From TruthOut
By Norman Solomon

Israelis and Arabs “feel that only force can assure justice,” I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And he wrote, “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government’s stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.

Israel’s airstrikes “have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise,” Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies, pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel’s attack. “This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians.” She mentioned “the one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year.”

Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel’s violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” Gandhi said.

What about a hundred eyes for an eye?

Read more Eye for an Eye

From Information Clearing House
By Robert Fisk

We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care any more – providing we don’t offend the Israelis. It’s not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel’s side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.

Ever since 1948, we’ve been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist “death wagon” will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be “liberated”. And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise “restraint” – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas’s home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.

The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel’s anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas’s anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which … See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and … Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was “under siege” – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv.

Read more History

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one’s typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or “who started it.” Still, any minimally decent human being — even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza — would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

But not The New Republic’s Marty Peretz. Here is his uniquely despicable view of the events of the last couple of days:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

“Do not fuck with the Jews.” And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead — including numerous children — and many hundreds more seriously wounded?

Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.

Objections to the Israeli attack are just “whining.” Those are the words of a psychopath. And what to do now?

Read more Israel

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

As George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make their case for some positive legacy from the past eight years, two arguments are playing key roles: the notion that torturing terror suspects saved American lives and the belief that Bush’s Iraq troop “surge” transformed a disaster into something close to “victory.”

Not only will these twin arguments be important in defining the public’s future impression of where Bush should rank on the presidential list, but they could constrain how far President Barack Obama can go in reversing these policies. In other words, the perception of the past can affect the future.

Though most current thinking holds that George W. Bush might want to trademark the slogan “Worst President Ever,” America’s powerful right-wing media (and its many allies in the mainstream press) will surely seek to rehabilitate Bush’s reputation as much as possible.

Even elevating Bush to the status of a presidential mediocrity might open the door for a revival of the Bush Dynasty with brother Jeb already eyeing one of Florida’s U.S. Senate seats and possibly harboring grander ambitions.

And even if another Bush in the White House is not realistic, a kinder-gentler judgment on George W. Bush at least could help the Republican Party rebound in 2010 and 2012. So evaluating the Bush-Cheney torture policies and how successful the “surge” are not just academic exercises.

Read more Myths

From AlterNet
By Paul Alexander

Last week, Al Gore sent an email message urging supporters to give money to Don Siegelman’s legal defense fund. Gore is the latest in a string of high profile supporters to suggest Siegelman, the former Governor of Alabama, was the victim of a Republican plot when he was found guilty of bribery, conspiracy and fraud in 2006, and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Now, in the waning days of the Bush administration, Siegelman is trying to win back his freedom — not to mention his good name — in a courtroom in Atlanta. Earlier this year, an appeals court granted his release after he had served nine months, saying the Governor’s appeal had raised “substantial questions” about the case against him. Siegelman’s cause was helped by a bipartisan group of 54 former state attorneys general from across the country who filed a federal appeals brief supporting his bid to overturn the conviction. Republican insiders have also come forward to say Siegelman was unfairly targeted by Rove and his circle.

Making it in prison depends on one’s level of tolerance. I’m used to mopping in my wife’s kitchen. It was just a bigger floor.

Siegelman’s appeal was heard earlier this month and the verdict will determine whether he returns to prison to finish out his sentence, or goes free.

How did a former governor — and a rising star in the Democratic Party — end up in a situation like this?

Read more Rove

From The LA Times
By Chris Ayres

There has been much talk in the media about America’s threatened superpower status — a result of its near-fatal exposure to the Kryptonite of subprime mortgages, among other factors — and how the country will inevitably find itself going the way of that other once-undefeated political juggernaut, the dear old British Empire.

To which I say: Lucky America!

I mean, yeah, it’s going to sting a bit. Losing any big, sexy-sounding job title will inevitably deliver a blow to your self-esteem. Yet it can also be liberating.

Do Tehranis and Muscovites blame Britain for the culture of mindless self-gratification that brought down the global economy? Of course not. They blame America — even though Britain is arguably the more guilty party, what with its foreign-debt-to-GDP ratio standing at an unconscionable (and, really, quite embarrassing) 490%, as opposed to the United States’ puritanical 89% (according to the 2007 “purchasing power parity” GDP and external debt figures supplied by the CIA World Factbook).

The fact is that when you’re No. 1, you always get blamed for everything. When you’re No. 3, or No. 5 — or No. 135 — you can put your hands in your pockets and whistle tunelessly with a “Who, me?” look on your face, and no one ever asks any questions.

Read more Slacker Americans

From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Obama won the Democratic nomination and the presidency by speaking out against the Iraq War. Now that he’s packing for Washington, however, the old Chicago lawyer is using Harvard Law weasel words to make sure the war goes on for years.

