Panetta's an Idiot, What the Frick Can He Tell You?

19 July 2011

by Jeff Huber

Buddy Hackett impersonator Leon Panetta, who just stepped into Uncle Bob Gates’ vacated billet in America’s Pentarchy, has set a new benchmark in ethnic humor.  He spent his first greet-and-grip trip abroad grinding his heel into his tinkle tool, saying more stupid things per minute of media exposure than George W. Bush ever did, and shrugged it all off in an MSNBC interview with “I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?” 

"Beats the shipoopi out of me."

Tell me you’re not really the frickin’ Secretary of Defense, Uncle Leo.  Moe, Larry and the Holy Ghost.  Where do we find such bureaucratic twits?  

Panetta began his government career as an Army intelligence officer during Lyndon Johnson’s surge in the Vietnam War.  Military intelligence is to both the military and intelligence what McDonald’s is to food.  Officers in combat branches have to be able to fly airplanes or drive ships or lead frightened young men in desperate attacks against machine gun nests. The only requirement for becoming an intelligence officer is to never know what the hell you’re talking about.  Panetta was discharged after a two-year tour as a first lieutenant and awarded an Army Commendation Medal, a medal normally given to junior enlisted and officer personnel for not getting caught masturbating in the middle of the parade ground at high noon.  (Fair disclosure: in the course of my career I received six Navy Commendation Medals, which shows you how good I was at not getting caught). 

Uncle Leo didn’t claw his way to the top of the warmongery by the sheer inertia of his lack of competence in military and intelligence matters alone.  He was a political prodigy.  In high school Panetta joined JSA (aka Junior Statesmen of America aka Junior State of America).  He was vice president of the student body as a junior and as a senior he was president.  He graduated from Santa Clara University in 1960 magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science.  In 1963 he got his Juris Doctor from Santa Clara School of Law.

There’s no mention of Panetta having served in Vietnam, and you can bet a shiny new District of Columbia quarter that we would have heard about it if he had.  It isn’t clear where exactly Panetta did serve, but I’d be willing to double down that he got himself stationed in Washington, just like a lot of wannabe politicos getting their military service block checked on their way to bigger and more malevolent things.  It’s a tried and true career path that continues to be beaten by ambitious youth eager to acquire the creeping corruption that accompanies the incremental accumulation of power.

Why did law school graduate Panetta become an Army intelligence officer instead of an Army JAG?  It’s hard to say for sure, but in Washington lawyers are as common as call girls.  If you’re a Washington lawyer with an ultra top-secret security clearance from your days in military intelligence, on the other hand, you defecate 24-karat ingots. 

In 1966, newly discharged First Lt. Panetta cashed in his credentials on a job as legislative aid to the Senate minority whip, and before he could say “Jimmy Hoffa poured into a pond of poached piranhas” three times, he knew where all the bodies were burid and he was a made guy.  The higher and higher up the ladder the mob kicked him, they more they could trust him to keep their secrets because he had as much blood on his hands as anybody else.

After Panetta rode this gravy train through a series of appointed positions, he switched parties in 1971 and was elected to nine terms as a congressman.  (He reportedly claimed to have left the Republican Party because it had moved away from political the center.  Heh.  The Republican Party hasn’t been in sliding distance of the political center since it was against slavery.)

Uncle Leo left the legislature to become Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.  Panetta had worked budget issues in Congress, though one can hardly imagine that he ever dirtied his hands on a spreadsheet.  Possessing actual skills involved with areas one works in is for the servant classes, not for high rollers like Panetta.  But his fluency in the Big Schmooze made him a natural to move up as Clinton’s White House chief of Staff, where no asset is more valuable than knowing how to deploy elbows and trim the sails to catch the prevailing winds.    

Eyebrows collided with hairlines, however, when young Mr. Obama nominated Panetta to head the CIA, and his elevation to defense secretary popped optical organs out of their orbits.  Talk about trading one empty hat for another.  It was telling that at his defense post confirmation hearing, Uncle Leo predicted that the next Pearl Harbor could be a cyber attack.  Clue in, Leon.  We’ve already had cyber attacks, on the Pentagon itself no less.

So it’s little wonder that Uncle Leo devoured his feet during his first, uh, trip abroad.  Oddly, though, his witless comments rang of a certain savant veracity.  We may snicker that he told the troops they were in Iraq because of 9/11, but why else was he going to say they were there?  Because their last commander in chief lied to the entire world to justify an invasion that had been on the neocon agenda since the late nineties, and because their present commander in chief is too much of a weakling to put an end to the “strategic mistake” like he pledged he would?  And how else could Panetta justify telling the troops that they’ll have to continue to fight and die for a strategic mistake as soon as the Iraqis get off the dime and ask us to stay like he wants them to? 

As to Panetta’s comment to the embedded war beat press that despite promises from the White House we’ll keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2004, I don’t see what the furor is all about.  This White House hasn’t kept any of its frickin’ war promises yet.  Why start now and set a bad precedent?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hiding Behind the Troops

7/12/11

By Jeff Huber

They sure could go for a Reese's Peanut Butter
Cup from your local Walgreens right about now. 

