Time Magazine: mashup of Iranian Politics and Lord of the Rings.
Channel Two is putting on a Lord of the Rings marathon as part of the government’s efforts to restore peace.
Lots of people, adults and kids, are watching in the room with me. On the screen, Gandalf the Grey returns to the Fellowship as Gandalf the White. He casts a blinding white light, his face is hidden behind a halo. Someone blurts out, “Imam zaman e?!” Is it the Imam? It is a reference, of course, to the white-bearded Ayatullah Khomeini, who is respectfully called Imam Khomeini. But “Imam” is at the same time a title of the Mahdi, a messianic figure that Muslims believe will come to save true believers from powerful evildoers at the time of the apocalypse. Isn’t that our predicament?
And listen: there is the sly reference to Ahmadinejad. Iranian films are dubbed very expertly. So listen to the Farsi word they use for hobbit and dwarf: kootoole, little person. Kootoole, of course, was and is, the term used in many of the chants out on the street against the diminutive President.
In the eye of the beholder in Tehran, the movie is transformed into an Iranian epic. When Gandalf’s white steed strides into the frame, local viewers see Rakhsh, the mythical horse of the Rostam, the great champion of the Shahnameh, the thousand-year old national epic. “Bah, bah…Rakhsh! Rakhsham amad!” someone says, in awe.
At the moment the ancient Treebeard bears Pippin through the forest and the hobbit asks, “And whose side are you on?” those of us watching already know the answer: Mousavi! Treebeard is decked in green, after all.
- If you want an idea of why the idea of mixing church and state is a bad one, look at Iran. You can’t challenge the state without challenging God’s word, you heathen. Die in hellfire!
- And which church gets to call the shots? The largest church in the USA is the Catholic Church, and I can just bet that there’s a lot of people in the USA who aren’t Catholic (or consider those damn Papists right up there with Saaaaatan) not caring for that. As a Unity person, I have no truck with theocrats of any stripe, thank you very much.
( Read the rest of this entry » )
From Booman Tribune: 1953 – the CIA engineers a coup against the elected (but leftist) prime minister of Iran, and sets in motion the anger against the US from the Iranian man on the street by creating the Iranian secret police SAVAK whose terror kept the Shah in power until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
A couple of posts on the politics of religion in Iran and on who the players in Iran are, and why they hate each other’s guts.
Another note on Ahmadinejad’s connection with the thug-militias out on the street.
And then there’s Andrew Sullivan’s comments on the Supreme Leader’s speech at Friday prayers today (after the cut):
( Read the rest of this entry » )If you’re looking for canned news on this, that’s going to be hard, as most news organizations have been shut down by the Ayatollahs. Here’s the best I can come up with:
Wikipedia (terms and background info):
- 2009 Iranian election protests
- term: Ansar / Ansar-e-Hezbollah
- term: Basij militia
- Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the theocratic leader of Iran; President Ahmadinejad is the day-to-day person in charge of things. Mousavi is an elder reformist statesman who ran against the President, won the actual vote, and as soon as it was obvious that the President was losing to someone who might challenge the hardliners and theocrats, the hardliners and theocrats announced (after shutting down the news channels, texting and so forth) that their guy had really won, and we have the guns, and what are you going to do about it?
- Riots and protests have swept Iran ever since. Hardliner militias (see groups mentioned above) have been attacking and killing protesters. There are calls for a national strike today/tomorrow.
Sources for new information:
- #Iranelection on Twitter (very rough and busy)
- AlJazeeera in English (video feed) (website)
- Niac-insight boils down the raw info from Iran messaging
- Photos of the protests from the Boston Globe and Flickr amateurs on the scene and more here.
- Andrew Sullivan is hot on this trail.
- Obama’s reactions so far.
- Nico Pitney at the HuffPo is doing a good liveblooging update on stuff.
- Gary Sick’s blog and Juan Cole are also gathering some good stuff.
HBO production and presently running on that network. My take on it is that it’s a once-funny; I have a hard time watching gangster movies because I really don’t get off on people beating and killing each other, especially if the people involved doing the beating are serious scum. This is SOPRANOS GO BAGHDAD; it’s really pretty well done, but not for anyone with an easily grossed-out stomach from the extreme violence. It’s good for what it is, but what it is the life of a sociopath monster. Three buckets of blood out of four.
