It's No Accident

I feel like starting an organization called Leftists Who Never Gave a Shit About Valerie Plame. I never cared, because exposing CIA agents is not a crime but a public service. I admit (or rather, boast) that I don't know all the ins-and-outs of this story, nor do I fully understand why it's supposed to have been resolved in Bush's favor. I could understand if I cared to read all about the facts -- but I don't care. It sure as hell doesn't change the facts about the imperialist war of aggression in Iraq. That's the real issue, and it's inescapable.

Posted by John Lacny at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I found myself saddened when Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd Al-Jawad passed from the scene of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. He was not at all a likable man, ruling as a grim and humorless patriarch in his home even as he led the secret nocturnal life of a sybarite -- a life he did his utmost to deny to members of his own family, even as his sons came to emulate him without knowing it at first. But the reader got to know him well, for he is arguably Mahfouz's single greatest creation as a character.

He dominated a series of novels that was cramped -- almost claustrophobic -- in its spacial setting, really only a few city blocks in old Cairo, and almost always in family quarters or a few pleasure bars even then. Yet this was a family drama of the interwar years that was so bound up with Egypt's national destiny that, taken as a whole, the Cairo Trilogy is almost as sweeping and at least as great as War and Peace.

I do not read Arabic, and I am told that most of Mahfouz's other work (with the exception of Midaq Alley) has been published in inadequate English translations that do not capture the power of his original Arabic prose. We can only hope that this will change, even though it will have to come in the wake of Mahfouz's death yesterday at the age of 94.

Posted by John Lacny at 08:46 PM | Permalink

I don't at all trust the British Daily Mail, the newspaper that once published an article called "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in praise of Oswald Mosley. And when it comes to the subject of Catholicism, I don't trust much of anything in the British press, since having a good laugh at the papists is a grand old knee-slapping pastime of the British right, center, liberal and left. That said, I do find disturbing the recent story in the Daily Mail which reports that the Vatican's official "exorcist" is going around saying that Hitler and Stalin were possessed by Satan. Apparently the dude means it literally.

Posted by John Lacny at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An infamous exchange between two patrician bluebloods is now available online for your edification: on the right, pompous New England affected Anglo-Catholic William F. Buckley; on the left, homosexual Southern Bourbon with a hankering after a long-lost Republic that never was, Gore Vidal. The exchange is set during the bloody Democratic National Convention of 1968 and is presented online in several parts. Vidal's comments are mostly banal defenses of basic freedom of speech, while Buckley makes as many excuses as he can for the thuggish behavior of the police. But the great, penultimate moment of tension is of course when the grand old man of the American right tells Vidal: "Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face." He also says that Vidal should "go back to his pornography."

Posted by John Lacny at 09:18 PM | Permalink

You'd think that it would be getting a bit late for more shocking "guess who supported Hitler" cultural revelations. And you'd be right, because there's nothing morally consequential in the story of Guenter Grass that he hadn't already told us years ago.

Grass's decision to finally talk about the seven months he spent running away from the Red Army as a Waffen-SS conscript has nevertheless set off an all-too-predictable shitstorm of manufactured indignation from familiar quarters. Every cringeing mediocrity and every bilious, philistine lickspittle has seen this as an opportunity to gloat. These people are beneath contempt, and there is no justice in the world if one hundred years from now the reputation of Guenter Grass doesn't live on long after all of them are forgotten.

Let me be very clear: my defense of Grass is not solely -- nor even much at all -- a defense of Grass's art against condemnations based on crude political criteria. The "love the art, hate the man" argument is one with which I sympathize greatly in cases where it applies, and there should be no doubt that great art in the service of evil is still great art. But that is not the issue here.

Grass may be a great artist, and his work would deserve defense on those grounds alone, but in this case, Grass also happens to be a decent human being who is the subject of unfair calumnies. He has always said that as a teenager he was an unquestioning supporter of fascism, just as most people around him were. Youth and ignorance are not much of an excuse, but Grass has never said that they are; and Grass was no Sophie Scholl, but he has never claimed that he was. And while the Waffen-SS had been a fanatical volunteer force, by the time Grass was a member it was full of conscripts just like the Wehrmacht; the fact that Grass was himself a draftee only serves to illustrate this. If he had been a Waffen-SS volunteer, that would have added a dark and disturbing detail that made his tale an even more interesting and complex one -- but it still would not have discredited him, since he has never claimed to have been anti-Hitler at the time. But the real story is more pedestrian than that, banal in the true, before-Hannah-Arendt-ruined-it sense of that word: Grass was a believer, but not really moreso than a typical German youth of his day. His behavior does not redound to his credit -- far from it -- but neither does this latest detail add much to the contours of a story we already knew. And the fact remains that his entire subsequent career has been an effort to extirpate the evil he participated in as an adolescent.

