http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Disillusionment Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:43:23 -0400 Liveleak http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gif http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Disillusionment Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:04:04 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=79c_1370141735 Candlelicht The liberators made a lot of noise and drank too much. They raced around in their jeeps, fought in the streets and stole. But the worst thing was their obsession with French women. They wanted sex -- some for free, some for money and some by force. After four years of German occupation, the French greeted the US soldiers landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 as liberators. The entire country was delirious with joy. But after only a few months, a shadow was cast over the new masters' image among the French. By the late summer of 1944, large numbers of women in Normandy were complaining about rapes by US soldiers. Fear spread among the population, as did a bitter joke: "Our men had to disguise themselves under the Germans. But when the Americans came, we had to hide the women." With the landing on Omaha Beach, "a veritable tsunami of male lust" washed over France, writes Mary Louise Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in her new book "What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France." In it, Roberts scrapes away at the idealized picture of war heroes. Although soldiers have had a reputation for committing rape in many wars, American GIs have been largely excluded from this stereotype. Historical research has paid very little attention to this dark side of the liberation of Europe, which was long treated as a taboo subject in both the United States and France. American propaganda did not sell the war to soldiers as a struggle for freedom, writes Roberts, but as a "sexual adventure." France was "a tremendous brothel," the magazine Life fantasized at the time, "inhabited by 40,000,000 hedonists who spend all their time eating, drinking (and) making love." The Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the US armed forces, taught soldiers German phrases like: "Waffen niederlegen!" ("Throw down your arms!"). But the French phrases it recommended to soldiers were different: "You have charming eyes," "I am not married" and "Are your parents at home?" After their victory, the soldiers felt it was time for a reward. And when they enjoyed themselves with French women, they were not only validating their own masculinity, but also, in a metaphorical sense, the new status of the United States as a superpower, writes Roberts. The liberation of France was sold to the American public as a love affair between US soldiers and grateful French women. On the other hand, following their defeat by the Germans, many French perceived the Americans' uninhibited activities in their own country as yet another humiliation. Although the French were officially among the victorious powers, the Americans were now in charge. 'Scenes Contrary to Decency' The subject of sex played a central role in the relationship between the French and their liberators. Prostitution was the source of constant strife between US military officials and local authorities. Some of the most dramatic reports came from the port city of Le Havre, which was overrun by soldiers headed home in the summer of 1945. In a letter to a Colonel Weed, the US regional commander, then Mayor Pierre Voisin complained that his citizens couldn't even go for a walk in the park or visit the cemetery without encountering GIs having sex in public with prostitutes. "Scenes contrary to decency" were unfolding in his city day and night, Voisin wrote. It was "not only scandalous but intolerable" that "youthful eyes are exposed to such public spectacles." The mayor suggested that the Americans set up a brothel outside the city so that the sexual activity would be discrete and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases could be combated by medical personnel. But the Americans could not operate brothels because they feared that stories about the soldiers' promiscuity would then make their way back to their wives at home. Besides, writes Roberts, many American military officials did not take the complaints seriously owing to their belief that it was normal for the French to have sex in public. But the citizens of Le Havre wrote letters of protest to their mayor, and not just regarding prostitution. We are "attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses," wrote one citizen in October 1945. "This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform." 'The Swagger of Conquerors' There were similar accounts from all over the country, with police reports listing holdups, theft and rapes. In Brittany, drunk soldiers destroyed bars when they ran out of cognac. Sexual assaults were commonplace in Marseilles. In Rouen, a soldier forced his way into a house, held up his weapon and demanded sex. The military authorities generally took the complaints about rape seriously. However, the soldiers who were convicted were almost exclusively African-American, some of them apparently on the basis of false accusations, because racism was also deeply entrenched in French society. A caf'e owner from Le Havre expressed the deep French disillusionment over the Americans' behavior when he said: "We expected friends who would not make us ashamed of our defeat. Instead, there came incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors." US soldiers who fought in World War II have commonly been depicted as honorable citizen warriors from the "Greatest Generation." But a new book uncovers the dark side of some GIs in liberated France, where robbing, raping and whoring were rife. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=79c_1370141735 Candlelicht Bandits in Uniform: The Dark Side of GIs in Liberated France American soldiers, liberated France, World War 2 Sat, 25 May 2013 16:40:50 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aa6_1369512980 omniradar The Silent Death of the American Left by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Is there a Left in America today? There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement? Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers? We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension raids and the looming nightmare of climate change? It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life. Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in. This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder. We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review , with the tragedy of our own defeat. Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater. Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology. Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism. Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs. What do they offer us, instead? Pious homilies about the work ethic, the sanctity of the family unit, the self-correcting laxative of market forces. The economic immiseration of black America, brutal and unrelenting, is simply elided, erased from the political dialogue, even at jam sessions of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, whenever Obama mentions the plight of black Americans (about once every two years by my count), as he did in his patronizing commencement addresses this spring, it is to chide blacks about cleaning up their acts, admonishing them to stop complaining about their circumstances and work harder at adopting the flight plan of white corporate culture. The self-evident need for large-scale public works projects to green the economy and put people to work goes unmentioned, while the press and the politicians engage in a faux debate over the minutia of sequestration and sharpen each others knives to begin slashing Social Security and Medicare. Where's the collective outrage? Where are the marches on the Capitol? The sit-ins in congressional offices? A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on the Obama administration's infamous memo justifying drone strikes inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen that the US is not officially at war against. In one revealing paragraph, a Justice Department lawyer cited Richard Nixon's illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a precedent for Obama's killer drone strikes. Let's recall that the bombing of Cambodia prompted several high-ranking officials in the Nixon cabinet to resign, including CounterPunch writer Roger Morris. It also sparked the student uprising at Kent State, which lead the Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to declare a state of emergency, ordering the National Guard to rush the campus. The Guard troops promptly began firing at the protesters, killing four and wounding nine. The war had come home. Where are those protests today? The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world's greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli. Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama's mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics. How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens... One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists. We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction. Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). This is a condensed version of a talk delivered at the University of Oregon. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aa6_1369512980 omniradar The Silent Death of the American Left. Sadly IMO Inept Political Left ! Sat, 05 Feb 2011 05:58:35 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=642_1296903398 Muhammad_ibn_Abdullah AGHDAD - After almost five years of war, many young Iraqis, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach. In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives. "I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us," said Sara Sami, a high school student in Basra. "Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don't deserve to be rulers." Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: "The religion men are liars. Young people don't believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore." The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religiousness among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology. While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its owner. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold. It is far from clear whether the shift means a wholesale turn away from religion. A tremendous piety still predominates in the private lives of young Iraqis, and religious leaders, despite the increased skepticism, still wield tremendous power. Measuring religiousness furthermore, is a tricky business in Iraq, where access to cities and towns that are far from Baghdad is limited. But a shift seems to be registering, at least anecdotally, in the choices some young Iraqis are making. Professors reported difficulty recruiting graduate students for religion classes. Attendance at weekly prayers appears to be down, even in areas where the violence has largely subsided, according to worshipers and imams in Baghdad and Falluja. In two visits to the weekly prayer session in Baghdad of the followers of Moktada al-Sadr last autumn, vastly smaller crowds attended than had in 2004 or 2005. Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are scrubbing overt references to religion. "In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics, they trusted them," said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. "It's painful to admit, but it's changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this." "When they behead someone, they say 'Allah Akbar,' they read Koranic verse," said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad. "The young people, they think that is Islam. So Islam is a failure, not only in the students' minds, but also in the community." A professor at Baghdad University's School of Law, who would identify herself only as Bushra, said of her students: "They have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them." That was not always the case. Saddam Hussein encouraged religion in Iraqi society in his later years, building Sunni mosques and injecting more religion into the public school curriculum, but always made sure it served his authoritarian needs. Shiites, considered to be an alternate political force and a threat to Hussein's power, were kept under close watch. Young Shiites who worshiped were seen as political subversives and risked attracting the attention of the police. For that reason, the American invasion was sweetest to the Shiites, who for the first time were able to worship freely. They soon became a potent political force, as religious political leaders appealed to their shared and painful past and their respect for the Shiite religious hierarchy. "After 2003, you couldn't put your foot into the husseiniya, it was so crowded with worshipers," said Sayeed Sabah, a Shiite religious leader from Baghdad, referring to a Shiite place of prayer. Religion had moved abruptly into the Shiite public space, but often in ways that made educated, religious Iraqis uncomfortable. Militias were offering Koran courses. Titles came cheaply. In Abu Mahmoud's neighborhood, a butcher with no knowledge of Islam became the leader of a mosque. A moderate Shiite cleric, Sheik Qasim, recalled watching in amazement as a former student, who never earned more than mediocre marks, whizzed by stalled traffic in a long convoy of sport utility vehicles in central Baghdad. He had become a religious leader. "I thought I would get out of the car, grab him and slap him!" said the sheik. "These people don't deserve their positions." An official for the Ministry of Education in Baghdad, a secular Shiite, described the newfound faith like this: "It was like they wanted to put on a new, stylish outfit." Religious Sunnis, for their part, also experienced a heady swell in mosque attendance, but soon became the hosts for groups of religious extremists, foreign and Iraqi, who were preparing to fight the United States. Zane Muhammad, a gangly 19-year-old with an earnest face, watched with curiosity as the first Islamists in his Baghdad neighborhood came to barbershops, tea parlors, and carpentry stores before taking over the mosques. They were neither uneducated nor poor, he said, though they focused on those who were. Then, one morning while waiting for a bus to school, Muhammad watched a man walk up to a neighbor, a college professor whose sect Muhammad did not know, shoot him at point-blank range three times and walk back to his car as calmly "as if he was leaving a grocery store." "Nobody is thinking," Muhammad said in an interview in October. "We use our minds just to know what to eat. This is something I am very sad about. We hear things and just believe them." By 2006, even those who had initially taken part in the violence were growing weary. Haidar, a grade school dropout, was proud to tell his family he was following a Shiite cleric in a fight against American soldiers in the summer of 2004. Two years later, however, he found himself in the company of gangsters. Young militia members were abusing drugs. Gift mopeds had become gift guns. In three years, he saw five killings, mostly of Sunnis, including that of a Sunni cabdriver shot for his car. It was just as bad, if not worse, for young Sunnis. Rubbed raw by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, they found themselves stranded in neighborhoods that were governed by seventh-century rules. During interviews with a dozen Sunni teenage boys in a Baghdad detention facility on several sticky days in September, several expressed relief at being in jail, so they could wear shorts, a form of dress they would have been punished for in their neighborhoods. Some Iraqis argue that religious-based politics was much more about identity than faith. When Shiites voted for religious parties in large numbers in an election in 2005, it was more an effort to show their numbers, than a victory of the religious over the secular. "It was a fight to prove our existence," said a young Shiite journalist from Sadr City. "We were embracing our existence, not religion." The war dragged on, and young people from both sects became more broadly involved. Criminals had begun using teenagers and younger boys to carry out killings. The number of juveniles in American detention was up more than sevenfold in November from April, and Iraq's main prison for youth, in Baghdad, has triple the prewar population. But while younger people were taking a more active role in the violence, their motivation was less likely than adults to be religion-driven. Of the 900 juvenile detainees in American custody in November fewer than 10 percent claimed to be fighting a holy war, according to the American military. About one-third of adults said they were. A worker in the American detention system said that by her estimate, only about a third of the adult detainee population, which is overwhelmingly Sunni, prayed. "As a group, they are not religious," said