Two Active TrueBlueLiberal Twitter Polls need your input.

One:
Who is the better liar, Putin or Trump...

POLL:
They both lie, but who lies better, i.e., more, more effectively, and more easily?

Duplicitous Validmir Putin, the KGB-trained leader of Russia,
or
#LyingDonaldTrump, the KFC-fueled leader of the USA?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 17, 2018

and Two:
Can one maintain civility when addressing Trump about his Washington, D.C., military parade with its authoritarian and un-American (i.e., Trumpian) overtones...

POLL:
Is it possible to tell @realDonaldTrump what you think of his fucking pyongyangish #MilitaryParade while maintaining civility? https://t.co/l9PcTu9DNs

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) July 19, 2018

Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his most important speech exactly fifty years ago.

In my last post I pointed toward the dramatic end of Dr. King's life, which took place 49 years ago today. Exactly one year earlier, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he gave what very well may be the best and most important speech in his brilliant career.

The speech is commonly referred to as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." In 1967 it was a brave move to come out so strongly against the war, advocating (among other things) conscientious objection among draft-age men, an end to U.S. bombing and a unilateral cease-fire, but the speech was so much more. It would be just as radical, and just as timely, if delivered today, 50 years later, when we have a billionaire president looking to increase a bloated military by another 54 billion dollars while cutting programs for the poor and middle class to exacerbate atrocious economic inequality.

Please read Martin Luther King's whole text, but here's a taste from that historic speech...

... When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. 

   A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

    A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. 

   A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. 

   America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. ...

Please read the whole thing here at Stanford's King Encyclopedia website.
Here's a story about the speech that was on NPR's All Things Considered tonight.
Here's The New York Times' "When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam."

Will Trump Revive this Blast of Past American Greatness?

The president elect made a statement published today about military parades and flyovers that brought to mind images of goose-stepping German troops and rows of Red Square missiles and choreographed Pyongyang multitudes; it also made me wonder if he's going to bring back one of the signature looks of one of his Republican forerunners who tried to install some old-world grandeur at the gates and doors of the White House.

I don't know if Americans under a certain age will remember the immediate reaction to Nixon's Palace Guard uniforms when he introduced them after a European trip in 1970, but they were almost immediately seen as a joke and retired. Americans in those years had a gut reaction to anything that had echoes of faux central-European grandeur and militarism (and toy soldiers and movie ushers and high-school bands). Like Nixon though, I can't help thinking that Donald Trump would look at these gold braids and buttons over double-breasted white tunics topped with gold-encrusted tall black caps and think, Classy! Great! Call Ivanka's best Chinese seamstresses and get them busy!

46 Years Ago Today.

The music behind this video of Kent State still photos is Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's 45rpm single of Neil Young's 'Ohio,' which hit the stores in June 1970 backed by Stephen Stills' 'Find the Cost of Freedom' in this printed lyric sleeve:

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12939311

I don't know if people who grew up with digital music can imagine how fast that recording and distribution seemed to us at the time; this was all over the radio and many of us went out to buy this to listen to it on our turntables. It definitely played a part in expanding the antiwar movement beyond the major cities and college campuses.

In the "news"...

I have been avoiding news channels lately, but I just surfed past Erin Burnett's show on CNN with my remote control and watched them deviate from the EBOLA HYSTERIA MONTH script for ten minutes (at about 7:50pm on 10/27/14) to warn us that ISIS might be preparing to use captured American shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down aircraft (followed immediately by a commercial for Northrop Grumman weaponry).

The Quote of the Day: "Visit the Caliphate Before the Caliphate Visits You"

It's not just NPR, but NPR is what I listen to when I'm not listening to music, so I have to blame them for giving over much too much of their Iraq coverage to the experts who were part of the fuck-up of the last decade. Having a uniform and brass on one's shoulder should not automatically qualify a person for opinions about war and peace, but NPR has been interviewing a lot of officers lately.

Here's the one I heard on the ride home this evening. At the 3'45" mark of this interview, Marine Colonel Gary Anderson (ret.) disqualifies himself by using the forbidden jargon "Boots on the Ground," but ten seconds later when Audie Cornish asks him if those "Boots" should be worn by Americans, he gives us our quote of the day:

"Well, I know it's not a popular thing. The American people think that they're uh tired of war, but uh they're gonna be a lot less tired when some of his [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's] American passport holders come back and start shooting up shopping malls and things like that. I think the watchword that I would use is 'Visit the Caliphate Before the Caliphate Visits You.'" 

This "watchword" (another suspect bit of jargon) would fit perfectly coming from a mouth of a Bush Administration cabinet member and could have been written as one the publicity tropes coming out of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in 2002-2003.

Can We Permanently Ban "Boots On The Ground"?

I think it's been a while since I've gone off on a language rant here, but is everyone else (other than the usual suspects within The Beltway and The Media) as sick to death of this never-ending use of "boots on the ground" as I am?  The attached clipping in which John Kerry, Bob Menendez, and Bob Corker all employ the overused military jargon is from Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times yesterday, but it could just as easily have come from any other story about Syria, or the mouth of any "expert" I've heard on NPR or the PBS NewsHour in the past decade discussing our current or future quagmires.

The lazy use of this metaphor for ground forces -- for actual young humans placed in harm's way by politicians -- seems to flow most freely out of the mouths of old men in dark suits trying to look manly in front of old men in brass-encrusted uniforms, but can we please stop it? 

Our Military Needs Your Fiver!