All of this is more than can be said for a great many cultural figures who were older than Grass was at the time, and who through varying combinations of moral cowardice (Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwaengler), obsequious careerism (Herbert von Karajan), or outright ideological fanaticism (Leni Riefenstahl, Knut Hamsun) put their talents directly at the service of fascism. It is not only that these people supported Hitler (or at least acquiesced to him) at the time, even as heroes from Mann to Brecht resisted. It is that their subsequent behavior was so reprehensible as well: if they didn't attempt to justify their Hitler-era behavior, they attempted to excuse themselves as naive or apolitical. Grass has done nothing like that; he has always maintained that his childhood political allegiances were shameful, and that the entire country should repudiate the fascist legacy.

The current round of attacks on Grass has two motivations: (1) to demonstrate that the attempt to repudiate the fascist past is a meaningless exercise since Grass himself was not adequately forthright until now, and more importantly (2) to discredit Grass's own criticisms of the postwar BRD and the status quo.

There is no better illustration of this than the fact that all of Grass's enemies in the current fracas have been bringing up his criticisms of the Bitburg affair. In this view, you see, Grass had no standing to criticize Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan for laying a wreath in memory of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, because -- gasp! -- Grass was himself a member of the Waffen-SS.

This kind of thing is a prime example of why facile charges of "hypocrisy" are the first and last refuges of the lazy hack. We now know that Grass was a Waffen-SS conscript, but that does not change the fact that Grass was right to criticize Reagan and Kohl. Bitburg was a calculated political move to rehabilitate fascism after the fact, through maudlin invocation of the battlefield heroism and abused innocence of the boys "on both sides." It was no accident that someone from the United States (namely Pat Buchanan, who wrote Reagan's speech) could have come up with such a stunt, since this is a country that is dotted with statues of Robert E. Lee. (Talk about "moral equivalence"!) We now know that Grass was himself a member of the Waffen-SS, but this really is beside the point, since he has not suggested that he was merely a preyed-upon ignoramus, nor that his participation in the war on the side of Hitler -- even peripherally -- should be excused in any way. And it was not Grass, after all, who we all heard refer to the butchers of Malmedy and Oradour as "victims, too."

It's worth putting all of this very simply: the bootlicking toadies who are attacking Guenter Grass hate him not for his sins, but for his virtues. They hate him first -- we might as well not beat around the bush -- because he is so obviously more talented than they are. But they hate him secondly because they have a conventional wisdom and a status quo to defend, and to the extent that Guenter Grass departs from that, they need to strike out at him.

For them, it counts as a demerit for Grass that he opposed the deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe, because it is evidence of an unwillingness to confront "totalitarianism." There's that "moral equivalence" again: the pompous, reflexive habit of Western intellectuals to dress up every aggressive move of every squalid imperialist politician as the new moral cause, the latter-day parallel to the war against fascism. Every enemy of the moment is as bad as Hitlerite Germany, and anyone who questions that is a simpering appeaser. This is the same mentality that applauded the wrecking of Vietnam, Nicaragua, and dozens of other countries, and which was willing to tolerate the threat of the nuclear annihilation of the entire human race for fifty years, all in the name of fighting the Soviet bogeyman; these same people cheered for the war in Iraq, setting themselves up on pedestals as the moral ones in that little adventure as well -- and they will do the same for the next war, and the one after that.

As a herd, the entire collection of Western intellectuals from the liberals on rightwards -- and not a few to the left of that, even -- are a crowd of leg-spreading camp-followers, competing only to differentiate themselves in levels of kowtowing, to see who will be the next to share the beds of the biggest men in charge.

Grass doesn't do that, which is why he's a target. He's a Gulliver in a land of Lilliputians. Long may he reign!

