World AIDS Day

[via Forward]

Griper Blade: Planet America

Things are looking good for former Bush administration officials. You wouldn't think this would be the case, looking at some of the news stories that have come out after they'd packed up their stuff and left the White House. But that'd be because you think rationally; that doesn't fly in DC anymore. Post-Bush, the nation's capital is still dominated by denial.

Sure, Bush was an abuser of the law and -- under the paranoiac Dick Cheney's guidance -- played a little fast and loose with legalities. But that doesn't mean he actually broke the law and, since we don't know for sure, we should probably forget the whole thing. When it comes to anti-Constitutional behavior, human rights abuses, and war crimes, it's probably best to ignore things -- no one wants to open up that whole can of worms. We used to say that no one was above the law, now we worry that upholding the law might be inconvenient or embarrassing. As it is now, some people are above the law -- but only if those people are members of the Bush administration.

Outside the US, people don't get this. They insist on bringing this stuff up over and over. Out in the big, wide world, they just don't get that the Bush administration gets a pass for anything and everything, because to do otherwise would be bad politics. Forgive and forget. Look forward, not backward. Let's move on. Some people don't get the simplicity of solving a problem by pretending it never happened.

Take David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University. As a former UN prosecutor, Crane is a citizen of that big, wide world and doesn't see things through the lens of political expediency and an insular American media. For Crane, the United States is not a separate planet in its own orbit and things that happen in one nation inform and set precedent for things that could -- and sometimes should -- happen in other nations.

In Crane's world -- which, admittedly, is that part of the world that isn't the US -- a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir means that other leaders could be held accountable for their crimes.

Crane says that the Bashir warrant "may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture." Turns out that when something's a war crime for one leader, it's a war crime for all leaders.

Crazy, huh?... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]


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Griper Blade: Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: A Green New Deal

I guess the big news from this weekend is that some guy in Iraq winged a pair of shoes at President Bush's head. All the news reports are telling us that this is a "sign of contempt" in Iraq, but it's hard to think of a place in the world where it would be a sign of anything else. It may not be universal, but it'd still be a pretty clear signal of disrespect anywhere you go -- "And now, in our traditional welcome, we shall batter you with shoes..." Still, shoes must be dirt cheap in Iraq, because you know that guy's probably not getting them back. I'm sticking with flipping the bird. Especially in this economy.

The shoe story has been so big that it's knocked other stories off the front page. Blagejovich has become "Blag-who-evich?" If the Governor of Illinois had known that was all it took to take the media heat off him for a moment or two, he might've hired someone to throw a pair of size 10s himself. That's one way to get a little breathing room.

But the shoe-chucker also knocked a developing story off the media radar this weekend. And that story's bigger than Blago. It's a developing story with international implications. Where the neocons in the Bush administration thought they could rebuild the world by knocking stuff down and blowing people up, others want to rebuild the world by rebuilding the world... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: A Return to Reality in Fighting HIV/AIDS

Back in 2006, I wrote a post I called "A Delusion-Based Global AIDS Policy." Since it was way back in the days before we had any hope of reason in the White House, the news on the global fight against HIV/AIDS wasn't all that good. The Bush administration, not wanting to contradict its domestic education policy, created a global AIDS strategy based on the same non-reasoning. That non-reasoning worked like this; since HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmittable disease, then the only way to fight it is to fight human nature -- which the religious right believes is basically evil -- and promote abstinence above all other measures. The only way for the world to fight this contagion would be for everyone in the world to adopt a tiny fraction of global population's world-view -- that of the Evangelical right -- and become "good people" the only way they believed it was possible to be a good person. In other words, by acting like a right wing evangelical. Or, least, like right wing evangelicals pretend to behave.

Of course, this works about as well as you'd expect it to work. The most pious wingnuts have failed at it in very humiliating and public ways. These people made their livings pretending human nature is a matter of choice -- imagine how hard it must be for an amateur. The results were as predictable as they were tragic.



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Griper Blade: Yes We Did

The world is celebrating this morning. In Kenya, there's dancing in the street and a national holiday. In Japan, the toast of the day is "President Obama, Banzai!" (I say we take that one). But it's Chicago that's the temporary center of the universe and they were cheering last night as Barack Obama and Joe Biden lost the title "Senator" and became "President-Elect" and "Vice President-Elect."

The fight didn't last very long -- when Ohio went Obama, it was over. He had more than 200 electoral votes in his pocket at that point and a solid 77 west coast votes in the bank. When Virginia went blue, the extremely improbable became the all-but impossible. AP gave Obama Florida, McCain conceded, and it was over...