You’re at a convenience shack or a grocery barn or wherever Old Century-style place it is you go where you have wait in some kind of line to pay for stuff in person and talk to an actual check-out clerk who hasn’t yet been replaced by a machine that’s smarter than your kid in college.  You look around while you’re waiting for the one or more of the latter-day luddites in front of you to write a check instead of swiping a credit card because a) they don’t believe in the 21^st century or b) they never heard of it.  (I can think of no contemporary scenario more Chaplin-esque—maddening, hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time—that the one that contains the bit of dialogue that goes: Darn it, I can never find that pen, it’s the one I always use, I know its in my purse somewhere, I always keep it there, it was an anniversary present, you know.  Oh, I hope I didn’t leave it someplace.)

Mixed in among the displays of designer kid’s candies that are more addictive than crack cocaine and tabloid periodicals that are worse for your mind than sniffing glue, right next to the cash register, you see a presentation that proudly features one of those old-oak-tree ribbon thingies with a logo you can’t quite read yet.  It’s not the pink one that wants you to save the ta-tas, no, and it’s not the one that wants you to adopt pound puppies and kitties or have them neutered or to clean up their poop or whatever—that one’s brown isn’t it? No, this is the yellow one, and you can read what it says now: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!

If you tack a dollar onto the tab for groceries or your beer or your giant box of Jujubes, “a portion” of it will go help our troops overseas who are protecting us and keeping us safe and are making all the sacrifices in our War on Evil while we sit at home and don’t make hardly any sacrifices at all.  This particular come-on promises to make sure every troop—that is, every troop who wants one, or asks for one, or fills out a ten page application form and writes a 500 word essay and then wins the drawing—will receive a gift, on the next Christian holiday, of a personalized Hershey bar that reads “Go, Troops, Go!” or simply “Yay Troops!”

At this point, you hopefully ask yourself why, if we the taxpayers have ponied up over a trillion dollars for our woebegone wars in Iraq and the Bananastans, should any of us pull another dollar out of our wallet to make sure our troops get a candy bar for Christmas?  Gee, those tens or maybe hundreds of billions we poured into Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan that disappeared like an old lady’s favorite pen, wouldn’t they alone have bought a lifetime supply of personalized Christmas Hershey bars for just about every person in the world who celebrates Christmas?

And you hopefully want to scream when you fail to toss a buck into the pot when you check out and the cash register professional pouts and says, “Don’t you want to help the troops?  The poor old lady who lost her pen did.”

If these yahooligans
don't end up in hell
there is no such place.

The preceding scenario portrays an artfully crafted scam with a witting or unwitting accomplice on the scene to guilt trip you into going along with it. It’s a parable that illustrates the principle behind the most cynical and perhaps the most effective pro-war propaganda campaign that has been operating since Dick Cheney first convened his White House Information Group to gull the American public and its legislature into rolling over for the invasion of Iraq, the crown jewel in the grand neoconservative strategy for invading and occupying the world. 

Some of the support-our-troops organizations you’ll rub against are no doubt front groups, supposedly “grass roots” outfits similar to the repellant Vets for Freedom that bills itself as the f the "leading voice representing troops and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan" but is actually a political beard run by Republican-affiliated public relations, media, legal, and political consultants who include former Bush White House spokesman Taylor Gross.

Many troop support groups and the people who run them are quite earnest and relatively free of Big War paw prints, but their effect is much the same as if they were simply a gaggle of propaganda goons.  And I hate to say this, but even most of the love-the-troops-hate-the-war folks, however well intentioned they are, play into the pro-war propaganda scheme.  In any case, it’s hard to tell which pro-trooper outfits are a scam and/or a front group and which ones, however misguided they may be, are on the up-and-up.  The thing to remember is that there is no reason on earth why you should pluck a single penny out of your pocket to “support” the troops.  You’ve already sacrificed enough; the malignant likes of Dick Cheney and John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol who brought you the Longest War Ever have hustled your country’s economy to hell in a hand truck, and unless you’re in pre-school right now, you’ll never see a return to the fiscal halcyon days of the President Pants (aka Clinton) era.

Lamentably, the grandchildren of kids in preschool might not see the end of the Long War either, now that the folks in charge of it have established a line of succession.  Ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, who just replaced Ex-CIA director Bob Gates as defense secretary, is the same brand war perpetuating bureaucratic savant as his predecessor was.  John Bolton was a kick up, kiss down kind of D.C. culture vulture; Panetta and Gates kissed up, down and sideways and sucked their way to the top of the dung heap.  They were, long ago, wholly vested in the warfare-welfare system status quo; they knew where all the bodies were buried because they’re the ones who hired the hit men. 

That they know little or nothing about actual war is of little consequence.  The next guy in line for their cabinet job, newly implanted CIA chief David Petraeus, knows little or nothing about actual war either, yet to hear the hapless bullroar machine describe him, you’d think he’s the reincarnation of Ike, Patton and Robert E. Lee combined.  Where Panetta and Gates are self-promoting bureaucrat buffoons, Petraeus is an out-and-out great white shark.  He knows where all the bodies are buried because he’s the one who embalmed them.  All Petraeus really knows about wars is how to keep from losing them by making sure they never end.  As his hagiographer and camp wife Tom Ricks artlessly blurted in his most recent rewritten history of the Iraq War, Petraeus really did “betray us,” pretending to be looking for a way out of Iraq when he was actually buying time to make it impossible for us to ever leave.

