Chalmers Johnson is arguably the most important writer in the United States these days. His "Blowback" trilogy on American empire is a landmark classic.

He is a distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley. An old cold warrier, he is an East Asia specialist.

The first volume in what unexpectedly became a trilogy was Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000, rev. 2004).  Blowback is a CIA term for the nasty consequences of meddling in other countries. This book was little noticed before 9/11. Afterwards, when much attention was directed to the question of "why they hate us," the book became a classic.

The second volume is: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004).  This book led to one of my favorite small social experiments. My small law firm has several U.S. citizens, all educated and mature adults, plus one law clerk from an African country. I made a prediction, and it came true.  I called a mini-staff meeting and asked everybody how many military bases they think the United States maintains around the world.  The Americans gave answers like:  5?  15?  maybe 25?  The African said: it must be over 1,000.  Ding ding ding!

I mean really. WTF do we think we are, we Americans?!

More below the fold...

In MilitaryTracy's last diary two days ago, there was this exchange:
LINK
I had mentioned being upset by a prayer in church for the troops that was not combined with any prayer for civilians in Iraq nor for world peace. Someone demanded to know why I had not stood up and protested in church. Well, you just don't do that in a large Catholic church, for many reasons, as several people pointed out. But I promised that I was going to write to the pastor.  Here is the letter I have just sent:

Dear Father x. and Father x.:

My wife x and I have been members of St. x for almost two years. We were honored as "benefactors" by the Cardinal. x teaches catechism at St. x.

I want to object to a prayer that is commonly said at Mass, and which was said in particular at the beautiful Sunday 6 p.m. Mass two days ago with Father x.  During common prayers, a prayer was said for the safety of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no related prayers.

I don't mind a prayer for the safety of U.S. troops.  But frankly, I think it is obscene, un-Christian, idolatrous, sacreligious, and grossly militaristic to constantly say that prayer without EVER combining it with a prayer for the safety of the millions of people whose lives have been disrupted or destroyed by the U.S. invasions of those countries.  And it is equally unbalanced to constantly say that prayer without a call for world peace.

It is a tragedy that approximately 3,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But all human beings are equally children of God.  That should especially be understood by the universal, Catholic church.  It is also true that many tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. action in Iraq--credible scientific information puts that number in the HUNDREDS of thousands. I think it is shameful that in two years I have never seen a SINGLE sign of concern for that slaughter at St. x.  Jesus was not a Republican.

I would respectfully request your thoughts on this, and I hope you will please pass this message along to whomever it is that composes the common prayers for Mass.

UPDATE: I did get a response, in less than 24 hours. I'll put it in a comment.

"Great crimes are always committed by great ignoramuses."

--Voltaire:  Letter to Rousseau, Aug. 10, 1755, in George Seldes, The Great Quotations (Pocket Books 1969 ed.).

I hate this time of year. Five main reasons (leading up to nice little political rant):

1. Since age 10, horrified by disconnect between mother's forced Christmas cheerfulness and her alcoholic confusion (and violent rages).

2. When I was 23, my younger brother killed himself two days before Christmas (today is the anniversary).

3. My wife and I have been unable to have children, and several adoption efforts blew up horribly, and the dogs don't understand the Christmas stuff. Every day is Christmas for them if they get a walk and some attention. Not having children is especially hard this time of year. (We're making Christmas dinner for some kids, and helping out many more in lots of different ways, but it's not quite the same.)

4. This particular year has been very bad for my business.

5. I'm horrified beyond belief by the disjunction between all the cheerful Christmas lights and the horrors of Iraq and torture and the other crimes of the Bush regime. I have a 45-minute drive home these days, through the most Republican part of Maryland, and this year I've noticed many Christmas light displays in ostentatious red, white and blue. A couple of places have American flag images made out of Christmas lights, right in the midst of Santas and angels and an occasional nativity scene. The conflation of cheap patriotism and materialistic religiosity drives me crazy. There is something truly blasphemous and obscene about putting an American flag, which is dripping with the blood of torture, next to a nativity scene, some kind of horrible total double idolatry.  I feel quite socially isolated (and deranged) with such feelings. I keep fantasizing about stopping at this one place and telling the owner I think it's a public disgrace that he's put up a giant flag in lights next to a Santa Claus figure. It's like Superman: Truth, Justice, and the American Way! He probably would not see my point.

And now I'm about to rush out to finally do a couple of hours of Christmas shopping that cannot be skipped. Oh cheerio.

This is not written or reasoned well. Just blowing off some angst.

This is my first diary since June. It has no links, just some thoughts worth recording.

I'm short on sleep, having stayed up real late for the election then had to get up extremely early to appear in a distant federal court. Five hours of driving in the rain today, mainly on unfamiliar roads while short on sleep. BUT I'M SURE HAPPY TODAY!!

Bush's press conference today was a wonder. I have a theory about what happened.

Last week, Bush swore that he'd stick with Rumsfeld and Cheney for the next two years. (Blogs commented that it was a strange remark, since Bush has no power to dismiss Cheney.)

