This week: • Congress • Radio hit • JFK •
• Lebanon • Spinoza • Stuff •

 

Washington Lexicon

This week we are honoured to have someone write for us who frankly is way above the calibre of the little red email’s normal mundane writers. Robert H McElroy, the publisher of TheWeekInCongress.com mulls the new balance of power in Washington.

Catchphrases gain a life of their own on Capitol Hill. Once a Member expresses that magical catchy word or phrase it can quickly become commonly used.

If we go back to the 104th Congress when the Republicans replaced the Democrat majority, the most popular term was ‘gridlock’ and it was an appropriate term considering that the opposition of a Republican Congress to a Democratic president and the reverse, produced little more than a slowly grinding, gritty, back and forth without much forward movement. But bills were passed and just when we began to understand that ‘gridlock’ was something more than what happens when you leave the barbeque out all winter the word was replaced with ‘draconian’.

‘Draconian’ stayed with Congress for several years and was appropriate because, under the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, the president and Congress had to cut deeply into spending programs. To those who did not favor the cuts, they were draconian.

With a new President in 2000 the discourse degenerated a bit and although there was no shortage of long and descriptive floor speeches there was mostly plodding reiteration of one justification or another with little apparent interest in waxing eloquent. First we gained a new catch word, ‘redact’. Redact didn’t have a long lifespan probably because Congress may frame support or opposition for a bill in one context or the other but while framing the message remains, the context in which it is framed changes quickly. ‘At the end of the day’ grew quickly in popularity. The phrase seemed to originate with then National Security Advisor Rice and then made its way to the Hill. President Bush, limited a bit in redaction skills, brought with him some medieval phrasing that appears to have drifted up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill. The President referred to perpetrators of 911 as ‘evil doers’ rather than the more common ‘attackers’ or even ‘the enemy’. Such phrasing made its way into Capitol Hill committee discourse where soldiers, troops and the military were recast as ‘war fighters’ and in an immigration bill a government official who would determine if an alien is legitimately seeking asylum in America as a ‘Trier of Facts’.

The run up to the 2006 elections left Members with little time or patience for the bon mot, drifting away from the President’s phrasing as they drifted away from his policies. But as Iraq became an issue in the elections ‘redeployment’ got a good run for its money. Redeployment was not exactly a catch phrase but fit in well with the continuous arguments about Iraq and was well used.

And now the elections are over, the Democrats will hold the majority beginning with the 110th Congress and the most frequently used term these days comes from the Member who put ‘redeployment’ on the lexicon map. Now, Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania has coined a new catchword and it will be interesting to see if it sprouts wings. ‘Crap’ is the familiar term that Mr. Murtha is comfortable using. The only question about ‘crap’ is if it is a useful term in the final days of the Republican 109th Congress or will it find more appropriate use in the Democratic 110th.

 

 

Putin slays all who oppose him

Russia remains in the iron fisted grip of a dictator, the likes of which have not been seen in the world’s largest country since the darkest days of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin has every stitch of legislative power sewn up, the media quake in fear, and businessmen kowtow to his diktats. No other leader, not even our ol’ fave Dubya, has used the “threat” of terror for his own ends to cement power and quash any dispute.

The ex-KGB/FSB spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin for his stance on Chechnya pointing out how it was Putin’s cronies who blew up an apartment block in Moscow seven years ago and made it look like the work of Chechens so that the Russian president could exercise de facto martial law — not dissimilar to many theories about how Cheney et al used 9/11 for their own purposes really.

This is not the first time the Kremlin has resorted to poison. They poisoned Anna Politkovskaya, the campaigning journalist murdered on October 7, on a plane last year. When that failed hitmen took her out last month. Litvinenko had started to investigate this murder and seemed close to proving Kremlin ties to the investigative journalist’s death.

A couple of years ago Litvinenko fled to Britain after being imprisoned for a second time. In May 2005 The Times reported how someone pushed a pram containing petrol bombs at the front door of his London home. The attempted assassination left him “shaken but unhurt”.

Putin, himself a KGB man, has assumed the power of the Tsars not seen for a century. And since he controls such fantastic deposits of oil and gas no nation is bold enough to rebuke him. In the Age of Peak Oil, human rights count for far less than the barrel.