At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas. The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars. Their stock market has gone to heck in a handbasket, and so on, and they can’t keep this sort of thing going forever.
Another place where cheap oil doesn’t go over so well- Iran. Between the fall of the Shah and the rise of the know-nothing theocrats, plus the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the ability of Iran to refine it’s own oil went to pieces. Nobody wanted to invest there, for fear of someone walking in the next day and taking it over, and because the actions of the government are constantly ending up with various economic sanctions against Iran. Just too unstable. Some plans for new refineries are coming online, maybe, in the middle of the next decade. Recently, they had to start rationing gasoline - which is kept artificially low at $0.32 a gallon.
Did they make money off the oil bubble? Sure. And they blew it on things like the cheap gas, because unemployment is very very high (more than 30%) and not keeping the public somewhat bought off and subsidized would create uprisings - against the theocrats. Perish the idea of making themselves more stable and attractive to outside investment!
To keep their budget going, they expected $100 a barrel oil. They aren’t going to get it.
The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, and talk to the Generals, learn their languages….hmm, hmm…of course, McCain’s walk last year to prove ‘how quiet things are now’ had the cast of the 12 days of warfare. 100 soldiers on point, three Blackhawks hawking, two gunships gunning and a geezer in a big flak suit… ah, you know the song.
The idea, too, was to show how McCain was a maaaaanly man, and Obama a know-nothing elitist pipsqueak and how that would go over with Mr and Mrs. Bubba.
Of course, the answer is that Obama went and – well, looked seriously Presidential wherever he went. And the VIPs he met on the way treated him as such, and were sighing with relief that someone who was halfway sane and sensible might be President of the USA. And at point after point on the trip, and just before, Obama’s ideas on the problems with the Middle East came out as sensible, sound solutions – so much so that the locals he was visiting were endorsing them to the great consternation of Bush and McCain. And since polls are showing that Obama’s weak spots is that he’s something of an unknown factor who may not have sound stuff on security and foreign affairs – well, this is all money in the bank for him.
McCain saw the huge crowds in Berlin and compared them to the sixteen people and an oompah band that he had at his speech in New Orleans when Hillary hit the wall, and – well, he didn’t like that. So now he’s throwing dirt at the idea of Obama Campainging Overseas, the horror of it all – of course, the fact that he’s campaigned and given speeches and travelled recently for fundraisers in such places as Mexico, Canada, Britain and Colombia is set aside.
Why? Because nobody’s calling him on it. CBS got caught the other day screwing around with an interview and rearranging the answers to the questions to avoid showing that he had (1) no idea as to when and what has happened in Iraq over the last couple of years, and (2) forgetting that the war against the Taliban happened since 9-11 and Iraq happened a couple of years after that. In short, he would have looked like a total fool, and CBS was protecting him.
With that, McCain could call Obama the Muslim Spawn of Satan and get away with it, because the big news agencies are not willing to aggressively report about his failings. They aren’t willing to pull apart his fakery, his non-plans, his weak numbers and figures, his failure to remember his butt if it’s not attached. They’re not willing to point out that the man can’t remember the most basic things about the whole situation in the Middle East, supposedly his strong point. Or that short of Bush’s policies for another four years, he has nothing to offer except that there will be a different picture in the post offices with the title President of the United States of America under it.
And basically, that’s the whole campaign. He wants the big job bad enough that he’s willing to say or do anything to get it.
…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.
The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.
Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.
Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.
Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.
It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.
When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)
Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.
To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.
Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.
Solving any problem becomes a matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.
Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere. Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?
But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.
Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?
But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.
Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.
This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.
And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-do
Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.
Some issues-oriented campaign.
Hydrogen, stupidity and incompetence. I swear to gawd, folks, I sometimes cannot imagine how we ever got this idea that George W. Bush, the first President with a MBA (from Harvard, yet) would run a tight, disciplined and competent organization that would - oh, how did that line go - “restore honor and dignity to the White House.”
Every time I look at some Bushoid project, I see such major idiocy and garbled photo-op efforts that I cannot imagine what the heck he was ever trying to accomplish. I see a lot of discipline in trying to get, accumulate and wield power, but nothing all that constructive is ever done with it.
