Poison* Pellets
Poison* Pellets
It is a rule of an erstwhile leaders political talk never to admit anything that makes them look weak, indecisive, disadvantaged. This leads them to automatically convert all occasions of possible any detracting allegation or incident into something favorable. "The best defense is a strong offense", some coaches contend. "Let untoward necessity be seized on as opportunity" is the maxim invoked by pastors of churches in America's mid West destroyed by the bloods of '08. It is a basic principle for riding out difficulties. However, when such optimistic practice hardens into a principled policy, and its reversal used to preempt truth, it converts the claim of justification into a front for denial. Since this defeats all attempts at correction in advance, it is poisonous to a system that depends on relating to reality through words.
A cynic might well say that this is, in fact,what politics is all about: making poisonous discourse per se. The following items from June 2008 have precipitated in accord with such judgment like hailstones from a West Texas thunderstorm.
***********
. 1. Lieberman ....<=> Obama, 6.03.'08
..
=>even as Obama is wooing AIPAC in NYC, trying to win Jewish votes
<= Lieberman is on the phone with McCain's camp, opposing
Obama's position on Israel.
He is confronted on the Senate floor about it by Obama the next day.
It poisons the system to have both:
A. Lieberman as the swing-vote 'to whom the Democrats are obliged to deal with in order to oppose Republicans;
B. His "independent" status is politically honored, even while conceded to be the MSM's non de guere for hard core right wing Connecticut Jews,
Having both means that in order for the system to allow Democrats opposing Republicans on any show-down issue, such as attacking Iran, for instance, Lieberman's "if it's good for the Jews" approval is required.
It is characteristic of the Poison Pellet that it conjoins the representation of that which defeats high purpose by equally high, but irrelevant accolades.
2. Tim Russert dies,
Friday June 13 in the am. Blood clot from a ruptured 'bad chloresterol' sac blocked vein caused a massive coronary, it was reported, though it sounded contrived. He had passed a stress test with flying colors only a week earlier; no history of.malfunction or heart disease. A sudden shock of some sort to his system delivered a shock to MSM communications, and through them to friends and neighbors in personal conversations (testifying). It would require many words of the finest, highest, most respected-to-revered sort to even begin to do justice to the way the man's passing was honored. Dedication to the profession of public information service, by one of its transparently dedicated servants built squarely into Buffalo, New York => Buffalo Bills, Lake Erie/Ontario => Niagara Falls America. His son, Luke, gave an an extensive interview testifying to a full, fun, open and comprehensively intellectual life with his father. Tim, as well known, had written a moving tribute to Luke's grandfather titled "Big Russ 'n Me.". In psychosemiotic* terms, this sudden, untimely death was the punctuation of a very large Region of Conservatism in Tokenspace. In doing what he did best, pouring out hid essence-blood, overcame negative, cynical leftists, reinstated (or valorizing) the mythos of The Dying Patriarchy.
It was as if the entire Fourth Estate had found exoneration. As a Group-process entity (token: "MSM*"), it could use it. Mercury has been madly criss-crossing Mars in retrograde forever, it feels like. John (why are they all named "John"?) McClellan had blown a big whistle with his "WHA' HAPPENED" disclosure the week before, followed by confirmation of the very point he made -- that the Bush administration had misrepresented the evidence for war in Iraq -- by a U.S. Senate report long in the making. Prior to that, the Pentagon's Propaganda Arm was exposed by the New York Times as manipulating public opinion to favor faux arguments, as in Hitler's Germany. One of the right wing's taunt's of McClellan was "If he thought he was being used to misrepresent things, why didn't he resign?", but that would have taken the courage of a German to speak against Die Fuhrer himself.
William Kristol's column on Monday's New York Times op-ed page, Big Tim, expresses unqualified admiration:
"Tim was now a big shot, and he rather enjoyed being a big shot. But he was just about the nicest big shot in Washington — decent and unpretentious, remarkably kind and genuinely thoughtful. In a city consumed by relationships and networking, Tim was known for his friendships and generosity. He became widely admired because his everyday behavior — with respect to staff, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers — was so routinely admirable."
Kristol also notes Russert had just returned with his family from a visit with Pope Benedictus XVI in the Vatican, following his son Luke's graduation from college. "Tim also lived to enjoy the college graduation last month of his son, Luke, of whom he was very proud. To celebrate the occasion, Tim, his wife, Maureen, and Luke visited Rome. They attended the Wednesday audience with Pope Benedict XVI, then had lunch with Cardinal John Patrick Foley, who had baptized Luke. As the lunch ended, Tim asked the cardinal to bless them."
Such a solid existential chunk of TokenSpace exists to be politicized. "Solid gold" rang up on Conservative Cash registers. Fox news' Hannity glares and blares "Leftist's hate Russert!" What makes him One of Them is his tokening of Sacrificial Son. The text messages issuing from his mouth in replays can now be looped, and re-looped, into the group-fantasy templates whenever a token of Son sacrifice would be useful.
