Has the True Blue Liberal blog's raison d'être been resurrected?

Yesterday I posted here for the first time in a while. With war drums beating again and one of America's most prominent war drummers, John Bolton, again in a position of power, it seemed necessary.

Today I went back and looked at one of the earliest posts on this blog from December 2004, while we were still dealing with the trauma of George W. Bush's re-election and I felt the need to jump into the leading social media of the time. I titled the post "Peace Bloggers." It had occurred to me when I decided to start a blog of my own to look up "Weblog" on Wikipedia. That article placed a lot of emphasis on the role of organized "War Bloggers" in the run-up to the Bush/Cheney war on Iraq as a key factor in the history of blogging (the current Wikipedia entry no longer even mentions "War Blogging"). So I proudly proclaimed that this little corner of the web would be a place for peace blogging, and that's why it's time for me to become more active again. If Trump thinks that war on Iran (or Venezuela or wherever) could help his popularity in the run-up to next year's election, does anyone believe that he would restrain the most hawkish of his advisors? Can some of us help to make war unpopular? Isn't it worth trying?

Bill Kristol Is Not a Reliable Theater Critic Either

I had the pleasure of seeing a new production of Molière's Tartuffe at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C. last Saturday night. While standing in the lobby with my wine during intermission, I was surprised to see a badly-dressed man wearing William Kristol's familiar permanent frown walk past. A couple of days later, something made me search for "Bill Kristol Tartuffe" on Google and I was led to his tweet about the show.

Just fled at intermission from ghastly production of Tartuffe @ShakespeareinDC. Perhaps worst single production of any play I've ever seen.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 7, 2015

The Saturday performance was a preview that received a standing ovation from those of us who stayed until the end, but it hadn't been reviewed yet. When the play officially opened on Tuesday, it received unanimous rave reviews in all the places I could find: The Washington Post, DC Theatre Scene, Broadway World, and DC Metro Theater Arts, but, then again, all of these reviewers seem to have watched the end of the play rather than storming out like an offended French noble watching the first version in 1664 (before the royally-mandated happy ending in the 1669 version).

Of course, Bill Kristol has been known to make extremely hasty and seriously erroneous judgments before. Here he is on C-Span in 2003 mansplaining to Daniel Ellsberg how George Bush's decade-long war in Iraq would be nothing at all like Vietnam.

"This is going to be a two-month war, not a year war..."  --Bill Kristol, 28 March 2003

Video proof that Iraq and Iran are still indistinguishable to some people.

If the US decides to be the volunteer police force for this guy again, maybe we can create another ISIS.

If Bush and Cheney are ever brought to justice ...

OK. Please stop laughing, BUT IF George Bush and Dick Cheney are ever brought to justice for war crimes generally, and specifically for the illegal and unjustified destruction of Iraq, then this article in The New York Times today, "Claims Against Saudis Cast New Light on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report," should play at least some role in their prosecution. If they really were classifying parts of the 9/11 commission report in December 2002 that showed actual links to Saudi officials while still ginning up fictional ties between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to begin their war, then this piece of evidence shouldn't be forgotten at their trial (again, please stop laughing).

This issue isn't even new, as shown by this exchange between Dick Cheney and Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on September 14, 2003, when we were only six months into our never-ending war along the Tigris and Euphrates. Cheney was still trotting out discredited Iraqi links and there were already rumors about the Saudi government connections contained in the suppressed sections of the 9/11 Report:

Dick Cheney: ... With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.

Tim Russert: We could establish a direct link between the hijackers of September 11 and Saudi Arabia.

Cheney: We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn’t mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That’s a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the ’90s. That was clearly official policy.

Russert: There are reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public.

Cheney: I don’t know want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. ..."

The shorter version? It's perfectly fine if the fictional Czech story of the Iraqi link is somehow "public out there" (with no help from Bush and Cheney, obviously), but the true Saudi link needs to be kept from the public.

Now for the happy musical outro courtesy of Michael Moore and REM who put all of this into a 2004 movie:

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.

A Day to Remember Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse

On this fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that pulled us deeper into Vietnam on false pretenses, I wasn't happy to turn on my computer at lunchtime to see this updated headline about Iraq on The New York Times' homepage:

"U.S. Weighs Iraq Airstrikes, Citing Crisis" The New York Times, 8/7/2014 at 1pm EDT

On August 7, 1964, the House voted unanimously and the Senate voted with only two exceptions to give President Johnson the authority to "take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" in Vietnam after an incident between American warships and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin that turned out to be not at all what it was presented to be when Johnson and McNamara explained it to the press, the Congress, and the American people.

Members of Congress and the American people should always remember when they read a bellicose headline or watch a speech from a Secretary of Defense or State with professional-looking maps, that only two members of Congress took a correct action 50 years ago today.

All Vietnam is not worth the life of an American boy...
— Alaska Senator Ernest Gruening, August 1964

I believe that history will record this resolution as a historic mistake. I am not going to go along with this kind of program, in South Vietnam … that in my judgment is going to kill needlessly untold numbers of American boys, and for nothing.
— Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, August 1964

If you want more details of the event itself, click here for the the Gulf of Tonkin excerpt from Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

With Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam" playing on the stereo, I run across the headline: "Bush says he'll visit Vietnam next year". Isn't it a little late?

Click here for details: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/21/bush.vietnam/ . To run across this article about our Commandant in Chief's future travel plans while Jimmy Cliff's 1969 "Vietnam" was playing in the background seemed especially appropriate.

I guess this chickenshit chickenhawk finally thinks it's safe enough, a little over thirty years after he first dressed up in a soldier suit and professed his deeply held belief in (other, poorer, Americans) killing Communists. Maybe if he wears his flightsuit he can stir up a little of the old animosity when he's over there in Hanoi & Ho Chi Minh City.

--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