Posted by John Lacny at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney Remarks
Election Night: Tuesday, August 8, 2006

(After Listening to Pink's "Dear Mr. President")

I wanted you to hear this song because it says so much about why this election in Georgia was so important.

In the film American Blackout, you saw that I say that my district needs jobs. And so, in partnership with faith-based organizations and labor, I put together a program to train my constituents to acquire the skills for jobs that won't be outsourced overseas, and that pay more than a living wage, with health and retirement benefits. Last month, we took in 500 students. Who at the end of their training will have transportable skills, internationally-recognized certification, and a chance to live the American dream, supporting their families and our community.

The news media didn't tell you about that because they wanted you to focus on my hair!

I first got into trouble when I was compelled in 1991, while serving in the Georgia Legislature, to speak against George Herbert Walker Bush's war against Iraq. And during a point of personal privilege, I declared that I could not support any of George Bush's reasons for war.

My colleagues got up and walked out on me, I was vilified in the press, and compared to Julian Bond, who too had spoken out against an unjust war.

Ladies and gentlemen, there comes a time when people of conscience are compelled to dissent.

Bobby Kennedy said, "The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country."

We love our country, and that is why we dissent: because we care.

We care about the dignity of all the world's people.

We care about minimum wage workers; we care about no wage workers;

we care about the homeless--too many of whom are veterans;

we want a healthy future for all our children;

we want our seniors to live in dignity.

Our country is too rich to tolerate such poverty in our midst.

We have more to give to our people and the world than DynCorp, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group.

We care about the air and the earth and the water. And so we reject George Bush's science lessons that distort the facts and justify policies that support drilling for oil in Alaska; exacerbate global warming; and allow more human consumption of known toxins and pollutants.

We care about the projection of US power around the world. Either we can be a force for good in the world; or we can rely on force and upset the world.

Sadly, this Administration has chosen the latter.

At a time when this country has failed to train enough certified teachers to educate our children, George Bush is spending billions, nearly one trillion, dollars for war. And in a point of personal privilege right now I echo what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "A time comes when silence is betrayal; we are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls 'enemy.'"

One year to the day before Dr. King was murdered, he declared that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own country.

With Israel's invasion of Lebanon, there might even be a call for more US or UN troops to be stationed in the Middle East, we -- here tonigh t-- say to our Commander-in-Chief: Sir, No Sir.

And so, before we engage in yet more war, I declare tonight that we stand with the families of our hurt soldiers and the hundreds of thousands of innocent hurt and dead Iraqis.

We stand with the homeless Vietnam and Gulf War veterans.

We stand with the Agent Orange victims and the 160,000 sick Gulf War veterans.

We stand with the 37,000 green card soldiers, not even citizens, but willing to trade their lives for a chance to live and work in America because our foreign policy has failed to uplift their hopes and aspirations in their own countries.

Dr. King told us that in order to stop the madness we would have to match actions with words. Mario Savio before that told us that we have to put our very bodies against the wheels and the gears and the levers of the machine and we have to say to those who own it, that they must stop it, or we will stop it.

Tonight I am joined by noted men and women activists who have put their bodies against the wheels and the gears and the levers of the machine and they are trying to stop it. They are not tricked by red herrings that the corporate media throw to us. They are focused on our objective to make America a better country.

Something is happening around the world: countries with little or nothing are standing up, rising up against the utter and complete domination.

Thank goodness for the people in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Venezuela, Malaysia, all standing up and speaking for the weak and the voiceless in their countries. A change is sweeping the world. And America must not be left out.

So my new friends are the mothers who have lost their sons in George Bush's war and we say to them hold fast to your faith -- your suffering will not be a stumbling block for us. We will make this stand with you -- you are not alone.

Denise Thomas, daughter went to Iraq once and when they tried to send her a second time, Mama got political. She's now the founder of the Georgia Chapter of Military Families Speak Out. First told her story at a prayer vigil organized by Ann Mauney. Prayed at by Reverend Timothy McDonald.

Then one mother who wasn't so lucky. She couldn't save her son from the War Machine. The first Georgia soldier to die in Iraq came from the 4th District. Patricia Roberts, Jamal Addison's mother, now politically active and my new friend.

