wheelchairman
02-07-2005, 10:19 AM
Let's face it, the right wing can say far more than any left-wing politician can. I'm mostly speaking in terms of the Right-wing in the United States, it's odd but in Denmark people tend to remain civil about politics.
But in America, the right wing can get away with being flat-out insulting to just about whoever they want. What's worse is, they'll get rewarded by being guests on Fox News and CNN for the more offensive they can be.
If we saw Left-wing intellectuals saying the same type of absurd things, they'd more than likely lose their jobs and have a lynch mob after them. What the hell?
We discussed before on this message board how the Left Wing seems to be the favored ones or some such, but quite honestly, that may just be an anamoly one only sees on college campuses.
Here's the article that first got me thinking about this:
http://www.thenation.com
Beat The Devil --
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right
by Alexander Cockburn
When it comes to left and right, meaning the contrapuntal voices of
sanity and dementia, we're meant to keep two sets of books.
Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a professor at the
University of Colorado. Churchill is known as a fiery historian and
writer, often on Indian topics. Back in 2001, after 9/11, Churchill
wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back," making the simple point,
in a later summary, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in massive
death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of
that destruction is returned."
[...]
Now suppose Churchill had talked about Schwarzenegger's war on the poor
in California and called on someone to punch the governor in the face,
or have a jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what remains of
Schwarzenegger's steroid-shriveled genitals, or have Ann Coulter rub
her knickers in his face or get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his
job in a minute.
Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything, and in our
Coulter-culture they do, just so they can burnish their profiles and
get invited on Fox or CNN talk shows. Why else would Tony Blankley
call on the Washington Times editorial page for Seymour Hersh to be
imprisoned or shot for treason? But it's a PR game only right-wingers
are allowed to play.
[...}
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right
by Alexander Cockburn
When it comes to left and right, meaning the contrapuntal voices of
sanity and dementia, we're meant to keep two sets of books.
Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a professor at the
University of Colorado. Churchill is known as a fiery historian and
writer, often on Indian topics. Back in 2001, after 9/11, Churchill
wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back," making the simple point,
in a later summary, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in massive
death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of
that destruction is returned."
That piece was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting
Chickens. About those killed in the 9/11 attacks, Churchill wrote
recently, "It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target,
or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following
the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have
consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad,
this placement of an element of the American 'command and control
infrastructure' in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade
Center itself into a 'legitimate' target."
At this point, Churchill could have specifically mentioned the infamous
bombing of the Amariya civilian shelter in Baghdad in January 1991,
with 400 deaths, almost all women and children, all subsequently
identified and named by the Iraqis. To this day, the US government
says it was an OK target.
Churchill concludes, "If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these
'standards' when they are routinely applied to other people, they
should not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.
It should be emphasized that I applied the 'little Eichmanns'
characterization only to those [World Trade Center workers] described
as 'technicians.' Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children,
janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in
the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, [they] were simply part
of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my
point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when
applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else." I'm glad he puts
that gloss in about the targets, thus clarifying what did read to some
like a blanket stigmatization of the WTC inhabitants in his original
paper.
A storm has burst over Churchill's head, with protests by Governor
Pataki and others at his scheduled participation in a panel at Hamilton
College called "Limits of Dissent?" In Colorado, he's resigned his
chairmanship of the department of ethnic studies, and politicians,
fired up by the mad dogs on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
by Lord O'Reilly of the Loofah on Fox, are howling for his eviction
from his job (Loofah? See O'Reilly's lewd fantasies:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11272004.html).
Why should Churchill apologize for anything? Is it a crime to say that
chickens can come home to roost and that the way to protect American
lives from terrorism is to respect international law? I don't think he
should have resigned as department chair. Let them drag him out by
main force.
So much for the voice of sanity. Now for the dementia of the right.
The New Republic's Tom Frank (not the Frank, please note, who just
wrote a book about Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on
an antiwar panel in Washington.
Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force soldier and current
organizer for Military Families Speak Out, who duly moved Frank to
write that "what I needed was a Republican like Arnold [Schwarzenegger]
who would walk up to [Goff] and punch him in the face." Then upon
Frank's outraged ears fell the views of International Socialist Review
editorial board member Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had a
"right" to rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to confide to
his readers that "these weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy
Pelosi talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting
through the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an
immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for
interrogation." After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author
Arundhati Roy's defense of the right to resist, Frank mused, "Maybe
sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to
take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."
Now suppose Churchill had talked about Schwarzenegger's war on the poor
in California and called on someone to punch the governor in the face,
or have a jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what remain of
Schwarzenegger's steroid-shriveled genitals, or have Ann Coulter rub
her knickers in his face or get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his
job in a minute.
Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything, and in our
Coulter-culture they do, just so they can burnish their profiles and
get invited on Fox or CNN talk shows. Why else would Tony Blankley
call on the Washington Times editorial page for Seymour Hersh to be
imprisoned or shot for treason? But it's a PR game only right-wingers
are allowed to play.
After savaging Churchill, the mad dogs of the right turned their sights
on Shahid Alam, a professor of economics at Northeastern University in
Boston. Alam, author of the excellent Poverty From the Wealth of
Nations, wrote a column for the CounterPunch web site in December in
which he argued that the 9/11 attacks were an Islamist insurgency, the
attackers believing that they were fighting -- as the American
revolutionaries did, in the 1770s -- for their freedom and dignity
against foreign occupation/control of their lands. Second, he argued
that these attacks were the result of the political failure of Muslims
to resist their tyrannies locally. It was a mistake, Alam said, to
attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Now he has been labeled "an
un-American" professor by Fox News, and there's an Internet campaign to
have him stripped of his faculty position.
So write to all the appropriate names, defending Churchill and Alam;
and if you feel like an outing to execrate Frank and The New Republic,
there'll be a demonstration sponsored by the DC Anti-War Network, the
DC chapter of the ISO and others at 5 pm on Friday, February 11,
outside TNR's DC editorial offices at 1331 H Street NW.
But in America, the right wing can get away with being flat-out insulting to just about whoever they want. What's worse is, they'll get rewarded by being guests on Fox News and CNN for the more offensive they can be.
If we saw Left-wing intellectuals saying the same type of absurd things, they'd more than likely lose their jobs and have a lynch mob after them. What the hell?
We discussed before on this message board how the Left Wing seems to be the favored ones or some such, but quite honestly, that may just be an anamoly one only sees on college campuses.
Here's the article that first got me thinking about this:
http://www.thenation.com
Beat The Devil --
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right
by Alexander Cockburn
When it comes to left and right, meaning the contrapuntal voices of
sanity and dementia, we're meant to keep two sets of books.
Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a professor at the
University of Colorado. Churchill is known as a fiery historian and
writer, often on Indian topics. Back in 2001, after 9/11, Churchill
wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back," making the simple point,
in a later summary, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in massive
death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of
that destruction is returned."
[...]
Now suppose Churchill had talked about Schwarzenegger's war on the poor
in California and called on someone to punch the governor in the face,
or have a jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what remains of
Schwarzenegger's steroid-shriveled genitals, or have Ann Coulter rub
her knickers in his face or get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his
job in a minute.
Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything, and in our
Coulter-culture they do, just so they can burnish their profiles and
get invited on Fox or CNN talk shows. Why else would Tony Blankley
call on the Washington Times editorial page for Seymour Hersh to be
imprisoned or shot for treason? But it's a PR game only right-wingers
are allowed to play.
[...}
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs of the Right
by Alexander Cockburn
When it comes to left and right, meaning the contrapuntal voices of
sanity and dementia, we're meant to keep two sets of books.
Start with sanity, in the form of Ward Churchill, a professor at the
University of Colorado. Churchill is known as a fiery historian and
writer, often on Indian topics. Back in 2001, after 9/11, Churchill
wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back," making the simple point,
in a later summary, that "if U.S. foreign policy results in massive
death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of
that destruction is returned."
