Deep Blade Journal

This just cannot be!? Can it? Not my country! Sadly, yes

In a dispatch quoted below, an AP photographer describes a harrowing journey fleeing American wrath against the city of Fallujah in Iraq.

“I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.”

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he “helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands.”

“I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.”

Somehow this evokes scenes of the worst totalitarian discipline against people trying to flee communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War. How can they call it freedom?

The embeds tell the attacker’s story

And that story spells s – u – c – c – e – s – s.

My evaluation is that the military and its embeds are not in fact telling the whole story. Click that photo above for a whole lot more. This is a bloody mess. Bodies are strewn everywhere. The hospitals are full of “propaganda”.

See also: As’ad AbuKhalil’s Angry Arab News Service.

This is beyond the pale. John Pilger is right — 911, the US elections, and now Fallujah demonstrate a media-driven normaliztion of the unthinkable. Please see medialens.org for extraordinary additional details about the official and corporate-media distortions Pilger cites, which he says serve to make all this unthinkable killing thinkable. Sadly, I must agree with Pilger.

We must increase the protest

US bombing of villages in SE Asia, c. 1970

Update note 7/17/2005: The image originally posted here was being linked to a vile anti-Muslim post on a bulletin board, so I have taken it down.
US bombing of Fallujah, Iraq, November 2004

The spring of 1970 was formative for me. At our high school in Minnesota, a large portion of the student body defied an order from the school administrators and walked out of school in protest of the invasion of Cambodia and the killings of student protesters in Ohio and Mississippi.

Today the foreign outrages being committed in the name of the United States of America are beginning to look an awful lot like those committed during the dark days of Spring 1970.

Back in those very different times, newspaper columnist Pete Hamill, then of the old New York Post, wrote:

There are four dead Americans on the campus of Kent State University — gunned down by other Americans. Tear gas seeps through the air of a half-dozen other campuses. Mass rallies are building….

From Indochina we hear news as we have for so long from Peter Arnett of the Associated Press. The forces of what is laughingly called “the Free World” are moving into Cambodia — burning and shooting and destroying.

Kids from Iowa are asked to distinguish between Cambodians and Vietnamese. Artillery is fired at moving human beings. The B-52s fly from our privileged sanctuaries in Thailand to churn up the Earth. Here we come, Cambodia, stick with us and let us give you freedom — at 17 rounds a second.

Sound familiar? In Fallujah, Fall 2004, US military theory is the opposite, yet exactly the same as it was in 1970. Instead of driving civilians into urban areas in order to depopulate the countryside, Fallujah — a major city the size of Saint Paul, Minnesota — has been depopulated in order to expose the resistance within. But thousands of innocent civilians are still there. And many tens of thousands among those who left are now refugees. This adds up to a colossal humanitarian crisis — “Catastrophic Conditions”, according to Aljazeera.

A report in today’s Observer further lays out the madness, stating that “Civilians are paying the price in Falluja”:

With [the bitter urban war] has come the awful realities for civilians. ‘Anyone who gets injured is likely to die, because there’s no medicine and they can’t get to doctors,’ said Abdul-Hameed Salim, a volunteer with the Iraqi Red Crescent. ‘There are snipers everywhere. Go outside and you’re going to get shot.’

Rasoul Ibrahim, who fled Falluja on foot with his wife and three children on Thursday morning, said families left in the city were in desperate need. Doctors at Falluja’s hospital said there had been an increase in typhoid cases. ‘There’s no water. People are drinking dirty water. Children are dying,’ Ibrahim told aid workers in Habbaniya, a makeshift refugee camp 12 miles to the west of Falluja where about 2,000 families are sheltering. ‘People are eating flour because there’s no proper food.’

Pile on top of that the intentional destruction of hospitals and at the hands of the US military. According to reporter Jackie Spinner of the Washington Post, embedded with the Marines near Fallujah,

The U.S. military was … vetting the doctors and staff at the hospital to make sure there were no insurgents among them. One of the persistent problems for the military — and this was the case last April — was the misreporting of civilian dead and wounded by the propaganda machines at the hospitals. The Marines secured this hospital first, in part, to make sure that civilians had access to medical care during the offensives.

