What was the marines name that died in this supposed gun battle with the (sarcasm) fierce courageous Saddam?
RexRed wrote:What was the marines name that died in this supposed gun battle with the (sarcasm) fierce courageous Saddam?
You're not going to let details get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, are you?
SGRENA: "I HAVE NOT SAID THAT THEY WANTED TO KILL ME."
The New York Times
March 13, 2005
FRANK RICH
The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told
IT was two and half weeks after 9/11 that I heard the dirtiest joke I'd ever heard in my life. New York was still tossing and turning under its blanket of grief back then. Almost no one was going out at night to have fun, a word that had been banished from the country's vocabulary. But desperately sad people will do desperate things. That's my excuse for making my way with my wife to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, where the Friars Club was roasting Hugh Hefner.
Someone had decided that the show must go on. A crowd materialized out of nowhere to pack a vast ballroom in an otherwise shadowy and deserted Midtown. On the dais were not only the expected clowns old (Alan King) and young (Jimmy Kimmel) but a surreal grab bag of celebrities out of Madame Tussauds: Dr. Joyce Brothers, Ice-T, Patty Hearst, Donald Trump. "God Bless America" was sung by Deborah Harry.
The ensuing avalanche of Viagra jokes did not pull off the miracle of making everyone in the room forget the recent events. Restlessness had long since set in when the last comic on the bill, Gilbert Gottfried, took the stage. Mr. Gottfried, decked out in preposterously ill-fitting formal wear, has a manic voice so shrill he makes Jerry Lewis sound like Morgan Freeman. He grabbed the podium for dear life and started rocking back and forth like a hyperactive teenager trapped onstage in a school assembly. Soon he delivered what may have been the first public 9/11 gag: He couldn't get a direct flight to California, he said, because "they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first."
There were boos, but Mr. Gottfried moved right along to his act's crowning joke. "A talent agent is sitting in is office," he began. "A family walks in - a man, woman, two kids, and their little dog. And the talent agent goes, 'What kind of an act do you do?' " What followed was a marathon description of a vaudeville routine featuring incest, bestiality and almost every conceivable bodily function. The agent asks the couple the name of their unusual act, and their answer is the punch line: "The Aristocrats."
As the mass exodus began, some people were laughing, others were appalled, and perhaps a majority of us were in the middle. We knew we had seen something remarkable, not because the joke was so funny but because it had served as shock therapy, harmless shock therapy for an adult audience, that at least temporarily relieved us of our burdens and jolted us back into the land of the living again. Some weeks later Comedy Central would cut the bit entirely from its cable recycling of the roast. But in the more than three years since, I have often reflected upon Mr. Gottfried's mesmerizing performance. At a terrible time it was an incongruous but welcome gift. He was inviting us to once again let loose.
I bring up that night now because I've seen "The Aristocrats," a new documentary inspired in part by Mr. Gottfried's strange triumph. Unveiled in January at Sundance, it's coming to a theater near some of you this summer. (It could be the first movie to get an NC-17 rating for sex and nudity not depicted on screen.) But I also bring up that night for the shadow it casts on a culture that is now caught in the vise of the government war against "indecency." The chill cast by that war is taking new casualties each day, and with each one, the commissars of censorship are emboldened to extend their reach. When even the expletives of our soldiers in Iraq are censored on a public television documentary, Mr. Gottfried's unchecked indecency seems to belong to another age.
The latest scheme for broadening that censorship arrived the week after the Oscar show was reduced to colorless piffle on network television. Ted Stevens, the powerful chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, pronounced himself sick of "four-letter words with participles" on cable and satellite television. "I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over the air," he said, promising to carry the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Never mind that anyone can keep pay TV at bay by not purchasing it, and that any parent who does subscribe can click on foolproof blocking devices to censor any channel. Senator Stevens's point is to intimidate MTV, Comedy Central, the satellite radio purveyors of Howard Stern and countless others from this moment on, whether he ultimately succeeds in exerting seemingly unconstitutional power over them or not.
