Is Obama cynical?

In the same way we wondered if Bush was evil or just stupid, now we are confronted with the almost same question in an only slightly new guise: is Obama just bland or is he cynical?

It takes more than that to buy me!

Here, in an exquisite and unnoticed example of candor, Rick Perry says he's offended at the suggestion he can be bought for as little as $5,000. You can almost hear him saying, "It takes a lot more than that to buy me!"

Enough with the Bashing!

Guess what? Uncle Sam has an Uncle! He's my Uncle Dave, and he is one of the smartest, kindest, most talented, most dedicated, most learned men I know. A good soul.

But like a lot of Uncles, he's very committed to his world view, and often sends me what I deem hysterical, ultra-conservative rants about Israel. He is very pro-Israel.

So there's a brouhaha going on about the status of Jerusalem, whether it's "in" Israel. So Uncle Dave sent me this article: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3106/pipes-white-house-mischief. Now, I basically agree with Uncle Dave on Jerusalem. It's part of Israel. How could it not be? At the same time, the UN mandate is still the prevailing legal authority in this matter. There is a reason Jerusalem has special status, and the trick is to both keep the Jews as the caretakers in some way, but of a city that is equally the province of all mankind, and certainly of the Big Three religions.

What's really important here, as I've mentioned before, when responding to an article like the one referenced above, is the answer to the question: does this help us achieve our goal? And, again, the answer is no. The unhelpful, inflammatory, and, more important, incredibly repetitive, idiosyncratic and uninspired words used to describe the situation can only alienate and further extend the gap. Even if you don't like the office holder, the office of President of the USA alone deserves better than these words to describe it: mischief, furtive, pranks, deceptions. We're talking about our own White House, and even if we disagree, there are ways to express yourself. If your goal is to blow off steam and feel good, this type of prose might be helpful. If your goal is to have a positive impact, then there's no reason to be so disrespectful. Real, grown up, professional diplomacy doesn't rest on ridiculing the other party. It's obnoxious, and counterproductive. I can tell you I could figure out this is a right wing screed just from the nasty tone, even if the subject were left out.

This article asks: "Do his munchkins really think they can get away with such sleazy sleights of hand?" You can disagree with what Obama is doing, but there is no reason to demean like this. These are not munchkins, they are men; men of great power and intelligence and authority. I would even say moral authority. Especially now that we have a brown President, we have to be ultra careful not to say things that imply he is not a full man. Jews especially should be sensitive to this issue, given the history of their own persecution, and also given the history of support for people of color. Why throw that out the window? It's insulting to the majority of Jews that have worked hard to show respect. This and many other examples reveals the moral bankruptcy of the author, not the subject, of the essay. While pointing the finger at our current administration, three fingers are pointing back at the accuser.

Oh, and they're not Islamists. They're Muslims.

Big Mike breaks it down!

Forget Pakistan

I know sometimes I can be a bit of a blowhard. As liberal as I am at heart, I still bleed red, white and blue. And so I just gotta say, thank God they finally got Osama. But I also want to say: Pakistan has been shitting on us and taking our money for 10 years and it’s gotta stop. There is no way we ought to continue to put up with that.

In today’s New York Times, the Pakistan government, probably as a cover for the extreme embarrassment or, worse, complicity in having the world’s most wanted criminal living in luxury a few miles from their capital and #1 military training center, said that our incursion into their country was a crime, that they would retaliate, and blah blah blah.

Here are the facts: Whether or not a crowd of thugs chanting USA! USA! after somebody gets killed makes you quesy (it makes me quesy), there is simply no doubt that Osama bin Laden was a really messed up, bad guy, who has the blood of thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of human lives on his hands. Not only did he admit (brag) about it, there is, as they say, a preponderance of evidence that he was really and truly behind some very heinous acts of terrorism. Try this link: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3559086/Life-and-crimes-of-Osama-bin-Laden.html.

The other interesting fact is that the USA carried out an extra-judicial killing and made it totally public. This is a new MO for us, and obviously I am all for it. I applaud the transparency, and willingness of our President to send real people in to kill him, vs. the bombing the bunker approach most of his aides favored.

But now that Osama dead, where from here?

We’re giving Pakistan $1.5 billion per year. That’s $15 billion dollars since 9-11. What if Obama said in the coming days, “I’ve reviewed the budget, with an eye to fiscal responsibility, and it occurs to me that Pakistan is actually not our friend at all, and in fact is completely playing us for fools.” And then cut that line item? And then gave that money to the American people? We would all get a check for $1,500! Take that Mr. “it’s your money” George Bush!

The whole nature of this “aid” we give their corrupt, lying and inept government is that they are using us as a chess piece in their game against India. All they want is 1) our money, 2) for the current state of chaos to continue forever in a condition where they manage the source of the disruptions as the sponsors, sub rosa, of the Taliban, particularly of the radical, or Al Quada, part of the Taliban.

