Military pisses on itself

You’d think the apparent desecration of Taliban corpses by United States Marines in Afghanistan would be indefensible, that the notion that someone would piss on a dead body would be so foreign to all of our consciences that this would not be an issue.

You would be wrong. This is a post to Facebook that I just came across:

am so sick of this shit with the Marines who urinated on their enemy. Hey stupid go visit a VA hospital sometime and look at the condition of some of our retuning soldiers. Did it ever occur to you that we might not be such a target if other people feared us? GO USA!!!!!!

To sum things up: Pissing on a corpse shows how powerful we are and apparently has military utility. Bizarre.

I’ll leave it to Cara Palmer, on Neon Tommy, — who calls the footage “utterly deplorable” — to explain things to my Facebook friend:

The thoughtless action and comments of the Marines depicted in the video is not only disrespectful, but it is also inhumane. The devaluation of another human being, dead or alive, in such a manner, even and especially in wartime, reflects badly on the character of those committing the act. Certain standards of behavior must be met, standards these particular Marines were far from meeting.

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The web reacts to NJ marriage-equality bill

[View the story “The blogosphere reacts to N.J. marriage-equality bill” on Storify]

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Anti-capitalist corporate Republicans, or something like that

Ted Rall’s piece today on Common Dreams is a brilliant dissection of our economic moment and the disjointed uses to which the Republican anybody-but-Romney brigade is attempting to use it, along with a rejoinder to a Democratic Party that has refused to really challenge the corporate order.

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Political disintegration, Ron Paul and the 1 percent

The right is fractured, unwilling or unable to reconcile its many disparate and untamable parts. The left, mostly marginalized in a media landscape controlled by the 1 percent, is in the same boat.

Just as it did during the Clinton years, it has fractured upon the shoals of a centrist Democratic presidency enthrall to the money men of Wall Street.

Here is what we are looking at:

  • The Democratic president, Barack Obama, has played nice with Wall Street — see Glenn Greenwald’s column today — when it should have taken the financial industry out behind the woodshed.
  • A Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, who picks his position based on the position of the sun and is even closer to Wall Street than Obama.
  • The anybody-but-romney contingent of the GOP — Gingrich, Santorum, Perry — that plays the populism card but has no critique of American capitalism, nor has any interest in pushing one.
  • And Ron Paul. Paul is the only candidate of either party who opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has from the beginning. He offers a critique of crony capitalism and has been as powerful an opponent of the Bush/Obama assaults on civil liberties.

Paul, as I wrote earlier, is no progressive. His history on race and comments on the Johnson civil rights legislation, hardline position on border security, antiabortion views and his opposition to unions, regulations and the social safety net cannot be overlooked.

In a year, however, when there are no Democrats on the ballot other than the centrist president and in a media culture that freezes out third-party challengers, Paul is being used as a stand-in for the missing critique of the system — a needed and legitimate critique. And his presence — and the lack of any kind of similar personality on the Democratic side — has raised the cracks in the left-liberal contingent.

Paul’s presence keeps elements of the left critique on the table, but he is an awful salesman for what so desperately needs to be sold. A Paul presidency would not achieve progressive goals — far from it — but it likely would prevent us from traveling a path we have too often traveled.

What the Paul phenomenon shows — as Obama-mania did in 2008 — is the desperate hunger on the left for someone to talk about the break down of the American system. And what it proves is that a single candidate offers little. What is needed is a movement, one focused on the corruption of our government and the corporate order, the dangers of the imperial project and the environmental cataclysm we face.

This need will remain in place 11 months from now, no matter who wins the election, regardless of who ends up winning the White House.

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Romney’s weak sweeps

The mainstream media is portraying tonight’s Romney win in New Hampshire as a big one and saying he swept the first two contests. Technically both are true. He won by double digits and won in Iowa.

But let’s be real here. Romney won Iowa by 8 votes over a guy — Santorum — who was polling in the low single digits just a couple of months ago and appears not to have cracked 40 percent in a state that was a foregone conclusion (he lives there and was governor next door, has huge name recognition and a massive organization).

Rather than showing his strength, the results demonstrate that Romney still has not won over his party and is likely vulnerable to a unified effort by the anyone-but-Romney group. Ron Paul, who is a special case, is at around 24 percent, but John Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum totaled 37 percent together — almost exactly the same figure Romney collected.

If Romney was going to be a real presidential contender, wouldn’t have had distinguished himself better from the pack than he has? Especially when his opponents have been Mo, Larry and Curly Joe.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.