“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I’ve read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
-–Mark Twain

“I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked.”
–Ezekiel 33:10

“For all the people out there scolding each other for various emotional reactions, I have this to say: Stop it. There is no “right” way to feel. Americans were victimized by a horrible mass murder. A measure of justice has been dealt. People react how they react. Some people react with joy. Some with grief. Some with jokes. Some do all of the above. All feelings are just that, feelings. Stop trying to control it.”
–Amanda Marcotte

I have felt each of these throughout the twenty-four hours following the announcement U.S. forces finally found and killed Osama bin Laden. And that’s not counting the initial disbelief and laughter I expressed when my friend Patrick told me on the phone last night. Or the disturbingly quick partisan assessment I made that Obama is assured re-election (which upon further thought is not assured at all: witness Bush the Elder’s loss of Gulf War brownie points when he failed to take the recession of the early 90s seriously.) Today when Twitter turned into a debate about the sincerity of Rush Limbaugh’s remarks praising Obama’s role in taking bin Laden down, I decided I should just back away and throw up my hands.

I am glad bin Laden is no longer at large. I hope his demise does not make him a martyr, but seriously demoralizes his organization and all of the violent sociopaths he inspired. But don’t tell me justice was served. Too much blood has been spilled in the name of my country, with my tax dollars, at the sacrifice of my countryfolk and the uncounted deaths of thousands of innocent people around the world.

Edited to add the link to Megan Mcardle’s post on dubious MLK quote. Which just makes this that much weirder.

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The France-led (sic) international coalition military intervention “Odyssey Dawn” operation against Gadaffi forces in Libya is necessarily controversial. Liberal Democrats are upset that Obama has side-stepped his constitutional responsibility to consult Congress in matters of war waging (Kucinich is already talking impeachment, yawn). FOXNews pundidiots seek rhetorical payback for past liberal mockery of Bush brush-clearing. Personally, I have been wondering if Western powers are seeking a foothold in North Africa to influence the democratic movements in the region. But Marc Armbinder’s piece in the National Journal raises a possibility I hadn’t considered — namely, the Libya intervention as dress-rehearsal for possible future military action against Iran. Here’s the money-quote everyone seems to be blockquoting:

Though the Libyan situation is quite unique – its military is nowhere near as strong as Iran’s is, for one thing – Obama hopes that a short, surgical, non-US-led campaign with no ground troops will satisfy Americans skeptical about military intervention and will not arouse the suspicions of Arabs and Muslims that the U.S. is attempting to influence indigenously growing democracies.

Intriguing. So if the Iranian government continues to repress the Iranian people’s democracy movement and commits an iconic atrocity, will that be provocation enough to justify military intervention? The Pentagon has been planning an invasion of Iran to take out its nuclear facilities for years now; and remember there was considerable concern the BushAdmin would take action a few years ago. But public opinion was solidly against it, what with two wars already bringing us down. It looks like the ObamAdmin is seeking a way around that.

We’ll see. I’m not saying that it WILL happen. But I’m concerned about where these things lead us, and what motivates my government’s military campaigns beyond the official rhetoric. I have no reason to trust the bastards. Not at all.

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From Bahrain:

“Protesters emboldened by the pull-back of the army, prepare barbecued fish for lunch in Pearl Square in Manama, Bahrain.”(Source: The Guardian UK)

From Wisconsin:

“Two protesters practice yoga inside the Capitol building on Saturday. (AP/Wisconsin State Journal, Michael P. King)” (From Salon.com)

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So the WaPo was the first Respectable Beltway News Organ to publish an opinion piece giving George Bush credit for the wave of popular democratic uprisings against Middle Eastern dictatorships. Yes, Instapundit and its clones jerked that knee first, but until it makes traction with the big boys, it’s not a meme with real revisionist potential. Yet you knew it was coming. When the national security threat posed by Iraq began to look shaky (much earlier for the more observant and better informed than for others, btw), exporting free market democracy was a fallback position. Neocons took a perfectly reasonable position — that the U.S. has been supporting dictatorships in the Middle East in a devil’s bargain that will do us more long-term harm than good — and turned it into a reason to wage wars of expansion, resource pillage and client state building. Now they are treating popular uprisings against U.S. client states as comparable to an illegal invasion and occupation that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. For Iraqis themselves, the irony is not lost.