Major General Douglas Stone, the head of detainee operations for the military. "When we ask if they are doing it for jihad, the answer is no." Muath, a slender, 19-year-old Sunni with distant eyes and hollow cheeks, is typical. He was selling mobile phone credits and plastic flowers, struggling to keep his mother and five young siblings afloat, when a recruiter, a man in his 30s, a regular customer, offered him cash in western Baghdad last spring to be part of an insurgent group, whose motivations were a mix of money and sectarian interests. Muath, the only wage earner, agreed. Suddenly his family could afford to eat meat again, he said in an interview in September. Indeed, at least part of the religious violence in Baghdad had money at its heart. An officer at the Kadhamiya detention center, where Muath was being held this autumn, said recordings of beheadings fetch much higher prices than those of shooting executions in the CD markets, which explains why even nonreligious kidnappers will behead hostages. When Muath was arrested last year, the police found two hostages, Shiite brothers, in a safe house that Muath revealed. Photographs showed the men looking wide-eyed into the camera; dark welts covered their bodies. Violent struggle against the United States was easy to romanticize at a distance. "I used to love Osama Bin Laden," proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths, abstract. Now, the student recites the familiar complaints: Her college has segregated the security checks; guards told her to stop wearing a revealing skirt; she covers her head for safety. "Now I hate Islam," she said, sitting in her family's unadorned living room in central Baghdad. "Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing." Parents have taken new precautions to keep their children out of trouble. Abu Tahsin, a Shiite from northern Baghdad, said that when his extended family built a Shiite mosque, they purposely did not register it with the religious authorities, even though it would have brought privileges, because they did not want to become entangled with any of the main religious Shiite groups that control Baghdad. In Falluja, a Sunni city west of Baghdad that had been overrun by Al Qaeda, Sheik Khalid al-Mahamedie, a moderate cleric, said that fathers now came with their sons to mosques to meet the instructors of Koran courses. Families used to worry most about their daughters in adolescence, but now, the sheik said, they worry more about their sons. "Before, parents warned their sons not to smoke or drink," said Muhammad Ali al-Jumaili, a Falluja father with a 20-year-old son. "Now all their energy is concentrated on not letting them be involved with terrorism." Recruiters are relentless, and, as it turns out, clever, peddling things their young targets need. Stone describes it as a sales pitch a pimp gives to a prospective prostitute. American military officers at the American detention center said it was the Al Qaeda detainees who were best prepared for group sessions and asked the most questions. A Qaeda recruiter approached Zane Muhammad, on a college campus with the offer of English lessons. Though lessons had been a personal ambition of Muhammad's for months, once he knew what the man was after, he politely avoided him."When you talk with them, you find them very modern, very smart," said Muhammad, a nonreligious Shiite, who recalled feigning disdain for his own sect to avoid suspicion. The population they focused on was poor and uneducated. About 60 percent of the American adult detainee population is illiterate and is unable to even read the Koran that religious recruiters are preaching. That leads to strange twists. One young detainee, a client of Abu Mahmoud's, was convinced he had to kill his parents when he was released, because they were married in an insufficiently Islamic way. There is a new favorite game in the lively household of the Baghdad journalist. When they see a man with a turban on television, they crack jokes. In one of them, people are warned not to give their cellphone numbers to a religious man. "If he knows the number, he'll steal the phone's credit," the journalist said. "The sheiks are making a society of nonbelievers." Kareem Hilmi, Ahmad Fadam and Qais Mizher contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/world/africa/03iht-youth.4.10662930.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=642_1296903398 Muhammad_ibn_Abdullah Terrorism Causing Young Iraqis to Lose Faith in Islam... islam, disillusionment, disenchantment, intellectually weak, violence, murder, massacres, jihad, killings, bombings, lies, deception, quran, muslims, allah, satan, falsehoods, iraq, youth, executions, Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:55:14 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d1a_1220550914 TalkingMonkey http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d1a_1220550914 TalkingMonkey TYT: Bob Barr Explains <span class="highlight">Disillusionment</span> with GOP Thu, 13 Jan 2011 07:18:22 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b65_1294920957 ElegantDecline Germany Flags Afghan Drawdown By PATRICK MCGROARTY BERLIN-The German government resolved to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by year end and tempered expectations for the conditions it will leave behind, saying its involvement in a war that has been deeply unpopular domestically will be guided by "very realistic goals" to ensure the country doesn't slip into chaos. Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet set the deadline as it extended the German deployment in Afghanistan for another year. The mandate kept the maximum number of German soldiers allowed in Afghanistan at 5,350, though the actual number of troops deployed isn't likely to rise above the current level of around 4,600. View Full Image germany0113 Reuters German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, center right, walked among German soldiers to take part in a commemoration ceremony for their comrade killed in Mazar-e-Sharif, north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Dec. 18, 2010. germany0113 germany0113 "We are confident we can reduce the presence by the end of 2011 as we hand over responsibility for security" to Afghan military and police forces, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said. The government plans to withdraw the last German troops in 2014. The timeline roughly mirrors that of the U.S. and other major North Atlantic Treaty Organization coalition partners, but suggests Washington could face resistance if it shifts course and asks its allies to commit more troops or undertake more risky missions in Afghanistan over the next few years. The deadline can be met only if local security forces are on track to assume responsibility in 2014 for the parts of northern Afghanistan currently overseen by German troops, said Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for Ms. Merkel. "Of course, a timetable like the one in this mandate also gives some urgency to the Afghan government to expedite and complete its work on military and political reforms," Mr. Seibert said. The German military operates mainly in the Kunduz province of northern Afghanistan, long one of the most stable regions in the country but the site of a marked increase in insurgent activity over the past two years. Germany's schedule for withdrawing its troops-the third-largest force in the U.S.-led NATO coalition-is similar to President Barack Obama's plan to remove some troops this July and have the bulk of U.S. forces out of the country by 2014. The U.K. is the second-largest contributor to the NATO mission, with about 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. British Prime Minister David Cameron said during a visit to the country in December that bringing some troops home in 2011 was "possible," but Defense Secretary Liam Fox seemed to temper those expectations during a visit this month, saying it was difficult to predict U.K. troop levels in Afghanistan over the next two years. The German cabinet's agreement will be put to a vote in parliament on Jan. 28 and is expected to pass easily because the most powerful opposition party, the Social Democrats, has said it will support it on the basis of the commitment to begin withdrawals this year. The war is deeply unpopular in Germany, with polls consistently showing that a majority of voters want German troops withdrawn from Afghanistan. The deployment has also brought a very public end to the careers of at least two high-ranking politicians. In Nov. 2009 a member of Ms. Merkel's cabinet, Franz Josef Jung, resigned amid allegations that the German military had withheld information about an airstrike in Kunduz earlier that fall, while Mr. Jung was defense minister. The Sept. 4 airstrike carried out by U.S. planes was ordered by a German commander and killed roughly 100 people. The military initially said all the casualties were Taliban fighters, but a NATO investigation later concluded that 30 to 40 civilians were among those killed, and German media reported that German military officials tried to cover up those deaths. In June, President Horst K"ohler abruptly resigned after suggesting in a radio interview that Germany might go to war to defend its business interests-a risky assertion in a nation that avoids comparisons to its militaristic past at all costs. Mr. K"ohler's comments were condemned by left-leaning opposition parties, but Ms. Merkel supported him publicly and his resignation was unexpected. Mr. K"ohler said the presidency-a largely ceremonial post in Germany-had been damaged by the disrespectful criticism following his remarks. