Month: September 2014

At Bloomberg View, Kavitha Davidson has little faith in the NFL’s plan to investigate their own incompetence.

At Breitbart Unmasked, Matt Osborne wonders if the Kansas GOP is headed for disaster.

At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru bends over backwards to defend his pal Ted Cruz from accusations of insensitivity towards Arab Christians. Republican congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania disagrees.

At the Denver Post, Lisa Wirthman covers the GOP’s underhanded push for over the counter birth control pills.

Jonathan Chait is still trying to nail down Ayn Rand’s influence on Paul Ryan’s political philosophy.

Rep. Jim Clyburn recommends sexting, which is kind of funny.

Let’s have some more Peter Tosh:

What’s on your mind?

Steve Singiser of Daily Kos points out something interesting. While the Democrats have been doing worse lately on generic preference polls (e.g., “Do you prefer a Republican or Democratic House/Senate?”), many of the most hotly contested Senate races have been moving modestly in their direction.

AK-Sen: Last five avg—Begich +0.8; Previous five avg—Begich +0.4
AR-Sen: Last five avg—Cotton +1.6; Previous five avg—Cotton +0.2
CO-Sen: Last five avg—Udall +2.8; Previous five avg—Udall +0.6
IA-Sen: Last five avg—Braley +1.0; Previous five avg—Braley +0.8
LA-Sen: Last five avg—Landrieu +0.2; Previous five avg—Cassidy +1.0
MI-Sen: Last five avg—Peters +5.0; Previous five avg—Peters +4.0
NC-Sen: Last five avg—Hagan +2.2; Previous five avg—Hagan +1.2

It’s hard to be certain what explains these contradictory trends. A shift from registered voter polls to likely voter polls should shift races in the Republicans’ direction, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in the polls of actual races, which could mask even greater recent gains for Team Blue. One possibility is that the DSCC and the individual candidates are doing a great job, while areas of the country without competitive Senate races are seeing the Dems slip. In this scenario, the generic polls really have little bearing on the Senate races.

I don’t know the answers but I will say that the recent dump of YouGov polls is shockingly negative for the Democrats and includes many outliers that are driving down the polling averages for Democratic candidates. I’d like to see someone take a crack at explaining the methodology that is producing those results.

Last night I stumbled upon an old piece I wrote in July of 2007 called When Psy-Ops Go Bad. The key Los Angeles Times source in that piece is now a dead link, but you can find the article here. It details the Pentagon’s claims that the notorious al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist Abu Omar Baghdadi was an entirely fictional character.

In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But on Wednesday, Abu Omar Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who said he was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terrorist organization.

An Iraqi actor has been used to read statements attributed to Baghdadi, who since October has been identified as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq group, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner.

Bergner said the new information came from a man captured July 4, described as the highest-ranking Iraqi within the Islamic State of Iraq.

He said the detainee, identified as Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmoud Mashadani, has served as a propaganda chief in the organization, a Sunni Muslim insurgent group that swears allegiance to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

According to Bergner, Mashadani helped create Islamic State of Iraq as a “virtual organization” that exists in cyberspace and is essentially a pseudonym for Al Qaeda in Iraq, another group that claims ties to Bin Laden. The front organization was aimed at making Iraqis believe that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a nationalistic group, even though it is led by an Egyptian and has few Iraqis among its leaders, Bergner said at a news conference.

“The Islamic State of Iraq is the latest effort by Al Qaeda to market itself and its goal of imposing a Taliban-like state on the Iraqi people,” Bergner said.

Islamic State of Iraq has been widely described as an umbrella organization of several insurgent groups, including Al Qaeda in Iraq.

There was no way to confirm the military’s claim, which comes at a time of heightened pressure on the White House to justify keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. Critics of the Bush administration say the president has been trying to do so by linking Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network to the conflict in Iraq, even though the organization had no substantial presence here until after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.

“The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people” in Iraq, Bush said Tuesday.

The U.S. military’s announcement Wednesday was the latest bizarre twist surrounding the figure known as Baghdadi. If the Iraqi government’s reaction was anything to go by, it won’t be the last.

Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed Askari rejected the U.S. assertion, insisting that Baghdadi is real. “Al-Baghdadi is wanted and pursued. We know many things about him, and we even have his picture,” Askari said. However, he said he could not release a photograph or additional information because it could jeopardize attempts to capture Baghdadi.

