The Rational Radical's Weblog

Saturday, April 05, 2003

Chris Matthews said tonight that Iraqi civilian casualties have been minimal. He should have said that anyone watching his network, MSNBC, or the other two whitewashers CNN and Fox, would think that civilian casualties have been minimal. But I don't think at least 859 civilians killed in only 2 1/2 weeks is minimal, do you?

Jack Clark 9:36 PM [+]   
Post #92074833

Groups Critical of Islam Are Waiting to Aid Iraq  This would certainly be a great idea: take a group which has characterized Islam as an evil religion, and give it a role in distributing aid in Iraq. The idea is just so boneheaded that the Bushians are likely to try it.

Jack Clark 9:33 PM [+]   
Post #92074744

Terrorism Task Force Detains an American Without Charges  Under cover of the Iraq War, the Bushians' imposition of increasingly totalitarian measures against Americans continues apace.

Jack Clark 9:32 PM [+]   
Post #92074698

Last night Jay Leno gave two uninterrupted complete segments to Dennis Miller to rail away at will. In the first segment he savaged anti-war demonstrators, especially Michael Moore. In the second segment he vigorously supported the war, and for good measure, made sure that we all understood that global warming was a myth. Speaking of climate change, hell will freeze over before Leno or anyone on NBC will let an anti-war comedienne rant and rave for two uninterrupted segments. NBC is owned by weapons manufacturer GE. But of course, NBC is, still, in the eyes of the blind-as-a-bat right wing pundits, part of the "liberal" media.

Jack Clark 9:48 PM [+]   
Post #92026439

Iraq Shows Casualties in Hospital  I'm glad the New York Times printed this article on the atrocity of U.S. cluster bombs killing dozens of civilians and wounding hundreds in one little town. But as usual, it's too little too late coverage, as the U.S. public probably already has it engrained in their brains that civilian casualties have been rare in this war, which is WRONG. When 10X as many civlians are killed as your own soldiers, something's wrong about the way we're fighting this war.

Jack Clark 9:44 PM [+]   
Post #92026298

Professor, Recruiter Face off at UMass  Emotions getting dangerously heated in the debate on the war. Reminds me of a time, oh, about 35 years ago.

Jack Clark 9:32 PM [+]   
Post #92025828

The War's Economic Motives Are Obvious   Here's a nice quick summary of some past U.S. military actions also based on greed and the desire to control resources.

Jack Clark 9:28 PM [+]   
Post #92025661

Widespread Use of Cluster Bombs Sparks Outrage  Not on the Pentagon's 24/7 cable news channels, heretofore known as CNN and MSNBC (Fox was always known that way!).

Jack Clark 9:25 PM [+]   
Post #92025548

Michael Moore, Book-selling King  Isn't it interesting, how Michael Moore's book is number one on the best seller list, even after being on the list for 50 weeks? At times it dropped way below that, but the book clearly has more legs than the rant-and-rave right-wing books that pop on and then quickly off the list, by the likes of Hannity and Coulter.

Jack Clark 10:12 PM [+]   
Post #91965440

Texas Court Acts to Clear 38, Almost All Black, in Drug Case  This legal atrocity happened, as you might expect, under George Bush's watch as Governor of Texas (as, of course, did the dragging death lynching). I wonder if Bush were still Governor, would this legal atrocity have been corrected.

Jack Clark 9:50 PM [+]   
Post #91964454

Bush as a "Dry Drunk"

Professor Katherine van Wormer of the University of Northern Iowa, an expert in addiction, says that Bush has many qualities of a ''dry drunk,'' a former alcoholic who stopped drinking but still thinks obsessively. She wrote:
'Bush's rigid, judgmental outlook comes across in virtually all his speeches. To fight evil, Bush is ready to take on the world, in almost a biblical sense. . . . Bush possesses the characteristics of the `dry drunk' in terms of his incoherence while speaking away from the script; his irritability with anyone (for example, Germany's Gerhard Schreoder) who dares disagree with him; and his dangerous obsessing about only one thing (Iraq). . . .

