Jim (Con't): Reader Gemma writes that two of her "favorite roundtables in the last few years were 'TV Roundtable' and 'Barbie Roundtable' but I really enjoy the grab bag ones too." Gemma, the grab bag ones result from us knowing we have to do a roundtable and better get started on it right away or we won't have one. Like right now. Ty will select e-mails throughout. Ty?
Ty: I'm selecting from our old account. After this roundtable, we won't go into it. 'B-b-but it's on so many articles! It's not fair!' Waah. Things change. I think Mike wrote about it. But the reality is that we all got hacked awhile back. You may remember that someone was posting at The Common Ills and The Daily Jot and Cedric's Big Mix. Not full posts, just a post with a link. C.I., Cedric and Wally change the passwords to their Blogger accounts regularly -- UK Computer Gurus even send reminders on that. So they were surprised that someone cracked and kept cracking their passwords. Then one day, one morning, as C.I. was finishing an entry, it's in there, this December 24th entry, you can read it, she puts in a message to Wally and Cedric, to change e-mail passwords, she figured out while she was writing that this was what was happening, they had hacked the e-mail accounts. So Wally, Cedric and C.I. changed the e-mail address for their accounts -- I'm referring to they write a post, they e-mail it to an address, it hits blogger and shows up on their page. And they had no other problems but that's when we started checking out sent boxes and discovered that we'd all been cracked. There were copies in our sent boxes of e-mails sent that we didn't write. Mike noted this to a degree at his site where he asked people e-mailing him to e-mail common_ills@yahoo.com and that's pretty much what everyone's done. That public account is being kept. But we're keeping our own e-mail account. We're just changing it up. Again, that's the short story for the change. The e-mail address is now thethirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com and that's how it's going to be.
Jim: Thank you, Ty. I want to start with Mike's "F**k Kevin Gosztola"from last week. Mike explain what's going on with that post.
Mike: Sure. Kevin Gosztola is a pampered priss who preens when petted. I'm not a big fan of candy asses. Bradley Manning leaked to WikiLeaks because of his outrage over counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism -- which has basically merged in the '00s. Gosztola wrote a very long -- and very boring -- article for The Nation and somehow managed to avoid that reality even after Bradley spoke in court citing those two things. This is at the core of Bradley's decision. You can't speak honestly of what he did without including it.
Jess: And Amy Goodman can't speak of it honestly either. As Ava and C.I. pointed out in "TV: Goody's COIN cover-up" awhile back, she aired BBC Arabic and The Guardian newspapers' James Steele: America's Mystery Man In Iraq -- a documentary about counterinsurgency and she avoids the term and asked that the guest not use the term, changes the topic when the guest does. This is about the 'liberal class' that Chris Hedges is always indicting including last week.
Jim: How so?
Jess: Harvard's the Carr Center is the home of this madness. Let's talk about what it is. C.I. notes it's war on a native people, it's where you try to turn a group against their own, you demonize members of it, in order to defeat them. And C.I. likes to include Eliot Cohen, a right-winger, speaking honestly and off the cuff in a Foreign Policy's roundtable on counterinsurgency:
The first thing is just to remind us all, counterinsurgency is a kind of military operation. There's an American style to counterinsurgency; there was a German style to counterinsurgency; there's a Soviet or Russian style to counterinsurgency. It's just a kind of operation that militaries do, and I think particularly in the popular discussion there's this tendency to call counterinsurgency the kind of stuff that's in the manual.
[. . .]
And finally, having played a very modest role in helping get the COIN manual launched, I've got two big reservations about it. Actually three. One is a technical one, which is it underestimated the killing part of counterinsurgency and particularly what Stan McChrystal and his merry men were doing [with special operations]. I think that is a large part of our counterinsurgency success. We killed a lot of the people who needed to be killed, or captured them, and that's not something you want to talk about. You'd rather talk about building power plants and stuff, but the killing part was really important, and I think we have to wrestle with that one because it's obviously problematic.
Jess (Con't): That's counterinsurgency and that's what Amy Goodman and Kevin Gozsta-alawhatever are covering up. Because the intellectual, academic finger prints are all over it.
Elaine: Which goes to the co-option of academia, sorry to jump in, Jess. But C.I., Rebecca and I were calling it out along with many others as late as the 70s. In one of the best snapshots, C.I. worked in a reporter today who wrote against counter-insurgency in the seventies. But it is money, it is big money, it is big funding. That's why War Hags and War Whores like Harvard's Sarah Sewall promote it and propagate it. And it's why intellectual and ethical cowards like Amy Goodman can't call it out. Amy Goodman is the greediest of the greedy whores. She's demonstrated that repeatedly. It really is time for Pacifica to end her bad program. There is a groundswell building for that because it's become more and more obvious under Barack Obama that Goodman's not about news but just one more whore covering for imperial wars when Democrats are in office.
