For, well, years now, there has been plenty of reason to worry that the US was going to embark upon a war with Iran. And when I say “embark”, I mean “launch a full-fledged air assault that would inevitably kill thousands and thousands of innocent Iranians, inviting the retaliation of Iran, Iranian-supported terror groups around the world, the Shiite majority surrounding American troops in Iraq, and all angry Muslims on planet Earth.”

There has been even more reason to be scared lately, with the revelation by journalist Seymour Hersh that the Bush administration has already budgeted $400 million this year to “prepare the battlefield”, supporting various dissident/terrorist groups inside Iran to “destabilize” the government.

But now, the good news. Apparently, the Iranian government has “agreed to freeze its enrichment program for six weeks and begin negotiations with the P5+1 group of states as early as next week” (”P5+1″ being the US, France, Russia, China, Germany and the UK).

This is a positive direction, in that it takes away the major US excuse for invading Iran. Of course, the real reason that the US wants to invade Iran is to destroy its influence and power in the Middle East (”damn Iranians, thinking they’ve got the right to make decisions about their nation, their resources, and the general neighborhood they live in!”), so it might simply be a matter of moving on to the next excuse to put their plans of idiot stupid evil into action. I mean, when the US screeched about Iraq’s WMDs, Saddam Hussein’s move to allow weapons inspectors into the country should have cooled down the war fever. But goddamit, we were determined to bring death daisycutters depleted uranium-tipped anti-tank shells torture DEMOCRACY to the not-suffering-enough-yet people of Iraq.

In conclusion, I am less scared tonight of an assault on Iran than I was this morning, possibly for no good reason.

Most excellent story I’ve read in a while:

Bolton dodges attempted ‘war crimes’ arrest

Author/columnist/activist George Monbiot shows up at an event where neocon John Bolton is giving a speech, and tries to make a citizens’ arrest, claiming that Bolton has committed war crimes and violated the Geneva Convention. Bolton managed to escape when security blocked Monbiot’s way.

“I’m disappointed I couldn’t reach him, but I made what I believe to be the first attempt ever to arrest one of the perpetrators of the Iraq war, and I would like to see that followed up.”

Right fucking on. Who’s next to try to Arrest John Bolton?

So you probably heard by now, former White House Spokesman Scott McClellan has released a new book, in which he accuses the White House of doing naughty things during his tenure: lies, propaganda, and that most heinous of crimes, tricking Scott McClellan.

As one would expect, American liberals are seizing these revelations (that we were all largely aware of) as the smoking mushroom cloud that exposes the Bush crimes for all the world to see.

Except that McClellan is a liar.

Seriously, the guy’s job in the Bush White House was to tell one bald-faced, easily disprovable lie after another to the media and the American people. He wasn’t that good at it, but he did it, lied for a living for three years.

But now that the liar is saying things that Liberals like, his word is to be trusted?

No folks, it doesn’t work like that. The man is a fucking liar. A fucking liar who is trying to sell copies of his new book, as well as try to clear his name in the history books. Like many before (and surely after) him, McClellan is telling the story of how all of the terrible things done by the Bush regime are Not Their Fault. The earlier you start telling your version of the story, the more likely your future encyclopedia entry won’t have phrases like “impeached” or “tried for treason” in it.

Of course, I must also note that McClellan seems to also use his book to try to clear Bush’s name, and explain how Bush was misled by his evil incompetent advisors. (Is there a stronger word than “incompetent”? Can we make “anticompetent” a word?)

The White House has gone into damage control mode thanks to McClellan’s book. Their strategy seems to be to paint McClellan as disgruntled, and possibly crazy (”We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew,” says new paid White House Spokesliar Dana Perino). Also, they are calling him a traitor.

But, the good news is that horrible, amoral sacks of crap are using the media to beat on each other. Everyone wins.

I’ll be doing a live radio show with the Neighborhood Public Radio project this Saturday at 2:30pm PST, live from the Rubber Rose. It’ll be broadcast over the air in San Diego on 103.9FM and also over the air in NYC on [find out what frequency they’re using in New York and type it here]. I plan to rant about the media, the presidential campaign, and talk about a new project I’m pondering, dealing with the looming energy/food/economic crises that are about to kick us all in the ovaries. The show should feature the return of my beloved BACKGROUND MUSIC.

[update]
SD frequency posted, no idea where to catch us in NYC. Also, duh, you can listen to the live stream online.

Come on by, the hijinx run from 1-3pm, I believe. And if I’m wrong, you’re at the Rubber Rose, an art gallery and sex shop. I imagine you’ll find a way to spend the time…

This is just embarassing. Newsweek publishes an article, in the form of a letter full of campaign tips for Barack Obama– written by Karl Rove.