Jack Clark 9:49 PM [+]   
Post #91964414

British Military Critical of US Troops' Heavy-Handed Style with Civilians  That style won't win hearts and minds, as the British know.

Jack Clark 9:46 PM [+]   
Post #91964206

Wailing Children, the Wounded, the Dead: Victims of the Day Cluster Bombs Rained on Babylon

Children Killed and Maimed in Cluster Bomb Attack on Town

Military Criticized for Type of Ordnance

Haven't heard of this atrocity from CNN, MSNBC or Fox, have you?

Jack Clark 9:37 PM [+]   
Post #91963809

Someone wrote regarding my desire for the best of the blue states to be in a separate country from the cretin-filled red ones, that we blue states would have all the "poor" people. What ignorance!

I've written before about the myth of the heartland -- roughly speaking, the "red states," which voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, as opposed to the "blue states," which voted for Al Gore. The nation's interior is supposedly a place of rugged individualists, unlike the spongers and whiners along the coasts. In reality, of course, rural states are heavily subsidized by urban states. New Jersey pays about $1.50 in federal taxes for every dollar it gets in return; Montana receives about $1.75 in federal spending for every dollar it pays in taxes.  A Red-Blue Terror Alert  

So as Paul Krugman points out, we blue states subsidize the red ones. And believe me, dollars are the least of it. Add culture, brains and morality.

Jack Clark 6:04 PM [+]   
Post #91952029

A Philanthropy Rush in Corporate Brazil  Amazing how Brazilian corporations give proportionally four times as much to social uplift as American ones. Just like the fact that the U.S. is last among industrialized nations in proportion of GDP it devotes to foreign aid (1/10 of one percent!), the stinginess of American corporations also belies the oft-blared trumpeting of how we Americans are the most generous people in the world.

Jack Clark 5:34 PM [+]   
Post #91950522

Insurance Loophole Helps Rich  Just one of the countless ways the system is stacked against the average guy, who has to pay his taxes, while the rich find ways to avoid paying.

Jack Clark 5:27 PM [+]   
Post #91950195

This is a great, hard-hitting ad explicitly stating how tax cuts for the rich wind up harming the helpless, the "least of these" among us. Shame on us!

Jack Clark 5:22 PM [+]   
Post #91949907

Pictures of US/British Killed  I feel sorry for each one of these elements of cannon fodder in Bush's War for Empire.

Jack Clark 10:13 PM [+]   
Post #91896506

U.S. Probes Claims of Civilian War Deaths  Our use of these cluster bombs, because of their continuing capacity for years and years after the conflict is over to cause death and maiming injuries to civilians, is criminal. We can certainly win the war quite easily using "just" our 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and 21,000 pound bombs, can't we?

Jack Clark 9:31 PM [+]   
Post #91894478

U.N.: Iraqi children may confuse rations, bomblets  What the hell is wrong with these imbeciles?! I'm glad we're distributing food, but this yellow food ration color caused the same problem in Afghanistan, and we said we'd change the color of the food packets.

Jack Clark 9:24 PM [+]   
Post #91894139

Kucinich Takes to The House Floor To Call For An End to The War  I am sure all the brave souls in Congress will support him.

Jack Clark 10:02 PM [+]   
Post #91825012

U.S. Military Detains, Beats and Threatens to Kill Four Foreign Journalists in Iraq  Wow! If you're not a co-opted, in-bed-with journalist, the U.S. military doesn't want you reporting, it seems.

Jack Clark 9:58 PM [+]   
Post #91824802

Critics Blast US Military's Decision to Sell Water to Penniless Iraqis  I hope this article is an April Fool's joke.

Jack Clark 9:56 PM [+]   
Post #91824672

Honesty: The Worst Policy  Great quote:

As the French man of letters Paul Valery once wrote, "Politics is the art of making people indifferent to what should concern them."

The handlers of Puppet-in-Chief Bush are masters of such politics, I must admit.

