"...before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran..." --Mustachioed Chickenhawk John Bolton to M.E.K. terrorists on July 1, 2017

As we get closer and closer to the 2020 election, we should never forget that Donald Trump has selected the number-one cheerleader for war against Iran as his National Security Advisor, especially since Bolton's publicly-proclaimed deadline for meeting his terrorist allies in Tehran has already passed. This New York Times video from last year, "John Bolton Wants Regime Change In Iran. What's His Alternative?" should be seen by all Americans before the Trump Administration's gunboat diplomacy turns the Persian Gulf into another Tonkin Gulf with trumped-up reasons for yet another disastrous American war. There have already been many too many misguided military adventures carried out under our flag in my lifetime.

"I have said for over ten years, since coming to these events, that the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs' regime in Tehran." -- Chickenhawk N.S.A. John Bolton speaking to the M.E.K., July 1, 2017

I haven't posted much on this True Blue Liberal blog in the past year, but with the current administration currently rattling sabers in Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, and elsewhere, we should all be prepared to speak out loudly and immediately and publicly (especially since we have a Congress that has handed all of its constitutional war powers to an authoritarian executive branch elected by a minority of Americans) whenever military action seems imminent. It doesn't seem like it's enough to type #ImAlreadyAgainstOurNextWar on Twitter every day. I need to start stating my anti-war opinions more clearly than can be done in 280 characters.

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."

It's not too early to start the #NoIranWar movement. (Poll)

As long as unhinged hothead General Michael Flynn and alt-right Crusader Steve Bannon have the attention of the ear leading to the Propecia-addled brain of Donald Trump, the chances of an unprovoked military attack on Iran continue to grow.

I know where I stand on this, and for the next seven days you can vote in this poll.

Flynn, Bannon, and Trump do NOT have my support for military action against Iran on trumped-up charges.#NoIranWar
Do they have your support?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) February 4, 2017

Barack Obama at Hiroshima

I woke up this morning at my normal time to come to work and turned on WAMC a little before 5am, when the BBC Witness segment is usually airing, but I heard Barack Obama in the middle of his remarks at Hiroshima, as the first sitting President to visit the site of the first atomic bombing. As I listened, I couldn't help thinking once again how much we will miss him -- how much the world will miss him -- when his successor takes her (or, shudder, his) seat in the Oval Office next January.

My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell.
That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago.
Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.
--Barack Obama, Hiroshima, 27 May 2016

Maybe I shouldn't speak for the whole world, but I will miss him. I'm 60 years old and he is, without question, the best president of my lifetime.

The GOP Alternative to the International Iran Deal

The Republicans have had an alternative to the complicated nuclear deal agreed to by the US, UK, Iran, France, China, Russia, and Germany all along.

It has never changed.

John McCain even made their simplistic strategy the semi-official 21st-century theme song of the Grand Old Party when he sang "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" at a South Carolina campaign appearance on April 17, 2007.

Kidnapped?

This is a question about language and how it frames our debates. If Israeli defense forces and Hamas are at war in Gaza, how can the action of taking a prisoner of war by either side be described as a "kidnapping"?

And when will the United States return all those kidnap victims we've been holding in Guantanamo for over a decade?

On Language and Twitter and Peace and War.

I have aesthetic preferences when it comes to Twitter. I like a tweet that uses complete sentences, no abbreviations, proper punctuation, and exactly 140 characters. When the first draft of one of my tweets meets all these criteria, I feel as if it has automatically assumed a level of truthiness, as if the muses had written it, not me. Well, here's the tweet I woke up with this morning. It meets all my aesthetic criteria. The last period of my first draft was character number 140.

We're living one of the most important moments in the long debate over how democracies should wage war. The 'No' of the people needs to win.
— TrueBlue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 6, 2013

I'm going to try to leave this as my only tweet of the day for as long as I can because I don't want to bury this thought under an avalanche of retweets and snarky comments about the Donalds Rumsfeld and Trump. I really believe strongly that "We're living one of the most important moments in the long debate over how democracies should wage war. The 'No' of the people needs to win." If wide majorities of the American public and their Representatives on both sides of aisle believe that we shouldn't be bombing Syria, then the President needs to stand by that judgment just as David Cameron is standing by his rebuke from the British Parliament. And these judgments of the people about the necessity and utility of adding more weapons and violence to the Middle East will not only be seen as historic, but they could be one of President Barack Obama's greatest legacies.  Here's another tweet of mine from yesterday morning that expresses my suspicions about the President's possible motives for going to Congress. The truthiness of this tweet is a little more suspect because I needed to abbreviate "Pres" and leave the initial "It" off the second sentence in order to fit it into exactly 140 characters, but I still stand by it:

Anyone else getting the feeling that Pres Obama went to Congress to get a No vote on unilateral action? Leaves him free to pursue diplomacy.
— TrueBlue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 5, 2013

I believe that the candidate and constitutional law professor from Illinois believed (and believes) what he said on December 20, 2007: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." Going to Congress before attacking Syria and having Congress assert its war powers by voting no is that candidate living up to his word, and his Congressional "loss" could be his ultimate objective. The Senator and candidate Obama did not want any President to have the war powers he (and his successors) currently hold.  Handing some of that power back to the people and their representatives could turn out to be one of his most important achievements. 

