16 Epic Jon Stewart Insults Worthy of Shakespeare

By Janet Allon


Jon Stewart takes a week off every once in a while and we are consigned to watching his reruns for a fix, which is okay because they stand up fairly well. It also gives us a chance to take a step back and savor some of his finest insults. Stewart might have torn a page or two from Shakespeare’s book—the bard was known to sling a good insult here and there.

When Hamlet says, “They have a plentiful lack of wit,” and a character in Coriolanus says, “More of your conversation would infect my brain,” they could certainly be talking about Fox News. 

Henry V’s line: “Such antics do not amount to a man,” could certainly apply to John Boehner or Ted Cruz, and “Thou mis-shapen dick,” seems tailor-made for Scalia, Alito and Limbaugh. Take your pick.

But Stewart has his own way with words (or he and his scribes do.) Too bad he took Hobby Lobby week off, but let’s take a moment to remember some of his best digs, some of which sound positively Shakespearean.

1. Sonnet to Rush Limbaugh:
“ Rush—The quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.”

2. Insult by metaphor:
''Fox News: You are the lupus of news.''

3. Ode to O’Reilly
''Here's what you and your minions don't understand, O'Reilly. Your hell doesn't scare me. I make my living watching Fox News eight hours a day. I'm already in hell.''

4. Soliloquy on Fox:
''Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic, to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust, and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.”

5. And in the role of the fool:
''Rick Perry is what happens if Lex Luthor distilled down George Bush essence in a laboratory and crossed it with gun powder and semen from the finest thoroughbred in Lubbock, and then strapped that concoction onto a nuclear missile and shot it into the f**king sun! And then, waited, waited, waited, until one day, on the anniversarry of the Alamo, a solar flare, yada yada yada, Rick Perry!''

6. The king in his lonely tower:
''Mitt Romney calling the President 'detached and out of touch' is like a multimillionaire who owns two mansions, six cars, and who thinks 'corporations are people, my friend' calling someone 'detached and out of touch.'''

7. Michele Bachmann, one of the witches in MacBeth?
''Be honest Newsweek, you used that photo in a petty attempt to make Michele Bachmann look crazy. That's what her words are for.''

8. Wait, no, Bachmann’s not nearly clever enough to be a witch
''I gotta say, of all my issues with Michele Bachmann's brain, migraines are not even in the top 20.''

9. My kingdom for a horse?
''These are troubled times, and we need a hero, someone unencumbered by politics as usual. Someone who could kill a moose with one hand and skin a bear with the other. Someone without a job. ... Yes! Like a ship slowly appearing over the horizon to an island of castaways, Sarah Palin has arrived with fresh food, clothing and that little box she keeps next to her bed filled with crazy.''

10. Falstaffian excess?
''Either he's getting ready to play an Indian in a 1950s Western, or John Boehner is not human, but actually made entirely of cured meats.'

11. How the mighty have fallen
''Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, once two of the most powerful men in this country, are now suffering from Balzheimer's disease. Why didn't I see it before? Balzheimer's is a terrible illness that attacks the memory and gives its victims the balls to attack others for things they themselves made a career of. There is no known cure.''

12. A rose by any other name would smell?
''Republicans are no longer allowed to say that people are rich. You have to refer to them as 'job creator'. You can't even use the word 'rich'. You have to say, 'This chocolate cake is so moist and job creator.'''

13. The green-eyed monster doth mock:
''Must be nice to be a Republican senator sometimes, because you get the fun of breaking sh*t and the joy of complaining the sh*t you just broke doesn't work.''

14. All’s well that . . . wait . . .
''I view America like this: 70 to 80 percent [are] pretty reasonable people that truthfully, if they sat down, even on contentious issues, would get along. And the other 20 percent of the country run it. ''

15. O war! Thou son of hell!
''Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe -- dare I dream it? -- maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.''

16. If you prick us, do we not bleed?
''Why is it that if you take advantage of a tax break and you're a corporation, you're a smart businessman, but if you take advantage of something you need to not be hungry, you're a moocher?''

Maine's Gov. Paul LePage May Be Dumbest in Nation's History

By Brad Friedman

We've long regarded Maine's Republican Gov. Paul LePage as giving Arizona's Republican Gov. Jan Brewer a run for her money as the dumbest Governor in the nation, if not the dumbest in history.

But it appears that LePage has been making a real run for that latter title all along.

As early as 2011, we took notice just after LePage took office and immediately ordered the removal of a mural from the state's Dept. of Labor because it was too pro-uniony, or something. That and other "Tea Party"-ish behavior by the then new Governor resulted in a bunch of state Senators from his own party asking him, publicly, to tone it down a bit.

"Were these isolated incidents, we would bite our collective tongues," the Republican lawmakers wrote in an op-ed at the time. "But, unfortunately, they are not isolated but frequent. Therefore, we feel we must speak out."

But that was just a taste for what was to come and what's been revealed about him this week...

You may also recall late last year when we highlighted the brain trust that is LePage as he was actually celebrating the melting Arctic, on the premise that it opened up the Northern Passage as a shipping lane for Maine --- despite the fact that global warming, in addition to threatening the entirety of human civilization in the not too distant future, is already posing more immediate dangers to Maine's maple syrup and shrimping industries, among others.

"Everybody looks at the negative effects of global warming, but with the ice melting, the Northern Passage has opened up," LePage explained, according to the Bangor Daily News at the time. "So maybe, instead of being at the end of the pipeline, we're now at the beginning of a new pipeline."

But our biggest clue about the guy, who is now running for re-election, probably should have come after his April 2013 claim that a new wind turbine at a Maine university --- one that had produced some 680,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean electricity in its first year (saving the school about $100,000, not to mention the reduction of dangerous CO2 output) --- actually had "a little electric motor that turns the blades."

"I’m serious," the Governor insisted during his remarks to the Skowhegan Area Chamber of Commerce that month. "They have an electric motor so they can show people that wind power works.

Unbelievable."

Well, now we may have an explanation --- of sorts --- for LePage's storied idiocy...or, at least his proud public display of same. According to the first chapter of journalist Mike Tipping's forthcoming book, As Maine Went: Governor Paul LePage and the Tea Party Takeover of Maine, until his own staff finally had to step in to put a stop to it, LePage had been meeting about once a month --- reportedly for several hours each time --- with a group of Rightwing "Sovereign Citizen" extremists and taking great interest, and even action, on their remarkable theories, legal and conspiratorial and otherwise.

While the Governor, according to Tipping, "was later forced to recant his accusation" about the wind turbine, "after his remarks made national news...He did not reveal the source of the false conspiracy theory." Tipping does so. On that relatively innocent, if highly illustrative, windmill conspiracy and much more that is far less innocent.