Jack Clark 9:53 PM [+]   
Post #91824533

Hero GIs Kill Car Full of Suspected Iraqi Terrorists   This is how bloodthirsty Newsmax.com headlines its story about the tragic killing of seven women and children at a checkpoint by U.S. soldiers. I am not making this up.

Jack Clark 9:44 PM [+]   
Post #91824048

If I hear one more time from a right-wing nutjob commentator about how this is the greatest military accomplishment in 11 days in the history of the universe... I have no indication that the men and women in our armed forces aren't performing excellently, according to their training. I have no beef with them. That being said, the major accomplishment cited is getting 250 miles to "within 50 miles of Bagdhad" so quickly. Well, they were essentially unopposed as they traveled in mechanized vehicles at top speed through a virtually uninhabited portion of the desert. That's not a military feat. That's a driving accomplishment. We control broad swatches of desolate terrain. How many cities do we hold? How much of a percentage of the Iraqi population is under our control? By the latter two measures, this is not the greatest military campaign in the history of the universe. And let's remember: this is all against a country with less than 1/10 our population and a military that is, compared to ours, like a skinny little 5 year old against Mike Tyson. If Mike Tyson easily beats the crap out of the kid, no one would or should be surprised. And everyone would think he was pretty much a deluded asshole if Mike Tyson then bragged about what a great fight he had just undertaken. Oh yeah, one other thing. If the 5 year didn't fight by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and tried to kick Tyson in the balls or the like, would anyone say the 5 year old was fighting "unfairly?" Give the 5 year old another 15 years, 200 pounds of muscle and years of training, and then he might not resort to "dirty" fighting. Get the meaning?

Jack Clark 10:08 PM [+]   
Post #91760627

Read the Small Print: The US Wants to Privatize Iraq's Oil  And as the article says, that will be a disaster for the Iraqi people, the majority of whom will see an ever-decreasing amount of any benefit from that natural resource.

Jack Clark 10:03 PM [+]   
Post #91760368

Blood Remains On the Hands  I'd say it's on ALL our hands because WE allowed the Bushians to start this war.

Jack Clark 9:55 PM [+]   
Post #91759973

US Troops Kill Ten Women, Kids at Iraqi Checkpoint  Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

Jack Clark 9:53 PM [+]   
Post #91759855

American Peace Activists Confirm Iraqi Hospital Bombed  Aw, these commie peace activists only saw first-hand a hospital bombed by the U.S. Who you gonna believe: their lying eyes, or the Pentagon?

Jack Clark 9:51 PM [+]   
Post #91759727

Some are saying, oh, if Al Gore were president, we wouldn't be in this war. Perhaps we should remember three things.

First, it was the "liberal" Lyndon Johnson who massively increased our involvement in Vietnam.

Second, Gore is part of the Democratic Leadership Council, which has remade the Democrats into moderate Republicans at best. The DLC is full of types who supported another illegal, immoral war against a country that never attacked us. I refer to their support of the contra terrorists in Nicaragua. I seem to recall that on a crucial vote, Al Gore voted to support U.S. aid to the contras.

Third, Democrats are no less committed than Republicans to the continued ownership and control of the world by the United States. Democrats just sometimes put the U.S. boot heel down a little less forcefully on the throats of the Third World poor.

None of this is dispositive, of course, but I just don't buy the general line that a Democrat such as Gore would never have started a war with Iraq.

Jack Clark 11:32 PM [+]   
Post #91694628

The Superpower of Peace and the Fundamentalist Nightmare  I like this way of putting it:

In the wake of September 11 and now Bush's clumsy, brutal attack on Iraq, the world is being crushed between the twin psychoses of the angry fundamentalist Islam of Osama bin Laden and the smug, self-righteous fundamentalist Christian views of the isolated, nuclear-armed George W. Bush.

Jack Clark 11:19 PM [+]   
Post #91694130

US Forces' Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons is 'Illegal'  It makes sick and kills both civilians and our own soldiers from radioactivity.

Jack Clark 11:06 PM [+]   
Post #91693656