A couple of quotes to start with: "He pushed the Reagan administration into supporting democratic reform for Central America, and he resisted the unionists who backed the proto-communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua" – Oliver Kamm defends CIA-backed death squads.
"When someone drinks excessively and needs to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, the police will also respond in order to see if underage drinking is taking place and to ticket the offenders" – US police act to maximise underage drinking fatalities (from Vice Squad)
Also mad and nonsense: Christian Voice and MediaWatch UK (look out, it’s a bomb); and the Democratic senators who support grinding the poor into the dirt. Including the US’s worst man on every policy issue outside of the Republican Party itself, Joe Leiberman.
Not that the UK can hold its head high. Today, our best-selling newspaper began a hate campaign against gypsies, in perhaps the press’s bleakest moment since the Daily Mail’s activities in the 1930s. Hopefully, Sun editor Rebekah Wade will be jailed for incitement to racial hatred. Or indefinitely interned under house arrest, since she approves of that kind of thing.
Oh, and lots of people seem to be linking to this wanker. Clue, not that anyone who’d fall for such nonsense will listen: the Cubans he discusses clearly didn’t lie down in the minefield and die because dying is preferable to spending one’s life in Cuba, but because they’d rather die peacefully than by being blown up by minefields.
"Tell us your gypsy stories" is the request from The Sun.
I would like to launch one of the first left-wing ‘blogosphere’ campaigns aganist the MSM (Murdoch Scum Media*). I would like people to collect, from whatever sources they can, testimony of gypsies suffering racism and discrimination, from the Nazi death camps, to their current lives in Eastern Europe, to modern day Britain. I’d like those to be the ‘gypsy stories’ The Sun publishes.
*I promised myself I wouldn’t stoop to the level of the right-wing bloggers, with their al-Guardian, Biased (or Baghdad) Broadcasting Corporation, EUrabia, Idiotarians (what’s that then, idiots? why the new word? oh, I see, YOU are an idiot). But The Sun is scum.
Were you a German war criminal, Rebekah?
At the risk of sounding like a Bushy, I wonder if Bush might actually be the first US president to support democratic change abroad in fact and not just in rhetoric. After all, Reagan et al preached freedom while funding death squads and installing proxy regimes. It’s hard to imagine him organising elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fact that Iraqis have voted for anti-US candidates, in the main, is a test for Bush. But when he says he wants democracy, there’s a chance he might just mean it.
The Cuban border sentry bloke is, natch, a fan of "A Few Good Men", a film that I never got. Jack Nicholson is all "WE GUARD YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP! YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!" and all I could think is "how is this remotely relevant to the offence you are accused of, which is murdering one of your own recruits in a base in Cuba?".
I simply don’t believe that the USA has ever been under any particular danger of Cuban invasion, or for that matter whether beating unpopular soldiers to death as they slept would help all that much if it was.
I’m blessed if I can see how you can morph a eulogy to a former trade union leader, Lane Kirkland, past-president of the AFL-CIO, into "Oliver Kamm defends CIA-backed death squads". Perhaps you could explain it for me?
US LatAm policy under Reagan was vicious ‘at least he’s our bastard’ realpolitik, which involved backing dictators and training local militias who went on to murder civilians and dissidents.
Someone could try and claim that repressive tactics were justified given the perceived threat the USSR posed against the US. But if they were instead to try and claim that the relevant policies were good for the people of Latin America, then they would definitionally be defending death squads.
But weren’t the Sandanistas voted out?
And what’s wrong with ‘realpolitik’, it’s better than rainbow, pie-in the-sky politik!
Yes, but the Tories were voted out. Does that mean it would retrospectively justify me killing a bunch of the fucks?
If it does, surely I can kill them now – after all, they aren’t democratically elected so they should be fair game. Surely they have less right to life than before they were voted out?
Were you a Tory, David?
DDuff – you’re absolutely right – as I said, I’d have some respect on principle for people who supported US 1980s LatAm policy out of realpolitik. I don’t, however, have any respect for people who falsely claim(ed) to support it for human rights reasons.
The guard guy must be a Jessup fan. He send a group of refugees back into a minefield.
How do you train people to execute such orders ("We had orders. We had our orders, so we followed them.") and maintain morale? That is what this Jessup character was referring to. You ask him to train and lead such a force, and then complain about the means and measures taken to achieve it.
I think it is a classic. "You can’t handle the Truth!"
(Or the Iraq war variant "We don’t do bodycounts.")
But then it was a lousy movie.
The Sandinistas were voted out in 1990, which is not in the 1980s or the Reagan years.
The Sandinistas were voted back in last November.