…caught in the middle of it all.

When I read this frightening piece, I was reminded of the climax of Louis de Bernières brilliant anti-war novel, (Captain) Corelli’s Mandolin, which portrays the tragic confusion and wholesale slaughter in the aftermath of the Italian-German occupation of Greece during World War 2.

During the occupation, the Greek resistance was, itself, divided into fiercely dogmatic ideological camps—Royalists, Communists, Socialists, Liberals, Monarchists, Anarchists, etc. They killed and tortured each other over sacks of potatoes and rice. In addition to these longstanding animosities between the Greeks themselves and the occupation by the Italians and Germans, there were external pressures from the Turks, the Bulgarians the Albanians and others. And of course, the British were in the middle of it too, protecting the interests of Empire.

After 1943, when the Allies invaded Sicily and the Mussolini government was overthrown, many Italian soldiers, including those in Greece, switched sides and took up arms against the Nazis. In response, Hitler ordered a wholesale massacre of the Italian Troops in Greece. The Nazis shot about 4000 Italian boys and burned the bodies. Four thousand survived and were being transported by ship to labor camps. But the ships were bombed by the British and most of the Italians drowned in the hulls. The rest were machine-gunned by the Germans as they tried to abandon ship.

The senseless and brutal carnage that followed in Greece for years was devastating. The Greek Communists, on orders from Tito, used the arms they had been supplied by the British to fight the Nazis to impose their will on most of the countryside. They perfected the “art of atrocity and oppression” which they had learned from watching the Nazis.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy.”
Louis de Bernière Corelli’s Mandolin

Cross posted at The Whole American Hog

Estrich has written a book, “The Case for Hillary Clinton” and now is acting as an attack-dog mouthpiece for the Clinton Campaign. Despite the post-debate polling among South Carolina Democrats that showed Obama winning the debate, Estrich thinks Obama made “the biggest mistake of the debate” by slighting Israel in his answer to a question about America’s best friends in the world.

Here’s Estrich’s take on the unforgivable Obama gaffe (emphasis mine):

Obama waxed on about NATO and our European allies before looking east to Japan. I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I’ve been around debates for decades and it was clear that Obama didn’t get that this was the Israel question.

He didn’t get that people like me, voters and donors, were waiting to hear the word “Israel” in a way that Japanese Americans were not. Japan doesn’t live under constant threats; Israel does. Japanese Americans don’t worry about Japan’s survival in the way Jewish Americans worry about Israel.

Nevermind that “people like me” are already deeply entrenched with Hillary.

Clinton, of course—as the Senator from New York has to be—is completely Pro-Israeli (hence her Iraq war vote for which she cannot apologize.) If I were in the Clinton camp, I think I would leave Obama alone on the Israeli-Palestinian Issue. If you want to examine the root causes of 9/11 and all the rest (including the Iraqi debackle and the potential Iranian debacle to come) it is all about Israel. Other than gasbag neocons and christianist evangelicals (who see Armageddon in the works)—I believe that the majority of Americans are growing weary of protecting and funding Israel and supplying them with terrible weapons that they use whenever they feel like it, especially since they seem unwilling or unable to agree to even modest reversals of their land-grabbing gains in the quest for a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord.

Here’s more chip-on-the-shoulder nonsense from Estrich:

Even when prompted by Brian Williams, who followed up by pointing out that Obama had neglected to mention Israel, and reminded him of his comment that “no one had suffered more than the Palestinian people,” Obama still didn’t get it right.

If “getting it right” means bowing and scraping and kissing the Israeli ring, I think Barrack Obama showed great political courage here. Don’t think for one moment that he misread the question or failed to grasp the significance of it. Obama knew full well what it was about – this was an AIPAC litmus test question— and he simply refused to rise to the bait. Bully for him.

Then comes the really absurd part of her rant, in which Ms. Estrich attacks Senator Obama for saying that no one has suffered more than the Palestinians in the history of the whole sordid ordeal:

Sure, he said that Israel is an important ally, but his clarification of his “poor Palestinians” comment only left him further in the hole. His point, he emphasized, was that no one had suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failures in Palestinian leadership. That’s not exactly how I see it, or how many Jewish Americans see it. The Palestinians may be suffering more in the sense that their standard of living is lower, but whose fault is that?

Now there’s a darn good question.