There used to be a poster back in the Vietnam years (known to Mitt Romney and the "Parisian Sightseeing Boat Veterans for Truth" as the years of French hell when Mitt could find neither good Velveeta nor real Wonder Bread!) that said something like, "What if Schools Had All the Money They Need and the Air Force Had to Hold a Bake Sale to Buy Bombers?"  Maybe that great day has finally come. Mitt Romney is asking us to give $5 to the military, but he doesn't seem to be promising us a homemade cupcake from Ann Romney's kitchen, so I say No Deal!

A Romney ad that appeared on my Rutgers Football blog earlier today.

"... and you never ask questions when god's on your side ..."

No, the title of this blog post isn't taken from the literature of the god-chosen Bachmann, Santorum, or Perry campaigns (I wasn't the one to make this up, but if a god did tell them to run, it proves s/he wants Obama to win re-election). No, the title of this blog post comes from the Bob Dylan song that's stuck in my head this afternoon, here in an interpretation of Joan Baez's from 1965:

On Thanksgiving I watched a younger relative play a disgusting millitary recruitment vehicle called "Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3" on a widescreen television. Have any of you seen this bloody spectacle? This thing is a bestseller, so I assume I'm a little out of the gamer loop. Is there any doubt that the Pentagon, if not specifically supporting such crap, loves that young Americans are being desensitized to killing by these products -- many of which will be under America's Christmas trees next month?

Every Munition is Sacred. Amen.

It sometimes seems as if every GOP position can be illustrated by a scene from a classic comedy. Today's video comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The following scene popped into my head while driving to work and thinking about the dangerous intersection of massive American militarization combined with primitive god-talk that dominates so much of our national conversation.

You just know that if there were an Arthurian Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in the bloated US arsenal of death (and who's to say for sure that there's not one buried in a black project somewhere), that every candidate in tonight's episode of the travelling Clown Circus (on CNN tonight at 8) at would be calling not only for its retention, but for expanding the stockpile of such cool weapons of leporine destruction -- and priests and monks trained in their proper usage.

Lowlights from this week in the GOP Clown Circus

Rick Perry wants to end civilian control of the military. (Think Progress)

Herman Cain shows a similar lack of understanding of the Constitution by pledging to 'overturn the Supreme Court' if they rule that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. I guess there were minimal checks and balances for the CEO of Godfather's Pizza. (Raw Story)

Newt Gingrich not only says that child labor laws are 'truly stupid', but he suggests a job for the kids, having them perform janitorial tasks after breaking up the school janitors' union (LA Times)

Michele Bachmann is not waiting to be elected President before giving orders to the Pentagon to begin making plans to go to war with Iran. (msnbc.com)

Rick Santorum told us that gay marriage will make our country fall, whatever that means in his indecipherable world view. (Huffington Post)

Ron Paul stated the obvious (but usually politically fatal) idea that US actions may have had something to do with the motivations of terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. (CBS)

Jon Huntsman tells the voters in New Hampshire that he doesn't care what the rest of the country thinks, and GOP voters in the rest of the country return the sentiment. (cnn.com)

The other Mormon, Mitt Romney, gave a confused speech in front of a defense contractor, telling his receptive audience that the budget for the bloated militarized police state of America should not be cut. Where should the money come from? We can take it away from healthcare for the poor. And he's the "moderate" in this group of clowns. (Raw Story)

There's certainly no room to cut anything here:

An Army of None

or,

What if They Gave a War and Nobody Came?

More excellent news on the recruiting front from Today's Washington Post : " Army Still Behind in Recruiting". No problem. As my sign said in New York on February 15, 2003, "Draft the Bush Twins!"

And here's a relevant quote I ran across in my handwritten journal (from pre-blog days), copied from the new English translation of Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust. This is Charlus talking to Marcel about the Great War raging on their doorsteps (p. 105 of the Penguin UK paperback):

<<. . . the truth is that every morning war is declared anew. Thus those who wish to continue it are as guilty as those who started it, perhaps more so, for the latter may not perhaps have foreseen the full horror of it.>>

Imagine, an Army of None,
True Blue Liberal

Bolton falls for "... uncorroborated and admittedly speculative theories ... continuously recycled among hard-line exiles. "

"Bolton does not provide any evidence or even say who the analysts and defectors may be. His comments, however, seem to reflect those made by one analyst and one defector whose uncorroborated and admittedly speculative theories are continuously recycled among hard-line exiles."

from: "Antiterroristas"

Interesting that the "hard-line exiles" in question here are not the well-known Iraqis who deceived the Bushies into war by inventing WMD fairy tales, but the Cuban exiles who have been dying to have America try the Bay of Pigs again for the last forty-five years. So who's it going to be next? Iran? Syria? North Korea? Cuba?? China??? George Jr. and Dick (and you have to believe that it's Dickie & Donnie pulling the strings on this one) can't really be serious about presenting John R. Bolton to the United Nations as our nation's representative, can they?
That would be tantamount to telling the Chinese and the Cubans and the rest of the non-USA-USA-USA-chanting world to go fuck itself. And they couldn't be saying that, could they?

Just Asking,
True Blue Liberal

BAN WAR TOYS -- Liberal Moral Value of the Day

Look at this if you dare (after all, you're paying for it) --"America's Army®" - Taxpayer-supported war games to train and brainwash the future cannon fodder of America

It was bad enough when our kids had to pay for (or beg their parents to buy) their first-person shooter games, now they can get them for free, with links to recruiters. I guess the Pentagon wasn't reaching the market penetration they needed at the local videogame stores. I had heard about this, but I stumbled on the link and I couldn't believe how bad it really was (I didn't play the "game", but its ominous splash screen is enough to make you puke).

Here's the #1 moral value of True Blue Liberal -- Don't teach our kids how to kill (until you draft them), especially not with our tax dollars. Can you imagine how hateful this website must look to anyone living outside the walls of America??