The world of Charlie-Foxtrot

David Seaton's News Links
There is something nightmarish about the meteoric ascension of Barack Obama, a perfection of the same surrealist stupidity, of national foot shooting, that gave the world George W. Bush; as if the United States was imitating ancient Rome, where the Emperor Caligula made a consul of his horse. Caligula only did it once.

"Strange" is a good word, but there is a better one.

What do you call it when many problems, all with many intersecting vectors, each with its own conflicting internal contradictions, all of them in mutual contradiction with each other, all of which then line up like planets in a malignant horoscope? A series of thesis and antithesis with a dialectical result that can only produce a sinister synthesis?

The US military calls this construction a "clusterfuck"; sometimes known by the NATO, phonetic-alphabet acronym, "Charlie-Foxtrot".

The United States finds itself at this moment immersed in full-spectrum, multilayered, universal, clusterfuck of historic proportions.

Just for starters, while the Israelis continue to do what they do to the Palestinians, atomic bomb brewing, Holocaust denying, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just warmly received in Baghdad. So much for Iraq.

Turning to atomic Pakistan and that failed state, opium farm, Afghanistan, Arnaud de Borchgrave has this to say:

Replacing U.S. influence topside in Pakistan — or still competing for it — is Saudi Arabia and its protege Nawaz Sharif, the man deposed by Mr. Musharraf in 1999 and exiled to the Saudi kingdom for 10 years. He flew home last fall after Mrs. Bhutto's return, this time generously bankrolled by his Saudi friends. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries (with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates) to recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The new triumvirate gradually superseding President Bush's "most trusted non-NATO ally" is made up of ISI, Saudi Arabia and Nawaz Sharif. This does not bode well for the future of NATO in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul controls only a third of the country while a resurgent Taliban is now solidly entrenched in 10 percent of the narco-state, according to National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell. And tribal leaders call the shots in the rest of a barren, medieval country whose opium poppy production generates more than two-thirds of its gross domestic product (and funds Taliban's insurgency). The most optimistic estimate calls for the United States and NATO to remain engaged, with increased military and economic assets, for another three to five years. Ten years would be more realistic. Speaking not for attribution, a Darwi-speaking U.S. official, back from a wide-ranging inspection trip to Afghanistan, said: "The corruption defies imagination. It has to rank as the worst in the world." Mr. Karzai, he said, used to be called the mayor of Kabul. No more, said my informant. Now Mr. Karzai doesn't even control the capital. Most of his ministers have U.S. visas up to date — just in case. More important, NATO could fracture and founder over the Afghan commitment. Violence and terrorism could then quickly escalate across the world. READ IT ALL

And then of course, there is the economy. James Howard Kunstler is the "Sultan of Clusterfuck", America's most entertaining prophet of doom. Here is what he has to say about the economy:

When you introduce perversities into an economic system, they invariably end up expressing themselves as distortions. The economy that evolved the past two decades, driven by the perverse securitization of wishes and frauds, will now express itself in a stark cratering of American living standards. Incomes and jobs will vanish, massive quantities of stuff will collect dust on the WalMart shelves, the fragile infrastructures of daily life will go to shit, and there will be political hell to pay. Every attempt to avoid a straight-up workout of our massive losses, will represent another layer of perversity and more consequent destructive distortions. I feel sorry for the next president. Even as he takes his oath of office, the nation will be flying apart like a seized-up engine. READ IT ALL

Into this world sails the USS Barack Obama, brilliant law student who has practiced little law, community activist, state legislator, three years in the US Senate... the man of the hour.

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with his wife, Valerie Plame, were a couple at the center of the fight against the rush to war in Iraq: Wilson's is the most damning dismantling of Barack Obama that I have read so far.

Joseph C. Wilson: Obama's Hollow "Judgment" and Empty Record - Huffington Post
I was involved in that debate in every step of the effort to prevent this senseless war and I profoundly resent Obama's distortion of George Bush's folly into Hillary Clinton's responsibility. I was in the middle of the debate in Washington. Obama wasn't there. I remember what was said and done. In fact, the administration lied in order to secure support for its war of choice, including cooking the intelligence and misleading Congress about the intent of the authorization. Senator Clinton's position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path. It was his war of choice.There is no credible reason to conclude that Obama would have acted any differently in voting for the authorization had he been in the Senate at that time. Indeed, he has said as much.(...) Obama's gyrations on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran are not the actions of one imbued with superior intuitive judgment, but rather the machinations of a political opportunist looking to avoid having his fingerprints on any issue that might be controversial, and require real judgment, while preserving his freedom to bludgeon his adversary for actually taking positions as elected office demands. It is hard to discern whether Senator Obama is a man of principle, but it is clear that he is not a man of substance. And that judgment, based on his hollow record, is inescapable. READ IT ALL

Well, as soldiers often say when in the midst of a clusterfuck, "shit happens". DS

The simplest test of hypocrisy

David Seaton's News Links
So much of what is said in defense of Israel centers around the Holocaust. Lets talk about it a little.

