You know the Army has the ‘Green Berets’ and the ‘Special Forces’ and the Navy has the ‘Seals’ and the Air Force has the…uh..’Rescue Rangers’ or something. Anyway, the jar heads over in the Marines have been feeling left out in all the laudatory media coverage and would like to have their own very special, elite, shock troops. You might ask, what took them so long to hop on the bandwagon? Well, the Marines believe that every Marine is an elite fighter. A Marine creed is “Every Marine a rifleman.” So this new Marine unit will be like the elite of the elite, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t buy all this ‘Special Forces’ crapola. I think it mainly operates as propaganda. I mean, how hard is it to be elite when you belong to the military of the country which spends trillions of dollars on war? Let’s be honest, most of these guys went into the military because they didn’t know what else to do after they got through sleeping through high school. All the guys who had it together in school and went into the military joined ROTC and went on to become pencil pushing military bureaucrats. I guess you have to make up all sorts of elite groups and medals to make up for the pathetic pay and living on welfare while your family waits for you to come home for a few weeks at a time.
Monthly Archives: June 2002
06
Jun 02
Proud to be a pie-stealing American?
Ah, wow. I thought this article was hilarious. Evidently, there’s an artist who bakes pies and leaves them to be grabbed by opportunists off the windowsill of her custom-built playhouse. To me, it demonstrates the adverse effects of American gimme gimme consumerism.
When Mack originally conceived the piece, she envisioned different layers of meaning. There’s the iconic pie, of course, but also ideas about neighborhood, community and domesticity. But several dozen pies later, her perceptions about the installation began to change. “Maybe it’s not so much about an American icon, but about how Americans act,” she says.
Lisa Osorio, a Brooklyn lawyer in her forties, is one of several people circling the cottage with the calculated patience of a prowling lioness. “The other day, there was a girl here eating a whole pie. I was like, you should share.” The girl didn’t, so Osorio watched and learned. “You have to kind of be around when she’s about to put the pie out,” she explains. “I’m just going to wait till I get one.”
Surely there are easier ways to acquire an apple pie. Maybe going to a store and just buying one? No way, says Osorio. “I want one of these, because I want to be a part of something special.”
When Mack finally puts the afternoon’s first pie out to cool, it is immediately snatched from the windowsill by Cynthia Otrupcak, a substitute teacher from upstate New York.
Like a victorious beauty queen, a flushed and gushing Otrupcak is surrounded by envious well-wishers who actually hate her, and it isn’t long before the scene turns ugly. Several witnesses accuse her of grabbing the pie from in front of a small boy whose nose had been pressed against a window for hours. Otrupcak is defending herself when she is approached by a man who has still other plans for her pie. “Excuse me,” he says, holding his maybe-6-year-old son by the shoulders and pushing the boy toward Otrupcak. “He’s been here four times now, and — ”
Otrupcak refuses to relinquish — or share — her pie.
“I’m appalled,” says Ellen Beyda, a Park Slope psychologist, shaking her head in disgust.
06
Jun 02
Homeland Uber Alles
George Bush, the Prince of Darkness, is expected to propose a new cabinet level law enforcement agency to increase the power of police state.
Its charge would be to gather intelligence from across the government — agencies ranging from the FBI and CIA to the Customs Service, Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization Service and state and local law enforcement — and “synthesize” that material with an eye on disrupting terrorist and other criminal activity and heading off future terrorist attacks.
In other words, its a newer, better, bigger, more powerful, invasive uber-authoritarian agency. I can’t wait to see Homeland Protection agents goosestepping about town with their colorful armbands and stylish Oakley sunglasses.
Ari “The Mouth of Sauron” Fleischer put it simply for all the cogs to hear, “The purpose is to protect the homeland from terror.” What we really need to do is to create an agency that will put some of these Wall Street terrorists behind bars. Kenneth Lay, Bush, Cheney, and those sheisters from Merrill Lynch could use some vacation time eating Froot Loops in Gitmo. I’d love to see George Bush in an orange jumpsuit. It would be priceless. That reminds me. I’ve always wondered how we’ve gotten away with building a prison camp in Cuba? Does the US pay its enemy Castro for this privilege or what?
05
Jun 02
Webcam, we hardly knew ye
The webcam is back! I kept having some sort of problem that would force me to reformat my hard drive and I got too lazy to put everything back up the way I had it. Today I got all my little ducks in a row and managed to get that sucker setup again.
