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Indict Dick Cheney

By Eric P. Metze | May 28, 2009

There has been a lot of “debate” over what to do with all of the human beings and monsters locked away in Guantanamo Bay. There are apparently only two sides to this discussion: free them all and send them letters of apology or kill them all and let God sort them out. I’m obviously oversimplifying things, but you wouldn’t know it if you watched the 24-hour news channels. Like so many public discussions, the truth is often obscured by the rhetoric.

Gitmo TortureFor every terror suspect we convict fairly, there are hundreds we detain unfairly. For every innocent person we keep incarcerated, we create dozens of potential enemies. And for every person (regardless of innocence or guilt) we treat unfairly or inhumanely, we create untold numbers of people who no longer see America as the shining beacon of freedom we so desperately claim to be. What other reasons do terrorists need to demonize us if we actively and regularly give them reasons? How can we dispute their claim that we are the Great Evil when our actions are so greatly evil?

Aside from keeping the worst of the worst locked safely away, the only thing that can change the anti-American sentiment that has been broiling over the past decade is a fresh and decent approach to our fellow citizens of the world. I do not include terrorists in this group, however. A terrorist loses their worldwide citizenship once they conspire to commit crimes against their fellow humans. But how, exactly, is that different than when we commit crimes against our fellow humans? An innocent person locked away in a dank cell is a crime of the highest order, and every person in the society that supports it shares the blame for it.

It used to be that the ends justified the means. Airplanes were used to murder 3,000 Americans? Let’s tighten airport security to the point where even children and the elderly are searched and detained. The Viet Cong are hiding amongst women and children in the jungle? Let’s firebomb the whole place to ensure we kill enough of the enemy. Japan attacks a military installation in the United States? Let’s put all people of Japanese descent into concentration camps. The South wants to secede from the union? Let’s go to war with them and kill hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans. The native Americans won’t move out of the land we want? Let’s force them off or just slaughter them outright.

Throughout American history, we have justified our atrocities in the name of our ideals. But even when those ideals are righteous, it does not change the fact that we have committed atrocities. Deep down, every intelligent or thoughtful person knows this. That’s why we justify executing people who have committed murder. We know that we are killing someone to make the point that killing is wrong. And while most of us recognize how glaringly hypocritical it is, as a nation we continue to do it anyway. If there was no hypocrisy to our actions, it would need no justification.

Which leads me to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Immediately after President Obama’s speech that re-defined America’s stance on national security, not five minutes had passed before Cheney took his own stage in an attempt to give a rebuttal. The Dick CheneyHis speech was a pre-emptive attack on his enemies, a tactic he is clearly comfortable with. In it’s own Karlrovian way, it displayed obvious hypocrisy wrapped in a package of carefully-worded propaganda. For example, after he mentioned 9/11 over a dozen times, he clearly stated that we should not focus on the past. Then he attempted to deflect criticism away from his administration and place the blame onto the current one, oblivious to the points Obama made just moments earlier about the numbers of political prisoners the Bush administration freed. He focused on innane and irrelevant details such as the term “abducted” and incorrectly characterized it as the Obama administration’s wording, all while using terms like “sadistic” to describe American iterrogators who were acting under full authorization from the Bush administration. He continued to fuel the quasi-debate about how safe America would be if we allowed detainees to be held on American soil, completely ignoring the fact that we have held thousands of people in Federal maxiumum security prisons and no one has ever escaped from one. Perhaps worst of all, he took credit for the fact that we were not attacked while under his watch, while failing to recognize that hundreds of attacks have occured on American soldiers every year since we entered Iraq.

All of this got me thinking about why Cheney (who I do not believe cares about America as much as he would like us to think) is suddenly so vocal on this issue. He has been on a media blitz, employing his loyal servants, family members, and his own personal media outlet to repeat the same talking points as opposed to actual experts who understand the issue. Why, Dick? Well, his daughter accidentally let the truth slip: Cheney fears prosecution. And he should. One grand jury has already indicted him, and more people are calling for his indictment every day.