You've got to read the amazing full chapter, as published at Talking Points Memo this week, to fully appreciate the madness in play here, particularly for a public official of LePage's high office. But this follow-up article, reported by the Portland Press Herald in response to the piece, proves to be a pretty good teaser for it:

 

[LePage's press secretary, Adrienne] Bennett did not address why LePage met with the group eight times, why a county sheriff was asked to look into their demands or why the governor's legal staff was asked to draft an opinion of the group's claims that Senate President Justin Alfond, D-Portland, and House Speaker Mark Eves, D-North Berwick, should be arrested and executed.

Yes. It's that insane and more so. Tipping's piece is a detailed and extraordinary read, but well worth bookmarking for the long holiday weekend along and a nice tall pitcher of lemonade iced tea.

Walmart’s Food Stamp Scam Explained in One Easy Chart

By Erica Smiley

Walmart, the nation’s most profitable corporation, may also be the greatest beneficiary of the taxpayer-funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps.

But how has Walmart managed to make so much money off of taxpayers? For the short answer, take a look at the chart below where we’ve illustrated the scam. For the long answer, keep reading.

Step One: Pay your employees so little that they are forced to rely on food stamps to survive.

Even at Walmart’s definition of a full-time job, an employee earning the company’s average wage of $8.81/hour makes just $15,500 per year, placing them well below the federal poverty line for a family of four. With such low wages, even when working full-time hours, many associates are forced to depend on taxpayer-funded assistance such as food stamps and Medicaid to survive. In other words, Walmart is shifting responsibility onto the public for ensuring their associates’ basic needs are met.

One study showed that a single Walmart can cost taxpayers anywhere from $904,542 to nearly $1.75 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee for these programs all because one of the world’s most profitable retailers is paying substandard wages and benefits. A more recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness revealed that Walmart’s reliance on programs like food stamps cost federal taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion a year.

Step Two: Exploit loopholes to avoid paying billions in taxes that fund food stamps.

While taxpayers are shouldering the responsibility to ensure Walmart’s employees can make ends meet, the company zealously avoids contributing its fair share of taxes using a myriad of schemes. Another report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies claims the company exploits a little-known loophole to avoid an estimated $104 million in U.S. taxes by granting extravagant “performance pay” bonuses to top executives. You read that right – the more Walmart pays its executives, the less it pays in taxes.

The Waltons, the nation’s wealthiest family and owners of Walmart, contribute almost none of their personal wealth to the charitable foundation that bears their name and instead uses the charity’s tax structure to avoid an estimated $3 billion per year in estate taxes.

By fervently minimizing its tax liability, Walmart has once again dodged its responsibility in addressing its employees’ basic needs and is instead letting the rest of us foot the bill.

Step Three: Reap billions in profits when food stamps are spent in your stores.

So what happens to all those food stamp dollars? They’re spent at Walmart!

Last year alone, Walmart collected an estimated $13 billion in revenue from food stamps spent in their stores. As Slate and NPR reported in April,

“The same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue – an estimated $13 billion last year – also likely has the most employees using food stamps.”

There you have it. Walmart’s perfected its food stamp scheme by keeping its employees dependent on taxpayer-funded food stamps, not paying its fair share in taxes to  fund SNAP, and then reaping all the profits from food stamp redemption in its stores.

For a company that can easily afford to pay its employees decent wages, Walmart has decided to do just the opposite. Just last week, the company’s spokesman, David Tovar, published a snarky retort in response to a recent New York Times opinion column denouncing the company’s refusal to meet its employees’ most basic needs. As the Huffington Post revealed, Tovar’s “fact check” was short on actual facts, but it did illustrate another of Walmart’s usual strategies: when problems are exposed within your ranks, unleash a well-funded PR machine instead of addressing the issue.

Rise of a right-wing quack: Faux-historian David Barton’s shocking new influence

David Barton - Glenn Beck's favorite "historian" - is a discredited fraud. Which makes his new ascent terrifying.

By Heather Digby Parton

David Barton (Credit: AP/Harry Cabluck)

Back when Glenn Beck was one of the most admired men in America and Fox News’ No. 1 celebrity, he introduced to the nation at large a “historian,” well known among the Christian right, by the name of David Barton, who claims to have documentary evidence that the founders based the Constitution explicitly on the Bible.

Beck often referred to a group known as the “black-robed regiment,” which was composed of priests and clergy who were revolutionary sympathizers, comparing today’s conservative preachers to what he implied were clergymen-soldiers in the secular liberal war on the Constitution.

Beck called upon David Barton to head what he called Beck University, an online course for those who wanted to educate themselves in the Beck school of thought. Let’s just say it wasn’t the curriculum you’d find at most schools of higher learning.   (You can hear one of David Barton’s “lectures” here, where he tells the Beck U students that American exceptionalism springs from its Christian theocratic principles.)

Barton quickly became the toast of Wingnuttia. He was invited to participate in Tea Party events all over the country and even held a constitutional seminar for the 2010 incoming freshman class at the invitation of congresswoman Michele Bachmann.  The New York Times featured him in a glowing profile that only mentioned in passing that his alleged scholarship was, shall we say, controversial:

[M]any professional historians dismiss Mr. Barton, whose academic degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, as a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible.
“The problem with David Barton is that there’s a lot of truth in what he says,” said Derek H. Davis, director of church-state studies at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Tex. “But the end product is a lot of distortions, half-truths and twisted history.”

---

---

That’s a very generous way of putting it. Unfortunately, his notoriety also brought new scrutiny to his alleged scholarship and that didn’t work out too well as you might imagine. Here’s just one example of his so-called scholarship being debunked by Chris Rodda, the senior researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, via Media Matters. She challenged Barton’s insistence that Thomas Jefferson dated his presidential papers with the phrase “in the year of our Lord Christ,” which indicated that the notorious theist was really a super-Christian (what with the added “Christ” and all).

According to Rodda, the truth is quite different: Jefferson took pains to omit “in the year of our Lord” in his documents, instead using phrases like “in the Christian computation,” and “of the Christian epoch.” Further, according to Rodda, the evidence Barton provided of Jefferson purportedly using the phrase is, in fact, a preprinted form that Jefferson had no input into creating.

This is the quality of constitutional scholarship that pervades the conservative movement these days: simple, outright lies that allege that this country was not founded on certain Enlightenment principles and the hard won experience of men and women who were exceedingly familiar with the bloody consequences of church and state being entwined.  It was, in their reckoning, conceived as a straight-up Christian nation, full stop.