Another irony is that throughout Bush’s presidency, neocons were quite critical of what they considered a betrayal by the administration of Egyptian democratic aspirations. Here from an opinion piece at the American Enterprise Institute — the neocon think tank where so many bullshit rationalizations for the Iraq invasion were gestated:

On April 30, the Egyptian government extended the country’s emergency laws for two more years. Under such laws, the government can censor media, ban public demonstrations and detain political dissidents indefinitely. Most political activists had hoped that Mr. Mubarak, under pressure from Washington, would annul them. But the White House remained silent.

Determining U.S. rhetoric to be hollow, Mr. Mubarak pushed further. On May 18, thousands of police clamped down on demonstrators expressing solidarity for two pro-reform judges, Hesham Bastawisi and Mahmoud Mekki, who sit on Egypt’s highest appellate court. The government harassed the judges after they questioned government vote rigging during September’s presidential election. Security forces have rounded up scores of other pro-democracy activists.

Still, democracy activists continued their vigils. President Bush’s words at his second inauguration seem to have resonance in the Arab world: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.” But excuse the oppressors is exactly what the White House did.

For more on Bush’s “double talk,” see Mona Eltahawy, who has more recently penned a great piece in The Guardian on the Middle East uprisings.

As the latter piece makes clear, these uprisings have been a long time coming, and are independent of the policy desires and national interests of foreign powers, including those of Washington, DC. Robert Grenier expresses eloquently and with some humor thoughts I have been having lately as I have watched my government struggle to come to terms with the events in Egypt:

Events in the Middle East have slipped away from us. Having long since opted in favour of political stability over the risks and uncertainties of democracy, having told ourselves that the people of the region are not ready to shoulder the burdens of freedom, having stressed that the necessary underpinnings of self-government go well beyond mere elections, suddenly the US has nothing it can credibly say as people take to the streets to try to seize control of their collective destiny.

All the US can do is “watch and respond”, trying to make the best of what it transparently regards as a bad situation.

Our words betray us. US spokesmen stress the protesters’ desire for jobs and for economic opportunity, as though that were the full extent of their aspirations. They entreat the wobbling, repressive governments in the region to “respect civil society”, and the right of the people to protest peacefully, as though these thoroughly discredited autocrats were actually capable of reform.

They urge calm and restraint. One listens in vain, however, for a ringing endorsement of freedom, or for a statement of encouragement to those willing to risk everything to assert their rights and their human dignity – values which the US nominally regards as universal.

Grenier continues with thoughts on the limits of American influence in the region, limits made narrower by the betrayals and compromises Washington has made in the name of my country. With the recent appointment of Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s V.P. — the go-to guy for the CIA’s program of extra-rendition of terror suspects it wanted to torture without getting its hands dirty — we should be incredibly skeptical about Secretary of State Clinton’s bureaucratic insistence on an orderly six-month transition process. This here video should put that shit in perspective.

Spoof on US State Departments Position on Egypt

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But Yemen? How should we gauge the official reaction to street protests against the U.S.-backed regime there? Tepid. At WaPo, Greg Sargent summarizes why:

The administration has relied on Saleh as a key partner in their counterterrorism efforts. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest has reported that American forces have assisted the Yemeni government in counterterrorism operations against AQAP. Saleh has given the U.S. cover for its use of targeted drone strikes against AQAP by taking credit for them. Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen says that nevertheless, the drone strikes have provoked popular sympathies for extremists.

Johnsen has also argued that the administration’s focus on seeing Yemen “only through the prism of counterterrorism” has produced the kind of instability they were trying to avoid. Yemen’s population is also poorer, and there’s far more potential for extremist groups to take advantage of a potential power vacuum.