If you can see only one of the shows that he wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870's. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government.
Its creator is David Milch, a former Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush and the onetime protégé of Robert Penn Warren, whose 1946 novel "All the King's Men" upends bowdlerized fairy tales about American politics just as "Deadwood" dismantles Hollywood's old sanitized Westerns. As Mr. Milch says in an interview on the DVD of the first "Deadwood" season: "It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, and that the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable." There was "a tremendous energy to the language," he adds, but the reason this language never surfaced in movie Westerns during the genre's heyday was the Hays production code. For some 30 years starting in 1934, Hollywood's self-censorship strictures kept even married couples in separate beds on screen.
Mr. Milch has fought such codes in the past. He was a co-creator, with Steven Bochco, of the network police show, "NYPD Blue," which prompted protests in 1993 for its rude language and exposure of David Caruso's backside. That battle was won; "NYPD Blue" overcame the howls of the American Family Association and an early blackout by some ABC affiliates to become a huge hit that ended its run only this month. But it's a measure of what has happened since that now even the backside of a cartoon toddler is being pixilated in the animated series "Family Guy," on Fox. Mr. Bochco told Variety, "I don't think today we could launch or sell 'NYPD Blue' in the form that it launched 12 years ago." He's right. We're turning the clock back to the days of Hays.
This is why "Deadwood" could not be better timed. It reminds us of who we are and where we came from, and that even indecency is part of an American's birthright. It also, if inadvertently, illuminates the most insidious underpinnings of today's decency police by further reminding us that the same people who want to stamp out entertainment like "Deadwood" also want to rewrite American history (and, when they can, the news) according to their dictates of moral and political correctness. They won't tolerate an honest account of the real Deadwood in a classroom or museum any more than they will its fictionalized representation on HBO.
Lynne Cheney has taken to writing and promoting triumphalist children's history books that, as she said on Fox News recently, offer "an uncynical approach to our nation and to our national story." (So much for her own out-of-print "Deadwood"-esque novel of 1981, "Sisters," with its evocation of lesbian passions on the frontier.) That's her right. But when her taste is enforced as government policy that's another matter. The vice president's wife has used her current political clout, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered last fall, to quietly squelch a Department of Education history curriculum pamphlet for parents that didn't fit her political agenda. It's no coincidence that Senator Stevens attacked the Smithsonian Institution in the 1990's when it mounted an exhibit deromanticizing the old West, "Deadwood"-style, by calling attention to the indignities visited on women, Indians and the environment.
At a certain point political correctness on the right becomes indistinguishable from that of the left. On the Oscar telecast, Robin Williams was prohibited by ABC from delivering a satirical comic song by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the "Hairspray" songwriting team, inspired by James Dobson's attack on the "pro-homosexual activism" of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. One of the no-no's: an unflattering reference to Indian casinos in the lyric "Pocahontas is addicted to craps." If the lyric had said Pocahontas was victimized by white guys, the right would have shut the song down just as fast.
"It's a dangerous world we're living in when you get to the point that a joke about Jude Law is the most controversial thing in the Oscar show," says the TV star and standup comic Bob Saget. "I'm missing Marlon Brando's Indian wife, David Niven and the streaker." I had called Mr. Saget because he is one of the hundred or so comedians who appear in the documentary "The Aristocrats," in which another comic, Paul Provenza, and the magician-comedian Penn Jillette interview their peers about the decades-long history and countless improvisational variations on the film's eponymous joke.
The movie is a multigenerational compendium of comedians, from Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles to George Carlin, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman and Cartman of "South Park." But the raunchiest participants are often those best known for their roles in family-friendly sitcoms on network TV: Drew Carey, Jason Alexander, Paul Reiser. I asked Mr. Saget, who starred as a lovable widower father in the long-running hit "Full House," where his own impulse to tell X-rated standup comes from. Among his reasons: "There's something about all of us that wants to push the limits of the world we're in, where you can't say anything. There's a time and a place for stuff that is freeing for people."