 

 

Presidential line-up link to JFK’s death

This past week has seen the anniversary of the greatest conspiracy of them all — the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. The little red email likes to think it knows a thing or three about the assassination of John F Kennedy. As arch conspiracy theorists we even have some fairly arresting images of the scene from 43 years ago on our Canned Revolution site here. But even we were taken back with the following stat we came across recently. More than 400 people associated to the events from that day died mysteriously in the following years.

Alex Jones has these details plus video on how JFK’s veep and successor Lyndon Baines Johnson was the man behind the assassination. The night before the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Baines Johnson met with Dallas tycoons, FBI moguls and organized crime kingpins — emerging from the conference to tell his mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown that “those SOB’s” would never embarrass him again. Click here for more. From 2004 the great Jones also has this great video that ties George Bush Snr very closely to the plot to kill Kennedy.

Intriguingly, the folk at What Really Happened point the finger at another president — Tricky Dicky Nixon, who lost narrowly to JFK in 1960. In this article the site shows how Nixon’s close henchmen E Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, both rumbled for breaking into Democrat HQ at Watergate, went in there to rescue photos of the pair of them dressed as tramps in Dallas on November 22, 1963. You can see the convincing pictures here.

The mystery of JFK embroils so many people. That’s why we have to wait till 2039 for the archives to be officially released.

 

 

Gemayel’s death: cui bono?

As with anything in the Middle East the first thing the little red email mulls when a major event happens is cui bono — who gains. This is the only way to work out what happens in this murky region of gun smoke and shattered mirrors. So when the Lebanese Christian Phalangilist industry minister  Pierre Gemayel was slain and the mass media immediately and en masse pointed to Syria, we were suspicious. And when George W Bush had the temerity (and short-term memory loss) to tout the “unwavering commitment of the United States to help build Lebanese democracy and to support Lebanese independence from the encroachments of Iran and Syria” we wanted to remind him of how his support and encouragement of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in July seemed to be a big old waver in said commitment to Lebanon’s independence and democracy.

Suspicion falls automatically on Syria because the Christian Phalangists are one of Syria’s main enemies in Lebanon and Gemayal was one of their nosiest protagonists.

They are also — and this seems to clinch it for most observers — part of the majority in the pro-American government of Fuad Siniora that supports a United Nations tribunal to try the killers of Rafik Hariri, an anti-Syria politician and leader of the Sunni Muslim community, who was blown up by a car bomb more than a year and a half ago.

In truth, when we look at who benefits the most Israel seems to gain in numerous ways from the tensions provoked by the assassination, as the popular and angry rallies in Beirut against Syria and Hizbollah are proving.

To understand Gemayel’s assassination, we need look no further than the murder of Rafik al-Hariri. Al Hariri’s assassination provides the raison d’etre for severing ties with Syria and for transforming Lebanon into a US vassal conforming nicely with Israel’s ambition to surround itself with non-threatening states as well as affording access to the vital water resources of Lebanon’s Wazzani River.

Back to Gemayel then and how Israel can gain from his death. First, and most obviously, Hizbollah — as Syria’s main political and military friend in Lebanon — has been forced suddenly on to the back foot. Hizbollah had been riding high after its triumph over the summer of withstanding the Israeli assault on Lebanon and routing an invasion force that tried to occupy the country’s south.

Hizbollah’s popularity and credibility rose so sharply that the leaders of the Shiite community had been hoping to cash in on that success domestically by demanding more power.

With their recent military victory, this was the moment Hizbollah hoped to make a breakthrough and force political concessions from the Sunnis and Christians, concessions that indirectly would have benefited Syria. With Gemayel’s death, the chances of that now look slim indeed. Hizbollah, and by extension Syria, are the losers; Israel, which wants Hizbollah weakened, is the winner.

Second, the assassination has pushed Lebanon to the brink of another civil war. With a political system barely able to contain sectarian differences, and with the various factions in no mood to compromise after the spate of recent assassinations, there is a real danger that fighting will return to Lebanon’s streets.

