catch a final glance; he’s smirking and for some reason all I can think of is Tony Blair.

According to FAIR the Smoking Gun Memo is going mostly unreported in the U.S., while Tom Engelhardt points out that a report by Mark Danner in the 9 June issue of the New York Review of Books, will be the first U.S. print publication to publish the full Memo:

That a “smoking gun” document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon, tells us much about our present moment.

Howard Zinn, one of the United States’ more sane citizens, touches on the origins of American nationalism, and how, when mixed with unbridled power, it has lead to one of the Yank’s more, uh, endearing traits: American exceptionalism.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early. When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible.

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on September 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation. We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

And Andrew Buncombe of the Independent reports on the AWOL crisis hitting the U.S. military:

As the death toll of troops mounts in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s military recruiting figures have plummeted to an all-time low. Thousands of US servicemen and women are now refusing to serve their country.