I was preparing my entry about NumbersUSA and hate groups while I was watching The Young Turks rerun and what I saw made me interrupt that entry to begin this new one. I don’t know all Jesse Ventura’s viewpoints or whether he is really a Goldwater Republican, but I could not agree more with that person who may not a scholar but in three interviews has articulated liberal viewpoints with much more consistency than many other shy, fragile, almost teary, insecure-when-not-approved-by-the-host Democrats.
In the second part of this entry I am going to post an update some previous entries related to the swine flu and, of course, the poll.
- The fist part of this entry is based in the letter I sent to Cenk Uygur, host of the Young Turks (http://www.theyoungturks.com/). In its May 19 edition, Cenk presented videos of interviews made to Ventura in the Hannity’s show and in The View as well as the puerile reaction of Joe Scarborough. In short, Jesse Ventura is great! He is not a library but he thinks, he doesn’t let the host to cut him when making controversial comments and he does not repeat cool talking points. He thinks.
a) In the interview with Hannity (http://www.youtube.com/...) Hannity began comparing Obama's first year deficit with Bush's deficit of the whole eight years (what, as he didn’t debated projections, statistically is 100% absurd. Want an easy example? The Clinton’s first year deficit compared to the surplus he left at the end of his eight years as President.) Ventura crashed Hannity’s ignorance saying how Obama had inherited Bush's fiscal wild party (to what I add, worse, Bush's wild lack of supervision that made possible $44 trillion in unsupervised credit default swaps with a SEC on its knees) and now Obama will have to "fix Bush’s mess" (Worse, Obama has been forced to make heavy spending to prevent the collapse of the financial system, prevent an energetic collapse, prevent a health-care collapse and to prevent a competitive collapse resulting from a declining level of education and a decrepit state of our infrastructure. On the other hand, Bush’s spending went to tax cuts for his pals and to a war of choice with contracts for his cronies to open the Iraqi oil market to other of his cronies. There are expenses and there are expenses.)
Then Hannity naively tried to trick Ventura saying that Bush had kept us safe because we were not hit again after 9/11. Ventura crashed him even worse saying what we know: Not only 9/11 happened eight months into the Bush’s administration but also he had received memos warning him and he didn’t even try to prevent the attack. Hannity’s talking point is based on the premise that al-Qaeda main goal is hitting us again. How Hannity knows whether al-Qaeda’s main goal is hitting us again? It had to be Salman Rushdie the first person in America who in Real Time with Bill Maher explained in TV for the first time that that tale wasn't true! Nobody else in the American media (except for Olbermann, Maddow, Moyers and Zakaria) has decided to use his brain again? For those who still read books in the mainstream media, there is also information in Imperial Hubris, a very conservative book which nevertheless in this end makes a very good analysis. On the other hand, in what precedent of the long counterinsurgency history Hannity bases his assertion that torture works in ticking-bomb scenarios?! Why nobody makes this simple question? Insurgencies are worldwide as old as the American Revolution! And when is Hannity going to collaborate with the troops accepting Keith Olbermann's invitation to be waterboarded?
After that, what came was a merciless beating in the best UFC style: Hannity criticized Obama for using the Teleprompter and Ventura gave examples of Obama’s intelligence decrying Bush’s; Hannity said that Bush inherited a recession (meaning the low impact and short recession following the end of the Technological bubble), aggravated by the impact of 9/11 (even though, besides effects in sectors like airlines and insurance companies, 9/11 only made a bit deeper a correction of the Dow that began before 9/11 and continued even after the Dow temporarily recovered from the impact of 9/11), to what Ventura replied saying what he intuitively, with all reason, had said before; then Hannity said that bin Laden had been offered by Sudan to Clinton in a silver platter (Actually Richard Clarke has a detailed testimony about this in his book Against All Enemies. Clarke was in the Clinton Administration and, has 100% more credibility than Hannity could have in all his lives piled together, in case you believe in reincarnation), to which Ventura reminded Hannity the connection between the Bush and the bin-Laden families (what is evident for anybody who knows what the Carlyle Group is).
