Miss Kabul

 

Elvis has left the building. At last.

...and as the band was playing him out, the Beltway chattering class was in a mass conniption over all those poor, helpless collaborators we left behind, and our lack of political will, and how, if we could only piss away another trillion or two and tough it out until mid-century, we could lick those mean old Taliban once and for all.

In the days leading up to Elvis' departure from the building, the press was full of screeching and howling about how this wasn't going to be like the evacuation of Saigon, honest it wasn't, seriously, for real — and the louder they howled, the more convinced I was that it would be like the evacuation of Saigon, except even more awesome.

I was 18 when I watched terrified Embassy flunkies being plucked off the roof by the choppers on TV. The draft had officially ended around 1971 or so, but I still had to register. Got a ready-to-burn card and everything. The day Saigon fell, I was about two weeks from graduating high school, and classified 1-H.

Turn out the lights, the party's over...!

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Blast From Yer Past: "Humaniterrorism", June 1999

After that remix of some old Yipster Times cartoons went so well, I thought it might be fun to find some more BFYP candidates among my old cartoons from around the turn of the century. This one has always remained a personal favorite, and is also special because it promoted the first event I ever worked on with long-time comrade and BBF Adam Eidinger of DCMJ and Prop 71 fame -- the "Not A Victory Parade" protesting the US/NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999.

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Here's the art in action, printed as a placard and carried in the march. You can see it right there behind and to the left of that boring-ass IAC/ANSWER placard.

Blast From Yer Past: "Humaniterrorism", June 1999

After that remix of some old Yipster Times cartoons went so well, I thought it might be fun to find some more BFYP candidates among my old cartoons from around the turn of the century. This one has always remained a personal favorite, and is also special because it promoted the first event I ever worked on with long-time comrade and BBF Adam Eidinger of DCMJ and Prop 71 fame -- the "Not A Victory Parade" protesting the US/NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999.

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Here's the art in action, printed as a placard and carried in the march. You can see it right there behind and to the left of that boring-ass IAC/ANSWER placard.

Hillary sez: "This Starts With You"

So, anyway, last Sunday afternoon, Adam, Ben and I were hanging around the DCCC office, passing one, knocking back a DC Brau and helping Adam write his op-ed for CNN -- and after that carnage was hosed off the floor, Adam decided to try to sign up on the Hillary Campaign Site for cheap lulz.

The headline on the masthead announced "This Starts With You", which was bad news right from the git-go. After being asked for our full name, address, phone number, zip code, email address, credit card information, Twitter handle, HIV status and blood type -- and dismissing half a dozen exhortations to send cash and sign up for an email list -- we took ourselves a semi-ironic click on the Terms Of Use and the Privacy Policy buried deep therein. Hilarity ensued.

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...and, here's some more classic Hillary action from the '08 Presidential freak circus: 
Hillary In 2008! One More Bite Won't Kill You, February 2006
Your Jackass Slate for 2008, February 2007.
Hillary Answers The Tough Ones, December 2007.

I'm With Stupid

So, Hillary Clinton is taking another whack at becoming America's Margaret Thatcher -- as if we hadn't seen this coming since about 2009.

A lot's been made about the vacuous, smarmy campaign kickoff video, of course, but an equal amount of confusion and mockery has arisen around Hillary's campaign logo. Aside from the fact that it looks like the logo for a plus-size women's fashion warehouse outlet, there's also the matter of the arrow pointing to the right.

It goes without saying that a lot of your denser Liberals and Pwogwessives are puzzled; one Pwog tweeted to the effect that it's a mistake, and that the arrow wasn't pointing in the direction Mrs. Bill wanted to take the country in. Oh, for Christ's sake, somebody tie me to a railroad track. Of course that's the direction she wants to take the country. This should be obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to Hillary ever since she carpetbagged her way into the Senate -- with her support for US/NATO bombing campaigns in Serbia, her support for the Patriot Act, her support for Israel, and the way she damn' near broke her neck rushing to support Bush's crimes in Iraq. You'd have to have been living in a cave for the past fifteen years (this would take in most Liberals) to not realize what a horrid, bloody, greedy warmongering neocon authoritarian she is.