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Griper Blade: Keep It Simple, Stupid

I always get some criticism when I look at a conflict someplace in the world, consider the arguments of both sides, and decide that there aren't any good guys in the fight. There's something in American thinking that requires every fight to be a fight of good against evil. We choose sides, cast the conflict in incredibly simplistic terms, and decide that the team we're backing isn't just faultless, but incapable of wrong. For a long-standing example of this, look at the popular conception of Israel vs. the Palestinians. Israel -- despite consistently damning reports by Amnesty International -- is practically angelic in the average American's mind.

These good guy/bad guy narratives have seemed to spring up overnight in recent history. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait supposedly came out of nowhere. But the truth is that Kuwaitis had been stealing Iraqi oil through "slant drilling" at the Iraqi border. While no one would argue that Hussein's actions weren't excessive, only those who don't know the facts would say they were unprovoked -- which, given the sorry state of our media, would be pretty much everyone. The invasion of Kuwait was never presented as a dictator vs. thieves. For the home audience, it was bad guy vs. good guys.

And we're seeing the same thing in the Russo-Georgian crisis. There aren't any good guys there, no one we should root for on merely moral grounds. In the conflict, there's no real case to make for the legality of Russia's invasion -- it's pretty much unquestionably a crime. But another question is whether Georgia deserves to be seen as heroic. Not every victim of a crime is a solid citizen; criminal on criminal violence is awfully commonplace...

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Griper Blade: The [Your Name Here] Candidate

The big foreign policy expert in the 2008 presidential race is John McCain... Right? Of course, the problem with putting yourself across as an expert means that people are going to expect you to know what you're talking about. So, when the going gets tough, the tough get going -- to Wikipedia.

Taegan Goddard reports that Mr. Big Fancy Foreign Policy Expert seems to have turned to the open source encyclopedia to get the skinny on Georgia in the Russo-Georgian crisis. "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today [August 11] on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia," Goddard writes at his Congressional Quarterly blog. "Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia."

Of course, Team McCain denies any Wiki-plagiarism. They claimed it was entirely coincidental. "Nonetheless, at least two political science professors have weighed in saying the similarities are more than coincidental and wouldn't be tolerated from their own students," writes Goddard.

It may be Matthew Yglesias who had the best reaction to the McCain copy-and-paste job; "Given that McCain, by his own admission, can't use the internet it's a bit of an ironic situation though perhaps it counts as progress of some sort."

Isn't that nice? McCain's learning to use the google...

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Russia, Georgia Headed for 'All Out War'

clipped from www.afp.com Russian tanks and troops entered Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia province on Friday to repel a Georgian military offensive to reclaim the region amid fighting said to have left hundreds dead. Moscow vowed retaliation to defend Russians in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali hit by the Georgian artillery and air assault -- the worst fighting since the 1992-94 separatist war in the region. Amid spiralling tensions that the main European security watchdog warned were heading for "all out war", the Georgian government acknowledged it was already losing newly won areas of Tskhinvali that were bombarded by Russian forces. "If this is not war, then I wonder what is," Georgia's ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was quoted as telling a special meeting of the organisation's permanent council in Vienna.

Not the best news I've heard all day...

Obama Shoots, He Scores

clipped from www.mcclatchydc.com

Nuthin' but net from way downtown...

Griper Blade: The Audacity of Being Realistic

It's not a photo we've seen lately. An American politician in Europe addressing a sea of people -- without any giant papier-mâché heads of Bush and Cheney in prison stripes, no one dressed like the Grim Reaper, no one demanding said politician face war crimes charges. If you ever needed proof that it's not America who's hated around the globe, but the American President, here ya go. I give you Barack Obama in Berlin yesterday.

Obama returned to the theme of the speech he gave after winning the Democratic primary. "People of Berlin -- people of the world -- this is our moment. This is our time," Obama told a crowd of some 200,000 who didn't hate him for being an American.

Left behind at home, John McCain can't win for losing. After suggesting that Obama needed to spend some time abroad, McCain complained that Obama was spending time abroad. In one of what has been a long string of poorly conceived photo-ops, Baghdad Johnny spoke to reporters at the Columbus, Ohio Sausage Haus in a neighborhood called German Village (No really, I swear), to gripe about Obama in Berlin.

"I'd love to give a speech in Germany," McCain said to the assembled dozens, "a political speech or a speech that maybe the German people would be interested in, but I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate ... for the office of presidency."

The unspoken suggestion was that it was unseemly for a candidate to stump in a foreign country. We're all supposed to forget that McCain just got back from Colombia not to long ago and previously addressed a crowd in Canada...

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