Another mother, lost her son, Casey, and decided to take her case directly to President Bush. Cindy Sheehan.

There's something special about these women. Their names aren't Deborah, or Esther, or Ruth. But they are women for these times. Women, called to make peaceful revolution.

President Kennedy warned us that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

So let the word go out: we aren't going to tolerate any more stolen elections; we're watching you. And we want our leaders back -- or we will become the leaders.

And not only do we want our country back, we want our Party back.

There is a growing force for peace in this country. And the peace movement that we are building is backed by millions of young people. I want to thank the hundreds of people who volunteered in our campaign, especially the young people who were excited about getting involved in something good.

Thank you all for a lot of hard work, thank you for the thousands of volunteer hours, thank you for helping to make a stand in Georgia.

I wish the new representative for the 4th Congressional District well.

Posted by John Lacny at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Gee, the Pennsylvania Republicans sure found a real winner when they took out Allen Kukovich. The latest headline about Bob Regola reads:

State senator's home searched in neighbor's gun death

Posted by John Lacny at 10:51 PM | Permalink

Congratulations to the Defeat Lieberman Movement! I write this just minutes after the New York Times website announced the news of Lieberman's concession. Now he needs to be re-defeated in the general election, and that is an important task, but let's not underestimate the significance of this moment.

There has been a tendency among Lamont supporters in recent weeks to try to claim that this election is not just about the war; the aim was to try to duck the question of why people chose Lieberman as the target despite the fact that many other Democrats (e.g., Hillary Clinton) also backed the war. And it is true that Lamont will be reliably better than Lieberman on a range of issues such as support for public education.

But why duck the fact that this election was about the war? Yes, there were other Democrats who supported it, but Lieberman was especially strident in doing so, and he made a place for himself as Bush's favorite Democrat because of his stance. His targeting and defeat are going to be seen as the electoral surge of the anti-war movement. This is good. It's especially interesting to note that, while the right wing and the DLC wing of the Democrats have been seething with hatred over Lamont, several establishment media outlets -- including the New York Times -- endorsed Lamont over Lieberman. This is one more sign of the significant split in the ranks of the ruling class. There is now an active dove faction among them. They see the opportunity that mass antiwar sentiment presents. The Defeat Lieberman Movement has already struck a blow for the anti-war movement even if Lamont does not win in November -- but we should all hope that he does, and do what we can to make it happen.

Posted by John Lacny at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by John Lacny at 08:52 PM | Permalink

The Mexican electoral tribunal has rejected a vote recount.

Posted by John Lacny at 08:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's that time again, when Wall Street celebrates because unemployment is higher than expected. Here's a bit from the Financial Times:

"Hopes that the US Federal Reserve will next week pause its long-running series of interest rate rises were boosted on Friday by figures showing weaker-than-expected employment growth and a rise in the jobless rate.

"The news triggered an early rally on the markets, although stock indices eventually gave back gains to close slightly lower."

In case you're one of those people who still hasn't noticed, here's what this means: there is a class struggle going on in the world. These people are on one side, and they are waging war on you, whether you know it or not. Unless you're an FBI agent who's assigned to read this obscure website for some reason.

Posted by John Lacny at 07:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The world's greatest living novelist had this to say recently in a Uruguayan newspaper. Thanks to Walter Lippmann (obviously, not that Walter Lippmann) and his CubaNews service for the translation.

Update, August 11: This article is now posted in English on Granma.

**********
Brecha (Montevideo), July 28, 2006

The Fidel Castro That I Know
by Gabriel García Márquez
(translated by Walter Lippmann)

His fondness for words. His power of seduction. He hunts for a problem wherever it is. The impelling force of inspiration is befits his style. The breadth of his tastes is very well reflected in his books. He gave up his cigars so as to have the moral authority to fight smoking. He likes to prepare recipes with a sort of scientific fervor. He keeps in excellent shape through several hours of daily exercise and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Strict discipline. He's drawn toward the unexpected by the force of his imagination. Learning to work is as important as learning to rest.

Fatigued by talking, he rests by talking. He writes well and likes to do it. His greatest motivation in life is the emotion of risk. The rostrum of an improviser seems to be his perfect ecological element. When he starts speaking, his voice is always hard to hear and his course is uncertain, but he takes advantage of anything to gain ground, little by little, until he takes a kind of swipe and takes possession of his audience. He's the inspiration: the irresistible and dazzling state of grace only denied by those who lack the glory to feel it. He's the quintessential anti-dogmatist.