Bush and Cheney were also vocal during the campaign in sneering at the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. To W, that represents the Old Farts (H.W.: "wouldn't be prudent"). Even the presence of the Great Fixer Baker is nothing to W, who thinks he is annointed.

So what happens today? The Republicans get slaughtered in the elections. (OH HAPPY DAY!!!)

And within hours Bush fires Rumsfeld; makes a big point about how he's meeting with the Baker-Hamilton group early next week; and appoints Bob Gates (a member of the Baker-Hamilton group, and H.W.'s man) as new SecDef.

Here's what really happened behind the scenes.

Bush has been dumping repeatedly on his father, and on the conservatives, and on everybody else. The frustration has risen to a fever pitch in all directions. Recently many high-level conservatives such as Richard Viguerie, Pat Buchanan, and many others have called for the downfall of the Bush administration.

So this is what I think:  Very early this morning there was an INTERVENTION (remember, a few days ago, Sullivan famously said on TV that this "isn't an election, it's an intevention").  (It has been notoriously reported that Bush stayed up EXTREMELY LATE last night watching the elections...ALL the way to 11 p.m.!!...so it must have been very early in the morning.)

In the intervention, the Powers That Be (not Bush 1 but the BIG MONEY behind Bush 1), probably in the guise of a call from Pops plus Baker, just simply laid the law down to junior.

The significance of this is not only that Rumsfeld got fired. It's also that the POWERS have now also fired Cheney. I predict Cheney will be gone, one way or the other, within six months or less.

You heard it here first!

For the last several days, I've been closely following several diaries here regarding Armando's GBCW extravaganza.

BooMan gets back from Vegas tonight...and it seems all those diaries have been disappeared.

What's the story with that?

By the way, as far as I can tell, this diary doesn't violate the rules that BooMan has set. It's more meta.

Damn! Those suskind diaries had all kinds of interesting debate. Was it *HE* who deleted them, wiping out everybody's comments? We're talking hundreds and hundreds of comments deleted.

I hope we're not seeing the first shots in a Troll Wars outbreak in this peaceable village.

[Update: BooMan had nothing to do with this. It remains a mystery.]

On a lighter note, I've been thinking about Leonard Cohen a lot recently. His most recent greatest hits album (The Essential Leonard Cohen (Sony 2002) is the one album I keep playing and replaying these days. Just this week I saw a blurb that claimed that he's Prince Charles's favorite singer. Yesterday, driving to work, I heard part of an interview Leonard just did with Terry Gross on the NPR show "Fresh Air." He has just released a new book of poetry, The Book of Longing. He's moved beyond the Zen monastery in California where he's been living the past five years. In response to a question that assumed he'd become a Buddhist, he said softly that that was wrong, he wasn't a Buddhist, wasn't looking for a religion, already had one.

Over the decades my three favorite singers have always been Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen. I always think of the three as a set. All three are Jewish. All three are brilliant musicians. All three are even better writers. All three put a tremendous amount of explicitly Christian and Christian/mystical symbolism in their songs, although that goes over the heads of some people. Bob Dylan even went through a born-again Christian phase, though he's gone back to Judaism as far as I know. I've never tracked this down for Paul Simon, but as far as I know he's always been Jewish. I'm a Catholic, and I was a gifted and industrious poet for more years than I've been a lawyer, and I've always had a special love for Jewish writers and artists.

As I said, I think these three guys are the greatest. I've loved all three all the way back to the 1960s. I got Leonard Cohen's second album Songs From A Room in 1969, when I was 14. My mother used to joke that she asked the people at the store for a record called "Songs From a Womb," having heard me wrong. The very first album I bought was Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel in 1967 (the second album I ever got was Sgt. Pepper by the Beatles--setting me up for an exaggerated view of the quality of the average album!). And of course, the 1960s and 1970s were all-Dylan all the time. I've never seen Leonard Cohen in person so far, but his 1985 Halloween show on Austin City Limits is my all-time favorite music video. The first I saw in person was Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden in 1970. I've seen Paul Simon many times. His Concert in Central Park is greater than great, and his Rhythm of the Saints is a candidate for all-time greatest single album by anybody.

I was thinking tonight that my ranking of the three has changed over the years. Bob Dylan has certainly had the greatest fame. Paul Simon has possibly had more commercial success. For a very long time I would have said Bob Dylan was the greatest.  There was a period in the 1980s and 1990s when I would have said that Paul Simon was the greatest. But since about 1999 I've come to think that Leonard Cohen is the real gem of the three, and that impression keeps getting stronger.

Among other things, Leonard Cohen is by far the strongest as a pure poet. His poetry is very strong, very original, very beautiful, and very spiritual.

Of the three, I also think Leonard is the more serious thinker about politics. His song stories of partisan resistance, and explorations of the mind of the extremist, go far beyond anything the other two have written.

It's a frivolous topic, but I'm curious what the rest of you might think. <more below>

In what may become a major bombshell, Rep. Murtha has issued a statement claiming it is true that U.S. Marines murdered 15 [or possibly 27 or more] innocent and unarmed Iraqi civilians in cold blood in Haditha last November. The murdered included seven women and three children.

