Hatred of Jews — It's Here, Real and as Dangerous as Ever

'Antisemitism is not just the Jewish community’s issue. It’s everybody’s'

Madison, Wisconsin — I was perusing an excellent new Substack website of a progressive, writing about the anniversary of the Iraq War invasion and lies.

Left a 'hello' comment for author from my wife and me, who had picked the gentleman up from the Dane County airport 20 years ago.

Then I was immediately trolled by this lunatic, one Clarence Wilhelm Spangle, writing in part: "Fuck you and your Jewish god. . . . The United States government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Israeli political Action Committee."

I had not been trolled like that in a while and not with this vile anti-Semitism.

I called a friend who has devoted the majority of his life fighting for civil liberties and against anti-Semitism, Mikey Weinstein, and received the following profile intel on Clarence Wilhelm Spangle:

First, the name ‘Nordic Pagan Solider” was not significant other than being connected to this Clarence Wilhelm Spangle. I found two other websites where this Clarence Spangle posts virulently anti-Semitic Hitler-loving garbage.  The first is Bitchute (a site similar to YouTube) and along with anti-Semitic videos such as "FUCK YOU AND YOUR JEWISH GOD RACE MIXING LOSERS," his about section contains the Nazi SS motto, “ϟϟ Meine Ehre heißt Treue ϟϟ”

 Ref: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/cwspangle/

From there, I found a website called Ancient Faces where Spangle posts pictures of Hitler and used the same Nazi SS motto. However, he also posted his interest in the surname Wilman and made a few posts regarding a real person named August E Wilman who died in Carmel, California in the early 2000s.  

Ref: https://www.ancientfaces.com/user/clarence-spangle/394802 and ref: https://www.spokeo.com/August-Wilman/California/Carmel/p40458225405

I’d speculate that he’s related to this August Wilman or a friend but with that nugget of real information he provided, I found a Clarence W Spangle living in Jacksonville, Florida.  Of most interest, this Charles Spangle also lived in Carmel, California from 2001-2012 just six miles away from where August Wilman lived. So almost certainly this Charence W Spangle living in Jacksonville, Florida is the one making these hate posts.

I’ve attached Spangle’s current address and phone information.   

The point is anti-Semitism is getting worse, and I urge folks to consider lending their voice against it.

It takes little imagination to contemplate nonsensical, incoherent myths, contrived races, demonized enemies of the people and lunatics in politics can explosively combine to catastrophic result.

If we could time-travel to 1930, and speculate on the rise of an anti-Semitic lunatic, we would likely postulate France or Russia.

In any event, post-World War II, we carry on an obligation to never forget and never let idiocy go unchallenged.

Lend your support to Stand Up to Jewish Hate.

Retweet:

Antisemitism is not just the Jewish community’s issue. It’s everybody’s. Retweet this video with #🟦 to show your support. #StandUpToJewishHate pic.twitter.com/fJrSRFtguW

— Stand Up to Jewish Hate (@StandUp2JewHate) March 27, 2023

My wife and I have always admired World War II veterans, though we know well U.S. work against anti-Semitism was less than perfect.

Still, we beat the Nazis, and their project to destroy the European Jews. 

Today and always, I salute fighters against Nazis and standing up to Jewish hate.

From Mikey Wienstein to Al Liethen, and millions more, thank you.

Wisconsin's Al Liethen - Stood up to anti-Semitism in WW II

Bush's Iraq War by the Numbers

Pres. George W. Bush in 2003 aboard the
USS Abraham Lincoln


What sick bunch of callow human beings inflicted upon the world this misery of the Iraq War? Lied to the troops and Marines of Operation Iraqi Freedom who swore the oath and committed their honor, to be betrayed by weak, miserable men and women? We know exactly whom these people are.

By Brad Friedman

War criminal - all

George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman predicted the War in Iraq would be a "cakewalk". As President Barack Obama announced today that all U.S. military troops would finally be leaving the "cakewalk" by year's end after 9 deadly years (and as Fox "News" was busy ignoring the historic announcement), ThinkProgress put together a few numbers from what they describe as "The World's Costliest Cakewalk"... [numbers below vastly understate the damage]:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

Unknown number of contractors working in support of U.S. mission injured

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

Zero weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

President Obama Has Ended the War in Iraq

President Barack Obama talks with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq
during a secure video teleconference in the Situation Room of the
White House, Oct. 21, 2011. Seated at the table, from left, are: Tony Blinken;
National Security Advisor to the Vice President;
National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Puneet Talwar,
Senior Director for Iraq, Iran and the Gulf States;
Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; and Chief of Staff
Bill Daley. Pictured onscreen are: at left, Prime Minister al-Maliki,
along with two aides; in center, Vice President Joe Biden;
at right, General Lloyd Austin, Commanding General of U.S. Forces
- Iraq and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey.
- Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

President Obama from the White House

Good evening,

I'm writing to tell you that all US troops will return home from Iraq by the end of December. After nearly nine years, the American war in Iraq will end. Our servicemen and women will be with their families for the holidays.