…it is the Palestinians and not the Jews who have chosen these terrible leaders and remained loyal to them. Doesn’t that count for something?

Well, pleeeeze excuuuuuseuse me! Remind me again who elected Netanyahu and Sharon after Rabin was assassinated by an (ahem) Israeli wingnut godbag.

By the way: here, for the record, is a fair and balanced summary of the plight of the Palestinian People:

1. Four decades of occupation.

2. Millions of refugees who are not allowed to return home and millions who cannot get passports to leave.

3. Over 100 unrecognized villages in Israel where Arab’s have been given Israeli citizenship and pay taxes but receive no services; no electricity, no water, no medical, no schools, no respect, no human rights.

4. 4,170 Palestinian Homes have been demolished without reason or compensation since 2000

5. A concrete wall/electrified fence that does not follow the Green Line and has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice and must come down, but continues to grab Palestinian land, water and divides families and prevents farmers from tending their land which terminates their rights to it.

6. 9,599 Palestinians prisoners are being held, many without charges and access to legal council, and many of these are woman and children.

7. 60+ new Jewish-only settlements have been built on confiscated Palestinian land between March 2001 and July 11, 2003.

8. The U.S. gives $15,139,178 per day to the Israeli government and military and has furnished billions in weapons of destruction.

Just to be clear: I am neither anti-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian. I am simply pro-peace. I loved Rabin and I have many Israeli friends. I am heartsick over the never-ending cycle of violence in the middle East. Nothing about this post shoud be construed as anti-semitic. It is about policy. When I refer to “all about Israel” above, I am only saying that I believe that the failure to come to some just resolution of this issue gives the terrorists all they need to justify their existence.

New York Trooper Believed Killed by Fellow Officer.

NEW YORK (CNN) — A New York state trooper who was thought to have been shot and killed by an escaped convict this week is now believed to have been killed by friendly fire, authorities announced Friday.

Trooper David C. Brinkerhoff is thought to have been fatally shot by a fellow trooper while trying to arrest Travis Trim, 23, during a shootout in Trim’s upstate Margaretville home Wednesday afternoon.

]]> http://www.correntewire.com/tom_mccain_and_huck_graham_greasing_the_bob_jones_skids 2007-04-18T22:12:54-04:00 2007-04-18T22:53:18-04:00 onealbear

Tom Turnipseed, my good friend and future United States Senator from South Carolina, sent me an e-mail this morning about Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been twisting a lot of far-right evangelical arms in South Carolina for his “Surge” buddy, John McCain. The response among evangelicals has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic. So McCain has broken out the old “consultant” (wink, wink) checkbook and is flat-out trying to buy the wingnut vote.

This is how the sham shakes out:

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Tom Turnipseed, my good friend and future United States Senator from South Carolina, sent me an e-mail this morning about Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been twisting a lot of far-right evangelical arms in South Carolina for his “Surge” buddy, John McCain. The response among evangelicals has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic. So McCain has broken out the old “consultant” (wink, wink) checkbook and is flat-out trying to buy the wingnut vote.

This is how the sham shakes out: Huck’s ally, State Senator Mike Fair is the godbag-wingnut mouthpiece for Bob Jones University. The McCain Campaign has “retained” Senator Fair as a “get-out-the-vote consultant,” paying him $21,000 ($7000 a month) since January. Fair’s godbag counterpart in the State House is Representative Gloria Haskins. McCain has “retained” her son, Bryan Haskins to the tune of $6500 over the last three months as a “youth campaign coordinator.” And they have paid Stan Spears Jr., son of Adjutant General Stan Spears, more than $5,000 as “veterans coordinator.” Hmmmmmm…and double hmmmmmmmm.

But it really doesn’t matter how much money they dole out in bribes (retainers?) to godbag-connected politicians and their relatives; Lindsey will not be able to deliver. Most evangelicals just won’t buy McCain. They don’t trust him as far as they can throw him on their core issues. They will go for Romney, Brownback, Huckabee, Thompson—I don’t know who—but it will be anybody but McCain.

The same is true on the Democratic side. State Senator Daryl Jackson, the Preacher/Consultant on the Clinton payroll ($10,000 a month) won’t fare any better. Hillary can pay him a retainer until the cows come home. The minority vote will be split all up and down the line— Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Biden and Dodd will all get respectable slices of that primary pie.

