Liberal Zombies Making Excuses For Afghanistan

 

I was on social media recently and a US-American liberal was engaging in some justifiable criticism of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  But I pushed back because that sort of thing tends to include a general amnesia about the utter and complete failure of NATO (the most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world) to contruct a political-economic order in Afghanistan that could meet the very modest hopes of the Afghan people.  In fact, our "government" of a corrupt, powerless puppet in Kabul (who had to be protected by NATO troops from his own people and from the warlord narco-gangsters that took over as provincial governors) was actually so bad, that honest journalists such as Chris Hedges and Tariq Ali (among others) demonstrated that the general population preferred the Taliban to it.

Furthermore, I mentioned the sickening cruelty of Biden petulantly freezing Afghanistan's foreign currency reserves and how, combined with inflation in the price of grain and fertilizer (that inflation itself being a product of Biden provoking a war between Ukraine and Russia) meant that many Afghan women, along with Afghan children and men, would soon starve to death, thus sparing them from the Taliban's misogynist tyranny.

Now, don't get me wrong: I said at the start of this that criticism of the Taliban is justified.  But when Biden carried out Trump's exit from the country, I also pointed out at the time how the media was framing it as the abandonment of the women of Afghanistan, as if we should have stayed there for twenty more years until the violence, corruption, theft, rape, murder eventually won the "hearts and minds" of the people.

The problem remains that the same imperialist voices who initiated this shit-show; who cheered it on for twenty years of stupid lies; are still the voices that are being sought out by the corporate oligarch, pro-imperialist media. Assholes like William Kristol, Max Boot, and the whole stinking lot of them are allowed to give their opinions while the people who have been proven right continue to be marginalized.

The narrative is that this is a disaster for Afghanistan, especially with regards to women's rights. And it's sickeningly true. The Taliban are horrible on women's rights. But if Afghan human rights and happiness (of both men and women) had been at all important to Western leaders, they would have done more to ensure that the government that they subsidized was a good one that did things for the people of Afghanistan. They didn't care so they didn't. Instead they subjected them to thieving rapist gangster warlords and thieving rapist gangster police and burned their cash crops and bombed their houses and invaded their homes in night raids and droned them from the skies for twenty fucking goddamned years.

With the lesson presumably being that illegal, hideous occupations should continue until the oligarchy is 98% agreed that they should be ended and not a second shorter.

Anyway, ... some other liberal was wandering by and accused me of being an extremist who didn't understand how the real world worked.  Saintly Joe Biden shouldn't be condemned for, well, aything I guess, because there are limits to US power, and maybe Biden didn't handle the withdrawl perfectly but he is still our Last, Great, Hope and a fine man and certainly not as corrupt as Trump and his family.

And with that world salad, they could all go on continuing to cling stupidly to the party of Biden, Pelosi, the Clintons, Buttigieg, Clyburn, Rahm Emmanuel and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz.

Layton not interested in NDP-Liberal merger

What is he thinking? After vote-splitting has produced what is going to be a monstrously authoritarian, monstrously economically incompetent, nightmare of a harpercon majority government, Jack Layton is still putting the NDP's partisan self-interest ahead of the national interest!

Jack Layton says he’s not interested in discussing the prospect of a merger between the NDP and the Liberals, contending the election result shows his party is now the "true alternative" to the Conservatives.

How can he be so blind?

Then again, there's five years to go and a lot can happen, one way or the other. First of all, the Liberal Party of Canada could go bankrupt, shrivel-up and die. That would be sweet. And no vote-splitting! As well, immediately entering into talks with the party of John Manley is inviting all sorts of mental and moral corruption. Layton's got a lot on his plate nowadays and the last thing the NDP needs is to be negotiating with shit-heads stammering and drooling:

"Uh, dahhhh! We got's to commit to 'the mission' in Afghanistan!"

"Duhhh, ... public health care is EX-burp!-PENSIVE!!"

"Centrism." "Centrism." "Centrism!" "Don't forget the centre!" "Duh, ... what does 'centrism' mean?"

"You don't want to penalize success by taxing the banksters!"

"The 'Tar Sands' are awesome!!!!"

And etc., etc., et-fucking-cetera. I honestly don't know what the best course of action is. But having recently been on the receiving end of the crazy bullshit at "Eugene Forsey Liberal"* I'm pretty certain that there's all sorts of good reasons to maybe wait and see if the Liberals implode into complete irrelevance before tainting oneself with their stupid beliefs.