Finally, Hannity said that Reagan had brought "the longest period of peace and economic growth"? (Hasn’t he heard of the S&L scandal and the economic vulnerability he left for H. W. Bush so crippling his possibilities of reelection?), "ended the cold war" (Actually the Cold War began with Truman y went through all the Presidents in between. The soviet economy was doomed since its own conception and finally had to let Eastern Germany go in exchange of loans from German banks and could not contain the autonomy of the unions in Poland. Thus, when Reagan outspent the soviets in the military, so giving them the final shot, what he did was to accelerate an outcome from which the soviets had no way to escape but in a much more expensive way. Star Wars...? Somebody?)
b) In the interview with Larry King, (Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/...; Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/...) Ventura gave his opinions on Dick Cheney in opposition to his opinion of Colin Powell, intuitively made the difference between religious marriage and secular marriage, which have been absurdly combined by the Religious Right in order to illegitimately exclude homosexuals from the secular marriage. Ventura also intuitively got a very good point when he said that if torture worked, we already would have gotten bin-Laden. True. The French paratroopers in the 50s got one of the exceptional cases in which torture worked. One member broke before the 36 hours the FLN asked its members to stay silent in case they were captured and tortured and as a result the heads of the FLN in the Algerian Casbah were found and killed. That was in the 50s!
c) The interview in The View was also pretty good (http://www.youtube.com/...). Elisabeth Hasselbeck tried to use her ignorance and the decibels of her voice, very useful to tame Democrats, with Ventura. It backfired. What followed should be rated R for disturbing images. It was as if Ventura had read my last entries about torture ("Actually terrorists know torture exists and The Birth of a Nation was not a documentary" and "An executive letter for Sandy Tsao and Dan Choi and other updates") and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He asked Hasselbeck why torture advocates didn’t demand to torture McVeigh and Nichols, local terrorists, if torture was so effective and why we only seemed to find waterboarding acceptable when we "waterboard Muslims". He also denounced that we had created our Hanoi Hilton in Guantanamo; that it was absurd going after Pelosi’s alleged lie and not demanding answers from Bush and Cheney for lying us into the war of Iraq; repeated his opinions about Dick Cheney, which I share, denounced the myth of the Right about the positive results of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed making the precision that the useful information we extracted from him was obtained before waterboarding him. He also said that the only clear goal of using torture was to fabricate the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda and that "enhanced interrogation is Dick Cheney changing the word" for torture. When a morally and intellectually destroyed Hasselbeck tried to picture waterboarding as a hard but necessary measure comparing it to the rescue operation against Somali pirates, Ventura reminded her that the Somali pirates, different from the "enemy combatants", were not in our custody.
I don’t watch Joe Scarborough’s show any more for mental hygiene unless I see Lawrence O’Donnell in the screen. In the same edition of the Young Turks, Cenk showed clips of him with Nosferatu look-alike Rudy Giuliani criticizing Ventura. Scarborough began talking about the efficiency of waterbording (Please see my two entries mentioned previous subparagraph to see how historically baseless this assertion is. Maybe he found in the people, including minors, confessing to be witches thanks to torture techniques like waterboarding in Gambia and Nigeria proof of the effectiveness of waterboarding). Then Scarborough claimed that Ventura doesn’t know anything of waterboarding. It happens that Ventura was a Navy Seal waterboarded when he was part of the Sere School before being sent to Vietnam!
Then Scarborough reached O’Reilly levels. He said that Ventura was more concerned for the rights of terrorists. How does he know? Based on what evidence? Could anybody in his choreography tell Scarborough that al-Qaeda uses our attitude towards torture in his recruiting propaganda, about the effects of Abu-Ghraib in al-Qaeda’s recruiting? When are these clowns going to invite somebody learnt in counterinsurgency history, who has real information, and not mediocre politicians who, when Democrats, always look afraid and insecure, fragile, defenseless, almost always trying to find the middle point, while Republicans, always manly yell and scream to impose the weight of their ignorance and their prejudice?
Definitely, Ventura for Congress as Representative for Minnesota!
