It's useful to have one of the supposedly credible rating agencies say that the Bush tax cuts should expire, so okay, flog it.
But really, who cares what the hell S&P thinks?
In the reality-based community, they have no credibility at at all. Their original threat contained a minor ($2 Trillion, whoops!) error of assumption, and when corrected, they just shrugged and issued another threat and the downgrade anyway.
The fact that they included revenues in their report is classic fake even-handedness. It'll never happen, they know it, and they're ultimately only serving their Wall St. masters by feeding debtficit hysteria, the bipartisan solution to which will always be pain for ordinary people.
The senior executives and Board of S&P should all be in Supermax, not pontificating in the press and in front of Congress. There are millions of people without jobs and literally thousands dead (yes, poverty and uninsurance kill) in part because of their ridiculously false AAA ratings of subprime loan based investment products.
so, yeah, "S&P sez raise taxes on the rich." Great. But it's because we need more austerity, not more spending. Don't kid yourself.
"Likewise for telling people to enlist; unless they are going to be fighter jet pilots, they wouldn’t get to be involved in Libya."
Except, of course they will. Quick, go sign up for the CIA, whose "boots" are already "on the ground." It's always been a technological fantasy that this will resolve with air power. The odds are that we will have to "arm the rebels," which, as Reuters is now reporting, of course, already means "covert action," and then next overt military advisors, and so on and war without end, amen.
I'm a regular reader with great respect for your intellect and passion. But you've fallen victim to a hustle.
In my view, the appropriate place for intervention on behalf of democracy is Bahrain, where our weapons, our money and our buddies are massacring and disappearing protesters. We have influence that could be exercised without blowing things up. Congress could have done as much for democracy by voting to suspend military aid to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia as it has by sitting by and cheering our almighty Commander in Chief as he gins up another regime change with a pack of lies and tons of flaming steel.
Just don't see how you can read the text as exoneration of the Bush Administration and Glaspie. the border dispute was the ostensible casus belli, or at least one of them, and we proclaimed no interest in it whatsoever.
There's no message indicating any potential consequences to Iraq for military action. In this situation, with troops massed on the border, diplomacy calls for much more forceful language if the state in question intends to respond militarily. Nowhere in the cable does Glaspie deliver any message along the lines of "the U.S. considers the territorial integrity of Kuwait to be a vital American interest and we will take any necessary action to secure that integrity." Quite the opposite. On the pretextual question of the border, we take no position.
I think Glenn Greenwald's take today is closer to the truth than yours or El Pais. It was a green light. No apologies necessary. It's certainly not a clear exoneration.
What's particularly outrageous about Glaspie's comment on the border is that after Iraq invaded, Bush deliberately ignored Soviet efforts to negotiate a withdrawal linked to a settlement of the border dispute, efforts that contemporaneous news accounts suggested may have had some possibility for success. Obviously, "negotiating" a border dispute while occupying the other party to the dispute is a disgraceful violation of the UN charter. But the Bush Administration refused even to pursue it as a resolution to the conflict, pushing forward with a military attack, even though the action might have been avoided through a forced resolution of an issue on which the US months earlier professed no interest at all.
The results -- hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the beginning of the catastrophic degradation of the Iraqi economy and public health systems, continued US military presence in Saudi Arabia, which became a favored cause of Al-Qaeda, the patriotic usurpation of expected reordering of domestic fiscal priorities post-Cold War, etc. -- were absolutely terrible for both Americans and the Middle East.
It's useful to have one of the supposedly credible rating agencies say that the Bush tax cuts should expire, so okay, flog it.
But really, who cares what the hell S&P thinks?
In the reality-based community, they have no credibility at at all. Their original threat contained a minor ($2 Trillion, whoops!) error of assumption, and when corrected, they just shrugged and issued another threat and the downgrade anyway.
The fact that they included revenues in their report is classic fake even-handedness. It'll never happen, they know it, and they're ultimately only serving their Wall St. masters by feeding debtficit hysteria, the bipartisan solution to which will always be pain for ordinary people.
The senior executives and Board of S&P should all be in Supermax, not pontificating in the press and in front of Congress. There are millions of people without jobs and literally thousands dead (yes, poverty and uninsurance kill) in part because of their ridiculously false AAA ratings of subprime loan based investment products.
so, yeah, "S&P sez raise taxes on the rich." Great. But it's because we need more austerity, not more spending. Don't kid yourself.
"Likewise for telling people to enlist; unless they are going to be fighter jet pilots, they wouldn’t get to be involved in Libya."
Except, of course they will. Quick, go sign up for the CIA, whose "boots" are already "on the ground." It's always been a technological fantasy that this will resolve with air power. The odds are that we will have to "arm the rebels," which, as Reuters is now reporting, of course, already means "covert action," and then next overt military advisors, and so on and war without end, amen.
I'm a regular reader with great respect for your intellect and passion. But you've fallen victim to a hustle.
In my view, the appropriate place for intervention on behalf of democracy is Bahrain, where our weapons, our money and our buddies are massacring and disappearing protesters. We have influence that could be exercised without blowing things up. Congress could have done as much for democracy by voting to suspend military aid to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia as it has by sitting by and cheering our almighty Commander in Chief as he gins up another regime change with a pack of lies and tons of flaming steel.
Just don't see how you can read the text as exoneration of the Bush Administration and Glaspie. the border dispute was the ostensible casus belli, or at least one of them, and we proclaimed no interest in it whatsoever.
There's no message indicating any potential consequences to Iraq for military action. In this situation, with troops massed on the border, diplomacy calls for much more forceful language if the state in question intends to respond militarily. Nowhere in the cable does Glaspie deliver any message along the lines of "the U.S. considers the territorial integrity of Kuwait to be a vital American interest and we will take any necessary action to secure that integrity." Quite the opposite. On the pretextual question of the border, we take no position.
I think Glenn Greenwald's take today is closer to the truth than yours or El Pais. It was a green light. No apologies necessary. It's certainly not a clear exoneration.
What's particularly outrageous about Glaspie's comment on the border is that after Iraq invaded, Bush deliberately ignored Soviet efforts to negotiate a withdrawal linked to a settlement of the border dispute, efforts that contemporaneous news accounts suggested may have had some possibility for success. Obviously, "negotiating" a border dispute while occupying the other party to the dispute is a disgraceful violation of the UN charter. But the Bush Administration refused even to pursue it as a resolution to the conflict, pushing forward with a military attack, even though the action might have been avoided through a forced resolution of an issue on which the US months earlier professed no interest at all.
The results -- hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, the beginning of the catastrophic degradation of the Iraqi economy and public health systems, continued US military presence in Saudi Arabia, which became a favored cause of Al-Qaeda, the patriotic usurpation of expected reordering of domestic fiscal priorities post-Cold War, etc. -- were absolutely terrible for both Americans and the Middle East.