3. Flag day 6.15 (Saturday)4. McCains POW record reported
Document 1. Point
Article: "In '74 Thesis, the Seeds of McCain's War Views" - David D. Kirkpatrick
NY Times 6.15.2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/us/politics/15pows.html?ref=politics
-Setting out an official story line on issues relating to McCain's Vietnam POW years.
Items
-Was tortured war hero, blaming war protestors for undercutting POW morale
Document 2. -Counterpoint
Article "From Glory Boy to PW Songbird"
Counterpunch
http://counterpunch.org/valentine06132008.html
Items
1. -was rescued by Vietnamese civilian. "I'll hate them forever"
On October 26 (1967), he was trying to level a power plant in a heavily populated area when a surface-to-air missile knocked a wing off his jet. Banged-up John McCain and what was left of plane splashed into Truc Bach Lake.
A compassionate Vietnamese civilian left his air raid shelter and swam out to McCain. McCain’s arm and leg were fractured and he was tangled up in his parachute underwater. He was drowning. The Vietnamese man saved McCain’s sorry ass, and yet McCain has nothing but hatred for “the gooks” who allegedly tortured him. As he told reporters on his campaign bus (The Straight Talk Express) in 2000, “I will hate them as long as I live.” (1)
2. Was he ever tortured?
McCain, in his carefully prepared statements, claims he was tortured while in solitary confinement (repeated in NYTimes article, and that is why he signed a confession saying, “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.” (3)
However, on March 25, 1999, two of his fellow POWs, Ted Guy and Gordon "Swede" Larson told the Phoenix New Times that, while they could not guarantee that McCain was not physically harmed, they doubted it.
As Larson said, "My only contention with the McCain deal is that while he was at The Plantation, to the best of my knowledge and Ted's knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way. No one was in that camp. It was the camp that people were released from."
Guy and Larson’s claims are given credence by McCain’s vehement opposition to releasing the government’s debriefings of Vietnam War POWs. McCain gave Michael Isikoff a peek at his debriefs, and Isikoff declared there was “nothing incriminating” in them, apart from the redactions. (4)
McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days, he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital."
3. How far did his collaboration with the enemy go?
One can only wonder when the concierge at the Hanoi Hilton started taking calls from Admiral McCain. Rather quickly, one surmises, for the Vietnamese soon took John Boy McCain to a hospital reserved for Vietnamese officers. Unlike his fellow POWs, he received care from a Soviet doctor.
“This poor stooge has propaganda value,” the Vietnamese realized. The Admiral’s bad boy was used to special treatment and his captors knew that. They were working him.
For his part, McCain acknowledges that the Vietnamese rushed him to a hospital, but denies he was given any "special medical treatment."
However….two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not “name rank and serial number, or kill me,” as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of US pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships. (5)
McCain was held for five and half years. Collaborating during the first two weeks might have been pragmatic, but he soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator for the next three years. Given the quality of the military information he allegedly shared, his situation isn’t as innocuous as the pragmatic French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy."
4. The Thing is .... (This makes him a poison pellet by the above definition -- compulsive reversal of what is reviled and despicable into the honorable and praiseworthy.)
"McCain learned his lesson well from the Vietnamese propagandists who used him for their psywar projects. But it’s not the collaboration that makes John McCain unfit for office; it’s the fact that he has managed to rewrite his collaboration into political capital. “He’s a war hero, respect him, or die.” (emph. added)"
5. - Inner Contradiction accounts for his infamous instability
"Underlying the Jekyll-Hyde reversals is McCain’s hidden past of collaboration. Somewhere in the unplumbed human part of John Sidney McCain III, he knows his POW experience contradicts the war hero image he projects. This essential dishonesty, this lie of the soul, is a sign of a larger lack of character....
McCain is not some principled leader, not a maverick cowboy fighting the powerful. He’s a sycophant. He believes in nothing but power and will do anything to attain it. He explodes in anger when challenged because, when a criticism hits to close to home, it goes to straight his deep-seeded shame."
5. CBS news admits for first time that Al Quaeda was
created by U.S. ant-Soviet policy in the 80's under Reagan.
6. The Nation online magazine hedges anti-Iran bomb message
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/329613
Article "Bombing Iran? It's Not So Bad, Really"
The Dreyfus Report
"Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, two Iran experts at the pro-Israeli thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, have published a primer for bombing Iran that looks at the costs and consequences. It's called "The Last Resort," but it might have been called "Making the Unthinkable Thinkable."
"hey make it look easy.
"ould Iranians "rally 'round the flag" if Iran is attacked? Maybe, maybe not, they say. "One cannot assume that a preventive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure would necessarily prompt a nationalist backlash.""
