"Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." --Pablo Picasso (quote not related to 40 years ago)
F for Fake Paprika Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season
A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty's commanding officer refused.
--Jeffrey St. Clair
The New York Times last Saturday carried an article by Stephanie Strom and Lydia Polgreen that had to be read between the lines even more than usual, but when that was done the article revealed the humbug of the Save Darfur Coalition, an Israeli lobby front group active in the US. NGOs working in Darfur say that the moneys collected by the coalition go to demonizing an "Arab" government--consistent with the US-Israeli propaganda campaign in the region--rather than aiding refugees from the rebellion in the west of the country. The US is engaged in a contest with China over African oil, and the World Bank, under neocon direction and acting as a agent of American policy, is losing the battle for influence in Africa to the Chinese. Only the US uses the term genocide in regard to Darfur, and the article draws a direct parallel with the use of the charge of genocide to justify the Clinton administration's attack on Kosovo. Former Clinton administration officials have been calling for US military action against Sudan on that model.
--Carl G. Estabrook (audio version of some of the same points--might require installation of some kind of software)
Last weekend’s scare headlines and breathless broadcast reports about the unspeakable horrors that were supposedly foiled with the uncovering of the “JFK plot” have largely faded from view as evidence mounts that the alleged threat was grossly hyped--if not totally invented--by US authorities.
--Bill Van Auken
Dave from 9llblimp, Penetrating the 9/11 Illusion: The Disregarded Evidence
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
--Jonathan Cook
Peggy Noonan knows she is seeing something ugly, but she really has no clue about what she is observing and that there really is a simple explanation, and if she had the knowledge she so desperately needs, she would have seen it a long time ago as so many others have. But, of course, they call the ones who can actually SEE what is really going on "conspiracy theorists." There are several issues here that I would like to cover, so bear with me.
--Laura Knight-Jadczyk
“He couldn’t even fix brakes,” the former friend said. “He never built bombs.”
--Bill Van Auken
The claims by Clinton and Obama at the New Hampshire debate that their first action if elected president would be to end the war have no credibility. What is described by the Democrats and by the major media as proposals to “withdraw troops” and “get out of Iraq” are nothing of the kind.
--Patrick Martin
Appearance on Vyzygoth’s Grassy Knoll Monday June 4 2007 11:45 am 1 hour 40 minutes
Hollywood is releasing an astonishing 14 sequels this summer. Certainly unyielding commercial demands (and the legendary appetites of hedge fund operators for high returns) cannot be played around with. But the pursuit of money doesn’t explain everything. There is also the significant element of mental exhaustion or simply empty-headedness. Do these people have any new ideas, or even think that having new ideas might be a positive good?
--Joanne Laurier
Now, you might be wondering how a man who was a lobbyist in Washington for twenty years could be described as a Washington outsider, but of course this comes from the same punditocracy that thinks Connecticut-born, Harvard-educated, Kennebunkport-vacationing George W. Bush is actually a cowboy from west Texas.
--Democratic Underground
Plot Was Unlikely to Work, Experts Say, Citing Safeguards and Pipeline Structure
The reasons for the media to suppress any reference to Sheehan’s decision to quit the Democratic Party are obvious: the major daily newspapers and television networks are controlled by the same financial aristocracy whose social interests are upheld by the two-party system. Anything that challenges the political monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans must be either ignored or ridiculed.
--Patrick Martin
The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the "Clash of Civilizations" for a New World Order (Weird right-wing Christian-Zionist site, but interesting study seems to have gotten in under the wire)
The real systemic problem looming in all this is the long-term ramifications of the conservative movement's increasing adoption of a genuinely extremist agenda. As I've been saying all along, the real threat posed by the clearly fascist tone of so much mainstream rightist rhetoric this decade hasn't been the immediate outbreak of actual violence, but rather the organic conditions it creates on the ground and its ramifications for the longer term. The faint-hearted, cowardly brand of pseudo-fascism proferred by the mainstream currently may well metastasize, eventually, into the cruel and violent version of outright fascism that arose some 80 years ago, given the right conditions.
Digby's warning on this point is, as always, on the money: the faction to watch here is the returning veterans of the Iraq war. I've contended since early in the conflict that the war would prove to be the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Finishing School: the extreme stresses under which we are now placing these soldiers, especially in the form of multiple tours and forced reenlistment, is eventually going to produce a bumper crop of damaged citizens, some of whom are going to be extremely vulnerable to the "stab in the back" meme that's become a major note in the right-wing drumbeat on the war.
--Dave Neiwert