My sleep schedule is all out of whack, so I am sitting here watching A Shot in the Dark, and I wonder- is there any one better at that style of comedy than Peter Sellers?
Archives for April 2013
Ghost Money in the Cruel Mountains
Aspiring empires going back to the days of Alexander the Great have discovered a universal truth concerning the peoples of the Hindu Kush: You can’t buy their loyalty (although some of them have been known to suggest it could be rented). Plenty of DFHs have been pointing this out since the start of Dubya’s Big Aventure, but the scope and toxicity of ‘our’ ham-handed efforts are just now (again) coming to light. Spencer Ackerman at Wired has a smart article explaining “How the CIA’s Bags of Cash Undermined the Afghanistan War“:
It’s the most understandable, intuitive and tempting mistake in geopolitics: secretly pay a powerful foreigner to do what you want. The CIA, like many spy agencies, has done it throughout its history, and now we know it helped undermine the America’s longest war.
Nearly every month since the war began in 2001, the CIA has sent a guy over to Afghan President Hamid Karzai with a bag — sometimes a suitcase, sometimes a backpack, sometimes a shopping bag — full of cash. His former chief of staff says they used to call it “ghost money,” and it totals tens of millions of dollars, according to an eye-opening New York Times story. Quite the hypocritical twist from a sponsor country that so frequently hectors Karzai about corruption. “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” a U.S. official levels with the paper’s Matthew Rosenberg, “was the United States.”
When Iran pays off Karzai, it’s disruptive foreign meddling. But when the CIA does it, it’s supposed to be an insurance policy to entrench U.S. influence in the president’s office. Alas, there’s something more important than influence in geopolitics: leverage. When Washington most needed leverage with Karzai, it didn’t have much — at least not that it was prepared to use — and the CIA ghost money helps explain why…
Paying off foreign leaders doesn’t always fail. Sometimes it’s expedient for an immediate goal, as when the CIA rented the anti-Taliban opposition in 2001 to gain a network of local fighters. And bribery can be an insurance policy for a broader goal, as with the U.S. arms purchases to Mubarak-era Egypt to secure the peace with Israel.
But just as foreign aid distorts a local economy and prompts corruption, so too does attempting to purchase a foreign leader. The CIA has learned this again and again: Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire/Congo; Nguyen Van Thieu in South Vietnam; Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya. Shortcutting the arduous work of foreign policy through cash payments rarely works as intended: at best, it can paper over deeper dysfunctions for a time, as with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or with Pakistan’s duplicitous intelligence service. But over the long term, it ends up leaving the client in a stronger position than the patron, since the patron is rarely willing to walk away from the messy foreign entanglement that prompted the payout in the first place…
By all means, read the whole thing.
So About Black Privilege …
So over at This Week in Blackness we talk a lot about white privilege. Hell, I did a video on it when TWiB! first started–but have you had your mind expanded to learn about black privilege?
If you read these posts and you’re thinking to yourself “Yeah! What’s up with that Negroes?” Please don’t say that out loud. Just come over and talk with us–perhaps listen to today’s show–and we can explain why this is so completely fucked…er…problematic.
On today’s #TWiBRadio we discuss what “black privilege” looks like on the black hand side, why there’s never too much penis in Washington, and President Obama’s zingers at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. Listen here:
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And on #amTWiB, political strategist L. Joy Williams and the morning crew of blackness (why are they ‘of blackness?’ Cause…well, um…your face.) discusses the Pennsylvania town where domestic abuse victims may face eviction, black voters turnout surpassing whites in 2012, and being on the brink of a cure for AIDS.
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Random Monday Music Video Open Thread (RMMVOT for short)
I was surfing the Youtube machine for some stray tunes to accompany a global e-mail purge when I came across this bit of both very cool performance and what my son calls Old People’s Music in a true old-folks setting:
I greatly enjoy James Taylor, and Mavis Staples is the bees’ knees, and I’ll do nostalgia w. the best of them, but the true moment of ecstasy in this video comes with the sudden glimpse of Dr. Emilio Lizardo at about 3:10. Colin Powell swaying to the tune ain’t bad either.
Talk about whatever unholy intersection of disparate realities has informed your day.
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Sully and Denise Confront Infowars Mope
Gotta love this guy going all south side end (sorry, the South Side is the ‘Burgh) on one of the Infowars “reporters” hanging around Boston trying to peddle the false flag nonsense:
Memo to the kids- if you are going to cuss someone out, that is how you do it.
Related asshattery:
Former Rep. Ron Paul said the police response to the Boston Marathon bombings was scarier than the bombing itself, which killed three and wounded more than 250.
“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul, a Texas Republican, wrote today on the website of the libertarian writer Lew Rockwell. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”
Paul said the scenes of the house-to-house search for the younger bombing suspect in suburban Watertown, Mass., were reminiscent of a “military coup in a far off banana republic.”
“Forced lockdown of a city,” he wrote. “Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.”
What is he talking about? It was a police investigation.
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This is a Stickup Everybody Get Face Down
The House Republicans are contemplating a new budget-hostage strategy, the the Washington Post reports in a story that is both highly useful and inadvertently Onion-esque. The hallmark of Onion news reporting is conveying insanity as if it were sane in a completely deadpan way. The news contained within the story is that the House GOP is thinking of tying the next increase in the debt ceiling to tax reform. Under this proposed strategy, the Post reports, “The debt limit might be raised for only a few months, with the promise of another increase when tax reform legislation passes the Senate.”
By tax reform, they mean cutting taxes…
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Later on, we’ll conspire
I’m not sure it’s possible to parody right-wingers anymore, given that all they want to do is troll. But I’m open to ideas.
Charles Johnson does the honors on NRA’s latest:
National Review is not the worst conservative rag out there — they’re like the Daily Caller after it aged ten years, bought a suit, stopped doing coke, and had to live through an uncomfortable coming-out conversation with its college buddy. But it sure prints some dumb BS (I’m just dying to hear what the editors say about “Marriage and the Court,” NOT). Still, this is the first time I’ve seen the magazine run a cover that literally looks like a Photoshop someone mocked up to make everyone on the masthead look like assholes.