Dave Lindorff

by Dave Lindorff

The teacup tempest over retired Gen. Wesley Clark's self-evident remark about John McCain -- to wit that flying a fighter aircraft and getting shot down and captured is not particularly relevant to the skill set needed to be a president -- raises a larger question: Why do veterans, and particularly the veterans of the criminal and pointless war in Iraq, or the earlier one in Vietnam, automatically get hero status, and why are they seen as naturals to run for higher national office?

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Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to Congressional Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision onto a bill giving the president all the money he asked for (and then some) to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through next June. Veterans of the Iraq War will also be getting tuition benefits equal to the full cost of in-state public college tuition plus $1000 a year for books and supplies.

When workers pick up those unemployment checks from their state Department of Labor offices, though, they should see them as dripping blood. Those checks have been bought with the blood of American men and women in uniform who have been sent over and over into harm's way in those two countries in misbegotten and criminal adventures that have nothing to do with defending America and everything to do with boosting the profits of oil companies and defense contractors, and with getting Bush re-elected and Republicans elected.

Iraq Vets, too, should not overlook the blood on their VA education benefits checks, because their tuition will be paid by the blood of active-duty comrades still left stranded in battle zones overseas.

It didn't have to be like this.

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Double standards when it comes to children are pretty appalling -- especially when it comes to "our" kids vs. "their" kids, but here in America they aren't limited to just right-wingers.

Take reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's latest ruling that you cannot execute rapists -- even those who rape children -- on the theory that only killing someone justifies execution.

Politicians who make their careers by promoting state-sponsored murder have been quick to condemn this latest "liberal outrage" by calling for more laws that would make execution the punishment for raping a child (admittedly a monstrous crime).

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President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of the warmongers and terror-pimps in the White House would have us believe that Omar Khadr is a monster. Khadr is the 21-year-old Canadian who is facing one of the first show-trials at Guantanamo.

But let's just step back a minute and consider Mr. Khadr's case.

The son of an alleged Islamic fundamentalist, Khadr was sent to one of those fundamentalist madrassa schools in Pakistan back when he was 14. From there, he went to Afghanistan to join with the Taliban in fighting against the remnant warlord backers of the Soviet Union, which had attempted to run Afghanistan as a vassal state.

Then came 9-11 and the October 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Young Khadr suddenly found himself fighting against the world's most powerful military.
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Reuters may be "satisfied" with the Pentagon's investigation concluding that U.S. troops were "justified" in their slaying of the news organization's working journalist Waleed Khaled back in 2005, but the rest of us shouldn't be.

Khaled and his driver were killed by U.S. troops when they came on a firefight involving U.S. troops and Iraqi police who were allegedly under attack. The Pentagon report into the incident concluded that the two men came onto the scene, and American forces, seeing Khaled's videocam and tripod, thought it was a rocket launcher. They reportedly fired warning shots. When Khaled's driver did the logical thing, backing slowly from the scene, U.S. troops "assumed it was an insurgent tactic" and fired to "disable" the vehicle, killing the two men.
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On Monday last week, something important happened in Washington. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic representative from Cleveland, who early in the primary season won some of the biggest applause lines in the Democratic presidential candidate debates, introduced 35 articles calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.

You'd be excused if you didn't know this happened. There was almost no reporting on the event that day or the next, which took several hours to accomplish, along with several hours Tuesday, to be read into the Congressional Record. Kucinich's address to the House was broadcast live on C-SPAN. But it was not announced in advance or highlighted on the C-SPAN Web site, and there were not many news reports on the historically significant fact that articles of impeachment had been filed against the president in subsequent days.

A week later, it has still not been reported in The New York Times, the nation's self-described "newspaper of record," even though the Times had just days before Rep. Kucinich's action, editorialized about the enormity of the president's lies in tricking the country into invading Iraq -- one of the crimes leading Rep. Kucinich's long list.
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One remark by a minor Israeli cabinet officer hinting at a possible U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran sent oil prices up by a record $11/barrel to a record $139 per barrel Friday. That should tell us what would happen if the Bush Administration were crazy enough to attack Iran, or to let its vassal state of Israel do it.

Most analysts say an actual attack on Iran would send oil almost immediately to past $300 per barrel -- a level that would strangle economies worldwide and send the world into an economic collapse not since the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs kicked off the Great Depression.

The repercussions of that would be staggering.

America, which runs on oil, would grind to a halt. Gasoline and home heating oil would double or triple in price, leading to desperation in the coming winter for those living north of the Mason-Dixon line, and to a mass exodus of the elderly from Florida and Arizona, where air-conditioning would no longer be affordable.
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The last couple of weeks have brought confirmation -- as if it were needed -- even in the corporate media that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the gang of thugs and sycophants around them in the White House, engaged in a massive conspiracy to lie the country into a war in Iraq.

The release of a confessional book by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and the subsequent release of a long blocked report by the Senate Intelligence Committee make it clear that Bush, Cheney, & Company deliberately lied to Congress and the American public back in 2002 and early 2003 about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (there was none). McClellan also states that Bush and Cheney conspired to "out" CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of a campaign to prevent her husband from exposing a major part of that campaign of lies: the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.
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It's kind of bizarre reading about supposed "feminists" who are reportedly claiming they'll vote for McCain rather than Obama, now that "their" candidate, Hillary Clinton, is out of the running for the presidential nomination.

First of all, John McCain is clearly the candidate of the anti-abortion crowd, but that's not the half of it. He's also the candidate who says Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Sam Alito are his kind of judges. We're talking here about guys (yeah, guys) who think a woman's place is in the home, and who only recently ruled that if she's discriminated against on the job, and doesn't learn about it for a decade or more, a woman can't do anything about it, because the original offense of underpaying her happened more than 180 days ago. McCain is also the guy who, after his wife suffered a serious car crash and became disabled, dumped her for a younger, richer woman. A feminist's dream, this guy.
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