In the last part of Cenk’s program, he commented how Democrats had cut funds requested by Obama to close Guantanamo (What can save the Democratic Party of defeat even in the midst of victory?) while caving to demands of the military industrial complex to build unnecessary metallic elephants approving expenses the Secretary of Defense hadn’t asked. Then Cenk described Lindsey Graham as McCain’s Mini Me while showing how his flip-flopping on torture mirrored McCain’s. Finally (but not in that order), he interviewed Adam Green from MoveOn.org, which has opened a fundraising fund of $1 for each day Norm Coleman does not step out the race. An activist had nailed Coleman making him sign for the fund. That fund, which will help progressive candidates in the next mid-term elections, is over $98,000 at the moment. Then it was Michael Steele’s turn (to what I add my own commentaries). First Steele calls Limbaugh an entertainer, then apologizes to Limbaugh. Then, Steele says that the era of the Republican party apologizing is over. Second act: Steele proposes his plan of rap and hats to make the Republican message look different and the Republican party tries to cut his funds. The involuntary comedy of Michael Steele and his Republican friends fortunately does not seem to end. But frankly, it must suck to be Michael Steele, especially when he shaves and see his face in the mirror.
- Update to my previous entries "Swine flu, schizophrenia, xenophobia and other diseases. Homage to Michelle Malkin", "Olbermann gives us another lesson of journalism. Update to my previous entry" and "Barbara Hollingsworth’s ethnically convenient solution for our health and employment problems". Actually, this part also complements the above mentioned entries about torture. Let’s see.
In this part I am going to write about a social disease, one that from 1993 to 2004 has cost their lives to 440 women and probably to other up to 260 missing women just in Juarez. Since 1993, this disease has spread from Juarez to Mexicali, Nogales, Sonora, Chihuahua, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Leon, Mexico DF, Zihuatanejo, Cancun and Oaxaca, not to mention Guatemala. This is the testimony of Diana Washington Valdez ("Harvest of Women, Safari in the Mexican desert", 2005, Mexico DF). Guess what? Like in the swine flu, it happens the virus was also originated here. [The translations are going to be mine but I think the book is also available in English].
Murdered and missing women have reached the levels of an urban legend in Juarez. Different from an urban legend, though, the victims are real. In August 2001, General Mario Acosta was captured for collaborating with drug lord Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. Nevertheless, this personage had been long before linked to the dirty war in Mexico under the model approved by the School of the Americas, which we founded. The school of the Americas was our anti-Communist kick-ass version of counterinsurgency, approved and sponsored eagerly by Nixon and Reagan, which produced or inspired monsters like Rios Montt, Somoza, Trujillo, and Videla. Acosta learned in the School of the Americas the torture techniques applied in Mexico in the 70s. Like here, the members of the White Brigade (the paramilitary corps created to apply the teachings of the School of the Americas) were tortured as we tortured people under the Sere program as part of their training. According to a report by the State Department mentioned in Washington’s book, Acosta "was involved in death and missing cases of 143 people during the decade of the seventies." (Pp. 188-189) Francisco Quiroz, another general implicated in the same cases, would have already in the 70s approved the use of military planes to carry political prisoners as well as drugs. According to a testimony by Kate Doyle to The Washington Post quoted by Washington, our government would have known of the dirty war but didn’t mention it to Mexico to not harm "discussions about commerce and oil, in which it was more interested" (Pp. 189-191).
When in 1995 our government sponsored the "Chihuahua Pilot Project’ and in 1996 created the GAES program in the Mexican military to crackdown on the drug cartels, the relation of those School of Americas inspired members of the military with the drug cartels got closer and some of them even deserted the army to be full-time enforcers for the drug cartels. A mercenary operation Dropkick financed privately in 2004 also in Juarez had a similar ending. Guess where the pilot program GAES was launched? Juarez, Chihuahua. Guess what happened in 1993? Vicente Carrillo Fuentes took Juarez beating rival cartels. Guess what is known to be ritually used as initiation and enhancer of loyalties among people linked to the Carrillo’s cartel? White Brigade-style, inspired in the School of the Americas, torture. Which were the worst years of the violence against women? 1995 and 1996. (Pp. 189-191 and 232-233) If you take into account the legendary levels of corruption of especially the Northern Mexican states, you should not be surprised by the death of witnesses and even a lawyer, the missing evidence and the way the investigations have been systematically blocked especially by the state of Chihuahua reaching Pablo Escobar’s Colombia levels.
This is the story of the School of Americas virus, a virus we exported to Mexico before the swine flu, the lives it took and its legacy, for which Latin America should be grateful according to Pat Buchanan. Ungrateful Mexicans...!