cheese it, the cops!

cage match: obama v assad

so in the equivalence y'all have been asserting between obama and assad (indeed, some of you have compared obama unfavorably to assad), i'll admit: obama scans your naked butt at the airport; he's got harmless anarchists in austin under surveillance; he invades your sovereign airspace to assassinate mass murderers; when he tries to explode gaddafi, he might miss. but let me ask you this: when was the last time he set up a crossfire on peaceful demonstrators and their kids as they held flowers and chanted 'freedom'?

in 2013 or 2017, when it's time for him to make way for president bachmann or president kucinich, will it take a cruise missile through his bathroom window to dislodge him?

oh, darn it. tsk tsk.

washpost, reporting events in homs today:

“I swear there is not enough room for the injured and the dead. It is indescribable,” said a woman who was at the hospital and spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared for her safety. She put the death toll at 65. “We were out in a peaceful protest,” she said. “We had our children with us. So why the live ammunition? Why all the murder?”

“We were carrying flowers and chanting for freedom,” said a man who witnessed the shootings and put the death toll at 67. “They just started shooting from every direction.”

Many bodies were still lying in the streets, he said, because the security forces were preventing ambulances from reaching the victims, who were being taken to hospital by private cars and motorcycles.

 

meanwhile...

it seems that saleh was wounded today. it couldn't happen to a nicer monster, though the tribal civil war in yemen is harder to be clear about than the protests in syria.

one clear shot

gonna say it again: anyone with a clear shot at assad is morally obliged to take it. human rights watch pursues its careful style of documentation; they're torturing and killing children and cutting off internet access, practically the only way that images of what is happening can emerge. again, i cannot imagine why the u.s. response is so sluggish. today might be important: fridays across the middle east have been, and the syrian situation is surely at the breaking point.

or get out the way

assad leads the reform.

israeli patriots running for president of the united states

few things are more disturbing than the approach of american politicians to israel. indeed they often seem to be actual agents - spokesmen, mouthpieces - of the israeli government, repeating its formulations and recapitulating its rigidity mechanically. every consideration of this matter in the media connects the response of presidential candidates to fundraising, which i must say is an observation that, if it came from anyone besides everyone, would sound amazingly anti-semitic: everyone knows where the money is, i guess, or who controls the banking system or something. but even if all that is true, it would be (or, it is) a devastating indictment of the american political system to attribute all these people's positions to $$$. steve rattner said it on morning joe. commentary magazine (for god's sake) talked about how the move will "depress" democratic fundraising. obviously, the united states can have no role in making peace if any of the republicans running get elected, since their position is word-for-word the position of one of the parties, and it's entirely non-negotiable because they can't finance their campaigns otherwise. palestinians' influence on the republican party - like any group's, i suppose - is precisely proportional to their presence on wall street. 

meanwhile, i would have thought that what obama said yesterday was simply a slightly-more straightforward formulation of the obvious basis of negotiations for decades. but even that is an insane radical departure in the eyes of netanyahu and hence in the eyes of mitt romney, tim pawlenty, jon huntsman, etc etc. it's not like obama actually criticized the brutality of israel's blockade of gaza or something, or went all "apartheid wall." can you imagine if he did? just to begin with, it'd be "anti-semitism!" tell you what, and speaking of campaign contributions and who's operating mitt romney's mouth: why don't you concentrate on making anti-semitic stereotypes false, rather than pointedly confirming them while constantly using the accusation to short-circuit even a rudimentary discussion of what is actually going on?

obama and assad

well obama is capable of giving an excellent speech. one thing i just don't understand: why he's still saying that 'assad faces a choice,' and that he 'can lead a transition.' assad has killed hundreds, interned more than 10,000 people, etc. the hope that the obama admin continues to hold out for assad is odd, even on completely other grounds: that syria is aligned with iran, for instance. i keep thinking that there's something we don't know, some substantial u.s. stake in the syrian regime that we don't understand, or some intelligence about the internal dialogue in the syrian regime, or something. otherwise this approach doesn't seem consistent or sensible or even fully comprehensible.