For the poor, of course, there has always been a vacuum, at least in terms of services, stability, and standard of living. Dropping bombs on them because their neighborhoods have been infiltrated by select enemies of Western powers may not be the best long-term strategy for promoting peace and stability in the region — not to mention the people’s democratic aspirations.

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Instead of “the hammer,” in the words of John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, America will rely on the “scalpel.” In a speech in May, Mr. Brennan, an architect of the White House strategy, used this analogy while pledging a “multigenerational” campaign against Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties.

This is the “realist” strategy proposed counter to the dominant neo-con pipe dreams of the Bush era now put into practice. It begs new definitions of realism, however. Anyone remember the enmity we incurred employing such tactics during the Cold War throughout Latin and South Americas, Africa and Asia? Indeed, as the NYTimes report notes, some of the same players who waged proxy wars in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, hiring such folks as Osama bin Laden as our proxy, are now crafting the covert war strategy.

Yet there is a difference: we have entered a new era of integrated violence by the corporate state. As the report notes, the CIA has become a “paramilitary organization” with little Congressional oversight; the Pentagon has taken a greater role in intelligence activity; and private contractors — a.k.a., mercenaries — assume more responsibility and power. All the while rules of engagement, intelligence verification and accountability wither away.

Also — significantly — there is the greater reliance on technology, a trend we have seen grow since the first Gulf War, when we learned our “smart bombs” were not so smart. Contra the Obama White House’s stated objective of fighting small scale, surgical conflicts with al Qaeda to reduce hostile blow-back from the world’s poor, there is a pattern: Less reliable information, more civilian casualties, less trustworthy informants with greater conflicts of interest, more anger among the survivors, more recruits for jihadist groups.

What do we make of this, Dr. Cox?

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For instance, consider the inevitable “draws fire” article on Republican responses to President Obama’s support for the construction of a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero. It’s got Peter King, that reliable voice of downstate NY dipshits:

“While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much,” he said. “The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from ground zero. Unfortunately, the president caved into political correctness.”

Note that it is NOT “political correctness” to defer to the knee-jerk sensibilities of people who confuse a major global religion with the violence committed by a fringe terrorist sect. Forget the Constitution or simple fairness, let the fears and grievances of a handful of victim’s families hold sway. In that light, I refer you to Matt Bors’ excellent cartoon on the subject.

But wait, there’s more! While the rest of the world would rather cram broken glass in their ears than hear what Rick Santorum has to say on any subject whatsoever, FOXNews knows their audience.

Former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania told Fox News that Obama seems to misunderstand that Islam is not just a religion, but also a political doctrine. He also said the mosque is being run by a man who accused the U.S. of being an accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Santorum compared the ground zero mosque to a minister who wants to builds a church near the location where the Rev. Martin Luther King was killed but preaches racial separation and the notion that King brought his death upon himself.

Martin Luther King — such handy rhetorical cover for right wing racism. Ironic, too, given that the good doctor would most likely support the construction of Cordoba House. Ah, but what about that nasty imam whom The Santorum calls out for victim-blaming? That would be Feisal Abdul Rauf, a respected Muslim cleric who has served the diplomatic missions of both Obama and Bush administrations. Insert hypocrisy here:

Oddly, Republicans didn’t complain when the Bush/Cheney State Department partnered with “this radical” to help with our diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. This isn’t complicated — if Bush considered Feisal Abdul Rauf a valuable American voice and representative, there’s no reason for the GOP to freak out now.

Reasons. Don’t make me laugh.

BTW, the “victim blaming” in question — the rhetorical arrow that King and Santorum fire off with all the precision of a drunk aiming for the urinal (coating the floor and walls in a perfect circle, the center target perfectly dry) — derives from an interview imam Rauf gave to the late Ed Bradley many years ago.

Bradley: And throughout the Muslim world, there is also strong opposition to America’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East because of its support of Israel and economic sanctions against Iraq.

Faisal: It is a reaction against the US government politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human rights, and where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries.

Bradley: Are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?

Faisal: I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but united states policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.

Bradley: You say that we’re an accessory? How?

