Sunday Open Thread…

 

well… honestly all the threads are ”open”.  I am not too hot on OTvs OT (on topic/off topic)…. also a quick mention, I am slowly learning more, often by stumbling accident, about “rich text”… so now all links should open in a new window.

Madman has a piece up at LSF on the Democratic courtiers.  It is x posted, which I mention as the thread is interesting.

As former Republicans, now Democrats, take office, do we really expect them to support long-standing, actually liberal, office holders who have been fighting the Bush Administration (and often the Democratic Party leadership) while this country has run so hard to the right? REALLY? Isn’t it more likely that they will do what Reid, Schumer, Clinton and Emmanuel already do, which is to ape the Republicans

A diary on the same issues of Democratic “go alongs” [thanks Tuston] and I noticed a Sirota counterpoint effort. Or more accurately he takes on the Wapo article at issue in the first diary. A drving rain of barely sharpened butter knives.  Never changes, an election approaches and everybody drinks the “get with the program” malaria laden water.  I won’t be calling it Kool-Aid.

via TO, Norman Solomon interviews Tasini.  Courtiers and orgs that play along are mentioned.  Some hopeful, nice words tho for NY state DFA individuals.  BRAVO!!

  Guernica: Do you think that it’s practical for people around the country to build from scratch organizations that are pegged to specific electoral campaigns, or is there a need for new infrastructure that is kept running all the time so that you don’t have to start at square one when you’re challenging a pro-war incumbent?

    Jonathan Tasini: I think we definitely need the latter. I’ve been working with Progressive Democrats of America because I do think that we want to help leave something in place that grows. Because elections do focus the mind. Too often progressive-billed organizations want to sit around debating stuff and put out policy papers – which is not a bad thing – but in the abstract people get distracted, bored, and disconnected from that kind of organization. Elections do focus people’s minds. It gives something very concrete to do. But it has to be about something – not just the race, but about building something for the future. So there’s an absolute need to have a real progressive infrastructure, not the one that I think we have which is certainly not trying to challenge the actual system, which I believe at least I’m trying to stand for.

And Asia Times on Elliot Abrams.  WIsh I believed in bomb shelters.  How fast can we dig down 100 feet, with a hardened top?  Guess the Iranians will be testing that method. 

Abrams is a neo-conservative ideologue who as a government operative has turned ideology into strategy and policy. But are his instincts and vision for the Middle East in keeping with US national interests and Mideast realities? Richard John Neuhaus, a longtime Abrams colleague since the 1970s and fellow neo-conservative, told The New Yorker: “What runs through Elliott’s thinking is a deep, almost quasi-religious devotion to democracy. He thinks real democratic change can happen in the Middle East. It’s breathtaking, in a way.”

In his dual role as chief of the White House’s global democracy initiative and as NSC deputy adviser, Abrams is well positioned to ensure that his radical ideas about a US-led democracy crusade and about an Israel-centric Middle East determine the directions of US foreign policy – the former providing a moral cover for the latter.

I don’t think Opera Glasses are quite up to the coming horrors… We all know what “democracy” is a code word for, furtherance of US corporatist interests, at the tip of our missiles.

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UPDATE, 5 pm on the Pacific Ocean…

Juan Cole has an important post up… anytime there is access to the actual words spoken by a world leader we appear to be preparing to bomb… I call that important.

Kayhan reports that [Pers.] Ahmadinejad said, “Iran is not a threat to any country, and is not in any way a people of intimidation and aggression.”

He described Iranians as people of peace and civilization. He said that Iran does not even pose a threat to Israel, and wants to deal with the problem there peacefully, through elections:

“Weapons research is in no way part of Iran’s program. Even with regard to the Zionist regime, our path to a solution is elections.”

Ahmadinejad seems to be explaining what his calls for the Zionist regime to be effaced actually mean. He says he doesn’t want violence against Israel, despite its own acts of enmity against Middle Eastern neighbors. I interpret his statement on Saturday to be an endorsement of the one-state solution, in which a government would be elected that all Palestinians and all Israelis would jointly vote for. The result would be a government about half made up of Israeli ministers and half of Palestinian ones. Whatever one wanted to call such an arrangement, it wouldn’t exactly be a “Zionist state,” which would thus have been dissolved.

We know Israel would never, never, never on this earth, embrace the one state solution.  NO reason for Palestinians to believe there will ever be an equitable two state solution.  Or that is what I thought, finally, the day Sharon walked on Temple Mount.  I am convinced he is reported as restive in his coma as somehow he sensed the hideous bombing.  He’d have liked to go along.  Push all the way to Beirut.  And continue to sack the north.

The schlock Western pundits, journalists and politicians who keep maintaining that Ahmadinejad threatened “to wipe Israel off the map” when he never said those words will never, ever manage to choke out the words Ahmadinejad spoke on Saturday, much less repeat them as a tag line forever after.

And as JC says, believe or don’t believe him, but let’s have his words in our hand…