misrata a month ago

on to syria!

in case you're wondering: yes. i would endorse lobbing cruise missiles into the presidential palace in damascus. the idea that the obama admin is still urging assad to institute reforms, etc., rather than calling for his immediate unconditional resignation, is disturbing.

the state of cuny

cuny has ditched tony kushner from its graduation ceremony (=honorary degree) on the grounds that he's "disparaged the state of israel." sometimes i agree that new york should secede from the union, or that it already has. or maybe it should just be annexed by "the state of israel." obviously the settlements in manhattan are expanding. yo i wonder what the propaganda value is supposed to be of always using the phrase "the state of israel." 

“I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. “Especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are almost universally misogynist, antigay, anti-Christian.”

just for the hell of it, i'll point out that turkey is a democracy. but what you're doing with trustees that just mutter word-for-word the propaganda of other governments, or engage in exclusions or repressions of speech to enforce the conventional yapyap of their bureaucrats, is a question cuny should ask itself.

while we're at it, we might ask what the attitude of the state of israel actually is to the spread of democracy among their neighbors. at any rate, the question here is whether kushner's positions as articulated disqualify him for an honorary degree from an american public university. i would have said that the idea that they do is ridiculous. 

bashar really has his fan club, like hillary clinton and whoever put together this site, describing him as "a younger, more moderate, more progressive Arab voice."

As one of the self-styled, “next generation” of Middle East leaders, like King Abdullah of Jordan, Bashar, with his technological X-Box savvy and love of Phil Collins, has managed to weather the domestic and regional storms thus far.  One of the youngest Middle Eastern leaders in power, he is likely to be around for a long time, and he along with his smokin’ hot wife is certainly going to be changing the landscape of the region.

i must say that the phil collins thing should have made us all see that bashar el-assad is a monster, even with his smokin wife. soon, perhaps, he will himself be smokin. he's earned it.

for some reason, every media outlet favors the formulation 'forces loyal to moammar gaddafi,' as also to assad or mubarak. i think they should stop reading minds. it seems particularly odd with regard to libya, where a goodly portion of gaddafi's force evidently consists of mercenaries. and 'loyalty' is actually the name for a virtue: i notice that carmelo anthony - who had an amazing game against the celtics last night - has it tattooed on his arm. but his approach is stop snitchin, which i sort of doubt is at the heart of the practice of assad 'loyalists.'

anyway, just go for 'the forces of moammar gaddafi.' it's neutral, shorter, and picks out the same people.

one symptom of the crisis crisis is all these forty or fifty-year states of emergency. i like the idea of spending decades panicking. i assume bashar al-assad has been screaming in unreasoning terror since birth.

perhaps the state of emergency was imposed and kept in place for so long as a response to the gluten crisis. or the dilbert crisis. or the crisis crisis itself.

i think bahrain is where this region-wide uprising could go fearsomely wrong. of course libya shows the potential effectiveness of the forces of reaction etc. but already the monarchy in bahrain is in a brutal crackdown on shiites, employing saudi military forces. let's just say that various nightmare scenarios occur, and saudi arabia and iran are two of the most heavily-armed powers in the region, with constituencies extending far beyond their own borders. it could get extremely bad extremely quickly over an extremely large area. throw in israel, the u.s. presence in iraq and the internal problems there, and you have a witches' brew of extraordinarily complex conflagration.

you know in yemen, saleh is asserting that the protests are an american/israeli plot. meanwhile the protesters are asserting that the crackdown by saleh is american-backed. whatever the fact, it's obvious that anti-americanism is something everyone agrees on. i think you'd have to blame the bush admin on that, in part (on the other hand decades of uncritical support for israel, combined with arab antisemitism, doesn't help. neither exploitation of oil, arming despots to the teeth etc.) on the other hand, the 'pragmatism' of the obama admin is extremely disconcerting; i think we don't know which side to be on; we just want to back and thus influence the winners. what we say about libya is exquisitely proportioned to who's winning, as it was in egypt.