Apparently they had doctors arrested and handcuffed. But even more importantly, don’t we have to wonder if the military’s statement concerning propaganda relayed by Ms. Spinner is propaganda 180 degrees in the opposite direction? According to another Aljazeera story, “US troops are preventing a Red Crescent convoy of emergency aid from reaching helpless residents inside Falluja, a spokeswoman says”.

It is difficult to reconcile stated US military policy that is supposed to ensure civilians have access to medical care when they are prevented from getting to the hospital. And these reports do not square with what US military spokespeople are saying:

Q General Sattler, Barbara Starr from CNN. Sir, if I could impose upon you to step closer to the mike so we could be very sure to hear you. I’d like to ask you to address in as much detail as you can the current humanitarian situation inside Fallujah. When will you allow the Red Crescent to go in? What is the medical situation, the ability to get food and water and other humanitarian assistance to the civilians that are left in the city?

And as you clear these houses and streets, we are seeing pictures, of course, of significant damage to homes and cars. Your plans for making restitution to the civilian population?

GEN. SATTLER: As soon as the security situation permits, the Iraqi interim government already has the humanitarian — and I will obviously let the prime minister’s representative discuss this — already has the humanitarian supplies completely lined up and ready to come into Fallujah.

MR. AL NAKIB: Well, we already sent 14 trucks yesterday. It’s very well-equipped with the medicine and humanitarian stuff in it, and blood and many things that the civilians will need. And we are going to send some more — it’s already been prepared — with a group of doctors and personnel who’s going to take care of the situation over here in Fallujah. And I believe if the general is (over ?) he will give us the green light tomorrow, we will be ready to bring all this equipment over here and we will start immediately.

GEN. SATTLER: Barbara, I’d like to also stress that we have one group of 30 civilians who came out who were taken and moved to a humanitarian assistance area. And the only other civilians — we had one civilian who was injured, a family of three who was picked up by Iraqi security forces and brought out, and then the approximately 300 that I mentioned earlier that are a combination, we feel, of civilians from Fallujah and possibly some fighters embedded with them. And that is the only families — the only civilians we’ve come across

They’re talking like it is a different world than is being reported from the scene. Who is more reliable? The US military or multiple sources from foreign media?

My own opinion: Right now I just can’t buy the statements of the military of my own country or it’s Iraqi puppet. If they think squelching reportage of civilian casualties emanating from hospitals is more important than the gross catastrophe facing those civilians…arrrrgggghhhh, that just seems so sick to me.

There is apparently some theory in this about destroying the naysayers to supposed US democratic purposes in Iraq. But like in Indochina three and a half decades ago, US planners have run up against a people who will not submit to liberation at gunpoint. The sympathies of the vast majority of Iraqis are clear — they want the US out — and the flames of vengeance are being fanned by the current US attacks. Pretty soon, there will be no issue for young American troops in distinguishing fighters and civilians — every Iraqi who loves his or her country will have been made into a fighter.

Nope. Neocon agenda not moving toward reality-based policy

Bush policy to prefer death and destruction, as illustrated by hospitals and mosques flattened along with hundreds killed in the US-led offensive against Fallujah, Iraq (BBC photo)

Juan Cole posted recently a piece written by an interesting establishment figure. In this piece, American Options in Iraq, author William R. Polk comes to the same conclusion I have promoted for a long time: the United States should withdraw from Iraq as quickly and as rationally as possible. Any other other course will lead to political, economic, and human disaster. Polk, a former member of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Council, responsible for the Middle East, after demolishing options wrought with danger that he calls “stay the course” and an Iraqi version of “Vietnamization”, writes:

