WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's JournalI would give just about anything to be the one who thought of this first.
Happy Halloween, all.
"Accept Defeat" <--- newest DCCC fundraising email
^^^ email I just got from the DCCC ^^^
...so I'm going to vote my ass off on Tuesday, and I'm sure you are, as well.
If it goes poorly for us, and you come here, and there are 50 threads saying YOU PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZED PRESIDENT OBAMA ARE THE REASON WE LOST WHAAAAAARGARBL, or some permutation thereof...
...remember that the DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE sent out eleventy billion emails explaining how there is no hope, and all is lost, so "go home." <--- direct quote
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
- President Theodore Roosevelt
It ain't our fault, folks. If it goes sideways, I invite you to "Shhh" in advance.
Vote.
A moment of silence for Mayor Tom Menino
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/30/thomas-menino-boston-longest-serving-mayor-has-died-age/zAuWXQ4ccPJSv7uuW0kcDK/story.html...who, among many other things, marched at the front of the Pride Parade every single year.
"What kind of a peace do I mean, and what kind of a peace do we seek?"
What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace -- the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living -- and the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war -- and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
Examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable -- that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.
We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable -- and we believe they can do it again.
For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.
-- President John F. Kennedy, American University, 10 June 1963
No particular reason for this post. The words have just been rolling through my head all day. Ted Sorensen could write the walls down.
This Nation of Cowards
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, center, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a news conference on Ebola in New York, October 24, 2014. The governors of New York and New Jersey on Sunday stood by their decision to require medical workers who had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa into quarantine, despite deep concerns about the impact it might have on fighting the epidemic and the lack of clarity about exactly how the plan would work.
(Photo: Katie Orlinsky / The New York Times)
This Nation of Cowards
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Tuesday 28 October 2014
It is likely that most of us, myself included, will live out our entire lives and die without ever meeting someone who willingly and purposefully volunteers to spend their vacation thousands of miles away, tending to people with diseases that make the talking heads on CNN and Fox want to hide under the bed. Kaci Hickox, a nurse from Maine who graduated from Johns Hopkins, is one such person.
In 2010, Hickox traveled overseas with the organization Doctors Without Borders to treat people suffering from yellow fever, one of several trips she made with that organization. Until last Friday, she was in Sierra Leone for a month, spending her vacation time helping to treat people infected with Ebola, the virus that has been burning through western Africa at an unprecedented rate. Kaci Hickox went to one of the most unstable countries in the world to help fight a deadly disease because someone had to, and so she raised her hand.
On Friday, she came home to a timorous nation of cowards.
That same day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo teamed up with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to establish a mandatory 21-day quarantine for any health workers returning from West Africa. When she landed at the ironically-named Liberty International Airport in Newark, she informed an immigration official that she had just returned from Sierra Leone, and was immediately hustled into a room. For the next several hours, she was questioned harshly by several people wearing bio-suits without being told exactly what was going on. According to her, nobody seemed to be in charge.
One man whose gun was visible under his bio-suit, in Hickox own words, "barked questions at me as if I was a criminal." After several hours passed, she was brought to University Hospital in Newark in a speeding sirens-blaring lights-flashing caravan of eight police cars. Upon arrival, she was stuffed into a quarantine tent with scant furniture, a port-o-potty and no shower, and was informed that this would be her home for the next twenty-one days.
(snip)
"The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny," Aesop tells us. These days, the tyrant will justify that tyranny by playing to the fears of the people. Kaci Hickox is but one example of a nation that has entirely surrendered to those fears, both real and imagined, because those fears are a facile way for TV networks to get ratings, and for politicians to get coverage by stoking those fears, which creates more fear, which generates ratings, which makes political careers. Lather rinse repeat.
This is what happens in a nation trained to be fearful by a media and political establishment which profits from that fear. We have seen it with terrorism, and with WMD in Iraq, and Bird Flu, and "They're coming for your guns," and immigration, and now ISIS, and in so many other moments as well. Now, it is Ebola, which is dangerous to be sure, but not to the point that we explode the Bill of Rights, again. For the record, it seems the CDC would seem to agree.
This is what happens to an ill-informed populace which is not taught to be strong, and fair, and true to the ideals of their founding, but is instead convinced by the very entities tasked to protect and inform them that they are, actually, about to die at the hands of this week's bloviated threat.
This is how a nation of cowards is made.
Mission accomplished.
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27090-this-nation-of-cowards
"Plague Ship": Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Charles P. Pierce
As long as there have been human beings, there has been epidemic disease. As long as there has been epidemic disease, there has been panic. As long as there has been panic, there have been heroes who stand in the middle of it, heedless of the blind terror, and beat it back through the sheer force of their humanity.
And as long as there have been human beings, there have been human beings with power over other human beings. As long as there have been human beings with power over other human beings, there have been governments. And as long as there has been epidemic disease, and as long as there has been panic, there have been human beings who have the right combination of rancid ambition and foul cowardice who come into the government and seek advantage from the panic and, therefore, from the epidemic disease itself. There have always been human beings who are heroes in the face of epidemic disease. And there have always been slaves to their own worst instincts.
Kaci Hickox, meet Chris Christie.
Kaci Hickox, meet the inexcusable Andrew Cuomo.
Kaci Hickox, meet the know-nothing poltroons of the American conservative movement.
Kaci Hickox, meet the bland, desperate inmates of the mainstream media.
The Red State gang and the rest of them can't help themselves. It's like asking camels not to spit.
CNN can't help itself because it already has fired up the logo and the doomy music. Sorry, Malaysian Airlines 370. You're on your own now, wherever you are.
The epic rest: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Big_Chicken_And_The_Hero_He_Captured
The Japanese had comfortable accomodations in the internment camps, too.
If you stretch the word "comfortable" to the breaking point.
No shower. No books. No television. No radio. No choice for Kaci Hickox.
"National security." "National emergency."
Tyranny will always find an excuse for its tyranny.
When you allow government officials to "quarantine" people in an atmosphere of fear, hysteria and political pressure, nothing good ever comes of it. George Takei can tell you all about it.
This could have and should have been handled much better, and when Kaci Hickox gets her multi-million dollar judgment after suing over her treatment, I will raise a toast to her.
And P.S., when you stomp on people who put themselves on the line to help other people in danger zones, pretty soon no one will be willing to help.
Video interview I did the othjer day on Bush, WMD, Iraq and ISIS
For your viewing pleasure.
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179