Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish - Our Enemy is Our Ignorance

from Democracy Now, democracynow.org the war and peace report, 01/19/2011

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the end of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Dubbed "Operation Cast Lead," up to 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the 22-day assault between December 28th, 2008 and January 18th, 2009. More than half the Palestinians killed were civilians, over 300 of them children.

Today we spend the rest of the hour remembering the story of just one Palestinian family behind those numbers. It’s one of the better known tragedies of the attack, in part because it unfolded live on Israeli television.
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a well-known Palestinian gynecologist who has spent years working in one of Israeli’s main hospitals. He crossed into Israel daily through the Erez checkpoint from his home in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza.
During the assault, Dr. Abuelaish was interviewed regularly on Israeli television and radio. Not even Israeli journalists were able to report independently from within Gaza, making Dr. Abuelaish one of the few Hebrew-speaking witnesses who told of the Palestinian suffering under fire.
On January 16, 2009, a day and a half before the official end of the war, Dr. Abuelaish’s home was shelled twice by Israeli tanks. His three daughters were killed—21-year-old Bessan, 15-year-old Mayar, and 13-year-old Aya—as well as his niece Noor. Another daughter, Shatha, and his brother were also badly injured.
Moments after Dr. Abuelaish discovered the bodies of his children, he called his friend Shlomi Eldar, a correspondent at Israel’s Channel 10 News, for help. Eldar happened to be in the studio at the time. Democracy Now! producer Anjali Kamat narrates the exchange that was broadcast live on Israeli television.

ANJALI KAMAT: On January 16th, when Dr. Abuelaish called Shlomi Eldar of Israel’s Channel 10 TV News, Israeli tank shells had just struck his home. They killed his family, he says. “I think I’m a bit overwhelmed, too.”

He explains that Dr. Abuelaish is a physician at Tel Hashomer Hospital. He always feared his family would be hurt. His daughters were injured. “I want to save them, but they died on the spot, Shlomi. They were hit in the head.”

A visibly emotional Eldar explains that the doctor had unsuccessfully tried to get out for many days and was afraid to even raise a white flag. “A shell hit his home,” Eldar says. “And I have to tell you, I do not know how to hang up this phone. I will not hang up this phone call.”

The anchor calls on the Israeli Defense Forces to allow ambulances to get to the doctor’s family. Shlomi Eldar then excused himself from the show, took off his earpiece and rushed off the set to get help to Dr. Abuelaish.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the live broadcast of Israel’s Channel 10 News on January 16, 2009. No ambulances ever reached Dr. Abuelaish’s home, which was surrounded by Israeli tanks. He and the surviving members of his family walked a quarter of a mile carrying the dead and wounded through the streets. They eventually found an ambulance to take them to the closest hospital. Standing outside, a grieving Dr. Abuelaish kissed the forehead and hands of his children as they were strapped into stretchers. He addressed a news camera at the scene in Hebrew.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: [translated] What happened? Everybody in Israel knows. They know that I was talking on television and on the radio, that we were at home, that there are innocent people, 25 people, here. Suddenly, today, when there was a hope for a ceasefire, in the last day that I was talking with my children, suddenly they bombed us. That’s how you treat a doctor who takes care of Israeli patients? Is this what’s done? Is this peace?

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli TV correspondent Shlomi Eldar arranged for the evacuation of Dr. Abuelaish and his only surviving daughter, 16-year-old Shatha, who was badly wounded. The next day, Dr. Abuelaish spoke at a news conference at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Angry Israelis present at the hospital heckled him while he spoke.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: I want them to know that I am from Jabalia camp. I am Palestinian. And we can live together. And no difference between Palestinian and Israelis. Within the borders of the hospital, all are equal. Why not to be outside equal? Why not? My children—my children were involved in peace. In peace, they participated in many peace camps everywhere. They were weaponed when they killed them. They were weaponed not by arms; they were weaponed by love.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish speaking two years ago. Of his six daughters, three were killed. One was critically injured, lost her eye. His tragic story has come to symbolize Palestinian suffering during Israel’s assault on Gaza. His story made headlines around the world, and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Abuelaish has just published a book. It’s called I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity.
He flew into New York for an interview in our studio from Toronto, Canada, where he has been practicing and teaching. I began by playing for him the tape of the day his voice was broadcast on the Israeli airwaves, and I asked him to remember that day for us.

AMY GOODMAN: It is two years later. As you listen to this, it brings us all back. It’s painful to even play it for you. Tell us about this day two years ago.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: It’s living with me. It’s not two years. It’s every moment. I see it every day. I feel it. I see my daughters speaking with me every day, to talk to me. They are part of me. And that’s what can I say, as long as I am living. As long as I am breathing, they are with me. I will never forget—the opposite. All of the time, I feel, I am determined, those girls, as other girls of the world, that I believe in their potential—they are asking me, "Do more. Bring us justice, and keep our holy souls holy, and fight with wisdom and good words."

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Abuelaish, tell us what happened that day, on January 16th.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: January 16th, we were expecting the ceasefire, day before or after. And a human life doesn’t need negotiation. It’s an urgency when it comes to human life. To save, we need to act immediate. And I was supposed to be interviewed live by Oshrat Kotler about women’s health and the situation in Gaza. And we were planning our future. Where can I be with my children? As I was fed up, and it’s time to be with my children, not to travel. I want to see them every day. And that’s the message, what I want to tell everyone. Don’t say "tomorrow." If you can do it today, do it today. Spend as much as you can of your time with your beloved ones. You don’t know if tomorrow is coming or not. We were planning to go to Toronto. And then, after I left their room, the first shell came.

AMY GOODMAN: What time was it?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Four-thirty p.m. It’s the same time of the time when their mother passed away, afternoon. Just four months’ period, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: She had died of leukemia?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Of leukemia. I didn’t imagine it. I thought the shelling from the surrounding, because we were surrounded by shelling everywhere. I didn’t think that it’s my house. But when I saw the smoke, the dusk, the chaos within the house, I went inside the room. Where is Bessan? To see them, I can’t recognize Bessan, Mayar, Aya, Noor. Just to see Shatha in front of me with her eye on her cheek and her fingers. Mayar, I want to see her. Where is her head? Bessan, decapitated, blood, parts. I started to think of saving Shatha, not to see her blind.

AMY GOODMAN: Shatha was how old?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: She was 17. She was in her high school. And at that moment, I decided either to save her eye, or I am ready to accept her to be with her sisters, but not to be disabled. That’s why I called my friend Shlomi. And it was God’s bless that he was at the studio with Oshrat Kotler, and it was broadcasted live to show the craziness of humanity in the 21st century.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip of when my colleague, Anjali Kamat, and Jacquie Soohen came to Gaza, and you gave them a tour of your house. This is Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: We are standing in the scene of the tragedy, in the place where four lovely girls were sitting, building their dreams and their hopes, and in seconds, these dreams were killed. These flowers were dead. Three of my daughters and one niece were killed in one second on the 16th of January at a quarter to five p.m. Just a few seconds, I left them, and they stayed in the room—two daughters here, one daughter here, one daughter here, and my niece with them.

The first shell came from the tank space, which is there, came to shell two daughters who were sitting here on their chairs. And when I heard this shell, I came inside the room to find, to look. I can’t recognize my daughters. Their heads were cut off their bodies. They were separated from their bodies, and I can’t recognize whose body is this. They were drowning in a pool of blood. This is the pool of blood. Even look here. This is their brain. These are parts of their brain. Aya was lying on the ground. Shatha was injured, and her eye is coming out. Her fingers were torn, just attached by a tag of skin. I felt disloved, out of space, screaming, “What can I do?”

They were not satisfied by the first shell and to leave my eldest daughter. But the second shell soon came to kill Aya, to injure my niece, who came down from the third floor, and to kill my eldest daughter Bessan, who was in the kitchen and came at that moment, screaming and jumping, “Dad! Dad! Aya is injured!”

The second shell, it penetrated the wall between this room to enter the other room. Look. This is the room with the weapons, where this room was fully equipped with weapons. These are the weapons which were in this room. These are the weapons. These are the weapons: the books and their clothes. These were the science handouts. There, you see, these are her handouts for the courses that she studies, which is stained with her blood. It’s mixed with her blood. These are the books. These are the weapons that I equipped my daughters with: with education, with knowledge, with dreams, with hopes, with loves.

I am a gynecologist who practiced most of my time in Israel. I was trained in Israel. And I devoted my life and my work for the benefit of humanity and well-being, to serve patients, not as someone else that you are delivering or helping choose. I am dealing with patients and human beings. We treat patients equally, with respect, with dignity, with privacy. Politicians and leaders should learn from doctors these values and these norms and to adopt them.

This invasion, from the beginning, I said it’s useless. It’s futile. No one is winning. The innocent civilians, the Gazans, civilians, paid the price of this invasion, no one else.

Military ways proved its failure. We should look for other ways to give each other its rights. We don’t want to speak about peace. Peace is—you know, this word lost its meaning. We should find something else: respect, equality, justice and partnership. That’s what we should look for.

