The Republic of T.

I heard one of my favorite holiday songs on the radio yesterday — John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” I’ve always loved it, but this year holds special meaning for me — especially the children of the Harlem Community Choir singing “War is over, if you want it.” on the chorus .

This holiday season, I’m getting something that — as a progressive — I have wanted for years: an end of the war in Iraq. As it happens, this “gift” is like many given and received this time of year. You never really know what you’re getting until you unwrap it. Once unwrapped, it’s not to be quite what you thought or hoped it would be. And, even with price tag removed, you know it cost way too much.

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This year, veterans day should be a day for all of us — all 99 percent of us — to stand with the 1 percent. Not, as Jim Hightower writes, the “corporate CEOs and hedge fund billionaires,” but the “extra-special 1 percent of our society” who are also part of the 99 percent — the veterans of our most recent, most misguided wars, as well as those before. As Hightower said, let it not be a day to merely salute our veterans, but to stand with them and rally with them, as they have already done for us.

Across the country, veterans of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are standing with the joining the 99 percent. Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old former Marine who served two tours or duty in Iraq, and Sgt. Shamar Thomas, another Marine who served in Iraq, are probably the most well known. Olsen, who was critically injured by a police projectile during the attack on Occupy Oakland, became the newest face of the movement, inspiring nationwide rallies. Thomas, in a video viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube, confronted police members of the NYPD over violence used against peaceful and unarmed protesters. Yet they represent countless veterans who served their country, often paying a great physical and psychological price, only to find themselves abandoned by their country in the midst of a recession and an unemployment crisis, and who are moved by what they have seen and experienced to join the movement of the 99 percent.

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It’s getting hard to keep track of all the cringe-worthy moments at the GOP debates. To that end I’ve created a kind "Low-lights" reel of such moments from the last few. (I fully expect to update this regularly.)

The latest, of course, is the booing of a gay soldier, serving Iraq.

Upon viewing the clip, several things come to mind.

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In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, and the celebrations inspired by news of his demise, there’s been some discussion of whether Americans should be celebrating and just what Americans are celebrating. Are we celebrating the death of another human being (even one as despicable as bin Laden)? Or are we celebrating a win; a "mission accomplished"?

That question is thrown in a disconcerting light upon considering both the course of action America embarked upon after 9/11, and what it cost. Did Osama bin Laden actually win in the end?

That depends.

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I was sitting on my couch, reading the news on my iPhone, when I learned of Osama bin Laden’s death — caught and shot in the head by military and C.I.A operatives, at his compound in Pakistan. Without thinking about, I close my eyes and breathed a sigh.

What was I feeling? Relief? Perhaps. Something had just ended for me and millions of American, certainly. I felt a lot of things in that moment, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. It didn’t surprise me that a lot of people did feel like celebrating. It disturbed me.

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Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 24 hours, you’ve probably heard that Osama Bin Laden is dead.

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

The world may well be a better place without it. It is certainly no worse off without him. But, this isn’t really the end of anything.

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I think Ezra got it about right, re: NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams, following his “Muslim=Terrorist” remarks on Fox News. It may have been that NPR was looking for a reason to fire Williams, and he gave it to them. They, however, acted too drastically and too quickly. As Ezra said, if NPR wanted to fire Williams the best option would be to simply wait out his contract and quietly declined to renew. Maybe people would have questioned whether it was his remarks to O’Reilly that put him over the top, but NPR could have simply declined to comment. (Heck, they wouldn’t even have to tell Williams himself.)

And, no, I don’t buy Williams claim that NPR’s decision is a “chilling assault on free speech.” I say the same thing to Williams I said to Dr. Laura.

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“Stuff happens.”
- Donald Rumsfeld on the looting of Iraq following the U.S. invasion.

Forget about “the Aughts.” Never mind “the Naughts.” The decade just passed — and which promises to leave a lingering, bitter aftertaste — deserves a better, more descriptive name. So for what it’s worth, I hereby dub the past ten years “The Uh-Ohs: A Decade of Conservative Failure.”

It’s as good as any of the others I’ve heard. Perhaps better. Here’s why.

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I know this seems like low hanging fruit. But Sarah Palin is back, and along with her mindless blather has returned the chorus of “do not under estimate Palin” and/or “Sarah must be taken seriously.”

Seriously? We’re supposed to take seriously someone who just days ago was spouting nonsense (in the words of a conservative blogger) about mammograms and death panels, and only weeks ago was seriously claiming a conspiracy to move “In God We Trust” off U.S. currency? We’re supposed to take seriously/placate/cower in fear of the mindlessly vehement incoherence of her followers?