He's been sufficiently talented to incorporate the ideas of José Martí, his bedtime author, to a Marxist revolution's bloodstream. The essence of his own thoughts lies perhaps in his certainty that working with the masses means first of all taking care of individuals.

That could explain his absolute confidence in face-to-face contact. He's got a language for each occasion and a different approach to persuasion according to his listener. He knows how to be up to the same standard as the other, and his vast and diverse information allows him to feel at ease in any environment. One thing's for sure: wherever he is, however he is and whoever he is with, Fidel Castro is there to win. His attitude toward defeat, even in the smallest acts of everyday life, seems to abide by a private logic: he doesn't even admit it, and never takes a moment's rest until he manages to reverse the situation and turn it into victory.

There's no one more obsessed when it comes to getting to the bottom of any matter. He engages in any project, whether colossal or millimetric, with the same fierce passion, especially if it means facing adversity. Never does he seem to be in a better mood than in those moments. Someone who thinks they know him well told him: "Things must be very wrong, because you look enraptured".

Reiteration is one of his working methods. For instance: the issue of the Latin American foreign debt had come up in his conversation some two years ago, and had evolved, branched out and deepened since then. The first thing he said, as a simple arithmetical conclusion, was that the debt was impossible to pay. Then came the staggered findings: its effects on national economies, its social and political impact, its decisive influence on international relations, its providential importance for a unitary policy in Latin America... up to a totalizing vision, which he exposed in an international meeting called for that purpose that time took care of proving right.

His rarest virtue as a politician is the ability to discern how an event will evolve all the way to its farthest consequences... but he practices such ability, not by flashes of inspiration, but as a result of arduous, tenacious reasoning. His supreme assistant is a memory he uses and abuses to back up a speech or a private talk with overwhelming statements and incredibly fast mathematical calculations.

He needs to be helped with incessant, spoon-fed and digested data. The task of accumulating information starts as soon as he arises. No less than 200 pages of news from all over the world join his breakfast every morning. Every day, wherever he is, they get urgent reports to him: according to his own estimate he has to read about 50 documents per day, not to mention the reports issued by official services and by those who visit him and whatever arouses his boundless curiosity.

Any answer has to be accurate, since he can pinpoint the smallest contradiction in a casual phrase. Books are another source of vital information. He's an avid reader. No one understands where he finds enough time or what method he applies to read so much and so quickly, although he insists he uses none in particular. He frequently takes a book with him in the early hours and makes comments about it the following morning. He can read in English, but he doesn't speak it. He'd rather read in Spanish, and at any given time is willing to read whatever piece of paper with letters on it that falls into his hands. A regular reader of economic and historical topics, he also appreciates good literature and follows it very closely.

He's in the habit of bombarding people with swift, consecutive questions he asks in bursts until he finds out the whys of the whys of the final whys. When a Latin American visitor hastily gave him figures about rice consumption in his country, he made his mental arithmetic and said: "That's weird; each person eats four pounds of rice a day". His supreme tactic is asking about things he already knows to confirm his data, and in some cases to size up his interlocutor and treat him accordingly.

He misses no chance to be well-informed. At an official reception he attended during the war in Angola, he described a battle so thoroughly that it was hard to convince a European diplomat that Fidel Castro had taken no part in it. His account of the capture and murder of Che Guevara, his description of the attack on the [Palacio de la] Moneda and Salvador Allende's death, or the one on the ravages of Hurricane Flora were great spoken features.

His vision of Latin America's future is the same Bolívar and Martí: an integrated, autonomous community capable of changing the fate of the world. He knows the United States better than any other country, barring Cuba. He has in-depth knowledge about the nature of its people, its power structure and its governments' second intentions, something he has efficiently used to weather the unceasing storm of the blockade.