The man known as Baghdadi emerged last year when Islamic State of Iraq was formed after the slaying of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

At first, I mistook the name Abu Omar Baghdadi for the name of his successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and I was quite confused, indeed. It would be quite a story if the leader of the Islamic State (aka, ISIL and ISIS) were someone that the Pentagon had declared a fictional being back in 2007.

But, then, I went back into my archives, and I found something else interesting that has now largely gone down the rabbit hole. And that is that U.S. military used a propaganda campaign to exaggerate the influence of Abu Musab Zarqawi. The purpose of this campaign was twofold. For the Iraqi audience it was to give them the impression that all the car bombs that were going off were to doings of foreigners, not a legitimate indigenous opposition to the occupation. For American audiences, the purpose was to link al-Qaeda to the war in Iraq in order to repair the damage done to the legitimacy of the cause once it was determined that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

THE US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program.

The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush Administration tie the war to the organisation responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The documents say that the US campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. US authorities claim some success with the effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicise Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the “US home audience” as a target of a broader propaganda campaign.

Lest you think I am dabbling in conspiratorial thinking, it was the Pentagon that argued that Abu Omar Baghdadi was a fictional character before celebrating his demise, and it was leaked military papers and transcripts that confirmed that the hype around Zarqawi was part of an organized psychological warfare campaign aimed, in part, at American audiences.

So, these two predecessors to the current head of the Islamic State were not quite what we were led to believe they were. It would seem wise, then, for the press to follow Peter Beinart’s suggestion that they use a greater degree of skepticism this time around than they demonstrated when we were first introduced to the Islamic State of Iraq. Whether that is happening or not is doubtful. For example, how many of the facts in Bobby Ghosh’s recent piece on Zarqawi for The Atlantic can we believe are free from the taint of the Pentagon’s psychological warfare program from back in 2005-2007 period? Personally, I don’t feel that I can believe any of it at face value.

Back when Al-Qaeda in Iraq was as much fiction as reality, I basically wrote off whatever the Bush administration had to say about them. But ISIS is definitely real now. They are definitely decimating communities and committing atrocities everywhere they go. But, if we are to understand them properly, we must remember their murky roots in lies and hype.

For the media to do its job today it must sift through the propaganda they served up to build a legend that was not accurate.

If a myth gave birth to this horrible reality, the media have to take a degree of responsibility for the role they played.

Enough of this phony “bipartisan” agreement on the necessity to continue the Blood For Oil War initially started by Bush I.

Enough!!!

Below is a tripartisan answer to this two-dimensional, stick figure inspired, totally cynical, economic imperialism-dictated bullshit. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Even Barack Obama appeared embarrassed by the speech…visibly embarrassed, like some captive reading a list of complaints that his captors had forced him to read on pain of death.

Enough already!!!

Read on.

The Terrorist in Chief by David Rovics

Click on the link to hear the song. He’s not much of a singer, but he’s an honest man. A moral man. Bet on it.

“Obama gave a speech, I wrote a song.”

Terrorist In Chief

It’s September 11th and Obama gave a speech
On the War on Terror and its mighty reach
The arm of the law is long and victory will be ours
As long as we cooperate with certain powers
Such as the ones who funded the Islamic State
The Saudis are our allies, of this there’s no debate
The misogynist king will bring us some relief
From the Caliphate – so said the Terrorist-In-Chief

It’s September 11th, listen to the man
Talk about successes in Afghanistan
Still the world’s poorest country, still beneath the yoke
Of the very terrorists whose back he claimed we broke
Now we’re at war with IS in Syria and Iraq
Though we can’t support the main army that’s fighting back
They’re terrorists too, though with a secular belief
So down with Assad! So said the Terrorist-In-Chief

It’s September 11th and there’s someone on the screen
I’m still trying to figure out what he means
The Peshmerga are ours now, we give them air support
While just across the border, lives cut short
By our Turkish allies, also in this fight
As they kill our infantry when they have them in their sights
There are some things not worth mentioning, he’s got to keep it brief
So said the Terrorist-In-Chief

It’s September 11th and I’m hearing every sound
3,200 boots, but they don’t really touch the ground
And all the mercenaries, they don’t really count
These details don’t matter when there’s a campaign to mount
Just listen closely, the White House has it sussed
We’ll protect those refugees, these oil cans won’t rust
No, not Honduran kids – Yazidi ones, good grief
So said the Terrorist-In-Chief

AG

Gary Legum, over at Wonkette, made me chuckle a few times while covering Ted Cruz’s excellent adventure at the Defense of Christian’s Dinner on Wednesday night. It seems that Ted didn’t anticipate that Arab Christians feel roughly same way about Israel as Arab Muslims do.