It would be one thing if Rove was a freelance political consultant who worked for either party, or who had a specific ideology or issue that was his focus. But no. Rove has been a Republican political operative since he was 17 years old– for forty years. During his years in the Bush White House, he explicitly talked about his goal of permanent Republican control of the government.

But now, he’s generously giving advice to a democratic candidate. Because Karl Rove Kares.

Of course, the article is a hit piece. It’s sly, no doubt, but it’s hard not to see it’s intent. It fluffs up every potential Obama controversy, props up every trivial smear, slants every poll stat as a point on a downward spiral. An unbiased observer would probably come away from this article thinking that Barack Obama has a lot of work to do if he wants to be a popular political candidate.

However, I don’t really blame Rove for this. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, Rove gotta stab baby kittens in the eye with a shrimp fork. He’s evil and should be launched into the sun, but we shouldn’t exactly be surprised when he tries to do evil things.

But jesus Newsweek, this is pretty fucking embarassing on your part. Clearly this “author” has a conflict of interests, clearly he has an agenda, and you publish his piece anyway? Go put on your Shame Hats.

NY cops not punished for murdering an unarmed black man.

Again.

Yearly reminder: if you’re gonna go eat at a restaurant in a major city next week, you can eat at one of the restaurants listed here on April 24, and 25+% of your bill will be donated to a local AIDS-related charity. Not a huge deal, but if you were gonna go out anyway, you can do a tiny bit of good.

Maybe you folks know that I’m a big video game nerd. Been playing them since near birth, and I could write a book or two explaining what I like, analyzing what games say about their designers and audience, pointing out the few games that have intriguing politics, and slamming the ones who’s politics are terrible. This is a little bit about topics 2 and 4.

Maybe some of you are familiar with the Resident Evil series of video games (and their horrible spin-off movie franchise of the same name). The games are usually about cities overrun with zombies, and the cops and soldiers who kill those zombies (and various other genetic mutants spawned by the evil corporate villain). Resident Evil 4 changed up the series slightly by replacing most of the zombies with regular people who’d been infected with some disease or something which made them mindless, violent minions of… somebody, I don’t remember. The story was set in some fictional countryside in Spain, which meant that you were killing wave after wave of rural Spanish villagers* (or some game designers idea of Spanish villagers, anyway). True, the farmers were hurling pitchforks and carving knives at you, but it was a little more disturbing to be shooting old women in aprons than shooting moaning, mobile corpses.

Resident Evil 5 is set to be released in November, and a trailer for the game was screened for the public last July. It follows some of the formula of RE4, with the infected/maniac regular people instead of zombies, but this one is set in Africa. And the main character is a white guy. So the trailer is largely footage of a white guy shooting and killing wave after wave of black people. Black people who are acting like violent savages. In Africa**.

Yeah.

Now, coming to my main point, I found an article on a popular gamer website called Kotaku, that quoted an African-American journalist criticizing the racism, intentional and un-, within the game’s trailer. And in the first several hundred comments left by fans on the website, barely any of commenters sided with the journalist, even a little bit.

I’m not attacking the trailer or the game (although I probably will in a moment). You can find plenty of reasonable factors and context that mitigate or explain away some of the racism. But almost no one was saying “wow, a game where a white guy shoots up a whole bunch of black people? I can see how that might be a little racist.” Or “a game where all the black characters are mindless, bloodthirsty beasts? That might be offensive to some people.”

Instead, it was dozens and dozens and dozens of people loudly proclaiming that the journalist was playing “the race card” (I don’t even know what that means anymore), arguing that the journalist was the one who was racist, putting words into the journalist’s mouth, sarcastically attacking the journalist for not pointing out every other example of racism against every race in every video game ever, or people who just kept saying “I watched the trailer, and I don’t see anything racist about it.”

That’s depressing.

There are, of course, plenty of contextual and mitigating factors here: the game designers, who are Japanese, might not understand racial history in the United States; the game is set in Africa so it makes sense that most of the people in it are African; the Africans are acting violently not because they are stereotypes but because they’ve been bitten by the zombie maniac virus; the game itself might be much different than the trailer; the game is probably not intended to be racist and will probably not turn anyone into a racist. And I’m sure that some of the response is because gamers are very sensitive to criticism of their games; politicians and pundits love to blame video games for the ills of society and propose various forms of control and censorship of this beloved medium.

But still.

It saddens and frightens me that so many of these people who think they are “color blind” are actually “blind to racism.”

—
* For the record, I was creeped out that I was killing poor Spaniards in this game and never did finish. Nice imperial supremacy going on in that game, really. American agent drops into Spain and starts killing the inhabitants because he needs to resuce the President’s Daughter. Yes, the Spaniards did happen to be weird alien hybrid things, but they weren’t hurting anyone till Hero showed up.
** It was initially announced that the game was set in Haiti, now the game designers are saying it’s actually set in Africa.