The war in Iraq came with tremendous cost. More than a million Americans served in Iraq, and nearly 4,500 gave their lives in service to the rest of us. Today, as always, we honor these patriots.

When I came into office, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end. As Commander in Chief, I ended our combat mission last year and pledged to keep our commitment to remove all our troops by the end of 2011. To date, we’ve removed more than 100,000 troops from Iraq.

This is a significant moment in our history. For more information, including video, please visit WhiteHouse.gov/BringingTroopsHome.

The end of the war in Iraq reflects a larger trend. The wars of the past decade are drawing to a close.

As we have removed troops from Iraq, we have refocused our fight against al Qaeda and secured major victories in taking out its leadership–including Osama bin Laden. And we’ve begun a transition in Afghanistan.

On the first day of my Administration, roughly 180,000 troops were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of this year that number will be cut in half, and we’ll continue to draw it down.

As we welcome home our newest veterans, we’ll enlist their talents in meeting our greatest challenges as a nation—restoring our economic strength at home. Because after a decade of war, the nation that we need to build is our own.

Today the United States moves forward, from a position of strength.

Thank you,

Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains; War Is Only the First Cycle of Violence

Most policymakers turn a blind eye, but social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families -- effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives. They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.

By JAMES DAO and CATRIN EINHORN in the NYT

WAUTOMA, Wis. — Life changed for Shawn Eisch with a phone call last January. His youngest brother, Brian, a soldier and single father, had just received orders to deploy from Fort Drum, N.Y., to Afghanistan and was mulling who might take his two boys for a year. Shawn volunteered.

So began a season of adjustments as the boys came to live in their uncle’s home here. Joey, the 8-year-old, got into fistfights at his new school. His 12-year-old brother, Isaac, rebelled against their uncle’s rules. And Shawn’s three children quietly resented sharing a bedroom, the family computer and, most of all, their parents’ attention with their younger cousins.

The once comfortable Eisch farmhouse suddenly felt crowded.

“It was a lot more traumatic than I ever pictured it, for them,” Shawn, 44, said. “And it was for me, too.”

The work of war is very much a family affair. Nearly 6 in 10 of the troops deployed today are married, and just under half have children. Those families — more than a million of them since 2001 — have borne the brunt of the psychological and emotional strain of deployments.

Siblings and grandparents have become surrogate parents. Spouses have struggled with loneliness and the stress of single parenting. Children have felt confused and abandoned during the long separations. All have felt anxieties about the distant dangers of war.

Christina Narewski, 26, thought her husband’s second deployment might be easier for her than his first. But she awoke one night this summer feeling so anxious about his absence that she thought she was having a heart attack and called an ambulance. And she still jumps when the doorbell rings, fearing it will be officers bearing unwanted news.

“It sucks that you’re afraid to answer your door,” she said.

Social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families -- effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives. They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.

And a paper published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2009 found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in civilian families. The longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the researchers found, the more likely their children were to have had difficulties in school and at home.

But those studies do not describe the myriad ways, often imperceptible to outsiders, in which families cope with deployments every day.

For Ms. Narewski, a mother of three, it has meant taking a grocery store job to distract her from thinking about her husband, a staff sergeant with the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, now in northern Afghanistan.

For Tim Sullivan, it has meant learning how to potty train, braid hair and fix dinner for his two young children while his wife, a sergeant in a support battalion to the 1-87, is deployed.

For young Joey Eisch, it meant crying himself to sleep for days after his father, a platoon sergeant with the battalion, left last spring. His older brother, Isaac, calm on the outside, was nervous on the inside.

“It’s pretty hard worrying if he’ll come back safe,” Isaac said. “I think about it like 10 or more times a day.”

Joining the Army Life

Soon after Christina and Francisco Narewski married in 2004, he applied for a job with the local sheriff’s office in Salinas, Calif. But he got tired of waiting and, after talking things over with Christina, enlisted in the Army instead.

“We both signed up for it,” Ms. Narewski said. “We knew deployments were going to come.”

That day arrived in the fall of 2007, when their third child was just 5 months old. Ms. Narewski missed Francisco dearly and sometimes cried just hearing his voice when he called from Iraq. But when he returned home in October 2008, it took them weeks to feel comfortable together again, she recalled.

