- I’m going to start out with a grievance against the entire foreign policy establishment of Washington DC, who 2 years ago were swearing that Donald Trump was going to start multiple nuclear wars or something.
Now they are mad because he is STOPPING two wars. How about you just admit you hate the President, love war and have been wrong for the last 20 years on every part of foreign policy?
Consider that my Christmas present. You don’t have to get me anything else.
- I’m on some Sunday shows this morning, I hope you’ll tune in to @CNNSotu and @FaceTheNation to hear some serious policy discussions.
- I’ll be back later this afternoon for some serious, and not so serious grievances, along with lots of my Festivus Waste Report. So come on back later!
- One of the things I hate most about Washington is that they have literally NO IDEA how to spend your money. That’s why I do waste reports, and do a FESTIVUS WASTE REPORT with some of the worst offenders of the year. Here are some of the worst in waste.
- Everyone's favorite frisky quail are back with an update on how much money they blew: https://goo.gl/cGonMN
- So of course, instead of fixing waste like this and reforming government, the geniuses in Congress decided to have a fight over how much MORE money they were going to “spend” aka borrow from China.
- Speaking of which, buried in the foreign aid reports last year, I discovered something — we give foreign aid to China. So government is so dumb, it is literally borrowing money from China, to give it back to China, while paying interest on it.
- This is actually my grievance with liberals. They want the government to do more and more, take over more healthcare, more education — I mean you seen what it ALREADY is doing?
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Monday, December 24, 2018. We remember the media critique of Nora
Ephron as a bunch of idiots online want to weigh in on topics they've
never stopped to explore or learn about.
Let's start with this.
Let's start with this.
“It should not be the job of America to replace regimes around the world. This is what President Trump recognized in Iraq, that it was the biggest foreign policy disaster of the last several decades, and he’s right...The generals still don’t get the mistake.” @RandPaul
- You mean THIS Rand Paul? The one who hand-carried a letter from you to Putin in August?
Apparently you have a lot in common. You both think you know more than generals.
You mean THIS Sally Deal? The piece of crap piece of trash who doesn't understand how it works?
Throw in the other piece of trash -- though there's a lot of them, I mean Ben
Draft-dodging reality TV show star who thinks he knows military strategy better than his Secretary of Defense who served in the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, has driven away his most qualified cabinet member. Thank you for your many years of service, General Mattis.
Love the necklace, sir, it screams "trash."
Reality for Ben and Sally idiot, Donald Trump does know more than the military. Barack did too. Every president does because we live in a democracy and not a military junta.
The military is not there to provide solutions. It is there to be tasked with a duty or a command and to follow it.
Do you pieces of trash understand that?
Depending on who the president is --what political party -- trash like you try to hide behind the military and wrap yourselves in the flag. You don't what the hell you're talking about because you are sorely lacking in the basic education you should have received.
In a democracy, you have civilian control over the military. The Congress will provide oversight. The president will provide orders.
The military will be tasked with executing those orders.
Their opinions? Not really that damn important.
Sorry if that offends your delicate -- and uninformed -- sensibilities.
Civilian control over the military. And the military does what they are commanded to do. Try grasping that reality or, if you prefer, move to some country that has a junta and enjoy yourselves there. Until then, grasp that living in a democracy means you can say anything but being in the public square probably means you shouldn't -- especially when every remark you make only underscores just how deeply stupid you are.
Let's deal with more idiots.
And to sacrifice the Kurds to Erdogan whose main goal is to eliminate them is a crime against humanity! Not to talk about letting Russia play the game and ISIS dancing because USA is turning the tail....
It means genocide for the Kurds, does it not? Some people say it’s not our fight. But, did we not learn this lesson from the Holocaust? Everyone should stand up & fight against genocide, & send the message to the whole world that it’s not acceptable & won’t be tolerated.
Are you worried about the Kurds? Well thank you. Thank you. Thank you for showing up for a minute or two. Damn, but your commitment of a few seconds certainly does inspire.
The US government has been betraying the Kurds all along. They have never done anything except use the Kurds in Iraq as pawns. We have noted that every damn year -- that's 14 now. 14 years, where the hell were you?
Turkey's been bombing northern Iraq -- the Kurdistan region -- since Nouri al-Maliki's first term. Where the hell have you been? We've been here, calling it out under every administration. When Bully Boy Bush illegally occupied the White House, we called out the bombings. When Barack Obama was president, we called out the bombings. Now that Donald Trump is president, we call out the bombings. You know who doesn't call out the bombings? The US government.
Even when the Iraqi government calls them out -- as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did earlier this month -- the US government does not call them out. It's kind of hard for them too because the US government also bombs countries and kills people with drones in the name of 'combating terrorism.'
So sweeties, you two wonderful angels who are suddenly worried, where the hell have you been?
More to the point, this attitude of using the Kurds? Not new to the US government, not at all new.
We've addressed the Pike Report over a hundred times here in the fourteen years this site has been around. How many times, sweet angels, have you?
Do you even know what the Pike Report is?