That piece was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting
Chickens. About those killed in the 9/11 attacks, Churchill wrote
recently, "It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target,
or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following
the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have
consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad,
this placement of an element of the American 'command and control
infrastructure' in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade
Center itself into a 'legitimate' target."
At this point, Churchill could have specifically mentioned the infamous
bombing of the Amariya civilian shelter in Baghdad in January 1991,
with 400 deaths, almost all women and children, all subsequently
identified and named by the Iraqis. To this day, the US government
says it was an OK target.
Churchill concludes, "If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these
'standards' when they are routinely applied to other people, they
should not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.
It should be emphasized that I applied the 'little Eichmanns'
characterization only to those [World Trade Center workers] described
as 'technicians.' Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children,
janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in
the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, [they] were simply part
of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my
point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when
applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else." I'm glad he puts
that gloss in about the targets, thus clarifying what did read to some
like a blanket stigmatization of the WTC inhabitants in his original
paper.
A storm has burst over Churchill's head, with protests by Governor
Pataki and others at his scheduled participation in a panel at Hamilton
College called "Limits of Dissent?" In Colorado, he's resigned his
chairmanship of the department of ethnic studies, and politicians,
fired up by the mad dogs on the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
by Lord O'Reilly of the Loofah on Fox, are howling for his eviction
from his job (Loofah? See O'Reilly's lewd fantasies:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11272004.html).
Why should Churchill apologize for anything? Is it a crime to say that
chickens can come home to roost and that the way to protect American
lives from terrorism is to respect international law? I don't think he
should have resigned as department chair. Let them drag him out by
main force.
So much for the voice of sanity. Now for the dementia of the right.
The New Republic's Tom Frank (not the Frank, please note, who just
wrote a book about Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on
an antiwar panel in Washington.
Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force soldier and current
organizer for Military Families Speak Out, who duly moved Frank to
write that "what I needed was a Republican like Arnold [Schwarzenegger]
who would walk up to [Goff] and punch him in the face." Then upon
Frank's outraged ears fell the views of International Socialist Review
editorial board member Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had a
"right" to rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to confide to
his readers that "these weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy
Pelosi talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting
through the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an
immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for
interrogation." After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author
Arundhati Roy's defense of the right to resist, Frank mused, "Maybe
sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to
take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."
Now suppose Churchill had talked about Schwarzenegger's war on the poor
in California and called on someone to punch the governor in the face,
or have a jovial Graner force Pataki to masturbate what remain of
Schwarzenegger's steroid-shriveled genitals, or have Ann Coulter rub
her knickers in his face or get blown up by a bomb? He'd be out of his
job in a minute.
Right-wing mad dogs are licensed to write anything, and in our
Coulter-culture they do, just so they can burnish their profiles and
get invited on Fox or CNN talk shows. Why else would Tony Blankley
call on the Washington Times editorial page for Seymour Hersh to be
imprisoned or shot for treason? But it's a PR game only right-wingers
are allowed to play.
After savaging Churchill, the mad dogs of the right turned their sights
on Shahid Alam, a professor of economics at Northeastern University in
Boston. Alam, author of the excellent Poverty From the Wealth of
Nations, wrote a column for the CounterPunch web site in December in
which he argued that the 9/11 attacks were an Islamist insurgency, the
attackers believing that they were fighting -- as the American
revolutionaries did, in the 1770s -- for their freedom and dignity
against foreign occupation/control of their lands. Second, he argued
that these attacks were the result of the political failure of Muslims
to resist their tyrannies locally. It was a mistake, Alam said, to
attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Now he has been labeled "an
un-American" professor by Fox News, and there's an Internet campaign to
have him stripped of his faculty position.
So write to all the appropriate names, defending Churchill and Alam;
and if you feel like an outing to execrate Frank and The New Republic,
there'll be a demonstration sponsored by the DC Anti-War Network, the
DC chapter of the ISO and others at 5 pm on Friday, February 11,
outside TNR's DC editorial offices at 1331 H Street NW.