“It’s almost like you’ve forgotten how to be with each other,” she said. “He’s been living in his spot for 15 months. Me and the kids have our own routine. It’s hard to get back to, ‘Oh, you’re home.’ ”

Last April, he left again, this time to Afghanistan. Ms. Narewski, who lives in Watertown, N.Y., thought she was prepared. Her mother came to live with them. She signed up for exercise classes to fill the hours. She and Francisco bought BlackBerrys with instant messaging service so they could communicate daily. And yet.

“I’ve never missed him as much as I do right now,” she said recently. “It doesn’t feel like we’re moving. It’s like you’re in a dream and you’re trying to get something and you can’t get it.”

Not all the spouses back home are women. Tim Sullivan’s days have revolved almost entirely around his two children, Austin, 4, and Leah, 2, since his wife, Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, deployed to Afghanistan in March.

He rises each weekday at 5:30 a.m. to dress and feed them before shuttling them to day care. Evenings are the reverse, usually ending with him dozing off in front of the television at their rented ranch-style house in Fayetteville, N.C.

He has moved twice and changed jobs three times in recent years to accommodate his wife’s military career. But he does not mind being home with the children, he says, because his father was not, having left the family when Mr. Sullivan was young.

“I’m not going to put my kids through that,” said Mr. Sullivan, 35, who handles child support cases for the county. “I’m going to be there.”

He worries about lost intimacy with his wife, saying that they have had a number of arguments by phone, usually about bill paying or child rearing. “She tells me: ‘Tim, you can’t just be Daddy, the hard person. You have to be Mommy, too,’” he said. “I tell her it’s not that easy.”

Yet he says that if she stays in the Army — as she has said she wants to do — he is prepared to move again or even endure another deployment. “I love her,” he said. “I’m already signed up. I made a decision to join the life that goes with that.”

Young Nomads

Isaac and Joey Eisch have also had to adjust to their father’s nomadic life. “I don’t try to get too attached to my friends because I move around a lot,” said Isaac, who has lived in five states and Germany with his father. (Joey has lived in three states.) “When I leave, it’s like, hard.”

When Sergeant Eisch got divorced in 2004, he took Isaac to an Army post in Germany while Joey stayed with his mother in Wisconsin. Soon after returning to the States in 2007, the sergeant became worried that his ex-wife was neglecting Joey. He petitioned family court for full custody of both boys and won.

In 2009, he transferred to Fort Drum and took the boys with him. Within months, he received orders for Afghanistan.

After nearly 17 years in the Army with no combat deployments, Sergeant Eisch was determined to go to war. The boys, he felt, were old enough to handle his leaving. Little did he know how hard it would be.

When Shawn put the boys in his truck at Fort Drum to take them to Wautoma, a two-stoplight town in central Wisconsin, Isaac clawed at the rear window “like a caged animal,” Sergeant Eisch said. He still tears up at the recollection.

“I question myself every day if I’m doing the right thing for my kids,” he said. “I’m trying to do my duty to my country and deploy, and do what Uncle Sam asks me to do. But what’s everybody asking my boys to do?”

Within a few weeks of arriving at his uncle’s home, Joey beat up a boy so badly that the school summoned the police. It was not the last time Shawn and his wife, Lisa, would be summoned to the principal’s office.

The boys were in pain, Shawn realized. “There was a lot more emotion,” he said, “than Lisa and I ever expected.”

Shawn, a state water conservation officer, decided he needed to set strict rules for homework and good behavior. Violations led to chores, typically stacking wood. But there were carrots, too: for Joey, promises of going to Build-a-Bear if he obeyed his teachers; for Isaac, going hunting with his uncle was the prize. Gradually, the calls from the principal declined, though they have not ended.

In September, Sergeant Eisch returned for midtour leave and the homecoming was as joyful as his departure had been wrenching. Father and sons spent the first nights in hotels, visited an amusement park, went fishing and traveled to New York City, where they saw Times Square and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

But the two weeks were over in what seemed like hours. In his final days, Sergeant Eisch had prepped the boys for his departure, but that did not make it any easier.

“Why can’t we just, like, end the war?” Isaac asked at one point.

As they waited at the airport, father and sons clung to each other. “I’m going to have to drink like a gallon of water to replenish these tears,” the sergeant said. “Be safe,” Isaac implored him over and over.

Sergeant Eisch said he would, and then was gone.

Despite his worries, Isaac tried to reassure himself. “He’s halfway through, and he’s going to make it,” he said. “With all that training he’s probably not going to get shot. He knows if there’s a red dot on his chest, run. Not toward the enemy. Run, and shoot.”