It is a rule of an erstwhile leaders political talk never to admit anything that makes them look weak, indecisive, disadvantaged. This leads them to automatically convert all occasions of possible any detracting allegation or incident into something favorable. "The best defense is a strong offense", some coaches contend. "Let untoward necessity be seized on as opportunity" is the maxim invoked by pastors of churches in America's mid West destroyed by the bloods of '08. It is a basic principle for riding out difficulties. However, when such optimistic practice hardens into a principled policy, and its reversal used to preempt truth, it converts the claim of justification into a front for denial. Since this defeats all attempts at correction in advance, it is poisonous to a system that depends on relating to reality through words.
A cynic might well say that this is, in fact,what politics is all about: making poisonous discourse per se. The following items from June 2008 have precipitated in accord with such judgment like hailstones from a West Texas thunderstorm.
***********
. 1. Lieberman ....<=> Obama, 6.03.'08
..
=>even as Obama is wooing AIPAC in NYC, trying to win Jewish votes
<= Lieberman is on the phone with McCain's camp, opposing
Obama's position on Israel.
He is confronted on the Senate floor about it by Obama the next day.
It poisons the system to have both:
A. Lieberman as the swing-vote 'to whom the Democrats are obliged to deal with in order to oppose Republicans;
B. His "independent" status is politically honored, even while conceded to be the MSM's non de guere for hard core right wing Connecticut Jews,
Having both means that in order for the system to allow Democrats opposing Republicans on any show-down issue, such as attacking Iran, for instance, Lieberman's "if it's good for the Jews" approval is required.
It is characteristic of the Poison Pellet that it conjoins the representation of that which defeats high purpose by equally high, but irrelevant accolades.
2. Tim Russert dies,
Friday June 13 in the am. Blood clot from a ruptured 'bad chloresterol' sac blocked vein caused a massive coronary, it was reported, though it sounded contrived. He had passed a stress test with flying colors only a week earlier; no history of.malfunction or heart disease. A sudden shock of some sort to his system delivered a shock to MSM communications, and through them to friends and neighbors in personal conversations (testifying). It would require many words of the finest, highest, most respected-to-revered sort to even begin to do justice to the way the man's passing was honored. Dedication to the profession of public information service, by one of its transparently dedicated servants built squarely into Buffalo, New York => Buffalo Bills, Lake Erie/Ontario => Niagara Falls America. His son, Luke, gave an an extensive interview testifying to a full, fun, open and comprehensively intellectual life with his father. Tim, as well known, had written a moving tribute to Luke's grandfather titled "Big Russ 'n Me.". In psychosemiotic* terms, this sudden, untimely death was the punctuation of a very large Region of Conservatism in Tokenspace. In doing what he did best, pouring out hid essence-blood, overcame negative, cynical leftists, reinstated (or valorizing) the mythos of The Dying Patriarchy.
It was as if the entire Fourth Estate had found exoneration. As a Group-process entity (token: "MSM*"), it could use it. Mercury has been madly criss-crossing Mars in retrograde forever, it feels like. John (why are they all named "John"?) McClellan had blown a big whistle with his "WHA' HAPPENED" disclosure the week before, followed by confirmation of the very point he made -- that the Bush administration had misrepresented the evidence for war in Iraq -- by a U.S. Senate report long in the making. Prior to that, the Pentagon's Propaganda Arm was exposed by the New York Times as manipulating public opinion to favor faux arguments, as in Hitler's Germany. One of the right wing's taunt's of McClellan was "If he thought he was being used to misrepresent things, why didn't he resign?", but that would have taken the courage of a German to speak against Die Fuhrer himself.
William Kristol's column on Monday's New York Times op-ed page, Big Tim, expresses unqualified admiration:
"Tim was now a big shot, and he rather enjoyed being a big shot. But he was just about the nicest big shot in Washington — decent and unpretentious, remarkably kind and genuinely thoughtful. In a city consumed by relationships and networking, Tim was known for his friendships and generosity. He became widely admired because his everyday behavior — with respect to staff, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers — was so routinely admirable."
Kristol also notes Russert had just returned with his family from a visit with Pope Benedictus XVI in the Vatican, following his son Luke's graduation from college. "Tim also lived to enjoy the college graduation last month of his son, Luke, of whom he was very proud. To celebrate the occasion, Tim, his wife, Maureen, and Luke visited Rome. They attended the Wednesday audience with Pope Benedict XVI, then had lunch with Cardinal John Patrick Foley, who had baptized Luke. As the lunch ended, Tim asked the cardinal to bless them."
Such a solid existential chunk of TokenSpace exists to be politicized. "Solid gold" rang up on Conservative Cash registers. Fox news' Hannity glares and blares "Leftist's hate Russert!" What makes him One of Them is his tokening of Sacrificial Son. The text messages issuing from his mouth in replays can now be looped, and re-looped, into the group-fantasy templates whenever a token of Son sacrifice would be useful.