Being of the Jewish persuasion, we do appreciate Ted’s defending our right to exist. But we’re not down with insufferable douche noodles trying to reduce a complex and difficult situation into a “You’re either with us or against us” meme. Our last president did that, and it worked out rather poorly for everyone.

We’re looking forward to the insane ferrets at Fox News trying to puzzle out how to feel about this video after they just spent months justifying unflinching support for Israeli policies by screaming that Obama was ignoring the problem of Christians being mass murdered in Syria and Iraq by bloodthirsty Muslims. Heads will be a-sploding, we’re sure.

And here’s a bonus clip from The Week in Cruz on Film. Check out this bit of hilarity on the Senate floor. Some background: Senate Democrats are pushing a constitutional amendment that would roll back the campaign finance excesses in Citizens United by declaring that Congress and the states can “regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections,” thus taking away the Roberts Court’s argument that money equals free speech.

Naturally, Republicans are trying to portray this as a root-and-branch repeal of the First Amendment. Which led to Edmonton Ted, who more and more looks to us like a macaroon with hair plugs, taking to the Senate floor to argue that the measure would allow the government to outlaw “Saturday Night Live” and toss Lorne Michaels in jail. We’re not sure what part of the senator’s base would actually have a problem with this, but reading the political leanings of a crowd doesn’t seem to have been Ted’s strong suit this week.

It may have been a particularly bad week for Ted Cruz but he, like zombies and mold, does not change.

Chris Christie will never be president.

South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond gave a speech on the Senate floor on March 4th, 1858. Mr. Hammond was a Democrat, but I think it is pretty obvious that today he would be a Republican. See if you recognize anything in this excerpt of his speech that might still be believed today but is no longer said out loud (for the most part).

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.

The Senator from New York [William Seward] said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, “the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and “operatives,” as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them? . . . .

Transient and temporary causes have thus far been your preservation. The great West has been open to your surplus population, and your hordes of semi-barbarian immigrants, who are crowding in year by year. They make a great movement, and you call it progress. Whither? It is progress; but it is progress toward Vigilance Committees. The South have sustained you in great measure. You are our factors. You fetch and carry for us. One hundred and fifty million dollars of our money passes annually through your hands. Much of it sticks; all of it assists to keep your machinery together and in motion. Suppose we were to discharge you; suppose we were to take our business out of your hands; — we should consign you to anarchy and poverty. You complain of the rule of the South; that has been another cause that has preserved you. We have kept the Government conservative to the great purposes of the Constitution. We have placed it, and kept it, upon the Constitution; and that has been the cause of your peace and prosperity. The Senator from New York says that that is about to be at an end; that you intend to take the Government from us; that it will pass from our hands into yours. Perhaps what he says is true; it may be; but do not forget — it can never be forgotten — it is written on the brightest page of human history — that we, the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, and, after ruling her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence, we surrendered her to you without a stain upon her honor, boundless in prosperity, incalculable in her strength, the wonder and admiration of the world. Time will show what you will make of her; but no time can diminish our glory or your responsibility.

I recognize an attitude about labor and about race. It’s still with us.

So, Jennifer Rubin and Cliff May think that the Islamic State is both Islamic and a state. They think the president was wrong or naive to say otherwise. The questions to ask here and simple and have nothing to do with the literal truth of the president’s assertion.

The questions are: why is it important to Rubin and Lee that the Islamic State be considered an Islamic state, and why is it important to the president that it not be considered an Islamic state?

Once you arrive at the answers you will immediately realize that the president was showing his intelligence and Rubin and May are showing their bigotry.

I wonder if we will ever get to the point that the cable news corporations don’t feel the need to replay the events of 9/11 every year on the anniversary of those attacks. It’s like a national holiday for cable news cameramen and hosts and producers. I wonder if they schedule time off with their kids.

Whatever we gain in the “never forget” category, we aren’t having a debate about the president’s speech. I think, this year, this footage is basically little better than pro-government propaganda.

And if I can admit a little personal weakness, reliving 9/11 is a trigger for post-traumatic stress. The 9/11 and anthrax attacks happened to my community and we lost people. I am not going to forget and being forced to experience it all over again is not a good feeling.

Here’s a new thread to discuss the the plan to deal with ISIS, or whatever.