Jim: Mike?
Mike: I think Jess and Elaine both make good points. In my piece, I pointed out that The Nation won't call it out. That's not always been the case. Back during Vietnam, the magazine could call it out. Under the cowardly leadership -- or what passes for leadership -- of Katrina vanden Heuvel, they refuse to. So I allow in my post that The Nation maybe why Kevin doesn't mention counterinsurgency in his article. But I also point out that to not mention it is dishonest and so that's no excuse. He shouldn't have written the article if he couldn't be honest.
Betty: Jim thought this was going to be a quick topic. When he mentioned it before the roundtable started, he said this would be a few seconds. I said, "No, it's going to be the whole roundtable." And that's fine. Under the strong advocacy of C.I., Ava and Elaine, we have learned over the years about
counterinsurgency and the need to call it out. I want to drop back a second, to when Bradley Manning spoke in the military court about why he passed on documents to WikiLeaks. He said, "I felt we were risking so much for people who seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and hatred on both sides. I began to become depressed at the situation we found ourselves mired in year after year. In attempting counterinsurgency operations, we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists. I wanted the public to know that not everyone living in Iraq were targets to be neutralized." I agree with Mike, it's dishonest to write or talk about Bradley and leave out counterinsurgency. That is what repulsed and motivated him.
Rebecca: And Betty was right that this is becoming a roundtable on one topic. But that's fine because it's an important topic. I'm really appalled by the refusal of so many on the left -- or the libertarians for that matter, the Justin Raimondos and the rest -- to call out counter-insurgency. What a bunch of chicken s**ts. Who was it -- Jess? -- who compared it to Chris Hedges' column indicting liberals who refuse to speak up? Because that's exactly what it is. Of course counter-insurgency is wrong. And yet, we've got a nation of commentators who are scared to speak that truth. Chicken s**ts and whores, that's all they are. Stan talked about this before -- much nicer than I'm doing -- about how it didn't take a thing to say counter-insurgency is wrong.
Stan: Right. I just said that it takes nothing to come out against counter-insurgency. We might not all be able to speak or write about it as eloquently as C.I., Elaine or Ava but we can all go on the record opposing counterinsurgency. C.I noted NYU Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff 's[PDF format warning] "War is Culture: Global Counterinsurgency, Visuality, and the Petraeus Doctrine" and in it, he writes, "Counterinsurgency has become a digitally mediated version of imperialists techniques to produce legitimacy. Its success in the United States is unquestioned: who in public life is against counterinsurgency, even if they oppose the war in Iraq or invasions elsewhere? War is culture." And like he asked, who in public life is against counterinsurgency? So many are so damn scared to call it out even though it's wrong.
Trina: Well during Vietnam, it was called out. That's why it fell into disrepute. That's why the military moved away from it. And it's just really sickening to watch people refuse to denounce it today. I think the assertion that it has to do with the fact that it's become big money for academia -- not just Harvard but Swarthmore and other institutions -- goes to the silence. The silence has to end. It's really amazing because it has been such a huge topic for, for example, Elaine and C.I. You go to their sites and it has been a non-stop topic for seven years and counting. But so many cowards are afraid to weigh in. It's a tool of empire and even those who might denounce empire in the abstract refuse to denounce counter-insurgency.
C.I.: Just to be clear, I didn't realize it was controversial and for a long time honestly thought there would be additional coverage elsewhere. There wasn't. Elaine, in fact, is the one who quickly grasped that Amy Goodman was not going to cover it. She would have guests on who could discuss it -- Elaine would point this out at her site, and this is when Bully Boy Bush was occupying the White House -- and Goodman would avoid the topic. There's money to be made there and Amy Goodman's just a trashy whore. That's why she supported the illegal war on Libya, it's why everyone else has done more to call out The Drone War than she does. She spends on a lot of time on the faux actions of Barack supporters, idiots like Bill McKibben, and a lot of time distracting. There is no worse gatekeeper on the left than Goodman. But what I did had no bravery or thought in it. I knew Monty McFate as a child, I called her out which might have been 'new' and I called out counterinsurgency which was nothing new or novel or even brave for me based on past experience. I didn't realize that everything had changed and that it had now infected and taken over academia.
Jim: Okay and on that note, I'll close down the counterinsurgency topic. Betty was right, it ended up being a huge part of this roundtable. That wasn't the plan. Ty, take us to an e-mail.