But his father did not run.

‘Dad’ Comes Home

Just weeks after returning to Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch, the senior noncommissioned officer for a reconnaissance and sniper platoon, was involved with Afghan police officers in a major offensive into a Taliban stronghold south of Kunduz city.

While directing fire from his armored truck, Sergeant Eisch saw a rocket-propelled grenade explode among a group of police officers standing in a field. The Afghans scattered, leaving behind a man writhing in pain. Sergeant Eisch ordered his medic to move their truck alongside the officer to shield him from gunfire. Then Sergeant Eisch got out.

“I just reacted,” he recalled. “I seen a guy hurt and nobody was helping him, so I went out there.”

The police officer was bleeding from several gaping wounds and seemed to have lost an eye. Sergeant Eisch started applying tourniquets when he heard the snap of bullets and felt “a chainsaw ripping through my legs.” He had been hit by machine gun fire, twice in the left leg, once in the right.

He crawled back into his truck and helped tighten tourniquets on his own legs. He was evacuated by helicopter and taken to a military hospital where, in a morphine daze, he called Shawn.

“Are you sitting down?” Brian asked woozily. “I’ve been shot.”

Shawn hung up and went into a quiet panic. He could not tell how badly Brian had been wounded. Would he lose his leg? He called the school and asked them to shield the boys from the news until he could get there.

Outside school, Shawn told Isaac, Joey and his 12-year-old daughter, Anna, about Brian’s injury. Only Isaac stayed relatively calm.

But later, Shawn found Isaac in his bedroom weeping quietly while looking at a photograph showing his father outside his tent, holding a rifle. Shawn helped him turn the photograph into a PowerPoint presentation titled, “I Love You Dad!”

For Shawn, a gentle and reserved man, his brother’s injury brought six months of family turmoil to a new level. Sensing his distress, Lisa urged him to go hunting, a favorite pastime. So he grabbed his bow and went to a wooded ridge on his 40 acres of property.

To his amazement, an eight-point buck wandered by. Shawn hit the deer, the largest he had ever killed with a bow. It seemed a good omen.

A few days later, Shawn flew with the boys, his father and Brian’s twin sister, Brenda, to Washington to visit the sergeant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. At the entrance, they saw men in wheelchairs with no arms and no legs. Others were burned or missing eyes. Shawn feared what the boys would see inside Brian’s room.

But Brian, giddy from painkillers, was his cheerful self. His right leg seemed almost normal. His left leg, swollen and stapled together, looked terrible. But it was a real leg, and it was still attached to him. The boys felt relieved.

Within days, Brian was wheeling himself around the hospital and cracking jokes with nurses, a green-and-yellow Green Bay Packers cap on his head. While Joey lost himself in coloring books and television, Isaac attended to his father’s every need.

“I feel a little more grown up,” Isaac said. “I feel a lot more attached to him than I was when he left.”

One doctor told Brian that he would never be able to carry a rucksack or run again because of nerve damage in his left leg. Someone even asked him if he wanted the leg amputated, since he would certainly be able to run with a prosthetic. Brian refused, and vowed to prove the doctor wrong. By December, he was walking with a cane and driving again.

For Shawn, too, the future had become murkier. It might be many weeks before Brian could reclaim his sons. But he also knew how glad the boys were to have their father back in one piece.

“Brian came home,” Shawn said one evening after visiting his brother in the hospital. “He didn’t come home like we hoped he would come home, but he came home.”

“Every single day I think about all those families and all those kids that are not going to have a dad come home from Afghanistan,” he said. “That hurts more than watching my brother try to take a step because I know my brother will take a step and I know he’s going to walk down the dock and get in his bass boat someday.”

It was late, and he had to get the boys up the next morning to visit their father at the hospital again. The holidays were fast approaching and the snow would soon be arriving in Wisconsin. Shawn wondered whether he could get Isaac out hunting before the season ended.

Yeah, he thought. He probably could.

Normandy - 65 Years

Update: Obama marks D-Day's 65th anniversary at Omaha Beach, France. "Don't forget ... ."

Today is June 6.

My girlfriend still talks about her late father and his service in World War II to defeat Nazis and fascists.

And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead and had me), we grew up hearing of the society-wide, shared sacrifice.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like when they were protected by the Bush administration.

Not like the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Lieberman-Neocon crowd doing their big con as 1o,000s come home dead, wounded, traumatized - different people - all for the lies of the policymakers; and Lieberman crowing for years that Iraq is "...the test of our generation." What a lying coward.