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God Save The Queen

Y'know that old saying about how history happens the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce? Well, what happens if it happens as farce the first time? You know, like when Obama was first running, and all the Liberals were screaming about how if you didn't support him you were some kind of racist, even though anybody who did even the most cursory examination of his background would've told you that the guy was a total sham, a lightweight who pretty much skated into every office he held, a classic Clinton Democrat, a flunkie of the Pentagon and Wall Street?

So, here comes Hillary Clinton, taking another stab at it now that Obama's warmed the seat up for her, and I can just see it now, the same old shit -- if I don't support Hillary, I'm a mean old sexist Teabagger, even though anybody who hasn't been living in a goddamn' cave for the past twenty years totally knows the score on this nasty old harpie. Anyone who points out her involvement on the board of Wal-Mart, her support for Israeli atrocities in Palestine, her support for the disaster in Iraq, or her support for corporate dictatorship is going to get a bunch of shrieking from geezing old '70s dead-enders who can't talk about anything but Roe V. Wade and the Glass Ceiling™.

So, folks, would it be safe to assume that American Feminism is pretty much dead? I mean, c'mon -- Glass Ceiling? "Lean In"? Roe V. Wade? Is that all you tired old broads have got for us?

But, more importantly -- who's going to hold Hillary's crown while she takes the oath of office?

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Greetings From Haiti!

Y'know, I hardly know where to start with this. Perhaps I could start with this gob-smacking foto of ex-Presidents Bubba and Chimp, both smiling their most smarmy and smug smiles as they accept the position of Special Envoys in charge of the Haitian relief effort. That's right, ex-President I Invaded Haiti In The '90s and ex-President Heckuva Job Brownie have been placed in charge of Haitian earthquake relief, and the bastards are frickin' smiling... and President Timberlake, there, seems just barely able to contain himself as well. What perfect cover for a little bit of that "vulture capitalism".



Or, perhaps this amazingly soulless, brutalist David Brooks column from the New York Times might work for you. In it, he calls for the throwing away of any tolerance or respect for foreign cultures and calls for "intrusive paternalism" at least half a dozen times in a page and a half of thinly-veiled racist spewage. In spirit and letter, it's really no different from any similar racist spewage about Haiti and the Dominican Republic published in the New York Times a century or so ago; Noam Chomsky writes in Year 501:

Times editors lauded the "unselfish and helpful" attitude that the US had always shown, now once again as it responded "in a fatherly way" as Haiti "sought help here." Our "unselfish intervention has been moved almost exclusively by a desire to give the benefits of peace to people tormented by repeated revolutions," with no thought of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise," for ourselves. "The people of the island should realize that [the US government] is their best friend." The US sought only to ensure that "the people were cured of the habit of insurrection and taught how to work and live"; they "would have to be reformed, guided and educated," and this "duty was undertaken by the United States." There is a further benefit for our "black brother": "To wean these peoples away from their shot-gun habit of government is to safeguard them against our own exasperation," which might lead to further intervention. "The good-will and unselfish purposes of our own government" are demonstrated by the consequences, the editors wrote in 1922, when they were all too apparent and the Marine atrocities had already aroused a storm of protest.

However, if comic relief is what you're after, don't despair; former US Senator John "Senator Goodhair" Edwards is going to Haiti to help out, also -- with cameras conveniently present, of course.

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Hillary Answers the Tough Ones!

Yet another awake-too-early morning finds my wife once again flipping between early-morning news programs at 6:30am, and landing on CNN's "American Morning" shitfest which, this particular morning, was running highlights of the previous evening's Donkeycratic Party "debate". Needless to say, of course, I emerged from my REM daze just in time to hear that chirpy, gushy college girl asking Hillary Clinton if she preferred "diamonds or pearls?" to which Her Hillaryship answered -- in classic Clintonian fashion, "I like both"...