3. Flag day 6.15 (Saturday)4. McCains POW record reported
Document 1. Point
Article: "In '74 Thesis, the Seeds of McCain's War Views" - David D. Kirkpatrick
NY Times 6.15.2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/us/politics/15pows.html?ref=politics
-Setting out an official story line on issues relating to McCain's Vietnam POW years.
Items
-Was tortured war hero, blaming war protestors for undercutting POW morale
Document 2. -Counterpoint
Article "From Glory Boy to PW Songbird"
Counterpunch
http://counterpunch.org/valentine06132008.html
Items
1. -was rescued by Vietnamese civilian. "I'll hate them forever"
On October 26 (1967), he was trying to level a power plant in a heavily populated area when a surface-to-air missile knocked a wing off his jet. Banged-up John McCain and what was left of plane splashed into Truc Bach Lake.
A compassionate Vietnamese civilian left his air raid shelter and swam out to McCain. McCain’s arm and leg were fractured and he was tangled up in his parachute underwater. He was drowning. The Vietnamese man saved McCain’s sorry ass, and yet McCain has nothing but hatred for “the gooks” who allegedly tortured him. As he told reporters on his campaign bus (The Straight Talk Express) in 2000, “I will hate them as long as I live.” (1)
2. Was he ever tortured?
McCain, in his carefully prepared statements, claims he was tortured while in solitary confinement (repeated in NYTimes article, and that is why he signed a confession saying, “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.” (3)
However, on March 25, 1999, two of his fellow POWs, Ted Guy and Gordon "Swede" Larson told the Phoenix New Times that, while they could not guarantee that McCain was not physically harmed, they doubted it.
As Larson said, "My only contention with the McCain deal is that while he was at The Plantation, to the best of my knowledge and Ted's knowledge, he was not physically abused in any way. No one was in that camp. It was the camp that people were released from."
Guy and Larson’s claims are given credence by McCain’s vehement opposition to releasing the government’s debriefings of Vietnam War POWs. McCain gave Michael Isikoff a peek at his debriefs, and Isikoff declared there was “nothing incriminating” in them, apart from the redactions. (4)
McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days, he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital."
3. How far did his collaboration with the enemy go?
One can only wonder when the concierge at the Hanoi Hilton started taking calls from Admiral McCain. Rather quickly, one surmises, for the Vietnamese soon took John Boy McCain to a hospital reserved for Vietnamese officers. Unlike his fellow POWs, he received care from a Soviet doctor.
“This poor stooge has propaganda value,” the Vietnamese realized. The Admiral’s bad boy was used to special treatment and his captors knew that. They were working him.
For his part, McCain acknowledges that the Vietnamese rushed him to a hospital, but denies he was given any "special medical treatment."
However….two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not “name rank and serial number, or kill me,” as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of US pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships. (5)
McCain was held for five and half years. Collaborating during the first two weeks might have been pragmatic, but he soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator for the next three years. Given the quality of the military information he allegedly shared, his situation isn’t as innocuous as the pragmatic French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy."
4. The Thing is .... (This makes him a poison pellet by the above definition -- compulsive reversal of what is reviled and despicable into the honorable and praiseworthy.)
"McCain learned his lesson well from the Vietnamese propagandists who used him for their psywar projects. But it’s not the collaboration that makes John McCain unfit for office; it’s the fact that he has managed to rewrite his collaboration into political capital. “He’s a war hero, respect him, or die.” (emph. added)"
5. - Inner Contradiction accounts for his infamous instability
"Underlying the Jekyll-Hyde reversals is McCain’s hidden past of collaboration. Somewhere in the unplumbed human part of John Sidney McCain III, he knows his POW experience contradicts the war hero image he projects. This essential dishonesty, this lie of the soul, is a sign of a larger lack of character....
McCain is not some principled leader, not a maverick cowboy fighting the powerful. He’s a sycophant. He believes in nothing but power and will do anything to attain it. He explodes in anger when challenged because, when a criticism hits to close to home, it goes to straight his deep-seeded shame."
5. CBS news admits for first time that Al Quaeda was
created by U.S. ant-Soviet policy in the 80's under Reagan.
6. The Nation online magazine hedges anti-Iran bomb message
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/329613
Article "Bombing Iran? It's Not So Bad, Really"
The Dreyfus Report
"Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, two Iran experts at the pro-Israeli thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, have published a primer for bombing Iran that looks at the costs and consequences. It's called "The Last Resort," but it might have been called "Making the Unthinkable Thinkable."
"hey make it look easy.
"ould Iranians "rally 'round the flag" if Iran is attacked? Maybe, maybe not, they say. "One cannot assume that a preventive strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure would necessarily prompt a nationalist backlash.""
posted by Sid Thomas | 5:17 AM
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