[Peace-discuss] From the week's news

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Move over, Sarah Palin! You only want to shoot wolves from helicopters. Real 
men like Obama want more helicopter gunships to mow down Afghan kids from the air."


[The following is from Alex Cockburn <http://www.counterpunch.org/>.  --CGE]

...Ignoring  Obama’s solemn appeals for unity, America has become joyously 
divided. Evangelicals, braced by Palin’s Christian faith, have risen spryly from 
the bed of their indifference to McCain, a man whose relationship to the Holy 
Spirit is remote. Now their champion is an accredited bible-thumper, in whom the 
Holy Spirit burns as brightly as  natural gas flares over the Arctic tundra.

Liberals, particularly women, maddened at the spectacle of attractive Governor 
Sarah embodying everything they loathe, flood the internet with frantic oaths 
and seize on every particle of gossip from Alaska suggesting that Palin is a 
hypocrite, a mismanager, a would-be burner of books, a bad mother and untrue to 
her man.  Those scoffing only a few short weeks ago at the National Enquirer’s 
“mere unverified gossip” about John Edward’s affair, now hasten to the 
supermarkets to snatch up the Enquirer’s latest allegations about Palin and her 
family.

As the political news circuits began to buzz with news of improved polling 
numbers for McCain-Palin in the battleground states, Obama’s ascent towards the 
status of a Sure Bet is stalled. After the triumphs of Denver the candidate 
relapsed into the nerveless mode of early August. He had the poor judgment to go 
on the cable news show of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and make the extraordinary 
statement that the so-called Surge in Iraq had “succeeded beyond our wildest 
dreams”. He calls for 10,000 more troops for Afghanistan. Move over, Sarah 
Palin! You only want to shoot wolves from helicopters. Real men like Obama want 
more helicopter gunships to mow down Afghan kids from the air.

At a stroke, with that deadly concession about the success of the surge, Obama 
handed McCain the opportunity, in their upcoming debates, to congratulate his 
Democratic opponent for acknowledging McCain’s superior political and military 
judgment. Simultaneously Obama foolishly threw over the side the reports of 
journalists on the spot like CounterPunch’s Patrick Cockburn who have been 
describing how the present lowering of violence in Iraq owes little to the surge 
in US troops, as opposed to changes in local political conditions. It certainly 
confirms my view that Obama rarely has the stomach to stand his ground, when 
challenged from the right with any vigor...

Day after day McCain’s escorts shielded Palin from any impromptu exchanges with 
the press, until the eagerly awaited 3-part interviews with ABC’s Charles Gibson 
began last Thursday. I’ll root for anyone against an uppity, patronizing network 
interviewer and so I was in Palin’s corner when ABC’s Gibson went after her 
about the Bush Doctrine, which he made sound as though it was something you 
learned in school along with the Gettysburg address.  No one knows what the Bush 
doctrine is, least of all President Bush. He’s spent seven long years trying to 
define it. Basically the Doctrine says it’s okay for employees or subcontracted 
agents of the US Government to kidnap people, lock them up in wire or concrete 
hutches for years at a time, regularly electrocuting them and beating their 
genitals until they go mad. Small wonder Sarah Palin didn’t want to get too 
specific...

We have the debates ahead and six weeks in which Americans  can recover from the 
intoxication of their first date with Governor Sarah and ponder whether they 
really want Republicans in the White House for 12 straight years. Popular though 
the Palin pick may have been, she’d need truly magical powers to have elicited 
an immediate Yes on that big question...

McCain NOT crippled upon POW release

Did you catch the previously unknown footage of McCain on Thursday night by a 
Swedish TV station? It was from March 14, 1973, when McCain was released by the 
Vietnamese. This was not the tortured cripple of the “returning hero” clips and 
photos we’ve been seeing. He looks pretty spry, albeit with a slight limp.Here’s 
the  link to the news coverage on SVT’s “Rapport”
http://svt.se/play?a=1244518

We were sent it from Stockholm by CounterPuncher Horst Schröder ...
Schroder correctly adds:

     "I assume such a news coverage would be totally impossible on US TV, 
especially the critical reflections on the USA’s war in Vietnam, and the 
juxtaposition of McCain’s heroic bombing raids with the suffering of the bombed 
Vietnamese on the ground. But then, of course, the main Swedish TV is  public, 
not privately owned. Not to say that we do not get some propaganda, but nothing 
like what’s dished up in the USA. I follow the major papers and some TV on the 
web, and I fail to understand how the people put up with this. If Goebbels still 
were around, he would eat his heart out with envy.

     "As far as I am concerned no one who flies up in the air carpetbombing a 
helpless civilian population, is a hero. McCain and others make out like these 
were Red Baron dog fighter times, or WW II RAF pilots who ran a much, much 
higher risk. The real heroes – if one wants to call them that ­­– in this 
totally immoral war were the grunts who actually had to meet the “enemy”. The 
same of course goes for the “heroic” bomber pilots in the present immoral wars 
in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq.

     "It is really depressing from our perspective, that such a large part of 
the US voters seem to be addicted to this kind of false heroic myths, to such a 
degree that one can build a whole election on some bomb raids 40 years ago 
committed on a hapless population by a greedy foreign power. It may well be that 
McCain felt at the time that he was doing the right thing, and felt proud of it. 
But it is depressing that 40 years later he still is proud of it, instead of 
regretting what he has doen and hang his head in shame. Even more depressing 
that close to half the voters lap this up.

     "And most depressing of all that even Obama and the Dems feel they have to 
pay lip service to this immoral hogwash and constantly debase themselves in 
worship of McCain the Hero.

     "Woe is us."

Woe indeed.

The Real John McCain

Our friend from Stockholm, quoted above, asks how come the US mainstream press 
hasn’t look closely at McCain’s conduct as a POW. That’s a no-brainer and even 
ABC’s Charlie Gibson could probably muster a truthful answer if he had to sit in 
Guantanamo for a couple of minutes. But most of the so-called “alternative 
media” has been nervous on this topic too. Somehow they think it’s dangerously 
counterproductive to assail so-called “heroes”, even if the heroism consisted of 
raining high explosive on peasants from 30,000 feet.

Not CounterPunch, I’m proud to say. We’ve run Doug Valentine’s investigations 
and other testimonies. And now, in our latest newsletter, released today, we 
take a long hard look at McCain the man: violent, deceitful, devoid of ethical 
principle. And that’s not us talking. That’s people who have known him well. 
Read the new stories by Doug Valentine, Jeffrey St Clair and myself. If the 
press had really homed in honestly on McCain instead of licking his boots for 
twenty years, he’d have been toast long, long ago...

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