I am pleased with the new direction this nation appears to be heading in terms of how we deal with terror suspects. If things go as planned, we will move these prisoners to our own soil where they can be safely and legally monitored. President Obama’s speech in front of the Constitution was more of a poignant reminder of where we come from than an arrogant assumption about missions not-quite-accomplished. That speech is destined for the history books, but hopefully it will be remembered as one of the great turning points in the American psyche. I hope it is the beginning of an era when we actually hold our leaders responsible for their actions, not excuse them because of their motives. Cheney is such a slippery weasel that I have no illusions about justice ever being served, but I would like to at least see us try. After all, when Bill Clinton shot someone in the face, it wasn’t with a shotgun, and we impeached him.

That is why I fully support the indictment and prosecution of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

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Media and the Brain

By Bruce | October 29, 2008

Popular culture has become as sulfur-smelling shit hitting the fan — specks of bad yuk all over everything.
Spreading across the face of modern life like a thick, wet blanket, obscuring vision, hampering and dominating, culture is just a waste product from the engine that’s the media — and media the word carries a definition created from an almost-endless list of particulars from TV, movies, books, art, anything written, spoken or sang, to science and engineering.
A whole shitload of shit.

(Illustration was found here).

Modern media’s nefarious influence originated the day before Halloween, Oct. 30, 1938 — 70 years ago Thursday.
Reality and fiction became one and the same for a big chunk of the US public when Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air created a radio-induced panic by adapting H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds as a news broadcast.
Welles and his group adapted all kinds of literature for its weekly radio show — just the week before, they’d presented Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days — but War of the Worlds turned out to be more than just another production.
A shit-fire erupted. Listeners who failed to catch the opening disclaimer about it being a radio play, had to wait 40 minutes before another explanation was made — more than enough time to panic and become irrational.
Although there were stories of mass panic — people cowering in basements, roads full of cars, fleeing a horrifying Martian fireball landing near Grovers Mill, New Jersey — it has all proved to be highly exaggerated by newspapers the following days.
The big mess came from tons of panic telephone calls to police, fire and radio stations, newspapers, hospitals and the like.
A good account of the incident can be found at National Geographic.

In the wake of the Munich, Germany, bullshit with Hitler only a month before and Welles’ efficient use of realistic-sounding news operations put a naive public quickly on edge.
As noted journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote at the time, Welles’ little exhibition had political consequences:

No, the mega-talented Mr. Welles did have something at hand — the great, unknown fear factor in human nature.
Media attacks the brain.
Joseph Goebbels had a knack for using media to fearmonger, or manipulate media to scare, to obtain a certain goal, the media a vehicle/means to an end, so to speak.
In fact, Goebbels founded and was the principal editor of the official Nazi periodical Der Angriff — “The Attack.”
And nowadays, we have Karl Rove, who really was an inbred follower of Lee Atwater.
Bush’s brain attempted to manipulate America, and in some cases, and for awhile, did just that, twisted and kneaded facts from lies, half truths and just plain plain bullshit.

(Illustration found here.

And, despite all the techno-marvels available nowadays, silence can be more than effective.

Indeed, silence on the most-all-consuming of all media — TV.
Television’s affect/effect is enormous, its influence on everybody pretty-much total — no one is immune, nobody gets out of this one alive.
Dreamy, fantasy-fueled kids, such as I in the late 1950s (and still today in grown-up form), are the easiest victims for TV’s long-lasting, potent and enchanting facade, which by now has produced a twisted-madness view of life.
One doesn’t have dwell in the ethereal, however, to have succumbed to TV’s wiles — sons of insurance salesmen and sons of farmers or teachers or big-rig drivers, all have been stamped in the brain by a television set almost all the time somewhere in the near vicinity.
Fiction and reality are practically fused nowadays with cable, satellite, blow-back online TV like YouTube, subtly blended and seamless, patched together in the twinkle-blink of an eye.
TV is an apparatus so much a part of life this past more-than 50 years, it’s taken completely for granted. Albeit the TV screen might cover a wall, it’s still an appliance so-well-blended, so-always-there, it’s near invisible.
The instrument of TV, in itself, is just like a toaster, but way different.

Despite all the chatter, all the options on TV nowadays, bullshit is still bullshit even when spoken with less than a whisper.

