And Iran is Next

With the recent, most terrifying Big Bad Terrorist Plot that struck just a month after the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it seems that our government is quite ready to invade Iran. Or, at the very least, it's posing quite effectively, making us think it's quite ready to invade Iran. Apparently, two men with links to a Mexican drug cartel decided to try and kill the Saudi ambassador to the US, a target that even to my mind doesn't seem to make much sense. There's also their chosen method of execution.

The Iranians planned to employ Mexican drug traffickers to kill Jubeir with a bomb as he ate at a restaurant, U.S. officials said.

The logistics alone to this seem like a nightmare. From the use of Mexican drug traffickers (who might not even be able to get into the country, much less to DC, and run the added risk of being recognized and thrown in jail for the ignominious charge of marijuana possession), the fact that a restaurant is a rather iffy place to find the ambassador, liable to change at a moment's notice.

Not that it was ever much of a threat, anyway, since the United States Attorney has stated that law enforcement officers were guiding their sources the whole time, and no explosives were ever placed anywhere. In essence, we've arrested a man on the basis of what he might have been able to do if the CIA and FBI had let him.

As a result of all this, Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton have touted the need for further sanctions against Iran, because obviously not talking to them helps them come to our side, just the way social ostracism works in high school.

Throughout all my travels through the internet punditry and news sites, I've not seen any concrete proof of Iranian involvement, except the fact that Mansour Arbabsiar (a disheveled, disorganized, divorced man in never-ending trouble with a long list of creditors) might have had contacts with the Iranian Quds.

Overall, it just seems like a rather ridiculous assertion, and I hope nothing more than a few hurt feelings will come from it. For more, Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent column on this subject. Enjoy.

On the Subject of Israel

President Obama recently (as in Thursday or Friday, but I'm too lazy to go look up exactly when) stated that he believed Israel should return to their pre-1967 borders. That of course means that Israel would have to give up the land they conquered and are now holding in violation of a UN treaty that they did, in fact, sign, forbidding the occupation of conquered territory.

As a result, my Christian friends on Facebook have been in an uproar, shouting about how America is going to be cursed because we're not going to "support" Israel anymore.

Number one, dear Christians, the Bible says nothing about "supporting" Israel. It says if someone blessed Abraham, they would be blessed, and if they cursed Abraham, they would be cursed. This promise was only reiterated twice, to Isaac and Jacob, so to some people, it's up in the air if that promise even applies to the entirety of the Hebrew bloodline. Next, it comes down to what a blessing and a curse actually is.

I'm sorry, but I do not think telling Israel that the IDF is nothing but a glorified hit squad and needs to be reformed is cursing Israel. I think that that is trying to save lives. Even if they are Palestinian lives, and obviously worthless in the eyes of God (honestly, I actually had somebody tell me almost exactly that. He later unfriended me because I had the audacity to suggest that the Palestinians and Hebrews were of the same value in the eyes of Jesus Christ). Nor do I think it is blessing Israel to continue playing both sides of the conflict over there and giving them all guns so they can even more effectively kill each other.

More than that, there comes a time when we just have to take care of ourselves, and forget about the rest of the world. Yes, that includes Israel. Israel has proven she can take care of herself without our help. She has the most highly-trained military on the planet, who have proven time and time again that they don't care how many people they kill, even if those people are innocents. Israel will be just fine, I promise you.

Meanwhile, America which is, by the way, our country (I'm not an Israeli, in case you missed that), is facing an ever-mounting national debt that nobody really wants to do anything about, unemployment that doesn't seem to be getting any better despite Obama's rhetoric about how quickly we were going to come back, and other conflicts abroad that were really stupid to begin with. Let's deal with our own problems, and let the rest of the world deal with theirs.

I'm pretty sure we're not going to get cursed for it.

Punditry and Confusion

So it seems to me that the pundits nowadays don't seem to know what to say about the Middle East uprisings. They putter about the issue, trying to make it sound ambiguous so that, no matter what the official line ends up being, they'll come out looking good.

I don't think anybody is quite sure what to think. On the one hand, these popular uprisings are against tyrannical governments. Those same tyrannical governments have been involved in torture, human rights violations on a massive scale, etc. They also give us oil. These are popular movements that are tired of living under their tyrannical governments, and are trying to get rid of said government, following in the footsteps of other great revolutionaries like, oh, George Washington. Except they're Muslim.

On the other hand, gas prices have skyrocketed as a consequence of these uprisings, and that's not good. Furthermore, there's always the dire possibility that the people in these countries will decide that they *gasp* want a government founded upon the tenets of their religion. The horror! We can't have that! Because they hate us! And they won't do what we tell them! They might not sell oil to us!

But then again, if the pundits don't support the uprisings, they'll end up looking like radical Statists who want to take away all liberty from every human everywhere, thereby reversing the American Tradition that has upheld...something all these years. But if they do support them, they might end up looking like proponents of state-funded, radical Islamic terror.