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b65_1294920957 ElegantDecline Germany Flags Afghan Drawdown Afghanistan, Disillusionment Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:24:24 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=411_1294913708 ElegantDecline More US Conservatives Are Questioning the Afghanistan War 13 hours ago Politics Daily Matt Lewis Columnist The list of conservatives who are questioning our involvement in Afghanistan is growing. As Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy magazine reported: "Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said he wants to build a center-right coalition to advocate for considering pulling out of Afghanistan in order to save the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent there." One of the first prominent conservatives to sound the alarm on Afghanistan was Tony Blankley, a columnist and press secretary for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Blankley has written several columns on the topic over the years. Questioning President Obama's strategy in Afghanistan, Blankley recently wrote, "I do not understand how, as a country, we can continue to send our troops into that cauldron with no rational expectation of success." Washington Post columnist George Will was even more explicit in September 2009, when he authored a column simply titled: "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." In July 2010, RNC Chairman Michael Steele touched off a firestorm when he called Afghanistan "Obama's war." When Bill Kristol called on Steele to resign over the comments, Ann Coulter answered with her own column: "'Bill Kristol Must Resign." In it, Coulter wrote, "As Michael Steele correctly noted, every great power that's tried to stage an all-out war in Afghanistan has gotten its ass handed to it. Everyone knows it's not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands." On the heels of Coulter's column, former Republican congressman -- and host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" -- Joe Scarborough noted: "For too long you have had John McCain and you've had Bill Kristol, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman define what it meant to be a Republican when it came to foreign policy . . . This is a very important op-ed that Ann Coulter wrote yesterday." After July, Republicans essentially put the issue on the back burner and focused on winning the November elections, and columnists presumably focused on the midterms, too. But news that Grover Norquist is now questioning our involvement in Afghanistan may signal the debate is back. One wonders if there's a "tipping point?" Will a real debate on the right take place over the war in Afghanistan -- and is it possible for an anti-war Republican presidential candidate to emerge? http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=411_1294913708 ElegantDecline More US Conservatives Are Questioning the Afghanistan War Afghanistan, Disillusionment Sun, 24 Feb 2013 09:39:23 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4fa_1361716408 Detroit Iron By Janice Fiamengo February 24, 2013 Proclaiming himself a conciliator and a moderate with a vision of Americans " stand with each other " and " paying their fair share ," President Barack Obama is in fact one of the most partisan presidents ever to occupy the White House. Fine-sounding words notwithstanding, he is a leftist ideologue and no-holds-barred political fighter whose practice has consistently been to demonize the American equivalents of the hated kulaks (farmers) and petit-bourgeoisie (small business owners) persecuted in the Soviet Union. Obama's enemies include those "bitter" people who " cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them " as well as the presumably benighted bigots who fail to realize that " the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam ." With his anti-American, neo-Marxist outlook shaped by mentors and heroes such as Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, and Jeremiah Wright, Obama is naturally inclined to be suspicious of freedom and to feel sympathy for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Reflex affinities such as Obama's have a long, bloody history, and anyone wishing to understand the threat posed by the Obama administration to the fabric of America is well advised to place its policies and rhetoric in a comprehensive historical perspective. How is it that an educated person can be attracted to totalitarian ideologies and predisposed to reject the freedoms of the western world? This was, arguably, the central question of the twentieth century, and it has assumed a renewed urgency since 9/11, a time when leftists have applauded terror attacks on the United States and claimed that America's enemies are in fact righteous victims. What is one to make of their seemingly sophisticated arguments justifying atrocity? Can such people really believe, to cite only a few examples, that the 9/11 hijackers were motivated by a longing for social justice? That the Palestinian leadership is committed to peace with Israel? That people are better off in Cuba, with the highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world, than in the United States? Jamie Glazov responds to such questions in United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror (2009), a brilliant investigation that not only extensively documents leftists' support for brutal regimes, but also diagnoses their worldview as a psycho-social syndrome of pathological dimensions. Leftist hatred, Glazov demonstrates, has less to do with specific political programs or economic systems than with a deep-rooted disenchantment with democratic freedoms and a corresponding "negative identification" with violence. The objective evidence for leftists' love of tyrants is substantial, and Glazov presents it convincingly with a blend of facts, anecdotes, and analysis. We learn, for example, about the massive effort on the part of western Communists to repress, distort, and recast the horrors of Stalinist Russia, including the purges that killed millions and the forced famine in the Ukraine that brought the peasantry to its knees. New York Times reporter Walter Duranty turned the reality of Ukrainian starvation into a cheerful tale of abundance, lying so aggressively in favor of Stalin's policies that when the Manchester Guardian 's Malcolm Muggeridge tried to report the truth-that peasant were dying en masse -he was mocked and derided, ultimately losing his job. When leftists turned their attention to other bloody Communist regimes in Cuba, North Vietnam, China, and Nicaragua, many high-profile members of the western intelligentsia were eager to travel there to report on the miraculous gains that had supposedly been achieved. Susan Sontag wrote of Castro's Cuba with fanatical admiration, denying the dictator's atrocities and downplaying limitations on freedom, even going so far as to claim that "No Cuban writer has been or is in jail," and that "the great majority of Cubans feel vastly freer today than they ever did before the revolution." Making his pilgrimage to Hanoi in 1970, Noam Chomsky accepted as gospel all the nonsense his North Vietnamese hosts told him about the regime, as did Gunter Grass after a tour of a model Nicaraguan prison, which led him to enthuse that there was no room in the new regime for revenge-this in a country that had executed 8,000 political enemies and jailed 20,000 in the first three years of the revolution. (Hollywood's Oliver Stone, with his glorification of Stalin and denunciation of the