]]> http://www.correntewire.com/huckleberry_graham_and_tom_mccains_iraq_adventures_with_apologies_to_mark_twain 2007-04-04T19:56:48-04:00 2007-04-04T20:18:48-04:00 onealbear

This morning, I got an e-mail from my old friend, Tom Turnipseed, a veteran political activist and former Democratic State Senator from South

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This morning, I got an e-mail from my old friend, Tom Turnipseed, a veteran political activist and former Democratic State Senator from South Carolina. Tom wonders why The State Newspaper of Columbia (a Knight-Ridder property) has not covered the story about Graham and McCain’s transparent photo-op in Iraq, which put hundreds of American Troops and Iraqi civilians in a very dangerous situation in order to carry off a complete media hoax and has now, apparently, become a complete human disaster. Damn good question. For that matter, where are the others— The (Greenville) News, The (Charleston) Post and Courier, The (Sumter) Item and The (Florence) Morning News? And where the hell is Robert Ariail, The State’s award-winning editorial cartoonist, who usually skewers everything and everybody? Are you guys ever going to challenge Lindsay Graham on anything? Or will “Huck” get a free ride, like his predecessor, Strom Thurmond, who never met a newspaper publisher in South Carolina that he couldn’t charm or intimidate.

On a related topic, I have heard through the grapevine that Tom Turnipseed is thinking about challenging “Huckleberry” in 2008. I sure hope he does, not only because he is the kind of bur-under-the-saddle populist that will drive Lindsay crazy, but also because he is the kind of Democrat who can win this seat. Turnipseed has been fighting in the trenches for decades on social and consumer issues in South Carolina. He is a thoughtful peace advocate. “Seed” has been a champion of working folks and civil rights and environmental causes for many years. He is a media celebrity in South Carolina and his writings on politics have been featured on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Now, I realize that South Carolina seems, to the outside world, to be hopelessly RED. This is an unfortunate preconception, which should be put to rest. Senator Fritz Hollings was a Democrat. He consistently won easy victories over his Republican opponents until he retired in 2004. The last South Carolina Governor, Jim Hodges, was a Democrat. There are two very powerful Democratic Congressmen from South Carolina, Jim Clyburn and John Spratt, both of whom are part of the Democratic leadership in the House. South Carolina has a solid Democratic base of Blacks, Labor and Courthouse Democrats and huge number of Independents. While it is true that many of these folks have tended to vote Republican in Presidential elections since Reagan, they remain fiercely independent and often, decline to identify with either party when polled. I wish I had a silver dollar for every time I have heard the boast; “I vote the man, not the party.” South Carolina is ripe for the plucking for any well-funded Democrat.

Thomas F. Schaller argues in his book, Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats can Win without the South, that the Democratic party should just write off the South and concentrate on the rest of the country. I could not disagree more strongly. There is a paradigm shift going on all over the country right now. Nobody gave Jim Webb a prayer in Virginia until George Allen’s Macaca gaffe, but Webb had a good chance all along. Sure, Virginia is home to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (as South Carolina is home to Bob Jones.) So what? Virginia had a Black Governor (Douglas Wilder) and the last two Governors have also been Democrats (Warner and Kaine.) Webb proved all of the punditocracy dead wrong. I’m with Dr. Dean on this: Fight ‘em on every front.

]]> http://www.correntewire.com/hils_vs_rudy_who_cares_it_s_never_gonna_happen 2007-03-29T18:09:18-04:00 2007-03-29T18:49:32-04:00 onealbear

This Time/CNN poll does not surprise me one bit. It is nothing more than a popularity contest between a popular Republican and an unpopular Democrat. WTF??

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This Time/CNN poll does not surprise me one bit. It is nothing more than a popularity contest between a popular Republican and an unpopular Democrat. WTF?? Despite what the Bushbots and Viagra swillers will make of it, there is no good news here for Republicans. This has absolutely nothing to do with the real mood of the nation. In the end, it won’t make a dime’s worth of difference anyway, because Hillary is definitely not going to be the Democratic nominee and Rudy is probably not going to be the Republican nominee. Mark this down: As South Carolina goes, so go the nominations. After Hillary comes in third (or fourth) in Iowa and New Hampshire, Obama, Edwards and others (Richardson, Gore, Clark?) will finish her off in South Carolina. The Bob Jones crowd will run Guliani out of town on a rail (like the Rovians did to McCain in 2000.) So go ahead, MSM, keep on polling, pontificating, huffing, puffing and whatever else make you feel important. I would bet the farm (if I had one, which I don’t) that you won’t get it right.