I post some World War II artifacts above that my girlfriend and her family treasure. Somehow, looking at them brings forth the truth of the World War II sacrifice and honor by mostly scared kids, in opposition to the imbecility and cowardice of the crowd of warmakers and liars, mostly but not exclusively in the Republican Party.

No one had the swagger and casualness of George W. Bush when it came time to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of real people and their loved ones.

'Baghdad will burn' Maliki told Obama of Torture Photos Release

Nancy A. Youssef from McClatchy Newspapers has a blockbuster that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki told President Obama that releasing the detainee torture photos from Iraq and Afghanistan would be explosive and that "Baghdad will burn" if the photos became public—a warning that resulted in Obama reversing his previous decision to release the photos.

War and torture do tend to piss off people.

On Monday, the ACLU and numerous human rights and peace organization released a letter calling for making the photos public with a clear statement that the U.S. repudiates such "barbaric behavior and is committed to dismantling the culture that allowed it to occur."
---
The full text of the letter to President Obama is below.

June 1, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

We write to express our profound disappointment with your decision on May 13 to block the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees by U.S. personnel overseas. We urge you to reconsider that misguided decision and to renew your commitment to our nation's most fundamental principles.

On your first full day in office, you eloquently proclaimed your administration's commitment to the principle of open government. You said: "A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency." That is exactly right. The hallmark of an open society is that we do not conceal information that reflects poorly on us - we expose it to the light of day, so that wrongdoers can be held accountable and future abuses prevented.

These photographs will no doubt be disturbing, as they should be. And we understand your concern about reaction to them overseas. But suppressing information to prevent public anger is inconsistent with democratic principles. The Pentagon should release the photos while reaffirming to the world that the U.S. repudiates such barbaric behavior and is committed to dismantling the culture that allowed it to occur. In the end, full disclosure of the crimes committed by our government will make us all safer.

The last eight years have demonstrated all too painfully that excessive secrecy creates a fertile environment for grave abuses. Those abuses have tarnished our nation's reputation and damaged its security. We will restore our standing as a leader on human rights not by hiding images of our failures, but by demonstrating that those failures will not go unpunished.

As you yourself have stated, 'the Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.' Suppressing photographs of abuse places your administration on the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of history. We hope you will reconsider your decision.

Sincerely,

Alliance for Justice
American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law
Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
CREDO Mobile
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Feminists for Free Expression Government Accountability Project
Human Rights Watch
International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (JALSA)
Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School
National Security Archive
OMB Watch
OpenTheGovernment.org
PEN American Center
Physicians for Human Rights
Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG)
Reporters Without Borders
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society
Veterans for Common Sense
Veterans For Peace

Obama and Trust

Update: What Are We Fighting For? (Rick Reyes)

It really would not take much for President Obama to renounce and halt torture and two American wars of aggression while he's at it.

That's actually why a lot of people put him into office.

Obama is breaking a trust right now for what he stands for, for what we stand for. Will he continue?

From Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional Americans:

Occasionally the conflict between ‘what we stand for’ and ‘what we do’ has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a ‘transcendent purpose’: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since ‘the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.’ But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that ‘transcendent purpose.’

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not ‘confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.’ Reality is the unachieved ‘national purpose’ revealed by ‘the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.’ What actually happened was merely the ‘abuse of reality.’

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the U.S. is ‘just one great, but imperfect, country among others.’ Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson's failure to understand that ‘America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward.’ The American idea is revealed in the country's birth as a ‘city on a hill,’ an ‘inspirational notion’ that resides ‘deep in the American psyche,’ and by ‘the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise’ demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to ‘the distortions of the American idea,’ ‘the abuse of reality.’ ...

‘Come Over and Help Us’

The inspirational phrase ‘city on a hill’ was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation ‘ordained by God.’ One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words ‘Come over and help us.’ The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of ‘the idea of America,’ from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a ‘shining city on the hill,’ while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the ‘humanitarian intervention’ led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described ‘the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union’ by means ‘more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.’

Islam Knows War Is Depraved

Update: Greenwald: We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment:

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to 'look to the future.'

We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions 'inflame anti-American sentiment' is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would 'inflame anti-American sentiment.' It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

---
Do not look at the pictures below - they are disgusting and repulsive to any civilized human being. [ I took them down, they make me feel sick. AfterDowningStreet keeps them to remind people that war is not a video game.]

But they make a point: That War, is awful and depraved.

Understand that President Obama's sub-moronic statement - "(T)he most direct consequence of releasing (the Abu Ghraib photos), I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger" - is ludicrous in the face of the 1,000,000s killed, wounded and traumatized for life in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Who wrote that for Obama?

Put aside the anti-democratic nature of secrecy and domestic government censorship for a moment, the families of the people we killed would gladly be tortured if they could bring back their children, their brothers, their fathers. Hey, these guys are actual human beings.