Case in point: Ignorance by a huge chunk/swath of America to the New York Times much-detailed expose of the Pentagon’s propaganda program.
The huge Times piece (11 pages) outlined how Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon created a legion of retired military types to hype the war on TV.
Of course, in the wave of hyper news the past three months, especially with the worldwide financial blow out, along with the politics, Sarah Palin and like junk, the revelation of Pentagon mouthpieces on TV news shows lying about how the Iraqi war was proceeding has slipped far, far afield.

Although the story appeared in April, and there was much play online, television went total black on the whole affair — TV was a co-conspirator.
Only one TV network, PBS, reported on the Times story and the Pentagon operation.
As Think Progress noted in early May;

The Pentagon has apparently gotten away with it — at least for now.

Another media quiet moment is the back-story on John McCain.
Rolling Stone magazine earlier this month presented a description of a self-centered hardcase McCain — a lifetime thing.
And if even a third of the article is true, McCain has very serious mental problems.
And this:
In September, counterpunch.org published a letter describing an encounter a woman had with McCain while on vacation in Fiji prior to the 2000 election.
I made mention of the incident on my blog and continued on my way.
Last week, I spied another story on HuffPost which sounded very similar, but different.
The first story can be found here:

And this from HuffPost:

The problem is we didn’t know who he is — apparently a badly deranged individual — because the news media, the mainstream news media, never told the truth, never revealed McCain’s problems.
Apparently reporters covering McCain looked upon him as a granddaddy or something akin to that as witnessed by a story Tuesday in the LA Times:

The reporter, Maeve Reston, then hit McCain with an awkward moment as seen here and the sweet, Straight Talking Express went into the cold, ugly gulping ‘Do You Know Who I Am?’ bullshit.

Does Tom Brokaw know McCain’s real persona?
Mainstream journalism has become way-lucrative for some that past couple of decades, just look at Ted Koppel’s estate jumping.
Control is to govern the TV.

(Illustration found here).

Technology has shifted the TV from just the so-called ‘living room’ to practically anywhere.
The Internet and all the little gadgets associated with it has caused a revolution in how we view the boob tube, maybe rearranging the impact of TV’s influence.

Last March, Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy,” a Fox animated comedy that ranks among the most popular online shows, told the International Herald Tribune a long-time familiar fixture might soon be gone from our lives.

An idea evoking nostalgic sadness for an inanimate object.

My first TV memory is of the set itself — an image really, really faded of this enormous cabinet-looking thing with a small glass front sitting on the back of a delivery truck, circa summertime, 1955.
I was a bit younger than seven — I hadn’t started to school just yet — and the set belonged to neighbors, owners of a hardware store in downtown Enterprise, Ala.
My family didn’t get our own TV for another two years, and after that, always had one.

TV appears a product of a near-obsessive desire to eliminate distance between people, places or things. No one guy invented TV.
A shit-load of brainiacs over near-two centuries, probably starting in 1837 with studies on electromagnetism, contributed in one way or another to advancing the product further toward the TV system we have today.

As a perception, this technological wonder most likely completed its purpose on April 7, 1927.
On that day the first long-distant television signal was broadcast between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover gave a little speech at the event.
Hoover was a rich, progressive, too-big-for-his-britches nit wit.
A mining engineer by trade, he was elected president the following year, but blown out of office in 1932 by not understanding, and thus failing to figure out the Great Depression — his name now synonymous with an era of catastrophic disaster, as back in “Hoover times.”
In his comments at the TV-signal exhibit, Hoover lavished lofty words on the significance of the occasion, but also inadvertently revealed the inherent disaster of human-evolved technology:

Human genius…?

(Illustration found here).

Television today is a morphed-marvel of a medium.

In digesting TV, a human uses primarily the senses of sight and hearing.
The core of this is the sensorium, where all this shit comes together.
According to Wikipedia, sensorium (plural: sensoria) refers to the sum of an organism’s perception, the “seat of sensation,” where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives.
The term originally enters English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century. In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind’s organ.
This so-called mind’s organ — the brain — contains a person’s total character, which is based on an awareness by the individual of the unique and changing sensory environments around them. Our senses gives us sensation, perception and also provide interpretation.

Communication has always influenced cultural society.
A gaggle of experts, from Harold Dwight Lasswell and Harold Adams Innis to most likely the best-known of the media-studies-writers, Marshall McLuhan, sometimes referred to as the “Oracle of the Electronic Age,” predicted the onslaught of media and its effect on humanity.
McLuhan was a serious student of the inherent problems with media.
In fact, his most studious work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), warned “there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies.”