But the good news in all this is that such craziness of the Tea Party fire is pretty much burned out and we don’t have to worry too much about this crazy stuff, right? After all, today they’re just a group of libertarian isolationists who want to work with the left to take our country back from the wealthy elites.  (And, who knows, maybe there really are a few like that out there.) But the makeup of the Tea Party remains the same as it ever was; it is simply the latest iteration of the far right.  And as religious right observer Sarah Posner adroitly observed:

[T]o understand why the Tea Party resonates with the religious right and vice versa, one must understand how the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement is driven by a fundamental tenet of Christian reconstructionism: that there are certain God-ordained spheres – family, church and government – and that government has exceeded the authority God gave it, to the detriment of church, family and the individual, whose rights, both Tea Partiers and religious right-ists maintain, are granted by God, not the government.
This notion that the federal government – not only godless, but in flagrant violation of God’s will – is “tyrannical” and needs to be overthrown resonates from militias to the John Birch Society to the podiums of religious-right gatherings where Republican presidential hopefuls jockey for the support of the faithful. To fail to see the religious roots of the Tea Party mantra – or the ways in which it reverberates as a divine imperative – is to blind oneself to a fundamental feature of American conservatism.

If you would like to see how this is being expressed in our current election cycle, look no further than this fine fellow, the Tea Party-endorsed talk radio host  Jody Hice, who is running for Congress in Georgia’s 10th District. Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal Constitution tells us:

“Although Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology,” Hice wrote in his 2012 book. “It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.

And as Ed Kilgore points out, he’s not the only one down there in Georgia running on a Christian right platform. In the 11th District, Barry Loudermilk is in a runoff with former impeachment manager Bob Barr (who also happens to be an actual, real live libertarian) and he’ a true believer too:

Loudermilk is an eager member of the Glenn Beck wing of the GOP. He is also an apostle of faux historian David Barton, who preaches that the U.S. Constitution is a document intended to create a conservative Christian government. Like Hice, they reject the notion of a separation between Christianity and state, and argue that the First Amendment was intended only to keep government from favoring one particular Christian denomination.

And just in case anyone has doubts about how fringey these ideas really are, the words of a potential GOP 2016 presidential candidate ought to bring you up short:

“I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced–forced at gunpoint no less–to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.”  – Mike Huckabee

Back in 2012 Barton’s book “The Jefferson Papers” was finally challenged by Christian conservative scholars and his so-called credibility took a hit. But he wasn’t down for long. He came back with presentations to state legislators in Kansas and Missouri and appeared at major Right to Life gatherings. Soon he was seen huddling in prayer with perhaps his most important connection, Sen. Ted Cruz:

“I’m not in a position to opine on academic disputes between historians, but I can tell you that David Barton is a good man, a courageous leader and a friend,” Cruz told POLITICO. “David’s historical research has helped millions rediscover the founding principles of our nation and the incredible sacrifices that men and women of faith made to bequeath to us the freest and most prosperous nation in the world.”

They aren’t done yet.
Right Wing Watch has published  a thorough dossier on Barton if you’d like to read further.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

John Boehner won’t answer his favorite question

Speaker John Boehner's law suit against the president distracts from finding an answer to his favorite question, where are the jobs? Ed Schultz, Sen. Sherrod Brown and United Steel Workers President Leo Gerard discuss.

Maybe We Should Listen to Bill Kristol on Iraq

By Tom Tomorrow

LeBron James Opts Out of Contract With Miami Heat, Becoming Free Agent

http://espn.go.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/story/_/id/11127329/lebron-james-opt-contract-miami-heat

Jon Stewart mocks ‘America’s Tragedy Herpe’ Dick Cheney and his ‘Sith apprentice’ daughter

By Tom Boggioni

 

With the rise of insurgent terrorist group ISIS in Iraq, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart mocked the reemergence of former Vice President Dick Cheney, calling him ‘America’s Tragedy Herpe’ returning to give advice on how to handle the troubled country.

Opening with Star Wars ‘Imperial March’ theme, a resigned Stewart said, “There is America’s tragedy herpe, Dick Cheney…. Alright, Dick Cheney, tell us how we have done everything wrong since you left office and, if you would, do it from in front of a Sears portrait studio backdrop, whilst your Sith apprentice stands in an eerie silent vigil, go…”

Stewart then showed a clip of a stiff Dick Cheney standing in front of a field, wearing a cowboy hat, and reading from a teleprompter while explaining that the Middle East was following apart under the Obama Administration.

Mocking Cheney, Stewart added, “My point is, if you send federal revenuers up here, we will defend our land.”

Wondering if “America has tired of Dick Cheney’s blame game,” Stewart showed a clip of Cheney’s appearance on Megyn Kelly’s show where the Fox host told the former vice president, “history ‘has proven you got it wrong.”

A smiling Stewart said maybe now Cheney will understand how it feels when “someone you thought was a friend shoots you in the face.”

Watch the video below from Comedy Central:

The best video game trailers of all time

By James Plafke

 

The video game industry has grown enough over the past 30 years that it has developed a key trait that earlier generations of games initially lacked: taste. Games have always been able to convey complex stories, but something needs to let people know that in order for them to make the purchase. Obviously, trailers are a way to capture people’s attention. Sometimes, though, developers go so far above and beyond creating that mini-commercial for their game that they ultimately create a tasteful, self-contained narrative all on its own that’s able to be delivered in just a couple of minutes. Many trailers are good, but only a select few can survive on their own as a separate piece of flash video fiction, and these are the best out there.
 

Valiant Hearts

Warning: the above trailer for UbiArt’s upcoming game is nearing the depression level of the infamous Futurama dog episode. You know the one. Aside from being instilled with the power to put tears in the eyes of the most hardened, bitter soul, the narrative not only conveys what the game is about, but you can show it to your grandma and she won’t feel lost. The trailer works on its own, regardless of its video game roots.
 

Dead Island

When the Dead Island trailer dropped a handful of years ago, for a brief moment, it engulfed the internet. From Twitter feeds to Facebook posts, and gaming outlets to sites that have nothing to do with media, the digitally connected world was interrupted. Once you saw the trailer, it made sense — it’s simply one of the best trailers from any genre of media. Thanks to its clever use of editing the chronological flow of time and mixing that with a tragic, self-contained tale, people still talk about this trailer today — even though the game ended up having no emotional value relative to the trailer’s.
 

Halo 3

The final installment in the original Halo trilogy, Halo 3 not only picked up where the previous game’s very controversial cliffhanger left off, but — at the time — was viewed as the last “real” Halo game. Three more were made after that, and Microsoft has already unveiled Halo 5. Though the series has enjoyed some stellar trailers and commercials over the years, nothing comes close to the famous “Believe” trailer. It features an intense battlefield scene, but everything is still as a camera pans and zooms through the paused action. On its own, it tells the story and havoc of war — it doesn’t matter that you don’t necessarily know who the armor-clad soldiers are or why they’re battling aliens. The meticulous, tragic detail speaks volumes on its own.
 

