I’ve been helping my friend Sam Husseini maintain an impromptu “liveblog” he set up to document his observation as he followed the Gaza Freedom March in Cairo, Egypt. Find all that material on that site: husseini.posterous.com.
Some of my contributions in his aid were inadvertently syndicated here, with HTML not escaped properly, etc. I’ve removed those posts.
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.
Whatever Mistakes We Have Madeby Nicholas J.S. Davies)
Going Backwards
‘Just War’ is Just Wordsby Ralph Nader