That’s where the “support our troops” hook kicks into high gear.  Whenever commenting for the embedded media about the prospects of bring troops home, the likes of King David, Mush Mullen, Desert Ox Odierno, Uncle Bob and now Panetta Head will fall back on the we don’t want to squander the tremendous gains our wonderful men and women in uniform sacrificed so bravely to achieve mantra.  Those bravely sacrificed for “gains” amount to an Iraq and Afghanistan that, nearly a decade after 9/11, still look like the London Zoo ten minutes after a Nazi air raid, and a best ally—Pakistan—that we’re in a virtual open war with.   

The Pentarchy exhorts us to honor our war dead and wounded by adding to their number in pursuit of self-defeating, self-perpetuating wars whose sole purpose is to create bases of operations from which we can launch more self-defeating, self-perpetuating wars in the name of American global leadership.   

The way you can support our troops is to apply constant pressure on your elected federal officials to bring them home and to keep their tea bagger toadying mitts off the troops’ pay and benefits.  Anything else is just helping the warmongery use our troops as a human shield.

Whatever you do, don't plunk down good money to have Walgreens send them a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.  Our troops are getting plenty to eat, trust me.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Daoist Diary: They're Here, They're Queer, They're Heavily Armed...

Maybe now retired reserve Air Force JAG officer Lindsey Graham will feel safe to ooze out from under the closet door.

#

Court Orders Immediate Halt to Gay Military Ban

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court ordered the U.S. government on Wednesday to immediately cease enforcing the ban on openly gay members of the military, a move that could speed the repeal of the 17-year-old rule.

Col. Lindsey Graham, USAF (Ret),
leading DADT proponent

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy must be lifted now that the Obama administration has concluded it's unconstitutional to treat gay Americans differently under the law. The appeals court noted that Congress repealed the policy in December and that the Pentagon is preparing to certify that it is ready to welcome gay military personnel.

#

As a senior naval officer I considered Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to be the dumbest of a host of ill-advised personnel regulations.  I knew so many brass hats who made Hugh Hefner look like Saint Paul but who considered homosexuals and lesbians too “perverted” to serve in “their” Navy.

Get used to it, old boys. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Don't Let the Door Hit You, Uncle Bob

5 July 2011

by Jeff Huber

Leave it to the Washington Post, perhaps the most fetid carcass in the tomb of our once vibrant fourth estate, to lead the pandering applause for recently recycled defense secretary Bob Gates.  In a recent fawning fluff piece on the Gates legacy, Pentagon correspondent Greg Jaffe, a journalistic progeny of David Petraeus myth fabricator Thomas E. Ricks, gushes like a bobbysoxer about how Gates established a reputation for “straight talk.”  There’s plenty of media shame to go around on this story, though; Anna Mulrine of the Christian Science Monitor writes a similar love letter, cooing about the how Gates spoke “truth to power.”    

Great.  Caesar’s.  Ghost.  If Uncle Bob established anything, it’s that his mouth has more sides to it that the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.  In a city desperately overpopulated with nude emperors, Gates was especially notable for his ability to maneuver around the naked truth like a master danseur.  The guy had more positions than the Kama Sutra. 

Possibly the best example of Gates’ mendacity is his smoke-and-mirror bombast on reductions in defense spending.  Gates conspicuously championed the cause of reduced military spending.  But his idea of slicing $100 billion from the defense budget over five years was “saving” it so the Pentagon could spend it on modernizing and recapitalizing military equipment and sustaining troops.  That’s like forcing your kids to "save" their allowance so they can blow it in a candy store.  And when you get right down to it, the military’s major expenditures come in two basic categories: equipment and troops.  The only other military expense is war, and where the federal budget is concerned, war is like Jell-O: there’s always room for it.

  

In June, Gates’ number necromancers announced plans to “freeze” the Pentagon’s budget, by which they actually meant that they could stop asking for annual increases—excepting for adjustments for inflation, of course—by 2015.  But a lot can happen between now and then, and even Gates sheepishly (or wolfishly?) confessed that predictions that far into the future have a “troubled track record” and that "any number of these decisions could be reversed."  By “any number,” one can safely assume that Gates meant “all.” 

"The defense budget
is not the cause
of this country's
fiscal woes."

In a speech to his war mongrel pals at the American Enterprise Institute (parent organization of Bill Kristol’s malignant Project for the New American Century), Gates allowed that defense budget cuts needed to be “part of the solution” to the country’s economic woes, but in the same breath he added “I have long believed – and still do – that the defense budget, however large it may be, is not the cause of this country’s fiscal woes.”  That’s a remarkable remark, considering that the official defense budget accounts for over 50 percent of discretionary federal spending and that the real tab for defense outlay, when you chalk up defense related spending not included in the DoD budget—non-DoD agencies defense-related spending, veterans benefits, interest on debt incurred by military spending and so on—may, according to some credible arguments, run to over half of all federal outlays. 

But the defense budget largely trickles into the pockets of military industrialists like the folks who belong to the American Enterprise Institute, and they are perfectly willing to hear that defense spending had nothing to do with ruining the economy.  They want to believe, or rather they want the rest of us to believe, that the economy was shipwrecked by all those black and brown people who got up one morning and forfeited on $700,000 billion worth of mortgages that the liberals made the banks lend them because of some law Jimmy Carter passed in the ‘70s.  

