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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So, apparently, Obama gave a speech the other day about Afghanistan. Mind you, I haven’t watched a single Obama speech ever since the ’04 Democratic Convention keynote and the Inauguration. That was pretty much all I could stand; since then, about all I could handle was the occasional video clip on TV, or the transcripts posted on the Web. From all accounts, it was classic Obama, a rehash of the Iraq “withdrawal” announcement: out of all the clips and reports I saw, two “money quotes” really stuck in my craw, and one of them was that “the tide of war is receding” — and just in time for next year’s election. Who’da thunk it?

It’s reported that our Boy Emperor is bringing home the troops he sent when he first escalated the slaughter in Afghanistan, leaving 70,000 still there, plus leaving himself an out — of course! — allowing him to stick around if things aren’t working out for the Empire. All told, this “withdrawal” means a continuation of the war until at least 2014 — conveniently, a year into the incoming GOP administration, at which point the Liberals and Progressives will have miraculously rediscovered their anti-war voices and be cynically filling the streets again.

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Continue reading "The Tide of War" »

Sorry I’m bit late with this one; I’d originally planned to do this about a week or so ago, except the Bahrain Grand Prix story got really hot and shoved everything else out of the way.

Anyway… as you’ll recall, Obama got himself “elected” in ’08 by pandering to Liberals and Progressives with a lot of big talk about the “fat cats” in the banks and on Wall Street – even as the Democrats were beating out the GOP in donations from Wall Street. Then, as you’ll also recall, Obama spent the next two years alienating Progressives by pandering to the banks and Wall Street, and appeasing the rightists.

So, then, a week or so back, Obama called together a bunch of the aforementioned financial industry “fat cats” to spend some time shuffling for dollars for his re-election campaign. The banksters, needless to say, felt rather alienated by all his anti-bank and anti-Wall Street rhetoric he dished out while pandering to the Progressives and many ’08 donors were none too keen on the idea of supplying more cash for Obama’s ’12 campaign.

Oh, well, Mr. Obama… as they say, “that’s show biz”.

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Continue reading "Don’t Call Us – We’ll Call You" »

The weather was iffy all day, swinging back and forth from perfect to looking like a downpour from one minute to the next. Still, by the time showtime rolled around, it had finally settled down to something unseasonably comfortable, and the gathered crowd of DC Statehood activists and supporting citizens finally got down to celebrating Flag Day by showing off a wide variety of DC flag-based tattoos.

“In The Flesh”, photographed and edited by Mike Flugennock, 04:32

And now, to augment your Flag Day Experience, here’s a little trip to Song Poem Hell, with the perversely legendary Gary Roberts — in his own inimitably atonal fashion — crooning “Our Flag”:

Continue reading "DC Flag Day, In The Flesh!" »