AMY GOODMAN: You have been watching Izzeldin Abuelaish or listening to Dr. Abuelaish, the Palestinian doctor who lost three daughters and a niece on January 16th, 2009: Bessam, 21; Mayar, 15; Aya, 14; Noor was 17, his niece. On this day, two years later, describe what was the Israeli government’s response to your children’s killing. You are well known throughout Israel, a Palestinian doctor who works in Israel. You were updating people on the siege almost every day on television.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: You know, it took one month to admit their responsibility and to say, "We shelled the house."

AMY GOODMAN: As opposed to...?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: As opposed to be done immediate, to recognize that and to admit, to take responsibility from the first moment, because they shelled it. It’s not after one month. It’s the first day.

AMY GOODMAN: Right. What did they say had happened?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: They tried to justify. We don’t need to justify. It’s better—we are human being, and it’s a human to err. But a mistake is a mistake if we didn’t learn from it, not to repeat those mistakes. They started to justify, to say there were snipers, the first day. The second scenario, there were militants. The third day, there were firing. And the fourth scenario, that they took shrapnels from my niece’s wound, and it was coming from Qassam rockets. Why? Please.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s what they said.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But it wasn’t true.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Of course. Of course. And it took one month to investigate it. Doesn’t need investigation for one month. It has been shelled, 16th, and it’s known who shelled it. Please. "We made a mistake. We did it. And we are ready for responsibility." This is the easiest way, to have the moral courage to admit responsibility. It will help all to move forward, not to deny.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about your daughters. Bessam, 21?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Bessam, I see her in front of me now, with her smile, with her potential, with her love, with her humanity. She was supposed to get her BA a few months later. She was the mother, the sister, the friend, the good person to everyone after I lost my wife. She’s the one who encouraged me to go and to resume my work. She took responsibility. Bessam, the wise person—she doesn’t speak much; she listens. But when she speaks, she says wisdoms. She said, "I learned the academic exams are nothing. It’s the life exams we face in life." She said, "Everything starts small, then becomes big. Everything starts in one place, then goes in different directions." When I sent her to Creativity for Peace camp in New Mexico—

AMY GOODMAN: In Santa Fe.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: In Santa Fe. She said, "There, I realized how similar are we." Can we learn from our children?

AMY GOODMAN: You mean there, Israeli and Palestinian girls.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Christian, Druze. They learned that they are similar. And that’s what we need to learn from our children, and to work for them.

AMY GOODMAN: And tell me about Mayar, who was 15.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Mayar, the smartest, the brightest girl. After once when I visited the school, she was number one in math in the Gaza Strip. If they have a math problem in their class, the students look at each other. They can’t—they say, "If Mayar was here, she is the one who is for it." She was open-minded. She was the chairman of the students’ parliament, to represent them, to defend those girls. Aya was 14, who had planned to be a journalist, to be the voice of the voiceless, to think of others, to defend others, and to work for them. They were fighters for humanity, for peace. They were connected with others to feel the suffering of other children. And that’s what we need.

AMY GOODMAN: And Noor, your niece?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Noor, she was 17, 17 years old. She came for her fate. She was at the camp with her mother. But she said she can’t tolerate the life there—in a public space, 50, 60 people in one room, with shortage of everything. It’s intimidation, humiliation. She said, "I want to go there to be with my dad." So she came and stayed with us. Just two days before, she came.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, your book, Dr. Abuelaish, is called I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity. You have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Your response has been remarkable. The response of Israelis to what happened to you? I mean, your cries for help were heard around the world in that conversation on Israel Channel 10—not conversation, your wailing for your family.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Those daughters, when I want to bring them justice, I must be healthy. And hate, as every one of us knows, it’s a poison. We don’t want to be injected with it. If you want to achieve a noble goal and cause, you must be healthy mentally, spiritually and physically, to defend your goals.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s three daughters and niece were killed in his home in Gaza when it was shelled by Israeli tanks on January 16, 2009, during the 22-day Israeli assault on Gaza. We’ll come back to our conversation with the Palestinian gynecologist in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with the Palestinian doctor, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish.

AMY GOODMAN: You have sued the Israeli government. Your statute of limitations is out on January 16th, so you have just sued. What are you demanding?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Because they didn’t leave any alternative for me within two years. I was using and used every possible peaceful way, with Israeli ministers, Knesset members. Please, we need the truth and, to bring those daughters justice, apology, responsibility and the consequences of that. That’s what we want. It will be a new opportunity, a window of opportunity, for both nations, for the leadership to speak about the truth and to have the moral courage to move forward, not to deny. We need to take responsibility. So I asked for that, and I told, human life can’t be valued by money, and it’s time to give, not to take. Any compensation that comes, it will go for a foundation that I established, Daughters for Life, for health and education, for girls and women in the Middle East, including Israel. It’s time for women to take the lead and to practice their full potential and their role. That’s what I am determined. I want to see the plans of my daughters fulfilled by other girls.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 1,400 Palestinians died in the Israeli siege of Gaza. Talk about what happened during that time.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: During that time, it was a crazy moment. Three weeks, no one knows about what happened. And the world was closing the eyes about what is happening in Gaza. Even for me in Gaza, we don’t know what is happening outside my house. Just with a radio, I used to listen. And Gazans became numbers. Human beings are not numbers. They have faces. They have names. They have hopes. They have dreams. Can we get from there to consider a human being as a human being, not numbers? And that’s what we need. Tell what happened, 16th of January, to open the eyes of the Israeli public, the international community, the Palestinians, that we are killing innocent civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: How does it feel for you to come into the United States, Dr. Abuelaish, at this time? Then, it was the Israeli assault on Gaza. Your children were killed by a military that is armed and financed by the United States.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: It’s time to face each other and to speak. And it’s important to transmit the message. The Americans, the American Jews, Arabs, Muslims everywhere, we need to communicate and to speak. Words are stronger than bullets. And without communicating, without acting and meeting together, who’s going to solve? And I learned one thing: our enemy is our ignorance. We don’t know. We don’t know. And to know, we need to communicate and to explain face to face.

AMY GOODMAN: The story of your life is remarkable, and you tell it very graphically in your book I Shall Not Hate. If you could just share with us where you were born, tell us in a nutshell, which I think is very much the story of the Palestinian people.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: I was born, raised and lived as a Palestinian refugee in the Jabalia refugee camp, deprived of what is called a childhood. I never tasted the childhood as millions in this world, which is man-made suffering. And this is the hope. It’s man-made. So we, as a human being, we can challenge those man-made challenges and not to accept it and to change it. I succeeded.

AMY GOODMAN: Your father came from...?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: From a village called Houg, where Sharon’s farm is established. It’s close to Sderot.

AMY GOODMAN: So, your land, your father, what he has a deed for, is actually known today as the Sharon farm, Ariel Sharon’s farm?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: The prime minister.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: The Abuelaish land. And in a sudden, to be a refugee, own nothing. But our parents, especially the Palestinian mother—she is the hero. From nothing, they pushed, encouraged the children. We lost everything, but we didn’t lose hope in the Palestinian children to be focused and to be educated.

AMY GOODMAN: You say your family left Houg in 1948—

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN:—your father afraid there would be an attack.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: They were exiled to leave, and they were forced to leave. And they were thinking it may take just a few days, and they will go back—these days, months, years, and now six decades. And even in the place where are we now, we are not safe, or we are not free.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you grew up in the Jabalia refugee camp completely destitute.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your only escape ultimately was your education, what your parents pushed you to do. And you became a doctor.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: The Jabalia refugee camp, it’s the place which is close to my heart. I feel the good and the bad times in the Jabalia refugee camp. It’s the memory, it’s the roots, but encouraged me of not accepting this life, this suffering, and that we can change it. I succeeded. From nothing. From nothing. And that’s the message I want others—please, stand up, have hope, have faith, and act.

AMY GOODMAN: How many of you lived in one room?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: We were—I remember, in the early days, the room, three by three meters, to have six, seven—one by one to be covered. In winter, we are attached together. That’s the life in the camp. We have no life. But we were determined, just breathing.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe what it’s like to go through a checkpoint. I mean, for you as an adult, as a recognized doctor, renowned through Israel as a gynecologist working in Israeli hospitals, describe what it was like for you to go through checkpoints. And where were these checkpoints?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: These checkpoints, someone, when he sees it from far, he doesn’t imagine it, especially when I leave from Gaza to Israel, to pass through how many checkpoints. It’s intimidation.

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Just from the first gate to the last gate, it’s about 20 gates you pass through.

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty checkpoints.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Twenty gates. From one to the other, within one checkpoint, this is what is called Erez, a checkpoint. And you need to pass through that, electronized, with computerized cameras. You don’t see just doors open, and someone is telling by voice to cross or not. It took me—sometimes, if you are lucky, it may take one hour, two hours. And sometimes ’til the permits and the coordination is ready, it may take me, from Gaza to Tel Aviv, which is 45 minutes, it may take between two hours to four or five hours.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’d even have the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint asking you for medical advice about birth control and other issues.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: They know me.

