NATO Troops Kill Afghan Protesters
KABUL, Afghanistan — A volatile town in southern Afghanistan erupted Tuesday as rumors spread that American servicemen had desecrated a Koran and defiled local women in a nearby village. When the march was over, at least eight protesters were dead and about a dozen wounded, supposedly shot by Afghan intelligence officers, but much of the town of Garmsir blamed Americans.
2 US Troops, 4 Afghan Soldiers Killed in Attacks
Two United States service members were killed Wednesday in a bomb blast in eastern Afghanistan. Their deaths brought to 12 the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan so far this month; 16 other soldiers from the international coalition have died this month.
16 Killed in US Drone Attack in Afghanistan
The U.S. this week used aerial drones to kill 16 freedom fighters in volatile southern Afghanistan, a rare instance of the U.S. and its allies using a tactic more commonly employed against targets across the border in Pakistan. U.S. military officials said both attacks took place in Helmand province, one of the most violent regions of Afghanistan. In the first strike, ISAF said, a drone fired a Hellfire missile at a suspected safe house early Tuesday morning, killing 13 insurgents. A separate drone strike Monday killed three.
Obama to Request $33,000,000,000 for Wars
The Associated Press is reporting President Obama plans to ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year. The request would come on top of an expected $708 billion sought for the Pentagon, the first time a Defense Department budget request would exceed $700 billion.
If he has lost his mind -- or does -- would it be world's end?
The assumption of Barack Obama cool, collected and calm has been a universal since this unknown individual began to gain presidential timbre through the campaign of '07. The media persona and Obama's two droning books convinced us that this "child of the 60s" was the very opposite of a hip-shooter: deeply thoughtful about most things; no personal experience with physical violence (has he ever been in a fistfight?); abstract and diffident; a professor from the Ivy League; most important, the child of a mother and father who separately personified the best of that glorious decade -- independent, free-spirited, anti-establishment, each with a virulent hatred of war and violence.
But what if it's altogether to the opposite? Rather than the happy product of such a union, maybe Barry Soetoro experienced those years and those parents in a much different way. An absent father, more concerned with his newer family, newer children, and political/diplomatic career than with the boy, to the extent that Obama never met his dad until the child was 10. And the absent mother: dumping her little boy onto his maternal grandparents, also more concerned with lifestyle, lovers, and profession.
The baboons of the American Right have made hatred of the 1960s their number one obsession for 40 years now. Nixon got elected on the wind of that hatred. So did Reagan. And George W. Bush made lots of hay in the darkness of that collective loathing. But theirs was political/power/values stuff. Not the result of private, everyday resentments, loneliness, confusion and heartbreak caused by the abandonment by two obviously self-absorbed parents. Barack Obama's Sixties hatred is honest and well-earned.
What if under the too-cool-for-school face burns a rage, a life- and self-hatred forever burning no matter what the ego satisfactions of the man's enormous accomplishments? What if his whole career has been little other than vengeance taken upon absent parents and all they represented? What if he is just another ego-prick, assassin, user, liar? Now in charge of the greatest criminal enterprise in world history -- Empire USA -- that and his actions as President make more sense than the Miracle of Hope and Change.
A man whose identity is forever hidden because of his wayward parents grabs the ultimate brass ring by pretending to be a Man of Peace (the insanity of this guy accepting the Nobel the same week he begins a new war must have particularly appealed to Obama's psychology), then governs as a Man of Total War. How long can he contain such outrageous private contradictions on such a public stage?
