The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama?

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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jun 25, 2018 9:44 pm

JackRiddler » Mon Jun 25, 2018 9:33 pm wrote:I wouldn't call it a cheerleader and sure hope it's an opening. Abolition of ICE is suddenly on the table as a conceivable.


It's an extraordinary opening but maybe only so long as it's not just a Trump fetish object.

I don't like cheerleaders but maybe it was a poor metaphor. OTOH maybe not:

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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 25, 2018 9:50 pm

If anything, Willis Carto and Roger Pearson were in direct competition with the Singlaub/Secord faction for control of the World Anti-Communist League in those very important early Reagan years. Carto and Pearson lost out because they were such a PR liability, given their overt ties to hardcore Nazi types. Perhaps they were sore losers?

JackRiddler » Mon Jun 25, 2018 8:33 pm wrote:I wouldn't call it a cheerleader and sure hope it's an opening. Abolition of ICE is suddenly on the table as a conceivable.

AFAIK and can remember, some facts about Iran-Contra: The "Iran" side was broken by a Lebanese newspaper. The "Contra" side was in effect broken by Eugene Hasenfus, the pilot who crashed, and from there it unraveled. The 1980 October Surprise I don't remember, but it was in the air from the start. The contra-cocaine part also from 1982, I remember reading rumors in left-alt press and finding it hard to believe! I have never heard about Willis Carto's involvement in any of these breaks and doubt it sincerely, but to nail it down chronologically we'd have to do some research.
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Elvis » Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:38 pm

JackRiddler wrote: I have never heard about Willis Carto's involvement in any of these breaks and doubt it sincerely, but to nail it down chronologically we'd have to do some research.


I have the old Spotlights, I just have to remember where I put them when I emptied out a chest. It's been awhile, to say the least, so I don't recall the details of which aspects they reported, but it was stuff I hadn't seen anywhere else, and I was keeping up on events at the time. Maybe it was post-Hafenfus; I remember being amused two years(?) later when MSM touted as new information what I'd read in Spotlight.

Thirty-six years ago? This could be an interesting memory test. :shock:
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 26, 2018 2:59 pm

.

The premises of this OP are false and unintentionally serve to reinforce pillars of the established propaganda:

1. People, basically people of the left and of course the immigrants themselves, have always been protesting U.S. immigration policy, bringing suits on behalf of deportees, and giving unofficial sanctuary to asylum seekers. The immigrant rights movement has not been receiving coverage since 2006, but that is the responsibility of corporate media and politicians. It was people on the left, not the right, who first dubbed Obama "deporter in chief" (which is completely untrue if it is meant to distinguish him from Clinton or Bush, who both deported many more people, but of course is true of all presidents).

2. The name-politicians and media outlets who are now protesting for the first time are definitely not the left. You shouldn't encourage intentional conflation of Nancy Pelosi or MSNBC with "the left" or "the resistance" to Trump. Leave that kind of defamatory practice to the corporate media and especially the right wing. Their specialty is to package unrepresentative individual celebrities or politicians as general stand-ins for a vague concept of "left" that includes undifferentiated Democrats, Democratic voters, liberals, unionists, feminists, activists of all kinds, socialists, anarchists and anti-fascists as though they were all synonymous and indistinguishable.

3. Nevertheless, negative attention to the practice of putting children in cages is progress compared to before. The right response cannot be to complain that similar atrocities were not protested in the past, or to complain that other atrocities are still being ignored. Hope this is an opening!

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Last edited by JackRiddler on Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Jerky » Tue Jun 26, 2018 3:13 pm

What HE said. :-)

It feels good to finally get back to agreeing with Jack on some topics!

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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby smiths » Wed Jun 27, 2018 9:34 pm

Any story they've "broken" has pretty much always turned out to be either entirely false or spun so incredibly out of all proportion as to be unusable by any fair-minded individual


Bullshit

And, doesn't address the completely fair point made in the OP

Border policies started and entrenched under Obama have been used to batter Trump with, and the question as to why the Democrats effectively 'got away with it' is fair

and we all know the answer, cos the media is up the establishments arse, and Obama was as establishment as say ... Boeing, Goldman Sachs or General Electric are
the question is why, who, why, what, why, when, why and why again?
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jun 28, 2018 12:53 pm

.

To really be accurate, however, border policies started under CLINTON, expanded under BUSH, and entrenched under Obama, are now being amplified and run to new extremes by the Trump regime.

See: Actual data presented by real scholars, not Internet frauds and libertarian fascist blowhards.