]]> http://www.correntewire.com/stroms_ward_72_military_business_as_usual 2007-03-19T20:13:13-04:00 2007-03-19T20:27:37-04:00 onealbear

The United States Military is an elitist, patriarchal, hierarchical organization and had been since the time of George Washington. So why is everybody so shocked by this ward 72 business??

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The United States Military is an elitist, patriarchal, hierarchical organization and had been since the time of George Washington. So why is everybody so shocked by this ward 72 business?? This is old news. Officer’s Clubs serve fine, twenty-year-old Scotch in crystal glasses with embroidered linen napkins. In an NCO club or a soldier’s bar, you’re lucky if your beer is served cold.

As a disabled veteran from another era, I can assure you that nothing much has changed. Like my father before me, I was an enlisted man, so I had to live with the consequences of low-priority veterans’ health care. I spent a couple of years in crowded, filthy, badly ventilated wards in the early 70’s at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. I spent months in the Fort Jackson Army Hospital and later, when I had complications from my service-connected disability, I suffered through many weeks in understaffed, overflowing Veterans Administration Hospitals in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina.

During most of this time, the esteemed Senior Senator from my state, Strom Thurmond was the Chairman (or the ranking minority member) of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. The conditions in VA Hospitals were horrible. Everybody knew this. It was no secret. In fact, there was sort of a standing (sick) joke about how dangerous these hospitals were. But interestingly, no matter how deplorable the conditions in VA hospitals got, the American Legion and the VFW fellows never held Thurmond accountable. These guys (including my father, bless his heart) would have followed Strom to hell and back as long as he stood for the preservation and purity of the White Race (cough, cough.)

I am not at all surprised by the existence of a Ward 72 at Walter Reed Hospital. Bethesda Naval Hospital probably has a super luxurious suite standing by for their congressional benefactors, too. Congress should de-fund this exorbitant outrage now! These Multi-Zillionaire Senators and Congressmen have plenty of private health insurance. Let them use it. Public funds should be used to care for Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Airmen who have been wounded and maimed in the line of duty.

]]> http://www.correntewire.com/a_sneak_preview_of_bocotton_stormfields_new_book_republic_grammar 2007-01-30T16:28:30-05:00 2007-01-30T16:29:15-05:00 onealbear

Chapter 1. Shrubsville

A pack of sleep dogs stretch and yawn lazily under a stand of tower Oak trees as the little commute train steams out of the Shrubsville station. Spring is here. The beauty Magnolias and Azaleas are just beginning to bloom. The passengers look out of the dirt windows as clouds of brick-red dust blow across the fresh-plow fields. Red Gibson, the engineer, peers out from under the bill of his stripe cap as the train moves slowly down the wind track in the direction of Shooterville. Red is a very tradition man. He remembers the glory days of the Republic Party—the Ronald Reagan days and the Contract-With-America days— when the Democrat Party knew its place in the scheme of things. “We’ve come a long ways from Doleton and Gingrichburg,” he says to his crust old brakeman. “Imagine the gall of this new Democrat Majority—thinking they have the right to question the Decider on matters of nation security.”

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Chapter 1. Shrubsville

A pack of sleep dogs stretch and yawn lazily under a stand of tower Oak trees as the little commute train steams out of the Shrubsville station. Spring is here. The beauty Magnolias and Azaleas are just beginning to bloom. The passengers look out of the dirt windows as clouds of brick-red dust blow across the fresh-plow fields. Red Gibson, the engineer, peers out from under the bill of his stripe cap as the train moves slowly down the wind track in the direction of Shooterville. Red is a very tradition man. He remembers the glory days of the Republic Party—the Ronald Reagan days and the Contract-With-America days— when the Democrat Party knew its place in the scheme of things. “We’ve come a long ways from Doleton and Gingrichburg,” he says to his crust old brakeman. “Imagine the gall of this new Democrat Majority—thinking they have the right to question the Decider on matters of nation security.”

Next Week, Chapter 2. Shooterville

(Here’s a preview…)

There are many passengers lined up to board the train at Shooterville, most seeking to escape the oppress heat that has come over the rust enclave, especially since the beginning of the ridicule Libby trial…

(To be continued)

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