However, McLuhan is perhaps most popular and a semi-cult icon for his phrase turned into book title, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.
He believed just about everything was “media” — including even a light bulb, that “creates an environment by its mere presence.”
He was so well known, Woody Allen used him as a rebuttal prop in Annie Hall.

In this modern age with a near-overload of information, the human brain is toiling overtime to digest and understand it all, a near total barrage of shit thrown as if from a techno fan and striking everybody between the eyeballs.
As this insane, unprecedented presidential election rockets to its conclusion, now only days away, the Wall Street shit-storm seems to never end, wars and way-more than rumors of wars keep nerves on edge and the global warming meltdown gets worse by the hour, just remember the words of one, Homer Jay Simpson:

Yeah, but sometimes I feel like them folks in 1938 New Jersey: Freakin’ shit! Now it’s Martians!

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Obama and the Strange Current of Change

By Bruce | June 4, 2008

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — most peculiar, mama
— Nobody Told Me, John Lennon

The final ‘Tuesday primary’ passed into history yesterday as this most-strange of presidential elections continues to stimulate the mind and move the bowels.

Although Barack Obama last night finally reached that noted, mathematical line in the political sand, Hillary Clinton still persists in being petulant.
Despite the numbers on the board, despite Obama’s now-obvious, phenomenal grasp of a kind of celebrity status, as Rupert Murdoch crowed “rock star,” and has led a rolling-thunder-revue across the America this past 18 months, Clinton continues to hang like a tenacious bulldog.

US politics has rarely fostered any thing close to a “rock star” persona.
One could be stretching the idea a bit with Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Of course, Jack Kennedy in 1960, Bobby Kennedy in 1968, along maybe with Eugene McCarthy (“Clean for Gene”) — the last year of any real ground-swell-tidal wave of enthusiasm and popular support for any candidate near Obama’s appeal.
The French have a flair for it, sometimes in the Latino countries, but never hardly-ever in the US.
Hillary Clinton can’t see it, or doesn’t want to see it.

In a little speech last night at Baruch College in New York City, Clinton congratulated Obama on “for all that he’s accomplished,” but wouldn’t call it quits.
She was going to wait “24 to 48 hours” to make any kind of public decision, one she had to have known before she crawled up to that podium.
A shame in the face of tsunami reality.

Later in the evening, Obama revealed the curl of the tide.
In a talk before 17,000 or so supporters packed into the very-futuristic-sounding Ecel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn. — appropriately and ironically where John McCain will accept the Republican mantle at its convention in September — Obama became a part of history:

A lot of ground in such a short space. Forty years after Martin Luther King’s death — one simple Biblical generation — and a black man is a major candidate for president.
In 2008, the big issues of race and gender came together and after all didn’t seem to matter.
The major concept here is change.
Not because Obama is black, or Clinton is a woman, but because change is the single most-important topic, especially among the young, who can see beyond the political bullshit.
A case in point: Photo on a political blog site of a white, intelligent-looking young boy at an Obama rally wearing a t-shit proclaiming “I trust Obama with my future.”

And Clinton acted like a spoiled brat.
According to the New York Post, “He (Obama) tried to call her twice following the speech, but got her voicemail. She finally returned the call as his plane was about to fly out of St. Paul to Washington.”

And to Washington and face the strange.

McCain’s speech last night in New Orleans is prime, pure strange.
Universally panned, Rolling Stone called it the “Worst. Speech. Ever,” as McCain tried to tighten down the hatches, but just continued to make matters worse.
Via the Associated Press — McCain tried to strong-arm the atmosphere by a strange, reverse osmosis: “The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again. I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas.”
Failed ideas?

If the past 18 months is any indication, and if the overall, general disgust with the George Bush administration continues, McCain and the GOP will get slaughtered in November.

The big blank space, however, is the modern-era office of the president.
In The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, writer/editor Gene Healy describes the post of chief executive as having way out-grown what the Constitution originally intended.
And the current sitting president has sucked up governmental powers at a rate never before seen in American politics.
Healy warns of those powers and the pressure keep them would be hard to resist “even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.”

Change is good.
Strange days indeed, mama.

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