Civil war may pose serious threats to Syrian interests — and offer significant benefits to Israel. If Hizbollah’s energies are seriously depleted in a civil war, Israel may be in a much better position to attack Lebanon again. Almost everyone in Israel is agreed that the Israeli army is itching to settle the score with Hizbollah in another round of fighting. This way it may get the next war it wants on much better terms; or Israel may be able to fight a proxy war against Hizbollah by aiding the Shiite group’s opponents.

Certainly one of the main goals of Israel’s bombing campaign over the summer, when much of Lebanon’s infrastructure was destroyed, appeared to be to provoke such a civil war. It was widely reported at the time that Israel’s generals hoped that the devastation would provoke the Christian, Sunni and Druze communities to rise up against Hizbollah.

Third, Syria is already the prime suspect in Hariri’s murder and in the assasination of three other Lebanese politicians and journalists, all seen as anti-Syrian, over the past 21 months.

Gemayel’s assassination, however, has dramatically revived interest in the question of who killed Hariri and brings Syria firmly back into the spotlight. None of this benefits Syria, but no doubt Israel will be able to take some considerable pleasure in Damascus’s discomfort.

Fourth, the Israeli government has been under international and domestic pressure to engage with Syria and negotiate a return of the Golan Heights, an area of Syrian territory it has been occupying since 1967.

With it would be resolved the fraught question of the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel but which Hizbollah and Syria claim as Lebanese territory that should have been returned in Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. The status of the Shebaa Farms has been one of the main outstanding areas of dispute between Israel and Hizbollah.

President Assad of Syria has been hinting openly that he is ready to discuss Israel’s return of the Golan Heights on better terms for Israel than it has ever before been offered.

According to reports in the Israeli media, Assad is prepared to demilitarise the Golan and turn it into a national park that would be open to Israelis. He would probably also not insist on a precise return to the 1967 border, which includes the northern shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. No Israeli leader wants this.

Gemayel’s death, and Syria being blamed for it, forces Damascus back into the fold of the “Axis of Evil”, and forestalls any threat of talks on the Golan.

Fifth, pressure has been growing in the US Administration to start talking to Syria, if only to try to recruit it to Washington’s “war on terror”. The US could desperately do with local help in managing its occupation of Iraq. It is unclear whether Bush is ready to make such an about-turn, but it remains a possibility.

Key allies such as Britain’s Tony Blair are pushing strongly for engagement with Syria, both to further isolate Iran — the possible target of either a US or Israeli strike against its presumed ambitions for nuclear weap — and to clear the path to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Gemayel’s death, and Syria’s blame for it, strengthens the case of the neoconservatives in Washington — Israel’s allies in the Administration — whose star had begun to wane. They can now argue convincingly that Syria is unreformed and unreformable. Such an outcome helps to avert the danger, from Israel’s point of view, that White House doves might win the argument for befriending Syria. Ironically, no other nation on earth provided more support to the US in the 12 months after 9/11 than Syria.

 

 

Spinoza: Dad’s Draft Dodging Tips

In 1971, when I was reclassified by America’s Selective Service or draft into 1-A, fit to serve, I was simply not about to let myself be drafted, in part because I’d suffered four years in a militarized and games-ridden Catholic school at the hands of the sort of muscular Christians who seemed at the time, in my immature world-view, to take special delight in making trouble for me.

It was for this reason that I hatched an elaborate scheme to dodge the American draft which included transforming myself from a dreamy arts fellow into a computer geek.

Like all that has anything to do with war, here we find shame and fame intertwined. I scuttled from the fight like a poltroon: but it was an unjust fight. In scuttling I had to show perverted courage and to make a stand for what I believed in, which was in part that the war was wrong but whose major theme was it was terribly wrong for a sensitive chap like me to be sent into the field.

It would have been better to make a real antiwar stand, and to be sent to jail, or to have joined up to foment rebellion in the ranks against the folly in Vietnam. But the real Spinoza reminds us that “neither fear nor courage saves us”, since neither self-preservation nor courage are cardinal virtues like Confucian benevolence, or humililty: whereas you can’t get enough humility, you can be too concerned with self-preservation or warrior fame.

