A victory for the Libyan people? D’ah ha ha ha ha ha hah, nahh, I’m just givin’ y’all some shit. Of course not. Gadhafi is claiming that the US, NATO, and their proxy “rebel” armies in Libya are still in for a “long war” and I, for one, hope he’s right — not because I don’t think that Gadhafi is a rat bastard, but because it would mean that Obama and the Cruise Missile Liberals would finally get their very own “Mission Accomplished” albatross hung on them.

Maximilian C. Forte writes in CounterPunch:

Since Colonel Gaddafi has lost his military hold in the war against NATO and the insurgents/rebels/new regime, numerous talking heads have taken to celebrating this war as a “success”. They believe this is a “victory of the Libyan people” and that we should all be celebrating. Others proclaim victory for the “responsibility to protect,” for “humanitarian interventionism,” and condemn the “anti-imperialist left”. Some of those who claim to be “revolutionaries,” or believe they support the “Arab revolution,” somehow find it possible to sideline NATO’s role in the war, instead extolling the democratic virtues of the insurgents, glorifying their martyrdom, and magnifying their role until everything else is pushed from view. I wish to dissent from this circle of acclamation, and remind readers of the role of ideologically-motivated fabrications of “truth” that were used to justify, enable, enhance, and motivate the war against Libya—and to emphasize how damaging the practical effects of those myths have been to Libyans, and to all those who favoured peaceful, non-militarist solutions… >more here.

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Continue reading "Celebration" »

Here’s a fun game you can play while reading or watching the “news”: every time you see a report from Libya and hear the phrase “Libyan rebels”, insert the phrase “supported by US and NATO airstrikes” after it, to get a more accurate picture of what’s going on.

Then, when you get bored with that, ask yourself this question: why is the US so gung-ho to intervene in Libya while totally ignoring an equally vicious and horrific regime in Syria? Here’s a hint: it’s got three letters, it’s black and goopy, and there’s a whole goddamn’ lot of it under the ground in Libya… and it sure as hell isn’t freedom.

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Continue reading "Band Of Rebels" »

Come join the winner of the 2009 Nobel “Iron Chef” Prize on a culinary review of three years of the Hope’n’Change Administration. Bon Appetit!

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Assembly instructions:
1. Print two-sided on 11×17 “full-bleed” color printer.
2. Fold in thirds so that the panel with the old Metro car and the title “Chef Barack’s Famous Democratic Diner” shows as the front cover.
3. Et voila!

Continue reading "Chef Barack’s Democratic Diner" »

Yeah, uh huh… like in Vietnam. And Nicaragua. And Iraq.

This was my other favorite quote from Obama’s Afghanistan speech, a crass naked appeal to American conceit. Matthew Rothschild writes in The Progressive:

Our war president promised more war. While he trumpeted his big Afghanistan speech as the first step in ending that war, Barack Obama essentially told the American people that tens of thousands of our soldiers would still be fighting there for at least three more years.

A year from now, Obama said all the additional “surge” troops will be back home. But the U.S. will still have close to 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, twice the number that were there when Obama took office.

Only “by 2014,” he said, will the Afghan people “be responsible for their own security.”

And even then, Obama appears to have left himself an out. “We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we made,” he said. But what if those “gains” aren’t kept? Would he reverse course and keep more troops there…?

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Continue reading "Like Generations Before…" »