AMY GOODMAN: They knew you, and you—still it could take hours.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: And they know me, and I know them. I understand the security needs, but can we make human life easy, too? Not to intimidate, not to humiliate. That’s what we need. A checkpoint security, I understand it. But it is not in that way, not in that way. When I came from Jordan to my wife, who was gasping—she was dying. I went to see her before she dies.

AMY GOODMAN: She died of leukemia?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: She died of leukemia. Took me more than 14 hours from Allenby Bridge to Sheba Medical Center.

AMY GOODMAN: And how far is it?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: It’s one-hour drive. And to move from one checkpoint to the other, we need to put ourselves in the shoe of the other. What are we doing? And why are we doing that? And is it the right way? Or can we change course?

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Abuelaish, newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that Israeli officials openly told U.S. diplomats the aim of the blockade of Gaza was to keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse. According to a November 2008 cable, Israel wanted Gaza’s economy to be, quote, "functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis." Can you describe the conditions?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Gaza is collapsing. There is no life in Gaza. And that’s—Gaza is stigmatized by everything you like for yourself, but for Gazans, say no—no life, no hope, no work, no employment. And some people—it’s shame to say, we open the borders for food. Human life is not dependent on food. They are hungry for food, for employment, for freedom, for education, to taste their life and to feel that they are free in their life. That’s what we need. What do you think of a person living in a palace, and you provide him with the best types of foods. He doesn’t need the food. He needs the freedom. The most holy thing in the universe is a human being under freedom, freedom of poverty and occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think has to happen right now?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: What to happen, that—to admit the rights of the Palestinians and to take active steps, and that there will never be a just and good peace just for one. Must be good and just for all, for Palestinians and Israelis. And I think it’s time for the Israeli government and the Israeli people to stand up. We need to translate the resolutions into actions. There is a Palestinian nation and an Israeli nation, and they have to live sharing the land with respect, and that the dignity of the Palestinians equals the dignity of the Israelis. And the freedom of the Palestinians is linked to the freedom of the Israelis from their fears. The security of the Israelis and safety is linked to the safety and the security of the Palestinians, not dependent on the security and suffering of the Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: And here in the United States you are. Your message to the American people?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: We need them to mediate and to take action, to say—

AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama?

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH: Yes, and that’s what do we need. If we care about each other, even about your friends, if they are making mistakes, tell them, "This is not good for your interest." We need to open their eyes. We may be hard and harsh with our beloved ones, from good will. And that’s what I think. We need to open the eyes of the Israeli public, and even if the Palestinian leadership is not committed to say to them, "This is not for your interest." But also, the road map is the humanity between us, not the territory. You can’t have everything and the other side have nothing. Peace has a price, to be by choice or from the heart. You can, by military ways, succeed for short term; you can force others to accept. But it is not sustainable, and we must look and to find the ways that are sustainable and to protect the future of our children and to put our children as a priority.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. Three of his daughters and his niece were killed on January 16, 2009, when his home in Gaza was shelled by Israeli tanks. He has just written a book about his life; it’s called I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity. He is currently teaching and practicing in Toronto, Canada, with his surviving children.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam

this is an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam, a speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York:

[John F. Kennedy] said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.

William Hartung - Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex Part I

from Democracy Now. democracynow.org the war and peace report 1/20/2011

JUAN GONZALEZ: This week marks the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech to the nation. It was January 17th, 1961.

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: My fellow Americans, this evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three-and-a-half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Eisenhower’s farewell address on January 17th, 1961, excerpt from the documentary Why We Fight. Fifty years after that speech, many argue that the military-industrial complex is stronger than ever.

AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest traces the rise of the military-industrial complex through the story of the nation’s largest weapons contractor, Lockheed Martin. As a full-service weapons contractor, Lockheed Martin receives over $29 billion per year in Pentagon contracts, or roughly one out of every 10 dollars the Defense Department doles out to private contractors.
William Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation—his book is called Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex—joining us here in our studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: The significance of this massive weapons manufacturer in the United States and why you chose to write a book on it?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think they’re the largest, they’re the most corrupt, and they have the most political influence. So, for example, they make cluster bombs, which are used in the Middle East. They design nuclear weapons. They make fighter planes. They make combat ships. So they have the full gamut of weapons. But they also have branched out. They work for the CIA, the FBI. They work for the IRS, the Census Bureau. So they’ve become this full-service government contractor, which really is involved in every aspects of our lives. Every time we interact with the government, Lockheed Martin is likely to be there.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I was struck, some of the ones you talked about. The Census Bureau—what does the Lockheed Martin do for the Census Bureau?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they help count the census. They have these people in little Lockheed Martin, you know, polo shirts who are—they have truckloads of data that they’re processing. They also helped design it. So they’re really in the middle of it. They’re running it, in some sense.

AMY GOODMAN: How did Lockheed get so big?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the mergers of the '90s were one of the big things. I mean, World War II was the first. Then, when Norm Augustine engineered the Lockheed-Martin Marietta merger, that's when they really became by far the biggest company, and they didn’t have a real competitor at that point.

AMY GOODMAN: Lockheed and Martin Marietta.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Became one company, yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: They also branched out, as you note, into services to local governments. For instance, here in New York City, Lockheed Martin had the contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to basically develop a surveillance system in the subways.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And so, they increasingly got into this intelligence gathering or in information systems for local governments. Could you talk about how that developed?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they bought a company that had been involved in a New York City parking violations scandal. And then they branched out into social services in Florida. They tried to get the welfare contract in Texas. As you said, they worked on the New York City subway surveillance system, which was a disaster. They were fired after a $212 million contract. So they went into that for about five years, and they had contracts in 44 states. But they just couldn’t get the job done. Finally, they were fired from so many places, they decided to get out of the business.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of President Eisenhower’s speech, what he meant by the "military-industrial complex" 50 years ago.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, he was concerned not just about the size, not just about the budget, but that it was going to undermine our democracy. And I think that’s what Lockheed Martin is about in many ways. I mean, they were involved with the Pentagon in doing surveillance on antiwar protesters. They build biometric identification systems for the FBI. The fact that they’re in the IRS makes me kind of nervous. It’s sort of creepy in a way. They’ve got so many kinds of data about us. I’m not sure, you know, a military contractor should really be in that position.

JUAN GONZALEZ: They were the firm that was involved in Total Information Awareness?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: The Counterintelligence Field Activity, which was closely related to that.

AMY GOODMAN: You say that Lockheed Martin makes foreign policy, has its own foreign policy.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: In many ways. I mean, not only were they involved in lobbying for the war in Iraq, but they have people in Liberia helping rebuild the justice system. They’re building refugee camps. They helped run elections in the Ukraine. They helped write the Afghan constitution. So, all kinds of things that you would think of as sort of the soft side of foreign policy, they’re making money from.

AMY GOODMAN: And its role in elections?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they recruit the monitors who monitor the elections in places like Bosnia.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean here.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Oh.

AMY GOODMAN: The money that they pour into elections at home.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Oh, they spend about $12 million per election cycle, either on lobbying or on candidates. And they have people like Buck McKeon, who runs the Armed Services Committee now. They’re the biggest donor to him. They’re the biggest donor to Daniel Inouye, who runs the Appropriations Committee in the Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they get money from the Pentagon, from the U.S. taxpayer, and then decide who they want to elect.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Essentially, they recycle our money into the political system, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to have to leave it there. It’s a remarkable book. Bill Hartung, director of Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. His latest book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.


William Hartung - Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex  Part II