U.S. as "an Orwellian state," is a current exemplar of this suicidal distemper.) After the collapse of Communism, it has been d'ej`a vu all over again with radical Islam. Immediately following the terrorist assault of 9/11, a jubilant chorus of university professors and progressives across North America refused to express horror for the attacks; instead, they blamed America, with Ward Churchill calling those who had died "little Eichmanns" and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt lecturing patriots who wanted to fly an American flag that it stood for "jingoism and vengeance and war." Hundreds of so-called anti-war demonstrations were organized almost immediately to express solidarity with the Taliban regime that had harbored the attackers and to paint the United States as a warmonger. Since then, droves of leftist lawyers have worked to obtain release for the terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay and to strike down legislation intended to help the United States guard itself against future attacks. Even when Islamists testify in court that their terror quests are inspired by Koranic injunctions to kill infidels, leftists insist that they are (justly) resisting American oppression. Western feminists routinely defend Islamic misogyny-wife beating, honor killing, genital mutilation, the burqa-and will not admit that women live better lives in the western democracies. And leftist gays march in anti-Israel rallies, joining with Muslim queer-bashers to denounce the only country in the Middle East where homosexuals can live securely. How to understand such blindness, such moral lunacy, such self-destructive fantasy? The heart of United in Hate is its analysis of the psychological mechanisms that drive the left's embrace of terror and repression. This is the most fascinating aspect of the book, balancing its rivetingsurvey of progressive misalliance. Glazov argues that underlying the progressive's disdain for his own culture and his support for its enemies is a deep-rooted alienation from modern democratic life. Feeling that his society has somehow betrayed him by failing to supply him with meaning and purpose, the "believer," as Glazov aptly dubs him, turns away from it with fury, magnifying its failings and projecting his longing for fulfillment onto a utopian order. Because he rejects the perilous satisfactions and anxieties of individual freedom, he "craves a fairy-tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible." With his swollen sense of grievance, the believer identifies with all others supposedly wronged by his society and imagines those who attack his country to be attacking the same injustices that anger him. But his outrage on behalf of his country's ostensible victims is really a displaced form of his own disillusionment and hunger for collective belonging. Guilt is often a powerful motivator also, for the believer is frequently a member of a privileged class and therefore feels shame "that he is not a genuine victim." By identifying with the oppressed, he feels "a sense of atonement" for his high caste. As he agonizes over those his own society has putatively harmed, he minimizes or outright denies the suffering of those who are really victimized by the regimes he adulates; their pain and deaths do not count for him, for they stand in the way of the realization of utopia. His greatest longing is to subsume his identity into the totalitarian entity, to experience power and purpose through it. This deep-seated craving explains the two most disturbing facets of the believer's behavior: his willingness to die for the cause-think of those leftists who wanted to serve as human shields for Saddam Hussein-and the fact that his greatest support for a totalitarian regime tends to occur when its (thrilling) violence is at its height. Glazov's emphasis on the pathological element of the believer's mindset is effectively supported by his book's roll call of blind allegiances and feverish denials. There is no other way to explain how people so fully formed by western culture and so uniquely equipped to appreciate all that it offers -- elite intellectuals and rebel thinkers such as Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault -- could actively seek its destruction. Their fanatical commitment is rightly approached as a mental disorder with a specific etiology and symptoms. The question raised by the book is a disturbing and salutary one: how is one to counter such an illness, colluded in so widely by the intelligentsia and possessing a fascination for so many? Springing from needs and desires that seem to develop with particular vehemence in societies that are most free, the believer's disorder is by its nature irrational, seemingly immune to proofs and argument. It reminds us of the vulnerability of democracy and the necessity for conservatives to counter leftist delusions with inspirational ideas, images, and stories of freedom. Despite our best efforts, it may take nothing less than a national catastrophe to awaken the general populace to the utopian peril. In the meanwhile, we have no choice but to pursue the truth as winsomely and tirelessly as we can, to confront leftist ideologues with the results of their utopian blueprints, and to write and read powerful books like United in Hate . Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/loving_the_enemy.html#ixzz2LpLvCg6m Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter AmericanThinker on Facebook http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/loving_the_enemy.html http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4fa_1361716408 Detroit Iron Loving the Enemy President Barack Obama, Jamie Glazov, Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Jeremiah Wright Sat, 05 Jan 2013 11:02:42 -0500 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a2e_1357401403 Rodja If you don't like the theme song jump to 3.50 where the message starts. Guess the Americans should be quite disillusioned about the war in Afghanistan by now, this guy will add some further disillusionment... http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a2e_1357401403 Rodja Message to Obama Afghanistan, message, Obama, mujahideen, jihad, islam, war, super, power Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:16:16 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=325_1348247293 VikingRapeSquad Not hard to understand why so many brits on this website are always so bitter, ignorant and jealous of the USA :) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/06/why-is-britain-becoming-intolerant Angry Britain: why are we becoming so intolerant? From racist outbursts on public transport to comedians baiting strikers and disabled people, there's an ugly mood in the air. What's making us increasingly cranky about our fellow citizens? And is there any cure for this modern malaise? The fate of England captain John Terry rests with the Crown Prosecution Service over claims of racist abuse that the player denies. Photograph: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images There is a film that is never discussed when people talk about the classics of Hollywood - and with good reason - but nonetheless, The Crazies provides a brief diversion. The 1973 horror flick, directed by George A Romero, is set in anytown USA, a homogenous, god-fearing, God Bless America kind of place. An American version of Midsomer - minus the murders. And the premise is that things go haywire when someone dastardly puts a little something in the water.Suddenly, strait-laced types start cursing and fighting. Scores are settled. People who want stuff just start taking it. Repressed attractions spring into public view and, as part of that, there's a fleeting, comic glimpse of horny neighbours humping in the high street. A thin veneer disintegrates. What lies beneath?Britain in December 2011 feels a bit like that place. Nothing to do with the privatised water companies, I'm sure, but for whatever reason, it does feel as if the safety catch has developed a fault, as if the car is on a slope and someone has disengaged the handbrake.There is an element of devil-may-care to the way we treat each other. You see it on the streets, in supermarkets, on public transport, hear it on the talk shows, read it on the internet threads. Go on to YouTube: three instances now of apparently ratty women berating fellow passengers on the public transport network. Emma West, from Croydon, south London, faces criminal charges for an alleged racially aggravated public order offence. The matter will now be decided by a court . The two others were posted subsequently, with