Journalist Nir Rosen, testifying before the Senate:

BIDEN: Based on what you’ve said, there’s really no hope, is there? We should really get the hell out of there right now, right? There’s nothing to do.

ROSEN: As a journalist, I’m uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power. I don’t think we’re there for the interests of the Iraqi people. I don’t think that’s ever been a motivation.

If anyone ever meets Nir Rosen, buy him a beer for me.

Sigh. April Fool’s Day is upon us again. Guess I won’t even try to write anything, because I don’t want to have to double-check my sources in case they’re just funnin’ me.

In other news, I’m totally a robot. Yup, wacky, I know.

Number one box office draw this weekend, is the movie “21″. It’s based on a true story of a group of MIT students who use their math skills to scam casinos and make lots of money. Unfortunately, it seems that the ringleaders of this scam were all Asian-Americans, but these three characters miraculously become white on the silver screen. Even worse, the students’ ethnicity was integral to their plans. They felt that young white guys blowing a million dollars at the casino would look suspicious, while rich Asian youths with money to burn would seem less so, due to stereotypes of rich foreign tourists. They were going touse these stereotypes to their advantage. Meaning that to the filmmakers actually had to change the plot of the film so that they could successfully whitewash the Asian characters. That’s how important it was to them to make sure the main characters were white.

Of course, this is because movie studio executives assume that the predominantly white American movie audience wants to see white people on screen instead of characters from other racial groups. Are they right to think this? Or can white audiences get behind films with casts where whites are a minority, or absent altogether?

This morning, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, ABC’s Good Morning America aired an interview with Vice President Cheney on the war. During the segment, Cheney flatly told White House correspondent Martha Raddatz that he doesn’t care about the American public’s views on the war:

CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Well, we already knew that, but it’s nice to have him say it on camera.

And he’s right, you can’t be blown off course by fluctuations in polls. But since the majority of Americans have steadily opposed this war for over two years straight, you can’t exactly call these figures a “fluctuation”.

Although I started the Lying Media Bastards blog in April of 2002, you can really only access posts going back to December 2005. This is due to a software upgrade I installed at that time, which was unable to import all of those old entries for some reason. The old posts are, and always have been available here, in an archives directory of the website, but they are hard to navigate/interpret/read.

Just recently, I have figured out an imperfect way to re-incorporate those archives into the blog, so I’ve begun that process. At this point, I’ve restored the entries from April 2002 through April 2003 (and ran into some new problems with those entries, sigh). I’ll try to get those up in the next week or so. With everyone reflecting on the five years of war in Iraq, it seems useful to have all those past entries available.

Anyhow, those old entries can be viewed here. I’ve also added a link to archives in the first set of links in the upper right column if you want to view them at a later date.

In addition, I made separate pages for my “special report”, when I travelled to NYC for the Republican National Convention protests in 2004. You can find those here. With many photos.

LMB Radio 03-16-08

“Huh? He’s doing radio again?”

- Iraq: a nightmare, wrapped in a tragedy, wrapped in a farce
- neocons: even more batshit crazy than you guessed
- recommendations: The Power of Nightmares documentary, DMZ the book, It’s a Jungle Out There the book
- Obama Muslim rumor: it’s not a smear, it’s bigotry
- Music by Manu Chao, Santogold, and DJ Doc Rok

Had the epiphany earlier today that I could do radio shows in much less time if I gritted my teeth and left out my beloved background music. I look forward to the day when I have more spare time and can do my show in what I consider a proper fashion, but till then, maybe I can produce some of these short, stripped-down shows on a regular basis.

Also: I really need to stop doing “Iraq is so bad that…” posts and shows. It’s fucking bad. You know that. Do you need to know how bad?

The Power of Nightmares available for watching online here, transcripts here: Part I, Part II, andPart III.

Wow, a little bit of good local news for us San Diego folks. Blackwater USA, America’s favorite brand of mercenary, has been planning to construct and run a training camp in the rural San Diego county town of Potrero. This plan has been opposed by a dedicated group of activists, but San Diego is a pretty military-friendly town, I never knew how popular or unpopular the project would be.

But last week, Blackwater announced that they would no longer seek to build their training camp in Potrero. The activists are claiming victory, Blackwater is claiming that their decision is solely due to financial concerns and noise regulations, and I wonder how much last summer’s wildfires that tore through Potrero might have helped their decision along.

Any way you slice it, this is good news. Let’s keep an eye out for their next proposed base, and try to stop that one too.

Handy chart that tells which major corporations own your favorite organic foods. True, organic farming produces food using methods less likely to kill the sun or turn topsoil to toxin, but it’s also a jillion dollar industry, which means some pasty, cigar-chomping capitalist with a monocle and a waistcoat will need to get his monied fingers all over it.

“I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.”