I'm not a particular enthusiast for dirty jokes, but that freedom is exactly what I, and I suspect others, felt when a comic with a funny voice in a bad suit broke all the rules of propriety at that Friars Roast. But it was just three days earlier at the White House that Ari Fleischer, asked to respond to a politically incorrect remark about 9/11 by another comedian, Bill Maher, warned all Americans "to watch what they say." That last week in September 2001, I've come to realize, is as much a marker in our cultural history as two weeks earlier is a marker in the history of our relations with the world. Even as we're constantly told we're in a war for "freedom" abroad, freedom in our culture at home has been under attack ever since.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
What is interesting about the following article is the fact that the US used not only Agent Orange, but Agent Green and Agent Blue from what our Vietnamese guide told us on our visit there last month.
****************************************
Agent Orange Case for Millions of Vietnamese Is Dismissed
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: March 10, 2005
In a decision that could close a controversial Vietnam-era chapter of American history, a federal judge in Brooklyn today dismissed a damage suit filed on behalf of millions of Vietnamese that claimed American chemical companies committed war crimes by supplying the military with the defoliant Agent Orange.
The civil suit, filed last year, had sought what could have been billions of dollars in damages and the environmental cleanup of Vietnam. The suit drew international attention for its claims about Agent Orange, which was widely used by the American military to clear the jungle until 1971.
The suit claimed that the defoliant, which contained the highly toxic substance dioxin, left a legacy of poison in Vietnam that caused birth defects, cancer and other health problems and amounted to a violation of international law.
But Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the United States District Court sided with the chemical companies and the Justice Department, which argued that supplying the defoliant did not amount to a war crime.
"No treaty or agreement, express or implied, of the United States," Judge Weinstein wrote, "operated to make use of herbicides in Vietnam a violation of the laws of war or any other form of international law until at the earliest April of 1975."
Because of sovereign immunity, the United States government was not sued.
In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford adopted a national policy renouncing the first use of herbicides in warfare. Also in 1975, the Senate ratified an international Geneva accord dating from 1925, which outlawed the use of poisonous gases during war.
The suit claimed that because of the dioxin in Agent Orange, spraying it amounted to the use of poison during war.
But Judge Weinstein concluded in a 233-page decision that even if the United States had been a Geneva signatory during the Vietnam War, the accord would not have barred the use of Agent Orange.
"The prohibition extended only to gases deployed for their asphyxiating or toxic effects on man," said the decision, issued in response to a motion for dismissal by the defendants, "not to herbicides designed to affect plants that may have unintended harmful side-effects on people."
William H. Goodman, a lawyer for an association of Vietnamese that filed the suit as a class action, said the decision would be appealed. He said the United States Supreme Court could eventually decide the issue.
"The judge missed the point," Mr. Goodman said. "He ruled as a matter of law that what these defendants manufactured was not a poison, whereas even these manufacturers recognized that it was at the time."
The companies have long said that dioxin was an unwanted byproduct of the manufacture of Agent Orange, but claimed that there was no conclusive link to the many serious health problems blamed on Agent Orange.
Over many decades, American veterans of the Vietnam War filed suits making health claims similar to those now being pressed by the Vietnamese. Judge Weinstein also handled those cases.
Seven American chemical companies settled the veterans' cases for $180 million in 1984.
The same chemical companies, including Dow, Monsanto and Hercules, were sued in the Vietnamese case.
Spokesmen for some of the companies applauded the decision today.
"We believe the defoliant saved lives by protecting allied forces from enemy ambush and did not create adverse health affects," said Scot Wheeler, a spokesman for the Dow Chemical Company.
Glynn Young, a spokesman for Monsanto, said Judge Weinstein's decision was correct.
"The judge said they didn't make the case," Mr. Young said. "That's a very difficult message for a lot of people to understand because there's so much emotion wrapped up in cases like this one."
