Antiwar.com Blog

The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank on the only cure for Nancy Pelosi’s rictus “smile”:

“She entered the room beaming and, over the course of an hour, smiled no fewer than 31 times and got off at least 23 laughs. But her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic ‘base’ over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

“‘Look,’ she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. ‘I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.’

“Unsmilingly, she continued: ‘If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.’

Poor people do indeed sleep in the streets of San Francisco, as anyone who has ever been to our downtown area will readily attest, and yet isn’t there something a little … scary about Pelosi’s Marie Antoinettish remark that seems to equate the homeless with rubbish that is rightfully swept away? It’s a sensitive subject in San Francisco, where compassionate liberalism — as opposed to Pelosi’s “liberalism” — is part of the City’s culture. 

I live in Nancy’s neighborhood, and we’ve bumped into each other, although not much. Having run against her (as the Republican nominee) in 1996, I had a bit of trouble getting her into a face-to-face: she refused to debate, and this imperious attitude evoked not a murmur of comment on the local political scene. I ran as the antiwar candidate, but since the war I was protesting back then was the Kosovo war, Bay Area liberals weren’t interested. Now, of course, there are people camped out on her lawn, trying to get an audience with Her Imperial(ist) Majesty, to no avail.

 Milbank continues:

“Though opposed to the war herself, Pelosi has for months been a target of an antiwar movement that believes she hasn’t done enough. Cindy Sheehan has announced a symbolic challenge to Pelosi in California’s 8th Congressional District. And the speaker is seething.

“‘We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,’ Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their ‘passion,’ Pelosi called it ‘a waste of time’ for them to target Democrats. ‘They are advocates,’ she said. ‘We are leaders.'”

Well then why doesn’t she start leading? Instead, she’s following the advice of Democratic spin-doctors who would much rather have the war as an issue in the upcoming presidential election than make any “risky” political move to actually bring our troops home. “We don’t have the votes,” they whine, but they’re lying: if the House, where they have a majority, votes down war funding, then the money can’t be spent. Period. The Democratic leadership rules this course out altogether, because they claim they’re frightened to death of being blamed for the defeat of our forces. Who lost Iraq? is not a question they feel prepared to answer under those circumstances. 

Better Iraqis and Americans should continue to die than the Democrats should have to get up off their knees, and rise to the occasion like real leaders, instead of craven opportunists. Aside from which, their opportunism is seriously misplaced: over 70 percent of the American people have had it up to here with this rotten war.  

Why are those people camped out in La Pelosi’s meticulously-manicured yard? Well, maybe because of this.

Yes, Nancy, it’s the First Amendment, and I hope every homeless person in town scoots on over to your digs with an “Impeach Bush” sign on the back of his cardboard placard imploring “Will Work for an End to the War — but I’ll settle for a square meal.”  

I like Milbank’s take on it:

“It was a rather fierce response to the party’s liberal base, which frightens many a congressional Democrat. But it wasn’t out of character for the new speaker. Pelosi’s fixed and constant smile makes her appear as if she is cutting an ad for a whitening toothpaste. But when you listen to the words that come from her grinning maw, the smile seems more akin to that of a barracuda.”

He got that right.

Bush today vigorously opposed a congressional resolution to finally recognize as genocide the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenian Christians.  Bush declared: “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.”

It’s a helluva thing when a war on terror supposedly requires the U.S. Congress to pretend that genocide didn’t occur.  Bush’s assertion that “we all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people” is a lie.   Most people either don’t know or don’t care about the carnage.  And Bush apparently wants to keep it that way.

The Washington Post editorial page was even more contemptible than Bush. They railed this morning that the resolution “endangers present-day U.S. security.”  The Post states, “The subject is a serious one — more than 1 million Armenians may have died at the hands of the Young Turk regime between 1915 and the early 1920s.”

May have?  Oh.  Perhaps it was all a misundertanding.

Ironically, Bush and the Washington Post editorial page are gung-ho on threatening massive bombing of Iran in part because the Iranian president is  seen as denying the Nazi Holocaust.

The U.S. government is supposedly obliged to help the Turkish government cover up its sordid past, and is also entitled to kill thousands or millions of Iranians because of that country’s figurehead’s denials of past atrocities.

I have consistently criticized Americans Against Escalation in Iraq — an antiwar group that has been running antiwar ads and doing grassroots political work – for what I viewed as their partisan strategy in pursuing an end to our involvement in Iraq, particularly their tactic of going after pro-war (or fence-sitting) Republicans in Congress and leaving pro-war Democrats alone. However, the following more than makes up for their past transgressions:

At last, the antiwar movement is waking up. Only a coalition of antiwar Democrats, Republicans, and independents can beat the War Party.

Wow! If even half of what Richard Poe claims in his “Hitchens Unhinged” piece over at Taki’s Top Drawer is true, what remains of the drink-soaked Trotskyist poppinjay’s reputation is shot. Here’s a hot excerpt:

“At the end of the event as he staggered, sweating and red faced, out of the room, he [Hitchens] advanced on Father Rutler in a threatening and physical manner, screaming that this beloved pastor and brilliant scholar whom he had never met was ‘a child molester and a lazy layabout who never did a day’s work in his life’. His behavior was so frightening that a bodyguard put himself between Hitchens and Father Rutler to protect him. Several of the event organizers then escorted Hitchens to the men’s room and when he emerged he continued his psychotic rant.”

Yikes.

Drunk on his own self-importance (and other things), reckless, violent, convinced he can get away with anything, Hitchens the personality seems to be the perfect reflection of the foreign policy he advocates.

Even Hitchens’ allies know what a dingbat he has become. The event, entitled “An Evening With Christopher Hitchens,” was sponsored by the “David Horowitz Freedom Center,” and took place at New York’s sedate Union League club, where Senor Horowitz no doubt had some inkling of what the out-of-control Hitchens was about to do when he opened the meeting with: “Welcome to what’s bound to be a stimulating and unpredictable events.”

I guess Hitchens was pretty well out of it by that time.

In the Michigan debate, economic imbecile John McCain just recommended that Ron Paul read The Wealth of Nations. Oh Jesus. Paul had just commented on how America’s fiscal insolvency is a result of maintaining a welfare-warfare – especially warfare – state. The military-industrial complex rakes in the dough, the politicians profit politically by distracting the yahoos from the nation’s real problems, and the national debt grows and grows – to be paid eventually in taxes, inflation, or both.

By the way, here’s Adam Smith on imperial warmongering:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

That’s from The Wealth of Nations, Johnny. Here’s some more.

Today at TomDispatch, Robert Lipsyte looks at recent media sideshows involving Michael Vick, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, Bill Belichick, et al., and wonders if there’s trickeration afoot:

After all, the powers-that-be love to promote sports scandals which encourage a hopelessness about the world as well as our ability to change or control it. Sports scandals liberate us from having to stand up, vote, demonstrate, move on. What’s the use when everything – including our games and pastimes – is so obviously fixed, or at least a little bit crooked?

But as Lipsyte notes, there’s one story at the intersection of sports and war “that refuses to die … one that, it seems, could yet give us hope.” Check it out.