Pink-y and the Complete Lack of a Brain

So I see the screeching, ineffectual buffoons from Code Pink -- namely the group's founder, Medea Benjamin -- were at it again today.

In case you were lucky enough to miss it, this time Benjamin managed to somehow grab the spotlight away from her biggest target yet, heckling the President of the United States. Never mind that Barack Obama was holding a press conference whose sole purpose was to explain and clarify U.S. policy on the prosecution of war overseas and to push publicly again for the closure of Guantanamo, that of course wasn't good enough for Benjamin, because DRONES!

What I loved about this moment, though, is that Obama handled it with an almost staggering level of graciousness, certainly much more than Benjamin would've gotten from a president culled from the current crop of Republicans. He let her shriek, let her rant about the CIA and Muslim-killing, even deferred to her, and then calmly continued.

In other words, he made her look like what she is: a fucking jackass.

Related: The Daily Banter: The 60's Brand of Protest Doesn't Work Anymore/2.8.13"

Unleash Hellfire

I like to think that my misanthropy is having a positive impact on Cesca.

His Daily Banter column today once again takes on Glenn Greenwald, only this time he foregoes ceremony and that "all due respect" nonsense and just thunders away at him. And that's an unqualified good.

The Daily Banter: The Most Terrifying Drone Ever! Run Away!/3.13.13

Endless Drone

Today's Daily Banter column cuts to the chase on the subject of Glenn Greenwald, David Sirota, Rand Paul, and, of course, drones.

Here's the opening shot:

"This has been alluded to a couple of times here over the past two days, mostly by the always thoughtful and analytical Bob Cesca, but as usual I’ll be the one to dispense with all the pleasantries and just come right out and say it: Fuck Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota. Fuck them because their opinions don’t deserve to be taken the least bit seriously. Their supposedly bottomless reservoir of intellectual honesty is really puddle-deep and, in fact, they’re nothing more than what their fiercest critics have always accused them of being: sanctimonious jokes who pretend to be dedicated, indignant fighters of all manner of civil liberties injustices when in reality they’ve bequeathed to themselves wide latitude to choose which sins to prosecute and which to forgive or overlook completely. They don’t care about all affronts by authority to your civil rights. They only care about the select few they’ve chosen to plant their flag in and dig deep on and if their slavish devotion to those signature issues happens to force them into a position of defending a set of civil rights offenses they care less about but which are in the grand scheme no less awful, then so be it."

Read the Rest Here

Picture of the Day

Okay, at this point it's becoming comedy. Here's the giant headline currently running over at the Huffington Post, your new headquarters for all things associated with drone hysteria. Sure, very serious guys like Glenn Greenwald can relentlessly self-flagellate over the horror of drone technology but they aren't usually into using Google Image Search to help drive their point home.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of Greenwald, Cesca made what I consider to be the colossal mistake of going down the sanctimony-and-intransigence rabbit hole by getting into a debate with him over drones via Twitter on Saturday.

He wrote about it today over at the Banter.

Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes on a topic that I've written about many times and which was brought up again on this week's podcast.

Here's the opening shot:

"I’ve said this sort of thing before many times. Matt Taibbi’s said it. David Cross does an entire bit about it. But no matter how often it’s repeated, there are still those out there on the left who live in their own little epistemic bubble and don’t seem to get something: the 60s are over and continuing to protest like it’s 1967 will get you absolutely nowhere in the year 2013. Yes, it’ll grab you a little attention, but ultimately not the kind you want. It’s an ineffective model of activism in the new millennium and the predisposition to fall back on it needs to be shelved once and for all."

Read the Rest Here

Droning On and On and On

Today's column for the Daily Banter expands a little on what Cesca's been talking about for the past few days -- the reaction to the White House memo detailing its justification for using drones to take out American citizens overseas who've joined with Al Qaeda.

Bob was rational and analytical. I, as usual, am a blunt object.

Here's an excerpt:

"God bless Cesca for taking a reasonable and nuanced approach to the subject of the White House memo on the justification for drone strikes and the ongoing use of the drones themselves. God bless him because I’m glad he’s putting forth the effort and trying to carefully dissect an issue that’s much more complex than many seem to be willing to acknowledge. God bless him because he’s doing it so I don’t have to — which is good seeing as how I genuinely don’t give a crap about drones strikes or the legality or illegality of killing Americans who’ve taken up arms against the U.S."

Read the Rest Here

Airhead Strike

I didn't think David Sirota could get any more melodramatically alarmist or comically self-important.

I was wrong.

Salon: Please Don't Kill Me, Obama: Why I Created a Petition for the President To Create a "Do Not Kill" List, and Why You Should Sign It/5.31.12

Get it? You should sign it because at any moment the President of the United States is going to order a Reaper drone to put two missiles into your Starbucks while you're ordering your non-fat chai or command Seal Team Six to take you out in your recliner in front of the TV. Hurry! You have to protect yourself!

Is there some way we can surreptitiously erase Sirota's name from his own "do not kill" list?

It's a start.

The Constant Drone (Continues)

Matt Osborne follows up his pretty terrific piece which took a look, from a military perspective, at the ongoing hemming and hawing from the left over drone strikes with a dissection of that Gary Kamiya column in Salon that I mentioned yesterday.

It's absolutely worth reading.

Osborne Ink: And the Dissonance Drones on Endlessly/2.21.12

The Constant Drone

Salon contributor Gary Kamiya is one of those writers I generally enjoy reading; he's thoughtful, intelligent and he articulates his points incisively. Today's column from him, however, made me roll my eyes more than a few times. It starts with the basic premise, and it's one that the emo-prog contingent has been scratching its collective head over for months now: Why oh why do so many liberals support the use of drone strikes to kill terrorist targets and even (clutches pearls) American citizens engaged in terrorism overseas? At Salon, the cognitive dissonance and unfocused outrage over this supposed paradox has typically been the domain of Glenn Greenwald, who delivers, as you'd expect, lengthy condescending lectures on it at regular intervals. To his credit, Kamiya at least approaches the subject with some measure of balance and a welcome lack of obnoxious piety, but it's still somewhat baffling that there are those on the left who are baffled that Americans by and large condone the use of armed drones in prosecuting the war against the terrorist threat.

I'd get deeply into it, but thankfully two people have already said everything that needs to be said on the subject. From the personal and political perspective there's this:

Oliver Willis: Why Do Liberals Support Drone Strikes?/2.8.12

And from a thorough and enlightening military perspective, this:

Osborne Ink: Drone Hysteria Is Stupid/1.30.12

By the way, Kamiya himself admits the reality of drone-waged warfare -- which he inexplicably calls "dirty," as opposed to what clean kind of warfare I'm not quite sure -- in a paragraph that inadvertently winds up being one of the funniest things I've read in an online publication in quite a while.

"The dirty war has been tactically effective. It has killed significant numbers of top Taliban and Al-Qaida leaders, including bin Laden himself, and forced other radical jihadists underground, disrupting their command and control and generally making their lives difficult.

Finally, dirty war has a proven historical track record. Agents of the American OSS and the British SOE, fighting behind enemy lines, carried out major acts of sabotage and subversion, tied up Axis troops and provided invaluable support to resistance groups. (I should know: I wrote a book about the SOE.) Dirty war tactics helped win World War II.

So why stop using such an effective instrument?

The answer is simple: Because it is not effective."

Sure, he goes on to make the claim that while drones are tactically effective, the ongoing use of them isn't strategically effective in the long term -- but it's amusing as hell to come across this particular double-take-worthy statement.