Ty: Robyn e-mailed Friday to ask how surprised we were by "Barack's move to take the scissors to Social Security"?
Cedric: Wally and I covered it Friday morning with "THIS JUST IN! LOOK WHAT THE BITCH DRAGGED IN!" and "Even Helen Keller could have seen it coming." I don't think we were surprised. I also think Trina's "Catfood Meat Loaf in the Kitchen?" reviewed how obvious it was. Trina, if I can ask, you were frustrated when you wrote and frustrated with the Cult of St. Barack?
Trina: Yes, I was. I've had it with making excuses for little kids who think it's more important to believe in Santa Claus than it is to see the truth.
Cedric: Well said. And that's how I feel too. Stop your fantasies, stop all your crap, we need to look at the world as it is. I'm just not in the mood for the Cult of St. Barack anymore. They need to grow the hell up. They are harming the country with their delusions. Barack made sexist remarks last week and you saw the Cult go into overdrive insisting any criticism of the Blessed Barack was racism. It's time to end this crap, it's time to end it. People need to grow the hell up.
Jim: Wally?
Wally: At some point, people are going to look back and ask how this cult leader with an eating disorder destroyed an active left. And the answer was because so many on the left were willing to be destroyed. I was talking to an idiot this week. She didn't come to our talk but showed up afterward because she wanted to meet C.I. She was asking me to introduce her to C.I. And I asked her if she had a class and had missed the talk but she said she didn't care about politics anymore now that "Bush is out of office" and she went on about how she didn't care about politics. What an idiot. Wanting to live in ignorance.
Jim: Wallow in it. Did you introduce her to C.I.?
Wally: No. I told her we didn't have time. And gave C.I. a look to let her know, 'avoid the crazy.' But that's what we're dealing with. Entitled assholes who think because they grumbled a little in 2006 they've done their part and don't have to pay attention.
Ann: And they think that because they've convinced themselves that Barack's some sort of 'new politician.' He's the same craven, sell-out we've seen 100 times before, if not worse.
Jim: Okay. I'm cutting you off, Ann, because Ty's going to bring up another topic from an e-mail and we'll let you and Ruth address that. Ty?
Ty: Gun control. We've taken no position on the issue and it's had a lot of people write in. Some -- like Candy -- are mad about that while others -- like Roy -- are glad. Ann?
Ann: I'll let Ruth go first because she's actually writing about this at her site.
Ruth: Okay. Well I am not one for people trying to use a tragedy to push their pet causes. I am not alone in that and I believe that is why support for stricter gun laws has fallen off. No one needed Michael Bloomberg, NYC Mayor, for instance, weighing in. No one needed to here that the answer was to show bloody photos of dead children. The ones wanting stricter laws ended up looking crazy as they thought they could either buy support or scare people into supporting. And that is why support has dropped.
Ann: I think Ruth's covered that very well at her site and just now so I'll move over to another aspect. Where are the damn jobs? Barack needs to shut his damn mouth about gun control. I don't give a damn. I do give a damn about us having jobs in the United States. He has had four years to focus on it, his entire first term. And he never did. Now, in his second term, he's off on immigration and gun control. He needs to drop both of them, focus on the economy and focus on nothing but the economy until we start seeing major creation in jobs. That's it, that should his priority.
Dona: Ty's going to do one more question and it's going to go to Kat and Isaiah, then every one will have had the chance to participate. Ty?
Ty: Bill notes that Roger Ebert died last week and that no site in the community bothered to note it.
Isaiah: I watched Ebert on that TV show with Gene Siskel. It wasn't really all that entertaining or perceptive. It did show film clips which was the main reason I watched. He was another talking head on TV to me. I'm not trying to be rude, just explaining that his death didn't register with me.
Kat: Roger Ebert offered sexism -- as did Gene Siskel. He didn't like Bush and he's a Democrat and so we're supposed to be in sackcloth covered in ash apparently. Spare me the widows weeds. He was a print journalist whose writing left no impact. Had he not gotten the TV show, he wouldn't have been known and on the show, again, he and Gene offered sexism nearly every week. They would offer things like Point of No Return would have been a better film if Bridget Fonda had fondled a gun -- crap like that. I'm not making that up, that was honestly their suggestion when they 'reviewed' that movie. Pauline Kael leaves a mountain of work behind her. She has a legacy. Ebert has nothing to show for it. I honestly think Leonard Maltin is a stronger reviewer and writer than Ebert.
Jim: That's probably not what Bill was hoping to hear but those are the answers that he got. This has been a rush transcript.