DC Dispatches

To abuse a cliche: After I got a full night’s sleep, it seemed like a bad dream. But another YouTube clip gone up overnight from my friend and past collaborator Robin Bell corroborates the reality of it all.

Yesterday DC was hit with a snowstorm that we’re now told ranks higher than anything in 70 years, and which brought the most snowfall in December in the city ever. Grocery stores were emptied, places shut down, people were forced to stay home or into the streets (so few sidewalks were even given one attempt at being shoveled), bars were packed with snowbound locals. It had the air of a “snow day,” an extra day off because of the weather, even though it was a Saturday. The city went a little nuts.

But apparently no-one could out-do a certain Detective Baylor of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Obama’s own hypocrisy undercuts the alleged nobility of his Nobel acceptance speech, the purposeful blindness of some of those who are dismayed by it undercuts their dismay, and the constant creep of collective amnesia that allows for others support the escalation of war and the “logic” offered by Obama is Oslo undercuts our safety.

Long out of practice in even attempting to write, I am reading a selection of Orwell’s essays (both the polemic and the trite review and in between) rather than expanding on my own declaration of opinion. Maybe I will learn something. The two volumes are what I might’ve once called provocatively titled: All Art Is Propaganda and Facing Unpleasant Facts. But now they’re just remedial guides for dealing with the world.

In the meantime, I share these selections from contemporary polemicists who I think did a good and more timely job: challenging both the silly dismay of some Democrats in what they seem to perceive as Obama’s betrayal (it isn’t one, he campaigned on escalating the Afghan war) and the others who find Obama’s justification of escalation as a proper way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, consistent with what he cited himself in the course of his speech.

• From Consortium News, an online publication whose cornerstone is Bob Parry Whatever Mistakes We Have Made by Nicholas J.S. Davies)
• From Jonathan Schwarz’s Orwell-inspired A Tiny Revolution a brief observation: Going Backwards
• ‘Just War’ is Just Words by Ralph Nader

My friend Sam Husseini’s project, The Washington Stakeout, was at the studios of ABC’s This Week this morning. The guests were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Senator Russ Feingold.

I collaborate with Husseini, providing technical support, and I also watch the shows. This morning I noticed that Clinton repeated a myth about the start of the Afghan war that the Institute for Public Accuracy, where Sam is the communications director, called-out in a press release earlier this week.

The appearance of both Clinton and Gates was pre-taped earlier in the week, otherwise I’m sure Sam would have tried to question her on it if she stopped for the press gaggle.

Sam did have some interaction with Senator Feingold which is now posted at The Washington Stakeout.

Husseini asked Feingold about the legitimacy of the Afghanistan war, Israel’s nuclear weapons (of which official acknowledgment might catalyze a different calculus in the US’s non-proliferation actions with regards to Iran, India, as well as, of course, Israel), and, in essence, how much due diligence was actually done in exploring the feasibility of Single Payer health care.