William Hartung - Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex Part II

from Democracy Now. democracynow.org the war and peace report 1/20/2011

This week marks the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech to the nation, in which he warned against the rise of a "military-industrial complex." We speak with William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, who traces the rise of the military-industrial complex through the story of the nation’s largest weapons contractor, Lockheed Martin. Hartung’s new book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is William Hartung. He’s the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, and he’s written a new book called Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex—very relevant as this is the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous address talking about the military-industrial complex.
Talk about, Bill Hartung, the revolving door between Lockheed—and explain again why Lockheed is so important—and the government.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the Bush years were a bonanza for the Lockheed Martin Corporation. They had a guy who went to run military space for the Air Force. They had the deputy national security adviser. They had the guy running the nuclear weapons complex. They had the guy who helped run the Homeland Security Department’s procurement program. All coming from Lockheed Martin.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Oh, that’s what I was going to say. When you say they "had" them, they all came from Lockheed Martin.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: They came from the company, so they were on the inside able to help them, yeah.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you say that they’re perhaps the most corrupt of the military-industrial companies, what do you mean?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, starting with the cost overruns in the ’60s, they had record cost overruns on their C-5 aircraft. Then they were involved in the bribery scandals of the ’70s, where they bribed, you know, prime ministers in Japan and Italy. They bribed people in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. So basically they were at the cutting edge of many of these, you know, corruption scandals. They helped get government subsidies for their mergers in the ’90s, in a conflict-of-interest deal that involved William Perry.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, were they ever sanctioned for any of this?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the bribery scandals, a few of their executives had to step down. But no criminal charges were ever brought.
AMY GOODMAN: What was the C-5A scandal?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they were supposed an aircraft that could go anywhere, basically what they called a flying military base. And it was going to be, post-Vietnam, a way to intervene more quickly. But what happened was they ran a $2 billion cost overrun, and the thing didn’t work. The Air Force tried to cover it up. And Ernest Fitzgerald, the whistleblower, actually lost his job over exposing this. And only when William Proxmire went to his defense was he restored to his job in the Pentagon.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, why does the U.S. government pay for their scandal?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I mean, basically, there just wasn’t the backbone, you know, among the presidents of those eras to really say, "Look, you know, you’re the one who screwed up here; you should be paying the cost of it." But, you know, because of Proxmire, they did claw back a few hundred million of that $2 billion, but basically the company got off scot-free in many respects.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s a lot of discussion now about President Reagan. His son Ron Reagan is saying in his new book that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s through—well, through the majority of his administrations. But you have a whole chapter on—well, you call it "Reagan to the Rescue."
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, Reagan doubled Lockheed Martin’s contracts in the first three years he was in office. So they were a little bit behind the curve in the Carter years, when spending dropped. And so, this was the era of the $600 toilet seat, the $7,000 coffee maker, rigged Star Wars tests. All these were done by Lockheed Martin during the Reagan era. So, they got a huge boost in their contracts at the same time that they were bilking the government on all kinds of activities, as well as helping to rig the Star Wars program, which helped Reagan push it along at a time when people were saying, you know, "How is this thing ever going to work?"
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how—what kind of influence or largesse did they get from the Clinton administration, and now from the Obama administration?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, Clinton years were good years for them, because that was the merger period. And they got a couple hundred million dollars to help them merge, to close down factories, even to pay executive bonuses for guys like Norm Augustine. We helped pay his golden parachute when he switched from Martin Marietta to Lockheed Martin. You know, so, basically—
AMY GOODMAN: How much?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, he got $8 million, of which we paid $3 million directly and the rest indirectly, because that’s—we’re the only place they get money from, is the taxpayers.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the Obama administration?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, under Obama, you know, so far, so good. I mean, he hasn’t cut military spending. He did stop their F-22 combat aircraft, but he cut $4 billion from that and he added $4 billion to their F-35. So basically that was a wash, even though it was sort of portrayed as getting tough with Lockheed Martin.
AMY GOODMAN: What is Lockheed Martin’s role in interrogating prisoners at U.S. facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they bought a couple companies involved in that: Sytex Corporation, Affiliated Computer Services. So they were recruiting interrogators and translators for both Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, some of the other prison camps in Iraq. They now have said that they’re out of that business, but there’s no way to document that, because they still own those companies.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And do they have much in the way of international sales? I mean, there’s the big deal now with China, but in other parts of the world? Or is basically the United States, the government, their mainstay?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, there’s a huge upsurge in weapons exports during the Obama years—up to $30 billion a year now, from about $10 billion at the beginning of the Bush years. And Lockheed Martin is right in the middle of that. They sell F-16 fighters. Their new F-35 is going to be built in 18 different countries, so a lot of the production will be done overseas, which is not normally the case in a fighter plane, but it’s been built in to the way this program has been designed.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the production is overseas, and it’s being sold overseas, but the U.S. subsidizes the corporation.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Exactly. So there will be some jobs here, but many, many fewer than they would be advertising.
AMY GOODMAN: Why, under Obama, has the—have weapons exports so increased?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, some of it is hangover from the Bush years. The deals were struck then, and they’re happening now. Part of it is exports are a huge part of his policy. So, we just concluded a $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia, which is the biggest deal ever—mostly benefiting Boeing, but also Lockheed Martin as a secondary company. So, you know, I think he really feels that, you know, exports of any kind are a benefit, and so he’s—he hasn’t really had a plan on controlling arms exports.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sixty billion with Saudi Arabia? What does that entail?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, 80 or so fighter planes, hundreds of Apache attack helicopters, everything from ammunition to guns to bombs. It’s pretty much a, you know, across-the-board kind of arming of the Saudi both internal security and armed forces.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And of course the Saudis have this huge need for all of this stuff, given all the threats from other countries that they have, supposedly?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they have been using it to go into Yemen and to attack some forces there. But basically, it’s about money and jobs.
AMY GOODMAN: And Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest human rights abusers in the world. I mean, right now we see the revolution taking place in Tunisia, that the U.S. government shored up the dictator there—right?—Ben Ali. And now, yeah, the U.S. got an economy that they felt good about, and they called it a secure country. It is hardly secure, and the people are rising up. What about what’s happening in Saudi Arabia? You’re talking about it also being used for, quote, "internal security"?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, U.S. firms have been training the Saudi national guard for decades. So, if they ever had to go up against the Saudi people, quite possible U.S. contractors would be there on the side of the Saudi government.
AMY GOODMAN: Why is there so little written about Saudi Arabia? I mean, in these WikiLeaks documents on Iran, you know, there’s a great deal of attention to Israel pushing for war with Iran. But what came out in the WikiLeaks documents is countries like and particularly Saudi Arabia was actually pushing to attack Iran.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think part of it is oil. I mean, I think a lot of the media doesn’t really go after them because they’re viewed as sort of untouchable, because the U.S. is not going to change its relationship with them, sort of regardless of what is reported. Part of it, I think, is ideology. You know, Iran—beating up on Iran is better business and better security strategy, if you want to keep large U.S. military budgets, than beating up on an ally. But there’s so much about Saudi Arabia that hasn’t been reporting, including their funding of fundamentalist groups that have ties to terrorism. It’s really one of the bigger outrages of our foreign policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, just putting our military-industrial complex in a global context, the United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, we spend six times more than the country with the next highest budget, which is China.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: That’s right. And despite that, of course, the Chinese threat is being waved at us as the reason to build new combat aircraft, new combat ships, even though for them to try to catch up with us would take probably half a century. And even then, it’s not clear it would happen, because it’s not like the United States would stand still. So this is really for power projection. It’s military bases all over the world. It’s the ability to intervene on whatever grounds—national security, humanitarian, however they want to dress it up. It’s really about being an imperial power, in many ways.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, we just concluded—the U.S. government concluded a deal with China selling them how many planes from Boeing? I mean, we’re talking about weapons.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, 200 airliners. But also, GE is giving them the electronics that can be used in any kind of aircraft—could be used in an airliner, could be used in a military aircraft. So, basically, they’re selling out U.S. technology for the short term and hoping it’s not used against the U.S. in the longer term.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think, as an observer of politics for so long, and particularly focusing on the military and weapons spending—your book, Prophets—that’s P-R-O-P-H-E-T-S—of War, about Lockheed Martin—what do you think has to be done?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think we need a president who will cut military spending by a good 20, 30 percent across the board, because then the companies will be in a harder position. You know, it’s one thing to lobby for one weapon system. But if you have to lobby against a 30 percent cut across the board, it’s sort of like putting them on the defensive. And I think, you know, that’s really the kind of thing that has to happen, because a reform here, a reform there, is not going to really undermine their power. But if you cut off their money source, it affects every other thing they’re able to do.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, they would get fewer campaign contributions, wouldn’t they? Since you pointed out just this one company, Lockheed Martin, poured millions into each election cycle.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, you know, they would probably try to spend more to head this off. But I think if they were starting from that level, it’d be very hard for them to get back to where they’d like to be, if there was really a serious, serious cut in the top line of the Pentagon budget.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And then, much of this government payments for these weapon systems then become, usually after every war, the basis for the new technologies. Basically, the government subsidizes the development of these new technologies that are then—these same companies—then used for other civilian purposes, right? That it becomes basically sort of a government subsidy for the companies to develop new technological systems to then market to the general population, whether it’s GPS or any of these other systems that we now take for granted, originally developed as a result of military research funded by the government.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, it’s sort of a free ride for the companies, because they get the government contracts, and then they can spin off all kinds of other products. Now, it’s been harder lately, because commercial electronics, for example, is getting an advance of military electronics. So, the spin-offs are fewer, but the concept is the same. You know, we pay for the R&D, we pay for the weapon systems, we get them set up, and then they can go use that in the commercial markets.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the privatization of the military. Private military contractors in Afghanistan, they outnumber U.S. soldiers.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, yes. It’s really become kind of war for profit. And it’s—you know, it’s not just logistic. It’s not just, you know, serving food and doing laundry. It’s not just fixing the weapons. It’s people carrying guns, and some of them near the front line. So, you know, it makes it that much harder—if you want to pull out troops, you know, are you really pulling out your full presence there? You know, how do you ride herd over that when it’s not just the Pentagon, it’s not just the armed forces, but it’s this whole concatenation of private companies that also need to be reined in?
AMY GOODMAN: And USA Today just revealed that because of new rules that say that officers, generals, people who advise the Pentagon, have to reveal other sources of income and who they’re working for, a number have quit, because they don’t want to reveal that.
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I mean, it’s a huge business to leave the Pentagon and then go into the private sector. As Bryan Bender showed in the Boston Globe, 34 out of 39 generals and admirals immediately leaving the Pentagon went either to defense contractors or defense consulting firms. So some of them, in their retirement, can make more than they made in their entire military service. And so, this is another source of conflict of interest—and corruption. I mean, there’s been people who have gone to jail for the way they’ve helped private companies. When they’re on the inside, they give them a deal, and then on the outside, they go work for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think we should still call them "defense" contractors?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, they’re—you know, they’re weapons contractors. They’re—I don’t know what you’d call the broader—essentially, they’re sort of military-industrial-surveillance contractors. They do everything. But "defense" always has been kind of a—you know, I guess a euphemistic term for what they do.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon was originally established as the War Department. We now call it the Defense Department. Do you think we should?
WILLIAM HARTUNG: No. I mean, you know, I think our government would have a hard time swallowing the honesty on that front, but I think it would go a long way towards people understanding what we’re about.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, thanks so much for being with us. He works with the New America Foundation. His latest book is called Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Thanks so much for joining us.

