Re-Imagining a Warmonger

1951HatterThis is the craziest article I’ve read in at least a year:

George W. Bush is smarter than you

With the opening of the new Bush Library, the creepy Bush family is trying to rewrite history and play with our memories. Unfortunately for them, my memory is just fine. The article in question is sarcastic, snobbish and overtly right-wing. The writer asks a few simple questions at the end of his article. What the hell — I’ll answer them for the moron who wrote the article.

“Upon what do you base your view of President Bush’s intellect?”

His actions and word, nearly all of them, over an 8 year period, during which time I was paying very close attention.

“How much is it shaped by the conventional wisdom about him? How much by verbal miscues highlighted by the press?”

Hardly any of it. My knowledge of Bush’s stupidity is based on his actions. President Bush was a mean, dumb jerk and probably still is. What other president obviously tortured people and then lied about doing it and then later admitted it but said torture wasn’t really torture? Only a dumb, mean jerk would do that. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.


“Do you discount your estimate of his intellect because he’s from Texas or because of his accent? Because he’s an athlete and a ranch owner? Because he never advertises that he went to Yale and Harvard?”

This is funny. Bush did mention his schools now and then, in his usual snobby elitist way.  But I especially had to laugh at the word “athlete”. Bush is not an athlete and never was. He rode a bike but that never made him an athlete, unless you are talking about his cheerleading days. Now, he thinks he’s a painter, but he paints himself mainly washing and taking baths, and then he does paintings of puppies. He’s feeling unclean, for some reason, and child-like at the same time.  As for being “southern” — I think two of the smartest people ever had southern accents — Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower. They might even both be from Texas — so no, that’s not it. It’s that Bush is a moron.

Only a stupid man would say, when asked about terrorism, that “They hate us for our freedoms”. What an insultingly stupid thing to tell the public — at the same time that same man is wiretapping us, data mining us, and surveilling everyone as much as he can, all the while stuffing innocent men into dungeons in various secret prisons around the world.

“This is a hard one, for liberals only. Do you assume that he is unintelligent because he made policy choices with which you disagree?”

Obviously, a partisan question.  No, we don’t assume he’s unintelligent because we liberals disagreed with everything he did and wondered how any human being could act so utterly inhuman.  Not even because he sent us to war on a lie, because it was a war for oil, and he told us it was for weapons of mass destruction that never existed.  We assumed he was dumb because he thought the Iraq war would end in about six months, and he thought their oil would pay for his war.  And he thought we could fight two wars at once, in several countries at once, and pay for it all with magic oil dust, and the world would love us for it. He was Super Bush. He had only a very childish and very naive sense of how it would all turn out, while many of us “liberals” saw the outcome as obviously disastrous and horrendously expensive.  We were right, he was wrong.  Why didn’t Bush see any of that coming?

Because Bush was a very stupid man.

There are a hundred other reasons, actions and words from Bush during those horrible eight years, that prove his stupidity.  He had no logic.  He knew less about the Middle East than your average sixth grader. He could not reason. He could not articulate anything, no matter how simple.  He even talked about steroids in baseball during a State of the Union speech.

So many WTF moments during his presidency. And there was his lack of original ideas and attempts to be like Reagan. How about his supposed economic analytic skills: that old trickle-down economic theory he espoused, a theory which has never, ever worked despite Republicans always claiming it does.  If Bush is so gosh-darned smart, why did he think trickle down economics would work, despite zero evidence of that ever happening? Huh?

Anyone who thinks George Bush was smarter than the common man or women is also a moron and is counting on the fact that we don’t remember recent history.  (Rewriting history is all the GOP has left in their attempts to be taken seriously.)  Not only are our memories just fine, but the internet exists, and it contains all of Bush’s actions, and all of his claims, and all of his lies, and you can’t get away from that simple fact. It’s all there in black and white and we won’t forget… unless you have a way of destroying the internet. I’m sure the GOP is working on that.