- George W. Bush, to US personnel in Afghanistan, March 13, 2008

US ally Turkey has invaded and bombed Iraq again last week.

The president of US enemy, Iran, visited Iraq last week, where he was warmly received by the Iraqi government.

Whose side are we on again?

I watched the documentary No End in Sight this weekend, a powerful and sobering film about some of the key decisions that led to the Iraq war, and the subsequent ruin of an occupation. If you’ve read Imperial Life in the Emerald City, not too much of the movie will surprise you, but it’s definitely worth a watch (and the book is worth a read). The one fact from the film that did take me aback was the time spent planning the post-war occupation of Iraq. The film tells you that prior to defeating Germany in WWII, the US government spent two years planning the eventual occupation of that country. How much time did the Bush administration spend planning the Iraqi occupation? 60 days, says the film, and even that answer gets undercut when members of that agency admit that they didn’t even meet until 10 days after they were hired, had a miniscule staff, and almost no resources.

The story of the Iraq war, is a simple one, really. A small group of arrogant idiots in the White House thought that they could spread “democracy” through the Middle East by replacing dictator Saddam Hussein with con man Ahmed Chalabi. By “spread” we mean “intimidate existing leaders and encourage coups against others” and by “democracy” we mean “any form of government that is friendly to US foreign policy and foreign corporate profit-lust.” I sometimes see this group of idiots (aka “neocons”) referred to as “reckless utopians”, as though we should applaud their intentions while weeping at the costs of their naivetie. But their intentions were not good, they were the same as so many people in power: the masses are sheep who should be controlled for the “greater good”; “leaders” like themselves are better than the rest of humanity; millions or billions of regular people may have to suffer or die to maintain “order”; since the leaders do such hard and important work, they deserve whatever power, perks and wealth they desire; and if the leaders can get away with all this, then the masses prove themselves to be the inferiors, and deserve whatever abuse and exploitation gets ladled out. That’s not utopian, that’s crass, ravenous, self-serving arrogance.

So that’s the story of the Iraq war. Powerful people who think they’re better than you and me decided that they could best maintain their dominance over other powerful people with deceit and slaughter.

Of course, discussing what got us into this war is sort of moot when compared to the question of what we should do in Iraq now, with its mountain of errors and rivers of carnage. And even that question is moot, as any answers provided by you and me won’t match up with the needs and goals of the folks in power who actually choose the policy.

Last batch of statistics I read said that around 70% of Iraqis want the US forces to leave their country. Many American politicians would quickly declare that if the US pulls out of Iraq, it will be a bloodbath. And it will certainly be terrible, no doubt about that. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Iraqi people, who know the situation far better than any senator or analyst in DC, still want the US to leave. And while large numbers of Americans are opposed to the war, a significant number seem to feel that we shouldn’t leave Iraq yet, either because it’s not right to leave the mess that we created, or because leaving without “finishing the job” will mean that the sacrifice and death of so many US soldiers was in vain.

Of course, the wishes of the Iraqi people should trump the wishes of the American public and American soldiers when it comes to what should happen in Iraq. Tragically, American soldiers were duped by this government, told that they were out to help the citizens of Iraq when the government did not really care about their desires and well-being (and increasingly shows that they don’t care about the well-being of the soldiers, either). Part of me is sympathetic, and does not want those soldiers and their families to have to accept these bleak and painful truths. But it is clear that the situation of Iraq is worse in by every conceivable measure since the invasion. And while it’s still possible for the US to do a little bit of good in Iraq, I don’t think it will be accomplished with bullets.

I don’t feel much need to address the “surge is working” point of view, but maybe I should. The “surge” was intended to reduce the violence in Baghdad so that political progress could be made in the Iraqi government. Violence dropped, but that was mostly due to the face that one side won. The Shia effectively control the city, and Baghdad has been ethnically cleansed. That’s why the civilian deaths are down. The reason US military deaths are down is a) Moqtada al-Sadr called a cease-fire between his Mahdi army and the US, b) the US is now working more through personnel-safe airstrikes, and c) the US has temporarily bought off the Sunni insurgency so that they’ll fight Al Qaeda in Iraq instead of American soldiers. But every savvy reporter that has spent time on the ground in Iraq says that Iraq does not really exist any more as a country, that the Iraqi government is a fiction, and that the Shia-Sunni civil war will likely re-ignite sometime between spring and fall.

How exactly are US troops going to fix this mess? Especially when the US government that gives them their marching orders has no real interest in actually helping the people we’ve fucked over?

Pakistan holds elections.

Pakistani people vote overwhelmingly against current president/thug Pervez Musharraf and his political party.

Bush administration asks Pakistan to keep Musharraf in power anyway.

Stolen from Atrios:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, [former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions Col. Morris Davis] provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

We must have fair trials, but no one can be found innocent. Good to know.

“What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!”

From xkcd, of course.