The Try-Works

You Try-Works readers do know how I love Mr. Fish.

And I should be fucking pistol-whipped for not having these up earlier.  My apologies, gentle(wo)men.  Don’t y’all never stop.

Happy 4th of July, Enjoy the Barbecue!!!

Why We Say . . .Fuck the Troops

With this kind of spirit in town, do you really think anyone’s gonna miss T.A.R.D. come August?

If you’re like me, dear reader, you’ve been pondering exactly why CodePink, United for Peace and Justice, Tent State and the rest of T.A.R.D. have taken it upon themselves to do everything they can fucking dream up to decimate local organizing around the DNC here in Denver.

As some of you have pointed out, it’s simply what these corporatized activist organizations do.  Right?  They blow into town, systematically plunder the work that’s been built at the grassroots level, crush local perspectives, drown out voices from communities of color, and ensure whatever so-called oppositional points of view left are pristine, lily-white, and entirely fucking useless.  It’s business as usual for these assholes.

But I’m curious as to why.  What do these little shits have to gain?  Or, a better question, given their nature: what purpose do they serve?

Well, I’ve got an answer.  And I’m gonna precede that answer with the following from Baudrillard’s discussion of Watergate in Simulacra and Simulation:

The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal — in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: “The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated”; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.

But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes “relation of force” to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.

Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality — these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn’t give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is “enlightened” thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. “Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc.” — as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).

In an admittedly reductive nutshell, then, that’s where I see T.A.R.D.  The members therein don’t actually oppose the war any more than the Watergate scandal opposes Capital.  Instead, they provide moral cover for the population at large.

We cluster-bombed civilians?
Don’t blame me, I adhere to solely non-violent principles.

US contractors raped prepubescent boys to garner information?
Don’t blame me, I lit a candle.

More than a million civilians have been exterminated since 2003?
Don’t blame me, I wore pink.

In fact, if you think about it, the members of T.A.R.D. are necessary for the furtherance of the war.  If they didn’t exist, the state would have to invent them.  Without them to provide that moral cover, to help bridge the cognitive dissonance inevitably caused by a culture that prattles on about human rights while committing a fucking holocaust, someone might actually do something to, well, stop the war.

In other words, CodePink, United for Peace and Justice, and the rest of T.A.R.D. are as necessary to ensuring Iraq remains an abattoir as .223 rounds.  They function as an ideological Free Speech Zone, mandating the limits of what is allowable in protest, and restricting dissent.  They serve to provide a safe, State-sanctioned zone for the exercise of limited rights, and to express a purely symbolic opposition to the war.

The only problem being, of course, that the war isn’t symbolic.  And neither are those one million and more dead Iraqis.

They’re just fucking dead.

And, in part, they have T.A.R.D. to thank for it.

Update:  On cue, your T.A.R.D. representative, in the Rocky Mountain News.

The city of Denver has conditionally approved permits for 1,000 local Democrats to host an Aug. 26 Democratic National Convention “watching party” on a big-screen TV at City Park and - just a Frisbee throw away - an encampment for 20,000 to 50,000 war protesters vowing to “Confront the Democrats” for failing to use their control of Congress to cut Iraq war funding.

“How fun will a Denver Democratic convention watching party be with 50,000 protesters all around protesting us?” asked Julie Kronenberger, a Denver County Democratic Party member working to obtain city permits for their night event at City Park Pavilion and adjacent band shell.

But leaders on both sides of the political divide believe they can find common ground at the park.

“I think it’s great. I think the dialogue between the people at Tent State University and the (local) Democrats will probably be more democratic than anything that’s going on inside the convention,” said Adam Jung, chief organizer for Tent State, which describes itself as “a positive, youth-led initiative to fund education instead of war.”

“We’re not there to chastise rank-and-file Democratic Party members. Many of them probably agree with our position on the war,” said Jung.

He said the young protesters’ beef is with national Democratic Party leaders, including presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Jung fears Obama is making a “run to the right” and wavering on vows to withdraw troops from Iraq 16 months after taking office.

Yet, he added, “I can’t foresee us doing anything that would make (local Dems’) night unpleasant. In fact, I think they would be welcome to check out what we’re doing. I think they might have a lot of fun.”

