By Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org)

3 October 2008

During yesterday’s vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden repeated the basic thrust of Barack Obama’s comments on Iraq one week ago. According to Biden, “John McCain was saying the Sunnis and Shiites got along with each other without reading the history of the last 700 years.”

In other words, Barack Obama’s apparent assumption of an endless conflict between Sunnis and Shiites Iraq was more than a slip of the tongue. Instead this seems to constitute a key ingredient in the Democratic narrative on Iraq: the country can be held together only by a strong ruler, otherwise Shiites and Sunnis would be at each other’s throats. Biden’s incarnation of the argument also served to clarify that Democrats quite literally are thinking of hundreds of years when they advance this contention; by his counting, the problems began in the early fourteenth century. That is certainly a slightly odd place to start, since Baghdad at the time was governed by Mongol rulers who themselves were rather difficult to label, sometimes they were pro-Shiite, sometimes pro-Sunni. At any rate, even if the exact number of centuries in this case may be attributable to a Biden idiosyncrasy, the main point is clear. Democrats do not think Shiites and Sunnis have any tradition of coexistence in Iraq.

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The reporter neglected to mention that McCain should have been covered as a dependent under his father’s military health plan as well.

McCain Gets Testy With Des Moines Register
Sam Stein, The Huffington Post, 1 October 2008

McCain gave another sharp answer when the editorial board noted that — having served in the military, then in Congress, and now being over the age of 65 — McCain has always been covered by a taxpayer-financed health care plan.

“I was out of the military for a while before I went to Congress,” McCain said. “But that is an interesting statement. And I have never been an astronaut, but I think I know the challenges of space,” he said. “And I have never done a lot of things in my life that I think I am familiar with. I have always been a free enterprise person who thinks families make the best choices for themselves.

“I did go a period of time when the health care wasn’t very good,” he added, in reference to his time as a POW.

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FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe appeared on C-Span’s Washington Journal this morning and nodded in agreement when a caller revealed an apparently popular opinion that Democrats are forcing through a bailout to grab power because Obama will likely lose the presidential election.

Kibbe said Blackberries were removed from the scene of negotiations last night to prevent leaks of nefarious dealings to a public that is polling 80% against a bailout.

Voting yea on a bailout bill in this climate is political suicide. Why are do-nothing Democrats interrupting their two-year slumber to pass wildly unpopular legislation?

James Petras, petras.lahaine.org, 27 September 2008

Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, has issued a report “A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela” (9/21/2008 hrw.org).

The publication of the “Report” directed by Jose Miguel Vivanco and sub-director Daniel Walkinson led to their expulsion from Venezuela for repeated political-partisan intervention in the internal affairs of the country.

A close reading of the “Report” reveals an astonishing number of blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.

We will proceed by providing some key background facts about HRW and Vivanco in order to highlight their role and relations to US imperial power. We will then comment on their methods, data collection and exposition. We will analyze each of HRW charges and finally proceed to evaluate their truth and propaganda value.

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Related:
“U.S. to sell IAF smart bombs for heavily fortified targets” [15 September 2008]

“Bipartisan report: U.S. Iran strike feasible” [23 September 2008]