We’re supposed to take seriously someone who bad mouthed her almost-son-in-law for being too busy being “in the media” and pushing his own potential book to see his own baby, while sitting across from (arguably) the “queen of all media” herself, and one of the biggest book promoters in the publishing world, spending an hour talking about her book and her own baby who has Down’s Syndrome and thus has special needs? We’re supposed to take seriously someone who implied that her daughter’s baby’s father was using his physical assets to promote himself, who did as much of the same as she could get away with in Runners’ World? We’re supposed to take seriously someone too stupid (Yeah, I said it.), to even recognize the hypocrisy, let alone the irony, of what she was saying?

Are we seriously supposed to overestimate thier importance as much as they do themselves?

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[Ed. Note: WARNING. Graphic Pictures Below Fold. NSFW. Possible Trigger.]

Word is, at least one of the pictures the Obama administration decided not to release shows an American soldier raping a female prisoner.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

Not that it pleases me in the least to say, but …

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It was five years ago today that we first glimpsed the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

We were told that it was all the fault of “a few bad apples.”

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Never mind this guy.

If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop in Iraq, it’s these guys you should be concerned about.

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Source.

After the previous post, it seems appropriate to move delusion to delusion. So, let’s look into the case of Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. In what world does Peggy Noonan reside? And what color is the sky there?

I ask because, though capable of surprising moments of clarity (which I hope to get to in a another post), her latest WSJ column sounds like a dispatch from the mental space to which Noonan decamped during the Clinton years, a place I’ve wondered about since her bid to let dolphins determine child custody and immigration policy — somewhere unrelated to the world I’ve been reading about in the headlines lately.

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In a previous post we explored the spectacle of George W. Bush bungling through an attempt at an expression of remorse — this time over the state of the economy — as only he can. It’s what you’d expect from a guy who believed he was on a mission from God, and has watched it go horribly wrong.

He still has to “Keep the faith,” and convince himself that all is pretty much as it should be, close enough, or well on its way there.

But the rest of us don’t.

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Back in May of this year I asked, “What the matter with US?”

And by “US” I mean the United States.

Why can’t we get behind this?

This, at the time, was treaty to ban cluster bombs,adopted by over 100 nations at a conference in Dublin, Ireland. The United State of Dubya was not among the 100+ plus nations that agreed to the treaty.

I ask then and I ask now: What the fuck is wrong with us?

Because now the treaty is finally being signed by those 100+, but for some reason the United States doesn’t want to ban cluster bombs.

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Sometimes the most pointed — or preposterous — comes from unexpected sources. This time, it’s The Onion providing the former and the Wall Street Journal serving up the latter.

The best satire comes wrapped around a grain of discomforting truth. Daniel De Groot unwrapped one in a headline from The Onion that should give Democrats something to think about. Read his post for more on that.

The jaw-dropper, though, comes from the Wall Street Journal, (hat-tip to Steve Benen at Political Animal) where they’ve apparently learned well (or not so well) something Rick pointed out earler: Conservatism never fails; it is only failed.

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Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss.  I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.

Seven years later — and five years after invading a country that had no connection to 9/11, didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and had no ties to Al Qaeda — the children of Iraq who haven’t been blown up in their homes have suffered such loss and poverty that they’re forced to abandon their educations and enter the workforce to support their families. If they’re lucky they won’t be forced into Iraq’s booming child sex trade, or Syria’s for that matter. That is, if they survive the latest cholera outbreak.

Yet we have no regrets. In fact, we’d do it again.

Is it any wonder they suffer with PTSD, too?

The increasing number of Iraqi children affected with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one of the saddest, and least known, legacies of the Iraq war.

A new clinic for their treatment just opened in Baghdad. That it is the first of its kind says a lot about how this problem is being addressed. Until now, as related by journalist Lourdes García Navarro, hundreds of children suffering from PTSD have been treated by Dr. Haider Maliki at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad.

… Children have been the victims of the Iraq political situation for several years. It began with the United Nations sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime, and continued with the U.S.-led wars against the country. The victims have mostly been children. According to some estimates, almost two million children had to leave school and start working in the streets to supplement their families’ meager incomes.

PTSD in children can affect their brain and lead to long term effects that will alter their development. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that children with PTSD were likely to experience a decrease in the size of the brain area known as hippocampus, which is a brain structure important in memory processing and emotion.

Stress sustained over a long period of time is likely to cause more serious effects. An estimated half a million Iraqi children had been traumatized by conflict, according to a 2003 UNICEF report.

[Photo via James Gordon @ Flickr]