What a dilemma.

bin Laden is Dead

I am so relieved Osama bin Laden was killed. Because, you know, I never knew when I might be brutally killed. By him. In a plane.

I decided that it was high time I say something about this subject, especially since I haven't blogged in, oh, a month. I'm quite sorry. Really, I am. Life has been ridiculous. You see, my mother has this annoying habit of constantly surpassing my high scores in various Facebook games. So, it has become one of my quests in life to beat her scores. It's a long quest. On top of that, I currently have a very large stack of reading material, including "Our Man in Tehran," by Robert Wright, which I believe shall prove to be quite interesting. Oh, and I'm trying to read through my Bible in 90 days. I'm currently near day 50, and it's...going well. I haven't missed a day yet.

But you don't really care about that all that, and I don't know why I'm rambling on about my personal life, because if you wanted to know about that, you'd go read my other blog. So.

Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead. Yes. A great menace...threat...thing to humanity et al has been removed. Because...he managed to kill...so many other people after we started chasing him. With thousands of soldiers.

There's something ridiculous, to my mind, about expending literally trillions of dollars, thousands of soldier's lives, and ten years of time to catch one man. Of course, that's not including the hundreds of thousands of Afghani civilians we've killed, nor the other hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians we've killed. Although Iraq had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden.

So basically, not much is new. We're still not going to pull out of Afghanistan, because the big bad insurgency is still there. And God forbid the Afghanis like...try to defend themselves. That would be horrible. We're also not leaving Iraq anytime in the near future, and since we've just invaded Libya - while, of course, making it very clear that we haven't invaded Libya - there's still going to be plenty of Middle Eastern ridiculousness for me to comment on.

So yes, Americans. Osama bin Laden, our Emmanuel Goldstein, is dead. You can go to sleep now, and let the government take care of you. Because it knows everything.

Egypt

So I thought it was high time that I say something on this subject, since its been going on for weeks now.

I've heard some interesting things from both sides. The Republicans, as always, are taking the opposite side from President Obama. The President apparently decided it would look good politically, and earn us more friends, if he gave a nod to the "rioting masses" in Egypt. Since then, I've seen numerous Facebook comments from Republican friends saying something to the effect that Obama is stupid, Egypt should quell the uprising with deadly force, and that the people of Egypt should stop trying to contest the government.

A couple problems with that, Yoda has.

*ahem* Number one, you didn't see this kind of lay-down-and-take-it attitude when the communist government in China was blasting unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square some years ago. Then, uprisings were wonderful. Uprisings such as that, movements of the people should be honored!

Number two, I think those people are forgetting their own country's heritage. People, America was founded on rabble rousers who formed...an uprising. And were none too quiet about it, either. They like, had guns. And were shooting people. Yeah.

So, to put it succinctly- Egypt's people have the right, just like all humanity, to choose their leaders. Isn't that one of the trademarks of the "American tradition?" Since Mubarak is a repressive dictator by all accounts, our wish to keep him in office is nothing more than the selective "freedom" we like to enforce. And as Mubarak wouldn't leave office quietly, the Egyptian people are doing their level best to make their intent and wishes known.

As to Egypt being a threat to us...what's changed, again? Get used to the fact that people don't like us, and it's probably because of us. That's how the world works.

And This is Called Blowback

Surprise, surprise.

Imagine this amazing concept- we do things and, like, the Middle Easterners want to do things back! It's like, totally weird.

In all seriousness, I don't understand the surprise here. We did things- pretty big things. Like, oh, messing in the politics of the region, keeping bases open all over the Middle East, invading two of their countries, threatening to invade two more, fanatically upholding a nation that has done some pretty horrid stuff over the years...

But all that has nothing to do with our current situation. Oh no. Our bombing of their countries has nothing to do with the current soaring recruitment numbers, not at all.

And this is what we call Doublethink, children.

What we do has an effect on what they do. What we do always has an effect on someone else's actions. The same principle applies here. (It's called blowback, BTW, if you were wondering...)

Oh and another note- Obama is going to get us all killed. He's so soft on those evil terrorists, after all.
"His first year in office he authorized more Predator strikes — more than 50 — than President Bush did in his last four years in office. In December, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama stated that sometimes peace requires war. “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” he said. Negotiations “could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”"

Here and Now...

Well, it's about that time again. It gets to where there's so much going on that I don't know where to start, so I don't post, and I just make things worse for myself (I'm a terrible procrastinator, and you'd think I'd learn), and then end up having to condense everything into three paragraph blurbs and combine them into one rather longish post that deals with more than one issue.

So yes. Here we go.


The Oil Spill

Yes, yes. The oil spill that is going to kill lots of little animals out in the ocean and endanger fishing livlihoods all over the US. Well...I never liked fish, so that's no skin off my nose. I haven't been following this story very much, mostly because oil is of absolutely zero interest to me.