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Who Will Control the Government's Guns?

Government (in the form of police) violence against nonviolent protesters at the Seattle WTO Meetings had many in The Movement questioning the relevance of strict Ghandian Nonviolence in modern street protest. It also changed a lot of my attitude toward Federal and State gun-control laws. I suddenly noticed that all of these laws were about disarming the People, and not the State.

Things got really awkward all of a sudden. Now, I'm really not a violent guy at all. I've always believed that war -- and situations that drive citizens to take up arms against their government -- are an indication of epic failure: ethical failure, cultural failure, moral failure, and spiritual failure. After Seattle, though, I started thinking more about people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, who are fighting US-backed state/corporate dictatorships and are forced to literally fight the police -- and often soldiers -- in the streets, often just for the right to gather in the streets to voice their grievances in the first place...and they aren't necessarily fighting by Gandhi's rules. I started thinking about the Palestinians, engaged in their resistance against the Israeli occupation of their country... and, they weren't exactly holding candles and singing kum-bah-yah, either.

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Got War?

Heading into the home stretch of Clintontime, all the media gush about the Clinton Legacy conveniently left out the assaults on the Constitution, military adventurism in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Act, not to mention a little perjury. Oh, wait, yeah, that's right, we had that big ol' Impeachment trial coming up; and if your name happened to be Bill Clinton, then there was only one thing to do: War Scare Time again, boys and girls! This time, as I recall, it was Serbia and its head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, who were Enemy Of The Month owing to accusations of "mass murder" or somesuch against Milosevic, in which it was eventually discovered that the "mass" part came to about the total annual murder rate for DC in a good year. So, President Elvis' Secretary of Snake...uh, Snake, the venerable old Reaganoid Madeleine Albright, was engaged in a round of diplomacy with Mr. Milosevic right about this time -- if, by "diplomacy", you mean "sign this absurdly one-sided, crippling list of our demands*, or else we'll crater your asses flat". Nothing, if not Mafia Diplomacy...only difference was, the actual Mafia would've let him slide with broken fingers.



Meanwhile, with the "Impeachment Tide Surging" -- as USA Today put it -- it was time once again for President Bubba to get all Presidential, meaning, of course, to fan up another war scare someplace against a country with no air force and damn near nothing to shoot back with and then fly the most technically sophisticated, most expensive and deadliest air force on the planet over them and stomp the fertilizer out of them for about a month and a half while going on TV with some grim-assed speech about how you had to do it. Also, if you've really got your ducks together, you find some fresh-faced young flack from Human Rights Watch to go on the Today Show the week the bombing starts and deliver the most spectacularly convoluted, steaming, quivering mass of triagulation ever seen in any mass media to date in an attempt to show that it really is OK that Clinton's air force is bombing civilians because they're defending human rights against Milosevic.

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Clinton's Place in History

November of '98, heading towards the end of The Good Old Clintontime, saw the by-now usual Sunday morning spew about the Clinton Legacy. Predictably, this took the form of gushing about "welfare reform" and his Crime Bill, but not a whole lot about the things that were really on peoples' minds -- like the Chinese takeover of American manufacturing, and stagnating wages. What we did hear a lot about, as well, was how well he dealt with the Iraqis, and his decisive action in his missile attacks on The Sudan and Afghanistan -- which turned out to have targeted civilians (as usual) and were timed so soon after his video testimony in the Lewinsky Scandal that it could've been the premise for a movie (what? wait a minute...)...



...which brings us to the real Clinton Legacy, the legacy of one of most right-wing and violent Administrations ever to be winked at and given a free pass by desperate, fawning, attention-whoring American Liberalism. Let's see... there was extra-Constitutional military violence against Iraq (twice), the Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia; threatening and dick-wiggling at North Korea, Bosnia, and Iran -- not to mention the military assault on the Branch Davidian outfit, with young children and elderly inside, right here in the good old USA. All this -- on top of assaults on the Constitution at every possible opportunity, most notably in the form of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which sought sweeping censorship powers over the then-emerging Internet and which was deservedly smacked down by the Supreme Court -- gave President Elvis Clinton a legacy that any modern head of state could envy, if his name happened to be Deng Xiaoping.