02
Jun 02
Crimmins quips
I love Barry Crimmins too. He’s the king of incisive one-liners.
- Marijuana is a very dangerous drug. Some people smoke it just once and go directly into politics.
- The Pentagon’s so greedy it has an extra side on its building.
- An angry audience member asked, “If you don’t love this country, why don’t you get out?”
Barry replied, “Because I don’t want to be victimized by its foreign policy.”
- There’s a nickel’s worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans. If you put a nickel on the table, a Democrat will steal it from you.. and a Republican will kill you for it.
- What a coincidence, Kaiser Ashcroft endorses the FBI de-emphasizing white collar crime right when the court-appointed Bush Administration is up to its armpits in charges that it consists of nothing more than fixers and apologists for obscenely corrupt corporations.
- Look at the bright side, if Bush and Cheney wrap themselves any more tightly in the flag, they’ll suffocate.
- On Memorial Day John Ashcroft is going to lay a wreath at the grave in which he recently buried the Bill of Rights.
- What’s more shocking? The fact that Bush knew something or the fact that Bush knew anything?
- Bush’s shamelessness is boundless. He lectures Cuba, speaking from a stolen office in which he stonewalls vital information, is at the beck and call of nefarious special interests and works as a cheesy hawker of photos commemorating a disaster that might have been averted had he half a brain, even a mild work ethic or a staff interested in doing anything but furthering his corrupt regime’s dastardly assault on peace, environmental sanity and human rights. Yet he feels not an inkling of embarrassment as he browbeats a country he’s trying to starve about how it can become moral enough to find its way into his good graces. Trouble is, George W. Bush is neither good nor gracious.
- In a Sunday FOX NEWS appearance Cheney said, “I’ve got a real problem with the suggestion that somehow my president had information and failed to act upon it to prevent the attack of Sept. 11.” Well at least he finally admitted to whom Bush belongs.
02
Jun 02
More great Al Martin
If you don’t read Al Martin’s website you should. He’s a former government insider turned crusader. I try to drop by once every few weeks. He doesn’t update very regularly, but its always wonderful and ironic.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, the TNT channel had what they called the “Salute to George Bush Movie Marathon.” Included in the list of movies they played as a salute to George Bush was “Enemy of the State,” Conspiracy Theory,” “Air America” and “Double-Crossed.” The over-arching theme was that TNT was obviously trying to be tongue in cheek. The underlying message is that George Bush is linked to all sorts of nasty illegal covert deeds. Here are the movies, in other words, that portray the Bushonian form of government — movies about the surveillance society (Enemy of the State), mind control (Conspiracy Theory), State-sponsored drug trafficking (Air America) as well as fraud and backstabbing (Double Crossed).
02
Jun 02
Intelligence failures
According to Newsweek, the CIA tracked hijackers around the world and into the US before September 11 suggesting that the CIA should have done something to stop the hijackers. I agree with this, but is the point to criticize the police state in order to give it greater power and authority? I hope not.
02
Jun 02
The Politics Of Wealth
From The Connection radio program:
-
Guest: Kevin Phillips, author of Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
- Listen to the show here in Real Audio
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and a fat wallet too. The American dream has always included the right to invent or to invest oneself into the well-padded life of the moneyed class. But now, author Kevin Phillips argues, the dream has turned to nightmare, and democracy itself is at risk.
The last twenty years has seen one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in history, and it didn’t happen by accident. Government has been seduced and successfully bedded by corporate interests.
The result is a dangerous love child called Plutocracy and a system that bends over backwards to provide the rich with tax breaks and special concessions, while leaving millions of poor Americans hanging without a safety net. Free markets, free reign, free people?
01
Jun 02
Sounding like a true fascist
In his speech before the graduating class of Westpoint, George Bush eerily echoed the dynamism of his Fascist and Nazi predecessors: “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge,” Bush told the cadets, who listened pensively on West Point’s football field as their parents applauded robustly from the stands. “In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”
I live for the day when Bush is gone, like Clinton before him, relegated to the dustbin of history. Where are the real leaders? That is one of the things I most object to about Bush, his spinelessness and lack of character. Everyone pretends he is not completely worthless. How much can you really believe in someone who doesn’t write any of their own speeches and who reads off of a teleprompter? He is nothing but a fraud.