Feckless Jaffe writes of how much Gates cared about the troops he commanded, and about his concern for their welfare in combat:  "Gates helicoptered into a hardscrabble U.S. base near the Pakistan border," Jaffe writes.  "Many of the soldiers had just been through a withering, weeklong battle that took the lives of six of their colleagues. 'I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you since I sent you here,' Gates told them. 'I just want to tell you how much I love you.'"
 

Jesus, Mary and Shemp.  I love you, man, in your hardscrabble base after your withering battle, dude.  It’s lucky for Uncle Bob that I wasn’t among the soldiers at that hardscrabble firebase, because he wouldn’t have gotten back into that helicopter under his own power.  Jaffe doesn’t say how he came by this Bunyon-esque narrative; he likely heard it from the same unnamed “senior military official” who feeds him the most of the propaganda he channels into his paper and calls “news.”

Despite how much Gates loves his hardscrabble, withered, battle hardened, desert tanned, crew cut, musky odor emitting troops, he is perfectly willing to screw them out of pay and benefits in order to meet his phony-baloney budget reduction strategy.  He’s also pushing a plan to poke veterans (those hardscrabblers of yesteryear) out of pay and benefits. 

He doesn’t like doing that, mind you.  It breaks his little heart, I'm sure.  But he’s already cut important weapon programs to the bone, and he’s only preserving must-have initiatives that will allow America to fight its future wars, high-dollar gizmos like flying submarines, and a killer drone that can fly halfway across the world from the deck of an aircraft carrier that’s already halfway across the world, and global strike rockets that can whack distant terrorists with a fraction of the wallop that could be delivered at a fraction of the cost by overpriced bombers we’ve already bought, and stealth fighters that may or may not be able to defeat air defense systems that may or may not ever exist*, and robot soldiers who don’t need any pay or benefits at all, and whose moms and dads and wives and kids won’t whine about it when they accidentally get killed by their fellow robot soldiers.  The shameful list of pricey gee-wizardry still on the defense dole goes on indefinitely.

Gates likely reckons we’ll need all these gizmos in future, because despite saying that he’s become “cautious on wars of choice,” he is singularly responsible for extending our wars of choice in Iraq and the Bananastans; he was the tool of choice to usher in the Iraq surge under young Mr. Bush and he backed Petraeus and the rest his velvet coup generals when they pulpit bullied young Mr. Obama into surging in the Bananastans.  I highly doubt whether baby boomers or Xers will see the end of those two conflicts.  

Candid, straight-talking, truth-to-power-telling Bob Gates was so full of crap I could smell him clear down here in Virginia Beach.  Lamentably, his successor, Leon Panetta, is likely to make Gates seem downright Washingtonian vis-à-vis the truth.  And the guy on deck for the SecDef job, new CIA chief David Petraeus, will make the Gates tenure look like the good old days. 

*Don’t be fooled by tales of Gates’ opposition to stealth aircraft programs.  They’re still alive and well and consuming more tax dollars than any ten federal infrastructure programs.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Obama Channels Nixon

28 June 2011

by Jeff Huber

Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor” has evolved into Barack Obama’s “responsible conclusion.” 

Candidate Richard Nixon promised in 1968 that if elected president, he would end the war in Vietnam.  In 1972, President Nixon, campaigning for reelection, assured the nation that “peace is at hand.”  

"We've ended our
combat mission in
Iraq."

In 1973, Congress passed the War Power Resolution to check the ability of presidents to commit the United States to war without approval of the legislature.  Nixon’s veto of the Resolution was overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. 

On 9 August 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency to escape impeachment for obstruction of justice and violations of his Constitutional constraints related to the Watergate affair. 

On 23 April 1975, in a speech at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford declared that the war in Vietnam was “finished as far as America is concerned.”   

On 30 April 1975, newly installed South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh surrendered to the North, seven years after Candidate Nixon promised to end the war and after 116 years of continuous war in that country.

The most toxic denizens of our polluted information environment are calling to have Obama impeached over his illegal war in Libya.  John V. Walsh, one of the paleo-hooligan at The American Conservative (one of my former gigs), recently called for Obama’s ouster on the basis that his disregard of the Constitution is in stark contrast to the understanding of and devotion to that document displayed by Tea Bag Barbie Palin and her adoring idolaters.  One of the wags at Gordon Liddy’s beloved Washington Times (to wit: Eugene G. Windchy) wails that we’re “in a constitutional crisis” because of the way Obama is stiff-arming the War Powers Resolution, the law that, ironically, Dick Cheney and other leading neocons argue is unconstitutional because it hinders presidents from encroaching on the legislature’s exclusive Constitutional prerogative to declare war. It’s funny how you didn’t hear Windchy or anybody else at the Washington Times puling about any constitutional crises when Big Dick was in the saddle.      

As distasteful as I find the agenda of the political right, I’m inclined to sympathize with their desire to rein in the totalitarian tenor of Obama’s reign, but impeach the guy?  Come on.  Not even Denny Kucinich has a serious notion of doing such a thing.  In the age of the New American Centurions, we don’t impeach presidents for taking us into illegal wars.  These days we only impeach presidents for their inability to keep their orbs and scepters in their pants.