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Paid Political Announcement

It was Sam Smith, writing in his Progressive Review, who beautifully characterized the Clinton Mob as "corporate lawyers with their own air force", and nowhere was that more evident than President Bubba's seemingly random, shits-and-giggles cruise-missile attacks on Baghdad in the early fall of 1996, right in the midst of his campaign for a second term, and probably for some random made-up "no-fly zone" violation or something.

Enemy-of-the-Month Club

About this time, at the peak of O.J. Frenzy, I was noticing a pattern in the media: that of what I liked to call the "Enemy Of The Month". Didn't it seem like that to you... seemed like every other day, there was some huge hysterical alarm in the media about some inflammatory hot-button bullshit issue like rap lyrics, or heavy metal lyrics, or cyberporn, or immigrants, or the Iraqis, or "hate speech", or... O.J.!



Brilliant -- in a ham-fisted fashion -- when you think about it: what better way to keep peoples' minds off of any actual real economic and social issues than keeping their panties in a bunch about a constant parade of shallow, sensationalistic "issues" like flag burning, TV violence, cyberporn, rap lyrics and -- most heinous of all at the time -- teen smoking. For some mysteriously weird reason that summer, a longtime American tradition was being raged over as if it were an asteroid about to hit the Earth. Needless to say, much of this starred President Elvis all over the TV lecturing us about teenaged smoking, using his Baby Boom membership as a tired-assed "I know, I remember the Sixties" bully pulpit. Hearing the broadcast browbeatings made me ask any Liberal within earshot, "Did you people honestly think this guy was going to give us any meaningful policy reforms on medical marijuana or drug policy in general? I mean, f'cripesake, listen to the guy!"

The real, personal insult on top of injury came that summer, a couple of weeks after Jerry Garcia had died, when President I Didn't Inhale, in his daily radio blather, chose once again to beat us over the head with the teenaged smoking "issue", vomiting smarm and condescension over my radio at staggering rates, alarmingly making note of Garcia's death in the speech, finishing with words to the effect of "remember what happened to Jerry! Just Say No, Kids!"

Right then, in that very instant -- that very fleeting little instant, sitting next to the boombox on the beach, mouth poised over a fresh slab of pizza, gulls snatching fries off the blanket, airplanes towing advertising overhead -- I felt that I could've dropped what I was doing, gotten some clothes on, driven back to DC, and risked certain life imprisonment for assaulting El Presidente, just for the satisfaction of crashing the speech and smacking President I Didn't Inhale square across the chops, on the air, for using rhetoric so crassly exploitive that it set a perverse "Gold Standard" for crass exploitation, even for the Clinton Mob.

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Spot the Terrorist

I always hated listening to Democrats and Liberals bitching about government abuses in the name of "fighting terrorism" under George W. Chimp, as they always seem to forget that their own boy, Bubba Clinton, wanted to do just about the same things after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. Who were the first people he wanted to go after? Go on, take a guess. Not surprised? Neither was I, hearing that President Bill's number-one target under his prototype Patriot Act was the Left. The crackpot "militias" in Montana, Michigan and Idaho -- guys who had actual guns and openly professed a willingness to use violence against their opponents, guys like OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh -- apparently were no huge threat, until Clinton needed the threat of rightist violence to scare people into accepting his authoritarian "anti-terror" measures... and then, oh, yeah, the rightist militia cranks were the goddamn' Enemy Of The Month. Never mind that Mr. Crime Fighter, Mr. Put Several Hundred Thousand More Cops Onto The Streets, Mr. Three-Strikes, never appeared to lift a finger on the womens' clinic shootings and bombings. Nahh, Mr. Crime Bill's first instinct here is to go for the crowd pleaser, and jail the Left -- as per usual.