George Bush was stupid while he was president and he’s still stupid. He said on camera during a recent interview with Matt Lauer that the purpose of his library wasn’t to present actual facts to the American people, but to present the facts as he saw them at the time. In other words, his opinions — like Saddam was part of 9/11, which was a pathetic joke to everyone but him. So he doesn’t feel his presidential library even has to include the facts of history.  His library even contains a deceptive interactive game along the same lines where you are told you are wrong if you disagree with his faulty reasoning.  It’s the same old thing:  Up is down, north is south, War is Peace.  Who in the world would ever want to revisit the topsy-turvy 1984 Orwellian world of GW Bush by going to his Alice in Wonderland Library?

No, we don’t think Bush is stupid because he has an accent. It’s because of what he didn’t have: a functioning, empathetic brain.

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Dennis Kucinich’s Great Idea

There aren’t many principled or ethical Democrats left in the US Congress.  (There are currently 2, maybe 3, that I can think of.) Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is one, but he was not re-elected in the latest election.  He will be missed, as he gave us some ideas that shouldn’t be ignored, and he remained anti-war until the end of his public service.

 

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New Artwork from New AWA Artist

DawnOfTheDead_CP_w108_h108_cw108_ch108_thumbNew AWA artist Childish Propaganda (likely not his real name) can now be found in the galleries here at AWA. He’s an artist in the UK who specializes in… well look at his gallery here. Welcome, CP.

If you are an artist who does artwork for justice, peace, or anything worthwhile and especially against war, contact us using the contact form here.

If you have joined us and have something to say (as in, writing) please contact us also. We are looking for new writing, poetry, whatever you can come up with. I’m too busy to add much here these days but I would not like to see this blog go neglected.

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Abby Martin on the Duty of Artists

Video contributed by artist Brynjar Danielsson.

Do artists have an obligation to use their creativity and talents to do socially relevant art?

I feel that way, but most artists probably do not. One artist I know actually believes that the reason all artists should make art is to make themselves happy!

Personally, not to judge, but I can’t think of anything more trite than being given a talent and using it only to make yourself happy. At the very least, I do wish artists would use their creativity to make some percentage of their work socially relevant, even if the rest of it is to sell at an art fair (which I do) or make someone’s walls pretty.

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Regarding Mr. Drone

Buddies who share a drone philosophy

Buddies who share a drone philosophy

On my last trip out of the country, a cab driver asked me, “President Obama, he’s a good guy?”  The question exhausted me. I just answered “yeah” rather than go into a lengthy political discussion with him.  If other people want to like him, (and they want to) I feel bad bursting their bubble.  One of my major problems with Obama is his drive to  — let’s face it — end the lives of people that are on his “kill list”.   The secret CIA drone program horrifies me and I’m struck by how little Americans know or care about it. One reason it’s so disturbing is that I think it’s only a matter of time before it begins, in some degree, right here in the U.S., probably used by law enforcement.
For others upset by the drone program, some recent information about “Mr. Drone” — John Brennan.
“Critics of US drone programme angered by John Brennan’s nomination to CIA
Obama’s decision to elevate ‘Mr Drone’ meets with outrage among liberal groups who plan to protest at inauguration” (wish I could be there) — from the Guardian…. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/10/critics-us-drone-brennan-cia-nomination
This quote contains civilian numbers, from another article: “While Brennan’s official title during Obama’s first term was US Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, he was known to critics and supporters alike as “Mr Drone” – the official behind the administration’s more than 350 separate drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that have killed more than 3400 people, including an estimated 891 civilians.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/201311691547863674.html

If anyone has artwork that would sufficiently illustrate this article or any others here, send them to in.  When I read about drones I can only think of making a large charcoal drawing of a dark, evil hole in the ground. When I do a new one I’ll post it here. Drones are death from the sky, almost Biblical in their purpose and end result — God raining down death from above, and it makes me think of stories like that from the Bible. That leads to the thought that we are regressing as human civilization in many ways, not progressing. It’s like the politicians have never read good science fiction and have no idea what they should be doing. Instead, they are using such amazing technology and knowledge for destructive purposes, all to protect the “holy American public” from some mythological threat.