First let me say that I have no doubts at all that it happened just the way it is portrayed (Raul Hilberg version at least).

Furthermore when I was only seven, the aged lady doctor with a heavy accent who walked several miles through a Midwestern blizzard to give me a lifesaving penicillin shot when I had gone into coma from double pneumonia, after my own pediatrician had refused to make the house call, had one of the tattoos on her arm. The next day, when I had awakened, I asked her about the numbers on her arm and my mother told me to shut up. So I am not a negationist. I loved that old lady and I owe my life to her.

So it strikes me as incongruous that with so much concern about the Holocaust that:

"an umbrella group of Holocaust survivor organizations in Israel estimated that about one-quarter of Israel’s 250,000 survivors are living in poverty."

according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

With billions of dollars of American aid going to Israel every year, and all the endless hoohah about the Shoa: the monuments and memorials, the TV programs, the university endowments, the books etcetera... that these poor, old people who are actually all that is humanly left of the Holocaust are lacking in even simple comforts makes me want to puke.

I would think until those that brandish the Holocaust at every turn, to justify Israel, actually do something to help these survivors live tranquilly and in comfort for the little time they have left, they should shut up.

They are fakes, the Shoa was real, but they are fakes and everything they are selling is fake.

The next thing you are going to hear - mark my words - is that Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are making a fund to help these old people. I'm not joking. DS

Hugo Chávez, the man who ate Dubya's lunch

David Seaton's News Links
A friend of mine, who is a top executive in Spain's giant oil firm, Repsol and who has been traveling all over Latin America and especially in Venezuela for over 20 years, tells me that the loss of US influence in South America since 9-11 is unbelievable for a veteran observer like he is. Spanish bank executives, who dominate the financial sector in Latin America, tell me the same story.

Hugo Chávez is living proof that all the talk about America's unique, hegemonic superpower status is so much horse manure. The world is already multi-polar and soon will be more so. The war in Iraq has undressed the United States. The cold war will be seen as a garden party compared to what is coming. DS

The Holocaust denier, the radical socialist, and their axis of unity - Guardian
Abstract: A billboard of Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad looms over a motorway in Venezuela, marking the entrance to a factory designed to produce three things: tractors, influence and angst.(...) The influence, less visible but real enough, is for Mr Chávez and Mr Ahmadinejad, two presidents who hope this and other ventures will project their prestige and power. The angst, if all goes to plan, is for Washington. Veniran might be tucked away in the backwater provincial capital of Ciudad Bolívar but it is part of a wider attempt by Mr Chávez to forge a common front against the United States. The socialist radical is using Venezuela's vast oil wealth to strike commercial and political deals with countries that challenge the US such as Iran, Belarus, Russia and China, as well as much of Latin America and the Caribbean, to rebuff what he refers to as the "empire". "Chávez is a global player because right now he has a lot of money that he is prepared to spend to advance his huge ambitions," said Michael Shifter, an analyst with the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank. "He has worked tirelessly to upset US priorities in Latin America."(...) Supporters say he has worked tirelessly to support the poor and marginalised, for example through a $250,000 (£121,000) loan to help farmers in Bolivia's lowlands build a coca industrialization plant, part of an effort to turn the leaf into cakes, biscuits and other legal products instead of cocaine. "For years we have wanted to do this but no one would support us," said Leonardo Choque, leader of the Chimoré federation of coca growers. "Then the Venezuelans come and offer us a loan with very low interest rates. And no conditions." Venezuela is also funding a new university nearby. In contrast the US is accused of bullying Andean nations into destroying coca crops without promoting equally lucrative alternative livelihoods - a big stick and a small carrot.(...) Iran is to help build platforms in a $4bn development of Orinoco delta oil deposits in exchange for reciprocal Venezuelan investments. The 4,000 tractors produced annually in Ciudad Bolívar are small beer in comparison but they have a symbolic value as agents of revolutionary change. Most are given or leased at discount in Venezuela to socialist cooperatives that have seized land, with government blessing, from big ranches and sugar plantations. Dozens have also been sent to Bolivia to support President Evo Morales, a leftwing radical and close Chávez ally, and last week dozens more began to be shipped north to Nicaragua, whose president, Daniel Ortega, is another Chávez ally and longtime bugbear for Washington. The first batch was timed to coincide with the 28th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.(...) A colleague who asked not to be named said the Iranians had been warmly welcomed. "I love it here. It's hot and sunny and they eat rice, just like back home. Except here I go out salsa dancing." Mr Chávez inaugurated the factory in 2005 with the then Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami. He has struck up a friendship with his successor, Mr Ahmadinejad, and hailed their "axis of unity". "The relationship is fundamentally geopolitical rather than economic," said Mr Shifter. "It tells the world that Iran, an international pariah, is welcome in Latin America, which is traditionally regarded as the strategic preserve or 'back yard' of the United States." READ IT ALL