more scenes of acrid cabaret. Women letting rip with barely concealed indecency, broadcasting to all who failed to tune them out that there are just too many foreigners. If that is not enough for you, read the online comments beneath the videos - note the rancourous tone of those who do battle, both for and against. Disregard the contributions from the far right; no one expects decency from them anyway. It is the aggression from those who might see themselves as middle of the road that is worthy of note.Consider what we say these days to get a laugh. Jeremy Clarkson knows his audience and it is a large, enduring, loyal one that has made him very rich. What would you do to striking nurses? "I'd shoot them," says the jester for our times , and he is unapologetic until the furore threatens his bottom line and forces an apology. Even then, contrition is only partial . People who kill themselves by jumping under trains play havoc with the schedules, complains Clarkson.Ricky Gervais is even more successful than the Top Gear presenter, a big wheel in Britain and a feted talent in the US. He sees humour in a phrase associated with Down's syndrome . Many object, but still many are with him. We love the comedian Jimmy Carr; it's a big time for him, with DVDs ready for the Christmas market. He also has top stuff about Down's and zingers about wounded British soldiers .What do we like on the telly? Reality shows, the louder and coarser the better. Shows highlighting celebrities desperate for cash or attention - or both - and therefore willing to debase themselves.Think about football. The England captain John Terry, ignominious with his fate in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service amid disputed claims that he called Anton Ferdinand of Queens Park Rangers a "black cunt". Football, always a pressure cooker, continually reveals much of what lies beneath. While the judicial authorities ponder Terry's case, the Premier League wonders what to do about Luis Su'arez of Liverpool , who may or may not have racially abused Patrice Evra of Manchester United during a high-profile fixture. This despite all the efforts over several years of campaigns such as the anti-racist Kick It Out initiative . The big boys lead by example. Muslim players with beards who turn out in the lower leagues go prepared each week for the likelihood that someone will try to provoke them by calling them "Bin Laden".Think about schools, where an ebullient, engaging New Zealand-born teacher called Suran Dickson has felt moved to leave her job and launch a charity to try to curb the worrying incidence of homophobic bullying in our schools, where terms such as "gay boy" and "homo" are playground missiles of choice. Where do these attitudes come from, I asked her the other day. Mostly their parents, she said.If someone hasn't taken the handbrake off - facilitating a slow but steady decline towards grouchiness and intolerance and not a little meanness - it certainly feels like it.How did we get here? There are many theories from which to take your pick. An obvious one is money. For the past decade we had a lot. Or at least, with plastic prevalent, it felt as if we had an unlimited supply. Now we know better, and we don't like it. The prime minister says we are all in this together, but no one believes him. The immediate landscape looks rocky for most people, and, beyond it, the going looks increasingly impassable. Wages cut, jobs lost, services run down, disillusionment with the establishment and the political class; little wonder people are cross. And, as we know, angry people behave badly. Cary Cooper , professor of organisational psychology and health and pro vice chancellor at Lancaster University, says we are witnessing "an exercise in civic frustration" - hard times cause fear and insecurity. "People feel financial insecurity, job insecurity," he says. "They don't even trust the health service. They feel social insecurity and project it on to other people. They can't get angry at the government or the bankers or economists or the NHS, so they take it out on others they can get to."He is surprised to one extent, he says. "I am an American and I have lived here for 30 years but I don't quite understand what is happening. In the US, they blame a lot when things go wrong and go over the top when things go right - so you have Steve Jobs, for example, as a hero for our lifetime. Here one expects something different. What is happening is the opposite of the 'Dunkirk spirit'. There is a lot of blame culture and I think it is rather sad. It's cathartic for people personally, but it doesn't solve the problem; in fact, it makes things worse by creating negativity. Maybe if things do actually get worse, that Dunkirk spirit will kick in."But there is something else that has less to do with money and more to do with politics. That cannot be blamed on the vagaries of the financial system or voracious brokers selling mortgages to people who cannot afford them. This was not foisted upon us; this was a choice. Two years ago, amid the deafening clamour of complaints about the scourge of "political correctness" - wails and lamentations from a crew diverse enough to include David Cameron, PD James and Cliff Richard - I wrote a piece for the Guardian site Comment is Free pointing out that those who complained of being silenced by political correctness were usually the ones who enjoyed a platform to make politically incorrect pronouncements, much like errant schoolboys hurling stink bombs into public places. I posed the question: "What would they be like without a handbrake?"The thesis bears repeating. "Political correctness has become the complaint of choice for those who don't like their world; for men who fear their positions are being eroded by women, white people who fear too much attention is being paid to non-white people, minorities jealous of other minorities, non-disabled folk who can't see why buses should have wheelchair ramps, tall people who fear short people. It embraces everything. It means nothing."Which was true, but that did not mean it was without value. As a concept to be built up by the right and then knocked down, "political correctness" was pretty useful. It gave a disparate battalion of the aggrieved something to rally round. They fought the fight, and any honest evaluation would have to conclude that they have been pretty successful. Anything that smacks of being PC - including moves against racism, sexism, gender discrimination or homophobia - risks being confronted by the right as just another example of the old discredited orthodoxy.There was a battle of ideas. And, the war itself is not over. But for now, they have won. And the result is a country that is a bit less civil, a bit more selfish, a bit more reckless over the sensitivities of others. This was inevitable. Those who argued against the boundaries they perceived as part and parcel of political correctness and railed against equalities cannot credibly complain about the scratchiness and volatility of life with the handbrake off. They fought long and hard to disengage it. People such as the honourable member for Shipley, Philip Davies , parliamentary mouthpiece for the Campaign Against Political Correctness , who has been seeking to tie up the Equalities Commission with inane questions , the better to make his political point. His puzzlers include: "The Black Police Association. Isn't that racist?"; "Is it OK to black up one's face?"; "Is it racist for a policeman to refer to a BMW as 'black man's wheels'?"Let's have a shout out for the Tory MP Matthew Hancock , who apologised for the last government's Equalities Act to businessmen at a fringe debate at last year's Conservative party conference - the act was aimed at outlawing discrimination in the workplace. You can rely on us to undermine it, he said. And then there is Peter Davies , father of Philip. He was elected in Doncaster for the English Democrats, pledging to sweep away all vestiges of political correctness. He discovered on the morning after his election that much of what he had promised to do was probably illegal.All did their bit. For all that, life without the social handbrake and the decency so often denounced as political correctness does not seem to have made them any happier. No one has benefited from it, really.Linda Bellos, chair of the Institute of Equalities and Diversity Practitioners , says the problem is not a large group of people, but an atmosphere created by a small group of people, which has an impact upon everybody. "They have made it OK. There has been a period in our recent social history in which it was not