The third option is to choose to get out rather than being forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed and made unambiguous. The initial steps could be merely verbal. America would have first to declare unequivocally that it will give up its lock on the Iraqi economy, will cease to spend Iraqi revenues as it chooses and will allow Iraqi oil production to be governed by market forces rather than by an American monopoly. If President Bush could be as courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria when he admitted that the Algerian insurgency had “won” and called for a “peace of the braves,” fighting would quickly die down in Iraq as it did in Algeria and in all other guerrilla wars. Then, and only then, could elections be meaningful. In this period, Iraq would need a police force but not an army. A UN multinational peacekeeping force would be easier, cheaper and safer than creating an Iraqi army which in the past destroyed moves toward civil society and probably would do so again, probably indeed paving the way for the “ghost” of Saddam Hussein….

In such a program, inevitably, there will be set-backs and shortfalls, but they can be partly filled by international organizations. The steps will not be easy; Iraqis will disagree over timing, personnel and rewards while giving the process a chance will require American political courage. But, and this is the crucial matter, any other course of action would be far worse for both America and Iraq. The safety and health of American society as well as Iraqi society requires that this policy be implemented intelligently, determinedly and soon.

The unwritten line here is that this Iraq thing is going to kill America and Iraq if we follow the Bush neocons down this endless tunnel where no light is visible at all, as the pointless destruction of Fallujah indicates.

There is no evidence President Bush will show any interest in this kind of gut check. Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service reports on hawk-preferred policy directions recommended for the recently-ratified neocon regime:

An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with longstanding ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls “a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.”

The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of “appropriate strategies” for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and “the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,” also calls for “regime change” in Iran and North Korea.

The list’s author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel’s giving up “defensible boundaries.”

While all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article published Friday morning in the ‘National Review Online’ have long been favoured by prominent neo-cons, the article itself, ‘Worldwide Value’, is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush’s re-election Tuesday….

“Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to the ultimate moral value — freedom — as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly (sic) anathema.”

To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning with the “reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilised by freedom’s enemies in Iraq”; followed by “regime change — one way or another — in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining ‘Axis of Evil’ states from fully realising their terrorist and nuclear ambitions.”

Third, the administration must provide “the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence ‘reforms’ contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing “protection of our homeland, including deploying effective missile defences at sea and in space, as well as ashore.”

Fifth, Washington must keep “faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and … for our shared ‘moral values) especially in the face of Yasser Arafat’s demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to ‘solve’ the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries.”

Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them “so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution — as well as other international institutions and mechanisms — to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington.”

Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt “appropriate strategies for contending with China’s increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, (Russian President) Vladimir Putin’s accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America”, which he does not identify.

Unfortunately, the neocon Middle East policy arc Lobe describes is locked in. Any other mode of thinking would force admission of error and undermine covert US purposes: develop military bases while controlling the region’s still substantial energy reserves (with the world as a whole now entering an era of resource decline) — including most importantly the ability to run the spigot for economic rivals like Europe, Japan, China, and S. Korea.

World players will seek alternatives. The S. Koreans recently entered an oil deal with Kazakhstan, the Chinese another with Iran. The Bush team intends to keep up the tension in all of these areas. Who is next on the hit list?

Please see previous post about Chomsky & Sullivan on Real Time

Thanks to Rodger Payne, here is a link for a complete transcript of last Friday’s HBO Real Time with Bill Maher. This transcript includes the gem of an interview Maher had with former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming earlier in the show than the Chomsky segment. Does Simpson understand comedy? Sadly, no.

Meanwhile, James Wolcott noticed something unusual right at the end as the credits were rolling:

Yes, that is uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan handling his hind end on camera. Not sure I’ll be able to get this picture out of my mind very quickly, so I thought I’d share the discomfort.

My favorite in liberal radio talk is the Duke Skorich Show heard on KUWS, 91.3 FM, Superior, Wisconsin. I want to send a big thank you to Duke and co-host Patty McNulty for making the most vital radio of our age. Do tune in (on the internet from the link above, if you are not within range of Duluth-Superior) Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings at 6:00pm Eastern time.

