When Ted Cruz lies, he appears to be praying. His lips narrow, almost disappearing into his face, and his eyebrows shift abruptly, rising like a drawbridge on his forehead into matching acute angles. He attains an appearance of supplication, an earnest desire that men and women need to listen, as God surely listens. Cruz has large ears; a straight nose with a fleshy tip, which shines in camera lights when he talks to reporters; straight black hair slicked back from his forehead like flattened licorice; thin lips; a long jaw with another knob of flesh at the base, also shiny in the lights. If, as Orwell said, everyone has the face he deserves at fifty, Cruz, who is only forty-two, has got a serious head start. For months, I sensed vaguely that he reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place who it was. Revelation has arrived: Ted Cruz resembles the Bill Murray of a quarter-century ago, when he played fishy, mock-sincere fakers. No one looked more untrustworthy than Bill Murray. The difference between the two men is that the actor was a satirist.
Cruz is not as iconographically satisfying as other American demagogues—Oliver North, say, whose square-jawed, unblinking evocation of James Stewart, John Wayne, and other Hollywood actors conveyed resolution. Or Ronald Reagan—Cruz’s reedy, unresonant voice lacks the husky timbre of Reagan’s emotion-clouded instrument, with its mixture of truculence and maudlin appeal.
Yet Cruz is amazingly sure-footed verbally. When confronted with a hostile question, he has his answer prepared well before the questioner stops talking. There are no unguarded moments, no slips or inadvertent admissions. He speaks swiftly, in the tones of sweet, sincere reason. How could anyone possibly disagree with him? His father is a Baptist, and Cruz himself has an evangelical cast to his language, but he’s an evangelical without consciousness of his own sins or vulnerability. He is conscious only of other people’s sins, which are boundless, and a threat to the republic; and of other people’s vulnerabilities and wounds, which he salts. If they have a shortage of vulnerabilities, he might make some up. When the Senate Armed Services Committee was discussing Chuck Hagel’s fitness to be Secretary of Defense, last February, Cruz, who had been in the Senate for about a month, said that Hagel was weak on Iran, adding, “It is at a minimum relevant to know if that two hundred thousand dollars that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.”
His strategy is universal aggression, aimed at everyone. Well, not quite everyone—lately, his popularity with the Tea Party cohort has increased. And at a recent rally at the convention of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, he was greeted with heated adoration. But normally Cruz resembles one of those war chariots with blades flashing from the wheels; he tries to cut up everything in his path. When things go wrong, he only sharpens the blades. From the Senate, he urged House Republicans into a government shutdown and a sustained threat not to extend the debt ceiling. When the President held firm and the Republican leadership backed down, the fallout included collapsing poll numbers for the Republican Party and the possibility, mentioned by nonpartisan political analysts, that the Democrats could pick up a serious number of seats in the House in 2014.
But, rather than acknowledge any responsibility, Cruz told Dana Bash, from CNN, that “the single most damaging thing that has happened to Republicans for 2014 is all of the Senate Republicans coming out attacking the House Republicans, attacking those pushing the effort to defund Obamacare, and lining themselves up opposite the American people.” He has repeated this charge—the betrayal, the stab in the back—in many forms. He has been wronged, his cohort has been wronged, the American people have been wronged, traduced by weaklings and cowards in the ranks. In Cruz’s rhetoric, the American people are always being wronged.
Last February, when he questioned Chuck Hagel, some senators suggested that his insinuating manner—the bullying slurs, the implication of treason—reminded them of Joseph McCarthy. Since then, comparing him to McCarthy has become commonplace. Physically, though, there is little resemblance. McCarthy had a heavy, rounded head, a dark-shadowed jaw, and thick eyebrows. He spoke in an amazing strangled feverish whine, which now seems almost a put-on. There was a “network of professors and teachers who are getting their orders from Moscow, from an organization that wants to destroy this nation, that wants to corrupt the minds of youth,” and so on. It was the sound of fear: Communism was taking over the country imminently, and he was the only one capable of preventing capitulation. The conspiracy was so vast (it included the United States Army and perhaps President Eisenhower) that he couldn’t actually describe it. He could only imply its extent—his voice, with its elongated vowels and lengthened final consonants, told us that evil, unless it was stopped, would go on and on, consuming everything.