Dying Light

Debuted last year, the same producer behind Dead Island — and thus its magnificent trailer seen above — is developing another zombie apocalypse game, Dying Light. Where Dead Island was more or less an open-world action title, Dying Light seems to be an open-world parkour title — but with zombies. The trailer, as seems to be the trend when Techland is involved, is great, and can stand as a self-contained short about the tragic story of a group of agile zombie apocalypse survivors, and the hell they have to go through just to survive.
 

 

Battleblock Theater

Once upon a time, there was a trailer about two guys who were the best of friends and going on an adventure. It release back in 2011, and had so many trailers between that and its 2013 release date, that it was actually a bit difficult to find this original version. While most memorable game trailers are serious affairs, Battleblock Theater’s is one of the funniest, from its unique narration style to the mimicry of wooden stick puppets. Whereas many trailers have been funny, this trailer is not only hilarious, but tells its own story, albeit a prologue. When your mom can enjoy a trailer about a game she knows nothing about, you know something went right.

The above trailers aren’t the only memorable game trailers – Metal Gear Solid trailers are always long and amusing, and one time Kratos was murdering enemies in a forest map that turned out to be the back of an enormous Titan climbing up mount Olympus. However, they’re perhaps the best instances of game trailers that can stand on their own. They have a proper beginning, middle, and end, and aren’t primarily focused on showing off how you’ll level up in a game, but instead effectively convey their games’ narratives by telling their own.

They Belong in Prison, Not on Television

From left: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Secretary of State Condleeza Rice,
former vice president Dick Cheney attend the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush
Presidential Library, April 25, 2013. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)

They Belong in Prison, Not on Television
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Friday 20 June 2014

I wrote my first article on the folly of an Iraq invasion in August of 2002. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I argued. There are no 9/11 connections in Iraq. There is no al Qaeda presence in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was notorious for hanging Wahabbists from the nearest available light pole. An invasion would tear the country apart, explode sectarian tensions, and plunge the region into chaos.

Neither I nor the world knew at that time that George W. Bush and Tony Blair had decided four months earlier that the deal was going down no matter what. Neither I nor the world knew at that time that a decision had been made one month earlier to ensure that "intelligence and facts" would be "fixed around the policy" of invasion. I stayed on the no-invasion beat for the next seven months, writing dozens of articles and a book, as the world watched millions of people take to the streets in an attempt to stop something that was, as it turns out, inevitable.

Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Condolleeza Rice, and of course, George W. Bush, piled the sandbags high and deep around a decision that had already been made. We know they have these weapons, we know where they are, we don't want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud, plastic sheeting and duct tape, 9/11. Save for 23 bold souls, a craven Senate caved to the pressure and delivered the Iraq War Resolution to the Bush administration, and in late March of 2003, the skies over Baghdad glowed orange as the city was turned into a bowl of molten fire.

As the WMD argument fell to ashes, I kept writing. As the 9/11-connection argument collapsed, I kept writing...and then, first in a trickle and then a flood, people started writing me. Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of American soldiers who had died in Iraq wrote me letter after letter, email after email, demanding answers. Why? Why did this happen? Why did my loved one die over there?

Never mind the fact that I and so very many others spent so much time and energy for so many years trying to stop all this from happening. Never mind the fact that the perpetrators of this enormous fraud, this smash-and-grab robbery, this looting of the Treasury, this act of first-degree murder on a massive scale, all walked away scot-free to pursue new careers and live lives of comfort. Amazingly enough, that's not the worst part.

The worst part is that they're all on my television again, trying to blame President Obama for the circumstances created by their own feckless, murderous decisions.

Tony Blair: "We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't."

Paul Wolfowitz: "Look, it's a complicated situation in which you don't just come up with, 'We're going to bomb this, we're going to do that.'"

Doug Feith: "This is the education of Barack Obama, but it's coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people to the American national interest."

John McCain: "What about the fact that General Petraeus had the conflict won thanks to the Surge and if we had left a residual force behind that we could have - we could, we would not be facing the crisis we are today."

Karl Rove, when asked about the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq: "Yeah, that's an old argument that we waste time on."

Dick Cheney: "He (Obama) abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory."

Let me put it plainly: these people do not belong on my television. They belong in prison, for the crimes of theft, torture and murder. They shattered the lives of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Iraqi civilians. They savaged the American economy paying for it all, and several of them got very rich in the process. They should be in orange jumpsuits and fetters, picking mealworms out of their gruel while shuttered in very small, very grim, very inescapable metal rooms.

I spent the first decade of the 21st century dealing with these blood-sodden bastards. Now, it appears, I will spend a chunk of a second decade watching them run around trying desperately to wash that blood from their hands...and the "news" media, also thoroughly culpable in this ongoing debacle, is all too happy to help them do it.

That, too, should be a crime.

The whole thing: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24490-william-rivers-pitt-they-belong-in-prison-not-on-tv

Scott Walker under investigation

Prosecutors in Wisconsin allege that Governor Scott Walker personally oversaw illegal coordinated fundraising among conservative groups. Lena Taylor and Ruth Conniff join Ed Schultz to discuss.

Father and Daughter Cheney Can Go Suck a Dick

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The only words that I want to hear coming out of Dick Cheney's mouth are an apology

Yesterday, Dick Cheney wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that blamed President Obama for the current crisis in Iraq. Tonight, Ed will explain to the former Vice President why he’s wrong with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Il., and democratic strategist Bob Shrum.

HEY, DICK CHENEY!

Republicans try to repeat past mistakes

Leaders within in the Bush Administration who lied America into the War in Iraq voice their “expert” opinion about the current turmoil. Ed Schultz, Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Ca., and Senator Jon Tester, D-Mt., discuss.

Americans poorly served by media on Iraq, Benghazi

Rachel Maddow criticizes right-wing media for searching for bad news in an arrest in the Benghazi attacks, and American media broadly for re-engaging so-called experts on Iraq with terrible track records, and Congress for not taking its role seriously.

Poll Shows Cantor’s Not The Only GOP Idiot In Trouble Nationally!

By Rika Christensen 

Eric Cantor’s stunning primary loss may herald other GOP losses in November. A recent poll from HuffPost/YouGov show that Republicans aren’t sure about other sitting Congress members either, as the poll found Republicans feel that the current GOP leaders aren’t conservative enough.

One has to wonder what “not conservative enough” means for these people. Cantor was plenty conservative, but his district apparently wants a hard-core Tea Partier who’s even more likely to engage in obstruction and try to legislate people’s private lives than even Cantor was, to take office.

It’s very unlikely that Cantor’s district would vote for a Democrat.

