One From That Stewart Guy

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

We're losing a good one.

(sigh) Hersh

Oh-fucking-dear - it might not be about what they told us it's about.

The Rude Pundit nails it again:

"High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy." Where Hersh goes wrong (and what everyone attacking the article follows) is pretending that his conclusion about President Obama and his administration making up a story about the bin Laden raid is earth-shattering. Christ, we just expect the president to lie to our faces. Hersh is living in a pre-Nixon era if he thinks we have that outrage gene anymore.

This is a nation that reelected the man who lied them into war. We are so apathetic that we just want to believe whatever story makes us sleep better at night. If we pull at the threads, if we start saying what the lies are in our "war on terror," there's a mighty big, comfy blanket that will fall apart. We will never allow that to happen. Truth carries a trigger-warning for Americans, so we choose to ignore it. Whether or not the real story is Hersh's, it sure as hell isn't the official one. It never is.

With all the bullshit faux-scandals and flat-out malarkey about Obama that the Repubs have been just making up, along comes a coupla items that're worth gabbing about (TPP, and now this bin Laden fantasy), and there's nothing  anybody has to say about anything?

I wonder why I'm not shocked that we are not shocked by any of this.

Today's Pix

Paid Up Patriotism

I've always felt uncomfortable with what seems like mandatory displays of patriotism - all the shit you see on Facebook and Twitter and on any given "news" show on radio or TV; and now including SportsBall events.  It's always seemed like I was back in high school in the late 60s, when guys wearing letter jackets were free (and encouraged) to beat up any kid who dared not stand up and sing the anthem or genuflect as the flag went by.

But not even in my darkest heaviest skepticism (some would say cynicism) did I ever really think we had sunk so low.

And I think it really sucks that we need Smedley Butler to come around once in a while to warn us again about the totally shitty misuse of any American soldier in service of wielding the political power necessary to pursue such grotesque profit at such an obscene expense.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.

I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Today's John Oliver

Today's Deep Thought

Once upon a time we decided we'd do a little governmentin' to get Dow Chemical and Standard Oil and Honeywell (et al) to stop dumping all their shit into the water, and to stop filling the skies with lead and mercury and sulfur (et al) - we needed Gubmint to help defend us against Big Bidness.

(remember now - Dick Nixon put the EPA together, but it was Johnson's idea because he loved working with the windows open on a spring day in DC, but he couldn't stand the stench of the Potomac wafting in on the breeze)

Anyway, then we decided that was just too restrictive and job-kill-y, so we wanted Big Bidness to defend us against Big Gubmint, and we got all Animal Instinct-y and Free Market-y, and gee - looks like we're kinda back to where we started.  'Cept that now, it seems we'll be fighting to the death to decide whether Big Bidness or Big Gubmint will defend us against an evermore hostile environment.

Good luck, kids.  

BTW - I'm in the market for some old aluminum cookware, hoping to push my Alzheimer's onset up by a decade or two so I don't hafta watch this shit happen.

Tim Wise

Re: Cops beating on people - mostly people with dark brown skin, and the ridiculousness of pale people thinking they know much of anything about what it's like to live black in white America.

It is bad enough that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the proper response to police brutality, economic devastation and perpetual marginality, having ourselves rarely been the targets of any of these. It is bad enough that we deign to instruct black people whose lives we have not lived, whose terrors we have not faced, and whose gauntlets we have not run, about violence; this, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we currently claim possession solely as a result of violence. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation's founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George's palace, no horseback freedom rides to effect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others; here because of our insatiable and rapacious desire to take by force the land and labor of those others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Rather, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

 Read the rest of it at Alternet

Happy Day, You Muthuh

Today's Quote

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge—even to ourselves—that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) --Carl Sagan 

I think of this quote pretty much every time I hear any "conservative" start to talk about almost anything.

Supply Side Economics & Trickle-Down
Religion
Nicotine isn't addictive and smoking's not really all that bad for ya
Tea Party
Antonin Scalia
Post-Racial America
Climate Change is a hoax
Tax Cuts boost government revenue
Cops aren't fucking us over
Freedom of Speech means billionaires should own everything
DumFux News
We were founded as a christian nation
Jade Helm 15

and on and on and on

Brady's Balls