Cruz speaks crisply. Still, like McCarthy, he evokes a menace that is destroying the nation: Obamacare, which is killing jobs, obliterating businesses, demoralizing everyone. Obamacare is his Communism, a conspiracy that is the main impediment to economic growth. It is a malaise that is particularly hurting “single moms, Hispanics, African-Americans”—a brazen touch on Cruz’s part, since it is exactly those three groups whose interests Republican policies tend to ignore. It takes a certain ingenuity to suggest that an attempt to insure the powerless is rendering them powerless. One of Cruz’s tricks is to turn his enemies’ words back on them so that they stand accused in their own language. Meanwhile, he remains, at least rhetorically, invulnerable behind a mask of sincerity.
Cruz voted no on the bipartisan immigration bill, no on the farm bill, no on the continuing resolution; he voted against the confirmations of John Brennan, Chuck Hagel, John Kerry, and Jack Lew. He makes extreme demands, then accuses the other side of being unwilling to compromise, then calls his own party members cowards, and so on. The refusal to extend the debt limit endangered the American government and economy. What does Cruz want? What is he up to? The naïve may believe that all of these obstructionist moves are part of a principled opposition to Obama, the President who, in the past, inspired greater and greater outrage in Republicans in proportion to how conciliatory and mild he became. But Cruz seeks more than the humbling of the President. There are plenty of other Republicans around eager to accomplish that.
He seeks the Presidency, of course. And he appears to be doing it by sowing as much confusion and disorder as possible—playing the joker in a seemingly nihilistic charade whose actual intent is a rational grab for power. Does he have a chance? One wonders about his supporters. Are they in on the joke, aware that his concern is a mask? Or do they take him literally, as a truth-teller and a prophet? Are they cynics or true believers? If they are cynics, he will fail; if they are true believers, he could go very far, expanding his support in a messianic crusade, a quest to purify and redeem the nation.
Prior to the next election, Democrats can’t do much to deter him. They may hope that he continues his rampage, turning off big money and more and more of the electorate. His immediate threat, obviously, is to moderate Republicans. If he continues to blaze, they will be consumed. Then again, there is another side to the Joseph McCarthy story. After going too far—attacking the Army, in 1953 and 1954—McCarthy was censured by the Senate, in December, 1954. (He died less than three years later, of liver problems, at the age of forty-eight.) When the mask of sincerity gets smashed, the man wearing it may break apart, too.
Ann Jones' new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The Untold Story, is devastating, and almost incomprehensibly so when one considers that virtually all of the death and destruction in U.S. wars is on the other side. Statistically, what happens to U.S. troops is almost nothing. In human terms, it's overwhelming.
Know a young person considering joining the military? Give them this book.
Know a person not working to end war? Give them this book.
Jones presents the choice before us in the clearest terms in the introduction:
"Contrary to common opinion in the United States, war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention -- an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind -- and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don't even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You'll see.
"What's more, war is obsolete. Most nations don't make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious 'coalition.' The earth is so small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business."
Jones begins her book with that distinguishing feature of war: death. The U.S. military assigns specialists in "Mortuary Affairs" to dispose of the dead. They dispose of their own sanity in the process. And first they dispose of their appetite. "Broiled meat in the chow hall smells much the same as any charred Marine, and you may carry the smell of the dead on a stained cuff as you raise a fork to your mouth, only to quickly put it down." Much of the dead is -- like the slop at the chow hall -- unrecognizable meat. Once dumped in landfills, until a Washington Post story made that a scandal, now it's dumped at sea. Much of the dead is the result of suicides. Mortuary Affairs scrubs the brains out of the port-o-potty and removes the rifle, so other troops don't have to see.
Then come, in vastly greater numbers, the wounded -- Jones' chapter two. A surgeon tells her that in Iraq the U.S. troops "had severe injuries, but the injuries were still on the body." In Afghanistan, troops step on mines and IEDs while walking, not driving. Some are literally blown to bits. Others can be picked up in recognizable pieces. Others survive. But many survive without one or two legs, one or two testicles, a penis, an arm, both arms -- or with a brain injury, or a ruined face, or all of the above. A doctor describes the emotion for a surgical team the first time they have to remove a penis and "watch it go into the surgical waste container."