McConnell, another face of GOP obstructionism, is having a tough time against Democrat Allison Lundergan Grimes right now. Because that’s a Senate seat, more people from more districts will vote in that election. You can gerrymander individual districts to death, but it’s much harder to guarantee the safety of the Senate seats for one party or the other.

Grimes is painting herself as a pro-coal Democrat, and some people in Kentucky are fed up enough with Mr. Our-Only-Goal-is-to-Make-Obama-A-One-Term-President McConnell to listen to her.

Grimes also has Senator Elizabeth Warren’s backing now.

John Boehner is a weak leader, unable to pull his party together on anything, and thus, unable to present Republican alternatives to Democratic plans. He often doesn’t put bills to the floor for a vote if he doesn’t have enough of his party behind him, even if, between Republicans and Democrats, he’d have the votes to pass it.

While he’s following the Hastert rule there, the Hastert rule isn’t actually a rule that the Speaker must follow, and when it comes to crucial votes (like whether to end a government shutdown and pass a clean resolution), all adhering to the Hastert rule does is, well, obstruct. Especially if the bill will pass with votes from both parties.

Unfortunately, it looks like Boehner only faces token Democratic opposition in Ohio. Of all three, Cantor’s already gone, McConnell is having trouble, but Boehner will probably stay, even though Tea Partiers are unhappy with his performance.

Nate Silver’s website, FiveThirtyEight.com, currently predicts that Republicans will win the seats of retiring Democratic senators, and that the Senate will end up 50-50, with the tie-breaking vote going in favor of the Democrats because Vice President Biden is a Democrat.

The biggest reason for that may be that Republicans are doing a better job of recruiting electable candidates; something they had considerable trouble with in 2012, when they thought the Tea Party nuts were their ticket to everything. People are also unhappy with Obama’s foreign policy decisions, which is hurting the Democratic Party as a whole.

Unfortunately, the HuffPo/YouGov poll doesn’t actually spell doom for the Republicans, per se, but it could, and should, give cocky Republicans pause, even those that aren’t up for re-election this year.

Their positions are not quite as secure as they think; even Nate Silver’s predictions are shifting slightly back towards Democrats.

More from AATTP on the 2014 midterm elections:

• Allison Grimes Tops Turtle McConnell 49%-46% in New Shocking Poll!
• Eric Cantor Steps Down as House Majority Leader After Stunning Defeat (Video)
• The Daily Show: The Tea Party Sucks So Bad, Turtle McConnell EASILY Beat His Rival (Video)
• Weeping Cheeto John Boehner on Cantor’s Defeat: It’s All Obama’s Fault (Video)

Eric Cantor's Loss Is Hillary Clinton's Gain

By Ronald Brownstein

The majority leader's loss means Republicans won't take up immigration reform before November—and maybe not before 2016. That's good news for Democrats

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

The best news for Hillary Rodham Clinton this week wasn't the mostly positive reviews for her memoir Hard Choices. It was the hard fall taken by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor when he was ousted by a Tea Party challenger who denounced him as insufficiently conservative, particularly on immigration.

The Virginia Republican's defeat virtually extinguishes the already flickering chances that House Republicans will pass immigration reform before the 2014 election, and even dims the odds that the chamber will take action before 2016. And that significantly improves prospects in the next presidential election for Clinton, or any other Democrat.

Cantor's defeat captures the divergence of interests between congressional Republicans and the strategists, donors, and activists in the GOP's presidential wing. After Mitt Romney lost in 2012 by more than 5 million votes, despite winning 59 percent of whites—a greater percentage than voted for Ronald Reagan during his 1980 landslide—many GOP thinkers concluded that the party was unlikely to recapture the White House without gaining ground with minorities, particularly Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Republicans in this camp believe that passing immigration reform is the threshold the GOP must cross before these growing communities will consider the party's positions on anything else.

But those arguments have not moved most congressional Republicans, especially those in the House. The House GOP has essentially barricaded itself against the demographic trends that have helped Democrats win the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections: 80 percent of House Republicans represent districts in which the white share of the population exceeds the national average. Cantor was one.

Polls consistently show that even most Republican partisans believe that immigrants here illegally should be allowed to stay—and either become citizens or, at least, work openly. But many Republican legislators believe that, as with gun control, those who oppose legalization vote on the issue more consistently than those who support it, especially in the conservative districts they mostly represent. 

That conviction is certain to be cemented by Cantor's loss to the underfunded Dave Brat, who lashed him for championing "amnesty," despite Cantor's support for only very limited reforms.

As in 2012—when Romney made a crippling commitment to "self-deportation" for those in the country illegally— GOP presidential candidates could be pulled to the right if immigration reform isn't resolved legislatively before the 2016 primaries. Cantor's loss may also prompt Obama to take more aggressive executive action to provide relief for undocumented immigrants. Republican hopefuls will feel enormous pressure to oppose that, as well. 

Both of those developments would limit the GOP's ability to improve its 2016 performance among minorities, who have provided Democrats almost exactly four-fifths of their votes in all but one presidential election since 1976. And that would mean the GOP could recapture the White House only if it expands its margins among whites or increases that group's share of the vote by raising turnout.

Neither would be easy. The white share of the vote has decreased in every presidential election since 1980 except one, and minority-population growth virtually ensures its continued decline. 

Disenchantment with Obama might offer the GOP a somewhat better chance of increasing its margin with whites. Polls show that only about one-fourth of whites or fewer believe they have benefited from either Obama's economic agenda or his health care plan. And the stubbornly slow economic recovery—plus a series of government missteps, including the health care roll out—have moved white voters, in particular, from receptivity toward greater federal activism after George W. Bush's presidency toward a renewed skepticism. "Obama has a taken a majority viewpoint that we need a more aggressive government … and gone 180 degrees in the other direction," says GOP pollster Glen Bolger.

Which returns us to Hillary Clinton. If she runs, the resurfacing doubts about Washington, particularly among whites, would present her with a problem similar to Bill Clinton's in 1992: formulating an agenda that convinces skeptical voters they will benefit from more government activism, rather than less—as Republicans will argue. 

But even so, it's a stiff bet for Republicans to gamble 2016 on holding Clinton below the 39 percent of whites Obama carried in 2012. 

In that meager showing, Obama lost white women by 14 percentage points, the biggest deficit for any Democrat since Reagan's second landslide in 1984. As the first female presidential nominee, Clinton might easily do better, perhaps much better. And because Obama already fell so far with white men, there might not be much further for her to fall. Simultaneously, the power of the Clinton name equips her to continue generating lopsided margins with minority voters—unless Republicans find ways to reach them. 

Even if most Americans remain skeptical of activist government after Obama's presidency, Clinton in all these ways would remain uniquely positioned to exploit the GOP's difficulties with attracting voters beyond its older, white, nonurban base. 

