No harm, no foul? Hardly.

It looks like Army Private Bradley Manning may face a court martial and life in prison.  Good.  I don’t think he is just guilty of theft as the investigator alleges.   That’s not enough.  I think he is guilty of treason.  Downloading confidential military records and giving them to outside sources cannot be tolerated.  One of the arguments his lawyer has been making is that Manning should be released is that the security breach didn’t really cause much damage or jeopardize American national security.  Liberals I know seem to think what Manning was doing was some freedom of speech issue.

Bullshit to both.

Let’s think a bit of what Manning actually did.   Manning was an intelligence officer in the Army.  Under the guise of downloading music, he took classified communications and shared them with Wikileaks.  If he worked at Apple or Microsoft or any other company, taking internal documents and data and sharing it would be grounds to be fired.  For military personnel, who are entrusted with the safety and security of the nation to steal and share classified information with anyone outside the government cannot be considered — under any circumstances — a good thing.  Not only does it set the worst possible precedent, it puts us all in danger.  This isn’t theft, this is treason.

Manning supporters say that he was doing the right thing: He was just exposing war crimes and other atrocities perpetrated by the American military.  The problem with that theory is that the information he released showed no such thing.  Even his defense relies on the idea that the information released did not harm anyone. You can’t have it both ways.  If he had been exposing some great crime committed by the US, we would all know about it.  He released embarrassing communications and the like.

I know what you are thinking, I am a hawk. I am no such thing, though pacifism isn’t my thing either.  We need to fight some wars — like WWII — we need to avoid others.  Our military makes mistakes and does things I don’t agree with.  The Marines urinating on corpses comes to mind as does what happened an Abu Ghraib.  None of that excuses Manning.

Private Bradley Manning was put in a position with access to classified information and entrusted with protecting the nation and he abdicated his responsibilities by leaking the data to Wikileaks.   I don’t understand why anyone would think that is a good thing and think he should spend the rest of his life in jail.

PS.  I don’t think the US has any reason to prosecute Julian Assange for anything as I know the Department of Justice is trying to do.  He broke no laws nor did he violate any trust.

You cannot be serious. Oh, wait. You are.

Didya hear?

The saying ‘lipstick on a pig’ is sexist.  Questioning the experience of a VP candidate is sexist if the candidate is female (and a Republican, just you hush up Geraldine Ferraro).  Sarah Palin told Congress to put their ‘bridge to nowhere’ money up their butt.  If you can see a foreign country from your state, you have foreign policy experience.

Well, did you know all of that?  John McCain said it, and he is a war hero so it must be true.  I could go into how ridiculous these statements are.  Or I could go on about how sad it is that our media thinks reporting lies and crap equals being balanced.  I could but this misses the point.  While we are talking about this crap, we are wasting our chance to examine the people running for the two tops jobs in the country.  We are in a war, our economy is tanking, the environment is a mess and we are talking about hockey moms. 

Every time I see a new headline about this stuff I have to ask, are these people serious?  The problem is that they are.  Very.  I look at this coverage and see it for what I think it is: the GOP playing the game the way they know how but there are people who buy into it. Their response is “Quit picking on good, decent, God-fearing Sarah.  She’s just as qualified as Obama.  Country first!”   If you really put the country first, you would vote for someone new.  Even if you don’t agree with Barack Obama on anything, can’t you at least admit that your side had a shot and now it is someone else’s turn. This is a democracy after all.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Don’t look now but things are about to go from worse to hellish

Much like Chicken Little I feel I have spent a lot of time of late talking about all the ways we are killing ourselves.  There’s global warming, infectious diseases, global warming’s impact on infectious diseases, the ‘war against terror,’ and now it looks very much like we are about to go to war with Iran.  If you think Iraq is a mess, just wait for Act II (Afghanistan was just a prologue).