So, some years later, when I saw the Government's response to 9/11 -- basically, the Oklahoma City response dialed up to 11 -- I wasn't all that surprised (unlike all the pants-pissing Liberals around me), having seen it all before from a Democratic administration, that of the Clinton Mob... but just try and point that out to your average mindless partisan Liberal, and watch their goddamn' heads explode from cognitive dissonance overload.

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Life: What a Wonderful Choice

About the same time the anti-abortion fanatics were defacing Dave Letterman's program with their "Life: What A Wonderful Choice" issue ads, their foot soldiers in the field were busy bombing clinic and shooting at doctors -- and patients. A spate of clinic shootings and bombings around mid-1995ish went largely unremarked on by President Bill, as I recall, as Mr. Bill may have been busy trying to provoke Iraq and "reform" welfare (as we know it).



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Clinton's (insert failed domestic initiative here)

With President Bubba ensconced in the Oval Office, we saw a quickly-established pattern of failure in domestic policy initiatives followed by dick-wiggling and small-scale military intervention overseas -- or some bad-assed "criminal justice" action at home -- in an effort to appear "Presidential". This was especially noticeable in the areas of economic stimulus and the last laughable attempt at health care "reform".

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Reinventing Government no.2

Right there it was, smack dab on the front of the Washington Post, this Major, this UN military mission flack, spewing what had to be one of the most twisted, most spectacularly weird and otherworldly excuses ever made for something like spraying unarmed protesters in the streets with machine-gun fire from helicopters and President Bubba, from all reports at the time, being totally OK with that.



One of my friends in one of the crews we had out with this piece tells an interesting story: that night, while saturating Dupont Circle and vicinity with this one, my friend's crew is beseiged by five or six young College Democrat types whining, "It's not Bill's fault!"... sort of a precursor to Chris "Leave Britney Alone!" Crocker at least nine years pre-YouTube. Yeah, that's right; my pal and his crew were harassed by Liberals for putting up anti-war posters.

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Bush/Saddam '92

Well, here we were maybe a year and a half since the big "victory" parade we gave ourselves, and Daddy Bush's approval numbers were circling the drain two months before the "election". Not being able to figure out how a bar-code reader worked, right there on TV in front of everybody and their cat, certainly hadn't helped matters any. So, there was only one thing for Daddy Bush to do, and that's -- you guessed it, gin up another war scare with a pretext so flimsy that I can't even remember what it was. Get everybody's patriotic hard-ons working again, and they'll forget about the economy, and the looming North American Free Trade Agreement... and the fact that their President was such a sheltered preppie that he never even had the chance to see how a bar-code scanner at the frickin' supermarket works.



A few mornings after our crews had hit the streets with this one, a scattering of them across Capitol Hill started showing up with a note stuck over them addressed to the local GOP contingents -- that is, the Hill's resident population of beer-guzzling interns working for GOP representatives and Senators -- from the local Democratic contingent of young beer-guzzlers, apologizing in the most profusely craven and abject manner for the tasteless cartoon being displayed on Capitol Hill, mere weeks before a major Presidential "election", implying that Daddy Bush was instigating a war scare to rustle up some votes. Oh, p'shaw. A war scare to win an election? Oh, tut-tut, it is to laugh.

Anyway, said young Democratic partisan beer-guzzling youth ended by swearing all up and down that it was the work of a lone nut -- admittedly, half true -- and not that of the Democratic Party, which goes without saying as even back then, the Democratic Party was one of the most dickless, craven outfits ever to foul the modern American political stage and could never, ever in its wildest dreams, ever summon up the cajones to publicly suggest that a sitting GOP President -- a scheming, lying, conniving, former CIA Director, f'cripesake -- would actually whip up a phony war threat in order to win an election.

As we were to find out about a year later, President Bill could give us all a clinic in how that kind of behavior is done right.

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