But anyway...it looks like the new opening up of offshore drilling places (you see how horribly ignorant I am of this issue?) is going to be postponed because of this spill. However, this spill has also (according to some members of Congress) made it politically unfeasible to try to pass energy and climate legislation- probably because any plan that'll get in good with the Republican minority will have to include something increasing offshore drilling, and the environmentalists aren't going to go for that right now...

And I sort of agree with them. Let's see...we just had a huge oil spill that may or may not have been caused by poor security or safety practices, and we want to add more cooks in the kitchen? o.0 Yeah. That's smart. Not.


Supreme Court Appointments and You

So with Justice Stevens retiring, that leaves another spot open on the Supreme Court. Meaning Obama gets to appoint another Justice. Which obviously means that we'll have to be subjected to a repeat of last year's Sotomayor Fiasco, with accusations whirling, counter-accusations being shot back, and underneath it all, the absolute certainty on the Right that Obama is an evil socialist who wants to enslave us all.

Hence this lovely quote- "Senate Republicans said they would be watchful for a nominee who made decisions based on his or her "own views and political agendas," in the words of Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee..."

Translation: "We're going to absolutely flip over any nominee you send us who isn't Republican and making decisions based on our views. Because anything less is absolutely unamerican."

And of course, being the civil rights geek I am, I was wondering exactly what the potential judges think about said rights...which, of course, means this caught my eye.

What exactly do the potential Justices think about executive power? Their records are vastly dissimilar in many ways, but I must say this woman talks some sense-
"Of the three, Judge Wood, of the appeals court in Chicago, has the clearest record in favor of protecting civil liberties and taking a skeptical stance toward executive power. In a 2003 essay, she spoke out against approaches to counterterrorism that she said posed “a significant threat to the continued observance of the rule of law” — like giving noncitizens fewer due process rights than citizens and sacrificing individual privacy to foster intelligence-gathering.

“In a democracy, those responsible for national security (principally, of course, the executive branch) must do more than say, ‘trust us, we know best’ when they are proposing significant intrusions on liberties protected by the Constitution,” Judge Wood wrote."

Thank you, Ms. Wood. One of the other prospective nominees (another woman, Ms. Kagan), I feel more iffy about. She has a known record of siding with the White House when it comes to executive power...and that's not a good thing. The other front-runner, one Merrick Garland, also has a mixed record which means he could go either way when it comes down to a decision on the issue.

Now I know very little about all the prospective nominees, but the NYTimes did a piece giving a brief blurb about each. Check it out.


Israel and Nukes, oh me oh my....

So it's happened. Finally, the IAEA is looking into Israel's nuclear capabilities. After ignoring her lapse for years in favor of jumping all over non-nuclear countries that are trying to proceed with their own programs, somebody has finally blown the whistle on Israel and asked for an investigation.

Sort of.

Israel is eighth on the agenda. Tentatively. Of course, if Israel and her allies (us) throw a big enough fit, she'll be struck off the agenda, probably never to return. Which would be wrong.

I thought the UN was about the world working together to reach common goals. I thought the UN was about us all knowing what everybody else was doing, so that nobody gets ahold of something they shouldn't (which kind of makes the whole world sound like a playdate...). So why shouldn't Israel's nuclear arsenal be discussed?

We've consistently yelled at Iran about their nukes (which they don't have). We went to war in Iraq over nukes (which they didn't have). We've consistently lambasted North Korea for their possession (and testing) of nukes. Yet somehow, our allies and ourselves are immune to this wave of criticism against the Big Bad Boy Bomb.

Wha-?

Ah yes. The difference. Iran would use nukes, and we never wou- Uh....wait...

Iran would use nukes, but Israel never would. Ever.

And we know both of these things for certain because we read the minds of their leaders. Uh-huh. Tell me how that works out for ya'.


How Convenient- Pakistan and the 'Square Bomber

So after the bomber-that-wasn't, our Government has decided Pakistan is the new Enemy of the State. Which of course means that the most obvious course of action is to invade their country, or, in the nice language of our President, "put more boots on the ground."

You almost have to wonder how this could happen so conveniently. Obama is looking for a way to invade Pakistan (for purposes of "national security", naturally), and hark! A bomb! Driven by a dummy who was trained in a Pakistani Taliban camp! He's a Pakistani Talib! Help!! Invade Pakistan!!

Of course.

Now naturally, the Pakistanis don't want us invading their nice little country. But that's okay. That's why we've been really nice to Islamabad lately. That way Pakistan will like us. Or maybe not. We'll just have to get hit with another attack, that's- oh wait. Did we say that out loud? ^.^

Palestinian Christians Speak

Very interesting, this. A group of Palestinian Christians have gotten together and written a very interesting document detailing their belief that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is unjust. It is a powerful document, and they make a good case.

Here is the main website, and here is the PDF file.

As with anything, it should be taken with a grain of salt- there have been outrages committed by Palestinians as well (as they acknowledge briefly), so there is fault on both sides.

Take the position of both sides, and somewhere in the middle, that's where truth lies.