We’ve been in a constitution crisis since 1950 when Harry Truman committed us to a full-blown war in Korea that ended in a negotiated tie with a foe that still flares up on us like a wicked case of facial herpes.  The constitutional crisis Obama has created is just another twig on the pyre of our republic.  And after the Bush and Cheney administration flushed shame and irony and truth and accountability and the bill of rights all the way to the Congressional Cafeteria, who will ever impeach anyone for anything ever again? 

Nor is it likely we’ll ever be able to vote the warmongers out of office.  If you’re not sharing a pillow with the war profits machine you don’t get elected.  Remember all that yak from candidate Obama about 16 months and we’re out of Iraq?  It isn’t happening.  Did you hear the yak from President Obama the other night about how he’s going to draw us down from the Bananastans?  That prevarication had barely left his mouth before King David Petraeus was telling the little war correspondents embedded up his rump about how, well, he’d go along with it, but it wasn’t the way he’d like things done, no sir, if Obama was listening to his generals he’d be drawing down a darn sight slower, that’s what, so when we lose in the Bananastans it won’t be King David’s fault, no sir, it will be on Obama’s head. 

It wasn't long after King David’s press ploy that Obama started this standard shuffling retreat, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the military’s top bull feather merchant, announced that generals Obama was giving commanders “wide latitude” to execute the president's “broad timelines.”  What were those broad timelines?  In Obama-speak: "Starting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year."  What in the wide world of sports, arts and sciences is that supposed to mean?  I want to screen the video of that speech in slo-mo so I can see Obama’s tongue flicking in and out.  Donuts will get you dollars that by the end of this year, we’ll have replaced 10,000 uniformed cooks and bed makers with civilian contractors provided by KBR and Blackwater, and we’ll assign extra emergency medical technicians to our combat brigades there and re-designate them as “volunteer fire brigades,” wink, wink, nudge, nudge.      

Take us to your leader.

Obama has fed us another bowl of pet plop and told us it’s chocolate ice cream, but that’s not going to keep him from being reelected.  The only way South Side Slick won’t serve another term is if extra terrestrials reveal themselves to us and tell us that Obama not only wasn’t born in America, he wasn’t born on earth, and then produce the certified original copy of his Martian birth certificate to prove it. 

Support the troops.

The only way I see the public start demanding that we extract ourselves from what even Uncle Bob Gates admits are “wars of choice” (he’s “wary” of them now that he’s all but ensured that they never end) is if prominent political and media figures start stating in unvarnished patois that the likes of Obama and Gates and Mullen and Petraeus are using our troops as pawns, not to preserve our nation but to preserve the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us would acquire “unwarranted influence” over government policy if we allowed it to. 

Lamentably, the chances of someone prominent enough to matter exercising that kind of moral courage are profoundly slimmer than the odds that the little green men will step out of the shadows. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Daily Daoist Diary, June 25 2011

I'll write a glowing tribute to Clarence Clemons the second Wayne Shorter becomes a household name.

JLH

Obama’s Hypocrisy and Other High Crimes

June 21, 2011

by Jeff Huber

“Let me be perfectly clear: I have taught the Constitution, I understand the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution when I am President of the United States."

--Senator Barack Obama, Feb. 26, 2008

Irony, sentenced the death penalty and executed by lethal bull roar injections during the Bush/Cheney regime, continues to claw at its coffin lid. 

The XJE2020 "Liberator"

Young Mr. Obama set a new benchmark in self-satirizing political posturing when he said in a speech last Thursday that he was copacetic about negotiating with the Taliban as long as they “renounce violence and accept the Afghan Constitution.”  This eclipsed even the pot-and-kettle hypocrisy we witnessed when young Mr. Bush used to admonish lesser tinhorns for not obeying the “rule of law.”

Obama’s embrace of violence has been so stark I suspect that most of us are too numb to fully comprehend it.  Bush was the first president to drive the country off a cliff in two optional and unwinnable wars.  Obama has embarked us on yet a third imperial snipe hunt, and he’s done so in a way that makes Bush’s contempt for the Constitution seem as venial as snitching a couple of extra cookies from the jar. 

Obama doesn’t want Congress to have any say so on whether or not he can commit forces to hostilities beyond 60 days as required of him by the War Powers Act of 1973, so he had some of the lawyers who work for him tell him the War Powers Act doesn't apply to Libya since all we're doing that's hostile, per se, is bombing some stuff with them predator drones so our troops aren’t subject to enemy fire.

By that benchmark, the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Dresden in World War II, long after Japanese and German air defenses had been destroyed, didn’t amount to hostilities wither.  If tomorrow we decide to level Iran or Yemen or whatever other little country we’re displeased with at the moment with intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles, that won't amount to hostilities either. 

Blowing a fistful of Muslim wedding chapels to kibbles with cruise missiles launched from naval combatants at sea doesn't amount to hostilities any more.  When the Air Force brings its gizmologically supercalifrag Prompt Global Strike on line, presidents like Bombardier Barry will be able to make smithereens out of third world Palookavilles worldwide within an hour of pushing a button on his iPad, sort of the same way he signed the extension of the Patriot Act a few weeks ago and that won’t constitute hostilities.  When the Navy gets its cockamamie UCAS aka Unmanned Combat Air System aka “killer drones,” presidents like Chicago Slim can order aircraft carrier strikes on the south side of Tripoli and kill all the civilians they want to and it won’t count as hostilities.  And when the Army and Marines get their combat robots with cool names like “Swords” and “Warrior X700,” presidents like Barack “I won’t be like George W. Bush” Obama will be able to invade and occupy whole countries and even regions and that won’t constitute hostilities either.

