“If we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.â€
is
“If we leave before we have destroyed all opposition to Amerian / British policies and secured the position of our puppet administration, we will never get our hands on their oil and the 2003 invasion won’t pay off.”
Just in case you couldn’t read between the lines.
Australians all let us rejoice! For our Federal Government has been absolved of all responsibility for the AWB scandal! It turns out they knew nothing! Nothing at all! It’s all okay. Breathe easy Australia, your Government knew nothing. They didn’t read the secret memos and cables. Andrew Bolt seems to think this is a good thing. The AWB was secretly paying Saddam Hussein’s regime hundreds of millions of dollars of kickbacks, the Australian Federal Government was getting memos about it… but they didn’t read them, so it’s all okay.
The other news to almost get skipped over today is that AWB were told, a year before the Australian public, that we were going to support an upcoming US invasion of Iraq. This was a full year before Prime Minister Howard claims he even made the decision!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m no leftie. I’ve voted for the Libs in every election, State and Federal, since I was 18. But this all sucks. It’s time for a major shake-up. Unfortunately, the ALP are a bunch of nogger-heads. (That was “nogger”, Kramer.). The Dems are dead. The Greens? Who is left? Those right-wing Christian nutters? Crikey. Slim pickings on the voting front this weekend. Whatever happened to those nice Communist kids who were around in the 70s?
Beti the Excel Jedi (and the host of the TPN Health and Fitness podcast) has put together a nifty pps containing the results of the TPN Oct 2006 survey so far. I’ll leave it open for another few weeks but I think the results are already showing some interesting trends.
Some interesting things that popped out at me:
And if you haven’t completed the survey yet, you still have a chance by going here.
Chavez is making geopolitics interesting again. Just as it looks like the Fidelissimo is riding off into a khaki sunset, along comes Hilarious Hugo with his attacks on Bush. According to The Australian:
VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez has taken his anti-imperialist rhetoric to New York’s Harlem overnight and ridiculed US President George W. Bush as a puffed-up John Wayne wannabe. And a supportive crowd loved it.
Mr Chavez stunned delegates at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday by calling Mr Bush "the devil himself" and saying he left the smell of sulfur hanging in the chamber from his appearance the previous day.
He received an ovation at the United Nations, but nothing like the raucous and upbeat receptions later Wednesday at a free university and again overnight at a Baptist church in the predominantly black neighbourhood of Harlem.
Crowds soaked up his critique of the Iraq war, his interpretation of the history of US military interventions and his stories about visiting Cuban President Fidel Castro, who is recovering from surgery.
You have to love this guy. He doesn’t just stay home and slag Bush. He goes to New York muthafraking City and says it. This is a man of the people. He’s also doing almost as much for Noam Chomsky’s book sales as his appearance on G’Day World:
Mr Chavez began his speech by displaying a copy of American writer Noam Chomsky’s 2004 book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, and recommended it to UN delegates and US citizens.
By yesterday, the book had risen from backlist obscurity to the No. 3 bestseller at Amazon.com
And the reason why the Democrats won’t win another election? They denounced Chavez! They should be getting this guy tattooed on their freaking skulls. He’s doing what they (and the US media) seem too scared to do – criticize Bush in a way that gets people’s attention.
Grandma Funks by the way is a terrific café in Richmond (Melbourne) that I’m having breakfast in this morning and I’ve just discovered they have FREE WI-FI. I’ve been coming here for years because I love the vibe of the joint (and the quality of their latte) but the big free wifi sign on their wall makes it a clear winner for "best Melbourne cafe 2006".
I’ve never really been a huge U2 fan. I can take or leave most of their catalogue although I respect Bono’s ability to write a lyric. And I’ve always been suspicious about his whole "save the world" shtick, not because of him per se, just because I am suspicious of any celebrity attaching themselves to a cause.
But I saw him interviewed about his work on TV (was it 60 Minutes?) a few months ago and some of the things he said struck a chord with me.
So in the airport yesterday morning, on my way to QLD, I picked up a copy of Bono On Bono Michka Assayas’s 2005 book containing a series of revealing interviews with the guy over the course of the early 2000’s. I’m already about two-thirds of the way through it and it’s one of the most inspirational reads I’ve had in a long time. Almost every page is chock full of quotes that smack you upside the head. Whether he’s talking about U2’s approach to their music or his political activism, it’s just a series of brilliant ideas. Even though he is a very passionate Catholic, and almost every page relates his work in both fields to his spiritual beliefs, which I definitely don’t identify with, the guy has so much first-hand wisdom about success in art and politics that this book is a complete gem.
I feel like it’s almost a personal call to me to grow up in a bunch of ways. He tells this story that he said is responsible in many ways for his political direction at the moment which I’ll relate here, albeit in a paraphrased fashion. The story was related to Bono by Harry Belafonte. HB told of a time when Bobby Kennedy has become Attorney General of they United States and the entire civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, was depressed because Kennedy was a racist and was going to block all of the civil rights efforts. King was presiding over a meeting with a group of his followers and he said something like "do you mean to tell me that there isn’t one nice thing you can say about Bobby Kennedy?". "That’s what we’re trying to tell you, there is nothing good to say about him", his people told him. And so King broke up the meeting and said they were not going to discuss the matter again until someone could find something good to say about Kennedy. Eventually they learned that Kennedy was close to his bishop. So the entire civil rights movement ganged up on Kennedy’s bishop and got him to convince Kennedy that morally he had to support them. And he became their biggest supporter.
So I had always wondered how a guy like Bono manages to get close to guys like Bush and Blair, if he truly represents what he says he does, and they are the worst manifestations of modern Western imperialism. And this is his angle. He finds the one thing they can agree on and ignores EVERYTHING else. He says in the book, when he’s working with them on debt relief, he ignores the Iraq invasion. He ignores all of the other evils they preside over. Because he knows he can only fight one fight at a time. He finds the common ground and ignores everything else. I find that REALLY hard to do in my dealings with people.
I think I can learn a lot from this guy. I’m almost finished the book and I think I’ll re-read it again as soon as I’m done. This time I’ll take notes.
Guest host is David Green, host of TPN’s All American Show, who works for the US Dept of Defense and was stationed in Iraq from Jan 2005 – Jan 2006, so this is a show about IRAQ. I apologize for my audio quality on this show… 100 shows and I still forgot to switch on the right mic…. idiot.
Show notes:
As always, our Intro / Outro music courtesy of Melbourne band Spruiker.