Germans are organized. The French are snotty. Americans have a national character trait, too: inattention. It’s now obvious that Obama exploited our hard-wired inability to read between the lines to lay the groundwork for what many of his supporters will soon view as a terrible betrayal.

Right there, in a July 14th op/ed, is Obama’s triumph of plausible deniability: “The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep,” he wrote in The New York Times. “Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.”

Seems clear. End means end. Finito. No more. But there’s an interesting phrase in Obama’s promises to pull out, repeated throughout the campaign”: “combat troops.” “We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated,” he wrote in his op/ed. “We can safely redeploy our combat brigades.”

“It’s time to end this war,” Obama concluded. Ending the war would mean following the political cartoonist Matt Bors’ prescription: The troops would go to the airport. They would board planes. They would fly away.

Read more Obama

From After Downing Street
By David Swanson

Russ Baker’s new book presents an account of the U.S. government that is both remarkably new and extensively documented. According to this account, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, devoted his career to secret intelligence work with the CIA many years before he became the CIA director, and the network of spies and petroleum plutocrats he began working with early on has played a powerful but hidden role in determining the direction of the U.S. government up to the current day.

New research and newly highlighted information assembled by Baker presents at least the strong possibility that Bush was involved in assassinating President Kennedy, and that Bush was involved in staging the Watergate break-in (and the break-in at Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s) with the purpose of having these break-ins exposed and the blame placed on President Nixon. In this account, those in on the get-Nixon plot included John Dean and Bob Woodward. While this retelling of history would make a certain Robert Redford movie look really, really silly, it would — on the other hand — make Woodward’s performance during Watergate fit more coherently with everything he’s known to have done before and since. It would also give new meaning to Dean’s recent book title “Conservatives Without a Conscience.” I would love to see either of these men’s response to Baker’s book.

Many readers of this review may now be rushing off to declare Baker either profoundly insane or (probably in fewer cases) indisputably correct in his views regarding the removal of Kennedy and Nixon from the White House, but I would strongly urge reading the book before doing so. It’s called “Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means for America.”

Read more H.W. Bush

From The Seattle Times
By Ellen Goodman

I was doing fine until I saw the rocking chairs. My attacks of Bush-bashing were in remission. I told myself it was time to move on, to embrace the change you can believe in and, well, you get the idea.

So when the president — he’s still the president? — popped up on television, I would repeat what Republicans told Democrats in 2000 after the Supreme Court ruling made George W. Bush president: Get Over It. Snap Out Of It. When he made a cameo appearance to socialize another piece of the economy, I silently counted the days of his tenure, backward.

I didn’t even squeal when they unveiled the presidential portrait of the man in his Casual Friday duds. And if I started to backslide, I logged on to YouTube. There — nepotism alert! — my comedian daughter Katie posted her own toodaloo to the president, a PG-13-rated satire called “Time to Say Goodbye to George W. Bush” that raised my spirits.

But then came the moment when the senior staff of Bush enablers gave two comfy rocking chairs to the man who described himself as “an old sage at 62 … headed to retirement.” The symbolism was too much.

Hadn’t Bush just said, “this isn’t one of the presidencies where you ride off into the sunset, you know, kind of waving goodbye”? Nevertheless, the chairs came with a video of the sunset over Crawford, Texas. It was a gift-wrapped reminder that after leaving the country in shambles, he is leaving the White House with peace of mind.

Read more Lack of Regrets

From TruthDig
By David Sirota

For most of us, Benjamin Franklin’s words in 1789 still apply: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

However, millionaires, by definition, are not most of us. While they can’t stave off the grim reaper, they can convince lawmakers to shield them from the taxman and balance budgets on the backs of everyone else.

That’s what’s going on in revenue-starved states right now: governors are preparing to slash middle-class programs and are resisting calls to raise taxes on the wealthy.
Nowhere is this class war more pronounced than in New York—the home of the financial thieves who killed the economy. Having halved its top tax rate over the last three decades, New York today faces a $15.4 billion deficit. In response, Gov. David Paterson (D) might have asked his state’s Gordon Gekkos to pay higher taxes, especially considering the idea’s popularity in polls and the news that Wall Street’s elite are still swimming in money. Indeed, according to CBS News, the allegedly beleaguered financial industry is so flush with cash it plans to dole out $14 billion in executive bonuses this year.

Yet, far from forcing robber barons to pay their fair share, Paterson told the New York Times that taxing millionaires is “the last place you want to go.” Instead, he proposes to punish Joe and Jane Six-pack by hiking the taxes and cutting the programs that disproportionately impact them. Specifically, he wants to increase sales taxes, college tuitions and licensing fees and slash education and low-income health programs.

Paterson defended his proposals by telling PBS’s Bill Moyers “that when you tax the wealthy in the downturn of an economy, you have an automatic link of a loss of job opportunities and then a loss of population.” The rationale sounds intelligently pragmatic—until you peruse the relevant data.

Read more Economic Death