To reduce it to political terms President Obama, think of war as a bad PR strategy, a rude thing to do to your fellow human beings in other countries and something that inflames anti-American opinion. War supports the message that we don't like you.

What the hell do you think war does for anti-American opinion?

VA Funding Heads in Right Direction

The wars, the economy, the hoped-for restoration of democratic principles to government, when this Democratic Congress and presidency are over, among many Americans this time will be remembered for a measure of respect given back to our veterans.

A crusial first step has been taken. From Rick Maze at the Army Times "VA advance funding one step closer to reality":

There is good news for military and veterans’ organizations in the 2010 budget agreement reached Monday night by House and Senate negotiators.

The budget, which includes $606 billion for the Defense Department and $106.5 billion for the Veterans Affairs Department next year, also creates a window of opportunity for passage of some high-priority issues this year.

For example, the agreement opens the door for the top priority of veterans’ organizations, providing money for veterans’ health care one year in advance. The key language, in this case, is a provision preventing a point of order being raised against legislation to provide a 2011 VA health funding bill this year.

BBC: Shoe-throwing Reporter's Brother Says He Has Been Severely Injured

We savaged a country; perhaps it's fitting that now Iraq savages a protester as we watch.

Public decency in Iraq

Illegally invading Iraq didn't work wonderfully to create an authoritarian client oil state, nor did it work out so very well to make a society recognizing human rights.

A million dead, millions displaced from their homes, millions traumatized, our own military reeling, 10,000s of young men and women injured and traumatized for life, and on and on.

Here's a gem from this morning emblematic of how wonderful Iraq is now:

A freelance journalist imprisoned in northern Iraq for violating a public decency law by writing a story about homosexuality has been pardoned and released, the writer and officials said Wednesday.

Public decency.

That's in the liberal, semi-autonomous part of Iraq. These guys make the Mormons and the religious right look like civil libertarians.

U.S. Interrogator Speaks out for Human Rights

Among the many things we won't miss from the Bush administration: Torture.

From this morning's Post:

These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. ...

It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Iraq Does Not Want US in Their Country

Al-Maliki: May Ask US Troops to Leave; Al-Sadr Forms Special Groups to Fight Occupation

It's like they don't want us there. Can we leave, now?

No WMD.

No Saddam.

No 911 conspirators.

Well, let's throw in a few $trillion more, sacrifice some more troops, and then maybe they'll like us this time.

McCain Is a Fool

Asked about American troops remaining in Iraq for decades, Senator John McCain said, "No, but that's not too important. What's important is casualties in Iraq."

Right, so it's not important that we walk across highways at rush hour either, just that we don't sustain casualties.

We are paying 10s of millions of dollars to former "terrorist" Sunnis not to attack us, millions more to prop up a Shiite government (adding up to about $12 billion/month), among other expenditures, while condemning the most popular movement in Iraq because they, like most Iraqis, want us out.

One has to ask: How seriously dumb is John McCain?

The invasion was illegal, though the resulting occupation ironically has the patina of a UN mandate, though the Bush dreams of a client oil state are gone.

Twelve billion a month? I wonder if families in the United States have any use for that money. How about our veterans sent to war on the basis of lies?

War and Its Human Costs

Update: The Suffering of Soldiers -

War has its costs, no matter how skillfully and cravenly Bush and his regime try to hide them.

Thanks to Vets for Common Sense. Also, please see its link to the editorial: New Front in Republican War on Voting: Disabled American Veterans via The Brad Blog.

In the face of what has been given by so many, it's worth noting some leading chickenhawks via SourceWatch: "Chickenhawks"

Notable Chickenhawks [too many to list, so here's the biggest of all]:
Rush Limbaugh
Bill O'Reilly

Rev. John Hagee Is a Bigoted Whack Whose Endorsement McCain Sought and Received

How can a complete whack like the Rev. John Hagee whose endorsement of and political relationship with John McCain are a matter of public record not dominate the airwaves?

The apocalyptic-minded and anti-Catholic Rev. John Hagee was pursued by John McCain, and Hagee ultimately endorsed McCain in late February when they appeared together in San Antonio. (picture at right)

Hagee is a bigoted nut, but also a major Republican political player whose specific foreign policy prescriptions are seen by him as preparing the way for the Second Coming, and are identical to the controversial policy positions taken by McCain on Iran and Iraq, now.

