Op-Ed
JULY 17, 2018
The unproven allegation that the Russian government helped us find out how the DNC was screwing Bernie Sanders with his pants on is not actually a moral, legal, or practical reason to launch a spree of mass-killing of innocents, which is what every war since WWII has been.
The terrorist acts of 9/11/2001 were crimes to be prosecuted, but not a moral, legal, or practical reason to launch a spree of mass-killing of innocents, even if dark-skinned Muslim innocents were chosen over any of the “white” places that the criminals plotted their crimes.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was also not what you have been told.
JULY 10, 2018
The eternal question of U.S. politics rears its ugly ass again: “Why in the hell does anyone ever listen to Alan Dershowitz?”
No court can overturn a Congressional impeachment and conviction. Will somebody at Fox and CNN page the nearest genocidal torture-defending lawyer, who is either Alan Dershowitz or someone joining him on a search for the real O.J. Simpson killer at a five-star restaurant for lunch today, and get Dershowitz a copy of the United States Constitution?
The Constitution gives impeachment to the House and the trial to the Senate with the Chief Justice presiding. It gives the House the “sole” power of impeachment, and the Senate the “sole” power to try all impeachments. That means nobody else, least of all a different branch of government, gets to say anything at all.
The Constitution, pace Dershowitz, does not list all specific offenses that qualify for impeachment.
ICE has strayed so far from its mission. It’s supposed to be here to keep Americans safe, but what it’s turned into is, frankly, a terrorist organization of its own, that is terrorizing people who are coming to this country.
I’m going to praise the heck out of yet another terrific book I’ve just read while yet again exclaiming (into a deep empty echoing canyon?) my bewilderment and outrage at the glaring omission it makes — the same one as all the other books.
George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis is part familiar; part original, creative, and inspiring; and pretty much all right-on and necessary. Its first chapter should be required reading everywhere — with the hope that whoever needs or wants the details will finish the book.
What’s a black female police officer to do when her fellow white male police officer talks about blowing up Black Lives Matter protestors? Any words of caution may be interpreted as anti-police rhetoric. This is the case of Police Lieutenant Melissa McFadden.
Racial discrimination
Police Lieutenant Melissa McFadden filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Columbus June 4. McFadden charges, among other things, that she was “retaliated and discriminated against” for “assisting a fellow officer in drafting and filing a claim of race based discrimination….” McFadden and one other female lieutenant are the highest-ranking minority women on the Columbus police force.
The charges in McFadden’s complaint are explosive. She alleges that after accompanying an “African-American female officer” to the city’s Human Resources department to file a complaint she was targeted by the white officers at the highest level of the department.
Institutionalized racism
Make no mistake: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions’ assault on immigrant families and their “tactic” of separating parents from their children are right out of the Nazi playbook.
It’s no accident US immigrations officials are telling parents they’re taking kids to “bathe,” then making them disappear … and then telling their parents they will never see them again.
This ghoulish reminder of Auschwitz shames us all. It should also terrify us. And make us ACT!
However removed we may think we are, WE are next, and so are our children.
This regime loves torture and dictatorship, and aspires to both.
Thugs like these have nothing of value to offer, so they rule with hate, fear, and scapegoating.
Many of these families are coming to our borders legally seeking asylum. Some families under assault are not even immigrants, they are merely of Hispanic origin or appearance.
There’s no immigrant “crisis” in the United States any more than there was a “Jewish Question” in Hitler’s Germany.
Hitler needed an object of hate to become absolute ruler. Jews comprised 1% of the German population. They were handy.
World BEYOND War
Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent.
The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again).
They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again).
General Braddock and Colonel Washington tried again in 1755 (and still failed, except in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated and the driving out of the Acadians and the Native Americans).
The British and U.S. attacked in 1758 and took away a Canadian fort, renamed it Pittsburgh, and eventually built a giant stadium across the river dedicated to the glorification of ketchup.
George Washington sent troops led by Benedict Arnold to attack Canada yet again in 1775.
An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided for the inclusion of Canada, despite Canada’s lack of interest in being included.
By David Swanson
We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, and yet they overwhelmingly believe that the United States is “fundamentally better than other countries.” Why?
Duina didn’t try to puzzle this one out for himself. He went out and surveyed patriotic poor people in Alabama and Montana. He found variations between those two places, such as people loving the government for helping them a little bit and people loving the government for not helping them at all. He found variations between men and women and racial groups, but mostly he found intense patriotism built around identical myths and phrases.
amantha Bee is a smart, talented, funny, incisive, edgy, 48-year-old Canadian/American mother of three. She is also the star of the TBS show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” now in its third year. In 2017, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.