Yet Cantor's defeat demonstrates again how much of that base will fiercely resist policies that might build a broader coalition. "Elections are a combination of message and math," acknowledges Bolger. "The message is a little more difficult for Clinton, and the math is a little bit easier." That's especially true after the Virginia earthquake.

The Bottomless Iraq Sinkhole

Posted by Rude One

Do you feel it? Do you have that sense of vertigo and nausea, all the way from gut to your 'nads? As you hear the names chiming in the news like a roll call of shame - Mosul, Tikrit, Kirkuk - a chant of our national doom?

The breakdown of Iraq is something that anyone with any sense knew was inevitable once we removed Saddam Hussein, the bottom peg of the Jenga game that is that nation. We predicted civil war and, goddamnit, it was gonna happen. There was no policy that was going to maintain order in that fucked-beyond-fucked country except for eternal occupation by the United States - oh, sorry - coalition of the willing or whatever the fuck we called it.  

Once more, Barack Obama's presidency is swallowed and squandered by the devastated landscape George W. Bush left behind.

Obama is already getting the blame for the uprisings, the Sunni on Shiite violence, the radical Kurds taking what they always wanted (aided by average, everyday Kurds). It's like blaming your current lover for the herpes you got from some dude ten years ago because he's there and why the fuck not direct your rage at someone who is convenient instead of yourself and your own stupid decisions.

Eventually, and you can bet on this, another talking point is going to come around. It's something the Rude Pundit wrote about a long time ago, so, hey, here it is, from February 27, 2006, a gentle reminder that those of us who opposed the war were smarter and more prescient thinking than anyone who supported it. It's titled "Pre-Emptive Blogging: Talking Points For a Coming Attack From the Right" and it goes like this:

"As Iraq spirals into a shitstorm of violence and vengeance, even as some Sunnis and some Shiites try desperately to avert a direct, overwhelming hit by said shitstorm, at some point soon, some right wing bag of douche is going to proclaim that liberals are 'happy' or 'thrilled' by a civil war in Iraq. Liberals can be accused of enabling terrorists by using the dwindling "freedom of speech" we're allowed, and it's a pretty small rhetorical leap from saying the left wants American soldiers to die (which the right has done) to saying the left loves us some civil war. Yes, liberals will be viciously insulted (defamed, even) by conservative commentators, bloggers, Freeper frothers, as if somewhere, in an oh-so-hip underground club, liberals are gathered in an orgy of celebration over the infinite bloodletting in Iraq, chanting gleefully, 'Told you so, told you so, told you so' as they toast with cosmos and down sushi...

"So let's just say it up front here: over here in Liberalburg, we weren't happy when Ronald Reagan was cozying up to Saddam Hussein back in the 1980's. We weren't happy that the United States was backing a brutal, murderous, raping thug, giving him weapons and such. We weren't happy with the first Persian Gulf War. We weren't happy with sanctions that decimated the poorest people in Iraq. We weren't happy that the President wouldn't allow weapons inspectors to finish their work.

"We weren't happy with this war to start with, saying, for instance, that a civil war was the inevitable outcome. We're not happy to be proven right. We're not happy, simply, when people are dying for no good cause, with no good outcome on the horizon, and no good way out. Frankly, oh, dear, sweet right wing, on the whole, we'd've rather been wrong and had tens of thousands of people not killed, tens of thousands of America soldiers not wounded. We'd've eaten the crow and, trust us, wonderful, fair right wing, you'd've shoved our faces in the plate of that black bird.

"But since we were right, maybe, just maybe, someone oughta pay a political price for being so goddamned wrong. Instead, though, the right's gonna try to turn it around and blame the left and those who 'didn't support the war' for its failure. Which would, for all intents and purposes, finally seal the deal on Vietnam redux.

"Somewhere, Saddam Hussein is shaking his head, the only one who, really, and for all the wrong reasons, has the right to say, 'Told you so.'"

There is no joy here, no schadenfreude. Just sorrow for the dead and displaced, just the pain that all Cassandras feel constantly.

American Voters Need To Realize The Terrible Urgency Of 2014

By Yellow Dog Yankee

Every time I hear a pundit or a pollster discuss the certainty that Republicans will hold the House or the high probability they will gain control of the Senate I suspect I am having an out-of-body experience.

In what world, no matter how ill-informed, gerrymandered, Fox News saturated, or Koch Brother’s money-smothered could Democrats not win overwhelmingly this November?

Are Democratic candidates and especially Democratic leadership so incapable of connecting the dots that a sane and literate electorate will sit out this critical election?

Yeah, apparently.

We have leadership handpicking candidates who won’t galvanize the base and refusing to provide support to non-incumbents unless they are sure-fire winners. Our candidates pussyfoot through campaigns, terrified of offending Republicans who would never vote for them anyway. All in all we have a party which is unwilling or unable to bludgeon voters with the truth.

Democrats consistently campaign on the defensive; letting the opposition frame the debate and choose the terms; Obamacare, Benghazi, the “IRS scandal” the War on Coal. They wield the Second Amendment like a mace and lie that liberals plan to eviscerate the First.

Complacent independents and Democrats may not be well informed or likely voters in off-year elections but they can understand actual facts and become angry enough to do something about them.

It is time we pick the battleground and infuse the field with urgency.

There isn’t a natural constituency the Republicans have not insulted, annoyed, or outright harmed in recent years yet many seem blissfully unaware of it.

How many veterans know Republicans killed $100 million in funding to improve access to care as opposed to those who only heard the President was to blame four months later when the VA scandal broke.

 How many low income persons are aware their own governors are keeping health care from them but instead believe Obamacare is killing the country?

There are 89,727 career and 137,037 non-career employees of the U.S. Postal Service. At least that many more adults probably depend on their paychecks. They all have heard that their livelihood is in danger but do they know why?

If it was made clear that a Republican law is forcing USPS to fund employee pensions for 75 years over a period of ten; that this is a badly disguised plan to kill the USPS to the benefit of UPS and FedEx, big donors to the GOP; and that Republicans are now angling to use that pension money to erase the deficit in the Highway Trust Fund, do you think they would sit at home on November 4?

Hell, they would probably drag their spouses, parents, and half the neighborhood to the polls with them.

So why is Ed Schultz the only one talking about this?

The conventional wisdom is that young people don’t vote in mid-terms. On Wednesday Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to lower the debt on student loans. Two years ago they refused to stop an automatic doubling of Stafford Loan interest rates. This information alone could fuel a monster get-out-the vote drive on campuses nationwide.

These examples don’t even scratch the surface. Progressives have long lamented that poor and middle-class people always vote against their own self-interest. Maybe they don’t know they are doing so.

Have we fully informed the near-elderly on Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicare?