It’s disconcerting to reflect that you bought the chump “change” slogan when you voted for Obama.  It’s even more cognitively disturbing to accept that your choice in 2012 will be between him and a staunch ally of Tea Bag Barbie.  But neither of those perceptive horrors holds a candle to the appalling realization that you agree wholeheartedly with something that came from the mouth of House Speaker Bill Boehner.  Of the administrations claim that our gun-barrel polka in Libya doesn’t amount to hostilities, Pumpkin said, “it doesn't pass the straight-face test."

No, it doesn't.  And yet it is with a straight face that Team O tells us why the boss rejected the advice of two top Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers when he decided to blow of Congress and its silly little concerns about the War Powers Act and separation of powers.  As the administration’s spin physicians told Charlie Savage of the New York Times to tell us, Mr. Obama decided instead to follow the advice of the White House counsel that said our activities fell short of hostilities, and that under normal circumstances the White House counsel’s interpretation of the law (Savage’s words, my italics) is legally binding on the executive branch.

The  top secret amendment to the Constitution that transfers judicial power from the judicial branch to the White House counsel must be the same amendment that allows FBI agents to ignore the Bill of Rights if, in their considered opinion, violating the first ten unclassified amendments is sanctioned by the broad guidelines of their bosses in the Justice Department.

Lord John Acton was divinely correct when he said that absolute power corrupts absolutely; he conspicuously did not add a codicil that said power only corrupts Republicans.  Obama’s extra-constitutional hijinks overreach even those of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was hounded out of office, in part because of a vibrant, healthy free press that duly performed its function as a fourth estate guarantor of our laws and freedoms.  That free press is now the Big Brother Broadcasting System.  Content-wise, the mainstream media and the rabid right tabloid outlets are virtually inseparable.  

I never imagined I’d look back on the Nixon era and think Those were the good old days.  

P.S.  The recent un-sourced announcements about Obama moving closer to ending the Bananastan bungle is exactly the same pre-election trick Dick Nixon pulled regarding Vietnam, not once but twice.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Obama's Law of Armed Conflict

June 14, 2011

by Jeff Huber

If young Mr. Obama is a representative example, the point of being a constitutional scholar is not knowing how adhere to the document but how to get away with using it to wipe your plenary keister.

Obama (left) and constitutional law
mentor Professor Lawrence Tribe

What makes Obama a “constitutional scholar” is that he studied constitutional law under some rooting, tooting, high-faluting constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School and he also taught the subject at the University of Chicago Law School.  I’m not sure if teaching a subject at the graduate level makes you a scholar in it.  All but about four of the faculty at the Naval War College didn’t know attrition from maneuver or their Clausewitz from their elbows or their Sun Tzu from a hole in the ground. 

Whether Obama is a legitimate expert on the Constitution or not, it’s become palpable that when it comes to making moral, ethical and legal decisions, he follows the example set by young Mr. Bush: rather than go through the troublesome chore of exercising his own judgment and moral conscience on weighty issues concerning the fate of his nation, Obama hired a herd of highly educated halfwits to tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal and ethical, and probably non-carcinogenic and low fat to boot.  (In a post-regime interview with NBC morning fop Matt Lauer, Bush said he thought water boarding was legal "because the lawyer said it was legal.”)

Eric Holder and the rest of the attorneys general conjuring legal positions favoring Obama’s tsarist policies make Bush era Svengali John Yoo seem like a decent human being in comparison.  Obama administration foreign policy wonks like Suzy Rice are neocons in Democrat's clothing.  As our ambassador to the UN, Suzy makes John Bolton look in retrospect like a blustering peace poofter.  And Obama’s top military advisers look exactly like Bush’s top military advisers because they’re the exact same herd of four-star hooligans. 

Boy George had the grace to let Congress rubber stamp them wars in Iraq and the Bananastans with a couple of them Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs).  Bush no doubt thought them two wars was legal ‘cause Congress said they was, and heck, Congress makes the dadburned laws so they ought to know what’s legal and what ain't, shouldn’t they?  Kid Obama hasn't even offered Congress a reach-around on his Libya deal. 

When our “days not weeks” commitment to Operation Odyssey Loser went screaming past the two month marker, Denny Kucinich and others did their best banshee impersonations about how Obama was in violation of the War Powers Act of 1973 because he’d exceeded the sixty day limit for committing U.S. troops to combat without a Simon Says from Congress. But the legislators behind the check and balance issues are just going through the motions and they know it.

Boehner, Graham,
McCain and Lieberman
say we should do
more in Libya.

Bad Bill Boehner shoved a “rebuke” of Obama through the House that amounts to a rap across the knuckles with a Nerf ruler.  Boehner’s resolution demands that the White House answer questions about the goals of the military campaign in Libya.  That’s probably because despite his resolution, Boehner is, along with his fellow Golden Girls of War in the Senate—John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman—in favor of continued if not escalated fighting in Libya, and he’s no doubt desperately searching for a plausible argument to justify his position. 