Keep reading.

Fucking pig.

And I mean that quite literally.  As Glenn Spagnuolo alludes in an interview with Peter Boyles this morning, Adam Jung(k) of Tent State (and a founding member of T.A.R.D.) is working with the city to draw people away from downtown Denver’s Civic Center Park, which is home base for the protests and protesters.

From Mr. Fish.

I apologize for my absence of late. Been busy with ancillary projects. Posting shall pick up, and in the meantime, the finest video ever posted to the web, and I mean ever, from the titans at RAIMD.

Well done, gentlefolk. This is the kind of shit that gets me up in the morning.

(Spotted here.)

Read to the end.

And, just for the record, fuck you Clay Evans.  As commenters to your column note, your rag runs all the same skewed AP horseshit about the war as your competitors.  You can claim to be anti-war because you write a yearly editorial, but how’s about including some actual fucking news about the war?

You are the media, asshole.  Instead of whining about the lack of Winter Soldier coverage in the media, whyn’t you, like, cover it?

Democracy Now ran great coverage last week of Winter Soldier testimony, wherein US troops confessed their part in the ongoing holocaust in Iraq, which you can find here, here and here.

I strongly suggest those of you whining about my posting pictures showing the human cost of the war in Iraq give it a listen.

I’d prefer you enlisted and shipped out to get your ass fucking blown off, but, hell, since we all know you as the cowardly little shits you are, I’ll settle for your listening to a little audio.

You can also get video of Winter Soldier testimony straight from the source, here.

(Thanks to Rolanda.)

(Thanks to Rolanda.)

Hell, she can’t even stop lying about her husband’s penchant for carpetbombing Iraq civilians on a whim.

Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He said today: “If facts matter, then it should matter that Hillary Clinton chose to rely on such a basic falsehood during the debate when she flatly stated: ‘We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors.’ In fact, just prior to the Clinton administration’s several days of bombing Iraq in December 1998, the U.N.’s UNSCOM weapons inspectors left Iraq when UNSCOM head Richard Butler withdrew them — because the Clinton administration made it clear that the U.S. government was about to start bombing.”

Solomon added: “That false statement by Hillary Clinton during the debate Thursday evening came as she was trying to verbally navigate what were her most difficult moments of the night: about her vote for the October 2002 congressional resolution that authorized an invasion of Iraq. At that point in the debate, she was arguing that she had made what she called a ‘reasoned judgment’ which assumed that Saddam Hussein had a record of blocking inspectors so they couldn’t find his weapons of mass destruction. In the process, her extreme distortion of history — asserting that the four-year absence of U.N. inspectors from Iraq was because Saddam ‘threw out inspectors’ in December 1998 — goes to the core of her candor about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and her rationale for voting to authorize it.

“Any journalists interested in fact-checking Senator Clinton’s claim that ‘We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors’ would be well-advised to stick to relying on the original reportage of what occurred in December 1998. Since then, a self-referential myth has developed in retrospective news coverage of those events, with journalists and politicians alike frequently recycling the false assertion that the four-year absence of U.N. inspectors from Iraq began when Saddam kicked them out of the country.”

The rest.

Your mainstream media: irrelevant during the build-up to war, irrelevant now.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 45,000 kilograms of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 45,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 16 kilometers south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 45,000-kilogram barrage, has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as “al-Qaeda”, so in situations like this it’s hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer’s first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined “The tragedy of Guernica” and called the assault “unparalleled in military history”. (Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

The self-evident barbarism of the event - the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population - caused international horror. It was news across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems and other works of art.

. . .

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed there - in person or by satellite phone - to check out the damage. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only significant if it’s of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the “bombs” can be produced at approximately “the cost of a pizza”, (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 45,000 kilograms of bombs just doesn’t have the ring of something that matters.

The rest.

The U.S. military faced complaints Tuesday from its Sunni allies over claims that still more civilians had been killed by American forces — amplifying tensions as the Pentagon tries to calm anger over an air strike last week that claimed innocent lives.

The disputes have further strained ties with anti-al-Qaida fighters considered crucial in turning the tide against extremist violence.

