PAUL KRUGMAN: Time to Take a Stand

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.

There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.

First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. And a recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.

So how can the military be claiming otherwise? Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people......


http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/09/paul-krugman-time-to-take-stand.html

There are still some honest senior officers but the ones placed in the top spots, like Petraeus, are traitorous, gutless stooges for the criminal administration. If the Democrats don't stand up now, I don't think they ever will.

there in Iran.

and decisive than by being timid and ineffective. Allowing the GOPers to wield the war as a political weapon allows them to be on the offensive, always setting the terms of debate and forcing the Dems to dance to their tune. Dems trying to use it as a political weapon themselves will only cause damage--they'll lose credibility and integrity on the subject if the public gets a sense that Dems are only interested in proving Chimpy wrong and winning elections, not in serving the country's best interests. Playing to the 30 percenters, though, is a recipe for disaster--these idiots will NEVER vote for a D in their lives--why pay them any heed?

We can debate the reasons why they seem to be unwilling to take any substamntive criminal action against multiple-felons who performed their crimes shamelessly and out the open.

Anthrax?

Blackmail?

Living in Fox's False Reality?

Does it matter WHY anymore? It just is. Sadly, for the nation, it's people, and the cause of freedom that will not be handed down to future generations of Amerikans the way it was passed to us, the last generations of Free Americans.

GOP sullied in terms of scandal and corruption, and yet Dems are still afraid to move into a clear leadership role on Iraq. Who will stand up, use strong and forceful language, make the barnburner speech that ends up being the shot heard 'round the world, to sway Congress into adopting some sanity on the war? Won't be Kerry--too long-winded and cerebral, same with Biden. Feingold's too liberal to make the R's pay heed, Boxer and Kennedy too. Obama, Hillary and Dodd are too cautious because of '08. My fear is that it will be an R, like Lugar or Warner, that drives the debate in the next few weeks, and makes Dems look like weak keystone cops, too concerned with politics and offending people to make a stand.

through an amazing day-to-day look at the Rise of Hitler, I have earned even more about the Rise of Bushler.

I have not the inclination nor time to lay all of what I have learned in this book "I Will Bear Witness" by Victor Klemperer, a Jew who, amazingly, survived in GERMANY for the entirety of WWII. He couldn't have had much company. :cry:

http://www.amazon.com/Will-Bear-Witness-1933-1941-Paperbacks/dp/0375753788

The point is, reading 1933-37 years the similarities to living in Bushmerika are far more than I ever could have imagined. Life was so, relatively...normal. But as 1937 (2007) progressed and moved on to '38-'40, Klemperer came to a disheartening conclusion:

That Hitler was empowered not in spite of Germany but instead was the embodiment of most of the German People and that he was not an aberration, at all, but a natural outgrowth.

Now as I have said, Nazi Germany, 1933-37, everything was very normal, and suddenly people did not grow horns and walk around murdering Jews at will. Hell, even into '39 you had sympathetic Germans (even some Nazis who weren't all excited/Hannitized about Hitlerism) who would try to help the Jewish Klemperer and his wife.

All thoroughout the diary, Klemperer reads like DU. He's up, he's down, he's excited, Hitler is finished, this new scandal will finish him. No, despair again, Hitler stronger than ever, and back and forth and back and forth until it finally became clear in 1937 or so. Even as late as 1937, LOTS of people speaking opposition to Hitler as with Bush in 2007, but whispered and the media of course, like Imperial Amerikan media only worse, all Nazi/Bushie lies all the time.

As it has become clear to me in 2007:

That Bush empowered was not in spite of Amerika but instead was the embodiment of most of the Amerikan People and that he was not an aberration, at all, but a natural outgrowth and expression of the current Amerikan character, which would seem to be exactly the opposite of what we were during WWII and the American Revolution.

It is a hideous thought. But it is as true now as when Klemperer first came to it about the last set of Bushies, the Nazis, to destroy a Republic and institute Right-Wing Authoritarianism.

And yes, I am well aware that a majority of Amerikans oppose Bushler. So what? It's not going to stop him any more than the same was true about Hitler and the Nazis in Germany 1935 and it matter nothing either.

It is the nature of tyrants like Hitler and Bush. The people they ruthlessly rule are disposable trash bags to them.

The Lieberman-lovers are alive and well and in charge of the democratic party.

They would not turn on him when he lost the primary, and they are with him now.

They love this new Amerika! They love this goddamn war! They just wish they could kill more faster.

i will call 30 congress people and senators tomorrow and demand they stop this damn war and stop the fisa law breaking..they did not have the right to give away my rights !

i will fight these mtf'ers if it takes everything in me..and it just might..

but i sit here in tears right now..

fly..

...along the same lines is "Defying Hitler," which speaks to the same "ordinary life" theme alluded to by Klemperer. Here's a clip:

"The remainder of Defying Hitler covers the Nazi Revolution of 1933. Haffner describes, from the perspective of an ordinary person, the response to the Reichstag fire, the inaction of opposing leaders, the meek surrender of Communist and centrist popular militia, the Jewish boycott, and the steady erosion of freedom amid surface normality."

"t was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror. I have described how the treachery and cowardice of the leaders of the opposition prevented their organisations being used against the Nazis or offering any resistance. That still leaves the question why no individuals ever spontaneously opposed some particular injustice or iniquity they experienced, even if they did not act against the whole. <...> It was hindered by the mechanical continuation of normal daily life."


We seem to be coming back full circle to all that my father and his generation thought they'd quashed in WWII. And ordinary life holds sway now, too. We're all busy trying to eat and pay the rent/mortgage, and though many of us devote time to writing letters and making calls, nothing we do seems to have any real effect. It begins to seem that it will take a complete breakdown, economically, socially to change things -- and that change may well not be a swing back to "normalcy," but a life very different from what we've known.

I'm not a morose pessimist by nature, but I'm afflicted with the ability to observe and consider, and I see nothing to cause much hope right now from our electoral process.

(Italics are not mine. I can't get rid of them, so please ignore.)

... the information in, and some glitch inserted italics in the middle of the quote which were not originally there.

Only a problem if it continues! :)

;)

"Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military."

It won't be "someone". It will be a considerable slice of the American electorate. One of the biggest problems America currently has is its adulation of the military. The Democrats' cringe arises from fear not only of Republican voters or swing voters but of their own voters, enough of whom share that adulation to make their caution prudent in power-winning terms, however dire the consequences. Similarly they lack the moral courage to oppose the death penalty or attempt to control guns. They are trying to win votes in a militaristic culture which takes many intrinsically right wing attitudes as self evidently good and beyond question. As far as I can see not one Democrat "leader" has the guts to stop cringing, start asking those questions and begin the slog back to a society based on enlightenment values.

In each vote that pit the dems against the repugs it was not the majority of dems that lost it for us, but it was a small number of 'Blue Dog Democrats. The were for the most part elected in 2006, aided in the primaries by Rahm Emmanual, against the rules of the party. He was at the time the head of the DCCC, appointed by Pelosi. They are all conservatives, some even were republicans last time around.

IMHO this was a plot between Emmanual, Pelosi, and Turd Blossom, in conjunction with wealthy conservatives to put conservatives in control of congress without resorting to the electorate to trust them.

Repugs who changed party affiliations and successfully ran as Dems. And, a rash of “Conservative Dems”. I asked repeatedly, what the h___ is a Conservative Dem and why would I want to support one? It was surreal, all who supported these Dems behaved as though everything was normal.