Do young women understand the current threat to their sexual freedom and to family planning?

Do small farmers know they are being damaged by agribusiness and the support Republican’s give it?

Are non-Christians aware of current legislative advocacy for state endorsed religion?

Are coastal residents such climate deniers they will allow their cities to drown?

Do minorities see the comprehensive effort Republicans are making to take away their vote?

It is not fear mongering to tell postal employees they will see their jobs shrivel and die under a Republican majority nor is it unfair to tell minorities and the elderly that this may be their last chance to vote unless voter suppression efforts are halted and halted quickly. It may be noble for a candidate to run on a platform of what she will do but it often works better to explain what an opponent has done.

And while we are at it we need to gather together the entire GOP and tie them up with one big ugly bow. The dreadful remarks we keep hearing – such as “No one has the guts to let them (poor people) wither and die” (John Johnston, congressional candidate, Indiana), or “I never said I would author legislation to put homosexuals to death, but I didn’t have a problem with it” (Scott Esk, state house candidate Oklahoma) or suggestions that poor children should have to sweep floors in return for a free lunch (Rep Jack Kingston and former Speaker Newt Gingrich), that non-Christians would certainly go to hell (Rep. Louie Gohmert just yesterday) or any of dozens of nasty and misogynistic comments about rape (take your pick) – are not isolated remarks. 

Let’s must pound home the truth that this is the way Republicans think and that only an election stands between thoughts and their reflection in real laws.

There is a Facebook meme to the effect that if Republicans stop lying about us we will stop telling the truth about them. The problem is they are still lying but we have never hit them with the unvarnished truth nor even attempted to arouse voters to the crises they are facing everywhere – with their jobs, their health, and their democracy.

It needs to be said over and over that we cannot wait until 2016 – there is a terrible urgency to now.

 

American Voters Need To Realize The Terrible Urgency Of 2014 was written by Yellow Dog Yankee for PoliticusUSA.

You've Been Drafted and You Don’t Even Know It

On the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Brian Williams led off NBC Nightly News this way: “On our broadcast tonight, the salute to the warriors who stormed the beaches here in Normandy...”

It’s such a commonplace of our American world, that word “warriors” for those in the U.S. military or, as is said time and again, our “wounded warriors” for those hurt in one of our many wars.  This time, however, because it was applied to the vets of World War II, my father’s war, it stopped me in my tracks. 

For just a moment, I couldn’t help imagining what my father would have said, had anyone called him -- or any of the air commandos in Burma for whom he was “operations officer” -- a warrior.  Though he’s been dead now for three decades, I don’t have a moment’s doubt that he would have thought it ridiculous. 

In World War I, America’s soldiers had been known as “doughboys.”  In World War II, they were regularly (and proudly) called “dogfaces” or G.I. (for “government issue”) Joes, and their citizen-soldier likenesses were reflected in the tough but bedraggled figures of Willy and Joe, Bill Mauldin’s much beloved wartime cartoon foot soldiers on the long slog to Berlin.

And that was fitting for a civilian military, a draft military.  It was down to earth.  It was how you described people who had left civilian life with every intention of returning to it as soon as humanly possible, who thought the military a grim necessity of a terrible moment in history and that war, a terrible but necessary way to go.  In those days, warriors would have been an alien term, the sort you associated with, say, Prussians.

My father volunteered just after the attack on Pearl Harbor and wasn’t demobilized until the war ended, but -- I remember it well in the years after -- while he took pride in his service, he maintained a typical and healthy American dislike (to put it politely) for what he called “the regular army” and George Washington would have called a “standing army.” 

He would have been amazed by the present American way of war and the propaganda universe we now live in when it comes to praising and elevating the U.S. military above the rest of society.  He would have found it inconceivable that a president’s wife would go on a popular TV show -- I’m talking about Michelle Obama on "Nashville" -- and mix it up with fictional characters to laud for the umpteenth time America’s warriors and their service to the nation.

In Vietnam, of course, the term still wasn’t warrior, it was “grunt.”  The elevation of the American soldier to the heavens of praise and bombast came significantly after the end of the citizen army, particularly with what retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore calls the new Fortress America mindset of the post-9/11 years and the ever more militarized world of constant war that went with it.

If only I could have picked up the phone, called my father, and heard the choice words he would have had for his newly elevated status as an American “warrior,” seven decades after Normandy.  But not being able to, on that D-Day anniversary I did the next best thing and called a 90-year-old friend, who was on a ship off one of those blood-soaked beaches as the invasion began. 

Thinking back those 70 years with a certain pride, he remembered that the thing the foot soldiers of World War II resented most was saluting or saying “sir” to officers.  No warriors they -- and no love for an eternal wartime either. 

Put another way, the farther we’ve come from our last great military victory, symbolized by the events of June 6, 1944, the more elevated the language for describing, or perhaps whitewashing, a new American way of war that, for pure failure, may have few matches. Tom

Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You -- He Already Has You
The Militarized Realities of Fortress America 

By William J. Astore

I spent four college years in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and then served 20 years in the U.S. Air Force.  In the military, especially in basic training, you have no privacy.  The government owns you.  You’re “government issue,” just another G.I., a number on a dogtag that has your blood type and religion in case you need a transfusion or last rites.  You get used to it.  That sacrifice of individual privacy and personal autonomy is the price you pay for joining the military.  Heck, I got a good career and a pension out of it, so don’t cry for me, America.

But this country has changed a lot since I joined ROTC in 1981, was fingerprinted, typed for blood, and otherwise poked and prodded. (I needed a medical waiver for myopia.) 

Nowadays, in Fortress America, every one of us is, in some sense, government issue in a surveillance state gone mad.

Unlike the recruiting poster of old, Uncle Sam doesn’t want you anymore -- he already has you.  You’ve been drafted into the American national security state.  That much is evident from Edward Snowden’s revelations. Your email?  It can be read.  Your phone calls?  Metadata about them is being gathered.  Your smartphone?  It’s a perfect tracking device if the government needs to find you.  Your computer?  Hackable and trackable.  Your server?  It’s at their service, not yours.

Many of the college students I’ve taught recently take such a loss of privacy for granted.  They have no idea what’s gone missing from their lives and so don’t value what they’ve lost or, if they fret about it at all, console themselves with magical thinking -- incantations like “I’ve done nothing wrong, so I’ve got nothing to hide.”  They have little sense of how capricious governments can be about the definition of “wrong.”

Consider us all recruits, more or less, in the new version of Fortress America, of an ever more militarized, securitized country.  Renting a movie?  Why not opt for the first Captain America and watch him vanquish the Nazis yet again, a reminder of the last war we truly won?  Did you head for a baseball park on Memorial Day?  What could be more American or more innocent?  So I hope you paid no attention to all those camouflaged caps and uniforms your favorite players were wearing in just another of an endless stream of tributes to our troops and veterans. 