The latest deaths occurred early Tuesday when U.S. soldiers, saying they acted on intelligence, stormed a squat, mud-brick house in the village of Adwar, 15 kilometers (10 miles) south of Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. The predominantly Sunni area is home to many former members of Saddam’s regime, and has been the frequent site of U.S. raids.

The U.S. military said a gunbattle broke out after the troops came under small-arms fire by two suspected terrorist cell members as they entered the building. It acknowledged a woman was killed and a child wounded but said it was not clear who shot them, adding an investigation was under way.

Iraqi police, relatives and neighbors said a couple and their 19-year-old son were shot to death in their beds late Monday. Doors in the small house were pockmarked with bullet-holes and pillows and other bedding on the floor were soaked with blood, according to

The U.S. military reported only three dead, but Iraqi police said two young girls were wounded and one died Tuesday at a hospital.

It was the second time in as many days that the U.S. military conceded involvement in the death of Iraqi civilians.

On Monday, the military said it had accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians, including a child, in an airstrike late Saturday targeting al-Qaida in Iraq south of Baghdad.

The rest.

Jessica Corry, who you’ll remember from my reaction to a spectacularly fucking dumb article in the Rocky Mountain News, has a new spectacularly dumb fucking article over at New West. I’m used to columnists from the Independence Institute not being the brightest of the bright, but in Ms. Corry’s case, I have to wonder that her brains don’t dribble out her ears with every keystroke.

This is my favorite:

To make their extremely debatable point that Christopher Columbus was a murderer, rapist and slave trader, they splashed fake blood peppered with doll heads onto the streets. They then blocked the street, at which point 80 people were arrested.

The rest.

What the fuck’s debatable about that? Have you done any research that didn’t take place at your keyboard in your fucking jammies, Ms. Corry?

The historical record’s pretty clear on Columbus. He traded slaves, you need read no further than his own writings to verify that. He also raped Indians — or at least kidnapped woman and gave them to his underlings to beat and rape — we’ve got diaries to that effect written by the motherfuckers sailing with him who were doing the raping. As to whether or not he was a murderer, again you don’t have to dig too deep to find evidence of it. No deeper than Bartolome de Las Casas, who sailed with Columbus.

That’s one source for each of the points you consider “debatable”. There are plenty more. You can argue that what Columbus did was worth the human cost because of the ensuing colonization of the Americas — it puts you on the same moral plane as Hitler, but you can argue it — but you can’t fucking argue that Columbus was not a murderer, a rapist and a slave trader. That train’s left the station, dear. At least amongst those of us who visit, like, libraries for our historical information.

Really, where the fuck does the Independence Institute come up with the mudheaded idiots?

Anyway, as much fun as it is to poke fun at Ms. Corry’s monolithic ignorance, I should be kind. After all, she did provide me with the heartiest belly laugh I’ve had in some time.

By continuing on, Lane and his radical clients have done nothing to help their cause, especially in my household, where my two-year-old daughter is now deeply afraid of American Indians.

Her fear is not the result of some bigoted Hollywood movie production. Rather, it’s because of the radical activists themselves. On a morning walk with my husband not far from our home in downtown Denver on the day of the last parade, my daughter heard the sound of drums and wanted a closer look. As she leaned forward in her stroller, protestors jumped out in front of her, splashing their “blood” onto the street.

Nearly four months later, she still talks about the event. Every time she hears the sound of a drum, she says “boom, boom, boom. Indians scare me, Mommy.”

I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be some kind of hamhanded attempt at irony, but, hell, I can’t help but take it as an imperative to action.

See, I’ve always been a little ambivalent about the fake blood, but now I plan on demanding it for each and every protest I attend.

Anything that scares the shit out of yuppie spawn has its fucking place.

And, gosh, just imagine how scary it must’ve been for those real flesh and blood brown babies getting fucking butchered by Columbus.

Or, for that matter, those flesh and blood brown babies being butchered in Iraq.

With the open encouragement of the Independence Institute.

Update: Interesting, by the way, how variable Ms. Corry’s tender sensibilities are. Fake blood on the street has her torturing prose into purple, yeah?