I don't know how you discuss the US government's relationship with the Kurds seriously without referenceing the Pike Report which the US Congress produced but then quickly decided not to release. It was leaked to the press and, February 16, 1976, The Village Voice published Aaron Latham's "Introduction to the Pike Papers." Latham explained:
In 1972, Dr. Henry Kissinger met with the Shah of Iran, who asked the U.S. to aid the Kurds in their rebellion against Iraq, an enemy of the Shah. Kissinger later presented the proposal to President Nixon who approved what would become a $16 million program. Then John B. Connally, the former Nixon Treasury Secretary, was dispatched to Iran to inform the Shah, one oil man to another.
The committee report charges that: "The President, Dr. Kissinger and the foreign head of state [the Shah] hoped our clients would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally's neighboring country [Iraq]. The policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise."
During the Arab-Israeli war, when the Kurds might have been able to strike at a distracted Iraqi government, Kissinger, according to the report, "personally restrained the insurgents from an all-out offensive on the one occasion when such an attack might have been successful."
Then, when Iran resolved its border dispute with Iraq, the U.S. summarily dropped the Kurds. And Iraq, knowing aid would be cut off, launched a search-and-destroy campaign the day after the border agreement was signed.
A high U.S. official later explained to the Pike committee staff: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
That is the root and start of a relationship where the US government repeatedly used and misled the Kurdish people and repeatedly lied and broke promises.
The report from the Church Committee was followed by the Pike report and that report ended up being suppressed after being printed. There's a whole story there -- including CBS having a copy of the report via Daniel Schorr and him passing it to THE VILLAGE VOICE who did publish it and Schorr then telling CBS that Lesley Stahl must have leaked it -- isn't she involved with Aaron Latham who reported on it -- to try to save his own ass. That's one of the reasons CBS parted with him and one of the major details left out of his obituaries in 2010. The reality of what he actually did is even left out of his WIKIPEDIA fan boy entry. Apparently, the truth is to be concealed and covered up. Didn't Nora Ephron learn that lesson. She wrote about what Schorr did -- wrote about it in real time -- and ESQUIRE refused to print it. She was their media critic and they refused to print it. She had to take it to MORE to get it published. It's collected in Nora's SCRIBBLE SCRABBLE.
At the CBS Washington bureau, they are trying to keep straight faces over what has happened to Daniel Schorr, but it's not easy. Schorr is not a popular man, and there are a lot of people who are thrilled that he has been caught committing the journalistic sins of coyness, egomania and self-service. These sins are, of course, common to all journalists, which is no excuse for getting caught at them. Nonetheless, his colleagues might have gritted their teeth and supported Schorr but for one thing: He panicked and attempted to shift the blame for what he had done, tried to implicate one of his co-workers in the deed, and that gave everyone the excuse they needed to abandon him entirely.
The issue of character probably should not intrude on a First Amendment case, but when it comes to Dan Schorr it's difficult to leave it out. Schorr insists that his problem ought to be shared by the journalistic community, that we must all hang together or we will most assuredly hang separately. As he put it recently: "It serves CBS, and it serves me, and it serves you -- because whatever happens to me will someday happen to you -- that we preserve a unified front now. I really feel a little bit like the alliance in World War Two, where De Gaulle and Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill sit down and say, You know we're going to have some problems, but let's lick the Nazis first. . . ." This is an extremely peculiar metaphor, but the part that interests me is not the equation of Nazis with the House of Representatives but the phrase "whatever happens to me will someday happen to you." It is quite probable that what happened to Dan Schorr happened to him precisely because he was Dan Schorr. There are elements of the story, in fact, that are reminiscent of Appointment in Samarra, or any novel the theme of which is that a man's character is his fate (or, put another way, that the chickens always come home to roost). The plot is a simple one: a reporter whose obesession with scoops occasionally leads him to make mistakes develops an obsession about a secret document and makes several terrible blunders that lead to his downfall. What happened to Dan Schorr is a real tragedy, but only because he did so much of it himself.
Along with lying to his bosses by fingering Lesley Stahl for his actions, he also lied to Walter Pincus that Harry Rosenfeld of THE WASHINGTON POST was willing to pay him (Schorr) for the report, he just couldn't stop lying. He gave the papers to THE VILLAGE VOICE and lied non-stop. He then lied about lying about Lesley Stahl. CBS NEWS' Sandy Socolow tells Nora that Schorr's tale was:
a f**king rearrangement of what happened of the worst sort. It is just an absolute rewrite of history. I had no reason to believe he was the source of the Voice story -- he had hated the pieces the Voice ran about him, and he'd stopped speaking to the woman who wrote it. He came in, and these aren't specific quotes, but he said to me, Shouldn't we check where Lesley and/or Aaron were while the Xeroxing was going on.
That's history and you won't find it at Crapapedia.
We're constantly supposed to reinvent the wheel. Maybe if women actually mattered, we'd all know of Nora's important and powerful essay, of how ESQUIRE refused to publish it? We'd know about the Pike Report.
But we don't. And two little angels tip-toe in, at the tail end of 2018, and want to say that US troops must stay in this country and that country to protect the Kurds.