The new extremes under Trump were accompanied, I might add, by the regime's own INTENTIONAL, attention-grabbing, BRAGGING CAMPAIGN to make sure everyone knew they were doing this! THEY called it "Zero Tolerance." MILLER wrote the new regulation of April. SESSIONS quoted the fucking bible justifying it, instead of actual law. TRUMP called humans animals and spoke of "infestation." (Is the media not supposed to report any of this?) This is all continuing since day 1 of Trump's campaign, calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, promising a Muslim ban, etc. etc.

If they had not turned attention to it THEMSELVES, maybe it still wouldn't be a media issue. When the corporate media finally do 1/10 of their job to report 1/10 of the atrocity associated with immigration policy, I say, good first step, and demand MORE. I do not say, "buh-buh -- Hillary Clinton!"

This is fucking America, since long before any of these assholes. If the timing were otherwise, if the people were not in a relative uproar on different sides of immigration issues, if Trump acted like a "normal" president and did it on the down-low instead of fucking BRAGGING about his racist policy DAILY in order to please his racist base, he'd probably be getting the exact same (relative) free ride from the corporate media and the Democratic politicians and the fake-liberal punditry that Obama did! That both Bushes did! That Reagan did during atrocities under his regime!

I cannot fathom how anyone could see the partial exposure of this cruelty and evil, much of it committed against CAGED CHILDREN, and respond by complaining about the messenger since "Obama did it too." Unless of course one is a Trump partisan, or seriously wants to suggest his administration differs from the rest in any positive fashion,* or should be defended for its atrocities on the basis of past atrocities being similar or worse.

===

* Korea, for the moment, thanks entirely to the South Korean people and Moon, although Trump is humping the fuck out of the credit and that's an example of the corporate media GIVING IT TO HIM! And recalling that last year, this fucking maniac threatened nuclear war, which always also means: RISKING nuclear war.

.
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Jun 28, 2018 4:21 pm

.

TL;DR: there is an ongoing legacy of vile assholes and Filthy scumbags running the show in the U.S. The variance is largely in the optics/presentation.
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jun 28, 2018 5:38 pm

Largely optics, not entirely. See what just happened in the last two days with the Supreme Court decisions? The attempt to destroy unions altogether doesn't count only as optics! The likely overturning of Roe v Wade is not optics.

More importantly, things develop. The system has a logic, a dynamic, a drive to crisis. Today is not yesterday. It's been getting worse, it's getting closer to breaking, and at the same time it can set off a more powerful resistance. People also change, if not always, and I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. I am not going to be kicking in the teeth anyone who takes to the streets now, because they weren't there earlier! I am not going to attack Clinton voters because they're protesting against the real barbarity under the real administration. At the moment someone is doing the right thing, I am not going to hit them for thinking naive things. That is just helping the motherfuckers.
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:44 pm

.

Indeed.
The Roe v Wade thing may turn out as an 'optic' (or virtue signal) depending on outcome, but regardless, 'Murica's Theatre of the Absurd seems to reach new highs (lows) with each passing month.

How many 'jump the shark' moments can be sustained at this point?
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jun 29, 2018 7:24 pm

Women's March organized a civil disobedience action in Washington over family separations, 600 women arrested.

If they had not done it, there would be complaints that "the pussyhats" are not serious, are useless, have no staying power. Why aren't they protesting the separation policy, it would be asked.

Since they did do it, the complaints will be that they didn't go back in time to also do it in 2014 under Obama--which some no doubt did, in smaller numbers. Growth is good.

Sometimes this is accompanied with the false claim that the "zero tolerance" policy was official and absolute prior to Trump, which it was not. It is an April 2018 order, enforced since then and now nominally rescinded.

That atrocities have been committed over immigration has, of course, always been true, but this one is new. That unaccompanied minors were caged before and caged now is true. Separation as a zero tolerance policy is new. It's not enough to end only that.
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Jerky » Sat Jun 30, 2018 1:20 am

I fully endorse Jack's read and analysis on this topic. The reflexive whataboutism I see about it here and elsewhere, when coming from the right seems disingenuous, and when coming from the left seems desperate.

Just my 2 cents.

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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:18 am

Uh, Jack ...

The U.S. government has forcibly separated families before. Here are 4 other times
http://kuow.org/post/us-government-has-forcibly-separated-families-here-are-4-other-times
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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jul 02, 2018 1:45 am

The Cognitive Dissonance Of Connecting Bush To Obama To Trump
Posted on June 25, 2018 by William Skink

by William Skink

What started with Bush after 9/11 continued under Obama and is metastasizing fast under Trump. Yet, thanks to partisan binary thinking, any claim of continuity between these three presidents creates immediate cognitive dissonance.

One of the arguments–actually, more like a warning–made during the Obama years was that failing to reign in executive power meant allowing that power to pass on to the next war criminal destined to give international law a fat, American middle finger.