"By early 2012," Jones writes, "3,000 [U.S.] soldiers had been killed by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 31,394 wounded. Among the wounded were more than 1,800 soldiers with severe damage to their genitals." Doctors treat an injured soldier's limbs first, later their genitals, later still their brains.
Back in the states, two young parents and "two pretty adolescent girls," step up "to sit on the padded platforms in the center of the room. They move with the tentative sobriety of shock. Aides wheel in a gurney that bears a bundle in a flannel sheet. They gather the edges of the sheet and swing the package over the platform into the very heart of the family. Carefully they lower it and then begin to peel away the wrapping. There, revealed, restored to the family, is the son, their boy, not dead, but missing both arms, both legs, and some part -- it's impossible to tell how much -- of his lower torso. The director calls out a cheery greeting, 'Hi Bobby! How are you doing today?' Bobby tries to answer but makes no sound. He flops on the platform, an emaciated head, eyes full of fear, his chest all bones under a damp grey ARMY tee shirt. . . . "
Be all that you can be.
In training you're ordered into a poison gas chamber and exposed to a bit of it. If Assad trained his troops that way, we'd murder a half million Syrians to get even. But U.S. military training is training in blind subservience, usually properly resented when it's too late. Up goes your chances of being dead, injured, guilt-ridden, traumatized, homicidal, and suicidal. Jones recounts the story of a soldier who murdered two Iraqi prisoners, came home convinced he was a murderer, laid out the two dead Iraqis' dog tags, wrapped a hose twice around his neck, and hung himself. Twenty-two a day: that's the count of U.S. veteran suicides according to the V.A. The rate is 4.7 times higher than normal, according to the Austin-American Statesmen's investigation of Texas veterans. That doesn't count recklessly crashed cars and motorcycles. And it doesn't count the epidemic of overdoses of the drugs meant to solve the problem.
How to help such suffering? Therapists used to ask people to talk and now ask them to take drugs. In either case, they don't ask them to honestly deal with their guilt. Between 2001 and 2007 homicides committed by active duty and veteran U.S. troops went up 90 percent. The military looks for problems in soldiers' family lives to explain such troubles, as if they all suddenly began marrying the wrong spouses just when their country deployed them into the stupidest war yet waged. Jones tells the story of one Marine who killed his wife but kept her body on the couch to watch TV with him for weeks. "I killed the only girl who ever loved me," he later lamented. Chances are good he had killed other people who were loved as well -- he'd just done so in a context in which some people praised him for it.
One wounded warrior tells Jones he loves war and longs to get back into it. "Blowin' shit up. It's fucking fun. I fuckin' love it." She replies, "I believe you really mean that," and he says, "No shit. I'm trying to educate you." But an older Army officer has a different view: "I've been in the army 26 years," he says, "and I can tell you it's a con." War, he believes in rather Smedley Butlerish fashion, is a way to make a small number of people "monufuckinmentally rich." He says his two sons will not serve in the military. "Before that happens I'll shoot them myself." Why? "War is absurd," he says. "Boys don't know any better. But for a grown man to be trapped in stupid wars -- it's embarrassing, it's humiliating, it's absurd."
Today, S.D. Wells covers the top 7 natural cancer cures that got buried by the FDA, CDC and AMA:
http://www.naturalnews.com/042688_natural_medicine_cancer_cures_government_agencies.html
Yes, it is truly frightening what is happening--and it is only by viewing alternative media that you find out about any of this. I have read that the starfish in British Columbia have all turned to "goo." And that most of the fish have disappeared. Like the canary in the coal mine. That this is being ignored makes me wonder if the powers that be want a large percentage of humanity to perish by the Fukushima radiation. Our Alaska HAARP technology is supposed to be capable of creating earthquakes anywhere in the world. Makes you wonder if the Fukushima earthquake was caused by that technology and meant to reduce the human herd. See articles at: http://www.naturalnews.com/032670_Fukushima_HAARP.html AND http://enenews.com/npr-starfish-epidemic-moving-fast-also-seen-turning-into-goo-in-washington-not-just-canada On 10/25/2013 12:42 PM, BG wrote: > http://www.popularresistance.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-fukushima-crisis/ > This is absolutely frightening, and entirely credible article... these > are things people are not aware of, starting with the 3 radioactive > reactor cores that 'have gone missing' ! Not to mention the ocean > pollution headed for the West Coast.. and the fact that the Japanese > and other govt's are just not responding effectively.. > The media has done a great job of hushing the real story up. I > remember way back reading about how after the triple meltdown > occurred, that the molten radioactive core masses could -possibly- > melt right through the supporting floor into the earth below.. after > that no more reporting on that story.. makes you wonder.. > B
By Aviva Shen
on October 23, 2013 at 9:51 am
CREDIT: Kiii News
A Texas district judge who has been voting for the past five decades was almost barred from the polls Tuesday, thanks to the state’s newly implemented, stricter voter ID law. The law kicked in on Tuesday as early voting in Texas’ November 5 election began.