*(Supposedly the NDP has the blood of Canadian Forces' soldiers on its hands. Why? How? Well, you see, in 2007, the Liberals [who put the CF there in the first place] proposed a non-binding resolution that the Canada leave Afghanistan in 2009. The NDP refused and insisted on immediate withdrawal. 2009 came and went and harper kept us there until 2011. Every soldier who died after 2009 died because of the NDP, and not the Liberals, who, even though they put them there, aren't responsible for anything because of their non-binding resolution. Of course, if "Eugene Forsey Liberal" didn't have shit for brains, he'd figure out that if the Liberals had joined with the NDP to propose an immediate withdrawal, there'd be even less blood on anyone's hands. Except for the fact that non-binding resolutions wouldn't have accomplished anything. And the fact that the now Liberal Bob Rae acted like such a "statesman" and made sure that harper's extension of "the mission" would go even beyond 2011 without even a debate in Parliament should have prevented the psychotic hack from even mentioning the blood on the Liberals' hands.)**

**(Stupid, self-righteous, hateful drivel really gets my dander up.)

Listen Up NDP: NO DEALS WITH hARPERCON SCUM

Far and Wide talks about how, in the face of Ignatieff's apparent eagerness to force an election, the harpercons are cuddling up to the NDP. Far and Wide's take on it is that it's surprising, given all the stuff about Ignatieff's unpopularity and the Liberals' moribund polling, that it's the harpercons who are desperately thrashing about (courting the "socialists" of the evil axis of separatists and socialists) to avoid an election.

My position is that if Ignatieff is showing the same absence of political acumen as he did in August 2009, coming off of a parliamentary break making election threats out of nowhere, then things are a little tricky. That having been said however, I would have to say that the NDP would disgrace itself by making a tawdry deal with the harpercons.

In the fall of 2009 I said that Ignatieff's out-of-the-blue election call would have produced a disaster but that the NDP asked for too little from the harpercons (and they didn't get it anyway).

Layton and the NDP should have done all they could to make harper literally grovel to stay in power. As it is, the repulsive fool has had to show himself (to anyone too unaware to have realized it before) that he's a hypocrite with all his "socialists and separatists" talk. If this all turns out to have been a combined effort by the entire opposition to simply manouvere harper into such a compromising position I'll take back my criticism, but somehow I'm pretty sure that things are as they seem. To whit: Ignatieff has belatedly found his spine (or has exploded in a fit of petulance) and the NDP, realizing that an election would be disastrous for them as well, have now scrambled to do what the Liberals have always been roundly condemned for, hiding pathetically from the electorate. harper, meanwhile, has once again shown himself to be a cowardly bully, who, when his back is to the wall, will do ANYTHING to hold onto power.

...

Two things are for certain though. This craziness has managed to make everyone (except the Bloc, I guess) look bad and everyone (except for harper) look good. harper looks bad because it's always been his stubborn arrogance that's made Parliament dysfunctional the whole time. Now, he's reduced to negotiating with the same "socialists and separatists" he hypocritically trashed the Liberals for courting. Layton looks cynical and hypocritical. Ignatieff looks like a petulant doofus.

At the same time, Layton is once again a player. If he extracts genuine concessions he can say that he knows how to bargain with harper as opposed to the Liberals' panic and embarrassed anger. Ignatieff can say that Layton wouldn't have had the opportunity without the Liberals' election threats. Personally, I'm hoping that harper's concessions won't be enough and Layton allows Ignatieff to force this election.

I say the same thing again. The NDP should ask that the harpercons deliver the exact sort of budget that a Liberal-NDP coalition government would have. If they do, then okay. If they don't, then fuck 'em. harper is a monster. He's a disgrace. He's a failure. He spits on our system of government. He spits on Canadian values. He despises us and he (ridiculously) thinks he's smarter than us. Defeat him.

The Liberals and the NDP should campaign against all the other parties, including each other. But when the smoke clears, Ignatieff and Layton must admit to themselves that they are going to have to work with one another.

Canadian Liberals in Opposition

It's always nice to see condemnation of the machinations of crooked Canadian governments. Unless, that is, it's coming from "conservatives" when they're in opposition. For two reasons: 1) There's the reality that the "conservatives" promise us far, far worse when they call for the end of a Liberal government, and 2) The intellectual level of "conservatives" is generally very low, so that the blog-o-sphere ends up sounding like this: "The Liberals are failing because they're socialists and homosexuals."

Liberals do a better job of criticizing a CPC government than vice-versa. And it's been fun reading all the Liberal bloggers trashing the Harper mal-government for its sleazy violations of election financing rules. Harper's gang of idiots are as entertainingly evil and stupid as the bush II regime down south, which they revere and adore. It's also been fun to read the steady stream of liberal ("Democrat") condemnation and exposes of bush II's thuggery and incompetence.

On the other hand though, it's frustrating. Yes, McCain is a clueless asshole, unfairly and incompetently bashing Barack Obama, but Barack Obama is just another corporate/imperialist shill. Can we stop paying attention to the sufferings of poor Obama and start thinking about what US-Americans can do to restore democracy to their country? And, yes Canadian Liberals, what "conservatives" do to the electoral process is dangerous and disgusting, ... just as shameless and disgusting as giving money to Liberal advertising firms under the guise of fighting separatism and using it for electoral propaganda or funneling it back to Liberal Party itself.

Yes, Liberal Bloggers, you're intelligent, generally decent people, and the Harpercons need a tight leash and a quick political death, but your party is almost as bad and isn't the answer to the malaise that's been growing in this country for over two decades. Get your heads out of your asses and abandon that corrupt institution and help us improve this country.