The US government has never protected the Kurds. Grow up. Educate yourself. Your stupidity is your own problem, address it.
The US government has not only allowed Turkey to bomb northern Iraq over and over each year, it has repeatedly undermined them in the Iraqi government. It has either lied to them (The Erbil Agreement) or it has outright sided against them favoring instead whichever puppet they've installed in Baghdad. That's reality and US troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria are not going to change that reality.
You have bought into a vague notion -- a slogan -- that has no reality foundation. You really need to educate yourself, you have no one to blame for that but yourself. You're adults, it's really time that you self-educate.
Here's another little detail to pull out of the sock drawer. Until February 2015, the KDP and PUK were designated terrorist organizations by the US government. Those are the two main political parties in the KRG. So stop pretending that the US government ever planned to help the Kurds -- it's been a long, long history of betrayal.
Meanwhile, the people of Basra continue to protest and, for a second time in two weeks, the police are firing bullets at them.
Police use live rounds to disperse protest in Iraq's Basra for second week via /r/Iraq bit.ly/2AfHKM1
Police use live rounds to disperse protest in Iraq's Basra for second week uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ira…
Mustafa Habib (NIQASH) reports on protests:
The protests in Basra first began this summer, as locals in southern
provinces had to simultaneously deal with a ack of state services,
drought and contaminated water that poisoned hundreds as well as
electricity shortages and blackouts. At one stage, it was almost as if
the city of Basra had been taken over by the protestors. Demonstrators
were so angry they set fire to various party headquarters, regardless of
who they were affiliated with. The population in southern Iraq is
mostly Shiite Muslim and some segments are close to the neighbouring
Iranian government. But the demonstrators also vented their anger on the
headquarters of parties considered close to Iran. No quarter was given,
all officials were seen as culpable.
This came as a surprise to some observers because as a city, Basra
had always been politically closer to Iran and a stronghold of the armed
militias who pledge allegiance to Iran. Many of the fighters in those
militias came from these parts of Iraq. The protests also spread to
other parts of southern Iraq and that level of dissatisfaction has
continued to this day.
How did this come about? The protests were the result of an organic
and unexpected alliance between three different parts of Basra society.
Firstly, they involved lower-income locals, who tend to identify
themselves first and foremost as members of the larger tribes and clans
in the area. A lot of these families live from agriculture and the water
shortage had an extreme impact on them. For the first time, some Basra
tribespeople decided to move to other areas where there was more water.
This resulted in fighting between them and the tribes already in those
areas.
The second group is comprised of civil society activists and
organizations – many of them established around 2015 as part of
well-funded international efforts to inspire more democracy in Iraq.
They have undertaken many pro-human rights campaigns and were
particularly effective in their use of social media to organize and
communicate with other demonstrators. These individuals tended to invent
hashtags and share pictures of the protests online but they did not
themselves get involved in the violence or arson.
The third segment of the Basra population involved in the protest
were the city’s liberal-leaning businesspeople, who have become
frustrated with the inefficacy of the local government. They perceive
the continuous wheeling and dealing and sharing out of fees and
contracts among the political class as a major problem, one that has
caused much of the current breakdown in state services and is
responsible for the lack of progress on important infrastructure
projects. This group participated more quietly in the demonstrations and
played a role in starting a dialogue with local politicians.
Despite unusually high poverty in the city, Basra remains one of
Iraq’s most important cities. It is the third largest metropolis after
Baghdad and Mosul and also home to Iraq’s only and all-important
shipping ports. Additionally the province produces over three-quarters
of Iraq’s oil, the proceeds of which keep the country running. It is
also an area widely considered loyal to the Shiite Muslim-led
government.
All of this is why the protests in this area are so important and why
they have the potential to change Iraq’s political landscape in the
long run. The protests have already had a significant impact on the
federal parliament in Baghdad, forcing politicians to speed up the
selection of the Speaker of parliament.
While Mustafa reports on the protests, THE NEW YORK TIMES wastes 21 paragraphs on a Santa Claus social media story and passes that crap off as Iraq reporting.
Let's offer one more reality check on the dumb and uninformed.
And Sarandon made a federal case about her Iraq vote, but John Edwards who she supported voted the same way, so did Pence & Kerry, who may run in 2020. Why does HRC get hell for things others do? Bernie is a horror 
Kurt pays child prostitutes, let's never forget that, dead. Let's also remember that Sarandon -- Susan Sarandon -- supported John Edwards after he took responsibility for his Iraq War vote -- in a WASHINGTON POST column and in repeated speeches. As Elizabeth Edwards noted, Hillary never did that. Instead, she is the candidate who first said that if you were looking for an apology, you should look for another candidate. After being repeatedly called out for that tone deaf statement, she offered that it was "a mistake" -- her vote for the Iraq War. As bad as that was, it then evolved into she was tricked by Bully Boy Bush. She thought, she insisted, he would send more troops. The Iraq War was illegal and based on lies and she's calling for more troops? Let's also remember that she's running to become the president of the United States but confessing that she was so dumb that Bully Boy Bush tricked her. Bully Boy Bush tricked her -- that's pretty stupid.
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