Tonight, Duke ran a fantastic and alarming program on peak oil with Matt Savinar. Matt runs Life After the Oil Crash, a site I have read in the past, but for which I have gained new appreciation. Highly recommended. Do read Matt’s letter dated 10/20/2004 and posted on the index page.

Here is a list of recent Deep Blade Journal posts on oil, peak oil, and the failure of energy issues to make it into the presidential campaign:

Campaigns fail on energy

Oil price rocket

World oil peak now?

Bush has post-oil-peak plan

Another day, another oil dollar

Veep debate lacked energy

Over pulling sour crude

BBC: “Something very odd has happened”

Finance ministers deeply rattled by oil situation: Oil dominates agenda at G7 meeting in Washington, DC; communiqué includes recommendation to conserve fuel

Andrew Sullivan flew into a snit on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher

Chomsky gave Bill Maher an excellent interview Friday evening. Maher allowed enough time and space for a good airing of important truths concerning Iraq and US foreign policy.

Following the taped Chomsky interview, gay conservative uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan during Maher’s panel discussion lit into what Chomsky said with angry venom. Later, he had no trouble finding anti-Chomsky bait to reference on his site. Sullivan is an immature snarler with little critical facility and no honesty concerning views he attributes to Noam Chomsky. His arguing technique is to screech “liar, liar, liar”. It’s pathetic.

Check out this post and also this one.

Sullivan thinks that these impressive-looking essays railing against Chomsky’s intelligence (“America’s Dumbest Intellectual” Stefan Kanfer, City Journal, Summer 2002) and character (“…the veils of fanciful rhetoric and careful implication are pulled back and the bloody intentions of the author come through in clear and undisguised language and in all their horrifying banality…” Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite, October 9) support his notion that Chomsky is “the most poisonous intellectual in America”.

Okay, fine. Sullivan and these varied writers are abhorred by Chomskian dogma like the principle of universality — America should apply to itself the same standards it requires of others. It is their choice to swim with the school of American exceptionalism with its rejection of notions of “moral equivalence“. It’s a popular school. And what Chomsky said in the Maher interview is certainly poisonous there. In my opinion, poisoned that school should be.

Please take the time to read through the transcripts below and tell me if you don’t think what Chomsky said to Maher is a sincerely moral position and a reasonable assessment of the criminal nature of the aggression against Iraq, while Sullivan presents arguments like a jingoistic pig.

BILL MAHER: …I have never had a guy requested more of me in twelve years of doing two shows – every kid wants Noam Chomsky – and we’ve got him today. Please welcome, Professor Noam Chomsky. (applause)

BILL MAHER: So professor, I’m not kidding, over the last twelve years, on three different networks, people, especially young kids, request you, when they first did it I didn’t even know who you were.

BILL MAHER: All right, let me ask you this – It seems to me that the most religious people, are also, at least in this country, the most super-patriotic. Isn’t there an inherent conflict there? I mean, if you’re truly religious and you believe in God – I mean Jesus is not an American, I assume…

NOAM CHOMSKY: …just the favorite philosopher of Americans…

BILL MAHER: Isn’t it impossible to be truly Christian and also to love one country – even if it’s your own – more than every other country.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Depends on how you understand your religion. Religions have taught all sorts of things in the past, from the most horrible to the most elevated. So you pick and choose.

BILL MAHER: Yeah, but Christ doesn’t say, “love your country”. He doesn’t say, “American life is more important than other life”. And I would imagine that a lot of people who call themselves Christian in this country believe.

NOAM CHOMSKY: If they do…there are plenty of things you can read in the gospels that are certainly not believed by George Bush and his associates. Are they helping the poor? Did they read the descriptions in the gospels of the hypocrite – the person who refuses to apply to himself the same standards he applies to others? We can go on and on…(applause)

BILL MAHER: Well, I could, but I don’t want to go to Gitmo. (laughter)

BILL MAHER: Um, we’re about to blow the unholy hell out of Fallujah. Don’t you think it’s too late? Don’t you think it’s just going to get more infected the more we pick at it?