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? 

Birthday Wishes to Thomas Pynchon...

...who was born in Glen Cove, New York on May 8, 1937.

... Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. ...

--Gravity's Rainbow (p.122 in the 1974 Bantam mass market paperback edition; note the interesting capitalization)

A Modern Nation Harbors and Cheers a War Criminal.

Late last week he left the country and there were calls for Canada to arrest him when he was there. But they didn't. Last night he made a public appearance in his home state, and was... well, I had to search for the video evidence before I would believe it.

George W. Bush was cheered at a World Series game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers, not the people guarding the southern border, but the baseball team that helped to make him rich in a web of crony capitalism at its worst.
A nation that not only harbors, but cheers its war criminals seems to be calling down karmic retribution on itself.
Is it too late go give this occupied territory back to Mexico? Or would that be cruel to Mexico?

Just Asking,

True Blue Liberal

#ArrestBush for #Torture in British Columbia Tomorrow

The Canadian government probably doesn't have any more will to arrest America's most prominent war criminal than an Obama administration whose main concern is proving their bipartisanship (and continuing Bush's wars "with honor"), but the fact remains that both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have officially warned our neighbor to the north that a torturer and war criminal is on his way to Surrey, British Columbia tomorrow and should be arrested.
If you're on Twitter or other Social Notworking sites, please send your support for Bush's arrest.

October 7, 2001 -- October 7, 2011 (and not over yet)

In an alternate universe, there is actually a recognition that today is the tenth anniversary of the start of our longest war.
However, in the military states of the USA, I guess it just seems normal to most of us to be a nation at constant war. I'm home today, and I'm flipping randomly through television news channels and there is no mention of Afghanistan that I've seen. There is more concern with Michael Jackson's doctor, the 2012 political horse race, Amanda Knox, a missing baby in Missouri ... the news channels might as well be the soma of Huxley's Brave New World, helping us to forget that we responded to criminal religious fanatics with daisy cutter bombs and met one day of extreme violence in the US with ten years of war (and counting) around the world.
I was at a loss on how to respond to today's significance and our collective amnesia, so I dug back into this blog and found one of my very first entries -- almost a mission statement. It doesn't go all the way back to October 2001. But even in December 2004, I was afraid that the MYTH of universal consent to the Afghan war was already being written by the powers that be and their corporate media:

Friday, December 17, 2004
Peace bloggers
It occurred to me as I started this process to look up Weblog on Wikipedia. I didn't realize how recent the history was, with the first use of the word Weblog only dating from the end of 1997 and Blog from 1999. So, even starting this blog at this relatively late date (16 Dec 04) might seem early in some later blogger's eyes. The Wikipedia article is also interesting in the role it gives to the "war bloggers" supporting the Iraq fiasco in 2002.

I don't want to leave any doubt that this will be a place for peace blogging. I was working in Manhattan on 11 Sept 2001 and not only was I out marching against the criminal invasion of Iraq on the streets of New York before and after the war started, but I still believe that Osama bin Laden would be in custody if we had NOT invaded Afghanistan -- if we had instead brought continued international pressure on the Taliban government, which showed some desire to bargain for its survival. War is NEVER the right answer to any problem, and we've started two of them (and the phantom fictional "war" on terror) in this first Bush/Cheney administration. AND WE RE-ELECTED THEM???!!! That's the real reason I felt the need to jump into this messy and overpopulated blog fray. Because the thing I truly thought was impossible, the fact that the American voters gave a vote of confidence to these criminals, has come to pass.

While it's irresistible to be vehemently Anti-Bush, it's not enough, we have to NOW start defining ourselves by our labels, rather than letting THEM use our words as a wedge issue to divide us. We are liberals and we're proud of all that stands for. They're conservatives, and they want to destroy the UN, Social Security, and every trace of FDR's fingerprints on this country & world. We can't let it happen.

- True Blue Liberal

All the Way With BHO?

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.

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

By the light of Gravity's Rainbow

A month ago I couldn't help quoting a passage from Moby Dick with eerie relevance to today. This morning I read this from another big encyclopedic American novel.

... Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. ... [note the interesting capitalization]

--Gravity's Rainbow
(p.122 in the 1973 Bantam mass market paperback)

Thomas Pynchon didn't know about Dick Cheney & Halliburton in 1973, but he certainly catches the current tone of war as business, and war as business that can only be understood by the ex-CEOs of Halliburton & sons of privilege. The rest of us are mere pawns in their games. But I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that the preceding passage represents the dominant tone of the novel. It's as lyrical as any novel written in some passages, dense in others, and stylistically (though never intellectually or morally) silly in places like this when it lapses into song or verse:

There once was a thing called a V-2,
To pilot which you did not need to---
You just pushed a button,
And it would leave nuttin'
But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

--Gravity's Rainbow
(p.355 in the 1973 Bantam mass market paperback)

Which is the perfect description of George the First's bloodless Gulf War I with its made-for-CNN Smart Bombs® and Patriot Missiles®.

--True Blue Liberal