I mean, it’s like calling in the roto-rooter man because you have drain problems in the downstairs toilet and come back to find him using the snake to sodomize the neighbor’s beagle to show it who’s the boss. That’s after finding that while nothing useful has been done about the toilet, drain cleaner is all over the sofa and the living room carpet, caulk has been applied to the upstairs bathroom’s toilet to seal up the tank lid so it will never open again, and a lit blowtorch has set your bedroom set afire.
As you survey the damage, the guy runs through the house and back out into the front yard screaming about terrorist dogs and presenting you with a partial bill for the next six months work for your house, with emphasis on how he’s going to make sure the rats under your house never use the sump for a swimming club again. And you should be grateful, too.
There’s a story up about a Middle Eastern Arabic language satellite channel that was broadcast as an arm of the US government, called The Free (al-Hurra) that - well, I used to listen as a kid to the Voice of America and other US government ‘information outlets’, and this is pitiful. They hired managers who have no background journalism, can’t speak Arabic, and don’t manage the finances as they flush $500 Million down the toilet.
It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station’s predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, “Jesus is risen today!” After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station’s budget.
“Many people just didn’t know how to do their job,” said Yasser Thabet, a former senior editor at al-Hurra. “If some problem happened on the air, people would just joke with each other, saying, ‘Well, nobody watches us anyway.’ It was very self-defeating.”
According to former al-Hurra staffers, Harb filled the newsroom with Lebanese employees, many of whom had thin journalistic credentials. Anchors spoke in heavy Lebanese dialects, turning off viewers from other countries. On-air reporting errors were common.
“He hired his friends — this was the problem — and they didn’t have any experience,” said Magdi Khalil, a former producer who clashed with Harb.
Again and again, that’s what I hear - people are hired because of their connections, especially political, with no real concern with their ability or competence. Karen Hughes, Bush’s longtime PR assistant, was responsible for its oversight - and did nothing to deal with the continuing problems she was repeatedly told about. Staff members ran Hizbollah tirades and pro-Iranian programming on the station that denied the Holocaust, and nobody on the top level caught on because they didn’t hear the broadcasts and wouldn’t understand them anyway.
Just pitiful. But that’s what happens when you govern without a care about anything aside of PR and photo-ops.
Ya know we gotta do it, and if the lilly-livered Democrat gets in, we have to think about Doing What Has to Be Done.
“Yes, gentlemen, they are on their way in, and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country, and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them. Otherwise, we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation. Uh, my boys will give you the best kind of start, 1400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now, uhuh. Uh, so let’s get going, there’s no other choice. God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural… fluids. God bless you all.”
- General Jack D. Ripper. USAF
The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah!
-President Greg Stillson
Ooh, I bet we even get $20 a gallon gasoline out of it, if we can find it! Groovy.
A map of Chinese languages and dialects. The ‘YUE’ one in the south is essentailly what we know of as Cantonese.
A map of Old Iranian languages. Useful for us ancient history sorts.
From a MSNBC interview of Huckabee:
“South Carolina’s a great place for me. I mean, I know how to eat grits and speak the language. We even know how to talk about eating fried squirrel and stuff like that, so we’re on the same wavelength.”
“Mika, I bet you never did this,” Huckabee went on, addressing Mika Brzezinski. “When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper, because that was the only thing they would let us use in the dorm, and we would fry squirrels in a popcorn popper in the dorm room.”
I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do, to amend the Constitution so it’s in God standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.
Amend. The Constitution. To God’s standards. According to whose idea of what God’s standards are?
( Read the rest of this entry » )Last night, after we were done watching Keith Olbermann (and after catching his excellent Special Comment on Bush’s lies over the NIE issue), we watched a little of Dan Abrams’ follow up show; he had Tony Blankley (formerly Newt Gingrich’s press guy), one of the main editors at SALON, and Pat Buchanan on for commentary on the NIE issues. The responses were universally scornful; Buchanan was saying that Joe Biden needed to get out there and have hearings on the whole thing and roast Bush alive on his lies to try to get us into war.