Comes now on the “left” of our narrow American political spectrum, Congressman Charles Rangel who wants the draft to return so as to force the children of the rich to pay for the criminal folly of Iraq. Comes now on the right Senator McCain who as an ex-Navy officer wants the same thing, because he believes (and he may be right) that a republic without patriotism becomes either a mobocracy or a toy of the rich.

My response is complex. It would be obscene of me to approve given my own track record, and above all because I have sons who under the planned system would be exposed to the draft until the age of 34, not 26 as was the case in the Vietnam era.

Rangel and McCain have a point. From the left, a draft would over time rid our society of Yuppie Joe because the central experience of military life for the gentleman ranker is having to deal on a daily and intimate basis with low fellows.

The absence of a draft in America has reinforced the hideous, because tacit, American class system in which low fellows with large bank balances, like Donald Trump, can actually presume to lecture me on “what duty is/Why day is day, night night, and time is time”, like Polonius in the old play, and even to lecture me on prolixity while being themselves, as is Polonius, verbose.

But from a progressive viewpoint, a draft will fix nothing if America’s elite insists on its own way internationally, and on sweetheart deals, whether equity oil in Iraq or nonunion labor in Central America. The draft didn’t prevent Vietnam.

Furthermore, having to worry about my kids getting killed and coming home in a box is almost as bad as the idea of my own violent death, and that is a very bad idea.

I conclude there oughta be a draft, but one with a clear option to replace military service by community service in something fun, such as fighting fires or teaching English to grubby children in the underdeveloped world.

And, old rich bastards should have a special draft just for them. CEOs and guys like Rumsfeld should be inducted at the age of 70 or 80.

They should get to choose between being gladiators for the public amusement (Rumsfeld thinks he’s a tough guy, and he’d probably choose this) or using their accumulated knowledge, and what wisdom they might have, to sit with sick or ignorant kids until those kids are feeling better and are smarter.

Like mothers do.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Imitation, the sincerest form of flattery
Alert readers in Hong Kong may have noticed a famliar logo apparent on a TV advert for a new food hall in Central. Our fist logo features on placards and shirts on a small mob. Nice of the advertising company boys to think of us when they thought “revolution”. Or, as one revolution wit put it: “the f**kers”. Still, on the plus side, the food hall is supposedly geared towards fair trade and organic products.

 

Video Israeli use of WMDs on Lebanon
Whilst reading a recent Robert Fisk report we came across this wild little sentence: “Israeli bomb craters in which a British scientific team say they have found traces of enriched uranium” but nothing further. An ultimate all-time low, even for a military as morally bankrupt as Israel, we felt. Depleted uranium is bad enough, but the use of enriched uranium is unquestionably a Weapon of Mass Destruction: it is a de facto dirty bomb. Further research turned up more on the craters at Khiam: another Fisk report and a Rai News documentary.

 

Iraq Milestones No1 — Most Expensive war since WWII
In a war with so many turning points and milestones, that it would appear that even the Pentagon spin doctors are subconsciously telling us the US is going round and round in circles, we thought we’d highlight a few of the milestones the spin doctors have left off the Pentagon press releases. According to USA Today and Political Wire Iraq looks set to be the most expensive war since WWII. Which leads to a nice tie-in to milestone number two:

 

Iraq Milestones No2 — Longer lasting conflict than WWII
Yup congrats all round — as of Saturday 25th November, the Iraq war has gone on longer than WWII (for the US). And given milestone one and two, milestone three is an interesting non sequitur to all the Pentagon spin:

 

Iraq Milestones No3 — November the deadliest month so far
According to AP, who’ve been tracking the figure since April 2005, November 2006 is the deadliest month so far, surpassing the previous record month — October 2006. We’re wading through the Iraq Body Count figures to gauge how true this is for the rest of the war, but it takes time to tabulate the data. IBC’s total is of course an absolute minimum number, but we are

 

Video Iraq: The Hidden War
Iraq’s suffering is shown almost nightly on the news, but in this film, Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, shows how much these reports sugar-coat the bloody reality of war. Iraq: The Hidden Story shows footage used by TV news broadcasts, and compares it with the devastatingly powerful uncensored footage of the aftermath of carnage that is becoming a part of daily life in Iraq. The little red email is of the opinion that the population of a country that invades another should in no way be sheltered from seeing exactly what their government’s action entail. As Robert Fisk points out in the film, this is precisely why Western governments will not allow those pictures to be broadcast: if they did, wars would be nigh on impossible.

