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08.05 "American Teen": A Winning Documentary about Real-Life High Schoolers 07.31 Francis Boyle's "Palestine Palestinians and International Law" Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters: 08.16 Out Damn Blot: A Letter to Colin Powell Health & Environment
08.14 The End of Cheap Oil: The Future is Now 08.05 Obama is Right: It's Easy to Reduce the Nation's (and Your Own) Fuel Bill Dramatically Media Watching
08.21 Mixed Truth of the Russia-Georgia War 08.16 John McCain's Party of Hate 08.15 Corporate Media Bashes New Chavez Enabling Law Decrees 08.15 Georgia/Russia Conflict Forced Into Cold War Frame 08.13 WPost and the Great Disconnect 08.12 WPost Admits Bungling Obama Quote 08.06 Why McCain May Well Win 08.06 Media Fall for 'Race Card' Spin 08.01 Wall Street Journalomics: The Case of the Missing Tax Facts 07.31 CNN Scoffs at White House Critics 07.31 WPost Calls Out 'Uppity' Obama US Politics, Policy & Culture
08.21 McCain's Ties to Neocon Hard Lines 08.21 Peace Mom v. Guardian of Power 08.20 Are You Ready For Nuclear War? 08.19 A Book Written to Defeat Obama 08.19 McCain's 'Cone of Silence' Caper 08.14 Is Perpetual War Our Future? 08.12 5 Years After Blackout, Power Grid Still in 'Dire Straits' 08.12 Olympic Shame 08.12 Thinking About Intermissions 08.11 ‘Medaling’ With Free Speech at the Olympics 08.11 Targeting Immigrants - The Largest Ever US ICE Raid 08.09 A Novel Approach to Politics 08.07 The Hamdan Principle and You 08.07 McCain Adopts Cheney's Energy Plan 08.06 The Serpent's Egg: Solzhenitsyn and the Origins of America's Gulag 08.05 Mining Racism and Murder in a Northeastern Pennsylvania Coal Town 08.04 The Other Presidential Candidates 08.03 McCain, Anthrax & the Afghan Blunder 08.01 Justice Probe Still Threatens Gonzales 07.31 Obama's Surge in Berlin 07.30 War Without End, Amen: Into the Afghan Abyss with Obama 07.30 McCain's Spin on the 'Surge' 07.30 Friday's House Judiciary Hearing on Impeachment: A Victory and a Challenge US High Crimes & Misdemeanors
08.20 Musharraf, Not Bush, Follows Nixon 08.18 Fear, Procurement, Profit: Permanent War and the American Way 08.17 This Time, the World Is Not Buying It 08.15 'Imminent' Threats Should Be a Belli Laugh 08.08 American Insouciance 08.07 Extra! Dog Bites Man! Read All About It! 08.05 Marching Off Into Tyranny 08.05 Follow This Dime 07.31 Wave of 'Capitol Crime' Continues 07.29 Bodyguard of Lies: The Truth Behind the 'Surge's' Smokescreen 07.28 Secret "Torture Memo" Gave Legal Cover to Interrogators Who Acted in "Good Faith" 07.28 The Bush Administration's Secret Biowarfare Agenda 07.26 The Endless Smearing of Joe Wilson Economics & Business
08.04 Thinking About Ponzi International
08.18 Blockades: Acts of War 08.17 Rice’s Recipe for Duck Soup 08.14 The Lawless Roads: Bluster in Georgia, Rank Tyranny at Home 08.14 Marching Through Georgia V: U.S. Forces Moving Into Putin's Powderkeg 08.14 Marching Through Georgia IV: The Butt Thumper and the Bear 08.13 Using Georgia to Target Russia 08.12 From Stupid to Moronic to Evil 08.11 Marching Through Georgia III: Reality's Rout and Cheney's Viagra 08.11 Marching Through Georgia II: The Kremlin Surge 08.08 Marching Through Georgia I: Cold War II Proxy Conflict Turns Hot 08.07 Living Death: The Eternal Now of Hiroshima 08.07 War with Iran - On, Off or Undecided? 08.04 Gaza Under Siege We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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KNOW YOUR GOVERNMENT:Supporting the Troops: "Shut Up and Suffer"![]() A soldier at Walter Reed ponders his future. Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.It is becoming increasingly difficult to find terms that would sufficiently plumb the depth and extent of the moral putrefaction that oozes out of the White House on a daily basis. Metaphors drawn from waste management, the barnyard or the most unsavoury of bodily processes fail to do justice to the moral nullity and active malice that animates every policy of this rancid, wretched crew. While no one could possibly expect the foul, perverted, fourth-rate minds of the Bush Administration to pay even the briefest quark of concern or attention to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people they have murdered in Iraq or the millions of American citizens they have driven into deep poverty, one might think that they would at least make a show of caring what happens to the men and women they have so cynically and criminally abused in the service of their apparently limitless greed and infinite stupidity. Especially as the Bushists (and their innumerable little bootlickers out there instapunditing and powerlining and pajama paryting and blowing hot air) have made such a fetish of "supporting the troops." But as any sentient being now recognizes, they are not interested in the concept as a physical reality, but only in the mere phrase – and only so far as it can be used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies. They literally, demonstrably, do not care what happens to the actual human beings in the U.S. armed forces. In fact, they are demonically adamant that more and more soldiers be sacrificed to their war of aggression and crony conquest, dying – or living lives blighted by pain and suffering – for the sake of the Iraqi "oil law." (Or, in the case of most of the bootlickers, for the sake of their own warped and stunted psyches, their apparent need to experience vicarious murder and domination – seeing the state as an extension of themselves – in order to assuage or cover up the various inadequacies, anxieties and craven fears that bedevil them.) This is a remarkable state of affairs: a militarist faction that doesn't even take care of its soldiers. Once again, we see a glaring example of the blind and brutal stupidity that is the hallmark of the Bush White House. (And this stinking fish most definitely rots from the head.) The early Caesars had the good sense to keep their legions sweet, especially the Praetorian Guard; even Saddam Hussein knew enough to take good care of his Republican Guard. But the Bushists merely chew up their soldiers and spit them out, like drunks heaving after a binge. Witness the language used by former Pentagon warlord, Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief sources of moral rot in Washington (and who, by the way, is still gainfully employed full-time at the Pentagon, working there every day with a phalanx of aides, doing God knows what – perhaps still running the place behind the scenes). The scene was one of the "rock star" press conferences where Rumsfeld used to preen before a pack of fawning media sycophants. This was in January 2003, with the invasion of Iraq looming on the horizon. Rumsfeld was rejecting the idea that conscription would be needed for the coming war – and the many other promised conflicts of the "War on Terror." As I wrote then in the Moscow Times (Jan. 17, 2003): "So Rumsfeld swatted the [draft] question away -- but it was perhaps the very ease of the parry that undid him. Ever the corporate pedant, Rumsfeld couldn't simply dismiss the notion of a draft; he had to explain why it was such a bad idea. His reason? Because the biological material "sucked" into the last draft, during the Vietnam War, was of such "inferior" quality.The Bushists' contempt for the riff-raff who fight their wars was evident from the beginning. It becomes more obvious all the time, as the ranks of the dead and wounded keep growing. This is the mindset that rules America – sick, grasping, brutal, craven, stupid and inhumane. Every day these perverts remain in power takes us another step deeper into the mire. Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation, CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
This column originally appeared on Chris Floyd's site, and is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on February 28, 2007. |
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