Daily Archives: February 9, 2012

Coffee Talk, Opinion/Editorial

“Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy”

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Quite an eye-catching headline, isn’t it? What is even more startling is who penned it. Are you sitting down? Okay. It was Glenn Greenwald, and this is a Salon headline. No, for real! This isn’t a joke from The Onion, or a pronouncement from the Heritage Foundation, or some other conservative news outlet. Nope, this is Glenn Greenwald, whose progressive bona fides are well in order.

WOW.

Now, why did Greenwald make such a pronouncement? Well, it is much the same what others of us have been yelling from the rooftops: why was it horrible when Bush did it, but awesome when Obama does it? That’s the bottom line, though. Glenn Greenwald is writing in response to a WaPo/ABC poll, and he fleshes it out more here:

[snip] Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.

Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it…

[...]

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.[snip[

It mystifies me as well. I know I have mentioned numerous times about my younger brother, a huge Obot, brushing off Obama’s vote for FISA after campaigning against it. My brother referred to it as “disappointing.” Uh huh, and somehow, all of these disappointments just got dismissed or ignored, while rallying to “Hope!” and “Change!” It really is astonishing.
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Coffee Talk

OBAMA’S GODFATHER~PART III: SHOCK DOCTRINE FOR DUMMIES~William Boe

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PART III:  SHOCK DOCTRINE FOR DUMMIES

In the Hindu trinity there is the god Brahma who is the Creator, the god Vishnu who is the Preserver and the god Rudra who is the destroyer of worlds.  Like Rudra, George Soros is The Destroyer of Worlds.

When the Soviet Union collapsed under a mountain of debt in the late 1980s, uncertainty ensued.  A scholar named Francis Fukuyama published a book called “The End of History”.  That book argued that ideological conflict was passé and the future belonged to markets.  That argument seemed naïve to me, given what we had witnessed in Iran at the beginning of that decade.  Nevertheless, the book was important for an entirely different reason, which I failed to appreciate at the time: fundamentally, it was a call to arms for the economic elites in the western world to abandon the old east-west paradigm and move aggressively toward a global economic model, which offered global capitalists lower costs of production and vast new markets which could be linked through supply chain strategies.

More recently, author Naomi Klein wrote a revealing book called “Shock Doctrine”.  This book describes in detail the principal vehicle used by the elites to impose the global model on targeted countries.  The first step is to create or exploit a crisis to advance an agenda which could not survive the democratic process in normal times. (Note: that is what Obama’s Chief of Staff Rham Emanuel meant when he said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”). The second step is to establish a new government in which multi-national corporations and political elites serve their own interests at the expense of the public.  (Note: the paradigmatic example of this is Chicago, and the Daley machine that gave us  Obama–as documented by the Chicago Tribune’s fine investigative reporter John Kass.)  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/15/politics .

Soros is no stranger to shock doctrine methods.  He introduced them first in Poland. Continue reading →