 

Video Flashback Paying The Price: Killing The Children Of Iraq
Much is made of the post-invasion Iraq casualties, and many who admit to the artificially-low Iraq Body Count figures still justify them as necessary to prevent Saddam’s attrocities against Iraqis. Few people factor in the West’s own genocide (in the words of two former UN officials) of the Iraqis from 1991-2003 — the US & UK sanctions regime. The sanctions have been estimated as responsible for the death of over half a million children, a price that Madeline Albright said at the time was worth paying. Paying The Price: Killing The Children Of Iraq, by John Pilger takes the lid off the UN’s darkest hour.

 

Video Gaza’s Reality
Would you be able to live like this? “We live in constant fear,” says one lady in the film. She is only one of the 4.2 million who do live like this, in Israel’s version of the Warsaw ghetto.

 

Video Was The CIA Involved In The Murder Of Robert Kennedy?
Film-maker Shane O’Sullivan has spent the last three years investigating the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968. He has uncovered new evidence that at least three CIA agents were in the hotel the night he died. BBC Newsnight shows the findings.

 

Next stop Iran?
Seymour Hersh looks at whether the Bush regime’s newly clipped wings will make conflict with Iran more or less likely.

 

Video South Park blame Canada again
They’ve taken on Mel Gibson, Saddam Hussein, Satan and Jesus. Now the potty-mouthed kids from South Park are featured in an online advertisement — and their target is the Canadian government and its opposition to a ban on bottom trawling on the high seas. Greenpeace posted a video spoof online starring Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman, who slam Canada’s stance on deep-sea dragging just as a six-day round of talks on sustainable fisheries began at the United Nations.

 

Kittyhawk stalked by Chinese Sub & revolutionaries
The US’s oldest active service warship and the only carrier permanently based outside the US, the USS Kittyhawk had a brush with a Chinese diesel sub recently, which got within torpedo range without being spotted. Which is a bit of a security fiasco. To add insult to injury, the Kittyhawk then let one of the Revolution’s own aboard armed with a camera when it docked in Hong Kong. The revolutionary couldn’t resist the temptation of a brush with the real-life equivalent of a Death Star, even it is 45 years old.

 

Tales from Bizarro World Americans For Dr Rice
We scrolled through this site searching in vain for a sign that it was a parody. Alas it would appear to be the real deal, which makes it a thousand times more surreally amusing. We present to you: Americans For Dr Rice, a site dedicated to getting Condi to run for President in 2008. And Hollywood thought it needed to remake The Manchurian Candidate and the Stepford Wives to show the dangers of brainwashing and automatons!?!

 

TWOT™ paranoia for Firefox
Need a dose of terror in your browser? Download the US Department of Homeland Insecurity Idiocy Level add-on for Firefox, and you can see the current Idiocy Level in the status bar.

 

Video Suspect Nation
Big Brother is big business in the UK: since the Blair government was first elected in 1997, UK civil liberties have gone to hell in a hand basket. This Channel 4 documentary looks at the amazing encroachments made by the government in 9 short years.

 

Donnie’s Departure Developments
Explain it to me again: why did Donnie Darkside have to go after the Dems got control of both houses? What’s that you say? Indictable? Surely not… And extraditable, you say? So with his departure, what about the rest of the administration? Ahhh… plausibly deniable! Of course.

 

Video Sopranos on network TV
This is so much like the version we get to see on Hong Kong TV, it's almost not funny. Mad TV shows us the Sopranos done for syndicated network TV.

 

Adbust PNAC meets POAC
The Project for the Old American Century have some great newsbites and a wonderful knack of propaganda busting the legion of 20th Century war propaganda posters that are a legacy of days gone by to bring them right up to date and willfully twisted.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then then how come the Hong Kong Observatory had to issue the Amber Rainstorm Warning in November for the first time ever?