Larry Craig: "It Ain't Easy Bein' Hypocritical"

Oops. What IS it with the "moral" and "family value" Republicans who can't keep their zippers up at the same time they insist anyone else engaging in much less heinous behavior deserve to be struck dead by God AND the American system? There is absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual and by no means is homosexual synonymous with pedophile (most of whom are heterosexual, btw) - unless, of course, you're a gay who insists that other gays deserve to be stoned - but am I the only one who wonders if Craig may have pulled this on one or more unsuspecting males below the age of consent?

From the Buzzflash team:

Well, it looks like Larry "I am Not Gay" Craig -- who has remained a senator despite his initial promise to resign as of September 30 -- has been caught by Idaho's most influential paper, the Idaho Statesman, and left without a stall to stand on, so to speak.

In a December 2nd article, accompanied by graphic audio accounts of gay sexual encounters with Craig, the Idaho Statesman (owned by McClatchy Newspapers) provides the names and stories of four men who appear to undercut Senator Craig's claims that what happened in a Minnesota washroom was due to him being a victim of "profiling."

We're not familiar with older, tall white guys from Idaho being "profiled" a whole lot, and apparently the long-standing rumors about Craig are once again being confirmed. Craig has shunned and ridiculed the Idaho Statesman since it first began exploring Craig's hypocrisy on his sexual preferences (he has been a big anti-gay stalwart). But the newspaper has kept on the beat, so to speak, and documents its article about the post-Minneapolis revelations about Senator Craig with graphic audio clips.

Torture And The Laws Bush Won't Even Pretend to Follow

At the same time he stands by his unmitigated nerve to cry foul against Russia in 2001 for its human rights abuses (talk about the skanky pot calling the Putey-Put kettle black), Bush wants everyone to notice he's "making illegal" what was already illegal to do but which he practices with all the fervor of a Republican Christian moralist paying a dominatrix for kinky sex (can you say William "Morals Czar" Bennett, anyone?).

Thus, may we assume (oh, yeaaaaahhhhh!) that President Bush signed a new law designed to "stop" torture in interrogations used against detainees and so-called terror suspects using invisible ink, with his fingers crossed behind his hand, AND with a signing statement that says, "this law applies only to Democrats and others not named Bush & Cheney"?

Meanwhile, the CIA is now allowed to return to interrogating whoever the hell they want, after many appropriate (and too many unasked) questions arose about how they conducted them.

Nicholas Kristof: "Repression By China, And By Us"

I have some very big conflicts when it comes to Kristof, one of The New York Times' top Op/Ed columnists, but I daresay he got most of this right. What's more, it's very important reading for us.

I’d meant to focus this column on a Chinese woman whose battle for justice has led the police to arrest her more than 30 times, lock her in an insane asylum, humiliate her sexually, shock her with cattle prods, beat her until she is crippled and, worst of all, take away her young daughter.

The case of Li Guirong, a graying 50-year-old who now hobbles on crutches, reflects China at its worst — government by thuggery. But each time I start this column, I feel that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have pulled the rug out from under me. Do I really have the right to complain about torture or extra-legal detentions in China when we Americans do the same in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba?

I keep remembering a heated conversation I had in Yunnan Province when I lived in China years ago. I reproached an official for China’s torture and arbitrary imprisonment, and he retorted that China was fragile and had lost hundreds of thousands of lives in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. “If you Americans ever faced the threat of chaos, you would do just the same,” he said.

“Impossible!” I replied.

Yet I owe him an apology, for he has been proven right. The moment we did feel a threat, after 9/11, we held people without trial, and beatings were widespread enough that more than 110 of our prisoners died in custody in places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo.

Our extrajudicial detentions and mistreatment of prisoners are wrong in and of themselves. But they also undercut our own ability to speak against oppression and torture around the world.

Read the rest here.

On This Memorial Day Weekend...

Let us appreciate America's 25 million living veterans (one in every dozen citizens), demand we stop unnecessary aggression against other countries, and begin to worry about our own massive problems. At the same time, think about all the many wars this Republican chickenhawk vice president (Dick Cheney) and chickenshit commander in chief, Mr. Bush, have started since they used corrupt court processes to take the White House in December 2000:

Besides those declared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the proxy war Israel waged for Bush to break the spine of Lebanon in proxy:

• War on the military and our veterans (asking so much while cutting services to them every damned day)
• War on basic human rights
• War on individual privacy
• War not on poverty but against the poor
• War on families (you have to be the "right" kind of family not to feel "intruded" upon
• War on science
• War on reason
• War on truth and accountability as well as the whistleblowers who try to make the Bushies honest
• War on public education and against the best conditions for our kids
• War on young minds, trying to lure them away from high school or college with lies
• War on drugs (which got rolled into the War on Terror which, as they say, is a bumper sticker motto but hardly a game plan) which includes the ability for Americans to afford them, to get them for their most urgent needs (ex: contraception, pain relief, and yes, even decongestants in cold formulas), and to make decisions about their own bodies
• War on anyone who isn't of the Fascist Fundamentalist Christian "faith" (Muslims, especially)
• War on America's honor, its reputation, its compassion
• War on the sick (remember Terri Schiavo, kept alive when there was little brain left in her while the Bushies had no trouble discontinuing treatment to the ultra poor minority babies)
• War on journalism
• War on the United Nations, NATO, and other worldly agencies

Care to name some other wars?

