'Tis the Season to be Jolly

But what's to be jolly about?

Get It Try It

'Tis the season to be jolly. But who has anything to be jolly about?

Ask the people of Donbass. Their revenue streams are cut off, so is their energy. There might not be so much bombing and shelling right now, but they're in a bad way.

Ask the people of Gaza. Actually, better not ask them. You don't want to hear what they have to say.

Ask the people of Sicily. They have a wonderful climate, but they're not happy either.

Ask the people of Europe. They have a refugee calamity on their hands.

Ask the people of Syria. They've had a civil war on their hands for years. Except that civil war is anything but civil.

Ask the people of some 160 countries. They might not be all that bad off all the time, but that's because they succeed in not thinking about the greater reality in their situation.

Ask Kiriakou, Snowden, Manning, Assange. Assange might be holding his own, but he's a Huckleberry Finn who loves the wide open spaces. Ask Manning who's working off a 35 year prison sentence for telling people about the lies of his government. Ask Snowden who's well taken care of in Russia (which is actually a fucking decent place) but who'd rather be home. Ask Kiriakou, or Barrett Brown, or dozens of others who've only dared speak truth to power.

There's one man at the top of this rubble. His picture is below. Believe it or not, he actually won the Alfred Nobel Prize for Peace. He did this before he actually did anything to deserve it. Which is actually a good thing, as everything after he got that prize has proved he didn't deserve it. And he actually had the gall to challenge George Orwell at the podium in Oslo and, with great patience, explain to the assembled crowd why war in fact is peace.



He just engineered the release of a prisoner from GITMO, that illegal camp on Cuba that he promised to close. GITMO, as you may remember, is a chunk of Cuban land that the US just sort of yanked from the Cubans over one hundred years ago. What the Cubans felt about that is irrelevant.

GITMO is a great place. They got McDonald's restaurants there! Just think about it: spreading superior US culture around the globe. And collecting people in torture cells from around the globe. As one commentator pointed out the other day, the whole idea of GITMO is self-defeating: you can't conduct a trial against any of those 'suspects' anyway, as any testimony they give is already tainted by the fact that they've been tortured. Another one of those great ideas from the leaders of the free world.

The US - and the man above - can't stand the fact that Russia's finally cleaning up their mess in Syria. But Russia was specifically asked by Syria to come in and clean up. The US forces, who've been there for years, have never been asked. Heck - they just sort of go in anyway! (Some would call that an invasion...)

Because, you see, the man above has declared that the ordinary rules don't apply when it comes to him or his country. No, they're exceptional. They don't have to follow the rules. They invade country after country (and have military bases in most of the rest) and they or their puppets bomb and shell the shit out of people, and then... well, in the case of Syria, someone else has to come in and clean up. Businessmen connected to the guy above get rich in the process, even if taxpayers in the US go broke once again paying for it all. (The wars of the US are not failures. Peoples lose out all over the place, but the Big Money profit. Otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.)

But the government of the above person, a president of the US, has to be the worst ever. The incompetence is staggering. Perhaps earlier governments were just as corrupt. But we didn't see the corruption as clearly as we do today.

That POTUS is now miffed that Russia's cleaning up Syria. He's so miffed that he's once again going to invade another country. He's going to put 'boots on the ground' in Syria. Of course he promised - stated unequivocally - that he never would, but what does that matter? Who takes a POTUS seriously anymore?

But he didn't ask Syria for permission. And Syria didn't ask him for help. They've been powerless to stop what's going on. And the Syrians elected that government, so the man above is offending the will of the Syrian people.

The POTUS isn't the entire US government. He's not John McCain. He's not John Kerry. He's not William Kristol, or Robert Kagan, or Victoria Nuland. But he's the POTUS, and he gets to wear the cool Air Force One jacket. He gets to sleep in the White House all he wants. And he can tell the bastards in Washington to shut the fuck up and do things differently.

But he won't.

Eight years ago, the US had a vicious race for POTUS between two minority candidates: the man above and a woman. The woman represented a bigger minority than the man, but supporting his minority was somehow more trendy. And he had a better run campaign. And he was a natural at reading off tele-prompters.

This time, eight years later, it's the woman. Again. Except we know a lot more about her than we did in 2008. In fact, we know too much.

The country's first black president turned out to be a humanitarian disaster; what further calamities await that country - and the world - with the country's first female POTUS?

OK, so go back to being jolly again.