The U.S. attack of Gaza

Glenn Greenwald explodes the illusion of the U.S. as a third-party bystander to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:

[P]retending that the US - and the Obama administration - bear no responsibility for what is taking place is sheer self-delusion, total fiction. It has long been the case that the central enabling fact in Israeli lawlessness and aggression is blind US support, and that continues, more than ever, to be the case under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The US is not some neutral, uninvolved party. Whatever side of this conflict you want to defend - or if you're one of those people who love to announce that you just wish the whole thing would go away - it's still necessary to take responsibility for the key role played by the American government and this administration in enabling everything that is taking place.
The ongoing illusion that the U.S. is a neutral outsider is propagated by the U.S. commercial media.
It's just been staggering to see how tilted US media discourse is: Israeli officials and pro-Israel "experts" are endlessly paraded across the screen while Palestinian voices are exceedingly rare; the fact of the 45-year-old brutal occupation and ongoing Israeli dominion over Gaza is barely mentioned; meanwhile, every primitive rocket that falls harmlessly near Israeli soil is trumpeted with screaming headlines while the carnage and terror in Gaza is mentioned, if at all, as an afterthought.

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Greenwald: Obama could not criticize Israel without criticizing himself.

Greenwald makes the case that Barack Obama could not criticize Israel's most recent round of aggression (targeted killings) without criticizing himself. The U.S. media is happy to stick to their standard script.

Israel's escalating air attacks on Gaza follow the depressingly familiar pattern that shapes this conflict. Overwhelming Israeli force slaughters innocent Palestinians, including children, which is preceded (and followed) by far more limited rocket attacks into Israel which kill a much smaller number, rocket attacks which are triggered by various forms of Israeli provocations -- all of which, most crucially, takes place in the context of Israel's 45-year-old brutal occupation of the Palestinians (and, despite a "withdrawal" of troops, that includes Gaza, over which Israel continues to exercise extensive dominion). The debates over these episodes then follow an equally familiar pattern, strictly adhering to a decades-old script that, by design at this point, goes nowhere. Meanwhile, most US media outlets are petrified of straying too far from pro-Israel orthodoxies.

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Itemize many hidden costs, not just the effect of Obamacare on omelets

John Metz, owner of many Denny's restaurants has decided to "add a 5 percent surcharge to customers' bills to offset what he said are the increased costs of Obamacare, along with reducing his employees' hours." More . . .

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The seduction of war

Glenn Greenwald: The one common strain running through these historic civil liberties assaults is war. War almost always erodes political liberties. That has always been true. Cicero famously observed "inter arma, enim silent leges" (in times of war, the law falls mute). That fact - that wars maximize a political leader's power - is a key reason they often crave war and why wars, under the Constitution, were supposed to be extremely difficult for presidents to start. As John Jay wrote in Federalist 4, "absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal."

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Oliver Stone’s new book rails on Obama, but . . .

Oliver Stone's new book, “The Untold History of the United States” rips Obama's presidency. For those conservatives who might get excited about this criticism, they should note that most of the ways in which Obama has failed have been in continuing Republican policies, notably those of George W. Bush.

Continue ReadingOliver Stone’s new book rails on Obama, but . . .