 William Hartung - Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex Part I

"The Right of The People to Keep and Bear Arms"

from The Rachel Maddow Show 1/13/11

MADDOW:  President Obama returned to Washington very early this morning.  And the White House, while not pivoting away from the Tucson tragedy, did start to field questions about whether there is anything in public policy that should change in response to this latest incident of American gun violence.

ROBERT GIBBS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY:  We will have an opportunity to evaluate ideas and proposals that may be brought forth as a result of circumstances and the facts around this case.  The president, again, since I have been with him in 2004, supported the assault weapons ban.  And we continue to do so.

MADDOW:  The president will continue to support the assault weapons ban.  You know, that position, a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, that is a position that Mr. Obama happens to share with his predecessor as president.  During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush said he supported the assault weapons ban.  It was a view that he continued to hold while he was president.

ARI FLEISCHER, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY:  The president thought and said so thought in 2000 that the assault weapon ban was a reasonable step.  He supports the reauthorization of the current ban.

MADDOW:  George W. Bush ultimately failed on that campaign process. The assault weapons ban was allowed to expire on his watch. But President George W. Bush, through his political career, did, in fact, support a number of gun control measures.

Things like banning the importation of large ammunition clips, banning guns within 300 yards of a school, raising the gun ownership age from 18 to 21, requiring instant background checks at gun shows, requiring trigger locks with handgun sales.

George W. Bush supported all of these gun control policies, which, of course, is why angry, enraged, paranoid NRA members picketed every one of George W. Bush‘s public appearances while he was president for all eight years.  Oh, wait, that didn‘t happen.  No, that didn‘t happen because his position on gun control was considered to be relatively mainstream and relatively noncontroversial.

Mr. Bush supported some—what you might call common sense restrictions on what weapons Americans are allowed to have.  And that‘s how the politics of the Second Amendment has worked.  There is a broadly defined consensus which includes both Barack Obama and George W. Bush and every other politician of either party who holds mainstream views on this subject.  It‘s the consensus view that the Second Amendment protects the right of Americans to own firearms.  But there are reasonable restrictions on what that means.

In the wake of the Tucson shootings, at the realization that the only reason the alleged shooter was able to kill and wound so many people is because he could fire 30 bullets before he stopped to reload, because he had a high-capacity magazine, that would not have been legal for him to buy had the ban on that not expired in 2004 -- in the wake of that realization, we have to decide as a country if we‘re going to keep to the mainstream centrist George W. Bush and Barack Obama included consensus on gun control, that some restrictions are OK, or whether we‘re going to reject that long-held consensus.

The common wisdom in Washington right now is that there can be no new policies concerning guns whatsoever.  No restrictions on gun access are politically possible no matter how great the need, no matter how big the problem that America has to confront about gun issues, no matter how great the national trauma, no matter how rational the restriction.

I know that is the common wisdom.  But the fact it‘s common doesn‘t mean it‘s not radical.  That‘s a radical assertion. That common wisdom that we cannot do anything about guns, that has never been true of gun politics in modern times.

Saying all restrictions are off the table, that‘s a rejection of the centrist consensus we have had on this for generations. That is the view of the gun radicals.  That‘s the view of the absolutists.

REP. PAUL BROUN , GEORGIA:  Fellow patriots, we have a lot of domestic enemies of the Constitution, and they‘re right down the Mall, in the Congress of the United States—and right down Independence Avenue in the White House of—that belongs to us.  It‘s not about my ability to hunt, which I love to do.  It‘s not about the ability for me to protect my family, my property against criminals, which we have the right to do.  But it‘s about—it‘s all about us protecting ourselves from a tyrannical government of the United States.

MADDOW:  Second Amendment, not about hunting or self-defense.  It‘s about citizens having the ability to overthrow the tyrannical government of the United States.  That‘s Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia speaking last April.

E.J. Dionne wrote about this at “The Washington Post” today.  He found Congressman Ron Paul making roughly the same argument in print five years ago.  Quoting Mr. Paul, quote, “The Second Amendment is not about hunting deer or keeping a pistol in your night stand.  It‘s not about protecting oneself against common criminals.  It‘s about preventing tyranny.  The Founders knew that unarmed citizens would never be able to overthrow a tyrannical government as they did.  The muskets they used against the British Army were the assault rifles of that time.”

Again, the argument is that the Second Amendment exists so Americans can overthrow the government.  That is a view.  It is a radical view of gun policy.

ALEX JONES, RADIO HOST:  We‘ve had had record gun sales.  When Americans are asked, why are you buying guns?  They‘re buying it for civil unrest and to fight back against government tyranny.

MADDOW:  That‘s conservative radio host Alex Jones. We essentially have two choices about what kind of country we are on this issue of guns.  Do we believe the Second Amendment requires the citizens of this country to be well-armed enough to defeat the military of this country?  Is it about the power to literally overthrow our government?

If that‘s the case, then this week‘s common wisdom is right.  No matter what the national trauma, there could be no regulation of the American people‘s firepower whatsoever.  I mean, right now, it is essentially illegal for civilians to own machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortars, cannons, explosive time bombs, anti-tank guns, Molotov cocktails.

I shouldn‘t say it‘s illegal.  Technically, they‘re actually not outright banned.  But we do restrict access to these things so greatly that these things that you see on the screen right here, these do not circulate among American citizens broadly.

But if you are with the Alex Joneses and Ron Pauls and Paul Brouns, if you are with the radicals on gun policy, then all of the laws that prohibit us from having these things need to change.
In fact, all of the laws that prohibit us from having access to anything you can imagine in terms of weaponry need to change, because in their view, to do right by the Constitution, you and I need to be able to defeat the U.S. military in battle.  We need to be able to overthrow the U.S. government.  So, we need not only anti-tank guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and bombs.

If the United States military is armed with depleted uranium munitions, if they‘re armed with nuclear weapons, in order to be able to compete with that—in order for you and me to go up against the tyrannical commander-in-chief of the U.S. military and defeat him in battle, you and I should quite literally be able to obtain private nuclear weapons.

This is not hyperbole.  If you believe the gun radicals‘ philosophy about guns, that gun rights are to protect our ability to overthrow the government, then we need to be able to destroy the U.S. military so we can overthrow that government.

He‘s commander in chief of the U.S. military.  We need to be able defeat him in battle.  Is that what gun rights are for?

If that is what gun rights are for, you and I need to privately buy everything the military has and more.  In fact, we would probably be advised in order to protect our gun rights to restrict what weapons the U.S. military is able to have, so we can make sure we continue to have a tactical advantage.

Forget the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union back in the 1980s.  Under this view of gun rights, every day should be an arms race between you and me and the 82^nd Airborne if that‘s the way we‘re going to approach gun politics.  Is that the philosophy with which we approach it?

Or can we approach gun politics the way that we do in modern America, which is that we reject that radical position?  I mean, we love and enjoy those folks and we like playing tape of them on the television.  But we don‘t move forward on their suggestions.

BROUN:  It‘s all about us protecting ourselves from a tyrannical government of the United States.

MADDOW:  We can either accept that view of gun policy or instead accept the view that our Constitution allows law-abiding Americans to own weapons with some reasonable restrictions that allow us to be a modern industrialized democracy that is not a Thunderdome.

Keith Olbermann - The Right Lives In A Perpetual State of Victimhood

from Monday, January 17, 2011

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the nine days since Tucson. That awful night, I said this: We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently. Left, right, middle — politicians and citizens —  sane and insane.

This age in which this country would accept "targeting" of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces, and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.

I cited seven examples of violent rhetoric from the right; and only one from the left -- my own. Because the point of that Comment and this one was not that the right pulled the trigger in Tucson but that we as citizens must stop the next Loughner, and the only way to potentially do this is to accept personal responsibility and to pledge -- as I said that night -- that "violence, or the threat of violence, have no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence."