Turns out that Hagee, of the let’s-bomb-Iran corner of the rightwing, is also a prominent signer of the Forgotten American Coalition's statement proclaiming that we need to stay in Iraq and that the “… Iraq War must be seen in the broader context of Islamo-fascism's war on America and Western Civilization. It is one front in a global conflict fought from Europe and the Middle East to Africa, the Balkans, the Indian Subcontinent and, finally, to the streets of our cities. ...”

If those words sound familiar, it’s because McCain had been repeating them in substance in his stump speech for months.

What has not been repeated for months is Hagee's venom coming from the Founder and National Chairman of the religious right's Christians United for Israel.

As Frank Rich writes this morning of Hagee:

Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is 'the Great Whore,' Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking 'the blood of the Jewish people.' That’s because the Great Whore represents 'the Roman Church,' which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Have a look at this video and you'll get the picture.

Religious Right Figures Signing Pro-war Statement IDed by ADL as Assaulting Tolerance and Pluralism; Now Courted by McCain

As John McCain moves to gain the halting support of religious right leaders, it's worth noting again who these people are, their neocon foreign policy prescriptions regarding Iraq, Iran and the Middle East, and their emphasis on Islamofascism, echoed by McCain.

Below is an updated piece on major religious right figures signing an anti-Iraqi withdrawal statement last year, who were identified by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as extremists assaulting tolerance and pluralism in America.

by Michael Leon at MAL Contends

Madison, Wisconsin — Several major American religious right figures signing an anti-Iraqi withdrawal statement were previously identified by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as extremists assaulting tolerance and pluralism in America.

A group of 44 right-wing, extremist American leaders had released a Declaration last fall urging the continuation of American policy in Iraq and warning of catastrophic consequences if America withdrawals from Iraq.

The unique Forgotten American Coalition is composed of both Anti-Semitic and Christians-for-a-militaristic-Israel groups, all of whom lean to the extreme right and expose authoritarian, militarist ideologies.

Several individuals signing the document were blasted in the ADL's 1994 publication, "The Religious Right: An Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America," (cover pictured above) warning that "an exclusionist religious movement in this country has attempted to restore what it perceives as the ruins of a Christian nation by more closely seeking to unite its version of Christianity with state power."

Among the individuals who have espoused theologies using state power to attack pluralism in America (identified in the ADL's The Religious Right publication) and who signed the anti-Iraq Withdrawal statement: include: Lou Sheldon (Traditional Values Coalition), Gary Bauer (Chairman, Forgotten American Coalition), Don Wildmon (American Family Association), Pat Robertson (the 700 Club), Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America), and Paul Weyrich (Free Congress Foundation).

The groups form the corp of the religious right in America, and a pillar of the contemporary Republican political coalition.

Their anti-withdrawal statement echos Bush administration talking points on Iraq, with echoes now of warnings of strikes against Iran, and thus far implicit advocacy of the campaign for president of Senator John McCain, as McCain stakes out neocon position on the Middle East.

The Forgotten American Coalition's statement reads in part:

As leaders of the conservative movement and concerned citizens, the undersigned wish to make our fellow Americans aware of the tragic consequences of a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. ...

The Iraq War must be seen in the broader context of Islamo-fascism's war on America and Western Civilization. It is one front in a global conflict fought from Europe and the Middle East to Africa, the Balkans, the Indian Subcontinent and, finally, to the streets of our cities. ...

9/11 was in part precipitated by the perception of American weakness and lack of determination. An Iraq withdrawal before our mission is accomplished will convince the terrorists and their state-sponsors that we indeed are the proverbial paper tiger.

Signed,

Gary Bauer (Chairman, Forgotten American Coalition)
Joe Barrek
Chris Carmouche (GrassTopsUSA.com)
Don Feder (Don Feder Associates)
Janet Folger (Faith2Action)
Richard Ford (Heritage Alliance PAC)
Rick Scarborough (Vision America)
Mike Valerio
Paul Weyrich (Free Congress Foundation)
Don Wildmon (American Family Association)
(The foregoing all are members of the Forgotten American Coalition Steering Committee)
Daniel Pipes (Middle East Forum)
Pat Robertson ("700 Club")
Phillip Jauregui (Judicial Action Group)
Phil Burress (Citizens for Community Values)
William J. Federer (AmeriSearch)
Wendy Wright (Concerned Women for America)
Dr. Janice Crouse (Beverly LaHaye Institute)
Dr. Jack Wheeler (Freedom Research Foundation)
Rabbi Daniel Lapin (Toward Tradition)
Frank Gaffney (Center for Security Policy)
Herb Zweibon (Americans for a Safe Israel)
Lou Sheldon (Traditional Values Coalition)
Mona Charen (syndicated columnist)
Morton Blackwell (Conservative Leadership PAC)
Gary Cass (Christian Anti-Defamation Commission)
Pastor John Hagee (Citizens United for Israel)
Larry Cirignano (Catholic activist)
Star Parker (Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education)
Clifford May (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies)
Jim Laffejy (Christian Seniors Association)
Michael Heath (Christian Civic League of Maine)
Ted Baehr (MovieGuide.org)
Mathew Staver (Liberty Counsel)
Colin Hanna (Let Freedom Ring)
Craig Shirley (Shirley And Bannister Public Affairs)
Ron Wexler (Ten Commandments Commission)
Foster Friess (Friess Associates Inc.)
Tim LaHaye (minister and author)
Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America)
Dr. Rod Majin (The Vanguard.Org)
Melanie Morgan (MoveAmericaForward.org)
Elaine Donnelly (Center for Military Readiness)
Ron Robinson (Young America's Foundation)
Flagg Youngblood (Young America's Foundation)