Let’s hear no whining about militarized uniforms on America’s playing fields.  After all, don’t you know that America’s real pastime these last years has been war and lots of it?

Be a Good Trooper

Think of the irony.  The Vietnam War generated an unruly citizen’s army that reflected an unruly and increasingly rebellious citizenry.  That proved more than the U.S. military and our ruling elites could take.  So President Nixon ended the draft in 1973 and made America’s citizen-soldier ideal, an ideal that had persisted for two centuries, a thing of the past.  The “all-volunteer military,” the professionals, were recruited or otherwise enticed to do the job for us.  No muss, no fuss, and it’s been that way ever since.  Plenty of war, but no need to be a “warrior,” unless you sign on the dotted line.  It’s the new American way.
But it turned out that there was a fair amount of fine print in the agreement that freed Americans from those involuntary military obligations.  Part of the bargain was to “support the pros” (or rather “our troops”) unstintingly and the rest involved being pacified, keeping your peace, being a happy warrior in the new national security state that, particularly in the wake of 9/11, grew to enormous proportions on the taxpayer dollar.  Whether you like it or not, you’ve been drafted into that role, so join the line of recruits and take your proper place in the garrison state. 

If you’re bold, gaze out across the increasingly fortified and monitored borders we share with Canada and Mexico.  (Remember when you could cross those borders with no hassle, not even a passport or ID card?  I do.) 

Watch for those drones, home from the wars and already hovering in or soon to arrive in your local skies -- ostensibly to fight crime.  Pay due respect to your increasingly up-armored police forces with their automatic weapons, their special SWAT teams, and their converted MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles).  These vintage Iraqi Freedom vehicles are now military surplus given away or sold on the cheap to local police departments.  Be careful to observe their draconian orders for prison-like “lockdowns” of your neighborhood or city, essentially temporary declarations of martial law, all for your safety and security. 

Be a good trooper and do what you’re told.  Stay out of public areas when you’re ordered to do so.  Learn to salute smartly.  (It’s one of the first lessons I was taught as a military recruit.)  No, not that middle-finger salute, you aging hippie.  Render a proper one to those in authority.  You had best learn how.

Or perhaps you don’t even have to, since so much that we now do automatically is structured to render that salute for us.  Repeated singings of “God Bless America” at sporting events.  Repeated viewings of movies that glorify the military.  (Special Operations forces are a hot topic in American multiplexes these days from Act of Valor to Lone Survivor.)  Why not answer the call of duty by playing militarized video games like Call of Duty?  Indeed, when you do think of war, be sure to treat it as a sport, a movie, a game.

Surging in America 

I’ve been out of the military for nearly a decade, and yet I feel more militarized today than when I wore a uniform.  That feeling first came over me in 2007, during what was called the “Iraqi surge” -- the sending of another 30,000 U.S. troops into the quagmire that was our occupation of that country. It prompted my first article for TomDispatch.  I was appalled by the way our civilian commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, hid behind the beribboned chest of his appointed surge commander, General David Petraeus, to justify his administration’s devolving war of choice in Iraq.  It seemed like the eerie visual equivalent of turning traditional American military-civilian relationships upside down, of a president who had gone over to the military.  And it worked.  A cowed Congress meekly submitted to “King David” Petraeus and rushed to cheer his testimony in support of further American escalation in Iraq.

Since then, it’s become a sartorial necessity for our presidents to don military flight jackets whenever they address our “warfighters” as a sign both of their “support” and of the militarization of the imperial presidency.  (For comparison, try to imagine Matthew Brady taking a photo of “honest Abe” in the Civil War equivalent of a flight jacket!)  It is now de rigueur for presidents to praise American troops as “the finest military in world history” or, as President Obama typically said to NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview from Normandy last week, “the greatest military in the world.” 

Even more hyperbolically, these same troops are celebrated across the country in the most vocal way possible as hardened “warriors” and benevolent freedom-bringers, simultaneously the goodest and the baddest of anyone on the planet -- and all without including any of the ugly, as in the ugliness of war and killing.  Perhaps that explains why I’ve seen military recruitment vans (sporting video game consoles) at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  Given that military service is so beneficent, why not get the country’s 12-year-old prospects hopped up on the prospect of joining the ranks?

Too few Americans see any problems in any of this, which shouldn’t surprise us.  After all, they’re already recruits themselves.  And if the prospect of all this does appall you, you can’t even burn your draft card in protest, so better to salute smartly and obey.  A good conduct medal will undoubtedly be coming your way soon.

It wasn’t always so.  I remember walking the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, in my freshly pressed ROTC uniform in 1981.  It was just six years after the Vietnam War ended in defeat and antiwar movies like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now were still fresh in people’s minds.  (First Blood and the Rambo “stab-in-the-back” myth wouldn’t come along for another year.)  I was aware of people looking at me not with hostility, but with a certain indifference mixed occasionally with barely disguised disdain.  It bothered me slightly, but even then I knew that a healthy distrust of large standing militaries was in the American grain.

No longer.  Today, service members, when appearing in uniform, are universally applauded and repetitiously lauded as heroes.

I’m not saying we should treat our troops with disdain, but as our history has shown us, genuflecting before them is not a healthy sign of respect.  Consider it a sign as well that we really are all government issue now.

Shedding a Militarized Mindset

If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider an old military officer’s manual I still have in my possession.  It’s vintage 1950, approved by that great American, General George C. Marshall, Jr., the man most responsible for our country’s victory in World War II.  It began with this reminder to the newly commissioned officer: “[O]n becoming an officer a man does not renounce any part of his fundamental character as an American citizen.  He has simply signed on for the post-graduate course where one learns how to exercise authority in accordance with the spirit of liberty.”  That may not be an easy thing to do, but the manual’s aim was to highlight the salutary tension between military authority and personal liberty that was the essence of the old citizen’s army.

It also reminded new officers that they were trustees of America’s liberty, quoting an unnamed admiral’s words on the subject: “The American philosophy places the individual above the state.  It distrusts personal power and coercion.  It denies the existence of indispensable men.  It asserts the supremacy of principle.”

Those words were a sound antidote to government-issue authoritarianism and militarism -- and they still are.  Together we all need to do our bit, not as G.I. Joes and Janes, but as Citizen Joes and Janes, to put personal liberty and constitutional principles first.  In the spirit of Ronald Reagan, who told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this [Berlin] wall,” isn’t it time to begin to tear down the walls of Fortress America and shed our militarized mindsets?  Future generations of citizens will thank us, if we have the courage to do so.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, edits the blog The Contrary Perspective.

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Copyright 2014 William J. Astore