This afternoon, former President Clinton issued a statement honoring what would have been Dr. King's 82nd birthday:

"...we'd all do well to heed this message. While no one intends their words or actions to incite the violence we saw in Tucson -- and it's wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise - we live in a world where what we say and how we say it can be read, heard, or seen by those who understand exactly what we mean and by those whose inner demons take them to a very different place.

"That's not an argument against free speech, but a reminder that, as with all freedoms, its use carries with it responsibility. Therefore, we should follow the example Dr. King set and exercise our freedom of speech in ways that both clarify our honest differences and nurture the best of us rather than bring out the worst."

Perfect.

Yet the response?

To date, only one commentator or politician has expressed the slightest introspection, the slightest self-awareness, the slightest remorse, the slightest ownership, of the existence of the fantasy dream cloud of violent language by which we are now nearly blinded.

"Our political discourse," John McCain wrote in an otherwise steaming serving of Washington Post Op-Ed partisan flab, "should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so."

That's it.

One individual assumed any personal responsibility for any of it, besides me: John McCain.  Not Palin, not Beck. Not Limbaugh, not West. Not Kanjorski, not Malloy. Not O'Reilly, not Angle. Not Jesse Kelly, not President Obama.

It's me and John McCain.

I assume he's like me, not sure whether to laugh, cry, or be proud of that. So what did everybody else say?

They said it was everybody else's fault. And they often said it with more violence than before.
In approximate chronological order:

Last Monday, while most on both sides were looking askance at the wealth of bogus documents that now traditionally follow these things, a writer at the discredited Breitbart site posted the headline, "Whoops! This Changes Things — Loughner's Hero Was Barack Obama."

Jim Hoft breathlessly cited a reference on the 'Free Republic' site to a Facebook page supposedly belonging to Jared Lee Loughner, complete with references to the quote "racist Tea Party" and "fight the Right," and identifying his " heroes" as Obama, Chavez, Che Guevara, and Saul Alinsky.

Mr. Hoft never noticed that on the alleged Loughner facebook page, the word "tyrrany" is misspelled and so is the name Loughner.

Last Monday a conservative radio host in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, complained about the coverage of the Giffords shooting by The New York Times, Bob Durgin said "Somebody ought to burn that paper down. Just go to New York and blow that sucker right out of the water."

Mr. Durgin's supervisor, one R.J. Harris, then improbably claimed "we do not advocate violence, period. That's why this whole outcry over the shootings in Tucson being linked to talk radio is just crazy."

Last Monday, another radio announcer named Rush Limbaugh dismissed Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik as a "liberal," even though last August Fox News was proud to host Dupnik as he rescinded his opposition to the Arizona Papers-Please Law once its racial-profiling was toned down; and the year before Dupnik criticized as "catering to illegals."

Limbaugh in fact blamed Dupnik for the shootings and added, "My guess is the sheriff wouldn't mind if the shooter was acquitted." Mr. Limbaugh also said, "I would wager that the sheriff knew of this shooter long before this event," which was brave of Mr. Limbaugh, considering the sheriff had said as much two days previously.

Last Monday, Glenn Beck posted what he claimed was a call for non-violence on his Website alongside a shot of him posing with a gun. His pledge was a labyrinthine demand that everyone renounce violence, provided that liberals renounced a 78-year old woman named... named... well, what's the difference? She's just the latest target of a man enjoying a sequence of paranoid delusions — he'll be obsessed with somebody else within the week.

On Tuesday, Republican Congressman Peter King of New York offered a limited, but useful prohibition against carrying weapons within a thousand feet of federally elected officials. But the leader of his party in the House, Speaker Boehner, immediately rejected it, out of hand, without public comment, or any hearing.

On Tuesday, another radio announcer, Mark Levin, wrapped up the case for his audience: "We all know without question that the murderer in Tucson was mentally ill, a liberal pothead and all the rest of it. We know this for a fact." On Tuesday, after Mr. Levin and yet another radio announcer, Michael Savage, were decried for using violent rhetoric, Mr. Savage called this a  "blood libel" and threatened to sue, seemingly as much for having been linked to Mr. Levin, as for having been linked to violent rhetoric.

On Tuesday, Congressman West of Florida said he had "no regrets" for any of the violent rhetoric he had used in his campaign. Mr. West did not address why **after** the Tucson shootings this video of his first choice to be his Chief of Staff, Joyce Kaufman, had been pulled from You Tube (since, restored):

    "I am convinced that the most important things the Founding Fathers did to insure my first amendment rights was to give me a second amendment. And if ballots don't work, bullets will."

Mr. West did say he was concerned about "the political opportunism that has come out of this." He observed that pointing fingers about violent rhetoric was "kind of deplorable and unconscionable this is not the time to start looking for, you know, grandstanding and things of that nature."

On Wednesday, a high school friend of Jared Laughner's said, "he did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn't listen to political radio."

Blogger Hoft of the Breitbart site thereupon called for Sheriff Dupnik's resignation, ignoring the rather obvious fact that there is a way one can avoid radio or television and still be extremely political. It's called "the Internet" and is popular with bloggers, like Mr. Hoft.

Later, a high school girlfriend would say Loughner was "strongly opinionated" and would be set off by "things about the government, things about politics… anything that pretty much had to do with the government."  On Wednesday, conservative blogger John Hawkins announced this was all a liberal plot: "Keith Olbermann, Kos, David Brock. All of them are thrilled Gabrielle Giffords was shot. They couldn't be happier about it. How bout that?"

On Wednesday, former Governor Palin of Alaska seemingly destroyed whatever her career was with an opportunistic video in which she identified the real victim here: herself.

She too invoked a  "blood libel," possibly as a dog-whistle to the ultra-religious right. And she almost literally said that while her words could not have caused violence, words critical of her words, they could cause violence.

On Wednesday, Arizona Congressman Trent Franks determined that the tragedy was that there just weren't more bullets flying in that Tucson parking lot. "I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person, that's all I have to say."

Representative Franks was apparently unaware that there was "one more gun there that day." A man named Joe Zamudio was carrying, and walked into the carnage. He saw another man with a gun in his hands, and was, by his own calculation, one second away from drawing his own and firing. That's when he realized the man had taken the gun away from the shooter. Mr. Zamudio had nearly shot one of the heroes. As Mr. Zamudio put it "I was really lucky."

On Thursday after President Obama's remarks at the Tucson Memorial, Breitbart's Mr. Hoft, shaking off his embarrassment over quoting the fake Loughner Facebook page, returned for more.  "Oops!...It Looks Like Obama Fibbed About Giffords "Opening Her Eyes For the First Time."

Then Giffords' physicians confirmed, yes, the Gillibrand/Pelosi/Wasserman-Schultz visit was the first time the Congresswoman had opened her eyes spontaneously or at length. She had previously only done so, and only done so briefly, when prodded by doctors.

Doubling down, Hoft then claimed there was an applause sign flashed during the president's remarks. In fact it was the closed-captioning on the arena video screen, informing the hearing-challenged that there had been applause.

On Friday, Bill Kelly of The Washington Times, took to heart the message in Mr. Obama's comments to heart. "With the monolith of hooting fans, it wouldn't surprise me that Obama supporters were actually bussed in for the memorial. Were they union employees or members of ACORN used to pepper the crowd to ensure conformity?"

Mr. Kelly then used the "blood libel" line himself and added "I'm not going to have my words, idioms, or expressions censored by the left because they see, in this crisis, a political opportunity to advance their agenda."

On Friday, the former counsel to President Clinton, Lanny Davis, now reduced to being a paid contributor to Fox News, explained what he took away from this president's remarks: that Mr. Obama should now publicly ask me to stop attacking Bill O'Reilly.

On Friday, Tucson Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries explained the Giffords shooting to the English newspaper "The Guardian."  "It's political gamesmanship. The real case is that she had no security at this event."

James Eric Fuller, one of those wounded at this event, himself a traumatized Vietnam vet, referred to the  "Tea Party crime syndicate" and said he believed that in the Giffords shooting, it had claimed its  "first target."

On Saturday, in a decision smacking of the tawdriness of the Maury Povich Show, Mr. Fuller was seated in the first row of an ABC News Town Hall in Tucson -- with Mr. Humphries of the Tea Party on the stage.  When Humphries suggested talk of gun control be deferred until after all the victims were buried,  Mr. Fuller stood up and started to shout at Humphries, "You're dead." Mr. Fuller was, quite appropriately, arrested, and removed for psychological evaluation. He has today apologized, and Mr. Humphries has said he does not feel threatened necessarily and wants Fuller to get psychological help.

On Saturday, Michael Carroll, State Assemblyman of the 25th District of New Jersey, wrote an op-ed rebutting President Obama: "An armed populace is the greatest bulwark of freedom. Our framers understood that, and envisioned a society akin to Switzerland, in which every citizen is armed and responsible for his own defense, and that of the state."

Assemblyman Carroll not only responded to President Obama's remarks by painting an America with a gun under every bed. He also -- of course -- compared Obama to the Nazis: "Germany elected Hitler, who seized all private firearms to consolidate his murderous tyranny."