###

The Iraq Lie

via mal contends

Comes up every once in a while. My girlfriend so proud of her dad talking about what she knew of her late father's service in World War II to defeat some pig NAZIs and fascists.

And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead to have me), we hear of the society-wide, shared sacrifice.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like today when they are protected by the Bush DOJ.

It's not like the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Lieberman-Neocon crowd doing their big con as 1o,000s come home dead, wounded, traumatized - different people, all for the lies of the policymakers; and Lieberman has the gall to crow for years that Iraq is "...the test of our generation." What a lying coward.

Makes one pretty sick.

I post some World War II artifacts above that my girlfriend and her family treasure. Somehow, looking at them brings forth the truth of the World War II sacrifice and honor by mostly scared kids, in opposition to the imbecility and cowardice of the crowd of Bush policymakers that we have today.

No one had the swagger and casualness of George W. Bush when it came time to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of real people and their loved ones.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Ending the Iraq War

The never-ending but always changing reasons offered by the administration and its political allies why we need to continue the occupation of Iraq are easily dismissed by any serious, honest analysis.

Zbigniew Brzezinski offers a straight-forward analysis in the Washington Post.

The case for U.S. disengagement from combat is compelling in its own right. But it must be matched by a comprehensive political and diplomatic effort to mitigate the destabilizing regional consequences of a war that the outgoing Bush administration started deliberately, justified demagogically and waged badly. ...

Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush's obsessions with the removal of Saddam Hussein were worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars -- not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States' world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing -- the answer would have been an unequivocal "no."

Turning the Corner in Iraq

Iraq still has many corners.

Rightwing Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just said on Face the Nation that we have "turned a corner" in Iraq, an ridiculous assertion that goes unchallenged by the young Bob Schieffer clone masquerading as a journalist this morning.

Those not vested in the lie that is the Iraq War know fully well that administration liars have been saying this for years now.

Hundreds of examples of corner-turning, turning-point, real-progress, yada yada lies can be listed from the inception of this imbecilic war, but these below ought to suffice:

- Turning the Corner in Iraq, Democrats are ignoring real progress (National Review Online, (April 13, 2007)

From May 1, 2006, ThinkProgress:

President Bush today called the formation of a new Iraqi government "a turning point" after hearing from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld about their weekend meeting with that country’s prime minister designate. (NYT, Bush Hails a 'Turning Point' in Iraq, May 1, 2006)

The 2004 transfer of sovereignty:

BUSH: A turning point will come in less than two weeks. On June the 30th, full sovereignty will be transferred to the interim government. The Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist, an American embassy will open in the capital of a free Iraq. [6/18/04]

The January 2005 Iraq election:

BUSH: Tomorrow the world will witness a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom, and a crucial advance in the war on terror. The Iraqi people will make their way to polling centers across their nation. [1/29/05]

MCCLELLAN: The election is a victory for the Iraqi people. It’s a significant step forward for freedom and it is a defeat for the terrorists and their ideology. It marks a turning point in Iraq’s history and a great advance toward a brighter future for all Iraqis, one that stands in stark contrast to the brutality and oppression of the past. [1/31/05]

CHENEY: The basic point, and one I’ve made already that I believe that the elections were the turning point. And we had that election in January — first free election in Iraq in decades. [12/18/05]

All of 2005:

BUSH: There’s still a lot of difficult work to be done in Iraq, but thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East, and the history of freedom. [12/12/05]

CHENEY: I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I’ll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was, in fact, a turning point; that putting in place a democratic government in Iraq was the - sort of the cornerstone, if you will, of victory against the insurgents. [2/7/06]

Last year about this time, As Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) said, “When you’ve ‘turned the corner’ in Iraq more times than Danica Patrick at the Indy 500, it means you are going in circles.”