acceptable to say certain things, but now people feel they have the authority," she says. "We are entitled to think what we like about each other. We have freedom to think. But morally, we do not have unfettered freedom of expression. There are things we can say but don't. People think it is OK to speak ignorance and hatred. They think they have the green light."The authority, claims Bellos, comes from the top. "If you look at much of the rhetoric about taking back powers from Europe, for example, much of the legislation being described refers to equalities. When ministers speak about it, they are using a kind of code."We are free societies, with freedom of speech and the right to offend, but all civilised societies need some kind of handbrake. The alternative is Lord of the Flies spanning several continents. Our main brake is the law and the judicial system, but before things reach that stage there is just us, making hundreds of micro-decisions each day about how we view and treat our fellow citizens.Perhaps, as Cooper suggests, there is a cultural element here. Some societies are known to be faster and louder and brasher and less forgiving than others, as many people find when first they arrive in London, and any Londoner discovers when making the adjustment to life in Manhattan. There is a spectrum embracing, at one end, those countries where the general culture seems relatively gentle and, at the other, those that require a strong nerve and a flak jacket. We had a particular place on the spectrum. One senses that we have moved.What to do? Well, the first thing to understand is that the handbrake that has been disengaged can be reapplied. There is a sense of right and wrong within the British psyche. The ratty YouTube women may have held centre stage, but it is worth noting that, in each case, their outbursts were challenged. Some may have agreed with the view that the country is overrun with migrants, but one could do that and still feel outrage at the way these people chose to behave.We bait celebrities and other masochists who volunteer for televised humiliation, but at some point there is always a public row about degradation. We err, we stray, but we know we have a default position and we retain a rough idea of where it is. John Terry holds a high-profile role representing his country, but when the allegations surfaced, he found himself the subject of police inquiries and a candidate for prosecution. One wonders if the captain of a national team would have endured such public criticism for a sin of alleged racism if that nation were Italy or Spain.And that is a point worth ending on. For even if things do seem to be unravelling a bit, this is a still a small island nation that strives, with some success, to fuse the destinies of people who have been here for hundreds of years with those of people who arrived yesterday. People with all sorts of complexions, all kinds of lifestyles; people with strong religious beliefs, people with none. We live together in cities, not in silos. We tend not to pry, but, if needed, we try to help. We try to live and let live. There are problems - the events of a turbulent summer and all we learned from those who were involved show that. There are serious challenges. But given the potential for division and societal dysfunction, the record is pretty good. It is right to take stock, and hopefully we will return to equilibrium, emerging a little less cranky. Still, the UK with the handbrake off remains a better place to be than many others with the handbrake firmly engaged. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=325_1348247293 VikingRapeSquad Broken, Intolerant, Bitter, Angry, Inbred Britain: The Last Gasps Of a Floundering Imperialist Empire Now Mocked, Humiliated and Laughing Stock Of The uk, britain, brits, bitter, ignorant, uneducated, inbred, haters, lol Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:53:23 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9b5_1344964757 aydeo A cartoonish version of the former far-right politician Geula Cohen, wild-haired and hysterical, recently chased her politician son around the studio with a shoe, berating him for leaving the Likud Party for the new Kadima Party. "You had to become a leftist?" she shouted. "You couldn't just be a murderer or a homosexual?" TEL AVIV, Jan. 1 - To the thumping beat of "Stayin' Alive," a super-size version of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appears sporty in a blue jogging suit and sweatband, with no aftereffects from his recent stroke. He raises his arms in Rocky-style triumph and jogs into the studio of Israel's hit spoof news show, "A Wonderful Country." The character playing his rival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appears taken aback by Mr. Sharon's recovery and mutters under his breath, "I'm going to sue the Western Wall," referring to a note to God, apparently not containing good wishes, that he had tucked into the holiest site in Judaism. Every Friday night about one million Israelis - nearly 60 percent of the viewing audience - tune in to watch their leaders ridiculed and their country mocked. The show takes few prisoners, a reflection of Israel's own lively and aggressive political culture. "Israelis have a need to rid themselves of stress through laughter," said Muli Segev, 33, the executive producer, trying to explain how the show works as a kind of catharsis for a nation obsessed with politics and the news. A cartoonish version of the former far-right politician Geula Cohen, wild-haired and hysterical, recently chased her politician son, Tzachi Hanegbi, around the studio with a shoe, berating him for leaving the Likud Party for Mr. Sharon's new Kadima Party. "You had to become a leftist?" she shouted. "You couldn't just be a murderer or a homosexual?" The show's characters and sketches have tapped into Israel's zeitgeist so well that a religious lawmaker asked the station to rebroadcast it during the week, to allow observant Jews, prohibited from watching Friday night because of the Sabbath, to join the national conversation. The show has injected a medley of new slang and phrases into that conversation. The speed with which politicians and journalists borrow those phrases is a measure of the show's success, said David Alexander, who teaches a course on satire at Haifa University. One of the most popular phrases to emerge is a simple cry of pain: "It's difficult, it's difficult!" uttered by a character named Luba, a Russian immigrant and supermarket cashier. The phrase, uttered repeatedly in thickly accented Hebrew, taps into the disillusionment and alienation with their new country felt by many immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Israelis know their politicians, many of whom have been around for decades, well. And Israelis are obsessed with the news, tuning into the radio for hourly updates. When they want a break, they turn to the show, a spoof of everything they have been following and debating so intensely. "The deep involvement of almost every single citizen in politics" is crucial to the show's success, Mr. Alexander said. "It is there to sum up the week for us in a cartoonish manner." Preparing for a recent episode, Mr. Segev and his team of seven writers hunkered down around a long wooden table blanketed with newspapers. Ideas, jokes and mimicked voices flew around the room. The show drew inspiration in part from "Saturday Night Live" and "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," Mr. Segev said. The writers are in their late 20's and early 30's, a generation that came of age in the 1990's, when an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeared possible. They cut their teeth on Israeli late-night television, with apolitical humor. Previous satirical shows, like "Hartzufim" of the 1990's, an Israeli version of the groundbreaking British satirical puppet show "Spitting Image," helped pave the way. Three years ago, when "A Wonderful Country" was born, Mr. Segev and his team felt the need to make a statement about Israel through political satire. The country was receptive, having become less reverent toward its institutions and leaders. "Humor is more aggressive in Israel," said Omri Marcus, 26, one of the writers. "It's more black, more intense." There is plenty of new material, now that early elections have been declared for March 28. The show depicts Mr. Sharon as an untouchable king who withstands allegations of corruption that swirl around him and his sons. One of them, Omri, has pleaded guilty to violating campaign-financing laws as he helped his father win the Likud leadership in 1999. But