And lastly, on Saturday, five days after the blogger Hoft scrubbed the post about the fake Facebook Loughner page with "Loughner" misspelled as "Laughner," Doug Giles of TownHall.com cited it as gospel, as if it hadn't been utterly discredited: "Loughner's  'hero list' (according to Facebook) includes Barack Obama."

Two days later, Giles' claim still sits, uncorrected, on that Website.

Nine days have passed, and the willful blindness hasn't even slowed down yet. Besides the total absence of even the glimmer of personal responsibility that Senator McCain and I have evinced, we learn from all this that the right lives in a perpetual state of victimhood.

We learn that the right doesn't even recognize the irony of its claim of being unfairly blamed for the violence of others, when it has spent the last several years doing exactly that to Muslims — particularly American Muslims.  We also learn that the right can simultaneously insist no political party or inclination can be blamed for Tucson — while it itself blames the Democratic party and the left, for Tucson.

We learn that the Right does not understand that if you — if we— foment a political environment in which politics are to be settled by violence, or the threat of violence, or in a rhetorical tide of violent imagery, it no longer matters what those politics specifically are, or if the hearer even understands your politics or agrees with your politics — he may hear only the permission to be violent.

And ultimately we learn — especially from Mrs. Palin's foolishness — this template of what the right would do in an actual open-and-shut slam dunk case in which a partisan of the right attempted to kill one of the left. The right would blame that victim blame him or her for not having brought enough security.  Or for not having brought a gun.

The Republican Party Caters To The Village Idiot

Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy For God, on The Rachel Maddow Show 09/16/2009

RACHEL MADDOW: What do you think the White House strategy is going to be to rebut the fact that more than one in three conservatives think the president might be the anti-Christ?  At least in New Jersey.  That is a P.R. challenge.

Joining us now is Frank Schaeffer.  He grew up in the religious far right.  He is the author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All or Almost All of It Back.” Mr. Schaeffer, thank you so much for coming back on the show tonight.

FRANK SCHAEFFER: Thanks for having me on.

MADDOW:  I do not know what possessed this polling firm to ask whether or not people think the president is the anti-Christ, but they did.  Does the response rate among conservatives surprise you?  More than one in three saying yes or they don‘t know.

SCHAEFFER:  Well, I was a child when President Kennedy was assassinated, and my mother thought, because he died of a head wound, foretold in scripture of the anti-Christ he would be resurrected as the anti-Christ.  She thought this might be a possibility.

So, those of us who come from the evangelical subculture have been weaned with our mother‘s milk on a changing cast list of villains.  It might be Kennedy to one generation, Obama to the next.

But I think the larger point this brings up is that the mainstream—not just media, but culture—doesn‘t sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture, we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity, that is bred from birth through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to reject facts as a matter of faith.  And so, this substitute for authentic historic Christianity, and I may add as a little caveat here, I‘m a church-going Christian, really brings up the question: Can Christianity be rescued from Christians?  And that‘s an open question.

And when you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our president is the anti-Christ, you have to draw one of two conclusions.  Either these are racists looking for any excuse to level the next accusation or they‘re beyond crazy?  And I think beyond crazy is a better explanation.

And that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America and we have a big slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back.  They look forward to Armageddon.  Good news is bad news to them.

When we talk about the “Left Behind” series of books that I talk about in my book “Crazy for God.” what we‘re talking about is a group of people that are resentful because they‘ve been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature.  The rest of us are getting on with our lives.  These people are standing on the hilltop waiting for the end.

And this is a dangerous group of people to have as neighbors, and they‘re our national neighbors.  And this is the source of all of these insanities that we see leveled at the president.  One way or another they go back to this little evangelical subculture.  It‘s a disaster.

MADDOW:  It is one thing though to think about these as almost cultish views, to think about these as views that are on the fringes of beyond the edge of mainstream Christianity.  It‘s another thing to look at the numbers. 

I mean, in this same poll, the numbers are also really high on the question of whether or not the president was born in the United States 61 percent of McCain voters in New Jersey expressing doubt that Obama is American, saying he definitely wasn‘t born in the U.S. or they‘re not sure.

The birther thing has been disproven.  The anti-Christ thing is—it‘s all another kettle of fish.  But how do you work to move people off that position?  It doesn‘t seem like facts are relevant in trying to move people away from these beliefs.

SCHAEFFER:  You don‘t work to move them off this position.  You move past them.  Look, a village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot.  It‘s as simple as that.  And we have to understand, we have a village idiot in this country, it‘s called “Fundamentalist Christianity.”

And until we move past these people—and let me add as a former lifelong Republican—until the Republican leadership has the guts to stand up and say it would better—it would be better not to have a Republican Party than have a party that caters to the village idiot, there‘s going to be no end in sight.  The next thing they‘ll do is accuse Obama of being the anti-Christ and then who knows what comes next on and on it goes.

There is no end to this stuff.  Why?  Because this subculture has as its fundamentalist faith that they distrust facts per se.  They believe in a younger of 6,000 years old with dinosaurs cavorting with human beings.  They think that whether it‘s economic news or news from the Middle East, it all has to do with the end of time and Christ returns.  This is la-la land.

And the Republican Party is totally enthralled to this subculture to the extent that there is no Republican Party.  There is a fundamentalist subculture which has become a cult.  It‘s fed red meat by the pawns like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other people who are just not terribly bright themselves and they are talking to even stupider people.  That‘s where we‘re at.  That‘s where all of this is coming from.

And it‘s becoming circular.  It‘s becoming a joke.  Unfortunately, a dangerous joke because once in a while, one of these “looney tunes,” as we see, brings guns to public meetings.  Who knows what they do next.  It‘s a serious thing we all have to face, but the Democrats and sane Americans just have to move past these people, say, “Wait on the hilltop until the end, the rest of us are going to get on with rebuilding our country.”

MADDOW:  Mr. Schaeffer, briefly, is there anybody on the right who could be constructive here if they wanted to be?  To the extent that people could be moved off of these conspiracy theories?  And I understand your point that they not—it‘s not true that all of them could be.  But is there anybody who could be influential to try to stop the impact of these conspiracies?

SCHAEFFER:  Look, in the year 2000 I worked for John McCain, to try to get him elected in the primaries instead of George Bush.  But John McCain sold out by nominating Sarah Palin who comes directly from the heart of this movement and carries with her all that baggage.  So, he sold out.  I don‘t see anybody on the Republican side of things these days who has the moral standing to provide real leadership, or who will risk their position to do so.

MADDOW:  Frank Schaeffer, author of “Crazy for God”—thank you very much for your time tonight, sir.  It‘s always fascinating and a pleasure to have you on the show.  Thanks.

SCHAEFFER:  Thanks a lot.

Amy Goodman - On Guns and A Grossly Outdated Second Amendment

ED ROLLINS: Democrats for four years controlled both the House and the Senate. If they wanted to pass gun control, they could have done it. You had a Democratic president who obviously would have signed it. He didn't. The bottom line today is the Second Amendment, as the Supreme Court has decided it, is the law of the land and I don't think there's a majority of Democrats and certainly not a majority of Republicans that are going to alter that.

GOODMAN: I want to say Ed's right that the Democrats could have done it, should have done it, and they still can with the Republicans. And when the founding fathers had their guns at home and were loading one bullet at a time, what would it take, something like five minutes, they never had any dream that people today could load in magazines and shoot off how many bullets a minute. I think we should take what the founding fathers' intent was all about and we should protect the people of this country.

Amy Goodman - Corporations Control Political Parties

JOHN KING: I suspect, Amy Goodman, that second to Michael Steele in disappointment tonight is the left in America which found Michael Steele to be controversial and shall we say they welcomed some of the controversies he helped gin up.

AMY GOODMAN: Well I mean when you look at what's happening, the discussion of $400 million Priebus is promising to raise, I mean the discussion of what President Obama will be raising to be reelected, we're talking about something over yes, gasp, $1 billion. It's as if the parties are no longer controlled by political leaders, it's by corporations.

And this is of the gravest concern whether we're talking about you know the changing of the guard in the vice president's office, Bruce Reed, former executive director of the Deficit Commission as they take on Social Security and Medicare. We're talking about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the corporations, whether Republican, whether a Democrat. It's not really about two parties anymore. It's about the big moneyed interests in this country and that's what has to be challenged.

Mark Kelly Talks About His Wife Gabrielle Giffords

from ABC news. Mark Kelly talks about his wife Gabrielle Giffords playing with his wedding ring.

Does she recognize you?

I'm pretty sure she does and certainly today.

What convinced you?

Yesterday in particular she started playing with my wedding ring. So if I hold her hand she'll play with my wedding ring. She'll move it up and down my finger. She'll take it off. She'll put it on her own finger. She'll move it to her thumb, and then she can put it back on my finger. The reason why I know that that means she recognizes me is because she's done that before this accident. She does that all the time.