 

Ever since we invaded Iraq there has been talk about going after Iran next.  The general scuttlebutt around DC has been that the war plans for such a move have been written and the only thing stopping Dubya et al from doing it have been the mess that had been Iraq.  Now that the situation there seems to be better – I do think the very belated surge has achieved at least a partial military success there that makes our withdrawal from there even more important – the administration can focus more on Iran.  They clearly feel we are threatening them as their recent threats to “strike back if attacked” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/09/asia/10iran.php)  that were closely followed by nuclear weapons testing.  If Dubya’s plan is to poke the bear, he is doing a bang-up job.

 

Lest anyone think we should invade another sovereign country:

 

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.”  The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh

 

It is even more worrisome that Senator McCain supports the White House on this issue because with Dubya & Cheney wanting to invade Iran and the McCain candidacy looking shaky, it would not surprise me one bit if a preemptive war with Iran would be to avoid a loss in November.  If McCain picks Joe Lieberman I think we can count the days until our troops go in.  This, by the way, is because Lieberman is a defense hawk and not because he is Jewish. I do not want hate mail about that.  This would be one October surprise we cannot afford.  

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Why it matters

Why it matters

 

NBC has been running these more obnoxious than words can describe ads about why they cover the presidential campaign as much as they do.  The gist is that it matters therefore they cover it.  While I find the ads repugnant and reminiscent of a John Stewart joke where they showed CNN using real wildfires to promo an interview with an actress from the movie Things we lost in the fire, this year’s contest matters.  It matters for reasons that transcend what color, gender the candidates are.  Seven years ago we put someone into the White House whose experience was less than minimal.  He failed at the several businesses he ran, traded Sammy Sosa and seemed to do very little as governor of Texas.  People who know more than I about the Texas system have said that this position doesn’t have a lot of power.  One area in which they do have some authority is in reviewing death row cases and pardon or commute the sentence of anyone deemed worthy.  Texas executes more people than any other state.  Ok, they are a large state and a viable defense in a murder case is “he needed killin’” but Dubya’s one contribution to the state was to reduce the amount of time the governor spends reviewing such cases to 15 minutes.  It’s only a matter of life and death, whatever.

 

So we let this guy into 1600 PA Ave and gave him the proverbial keys to the kingdom and hoped for the best.  We didn’t get it.  Unbeknownst to me, and most of the US, Dubya and his dad don’t get along well.  That sucks because a, I thought that at the very least we may not like Dubya but he would lean on dad when things got rough (was not a supporter of Bush 1 but the man is intelligent and has a lot of foreign policy experience) and b, when we were about to invade Iraq the one person on Earth with experience doing that very thing was shut out.  One issue 43 had against 41 was the way he handled Iraq.  So, for reasons only he knows, he surrounded himself with very intelligent people, though most were stuck in a world that didn’t exist anymore – the Cold War days.  Look where we are today.  In a war we cannot end, the dollar and my cat’s poop are worth about the same and the economy is just going to get worse before it gets better.  We are stuck between a rock and hard place with China, who owns most of our country yet isn’t on great terms with human rights.  I can only imagine what will happen this summer when all the tourists and Tibet protesters descend on that country.  Bloodbath comes to mind but can they be that stupid?  Can they?

 

So back in the States we have a presidential election to deal with.  On the Democratic side we have two people who are basically the same when it comes to their positions on, well, everything.  .

 

On the other side of the aisle we have John McCain, a well respected veteran who is known for speaking his mind but while equally important, people seem to be ignoring the fact that he is insane.  I don’t like to think I am ageist but the joke about bombing our enemies (the now saintly Reagan said that while checking his microphone, his exact comments were something like “the bombing of Russia will commence in five minutes) was never funny.  McCain entered an event singing (to the tune of some Beach Boys’ song, I think) “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”  Not funny.  It’s scary because I don’t think he was kidding.  Worse, the man who has made his experience on the international scene the cornerstone of his campaign got the Sunnis and Shia confused.  A BIG blunder for someone like him.  He claimed al Qaeda is getting training in Iran (from the government). They are not and any al Qaeda that is in Iraq went there AFTER we invaded.

 

So we have a lot to think about.  Oh and lest you really think this has been a good idea, 97 percent of the American military deaths in Iraq has happened after the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner incident.  Great.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend