Category Archives: Bush

The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism

The following is excerpted from my latest column, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”:

“The Egyptian Justice Ministry, under the authority of the military council, has detained and indicted 19 American democracy activists. To listen to the malfunctioning media stateside, however, the Egyptians are being petty, picking a fight with their American benefactors for “operating in Egypt without a license.”

Or, if you want ‘expert’ opinion, courtesy of Politico.com, the Egyptian plan to prosecute these ‘Americans and two dozen others’ ‘is more over the future of U.S. aid to Egypt and who controls it.’

Among the Americans detained in Egypt is Sam LaHood—son of Ray LaHood, the Obama administration’s secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

Try as it did to obfuscate Egypt’s allegations against LaHood, the New York Times was forced to mention the military-led government’s suspicion that LaHood’s organization had been funneling funds through Washington ‘to stir unrest in the streets’ of Cairo. The Gray Lady nevertheless attributed this preposterous figment of the Arab imagination to an ‘escalating drumbeat of anti-American statements’ in Egypt.

LaHood fell under suspicion in his capacity as head of the International Republican Institute (IRI). And, wouldn’t you know it, he was working alongside the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Freedom House—described by the Times as ‘a Washington-based group that promotes democracy and open elections.’ Also arraigned were the director of the NDI and one ‘Patrick Butler, vice president of programs at the DC-based International Center for Journalists.’

The IRI and the NDI are excrescences of the Republican and Democratic parties respectively.

Yes, on the foreign-policy front, not much distinguishes America’s duopoly. Republicans and Democrats work in tandem, Saul-Alinsky style, to bring about volcanic transformation in societies that desperately need stability. …

Dr. Ron Paul excepted, conjuring up new missions abroad is a project shared by the incumbent president and his Republican rivals.

To cap it all, the troublesome meddling is paid for by the unsuspecting, overburdened American taxpayer. …

The hypocrisy in all this is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators, who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds.

… Were Americans to run riot, as the spirited Egyptians have done pursuant to the Port Said stampede, they’d probably come face-to-face with the Military. In contravention of The Posse Comitatus Act—and in furtherance of freedom, of course—the 2006 version of The National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Armed Forces to ‘restore public order’ during “major public emergencies.”

Read the complete column, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”

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UPDATED: LaHood Is Still In The Egyptian Hood

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Russia

Egypt’s road to majoritarian politics—which is what America demands for that country—is stalled at the military dictatorship stage. The latter is probably preferable to a people’s republic governed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafist al-Nour Party, which won the ballot in the newly installed democracy. [BBC]

It is a fact—and three of the Republican presidential candidates will applaud it—that America runs community agitators across the world. These Republican- and Democratic Party Saul Alinskys (neoconservatives and neoliberals) work to incite democracy and undermine order. This has obtained with respect to both Bush, Obama (who are, to all intent and purposes, non-identical, evil ideological twins), and before them.

Could Egypt’s leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, be hip to the ill-effects of American community organizing abroad? Egyptian authorities have stopped Sam LaHood from leaving Egypt.

In addition to being the son of Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois, LaHood heads the International Republican Institute, an American-backed democracy-building group. (Neocon meddlers.)

He is “one of six Americans working for the Republican Institute or its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute.” Obama had a fit. Ditto the Republicans. LaHood’s their operative.

Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, said the Egyptian government continued to flout American efforts and to undermine democratic rights. “This is out of control,” Mr. Wolf said on Thursday. “If the administration follows the law, there’s no way they can continue the aid.”

(NYT)

A tug of war between Washington and Cairo over American aid for Egyptian human rights and democracy-building groups goes back to the era of former President Hosni Mubarak. To maintain control over organizations that might pose potential challenges to his government, Mr. Mubarak required nonprofit groups to obtain licenses, which were almost never issued.
Instead, the generals have echoed the Mubarak government’s refrain that any unrest was the work of “foreign hands.” Often, the military-led government has pointed specifically at Washington, suggesting that the United States was financing Egyptian groups behind the frequent turmoil in the streets.

(NYT)

And the aforementioned Generals may have a point. Ask the Ukraine (“Orange” Revolution), Georgia (“Rose”), Lebanon (“Cedar”), Kyrgizstan (“Tulip”), etc. Attempts to foment revolution are probably underway in Belarus, Russia, Iran, Syria (pending).

