Category: 7. Obsession with National Security

  • Torture's OK Because 'America Is Awesome'

    “The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome.”

  • The Tea Party, the Debt Ceiling, and White Southern Extremism

    “Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label. The threat of Southern Tea Party representatives and […]

  • Wielding Power

    “The only rational thought is that he’s gotten what he wants. That he wanted to protect the torturers. That he wanted to protect the banksters. That he wanted to solidify and increase the powers of an Imperial Presidency. That he wanted Health Care Reform that amounts to little more than a giveaway to the megacorporations […]

  • Regime Change is Not Revolution

    “Plutocracy’s an easier sell when people can aspire to step over their neighbor’s corpse to join it instead of that ‘we’re all in this together’ bullshit.”

  • Pro-War Ideology Connected to Being Shielded From the Human Cost of War

    “[A new study] suggests that many Americans’ aggressively pro-war ideology may fundamentally rely on their being physically shielded/disconnected from the human cost of war. … The researchers analyzed data from the Jennings-Niemi Political Socialization Study of college-bound high schoolers and subsequent interviews of those same high-schoolers from 1965 onward. In the process, they discovered that men […]

  • The American Death Star

    “When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone […]

  • Former Military Interrogator on How Torture Delayed Finding Bin Laden

    “One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Skaykh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as […]

  • Chinese Hackers Used Backdoor Created for Law Enforcement to Access Gmail

    “Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. ..  In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what […]

  • Potency of the Moment

    “The potency of the moment is Obama’s to lose. … So historic is the shift, in fact, that all Obama really has to do now is let the astonishing details of the clandestine operation trickle down and word of his direct, daring involvement penetrate the collective consciousness, and not only will any current agenda items […]

  • Jeremy Scahill on Bin Laden

    “I found it quite disgusting to see people chanting, like it was some sort of sporting event, outside of the White House. I think it was idiotic. Let’s remember here, hundreds of thousands of people have died. Iraq was invaded, a country that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, nothing to do with Osama bin […]