The Last Straw?

Florida man, 32, calls 911,
wants Mom arrested
for taking his beer.

Can the United States sink any lower in world opinion? I think Obama’s support for the Israeli attack on the peaceful flotilla attempting to bring aid to the people in Gaza may be the last straw. The entire International Community is outraged at what the Israelis have done – except, of course, the United States. Obama has apparently threatened to veto any attempt to censure or punish anyone for this cowardly and illegal attack on ships in International waters. I guess there is nothing the Israelis can do, no matter how vile, illegal, immoral, disgusting, racist, and completely wrong that the U. S. will not support. This makes us International criminals along with the Israelis. Does anyone really care? Is there really nothing that can be done to keep the Israelis from breaking International laws over and over again? What is this seemingly hypnotic power they hold over us? How can the U.S. and Obama talk of peace in the Middle East when there can never be peace as long as the Israelis persist in stealing Palestinian land and water and no one does anything to stop them? Our unrestricted support of Israel is nothing short of shameful. It is wrong, wrong-headed, stupid, unproductive, anti-peace, and in fact ultimately detrimental to both ourselves and the Israelis. But, then, what might we have expected when Obama named Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff, a man who has, as I understand it, dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship and served for a time with the Israeli military. It is perfectly obvious by now to anyone with even a tiny brain that the U.S. cannot be an unbiased broker of peace between the Palestinians and Israel. As the U.S. presumably is the only nation that could broker a peace we can just forget about it and allow the Israelis to continue their slow genocide of the million and a half Palestinians they have forced into the ghetto called Gaza. Netanyahu’s excuses for the attack are simply pathetic: people on the ships attacked the Israeli commandos (utterly absurd), they had to search the ships for weapons (ridiculous, they had to know the ships would not have been carrying weapons), Israel has a right to defend itself (from ships designed to bring aid to a needy people), they had a legal right to the blockade (only during a state of war which does not exist), and I don’t know what else.

Eric Holder, our Attorney General, is now talking tough, real tough, about both civil and criminal investigations of BP and holding them fully accountable. I’ll believe it when I see it. What I find particularly laughable about Holder’s claim is that he will fully prosecute anyone who has broken the law -- except, of course, George Bush and Dick Cheney, who not only broke the law but are admitted war criminals. I sincerely hope that Holder will investigate and prosecute BP if they are found guilty of criminal acts (we already know they are), but I fear this may turn out to be just talk because the Obama administration has to disengage themselves from their cooperation with BP for political reasons. As BP has more money than most nations, as well as entire armies of lawyers, they will tie everything up in court until doomsday (and I mean literally doomsday which may not be so far away).

I suspect that just as it is truly impossible to conceive of trillions of dollars, it is probably equally impossible to truly imagine the horror that will result from this BP oil leak before it is over (leak is not really the right word, volcanic eruption might be more descriptive). I am not comforted by learning that the two alternative holes being drilled, widely touted as sure to succeed, are not at all guaranteed to succeed. Similarly, I am not pleased to learn that in a worst case scenario there may be no end until Christmas.

LKBIQ:

If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.
Grandma Moses

TILT:
Besides man, Barbary apes (really monkeys) are the only primates that live freely in Europe.