UPDATE (Jan. 30): “The God that Failed,” via Nebojsa Malic:

Parallel to the open warfare, the Empire continues its cloak-and-dagger efforts to subvert target states through “color revolutions.” The latest target is Russia, where questionable claims of electoral fraud have been used as a pretext for the “White” revolution – planned, organized and financed by Washington.
The troubles with these faux-revolutions are many. One of the most pernicious, of course, is that they undermine the very concept of democracy as a system of government by consent. In the virtual world of the Empire (and its EU extension), only those that serve and obey are “democrats,” regardless of what they actually believe and how many votes they get at the polls. As Philip Cunliffe observed several years ago in Serbia, “what counts as democracy is what the EU decides is democratic, and the democrats are those who are anointed by the international community, regardless of who actually receives the votes.”
It is bad enough that the Empire made democracy a religion, and a false one at that. Now it is going around the world subverting that very religion, leaving millions of cheated, angry people in its wake. Worse yet, the tendrils of this approach are showing up at home, from street protests to party primaries.

Andy Sullivan’s Struggle

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan lacks a philosophical core. Unlike Hitchens, Sullivan is not a formidable intellect, rhetorician and writer. Hitchens didn’t have to struggle to stay interesting. Sullivan does. The fruits of Sullivan’s Struggle are splayed on the latest cover of Newsweek, provocatively subtitled, “Why are Obama’s Critic’s So Dumb?”

A caveat: I [Andy] write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. … If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Crunchy Con Andy would like his followers to forget what I documented last in “Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan“:

Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.
Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)
I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

UPDATE III: Meryl Creep’s ‘Craft’ (Access Hollywood)

Art, Bush, Celebrity, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism

“I gotta thank everybody in England that let me come and trample over their history,’ crowed the pretentious over-actor, Meryl Creep, during the Golden Globes Award ceremony, where Creep was rewarded for a role in trashing The Iron Lady.

The silly bitch, doyenne of American cinema, needed everybody to know that, noble character that she is, she, Meryl, still managed to play (the much-greater) Margaret Thatcher, despite hating the prime minister’s politics—and guts.

So has Hollywood been elevated in the zeitgeist that it can take time off from narrating, entertaining, and telling stories—as it once did—to “educate,” preach, propagandize, and rub our noses in this royal muck.

The deeply stupid inhabitants of Hollywood have been imbued with magical qualities, so much so that they can ditch their jobs as entertainers and devote their lives to trying to improve the plebs who lap their crap up.

But the evidence is in. Activism has now replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. I don’t know about you, but given my own intelligence, I refuse to be lectured by “tards.” Unless these cerebrally compromised egotists can promise me a GOOD STORY sans politics—I do not patronize their “art.”

What will it take for clear-thinking people to quit enriching Hollywood “tards”?

The tarts and “tards” of Hollywood should be made to understand, through their pocketbooks, that they are nothing but public entertainers; glorified circus animals, show critters. Amuse us–if anything, make us think less about our daily political reality—or f-ck off.

Will YOU carry through?

UPDATE I: “… her philo–Semitism, always the mark of excellence in a Gentile,” writes Julie Burchill, in the essay, “Slimeballs always hate a strong woman.”

UPDATE II (July 17): Kids, kids, Hollywood was once great when its men and women reflected the multifaceted soul of America, RIP. Now Hollywood is simply a monolithic, left-liberal automaton, marching in thematic unison. Again and again we see the same theme, the same preachy worldview, the same giant digit wagging above at the captive audience. And the scripts: impoverished and ignorant.

Please, people, give credit where it was once due.

“A Christmas Story,”
Munich

And boy, could the joyless A. Jolie learn a thing or two about acting from the many great performances of her dad Jon Voight. The Odessa File, for one.

Don’t forget the few good TV series, such as Lights Out, Justified, Mad Men, etc.

UPDATE III: ACCESS HOLLYWOOD. Via Laura Ingraham:

Everyone knows President Barack Obama likes a celebrity fix – just ask Johnny Depp.
And today, just a day after pictures emerged of his extravagant 2009 Halloween party at the White House, the most powerful man in America was enjoying more VIP company.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie brought some Hollywood star power to Washington D.C. as they stopped by for a chat with the chief executive at the Oval Office.

Bush was no different.That war criminal was as tight as thieves with Bono.