NOAM CHOMSKY: The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. A straight out war crime. (applause)

NOAM CHOMSKY: If we don’t want to be hypocrites in the sense it’s condemned in the Bible, we’ll apply to ourselves the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunals, for example, which said that aggression – invasion – is the supreme international crime, which includes within it all subsequent crimes, including all those which are taking place now. So when they invade Fallujah, which I suppose they will after having driven out all the population, they’ll probably smash the place up. It’ll add to the enormous casualty lists, which may be in the range of 100,000 by now, maybe more, maybe less. And there’s more to come.

BILL MAHER: Why do you think we did Iraq? What is the bottom-line reason? I assume you don’t think the reasons given were the real reasons.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think that the polls taken in Baghdad explain it very well. They seem to understand the United States invaded Iraq to gain control over one of the major sources of the world’s energy, right in the heart of the world’s major energy-producing region; to create if they can a dependent client state; to have permanent military bases; and to gain “critical leverage” – I’m quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski – to gain critical leverage over rivals – the European and Asian economies…

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s been understood since the second world war that if you have your hand on that spigot – the source of the…main source of the world’s energy, you have what early planners call “veto power” over others….Iraq is also the last part of the world where there are vast, untapped, easily-accessible energy resources. And you can be sure that they want the profits from that to go primarily to US-based multinationals, and back to the US Treasury and so-on – not to rivals. There are plenty of reasons for invading Iraq.

BILL MAHER: Now, President Bush always says “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. And I haven’t agreed with that. I think the people who were in his rape rooms are better off without Saddam Hussein. That’s a far cry…from the whole world. Ah, during the cold war, we selfishly backed any tyrant who was on our side that would have stopped who we thought was the greater ill of communism. Why don’t we have that same selfish doctrine with this man? Because certainly we know, somewhere in government must know, that Saddam Hussein would never have allowed a power rival, even if it was a terrorist organization in Iraq. He actually would have been a bulwark for us.

NOAM CHOMSKY: …Remember, the US supported Saddam Hussein. And that means the people now in office or their immediate mentors, supported him in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with cold war, or with the war with Iran. The support went on after the war with Iran was over; it went on after the Berlin wall fell. In fact it even went on after the first Gulf War when the first Bush Administration authorized Saddam to crush a Shiite uprising, which probably would have overthrown him. It’s certainly true that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and also without the people who supported him through his worst atrocities, and are now telling us about them. The fact of the matter is, if it hadn’t been for the sanctions, which devastated the society and killed hundreds of thousands of people, it’s very likely that the Iraqis themselves would have sent Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other brutal monsters, also supported by the people now in Washington, like Ceausescu in Romania or Suharto in Indonesia, or Marcos, a whole string of others, quite a rogues gallery. And probably Saddam would have gone the same way.

BILL MAHER: Professor, I wish I had all night to talk to you. I hope you do this again. Please keep thinking outside the box. I know it’s lonely there [Chomsky shrugs], but stay the course. Thank you… (applause)

After the interview, Andrew Sullivan sitting on Maher’s in-studio panel, jumped in with a variety of agitated comments. As is typical when a hater hears a presentation by Chomsky, Sullivan launched a ferocious appeal to ridicule in his fallacious attempt to refute Chomsky’s statements. I won’t type all this out, but here’s a lot of it, including a couple of interjections from Maher and a couple of excellent comments from actor/comedian and panel member D.L. Hughley. Former US Representative Pat Schroeder also appeared on the panel, but added little to this segment of the show.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: What? [Sullivan grimaces] He thinks that in the discussion of Saddam Hussein we should raise the issue of Nuremberg trials for the United States? [audience members shout "yes"] Well, yes [Sullivan displays dismissive gesture towards audience].