As she told local channel Kiii News, 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts was flagged for possible voter fraud because her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name, while her voter registration form has her real middle name. This was the first time she has ever had a problem voting in 49 years. “What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote,” she said.
Watts worried that women who use maiden names or hyphenated names may be surprised at the polls. “I don’t think most women know that this is going to create a problem,” the judge said. “That their maiden name is on their driver’s license, which was mandated in 1964 when I got married, and this. And so why would I want to use a provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last 49 years?”
Many married women do not update their IDs after taking their spouse’s surnames, as the process is arduous and costly. Women must present original documents verifying their name change, such as a marriage license, or pay $20 to obtain new copies. Under the new voter ID law, these women are potential voter fraud risks.
Watts is hardly the only woman who has encountered problems. ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes interviewed 84-year-old Dorothy Card, who was denied a voter ID three times even though she has voted for more than 60 years and provided extensive proof of identity.
While Watts, as an experienced judge, is familiar with the intricacies of election law, the people most likely to be stopped at the polls will be less informed about their rights. Low-income voters, minorities, students and seniors disproportionately lack the required identification — a fact that prompted the Justice Department and several federal judges to block the law under now-defunct provisions in the Voting Rights Act. After public outcry, Texas officials said they would distribute a free voter ID to eligible recipients who applied for one. As of this week, however, just 41 people received free IDs, out of the 1.4 million Texas voters who lack the required documents.
“Ours is a noble cause,” NSA Director Keith B. Alexander said during a public event last month. “Our job is to defend this nation and to protect our civil liberties and privacy.”
Makes you want to puddle up with patriotic pride, don’t it? These noble, noble guardians of ours: peeping through our digital windows, rifling through our in-boxes, listening to our personal conversations, reading our private thoughts, tracking our purchases (underwear, fishing gear, sex toys, books, movies, tampons, anything, everything), recording our dreams, our interests, our beliefs, our desires, skulking in the shadows, pushing buttons to kill people … yes, noble is certainly the first word that comes to mind.
2. Habituation Blues
It was once thought that the Snowden trove -- which details the astonishingly pervasive and penetrative reach of America's security apparatchiks into every nook and cranny of our private lives -- might prove to be a stinging blow to our imperial overlords, rousing an angry populace to begin taking back some of the liberties that have been systematically stripped from them by the bipartisan elite. But instead of a powerful tsunami of truth -- a relentless flood of revelations, coming at the overlords from every direction, keeping them off-balance -- we have seen only a slow drip-feed of polite, lawyer-scrubbed pieces from a small portion of the trove, carefully filtered by a tiny circle of responsible journalists at a handful of respectable institutions to ensure, as the custodians constantly assure us, that the revelations will "do no harm" to the security apparat's vital mission.
The perverse result of this process has been to slowly habituate the public to the idea of ubiquitous surveillance. The drawn-out spacing of the stories -- and the small circle of well-known venues from which they come -- has given the apparatchiks and their leaders plenty of time to prepare and launch counter-attacks, to confuse and diffuse the issues with barrages of carefully-wrought bullshit, and to mobilize their own allies in the compliant media to attack the high-profile producers of the stories -- such as the angry assaults in recent days by Britain's right-wing papers, accusing the Guardian of treason, etc., and, once again, diverting attention from the dark and heavy substance of the revelations to the juicier froth of a media cat-fight.
And so, as we have seen time and again over the years, an outbreak of "dissident" revelations is slowly being turned into a means of habituating people to the horrors they expose -- such as the widespread use of torture, which became a widely accepted practice during the last decade.
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