Omri Sharon insists his father knew nothing. In a recent episode, Mr. Sharon is shown with an equally portly Omri bent over his knee. The prime minister repeatedly spanks him, blaming him not only for the recent corruption scandal but also for everything controversial in his own career, including his role two decades ago in leading Israel into war in Lebanon. "There is something more about survival here as a young country where it still feels like everything could fall apart," said Tal Friedman, who plays Mr. Sharon. So Israeli satire, Mr. Friedman said, "deals with more extreme issues, including whether we will continue to exist or not." But notoriety is also publicity. It has become a badge of honor for politicians and public figures to be impersonated on the show - their status as a "somebody" increasingly linked to whether or not they are made a laughingstock. Although Palestinians do not seem to watch the show in significant numbers, at least one prominent Palestinian figure has been tuning in. Zakariya Zubeidi, a Palestinian militant leader who was, until recently, on Israel's most-wanted list, told the Israeli newspaper Maariv last February that the show made him laugh. "I hear they want to make me into a character; if they do I will end the cease-fire," he said, jokingly referring to an agreement by Palestinian militant groups at the time to suspend attacks on Israelis. Orna Banai, one of the show's stars, said that she sometimes felt the line between reality and satire was obscured. "You see the real people and for a second you feel they are a character on 'A Wonderful Country,' " she said. "That's the power of the program." Of course, even the title of the show is gently satirical. At the close of every broadcast, the news anchor intones: "And remember - we have a wonderful country." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/international/middleeast/02telaviv.html?_r=3 Photos: The Wonderful country staff and Different characters from the show during the years- Ariel Sharon,IDF chief of staff,GW Bush,Lieberman (presented as a Russian dictator) Video: A mix of the Wonderful country new openning scene and Adel http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9b5_1344964757 aydeo Satire That Spares Nothing, Not Even God and Country - By the NYTimes NYTimes,Wonderful country,Ariel Sharon,Netanyahu,Palestinians,Bush,Lieberman,God Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:45:52 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=baa_1339774835 yorba They backed him last time, but now say they see the president as a weak leader. Five months from Election Day, can the White House hear the harsh message pollsters are sending? How tough an uphill climb does President Obama face with independent voters ? If the findings of a focus group conducted this week are any indication, a steep one indeed. Nine of the 12 people gathered in Denver on Tuesday voted for Obama in '08, but only three lean toward him at this point. They are a cross-section of America, working in real estate, health care, IT, and sales, and they're torn between a president whose performance they say has been underwhelming and who doesn't deserve reelection, and a challenger they know very little about beyond the fact that he's a rich and successful businessman. When Democratic pollster Peter Hart probed for their thoughts about Bain Capital , the private-equity firm that Mitt Romney headed, nine of the group opted out, saying they didn't know enough to talk about it. Of the three who ventured they knew "a little," one said "Mitt ran it," while another said "He did well," three words that sum up the Obama campaign's challenge as they try to tarnish what Hart has called Romney's "halo effect" on the economy. They aren't biting on Bain. Listening to these voters for over two hours, it was clear that their assessment of the economy is not as bleak as one would suppose, given their disaffection from Obama. They generally agree that the economy is improving, but Obama doesn't get credit for a recovery that, while slow, is moving in the right direction-the core of his message for a second term. A few cited what they called "little things" Obama has done for the economy, like reining in credit-card companies, but no one could cite major accomplishments that would measure up to the expectations aroused by Obama as a candidate who promised to bring about transformative change. This Denver group was sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hart's findings add to a growing chorus of concern among Democrats not directly aligned with the Obama campaign that the president is not connecting with the voters he needs to win. Asked if he was feeling the heat from his allies in the Obama camp, Hart told The Daily Beast, "They know who I am, and that I'm a straight-shooter, and I'm totally in their corner. Sometimes being in their corner means telling them the truth." "The whole platform was hope-I don't feel any more hope today." Whether it's a failure of policy or of communications is debatable, but the sense of disillusionment with Obama's performance is real. "He set up expectations that began 46 months ago, and they only grew over time," says Hart. He singled out Jeffrey, a 31-year-old Web designer and home remodeler, as the voter Obama most needs and might not get . Jeffrey voted for Obama last time. "The whole platform was hope-I don't feel any more hope today," he said. Pressed by Hart as to which candidate he was leaning toward, Jeffrey said the tenor of the campaign turned him off, that he felt like he was in the middle of a weird argument between a husband and wife, and all he wanted to do was leave the room. "I don't even know if I'm going to vote this time," he said glumly. The crux of Obama's challenge is to win back enough of the voters who have lost confidence in him, and in his ability to make government work for them. "Does that person even vote?" Hart later wondered. In his view, the young, bearded Web designer should be in Obama's corner, and the fact that he isn't is emblematic of the president's problems. While the results of this focus group forecast trouble for Obama, they also point to an opening, which is to "get beyond the rat-a-tat of the present and take it to the future," says Hart, a process begun by Obama with his economic speech in Cleveland Thursday. A sustained effort, and not just a one-stop speech, could reframe the race. There's an opening, too, for Romney if he can build on the general impression voters have of him as a good businessman, and "make voters feel comfortable that he's not going to dismantle everything we have," says Hart, when it comes to health care and other social support programs. Asked which candidate these voters would like to attend a baseball game with, nobody wanted to go with Romney except to have him pick up the tab, giving Obama a substantial edge in likability. Both candidates came up short on a more subtle leadership exercise. Asked how each would perform if they were lost in the forest with nine friends, the group concluded Romney would use his super-duper expensive phone to call for help, with Donald Trump and wife Ann Romney topping the call list, while Obama would give a pep talk and then retreat to the sidelines. There's the campaign in a microcosm. For Obama, this was a devastating departure from how voters responded to a similar question four years ago, when they said then candidate Obama would work with you, reason with you, and bring out the best in you. This time, says Hart, there was "no sense of leadership." These are hard-nosed assessments five months out from the election, and the Obama campaign ignores them at its peril. Hart is a highly respected pollster with four decades of experience. Soft-spoken and generally cautious in his conclusions, people pay attention when he sounds the alarm. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/15/in-focus-group-independent-voters-souring-on-obama.html http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=baa_1339774835 yorba Independent Voters Souring on Obama independent voters obama, no hope, focus group independents, re-election strategy, blame Bush Sun, 06 May 2012 23:45:29 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ab2_1336362121 LostSomewhereInSpace this was one of his last interviews, finally found the entire thing, Bill talks about his disillusionment with hollywood, the entertainment industry, the media, and our government http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ab2_1336362121 LostSomewhereInSpace Bill Hicks on Austin Public Access ( FULL) Bill Hicks, NWO, Illuminati, censorship