Don Bacon: New occasional poster here
Alert JWN readers-- is there any other kind?-- will have noted that yesterday long-term commenter Don Bacon got to publish his own (excellent) authored post here. It was on the Iraqi SOFA, etc negotiations and the notable lack of transparency and accountability with which the Bushies have been handling them. This is the first of an occasional series of posts I hope Don will be putting up here, joining Scott Harrop in the distinguished class of "occasional co-posters."
I asked Don to tell me a little about himself and this is what he wrote:
- I'm of small-town Yankee origins with several degrees in engineering and education, but the degrees I like the best are the Fahrenheit degrees while soaking in Western hot springs. Just an old hippy. Ironically I got exposed to Smedley Butler while in an army career, and have since worked to increase his exposure in the world. The Smedley Butler Society website regularly gets visitors from many countries. Smed was raised a Quaker, of course, which no doubt had an effect on his later conclusion (after an active 33-year Marine career) that "war is a racket . . .the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
Helena has kindly asked me to contribute and I will do so to the best of my ability. I won't embarrass her here with my opinion of her, except to say that it motivates me. It isn't just the large five-figure stipend that she promised me. (Heavy irony alert there, folks. ~HC) I do recognize that my sometimes contentious writing style might get old to some so I will be away a lot, and then my contributions will be sporadic at best. My next travels will take me to Mexico, New Zealand and Fiji, in my endless quest to find somebody that likes George Bush. I'm thinking that an uncivilized Fiji cannibal might be the ticket, providing the interview is carefully conducted.
My other life guru, besides General Butler, is Henry David Thoreau. I'll take advantage of this opportunity to quote a selection. Most of what Thoreau wrote is great, but this passage from Walden inspires me the most. "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake."
With this as a guide, let the games begin!
notable lack of transparency and accountability with which the Bushies have been handling them.
If Helena thinks its Bush&Co responsible for above things so be Don, you are all wrong or you covering the reality and hidden agenda by US as state not as Bush.
I asked you to be more "transparency and accountability" when you writing about Iraq /US things here don't put smoke to hid yourselves by disturbing views.
Let see the “socialist” new elected President Obama and his “Zionist” WH Chief of Staff how they solve this SOFA…
Salah,
You're right, it is the US government and not only Bush which is at fault. In the SOFA piece, at the end, I did place particular blame on the (Democratic) Senate for not fulfilling its Constitutional responsibilities.
You're also correct that the appointment of Rahm Israel Emanuel, an Israeli citizen who is the son of a Zionist arab-hating terrorist and who served with the Israeli army during the first yellow ribbon war, is not a particularly good omen, to say the least.