The warmongering ménage of McCain, Graham and Lieberman actually disagree on Libya: not over whether to escalate the fight there, but on how to do it.  Goober Graham wants to “cut the head of the snake off” (oh, Goobs, you little mongoose you) by bombing Ghadaffi’s strongholds.  Senator Ex-Prisoner of War wants to beef up the rebel forces so they can win the battle on the ground.  Joe Bag-o’-Bullroar says we’re only a “foot and a half” engaged and would like to see us plunge both feet firmly into our latest Manic Misadventure in Quicksand Land.


But even the Three Senate Sisters can’t toil-and-trouble up a real reason for fighting the war in Libya.  Oh, they toss around the “regime change” rubric faster than FOX News can fling a straw man, but circumcising the sovereignty from tinhorn heads of state like Khadafi is a means, not an end.  What real objective do we have in ousting Khadafi?  There are no weapons of mass destruction, there are no ties to 9/11 or al Qaeda and there’s no pressing humanitarian situation in Libya that doesn’t exist in Egypt or Syria or Somalia or dozens of other third world hornet holes that we aren’t engaged in militarily.  The reason nobody is coming forth with an “explanation” of what we’re doing in Libya is that they can’t.  Even Carl Rove can’t pull a bluster this big out of his hat.  What, we’re going to say we’re enforcing a no-fly zone over there so they can’t enforce a no-fly zone over here? 

So our leaders are motivated to circumvent our core founding document for the sake of the dope deals within dope deals they’ve cut with the Saudis and the Israelis and the military industrial complex and our Maker only knows what other malignant monkey shiners.

But whatever's going on, you can kiss the notion of the Constitution being a “living document” farewell.  It’s dropped dead away; it's as dead as irony, shame and integrity. 

Oh, happy Flag Day.  And support the troops, huh?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

For Whom the Mission Creeps in Libya

June 7, 2011

By Jeff Huber

“Nobody wants to sit on the bench.”

-- Los Angeles Angels pitcher Bobby Wilson

One of the big Sunday stories was about how British and French attack helicopters deployed on amphibious ships have joined the fight in Libya.  Unnamed information warriors told Simon Denyer of the Washington Post to tell us that the helicopters give “NATO he ability to strike military targets in built-up areas with more precision than fast-moving, high-flying warplanes.”  

Attack helicopters:
Libyan chicks dig 'em.

That may be true in some cases.  Say, for example, you want to hover over a street for hours and blow off any human head that happens to stick out a door or window. Helicopters do that pretty well, as we’ve seen so graphically in Iraq.  In their first few days of Libyan operations, however, the Brit Apaches and French Tigers and Gazelles (adorable nicknames, huh?) targeted military vehicles, military command buildings, a radar installation and a checkpoint, all targets that can be struck with precision by laser and Satellite guided bombs dropped from fixed-wing aircraft flying well above the maximum altitudes of the sorts of tactical anti-aircraft weapons that typically chew helicopters into bite-sized morsels. 

So why are the helicopters involved?

Warriors, like athletes, don't like sitting on the bench come game day.  Like it or not, that’s a desirable and even admirable trait for military personnel to have.  We don’t want a big, expensive force of Sgt. Bilkos who, once a war breaks out, will move heaven and earth and their floating crap game to stay out of it.  There’s even a legitimate goal in utilizing an armed conflict, however minor, to “blood” as much of your force as you can get in on the action.  It is, when you get right down to it, a waste of perfectly good mayhem if you don't.  This is especially true of naval and air forces that, given the paucity of credible navies or air defenses among the have-nots we like to go to war with, offer little risk of suffering embarrassing levels of unsightly friendly casualties. 

But England and France didn’t send their amphibious helicopters to war because the helicopter crews and sailors wanted to fight.  The Euros need a justification to keep spending outrageous amounts of money on their naval air forces.  And if they don’t use their naval air strike forces in a war that just happens to be happening in the Mediterranean Sea where all the NATO members’ naval forces can get to, and that happens to involve doing air strikes on a country with a big coast along the Med, then why do they have naval air strike forces in the first place?  Come to think of it, why is there still a NATO two decades after the Evil Empire it was formed to oppose did a Humpty Dumpty off the Berlin Wall?  

Our lose-lose Libya lunacy is about preserving the Long War for as long as possible.  Yeah, there's a keep Russia's mitts off Libya's oil factor and a certain amount of doing the Bush family Saudi pals' bidding, but our play war in Africa has so little to do with national security that nobody behind the wheel of this brakeless bus is bothering to pretend that it does.  Worse is that the passengers seem oblivious to the cliff’s edge their leaders are in the process of driving them over.  (In the middle of an extended recession and during an era when we have no military peer on the horizon, our on-the-books defense budget is the highest it has been since World War II and plausible estimates peg our actual defense spending at $1.22 trillion, roughly a third of our total 2012 budget.) 

What started as UN Ambassador and liberal warmonger Suzan Rice’s wafer-thin no-fly zone for the purpose of protecting the freedom-loving peoples of Libya from Muamar Kadhafi’s Our Gang air force has become a strategic bombing campaign aimed at regime change.  The best purpose we have for wanting regime change comes from Bombardier Barry himself, whose present position is that regime change is the only way to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya, as opposed his position in March that said regime change wasn’t necessary to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya.

What unmasked poppycock.  The second we signed on for the no-fly zone we signed on for regime change, and boy, as war aims go, hasn’t that one worked out swell for us in the past decade?  We have yet to extract ourselves from the two countries we puppet rigged on young Mr. Bush’s botched watch, and Mr. Obama’s promised withdrawal timelines have proven to be pure “disassembly.” 