Why don’t the politicians ask us how scared we really are before they unleash these drone attacks that kill so many people?  I would guess most people are more scared of things like losing their jobs, not having enough money to pay bills, and about bills and safety here at home, in general.

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The War At Home

schoolshootingsketch

Published on Saturday, December 15, 2012 by Common Dreams

A Culture That Condones The Killing Of Children And Teaches Children To Kill

by Lucinda Marshall

The Sandy Hook massacre isn’t just about the need for gun control laws, it is about a culture that condones the killing of children and teaches children that killing is okay.

It is about a country addicted to violence on television and movie screens.

It is about cuts in education spending.

It is about giving the military free access to our schools where they regale our children with romanticized delusions of military righteousness.

It is about environmental and health policies that expose our children to all manner of toxins in the air, land and water.

It is about thinking we have the right to kill children with drones or by dropping toxic munitions on their countries that cause birth defects and miscarriages.

It is about saddling our children with crippling education debt and no prospect for jobs.

It is about telling boys (and men) they have to be tough and to fight and kill for what they want or think is right.

It is about a national policy that denies children basic rights and systemically teaches them that violence is okay.

And it is about a media so insensitive that it thinks it is okay to shove a microphone in the face of young victims in the name of sensationalized 24/7 cable “news” while under-reporting the root causes of this tragedy.

Sandy Hook did not happen because of a lone, disturbed young man and it is not an isolated incident. It is an epidemic and we are all to blame. And today (and tomorrow and every day after that) is the time to confront this self-inflicted tragedy.

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AWA Denounces and Rejects This Violence

Palestinian Civilians Bear the Brunt of Unrelenting Bombings in U.S.-Backed Attack on Gaza

President Obama, who “won” a Nobel Prize for Peace soon after his initial election,  has vowed full support for Israel’s “self defense” even though all media outlets describe the Israeli violence as an “offensive”.  As any sports fan knows, offense is not defense. Self defense would be rightly defined as fighting against the latest escalation of Israeli aggression, which was started with an assassination by Netanyahu to bolster his re-election chances. (Israeli violence against Palestinians is literally non-stop). But all that’s too obvious for the mainstream corporate media.

The corporate media (which profits from all wars)  focuses on crying Israeli people “terrorized” by so-called “Hamas rockets”, failing to mention that Hamas is the democratically-elected government of Gaza and about as much a terrorist organization as the government of Israel, (and the United States).  If it weren’t for Hamas, and their suppliers, everyone in Gaza would probably be dead or in prisoner camps or dying of starvation by now.

When American drone strikes fall on Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen and elsewhere, it’s very odd that we don’t label that “terrorism” and recognize the “right” of those in those countries to “defend themselves.”

Yet, all these players are violent, and all should stop the violence.   But when one side insists they are “right” and has the right to “defend themselves” and the other side, presumably, does not — the violence will continue forever.  That is a certainty.

Every leader of every country knows this, and every leader lies to its population about that truth.  And the corporate media lies to all of us.

From Democracy Now: (aka real media)

President Obama has announced his full support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip even as dozens of Palestinians, including many civilians, continue to be killed by U.S.-supplied weaponry. At least 95 Palestinians have been killed in air strikes by warplanes and drones. More than 700 have been wounded, including 200 children. On Sunday, a massive air strike leveled a home in Gaza City killing 12 people, including 10 members of the same family. Over the past week, rockets fired from Gaza have killed three Israelis. We go to Gaza to speak with Raji Sourani, an award-winning human rights lawyer and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza. (From Democracynow.org)

Guest:
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