Reprise: Afghanistan Again December 10, 2012

Just to return for a wee moment to the United States government’s claim that it is murdering people in Afghanistan so that the country will never again be used as a base to attack the United States…

The claim is ridiculous on its face, as I’ve often said. The attacks could have been planned anywhere in the world. The attackers trained in the United States. Their weapons, airplanes, were American airplanes flown from American airports and hijacked in American airspace.

The Americans would have been better off ignoring Afghanistan as a player and hunting Bin Laden and his co-workers with small teams using intelligence gathered from multiple international sources. Instead they did the equivalent of dropping a bomb on a biological weapons warehouse, spreading the deadly bugs all over the place. Now the Americans are killing people all over the world, including their own citizens, all in the name of fighting a disease which they in large part are responsible for creating and disseminating.

And now the Americans use the ultimate coward’s weapon and coward’s rationale: airborne drones using missiles to murder ‘suspected militants’. Suspected. Militants. Not known terrorists actually guilty of criminal acts. Suspected. Militants. Speak too loudly in support of your country and your beliefs and the Americans will strike like an invisible god from the sky, hurling lightning bolts at you. And your womenfolk. And your children. Because they ‘suspect’ you and your women and your children just plain don’t like the United States of America.

What a pathetic, shambling, mindless thing America has become.

Musings on Murder and Contempt June 21, 2012

The Drone Murders

The Pakistanis make much of the fact that the United States is sending military drone aircraft into its airspace to kill Pakistanis, including women and children who inconveniently happen to get in the way of Obama’s murderous toys.

The Pakistanis bluster and complain and threaten, but they don’t do the one thing any rational government might do. Shoot the damn things down.

Pakistan has an air force. It has radar. It has air defense. It has missiles. The drones are military aircraft of a foreign nation invading Pakistani airspace and killing civilians. Drones are not the most nimble or speedy craft. Start shooting them down. Yemen, similarly besieged by the D.C. killers, should take similar action.

Otherwise some among us might be tempted to think that these countries enjoy being the killing ground for the primary terrorist state in the world today.

Contempt of Congress?

How amusing is it that a committee of Congress has decided to hold the Attorney General in contempt of Congress?

That would be a House Committee chaired by one of the uglier Republican partisans, Darrell Issa. The short version is that he and his treacherous friends have decided to attack the Presidency for doing pretty much the same thing the last Republican President did. To add to their hypocrisy, it was their Attorney General under that last Republican President who corrupted the entire Department of Justice, but Issa and his crew of thugs (that would comprise the entire Republican Party as it commits a street mugging of American democracy in broad daylight) had nothing to say about Republican corruption of the Justice Department.

But the amusing thing is that any committee of Congress would hold anyone in contempt of Congress.

Some eighty percent of Americans hold Congress in contempt of the American people.

I’d go further and say Congress is in contempt of the American people, the Constitution, the laws of the country, international law, and reason itself.

These people should be running for the hills and hiding under rocks. Unfortunately the people who sent them to Washington are not smart enough to chase them out. In the end there’s just plenty of contempt all around and hardly a bit of functioning brain matter in American politics, especially the Washington version of politics.

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