Faisal: Because we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.

Make of that what you will — everyone else is!

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Or, really, his cook. But how’s he gonna get his lamb kabobs now, huh? Anyway, the cook will get two years, wherever the military decides to finally put him.

The judge, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Paul, said an assistant defense secretary ordered two years ago that the Army and the military’s Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo base, develop a detailed plan for housing prisoners after their conviction.”This has not been done,” the judge said tersely.

She said the absence of any written policy or plan was “especially troubling” because another trial was under way for a young Canadian captive and could produce another conviction.

Oh, yes — the Canadian. Torturing false confessions out of child soldiers caught up in a dragnet and shipped thousands of miles away into a legal no-man’s land: such are the values my grandfather fought for in the Pacific Theater of Dubya Dubya Two!

Well, I’m sure the young man will get a fair trial.

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Setting aside the obvious point that even mobsters and drug lords deserve representation in a court of law, we should not get sucked into Thiessen’s argument that The Public Has a Right to Know when Justice Department lawyers have experience advocating the rights of the accused. He’s created a false equivalency that would seem to mine new depths in intellectual dishonesty were it not for this next question:

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack?

That is the dumbest question I have ever read in the pages of WaPo — a feat, given the other members of the op/ed brain trust over there. But I’ll humor him. Here’s the obvious answer: we were too busy being outraged by the unethical and illegal advice the “fine lawyers” gave to an administration too eager to apply techniques favored by the Khmer Rouge and Augusto Pinochet’s thugs. Besides, it is hard to get too vicious in attacking a guy like John Yoo who can be so cavalier about massacring villagers and crushing little boy’s testicles.

UPDATED to include this excellent riposte by Dahlia Lithwick:

Ten years ago, if some paranoid hysteric accused you of being an al-Qaida sympathizer or a jihadist, you could find a lawyer to help you make the case that you were not. But in the ever-expanding war on the Bill of Rights being waged by Liz Cheney, once you’re designated a terrorist, you lose your Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Because just by representing you—even if you’re acquitted—your lawyers become terrorists, too!

Read the whole thing, cuz Dahlia brings the pain. Also, Glenn Greenwald jumps on Thiessen and takes down Fred Hiatt.

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Homophobes are concerned with only one thing: who is putting what where. More specifically, they are really concerned with the unregulated interaction between the penis and the anus. Consider two recent examples. Barb Davis White has a little quip she uses to argue against the legitimacy of same-sex marriage as a civil rights issue:

“Rosa Parks did not move to the front of the bus to support sodomy.”

Technically, this is true. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to an arrogant white man. She had had a long day at work and simply did not want to stand up just so this obnoxious asshole could express his social supremacy. True, this act of resistance was not wholly spontaneous — Parks was active in her church and in the NAACP. But while she had an awful lot of issues on her mind at that moment, sodomy was probably not one of them.

All of which is totally irrelevant to the question of social equality for sexual minorities. Yet to an anally fixated teabagger like White, this is a trump card.

“I’m here today to tell you that homosexuality and lesbian behavior is unhealthy,” claiming that gays and lesbians have higher rates of STDs than anyone else in the world, including “gay bowel disease,” an ailment that does not exist and is often used by religious right figures to paint gay men as diseased.

Okay, until I read the above quotes at Pam’s House Blend, I had never heard of “gay bowel disease” or “gay bowel syndrome.” For one thing, it’s discredited junk science. For another, the origin of the term goes directly to the heart of my thesis: GBS is the figment of the anally fixated.

In 1976, a group of physicians in private proctologic practice in New York City coined the illness “Gay Bowel Syndrome” in reference to a constellation of gay male anorectal disorders. Through analysis of biomedical discourse and popular media, it is apparent that Gay Bowel Syndrome is an essentialized category of difference that is neither gay-specific, confined to the bowel, nor a syndrome.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with anal sex. There is something wrong with being so preoccupied with the anal sex habits of complete strangers that one becomes a deranged proponent of punitive social policies and irrational discrimination.

So you know that expression, “Get your head out of your ass”…?

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