Wolcott hits the nail square on the head: The war crimes of the United Sta

[WoodrowFan]

Wolcott says it better than most people could ever dream of doing. It's worth reading in its entirety.....

http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/07/the_damned.php

The war crimes of the United States compound by the minute, the hour, the day. I predict that George Bush, upon leaving office, will be the most despised president in American history. He will have his core support, the clotted, stunted brains that collect at sites like Lucianne.com and Powerline, but he will enjoy no Reaganesque orange sunset afterglow (or Nixonian self-rehabilitation), so deep, lasting, and tragic is the damage he's done, a damage abetted by a craven, corrupt political class and a press that even now, as the full dimensions of the disaster unfold before us, is unable to sound alarm, so accustomed as they've become to their role as sponges and clever snots. History will not forgive Bush or the United States, nor should it, for raising and destroying the hopes of the Iraqi people, and presiding over the dissolution of their nation into a failed state.

........

"We should not confuse Hezbollah with Al Qaeda. Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international network. Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international political and financial network. They have personnel and supporters scattered in countries around the world who have the training and resources to mount attacks. Hezbollah has no qualms about using terrorist attacks as part of a broader strategy to achieve its objectives. The last major Hezbollah attack against the United States was the June 1996 attack on the U.S. military apartment complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah also organized the attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994. But they also have exercised restraint when they felt they could achieve their objectives through political means. The ten year hiatus in major mass casualty attacks could come to a shattering end in the coming months, and American citizens are likely to pay some of that price with their own blood."


sorry, I was so eager to post I forgot the link!

[bemildred]

1. Liink? nt

[phiddle]

2. Link? Thanks

[MADem]

3. Put the link up so we CAN read it! NT

[WoodrowFan]

4. sorry!!! I added the link(NT)

[MADem]

5. Thanks, looks like a great article...NT

[whistle]

6. Thanks for finding and posting this piece, right on the money!

[Warren Stupidity]

7. "to their role as sponges and clever snots"

That is one of the best descriptions of the mediawhores I have read so far.

[Nikki Stone 1]

9. That phrase stuck out for me too

Appropriate

[MrPrax]

8. Didn't take much to shut the left

up even on the Internet over this one...

Wolcott is one of the very few out there saying these things.

Bloggers Offer Unusual Take On Raging Conflict: Silence
By JENNIFER SIEGEL
July 21, 2006

Bloggers — as the feisty class of Internet pundits are known — love to paint themselves as free-speech warriors who bravely tackle the hard truths that mainstream media outlets either ignore or distort. But as the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raged on and conventional media outlets covered the news from the ground, major players in the liberal blogosphere were keeping, by their own admission, decidedly quiet.

The most prominent liberal blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, briefly addressed the topic Monday on his eponymous Web site DailyKos.com, in a post titled "Why I won't write about the Israel/ Lebanon/ Palestine fighting."
...

He added: "I doubt that it's too consciously thought out, that there's a decision not to touch it because there's not a unified perspective."

On his blog for the Washington Monthly, Drum offered a number of reasons to explain his own tight-lipped response to the fighting, a list that included: the "unusually vicious comment threads" it inspires; the seemingly "intractable" nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — "a plausible excuse for inaction coming from a pundit or a blogger... not a plausible excuse for a president of the United States"— and the fact that the complex is "fantastically complex."
...

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the The New Republic and a general critic of bloggers, rejected the "complexity" explanation.

"Why would you expect complexity from bloggers, left, right, or Martian?" Wieseltier wrote in an email to the Forward. "They are not in the complexity business on any issue. Maybe the problem is not complexity but complication — the way in which sympathy with Israel's campaign against Hezbollah, and therefore with the use of force, might complicate their lives in progressiveland, where they live."
Forward

Well that was an easy wedge issue...and everyone was so worried about stem-cells, abortion and gay marriage.

"...In fact, the Holocaust has proven to be a valuable commodity for politically correct Germans. By "defending" Holocaust memory and Jewish elites against any and all criticism, they get to play-act at moral courage. What price do they actually pay, what sacrifice do they actually make, for this "defense"?
Given Germany's prevailing cultural ambience and the overarching power of American Jewry, such courage in fact reaps rich rewards. Pillorying a Jewish dissident costs nothing--and provides a "legitimate" outlet for latent prejudice.
Finkelstein

and provides the 'liberal' with the patina of a respectable social conscience without ever having to take a stand on anything that might come into conflict with their 'real' values.

[Demeter]

12. Leon Wieseltier Can Put It Where The Sun Don't Shine

He's more than a coward, and no pundit of any sort.

There are so many parties responsible for the Middle East Mess, and short of wiping them all off the face of the earth (and I'm including the US here) there is no obvious, easy, or even feasible solution. Since fixing the US is our priority and problem, it tends to concentrate our efforts. Fixing the US can only help in the Middle East. Now, if other responsible citizens of other nations responsible for the Middle East Mess took on the job of "fixing" their own, perhaps a solution might be found. We have to concentrate on Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, the PNACers and the GOP, and AIPAC. That's quite enough for anybody.

[ben_thayer]

10. I'd like to read the whole article, but...

for some reason I keep getting an error message that "jameswolcott.com cannot be found". I've tried 3 different browsers with the same results. I used to read him regularly, but haven't been able to get to his site for about a month. Anybody have an idea wussup?? Is Comcast censoring me??

:shrug:

[hlthe2b]

13. The link above doesn't work?

Try clearing you cache... maybe you keep loading a page that was down at one time or another...

[ben_thayer]

14. Nope... I've tried it and

multiple links from Google searches. Never had a problem like this. Weird.

[clydefrand]

11. I really think we need to push for the ICC to go after '*', because

if they don't get him, we very well may have a dictator on our hands. The repubs in congress sure aren't going to allow impeachment proceedings.

[enki23]

15. nevermind. mixed messages, and all that.

.