Grendel's Mother Must Denounce Grendel's Bloody Attacks on Meadhall Immediately. Hrothgar's People Are Suffering, Yet She Says Nothing

Can it be better and more plainly said?

If I’m driving to visit my sister in Tripoli, how do I avoid getting blown up by a NATO airstrike? If I hunker down in my house in Gharyan, how do I avoid rebels fighting the pro-Qaddafi forces in my neighborhood? If the rebels accuse me of loyalty to Qaddafi, how do I avoid being shot? If the loyalists accuse me of aiding the enemy, how do I avoid getting executed?

All I want to do is stay alive. How do I do that? And how do NATO airstrikes assist in that end?

Every time some credulous asshole starts yawping about how "Obama must speak out," I dream of corpses. Oh, oh, no, they're just, like, pointing out the hypocrisy of supporting protests here but not there. Oh, god, you fucking fools, you rubes, you accomplices to war and evil! Let him be a hypocrite! Let him not speak out! PLEASE, someone, stop this fucking monster from speaking out. When he keeps his goddamn yap shut, there is at least some minor, slim chance that the country will escape airstrikes.

This is the problem with the left, and this is why, though their language of "national interest" is somewhat distasteful to me, I so often identify more closely with the isolationist right than the sort-of anti-imperial left. Daniel Larison understands in a way that most lefties apparently do not that American governments taking up the rhetorical cause of rebels and revolutions are not engaging in rare, admirable acts of solidarity. Barack Obama "speaking out" on behalf of the Libyan opposition was not the act of a selfless democrat cheering on the aspirations of some other people to be free; it was a prelude to war, and his "speaking out" on behalf of whomever in Bahrain would be the same.

So someone says:

Obama condemned the Gaddafi government in his speech, justifying the recent military attacks in Libya, saying: "Innocent people were targeted for killing. Hospitals and ambulances were attacked. Journalists were arrested." Now that the same things are happening in Bahrain, Obama has little to say.

Look what's happening in Libya! NATO is bombing Tripoli! There are a million people in Tripoli! And you want this fucker Obama to do the same to Bahrain?

Oh, oh, no. No. We just want him to speak out. You know. So as not to be a hypocrite. What're a few JDAMs between friends when a consistent approach to the promotion of democracy is on the line?

Sink the Bismark

Amy Goodman is the host of a radio emission called Democracy Now!--the exclamation point is part of the title, like, Oklahoma! OK! It is grindingly earnest, as you'd imagine, and completely fatuous; its principle bugaboo is the "treatment of journalists"--this being the prism through which its college-nostalgic audience can appreciate, in rainbow hues, the various repressions and degradations of the third world; if not Amy, then some other English-fluent native newspaperman is forever getting hassled by the local cops, and this, dear listener, tells you that Democracy, for all those others, comes up somewhat short of Now! As with most liberal types, Goodman's peacableness is like airport toilet paper, thin and itchy. One of our far-flung correspondents sends along her plea in the Guardian that Barry send in the marines. Target: Bahrain, to put it in Clancyspeak. Her rationale is impeccable:

Add to that Bahrain's strategic role: it is where the US navy's fifth fleet is based, tasked with protecting "US interests" like the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, and supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Surely, US interests include supporting democracy over despots.

You have to love that surely; it really is the Snickers bar in the Country-Club pool. Surely the nation that invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and which sits in perpetual Crusader-King watery fastness upon Suez and the Straits supports democracy over despots. I've seen spinals, dude, and this guy can walk.

Hosni Minibarack

When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings.

-Friedman

You don't need to follow the link, nor read the article. I propose to you that this single sentence contains within it, quite unintentionally, all the woes of the empire, all of its grim and hysterical mispprehensions about the world.

Annals of the Lost Aspirations of Our Tender Youth, Now Past

An intrepid reader forwards this: Bradley Manning: top US legal scholars voice outrage at 'torture'. How I LULZD! Writing a letter to remind the American President that he used to be a perfessir is like writing a letter to the Führer reminding him that he used to be a painter.

Surfing to Serfdom

If you look at "high unemployment" as a public policy problem that "reduces demand" and prevents "a full economic recovery"--or, whatever, fill in the blanks with your own finance-pages-isms--then the behavior of the President and the federal government seem inexplicable.

If you look at "high unemployment" as a desirable state in which the bargaining power of both the employed and the job-seeking is reduced to essentially zero, a state in which individuals and labor unions accept ever-more-disadvantageous wages and working conditions just in order to have a job; in which, in particular, workers desperate not to be fired increase hours worked and output even though their compensation is shrinking; in which profitability increases in part on the backs of those "productivity" gains . . . well, shit, it all makes a lot of sense. When nice liberals wonder why Barack Obama and the Democrats and the Republicans and Everybody are enacting policies to "harm the labor market," I would answer that they are enacting policies to harm the labor market.