I hoped this argument would be more persuasive, since Democrats at the time didn’t seem too worried about Obama doing things like executing an American teenager with a drone strike and deposing Gaddafi with the business end of a bayonet.

Since Democrats are now flipping their shit over how the Trump regime is punishing children for the actions of their adult family members, let’s quickly revisit the justification Robert Gibbs gave for Team Obama killing an American teenager:

ADAMSON: …It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor.

GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.


I’m sure Robert Gibbs can eat wherever the hell he wants in DC. Why? Because the power of partisan binary thinking disappears any threatening info that could trigger cognitive dissonance. It’s both impressive and demoralizing to witness.

Our lovely corporate media helps Americans avoid cognitive dissonance as best they can. For example, did you hear that the Trump regime killed that 16 year old teenager’s 8 year old sister? Yep, it happened, and barely anyone gave a fuck that it happened:

In a hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism, Nasser al-Awlaki just lost another one of his young grandchildren to U.S. violence. On Sunday, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid on what it said was a compound harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A statement issued by President Trump lamented the death of an American service member and several others who were wounded, but made no mention of any civilian deaths. U.S. military officials initially denied any civilian deaths, and (therefore) the CNN report on the raid said nothing about any civilians being killed.

But reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, Nawar, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki.


Killing civilians–be it women, children or men (jk, men are never considered civilians) is simply how US imperialism rolls. Why do anything to actually inform the American public about what is done, daily, in their name? That could revive the anti-war movement and hurt profits for Boeing and Raytheon, and we can’t have that.

But the information is out there for those who want to look. For example, Ben Rhodes recently admitted that Obama armed jihadists in Syria–you know, those bad people that are so bad it’s apparently ok to kill their children.

This is from a ZH piece zeroing in on one particular illuminating exchange:

In a wide ranging interview titled “Confronting the Consequences of Obama’s Foreign Policy” The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan put the question to Ben Rhodes, who served as longtime deputy national security adviser at the White House under Obama and is now promoting his newly published book, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House.

Rhodes has been described as being so trusted and close to Obama that he was “in the room” for almost every foreign policy decision of significance that Obama made during his eight years in office. While the Intercept interview is worth listening to in full, it’s the segment on Syria that caught our attention.

In spite of Rhodes trying to dance around the issue, he sheepishly answers in the affirmative when Mehdi Hasan asks the following question about supporting jihadists in Syria:


Did you intervene too much in Syria? Because the CIA spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding and arming anti-Assad rebels, a lot of those arms, as you know, ended up in the hands of jihadist groups, some even in the hands of ISIS.

Your critics would say you exacerbated that proxy war in Syria; you prolonged the conflict in Syria; you ended up bolstering jihadists.

Rhodes initially rambles about his book and “second guessing” Syria policy in avoidance of the question. But Hasan pulls him back with the following: “Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms.”

The two spar over Hasan’s charge of “bolstering jihadists” in the following key section of the interview, at the end of which Rhodes reluctantly answers “yeah…” — but while trying to pass ultimate blame onto US allies Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (similar to what Vice President Biden did in a 2014 speech):MH: Oh, come on, but you were coordinating a lot of their arms. You know, the U.S. was heavily involved in that war with the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks.

BR: Well, I was going to say: Turkey, Qatar, Saudi.

MH: You were in there as well.

BR: Yeah, but, the fact of the matter is that once it kind of devolved into kind of a sectarian-based civil war with different sides fighting for their perceived survival, I think we, the ability to bring that type of situation to close, and part of what I wrestled with in the book is the limits of our ability to pull a lever and make killing like that stop once it’s underway.

To our knowledge this is the only time a major media organization has directly asked a high ranking foreign policy adviser from the Obama administration to own up to the years long White House support to jihadists in Syria.


I assume Ben Rhodes won’t be accosted in public for his role in arming jihadists who separate kids from their families by separating heads from bodies. and Obama? He scored a nice Netflix deal while also scamming Chicago to build the Obama Presidential Center.

But this is all in the past. The clear and present danger is Trump. Forget those distant Obama years, and the even more distant memories of Team Bush. Don’t think critically about how we got here. Just focus on Trump. And his minions. And whatever new outrage corporate media is telling you to be outraged about.

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Re: The "Abject Silence" From The Left;Detention Under Obama

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jul 03, 2018 3:31 pm

Someone here, Jack I believe, once illustrated how one of the primary functions of DNC administrations is to legitimize and legalize the rightward regressions of the GOP made during their tenures. I think that largely holds.

I also agree with not conflating center-right establishment democrats with anything that has to do with “the left”. Peace should be a position first appearing near the center. Same with climate justice, universal healthcare, or the right to shelter. Where are the elected politicians who hold those tame beliefs?
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