Five U.S. troops were killed in a June 6 rocket attack on an Iraqi base in eastern Baghdad.  I’m sure those troops parents slash spouses slash children will find great comfort in knowing that Obama ended their deceased parents’ slash spouses’ slash children’s combat mission almost a year ago.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

  

Obama's Patriot Games

May 31, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Harvey Korman and Mel Brooks
test prototype "autopen."

Young Mr. Obama signed an extension of the Patriot Act on May 26, minutes before a midnight deadline.  Or rather, he robo-signed it.  Obama was in France meeting with that country’s president, Nikolas Sarkozy.  The Patriot Act extension was somewhere in Washington, presumably in the Oval Office.  “The White House” told AP’s Jim Abrams to tell us that, “the president used an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actual signature.”  Talk about distancing yourself from your actions. 

One supposes that using an autopen involves something like Obama pushing the “enact” button on his 3G iPad II and sending a signal across the web to the iPen on his desk.  Do you think he has a customized Executive Overreach app that controls all that business?  One rather wonders if he read the bill with one of the sundry eBook apps available for iPad before he eNacted it, though one rather doubts that he did. 

One can safely risk a shiny new Illinous quarter that darned few people who ever had anything to do with making the USA Patriot Act law actually read it.  One could also wager that even fewer people know that the law is a god-awful acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”  I bet it took as many true believers to trance up that tortured title as it took to transcribe the Act itself. 

You should have read
the fine print!

It’s little wonder that so few people have read the Patriot Act; it is unreadable.  I regularly read Joyce, Proust, Faulkner and Clausewitz and enjoy them all immensely, but I can’t make hide nor hair of the Patriot Act.  They might as well have titled it Remembrance of Legislation Past, because it is a compendium of amendments to laws already on the books that are themselves unreadable because they’re incomprehensible and/or classified and/or don’t even exist as far as anyone really knows.  About all one can glean about the Patriot Act is that it made the Bill of Rights as obsolete as human decency among Republicans and moral courage among Democrats.   

In 2007, yahooligans from both sides of the aisle howled like Sergeant Fury’s Commandos at the release of an inspector general report that revealed abuses of the Patriot Act by the FBI.  "It shows just how this administration has no respect for checks and balances” barked Democrat Chuck Schumer.  Republican Arlen Specter growled that Congress might "take away some of the authority which we've already given to the FBI, since they appear not to be able to know how to use it."  But in the end, nothing really changed and everybody in the FBI lived to molest the Constitution another day.

This time around, the extension was passed over “bi-partisan resistance” that amounted to little more than a road bump on Obama’s road to establishing an executive branch so plenary as to make Julius Caesar churn in his urn and Dick Cheney jealous.  At the end of the day—or rather minutes before that—Barry the Kid had signed a law that allows his minions to write their own search warrants and listen in on dirty phone calls ‘til they tickle themselves dry.

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senate Republican leader and a leading neocon chimp, said that provisions of the Patriot Act "have kept us safe for nearly a decade and Americans today should be relieved and reassured to know that these programs will continue."

Sure, Mitch.  All that executive trumping of the Constitution allowed us to catch the Panty Bomber who couldn’t even blow off his own tally whacker and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his get away car and his apartment, both of whom Inspector Clouseau could have tracked down and nabbed from his deathbed, Patriot Act or no Patriot Act. 

And after all the fuss, Congress passed the extension by a landfill—the vote went 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House, showing you that your representatives are far more committed to revoking your rights than to providing you with health care.  It’s also another indicator that Congress has completely abdicated its war-making powers to the executive. 

But as indicators of Congressional vaginitis go, the rubber-stamping of the Perpetual Patriot Bill is eclipsed by The Kid’s merry derision the War Powers Act of 1973.  Days not weeks of our Libya lollapalooza have turned into months, which means the O’bombardier’s 60-day deadline for engaging in hostilities not approved by Congress has come and gone like a goose’s breakfast with no Congressional approval, and aside from a few voices like Dennis Kucinich's crying in the Constitutional wilderness, nobody’s overly apoplexied about it. 

Representative Howard Berman of California, a Democrat and enthusiastic consumer of Obama’s precious bodily fluids, gargles, “There are no black-and-white answers here.”  Yes, there are black and white answers, here, Dennis, written in black ink on white paper in the War Powers Act: "s-i-x-t-y-space-d-a-y-s."  Lamentably, though, Berman’s bleat reflects the singular sad truth about the American mutation of the rule of law, namely that laws only mean what they say if they say what the rulers want them to mean. 

I got mine, baby!

The White House says it has all the authority it needs to keep on fighting in Libya, but declines to explain what law gives them that authority or even bother to make a flimsy legal argument to that effect.  That’s probably because there is no argument, flimsy or otherwise, that says what Obama is doing in Libya is legal. 

But Obama is a law unto himself, isn’t he?

As an aside, I loved how Obama makes cutesy appearances like his Memorial Day photo op at Arlington National Cemetery as his outgoing Secretary of War Bob Gates is telling folks like the inner warmongery at the American Enterprise Institute that we’ll need to reduce defense spending by cutting military pay and veteran’s benefits.

Support the troops, huh Uncle Bob?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.