ANDREW SULLIVAN: Welcome to the world view of the far left, in which the United States is the source of evil, and Saddam Hussein is a source of good….

ANDREW SULLIVAN: I do not believe that the United States is on a par with those regimes…and Chomsky does…

BILL MAHER: He has a right to his opinion.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: [becoming unglued] He doesn’t have a right to besmirch freedom and democracy in the world and support tyranny and dictatorship…There are no two ideas…there is either freedom or there is not, there is either democracy or there is not….

ANDREW SULLIVAN: If the United States wanted to invade and get oil supplies, we could invade and control purely the oil fields. We could control and get all the oil we want. This is nonsense, he knows its nonsense…I assume he’s smart enough to know he’s lying.

D.L. HUGHLEY: …This country has never taken a good look at itself, it’s policies, and what those policies mean to people around the world…now I don’t agree…I feel like I’m living in the greatest country in the world, I feel like I have the greatest family in the world, but to say they haven’t done some fucked up things, family and country, is idiotic….

ANDREW SULLIVAN: Of course.

D.L. HUGHLEY: …and we need to be like we always tell other people to do…what they tell black people to do, is pull yourself up by your bootstraps and accept responsibility for the shit that you’ve done.

BILL MAHER: [to Sullivan] You started off this show…giving me a big lecture…[crosstalk] wait a second about giving people their due. And then you say, “I hope he knows he’s lying”, “I hope he’s smart enough to know he’s lying”. What if I said that about your half? What if I said, “I hope they know they’re smart enough to know they’re lying, but they’re not because they’re dumb goobers”.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: [with smug air of superiority] …There are some views, people who support the Soviet Union, as Chomsky did for so long. Who’ve supported tyranny in all sorts of places like Chomsky has done. Who’ve lied consistently as Chomsky has done; who do not deserve fundamental respect….

ANDREW SULLIVAN: For example, he claimed 100,000 dead in Iraq. No one believes that….

BILL MAHER: That was in the paper…I read that too….

ANDREW SULLIVAN: …If you look at that analysis it is absolutely riddled with exaggerations…

BILL MAHER: …First of all, neither one of us knows how many are dead in Iraq…

ANDREW SULLIVAN: We have a pretty good idea it could never be near that amount…

BILL MAHER: So the Pentagon, they could never be lying, so Chomsky has to be a liar…I mean give me a break.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: [with childlike affectations] You don’t have to believe the United States is perfect to believe it has been a force for good in the world. There are millions and millions of people in this world … who are living free because of this country. And and and and to denigrate this country as a source of evil, which is his view, or the tool of forces beyond our control is wrong in my view. It’s immoral, in my view. And it’s one of the reasons the left has lost it’s ability to persuade people…

Enough. Sullivan is obviously so immature it’s amazing he gets hundreds of thousands of hits per day. His attack is ad hominem, attributing to Chomsky views he clearly does not hold.

The matter of the 100,000 war dead in Iraq is telling. This is Sullivan’s big proof that Chomsky lies. In fact Chomsky was quite careful when he spoke about these recently-released casualty figures. He indicated that the actual number may be more or less, but that it it resonable to discuss 100,000. See this story in today’s Guardian for a discussion showing that the 100,000 figure is defensible, despite the fact it has been criticized.

Sullivan should take a hard look at his own references. The writers he cites (see links above the transcript) are tortured windbags, but at least they quote Chomsky much more accurately. Sullivan cites a blog self-described as “dedicated to the permanent and total discrediting of the work of noam chomsky and his fellow travelers. VIVA LA COUNTERREVOLUTION!” Here, the author, stupefied with Chomsky hatred (just amazing that a guy would want to focus his blogging talents like this), quotes and critiques What Uncle Sam Really Wants, a book-length electronic collection assembled by Z magazine more than a decade ago.

The Cold War provided that too. No matter how outlandish the idea that the Soviet Union and its tentacles were strangling the West, the “Evil Empire” was in fact evil, was an empire and was brutal. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy — its own population — by terrifying it with the (quite real) crimes of the other.