The Marine Corps initially lied about it, claiming that the civilians were killed when a bomb went off. But the truth is that the soldiers massacred everyone in several houses, angered about a Marine that had previously been killed.

Stay tuned for more claims that Murtha, who served in the USMC for more than 30 years, is a "coward" and a "traitor."

In a new USA Today/Gallup poll
released today, Bush fell to 31%, a new low, with a 65% disapproval rating, a new high. 1,013 people participated in the poll, and I'm pleased to say I got called for this one. I'm happy that my "STRONG DISAPPROVAL!!!!!" answer got factored into the statistics Rove needs to read this week. Heh heh.

This isn't much of a diary, but I thought this was cool. This was the first time I've ever been called for a national political poll.

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast."

---more below---

Today's New York Times has an
incredible editorial about the call of Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles for all Christians to practice civil disobediance against the looming new immigration "reforms." Excerpts below--

A comment of mine on a good diary this evening about our friend Riverbend in Baghdad grew to be longer than I expected, and I'd like to post it here again as a diary. I'm curious what you all think. We all think we know so much about all of this, and yet so much is opaque.

>>>>>>>>

Who would profit from an all-out war between the Sunnis and Shias in Iraq?

...............

The Persians? It seems inconceivable that the clerics who rule Iran would bomb Shia mosques. But do they have a Machiavellian wing?

The Saudis? Inconceivable.

The Jordanians? Nope.

The Syrians? Seems inconceivable, they're so outnumbered.

The Turks? I can imagine some spook tale scenarios involving control of Kirkuk. But it seems inconceivable.

Al Qaeda? Obvious culprit. Chaos creates hellhole for Americans, etc. But I don't think this makes sense.

The Americans? Improbable, but not inconceivable.

The Chinese and the Russians? Now we're cooking with gas.

The Chinese and the Russians kick the Americans out of the Middle East, destabilize the Saudis, and strengthen their ties with Iran. That makes sense. I'll bet that's what she's talking about.

................ (more below)

I've spent five years fulminating every day about Bush's lies and incompetence and damage to this country. It's easy to see (if you're not part of the cult like my father) that Bush has a dull mind. But his handlers and speechwriters sometimes are amazingly good at propaganda.

Listening to NPR last night, I was struck by one Bush sentence that was played in a sound-bite. This was something Bush said Monday at Kansas State University, where he is taking the audacious approach of defending his policy of extrastatutory domestic wiretapping as a good thing that makes him better than Democrats.

He said this, adamantly and defiantly (I don't have a transcript, but this is very close to an exact quotation):  "The federal courts have upheld the right of the president to conduct foreign intelligence operations against our enemies!"

That sentence is a gem of misdirection, a masterpiece of propaganda.  The sentence itself, taken out of context, is literally true! In context, however, it encapsulates at least three major lies. Count the lies! How many lies can you see in that one sentence?

<answer below>

Everyone who opposes George W. Bush and the authoritarians who have taken over the U.S. government MUST carefully listen to Al Gore's brilliant speech given today in Washington! It was the best speech I've ever seen in almost 50 years of following politics. I'm in awe.

Fuck the media!!! Let's say that again:  FUCK THE MEDIA!!! If they don't have the IQ or the courage to recognize an important statement like Gore's today, then what . . . Arthur Gilroy is mainly right, I'm sorry to say. We just have to turn them off. Stop watching TV. Stop reading newspapers. It's our country. We still have the Internet. The current media should all be destroyed.

I'm not an organizer. I'm a lawyer in his 50s who has suffered so much from the destruction of the rule of law over the last five years that ... I'm starting to think a lot about crazy, desperate actions, like moving to New Zealand, or acts of anger.

Al Gore's speech today was the most beautiful thing I've heard in many years. I'm going to do my own pitiful part to make sure lots of people hear what he said, and I hope you all will do the same. It could not possibly be more important.

And I hope people get together to draft him for president. God almighty how good it would be going to sleep at night knowing a smart and decent man was in the White House!!!!!

I often think: How could this country have sunk so low from its founders? How could we be blessed by so many truly blessed men, and end up with a little shit like George Bush? How could any adult human being watch the debates between Gore and Bush or Kerry and Bush and vote for Bush??? It really boggles my mind.

But watch Gore's speech today. You'll see a real mind at work, someone who doesn't just mouth-breath and parrot someone else's words like Bush, but a real thinker who is also a real, deep patriot. Damn! Watch it. It was a truly great speech, much much better than I'd expected.

And another thing about it...my wife and I watched it on C-SPAN, and we were blown away. One thing that was amazing was Gore's deep, strong, resonant voice. He projected power and genuine majesty. I've heard a few clips on the radio and TV today, and somehow they have it mixed so that the strength of his voice does not come through, almost as if they've deliberately put on some kind of castration filter. That sounds paranoid, but I found the contrast striking in the radio this afternoon. Don't just listen to an Internet feed. Try to get a good copy of the C-SPAN feed. (I'm looking for that myself tonight.)

You might be surprised. This is not something that should just sink into oblivion. This was a REALLY great speech, which is connected to the fact that is's a real act of courage to give it. I hope Mr. Gore does not fly in any small planes for the next few years.