Red Cross: Israel Violates Humanitarian Rights

Sadly, this latest report - the conclusions of which have been echoed elsewhere for years, such as with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others - is no surprise. And, as long as Israel continues its inhumane treatment of Palestinians (and the U.S. keeps making certain Israel has the money and military might to do that), there will be no peace in the Middle East.

Nicholas Kristof: "Iran's Operative In The White House"

And oh what a Dick that operative is! Read all of this op/ed at JP's Pottersville, or content yourself with this slab:

If an 18-year-old American soldier were caught slipping obscure military paperwork to Iranian spies, he would be arrested, pilloried in the news media and tossed into prison for years.

But in fact there’s an American who has provided services of incalculably greater value to Iran in recent years. So you have to wonder: Is Dick Cheney an Iranian mole?

Consider that the Bush administration’s first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, Iran’s bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran’s even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

You really think that’s just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?

Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq’s army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better — so maybe they did write the script ...

We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that’s just another coincidence?

Or think about broader Bush administration policies in the Middle East. For six years, the White House vigorously backed Israeli hard-liners and refused to engage seriously in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus nurturing anti-Americanism and religious fundamentalism. Then last summer, the White House backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which turned Iran’s proxies in Hezbollah into street heroes in much of the Arab world.

Consider also the way the administration has systematically antagonized our former allies in Europe and Asia, undermining chances of a united front to block Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Cheney may nominally push for sanctions against Iran, but by alienating our allies he makes strong sanctions harder to achieve.

And by condoning torture and extralegal detentions in Guantánamo, the White House antagonized Muslims around the world and made us look like hypocrites when we criticize Arab or Iranian human rights abuses. Take Mr. Cheney’s endorsement of the torture known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning: “It’s a no-brainer for me,” he said. The torturers in Iran’s Evin prison must have cheered. They got a pass as well.

Even at home, Iran’s leaders have been bolstered by President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Iran’s hard-liners are hugely unpopular and the regime is wobbly, but Bush administration policies have inflamed Iranian nationalism and given cover to the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Find the rest here.

Was Corruption And Extreme Human Rights Abuses Reason For High Profile Soldier Suicide in Iraq?

I recommend everyone read Greg Mitchell's latest "Pressing Issues" column at Editor and Publisher because it casts light into some very dark and murky corners of the whole Iraq war and the Bush Administration's management of it:

Col. Ted Westhusing, a West Point scholar, put a bullet in his head in Iraq after reporting widespread corruption. His suicide note -- complaining about human rights abuses and other crimes -- was addressed to his two commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, now leader of the U.S. "surge" effort in Iraq. It urged them to "Reevaluate yourselves....You are not what you think you are and I know it."

"Civil Rights Under Siege In Israel"

This letter from Mark Hage of Montpelier in the Time Argus, I believe, states some excellent points:

Thank you for your editorial ("Israel's Dilemma," Feb. 23) on the controversy in Israel over a manifesto that calls for the country, officially a "Jewish state," to become a bi-national state with full equality for all citizens.

Since the mid-90s, Palestinian citizens have intensified their political and legal efforts to achieve the same rights as Jews. There are more than one million Palestinian citizens in Israel, and they live under apartheid-like conditions. Hundreds of rural communities have been established since Israel was created in 1948, but are closed to Arab citizens. For 60 years, vast tracts of private Arab landholdings have been confiscated by government authorities to benefit Jews exclusively.

Most Palestinian children, prior to the university level, attend segregated, inferior and under-funded schools. Arab towns, the poorest in the country, are short-changed annually when it comes to municipal budgets and funding infrastructure projects.

Palestinians are no strangers to police brutality, and Israeli cops, like Jewish soldiers, are prone to being trigger-happy when their weapons are aimed at Arabs. In October, 2000, police shot dead 12 unarmed Palestinians and a man from Gaza during protests against Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories. No Jewish officers were indicted for this atrocity.

Job discrimination against Palestinian workers is widespread, and substantial sectors of the Israeli economy are off-limits to them. The civil service is the country' largest employer, but in 2004, just 5 percent of its 55,000 workers were Palestinian. Islamic and Christian holy sites get a pittance of their funding from public coffers, and according to English journalist Jonathan Cook, "almost all of the Muslim and Christian holy places that existed in Israel before 1948 have been destroyed, fenced off, locked up or converted for the use of Jewish communities."

Israel is confronting a civil rights movement within its 1967 borders, and a national liberation struggle in the West Bank and Gaza. Both challenge the fundamental tenets and structures of Zionism, which elevate Jewish blood, privilege and religion over democracy, equality and the rule of law.

Mark Hage

Montpelier