Bush, who was behind starting this “special relationship,” realized how lame our position was toward the end, and Obama knew it from the beginning, but hasn’t had any cover to get out of it, perhaps, and hopefully, until now. Nor has he had any cover to bail on Afghanistan, again, hopefully, until now.

Karzai is an international criminal, another true bad guy, and not our friend in any way. We need to stop playing nice with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and probably a bunch of other “Stans” as well. Why? Because it’s only going to get worse, so we might as well take our medicine now. We cannot be the world’s policeman, and in that sense I am with Ron Paul.

So Barack Obama, now’s your chance. Get us the hell out.

Arab Spring

Arab Spring now turns to Summer. The ripples from waves after wave of revolutionary fervor, for what can only be described as democracy pure and simple, now reach back from that region to our own shores, and they are heading for us. And so we find in ourselves and our dialog and our policy a feeling of foreboding, of fear even, as if somehow we too might be in harm's way. And, indeed, we do seem somehow to be stuck right in the middle of the whole thing, both temporaly, with uncertain outcomes abounding, and philosophically, with ironies and paradoxes about the USA being both the champion of democracy and the defender of its enemies.

In times such as these it might behoove us to step back and ask: what is really going on?

I hate to say it, and as a critic of the Iraq War I know it will appear contradictory and likely to alienate my peace loving confederates, but it appears that it is precisely the brutal campaign of shock and awe and ultimately regime change that ironically inspired what we are witnessing today.

Whoever we believe, whatever the real reason, it remains incontrovertibly true that in the spring of 2003 the United States of America initiated a shocking and awful war against the government, and people, of Iraq, which in the first four years resulted in the loss of anywhere between 100,000 and a million human lives, depending on which source you choose, and cost, according to a conservative estimate by Paul Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, over three trillion dollars to the USA alone.

Quite simply, this incredible and unaffordable loss of money and human life, in all its sloppiness, bluntness and literally overkill, showed the Arab world that even a leader as intractable as Saddam Hussein could be ousted. Needless to say, this is a horrible price to pay to provide such an illustration. But now that the fire has been ignited, we ought to be honest about the context. Obviously, the current climate of war and revolution finds its origins in several sources, but to deny that what we are witnessing today grows from what we started only a few years ago is to deny ourselves the opportunity to do the right thing now.

A few caveats. First, I am not saying, as many on the far right are, that this fact makes the war more justifiable. I have always argued that our aims could be far better achieved by dropping a few hundred thousand Ipads loaded with some good chat software and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest translated into Arabic over the Middle East.

Second, Shock and Awe is just the original cause. The proximate cause is, of course, Wikileaks and what it did to a Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire and ignited the Arab Revolution. The revelations made public in the secret cables from the US Ambassador, of the amazing corruption of President Ben Ali and his family, infuriated the Tunisian population in a way nothing but the truth can do.

And third, the cause is obviously the entire history of oppressive government in that region. So it's not just the war. And while my point is not that the war is then to be praised, it is rather to draw a contrast between the amazing expenditure that it represented, and how a much smaller expenditure on our part toward the efforts being made today would yield such a more efficient result.

Syria is gunning down its own people, so far hundreds of them. But the US won't even freeze Bashar Al-Assad's assets (they are only freezing his brother's). No one would argue that Syria is a bad place and Bashar, like his father Hefez, are bad people, but because of strategic considerations, we won't support the democracy movement there. We refused to help Libya until Sarkozy and the Arab League forced our hand. Saudi Arabia is a brutal monarchy, utterly opposed to democracy and human rights (and equal rights), teaches its children that Jews are the devil and to devote themselves to a lifelong hatred of Israel and the US, and yet we continue to sponsor them to this day. Egypt was no better, and our country threw - since the Peace Accords, over $65 billion - down what turned out to be the drain trying to keep Egypt on our side and help their government repress its people.

How could the very country that invented the idea that it is virtuous to overthrow your government when it's oppressing you be so unable and unwilling to live up to its ideals? And why do we kill ourselves (for that is always what we do when we kill others) mounting these over-the-top, blunt assaults that are maximally inefficient, only to fail to grasp the opportunity to do so much good so much more efficiently, as we now could do in the Middle East?

It seems the greatest danger in making mistakes as massive as the ones we continue to make is drawing the wrong lessons from them. The only good thing to come out of Iraq is the Arab Revolution! Forget how or who or why, but all the same, the Arab world got to see with their own eyes that governments could come toppling down. And forget how much we've defiled our own values, these values are, despite every perversion to which they have been subjected, they are still at the core of what motivates those fighting for freedom today in scores of countries around the world. But because of the massive stupidity of Iraq, we now are afraid to raise a finger. But that is drawing the wrong lesson. Even the slightest help, even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest translated into Arabic, would yield a giant result.