Susan and I flipped out on that response; if Bush lost Pat Buchanan on this one that bad (even Blankley couldn’t defend how they handled this), then Bush was in deep trouble.
I hope so. I hope that this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a recent interview, (the whole thing is worth reading) Scott Ritter was saying something that caught my eye about why there was such reluctance in Bush’s case to nail him to the wall for his behaviour:
Ritter: It’s difficult to explain. First of all you have to note, from the public side, that very few Americans actually function as citizens anymore. What I mean by that are people who invest themselves in this country, people who care, who give a damn. Americans are primarily consumers today, and so long as they continue to wrap themselves in the cocoon of comfort, and the system keeps them walking down a road to the perceived path of prosperity, they don’t want to rock the boat. If it doesn’t have a direct impact on their day-to-day existence, they simply don’t care.
There’s a minority of people who do, but the majority of Americans don’t. And if the people don’t care — and remember, the people are the constituents — if the constituents don’t care, then those they elect to higher office won’t feel the pressure to change.
The Democrats, one would hope, would live up to their rhetoric, that is, challenging the Bush administration’s imperial aspirations. Once it became clear Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, one would have thought that when the Democrats took control of Congress they would have sought to reimpose a system of checks and balances, as the Constitution mandates. But instead the Democrats have put their focus solely on recapturing the White House, and, in doing so, will not do anything that creates a political window of opportunity for their Republican opponents.
The Democrats don’t want to be explaining to an apathetic constituency, an ignorant constituency whose ignorance is prone to be exploited because it produces fear, fear of the unknown, and the global war on terror is the ultimate fear button. The Democrats, rather than challenging the Bush administration’s position on the global war on terror, challenging the notion of these imminent threats, continues to play them up because that is the safest route toward the White House. At least that is their perception.
The last thing they are gong to do is pass a piece of legislation that opens the door for the Republicans to say, “Look how weak these guys are on terror. They’re actually defending the Iranians. They’re defending this Ahmadinejad guy. They’re defending the Holocaust denier. They’re defending the guy who wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” The Democrats don’t want to go up against that. They don’t have the courage of conviction to enter into that debate and stare at whoever makes that statement and say they’re a bald-faced liar. They’re not going to go that route.
So we will see what happens now…
Various sources are now saying that yes, Bush was indeed told point-blank last August that the intelligence services had new information that led them to strongly believe that the Iranian A-bomb project had been DOA for years. One of those sources is the President’s mouthpiece.
Bush, on Tuesday: In August, I think it was John — Mike McConnell came in and said, We have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was.
White House mouthpiece, Wednesday: President Bush was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program ‘may be suspended,’ the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.”
The White House statement released by Dana Perino tonight also states McConnell told Bush “the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program.”
On Tuesday, Bush said “nobody ever told me” to back down from his hawkish rhetoric on Iran. No, maybe not. But Bush knew Iran “may have suspended” its nuclear weapons program and that the intelligence community was in the process of “changing its assessment.” And yet, he continued to warn of “World War III” and a “nuclear holocaust” because nobody told specifically him to stop.
Jebus to Jebus and nine hands around. What a fricking piece of work the man is.
…and say that he really, truly had no idea about the NIE’s stuff about the 2003 stop to the Iranian A-bomb efforts. There were some creative ways to use that and get somewhere for the bigger picture with Iran. But, expecting positive use of Bush’s imagination is asking too much. Sheesh.
It’s also pointed out on the blogosphere that there are some collateral issues with the NIE disclosures.
- With the huge loss of credibility in a demonstrable way, Bush just shot himself in the foot to keep sanctions going and to get non-US firms to not do business of ALL sorts with Iran. Nice job, dood.
- This will not help Hillary, whose hard-line stuff on Iran was based on there being a serious threat to the USA. Now, it looks like exactly what Edwards was calling it - giving Bush carte-blanche against Iran because she didn’t want to look weak on National Security because she wasn’t willing to look at the situation closely and call it for the BS that it was. With that, the discussion goes to the fine points on domestic stuff or to supporting a wide commitment in Iraq.
People just do not think this stuff through.
Bush: “Don’t talk like that in front of the children! Kids, I believe in the Iranian A-bomb, don’t you? If we’d all just clap our hands…”
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