Though he ruled against the Vietnamese plaintiffs, Judge Weinstein agreed with many arguments put forth by their lawyers. He rejected arguments of the Justice Department that the court had no place in reviewing military strategies adopted by President John F. Kennedy and his successors.
Saying "presidential powers are limited even in wartime," Judge Weinstein said American courts had the power to decide whether presidential decisions about the conduct of a war violated international law.
"In the Third Reich," the decision said, "all power of the state was centered in Hitler; yet his orders did not serve as a defense at Nuremberg," where war crimes trials were conducted after World War II.
Similarly, he rejected an argument from the chemical companies that they were shielded by rules that typically protect military contractors from suits for providing war materiel.
Clearly writing to influence courts in the future, Judge Weinstein used sweeping language and employed extensive citations to historical, military, scientific and legal writings.
If supplying contaminated herbicide had been a war crime, Judge Weinstein wrote, the chemical companies could have refused to supply it. "We are a nation of free men and women," he wrote, "habituated to standing up to government when it exceeds its authority."
This site
http://zfacts.com/p/780.html
Is worth reading. To everyone.
But it doesn't play well with cut&paste, sorry.
Cycloptichorn
Walter Hinteler wrote:Well, I know that my posts are read -by those, who can do so. Others might have automatic blinkers installed.
I read them Walter. Please keep on posting them. The ones you post are informative about not only what is happening but also what people think about what is happening.
We Americans are quite flawed and fallible. We always have been. I expect that to some degree we always will be. What I in particular would like to know is how we compare in that respect with citizens of other countries. Are we more, less, or about the same in the flawed and fallible department? Regardless of the answer to that question, we have much room for improvement and are determined to continue making those improvements. Also regardless of the answer to that question, we have accomplished and are continuing to accomplish some very noble things both for ourselves and humanity. How we are able to do that with all our flaws and fallibilities is a great mystery to me. Perhaps it relates to the fact that so many of us (no where near enough yet to suit me) persist passionately devoting our lives to living up to our very noble almost 229 year old founding principles.
ican711nm wrote: The ones you post are informative about not only what is happening but also what people think about what is happening.
I know - but I thought it only to be fair to post the press releases from the "Multi-National Force - Iraq and Multi-National Corps - Iraq Joint Public Affairs Office" as well.
Walter Hinteler wrote: ... I know - but I thought it only to be fair to post the press releases from the "Multi-National Force - Iraq and Multi-National Corps - Iraq Joint Public Affairs Office" as well.
I infer that you think those two sources present neither what is happening nor what people think is happening.
OK then, what do you think they do present: that which they think is
not happening or that which people
don't think about what is happening?
I really don't know, why the Italian government says this and the US-Forces that.
Both will have own reasons for doing so - unless they tell about this, I really have no idea what happened there.
The US said, it will last three to four weeks until they can say something.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4337363.stm
Dozens die in Iraq suicide attack
Quote:At least 47 people have been killed by a suicide bomber who blew himself up at a Shia funeral service in the restive northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
<shame>
I wonder if our children will forgive us for not doing more to stop this.
Cycloptichorn
Cycloptichorn wrote:<shame>
I wonder if our children will forgive us for not doing more to stop this.
Cycloptichorn
Like what?
Do you believe if the US military upped and hauled butt outta Iraq tomorow the killing would stop?
Please. If would increase 1000 fold.
Quote, "Please. If would increase 1000 fold." It's a good possibility according to some experts. They think a civil war will ensue in Iraq, because we have destablized it by our preemptive attack.
Destabilized it? From what? A murderous dictatorship really isn't that stable.
There are other "murderous dictators" in this world. We attacked (again) Iraq on false pretenses of WMDs and Saddam's connection to al Qaida to "Protectd the American People" - which was never proven to hold water aftewards.
Today Spanish Muslims issue fatwa on Al Qaeda. Anyone got an article or link?
Now, if only the all the other Muslims in other countries will also denounce Osama, that should being a good backlash that will eventually end his terrorist activities. He can't live forever.