Michael Moore On Rachel Maddow 01/17/2011 Talks Gun Control

Daniel Ellsberg - The Courage We Need

from The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

The courage we need is not the courage, the fortitude, to be obedient in the service of an unjust war, to help conceal lies, to do our job by a boss who has usurped power in his acting as an outlaw government. It is the courage, at last, to face honestly the truth and the reality of what we are doing in the world, and act responsibly to change it.

Daniel Ellsberg's website

Will Jesse Kelly replace Giffords?

these are dark days people

Keith Olbermann - Violence and Threats Have No Place In Democracy

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently.

Left, right, middle - politicians and citizens - sane and insane. This morning in Arizona, this age in which this country would accept  "targeting" of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.

This morning in Arizona, this time of the ever-escalating, borderline-ecstatic invocation of violence in fact or in fantasy in our political discourse, closed. It is essential tonight not to demand revenge, but to demand justice; to insist not upon payback against those politicians and commentators who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism, but to work to change the minds of them and their supporters - or if those minds tonight are too closed, or if those minds tonight are too unmoved, or if those minds tonight are too triumphant, to make sure by peaceful means that those politicians and commentators and supporters have no further place in our system of government.

If Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics - she must be repudiated by the members of her own party, and if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling, and they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.

If Jesse Kelly, whose campaign against Congresswoman Giffords included an event in which he encouraged his supporters to join him firing machine guns, does not repudiate this, and does not admit that even if it was solely indirectly, or solely coincidentally, it contributed to the black cloud of violence that has envellopped our politics, he must be repudiated by Arizona's Republican Party.

If Congressman Allen West, who during his successful campaign told his supporters that they should make his opponent afraid to come out of his home, does not repudiate those remarks and all other suggestions of violence and forced fear, he should be repudiated by his constituents and the Republican Congressional Caucus.

If Sharron Angle, who spoke of "Second Amendment solutions," does not repudiate that remark and urge her supporters to think anew of the terrible reality of what her words implied, she must be repudiated by her supporters in Nevada.

If the Tea Party leaders who took out of context a Jefferson quote about blood and tyranny and the tree of liberty do not understand - do not understand tonight, now what that really means, and these leaders do not tell their followers to abhor violence and all threat of violence, then those Tea Party leaders must be repudiated by the Republican Party.

If Glenn Beck, who obsesses nearly as strangely as Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt and who wistfully joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O'Reilly, who blithely repeated "Tiller the Killer" until the phrase was burned into the minds of his viewers, do not begin their next broadcasts with solemn apologies for ever turning to the death-fantasies and the dreams of bloodlust, for ever having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by their viewers, and by all politicians, and by sponsors, and by the networks that employ them.

And if those of us considered to be "on the left" do not re-dedicate ourselves to our vigilance to eliminate all our own suggestions of violence - how ever inadvertent they might have been then we too deserve the repudiation of the more sober and peaceful of our politicians and our viewers and our networks.

Here, once, in a clumsy metaphor, I made such an unintended statement about the candidacy of then-Senator Clinton. It sounded as if it was a call to physical violence. It was wrong, then. It is even more wrong tonight. I apologize for it again, and I urge politicians and commentators and citizens of every political conviction to use my comment as a means to recognize the insidiousness of violent imagery, that if it can go so easily slip into the comments of one as opposed to violence as me, how easily, how pervasively, how disastrously can it slip into the already-violent or deranged mind?

For tonight we stand at one of the clichéd crossroads of American history. Even if the alleged terrorist Jared Lee Loughner was merely shooting into a political crowd because he wanted to shoot into a political crowd, even if he somehow was unaware who was in the crowd, we have nevertheless  for years been building up to a moment like this.

Assume the details are coincidence. The violence is not. The rhetoric has devolved and descended, past the ugly and past the threatening and past the fantastic and into the imminently murderous.

We will not return to the 1850s, when a pro-slavery Congressman nearly beat to death an anti-slavery Senator; when an anti-slavery madman cut to death with broadswords pro-slavery advocates.

We will not return to the 1960s, when with rationalizations of an insane desire for fame, or of hatred, or of political opposition, a President was assassinated and an ultra-Conservative would-be president was paralyzed, and a leader of peace was murdered on a balcony.
We will not.

Because tonight, what Mrs. Palin, and what Mr. Kelly, and what Congressman West, and what Ms. Angle, and what Mr. Beck, and what Mr. O'Reilly, and what you and I must understand, was that the man who fired today did not fire at a Democratic Congresswoman and her supporters
.
He was not just a mad-man incited by a thousand daily temptations by slightly less-mad-men to do things they would not rationally condone.

He fired today into our liberty and our rights to live and to agree or disagree in safety and in freedom from fear that our support or opposition will cost us our lives or our health or our sense of safety. The bullseye might just as well have been on Mrs. Palin, or Mr. Kelly, or you, or me. The wrong, the horror, would have been - could still be just as real and just as unacceptable.

At a time of such urgency and impact, we as Americans - conservative or liberal - should pour our hearts and souls into politics. We should not - none of us, not Gabby Giffords and not any Conservative - ever have to pour our blood. And every politician and commentator who hints otherwise, or worse still stays silent now, should have no place in our political system, and should be denied that place, not by violence, but by being shunned and ignored.

It is a simple pledge, it is to the point, and it is essential that every American politician and commentator and activist and partisan take it and take it now, I say it first, and freely:

Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence. Because for whatever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

Douchebags In Camouflage Are Not A Good Thing

Does Jesse Kelly look like a RINO (Republican In Name Only)? No, he looks like someone who would have followers that open fire into a crowd of people. He looks like the kind of person who would have been a participant in Collateral Murder. 

"Can we have another fundraiser at the target range, Jesse Kelly?" ~ Eric Fuller, Tucson shooting survivor
  

Afraid of Americans

I suspect David Bowie isn't the only one who is afraid of Americans.

Jesse Kelly was Gabrielle Gifford's congressional opponent in the 2010 midterm elections. The congresswoman was shot in the head in Tucson on Saturday January 8, 2011 by a gunman who opened fire outside a Safeway during a political event. 
 

Sarah Palin's Crosshairs Map

Sarah Palin is an utterly irresponsible and despicable human being!

 

 ...[Sarah Palin] has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there's consequences to that action. ~ Congresswoman Giffords

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), said Sunday Gabrielle Giffords told him just a week and a half ago that she was worried about the potential for violence back home:

Gabby did tell me that she was concerned. She did say it's really bad out there, particularly in a district like [hers]. She was very much troubled that Sarah Palin put her in the crosshairs.

Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik from Democracy Now 01-11-2011:

In my judgment, people who are mentally unstable are very susceptible to the kind of rhetoric that’s going on in our country. And I think that we all have a responsibility to take a look at that. I think it’s sad, the state that America has become, where we have a political system that, in my judgment, is totally broken. And anger plays a large role in the things that are going on. And there are people who play to the anger in our people and who encourage it. 

On Geraldo:

                                                                       

 When you have people like Sharron Angle in Las Vegas running against Harry Reid making outrageous statements such as ‘we may need to resort to taking the 2nd amendment into certain cases’ and for people like Sarah Palin to say ‘we have people like Gabby Giffords in our crossairs’, I think those statements are totally irresponsible and they’re not without consequences and I think we may be seeing the fruit of it here. ~ Sheriff Dupnik

You Barely Hear A Peep

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the thousands of Red-Winged Blackbirds found dead in Arkansas this past weekend. Even Universe Today is taking notice in a piece from January 6, 2011 called, Aflockalypse:

5,000 blackbirds falling dead from the sky in Arkansas; tens of thousands of dead fish in Chesapeake Bay; 50-100 dead birds found strewn in lawns in Sweden; 40,000 dead crabs washed up on England’s shores; 530 penguins, numerous other seabirds, five dolphins, and three giant sea turtles dead in Brazil; 200 American Coots dead on a Texas bridge; hundreds of snapper fish dead in New Zealand. And the list keeps growing.

Were these deaths caused by humans polluting the air, land and water? Perhaps, but each year in the U.S. alone people are directly responsible for the deaths of:

38 million cows and calves, 95 million hogs, 5 million sheep and goats, 278 million turkeys, 20 million ducks, and over 7 billion chickens. Most of these animals are bred, raised and killed on enormous mechanized farms that specialize in one species and house hundreds or thousands of animals at a time. (Deep Vegetarianism, Fox 1999)

And you barely hear a peep about that!

Michael Moore On Bradley Manning

“I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” ~ Bradley Manning

from The Rachel Maddow Show 12/21/10

Bradley Manning, the soldier who sits in Quantico tonight. This man has been in solitary confinement for seven months, seven months; and his crime is, his crime, is that he did what they said at Nuremburg we're to do. If you see something happening, especially during wartime, that is illegal, immoral, you have a responsibility as a human being to stand up and say something; and he came across, allegedly, the video of our soldiers firing from a helicopter and murdering two reporters from Reuters along with a bunch of Iraqi civilians. That is being done in my name and with my tax dollars. I want to know when that's going on, and I admire anybody who stands up and tells us that's going on. He should be rewarded, not be in prison.

Leaks don't kill people, secrets do. ~ Michael Moore