tune remains the same

If we had clearer memory of the evil we've done, we might be motivated to forego the evil we're doing today.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction on February 5, 2003.

Just as John Brennan sat in front of a Senate committee regurgitating specious legalisms justifying Obama's murderous drone war and gelding of the constitution, Powell sat in the UN general assembly and lied through his teeth.

Not one major newspaper or news network responded to Powell's theatrics with anything remotely approaching skepticism. The obsequious, totally credulous editorials read like Onion articles today. The NY Times was probably the soberest, merely noting that "Mr. Powell's speech was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein's regime."

Powell's "sober, factual case" turned out to be nine parts bullshit and one part sales pitch, but the corporate media swallowed the b.s. so easily the pitch wasn't really necessary. Any human who's breathing and semi-conscious can't help but notice how similar "Hussein's WMD" were to "Iran's nuclear capability" or the "threat" to national security from impoverished desert-dwellers in Yemen and hillbillies in Pakistan today.

So what happens to journalists who are really nothing more that stenographers bending their knees before the war machine? They all get turned out for being such tools, right? Actually, most of them have the same jobs today they did back then. For example, Google the name of Richard Cohen, one of the biggest sewer pipes who channeled the Bush administration's lies, and you'll find out he's "honored, respected, award-winning," etc.

I've noticed that among people who stood erect for war with Iraq, there are two approaches to the problem of the past. First, and most common, there's the "Who?Me?" approach, in which one conveniently forgets that he or she was a cheerleader for the destructiion of Iraq and the deaths of at least 100,000. The alternative approach, not quite as lame but certainly more bizarre, is to try to brazen it out, and claim the war was justified, "because, you know, he had em."

And most of them, just like most of the pundits and talking heads are still around, willing to share their vast knowledge of world politics with the rest of us, telling a new set of lies about a new (but similar) set of villains who are out to destroy us all, take away our guns and state lotteries, and devour our children, yadda yadda.

It's all here and more, at Gin and Tacos.