Remember to take your medication!

Don't be a reactionary blogger who can't remember past ten minutes ago! You don't have to be as nitwitted as Michelle Malkin et cie. to forget that hallucinations aren't real just because they're yours and that this kind of incapacity to distinguish the two can help to "light up" a source providing useful and otherwise safely verifiable information to real journalists. Here's a case in point.

Americans can too think straight!

You might think that the striking contrast between the principled and coherent, if understandably shrill, arguments advanced by arch-devil Saddam Hussein and his distinguished lawyers (Ramsey Clark, inter alia) might by now have sunk in to the American news media that have shaped public opinion and policy in obsequious obedience to the American gangsters in Washington. But if that were true, this obituary by one of the American Society for International Law's most knowledgeable and articulate members wouldn't cast the American free press (i. e., the government propaganda machines) in such sharp relief.

About Saddam

Someone who has, in spite of his humble origins, cut such a gigantic figure across the world stage over the past few decades naturally provides a grotesquely monumental contrast to President Bush, who in spite of his privileged birth, has shown none of the noblesse oblige or even evidence of the strenuous and expensive, and ultimately fruitless, efforts to educate him expended over the whole course of his life. Such a someone, paradoxically enough, Saddam Hussein turned out to be in the few years since, having mistaken the scurrilous face of American imperialism for development assistance since his party was installed by the U.S. so many years ago, he fatally presumed that the U.S. would see his adoption of our approach to foreign policy (since launching a war of conquest against Mexico) -- military invasion and occupation -- as an acceptable way to revise the borders drawn in his part of the world by our British cousins in the years after the first World War.

He was mistaken about that, of course. Among other things, he believed the American propaganda about liberating the world from terror and tyranny instead of the fact that Americans instead have relied on terror and military aggression to perpetuate tyranny in their own narrow self-interest at least since Mexico 1848 through Hawaii in 1893, Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, and Puerto Rico, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Afghanistan, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, among those interventions to which it has admitted, over the course of the next century or so.

It was instructive to see how calm and dignified he was during the last moments of his life, as what appeared to be street thugs no doubt ultimately answerable to George W. Bush at some faraway hiding place abused him and thereby made their own contribution to the destruction of any sense of legitimacy or justice other than the kind proclaimed by leaders who send young people to fight their fights while they cower behind their parents' lawyers' manipulation of the courts and the judges indebted to them for their own places at the table.

Saddam himself cannot be excused from his own violations of international law and the norms of civilized nations, as they say. But quite apart from the barbarity and arrogance that inform the taking of any life, it can at least be said that he was responsible for far less death and destruction than the drug and alcohol abusing C-student outlaw in the White House, whose only hope remains that Americans, like anybody else, don't learn to care what sort of injuries must be done to life and liberty elsewhere in order for Americans to have the appearance of an abundance of it here.

Hussein deserved what happened to him at the end of his life no more than President Bush deserved it long ago, which is to say not at all. What would have been far more constructive for the uplifting of humanity from the evolutionary struggle out of which it sprang is a fair trial for Hussein -- or, Jesus Christ, at least one that looks a little bit fairer than the one we have seen -- before an international tribunal that applies the norms common to the people of the world, instead of the ones dictated to it by the U.S.A. for its own selfish purposes. An appropriate punishment could then be found, if in fact a conviction could be supported by genuine evidence. Needless to say, there is nothing that would lift American out of the swamp of venality in which it seems so hopelessly stuck as a similar trial for the high command of this fiasco in Iraq -- Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and their military puppets -- with a like result. We are hearing that the Americans are growing more tolerant of the exercise of justice under the rule of law by the International Criminal Court and other such institutions in the Hague, Geneva and Vienna; if we cannot try our own war criminals as we are entitled to do under the Rome Statute of the ICC, perhaps we are ready at least to comply with the statute's requirement that we surrender them to the Court for trial in the Hague. It is our best hope, however forlorn it may be.

Not surprising

It isn't at all startling that a political hack like Nancy Pelosi would cravenly cater to the powerful Zionist machine here in the USA, but I was a little surprised at the viciousness of her attack on President Carter, who is, after all, the only President alive who has published 20 books and received the Nobel peace prize, inter a whole lot alia, at all, much less doing it mostly since leaving office. "Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid" is a provocative title, even as the author himself carefully parses it as he promotes it, and I'm sure Jimmy is not surprised at all.

Technically, I suppose, what Pelosi reportedly said is very likely true: I agree that "the Jewish people" would probably "never" support an apartheid state of the sort Israel has established in its own "legal" territory and in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. But this isn't about the Jewish people -- as if Pelosi didn't know -- but about a fundamentalist political action coalition, Zionism, that indeed does support an apartheid state. That's only natural, because pace John Bolton and the entire Zionist complex, Zionism is, as the General Assembly determined before America gave it the Guantanamo treatment, Zionism is a form of racism.

Scotland's Scotsman speaks to Lebanon

The Scotsman does a generally superior job of accurately reporting the news from the eastern Mediterranean. Here's just one example from Aug. 20, 2006, which nevertheless manages to insinuate that the death of an invading Israeli soldier is at least as tragic as the deaths of six Lebanese civilians from the rain of illegal cluster bombs viciously scattered throughout Lebanon by the Israeli Luftwaffe for the benefit of the elite Israeli storm troopers:
Scotsman.com News - Lebanon - Israeli attack leaves truce in tatters as peacekeepers arrive

What it's all about

That would be concisely summarized here.

Does Israel have a "right to exist"?

The ever-inspiring Scott Ritter, who has become a sage and a guide the old fashioned way -- by thinking for himself -- offers on AlterNet this comment on the surreal tragedy inflicted on the people of Lebanon by the state of Israel:
AlterNet: War on Iraq: The Grave Consequences of Supporting War in Lebanon

It put me in mind of the frequent claim by the Israelis that the legitimacy of any party with whom they can negotiate turns on their willingness to recognize Israel's "right to exist".

I have never really understood this. Our own Declaration of Independence flatly contradicts the idea that a state or a government has any such right; when a government becomes destructive of specified ends, Jefferson wrote, "it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." It is the people who hold the rights; it is in order to protect these rights that governments are instituted among people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".

I think what is probably meant by the claim of Israeli officials that their government has some such right of existence derives from the principle that all the people in Palestine, like all the people of Earth, have a right of self-determination. This right is well established in law, and would accommodate the creation of a Jewish state like Israel where everyone there had a free choice as to whether they wanted it, which Israel has been unwilling to permit.