Are those the words of someone who “supported tyranny”, as Sullivan claims? Of course that is ridiculous and this whole exercise is asinine. I blame Sullivan for forcing me to it. Jerk.

Greg Palast thinks so; cs watched an Ohio polling place that did not live up to the media image of crushing lines

Fellow blogger and Ohio resident cs, a good friend of Deep Blade Journal, has put up an extensive post describing many troubling facets of last Tuesday’s vote in that state. It’s full of personal insights and voluminous references.

I believe that the major point here is not that the 2004 election is tainted with illegitimacy in the same manner as the 2000 election, but that the US election infrastructure and process is severely broken in many places and swaths of the population are stealthily denied their civil rights. The lesson is for the future now, not the present. It is shameful, given the 2000 debacle, that demands for fixing these flaws are not heard 100-fold louder. We have no one to blame but ourselves if we allow this to continue into the future.

The major national media will present a coronation story that will follow Bush through inauguration. It is our responsibility to oppose Bush’s lies about everything from the horrific death and destruction he is visiting upon Iraq to the dismantling of social security he is proposing.

Values code for Christian-based protofascism mobilized Bush voters

Gay marriage served as the voter wedge for Bush, coded under the rubric of “high moral values”

We really didn’t see this coming, not with this much force. Now that it hit us over the head, a general alarm should sound. After this election, it is clear that the population of deluded fundamentalist reactionary Christians is growing and reaching majority status in vast areas of our country. They seek to usher in an era of protofascist purification and renewal. Through the disturbing elections of 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, I never felt things were tipping this way in the sense of an overwhelming mass movement. But now I fear we may be entering such an era.

David Neiwert at Orcinus has a wealth of amazing material on these undercurrents, including an outline of the proper progressive response — we must reject coded messages suggesting that we now must “heal” from the divisive electoral struggle.

Neiwert quotes the insufferable Bill Bennett, who was quick to issue this call for purification:

I have long advocated a stronger tie between politics and the virtues. Last night it was evident that the American people agree…Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal (“The Great Relearning,” as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) — no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected.

Neiwert goes on to report an email anecdote he received that reveals some very important indications of red-state mood:

My 11 year old daughter in the 6th grade was the ONLY student to wear a Kerry/Edwards button to school, out of 729 students in her middle school. Her classmates ridiculed her, told her to get the hell away from them, and kicked at her desk all day to separate her from them. They even told her she was not a “Christian” because she supported Kerry. They told her that Kerry was gay because he supported gay marriage. Today was even worse. They gloated, jeered and sneered at her from the minute she stepped out of the car to the minute she was picked up from school. They did not have to kick her desk because she intentionally moved it away from them.

Very extensive additional material appears at Orcinus.

See also Under the Same Sun. Zeynep includes this disturbing analysis under the heading “Gays are the New Jews”:

Here’s what’s happening in a nutshell: a proto-fascist administration is whipping up support and clouding the political picture by aggressively targeting an already despised, small minority that is, for the most part, expressing no other wish than to assimilate as who they are. Many members of that minority are already relatively integrated into the existing power structure. Most are not poor or marginal but wish for not much more than being accepted into the existing institutional structures: the very structures that many progressives spend their lives fighting to change (for example, the military). Yes, the obvious analogy is the Jews in pre-WWII Germany.

The anti-gay amendments that have just passed are comparable to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in their function, if not their scope and final intent. These laws were passed in 1935, stripping Jews of many of their basic civic rights and erecting impassable barriers to the increasing assimilation of the Jewish minority into Germany.

Undoubtedly, supporters of these anti-gay measures do not see themselves as the new Nazis. Of course not. Participants in a pogrom by definition do not see their actions as wrong. Likewise, voters for Bush seemingly were untroubled by the contradiction of his supposed high moral values and torture of Arab/Muslim prisoners under his administration’s care. What could be in store for gays and other undesirables if these trends are allowed to continue?