But being married to a fucking convicted rapist doesn’t seem to phase her in the least. (Scroll down to the comments.)

Local edition.

A Fort Carson soldier told Army investigators he and another soldier routinely shot at Iraqi civilians while on patrol in Baghdad, according to court records filed in a Colorado Springs homicide case.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command is investigating the alleged war crimes.

Pfc. Bruce Bastien Jr., who faces a first-degree murder charge in the December death of Spc. Kevin Shields, told a CIC agent “about potential crimes which occurred in Iraq during these soldiers’ deployment there,” the records reveal.

The rest.

Oops.

A group of gunmen killed in U.S. airstrikes in Iraq last week were pro-U.S. fighters, an American military officer said on Sunday, despite the military’s public statements that they were insurgents.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. military officials had talked to Sunni Arab tribal sheikhs in Taji, just north of Baghdad, to express their regret for the loss of life in the attack, which took place last Tuesday.

“There was some confusion and we were not able to turn off the attack quickly enough,” he said of the airstrikes that continued for several hours despite frantic phone calls from local tribal leaders to the U.S. base in Taji.

“We have talked to them and explained our sorrow over the incident and the loss of lives of volunteers trying to bring order to their neighbourhoods,” the officer said.

The incident threatens to derail a carefully constructed relationship between U.S. forces and anti-al Qaeda Sunni tribes in Taji and has put the spotlight on operating procedures for tribal police units the U.S. military is forming around Iraq.

“If they (the U.S. military) do not give us a proper reason for what happened, we will withdraw from the Awakening Council and let al Qaeda return,” said Sheikh Shathir Abid Salim, leader of the anti-al Qaeda group. His brother was among those killed.

The military said in a statement last week that it killed 25 suspected insurgents in operations targeting al Qaeda militants near the capital. Tribal leaders told Reuters U.S. warplanes had mistakenly bombed their men, killing 45.

The rest.

A catchy little jingle for those among you with those magnetic abominations plastered all over your soccer-mobile.

And, yeah, it’s wholly derivative of John Prine’s classic anti-war jingle, as follows, but you won’t catch me complaining.

That consists of:

1. losing your ass in a nonsense war that has nothing to do with your so-called war on terror;

2. running a brutal occupation which has degenerated into wholesale murder and torture on your part;

3. exponentially increasing recruitment for the terrorist elements you purport to be at war with;

4. remaining wholly incapable of finding those who lead said terrorist elements, let alone nullifying them.

What’s your next move?

Declare war on your own citizenry.

After all, at least you can find most of them.

Under the guise of a bill that calls for the study of “homegrown terrorism,” Congress is apparently trying to broaden the definition of terrorism to encompass both First Amendment political activity and traditional forms of protest such as nonviolent civil disobedience, according to civil liberties advocates, scholars and historians.

The proposed law, The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R. 1955), was passed by the House of Representative in a 404-6 vote Oct. 23. (The Senate is currently considering a companion bill, S. 1959.) The act would establish a “National Commission on the prevention of violent radicalization and ideologically based violence” and a university-based “Center for Excellence” to “examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence in the United States” in order to develop policy for “prevention, disruption and mitigation.”

Many observers fear that the proposed law will be used against U.S.-based groups engaged in legal but unpopular political activism, ranging from political Islamists to animal-rights and environmental campaigners to radical right-wing organizations. There is concern, too, that the bill will undermine academic integrity and is the latest salvo in a decade-long government grab for power at the expense of civil liberties.

David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University who studies government surveillance and harassment of dissident scholars, says the bill “is a shot over the bow of environmental activists, animal-rights activists, anti-globalization activists and scholars who are working in the Middle East who have views that go against the administration.” Price says some right-wing outfits such as gun clubs are also threatened because “[they] would be looked at with suspicion under the bill.”

The rest.

(Thanks to the folks at Hitchens Watch.)

Christopher Hitchens would like you to give thanks for that abattoir we call Iraq this Turkey Day.

That doesn’t even really warrant comment, but nonetheless I’d like to give thanks for that wholly delightful — albeit slightly gruesome –  act of conscience wreaked by the poor gentleman assigned to shave Hitch’s testicles.

Waiting, waiting . . .