JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Not much satisfaction in this.

He was killed by a far greater butcher, the one responsible for a million deaths in Iraq, three million in Vietnam, and who knows how many in Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Chile, and a dozen other places.

Only the pathetic Peace Prize President – who regularly has his drones killing people in Pakistan – takes any real satisfaction because he is looking forward to a difficult election.

Obama’s re-election is hardly something to celebrate, but that is what this unbelievably costly deed concerns.

By the way, there has never been one shred of proof offered of Bin Laden’s guilt of anything except not liking the United States.

The FBI never even put him on its Most Wanted List.

Justice has been done?

I truly believe the predatory United States has no concept of what justice is.

_____________________________

The excesses reflected in many comments simply prove the impact of propaganda and public gullibility.

Even if he was guilty as charged – and we have never, never been offered proof – his crime is smaller than many crimes of the same American military who killed him.

His crimes, if so they be, also are absolutely no greater than those of Israel, and just in recent years.

Here is a state which killed 400 children in Gaza and another 1,000 adults, about the same number in Southern Lebanon, who knows how many week-in-week-out in raids of various towns, and of course murdered about ten people on the high seas in an act of savage piracy.

There is no justice in any of this. Only more proof, if any were needed, that might makes right.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Sorry, this article is delusional.

Remodeling America is an imaginary concept.

Despite changes over the last two centuries such as universal franchise, America manages a great deal to be what it was two centuries ago.

An aristocracy of wealth and influence, where only a small number of people’s views genuinely count and one bent on imperial expansion.

The entire political system is stacked against serious change.

Congress is the best money can buy, and that goes for both parties.

The two parties are an opportunistic duopoly representing almost no principles at all.

The Washington establishment of the Pentagon/CIA/NIA/FBI actually form an unelected continuing government behind the elected government.

The last president who tried challenging that unelected government died in Dallas November 22, 1963.

Obama is personally an enlightened man of considerable depths, but he is ambitious to be and remain president. That wish is virtually incompatible with “remolding America.”

American exceptionalism is now everywhere and always the rule, whether it is making a war crime/ invasion into legitimate foreign policy or the Secretary of State putting pressure on Italy over a woman, one from a well-off family, fairly convicted of murder.