When interviewed, usually for hours on end, he dwells on every subject, venturing into its least expected twists and turns without ever neglecting accuracy, aware that a single misused word can bring about irreparable damage. He has never refused to answer any question, nor has he lost patience. There are some who keep him from hearing the truth in order to spare him from too many worries. He knows, though. To an official who tried to do so, he said: "You hide the facts from me so as not to disturb me, but when I find out at the end I will die of shock for having to face so many truths you never told me". The most serious ones, however, are those they keep from him to cover up for deficiencies, because parallel with the outstanding achievements that sustain the Revolution -whether in politics, science, sports or culture- runs a huge bureaucratic incompetence which affects daily life at almost every level, and particularly domestic happiness.

When he talks with people in the street, their conversation acquires the raw expressiveness and frankness of real endearment. They call him "Fidel". They surround him safety. They address him on a first-name basis; they argue with him, state opposing views and make demands, all in a live broadcasting session through which the truth comes tumbling out. That's when we get to see the uncommon human being concealed by the brightness of his own image. This is the Fidel Castro that I believe I know: a man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, old-fashioned bearing, cautious words and fine manners whose ideas can't be less than extraordinary.

He dreams that his scientists will eventually discover the ultimate cure for cancer, and he has developed a foreign policy fit for a world power in an island 84 times smaller than his major enemy. He's convinced that a proper formation of consciousness is mankind's greatest accomplishment, and that moral incentives outdo material things in changing the world and pushing history.

In his few moments of yearning for life, I've heard him ruminating on the things he could have done differently to reclaim more time from life. Seeing him weighed down with the burden of so many people's destiny, I asked him what he would like to do more than anything else, and his straightaway answer was: "To stand on a street corner.”

Posted by John Lacny at 09:27 PM | Permalink

John Murtha's story is rapidly taking on Dreyfus-style contours. I don't mean that Murtha is as powerless as Dreyfus the scapegoat became, and obviously I do not mean that Murtha is being singled out for racist reasons the way Dreyfus was. But Murtha and Dreyfus are comparable figures, in that each is a solid, respected citizen and servant of the state; basically conservative in the broadest sense of the term; proud of his military service, and either close to (Murtha) or part of (Dreyfus) the officer corps. And each is now being singled out for a vendetta by the most wicked, backward elements of society.

Yesterday a Marine Sergeant under investigation in the Haditha massacre sued Murtha for defamation because Murtha had the temerity to denounce that war crime. Then today, a vicious group of "veterans" -- comparable to the Freikorps of old, or the Black & Tans, or the American Legionnaires who lynched Wesley Everest, all of them once again preparing their "stab in the back" narrative the way they did in both 1919 Germany and the 1975 USA -- held a press conference to call Murtha "irresponsible and un-American" and to accuse him of "providing aid and comfort to the enemy" (which, in case you didn't know, is the formal definition of treason in the Constitution -- and in this case, it is a slanderous lie).

Happily, the decent people of Johnstown turned out in greater numbers than the handful of cranks across the street, though you wouldn't have known that from the abominable local TV coverage that didn't even mention the relative numbers.

It goes without saying that I have never been a fan of John Murtha's politics. But it is because of his long record of service to the military establishment -- and because of his political base among the common people of as "typical" a "Heartland" district as any you could find -- that the enemy sees Murtha as so much of a threat. One of him is worth a thousand of us hardcore antiwar activists at this political juncture, just as one Cindy Sheehan was worth a hundred of us last year.

Murtha is going to win re-election easily. That is a good thing, and let's hope that the electoral rebuff to the shrieking war harpy Diana Irey is as decisive as possible. But more to the point, the enemies of freedom need to be loudly rejected on the streets as well. The hardcore apologists for this disastrous imperialist war are planning a rally against Murtha in Johnstown on October 1. On our side, we should be gathering details and making plans of our own. Let's make sure the Dreyfusards outnumber the anti-Dreyfusards in Johnstown on October 1!

Posted by John Lacny at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I don't know when John Murtha really decided he was going to become the voice of reason, but he's done it again, this time calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon. This is tougher than Iraq, since Israel is the most electrified third rail of US foreign policy. It should go without saying that Murtha's point of view does not break with the fundamentally pro-Israel tilt of US foreign policy -- let alone US imperialism or its "right to warmonger" -- but it is significant that he takes on Israel at all.

Like it or not, the political vindication of the anti-war movement this fall is going to be tied to Murtha's re-election. Happily, he's going to win easily.

Posted by John Lacny at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Never give up!

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