A Quick Tour Of The Web

What's up with Blogger and Blogspot? It has been really impossible for me to get on and post for the past few days. I assume chatter levels are at an all-time high... Or is this an effort to shut down dissenting voices?

Wow. Juan Cole has a guest blogger at his Informed Comment site, Mark LeVine, from the University of California, Irvine. And Mark isn't messing around:

"To put it bluntly, Americans have chosen to return a man to the White House who has supervised the killing of more civilians than Slobodan Milosevic. We have signed onto a President who sanctions torture, who wantonly rejects any international treaty--Kyoto, the ABM and the International Criminal Court--that doesn't suit his messianic agenda. Who truly believes "God Almighty" is on his side.

America, in short, has become a criminal nation, and it must be stopped."

It is SO refreshing to read an American saying such things openly, in public, in sheer bloody defiance of the almighty status quo. Now where are the rest of you???

To more than 70% of America’s eligible votes--that is, the approximately thirty percent that voted for Bush and the forty percent that didn’t feel this situation was compelling enough to warrant their taking the time to vote--none of it really matters. America is great and strong and can do what it wants, and to hell with anyone who gets in our way, especially if they fight back.

For the time being at least, the USA has lost the right to call itself a Democracy.

So what's the response elsewhere on the Web?

Josh Marshall has given up - very "sensibly" - but he's still a good source of info. Today he highlights the US dollar's post-election fall to near all-time lows against the Euro. See, you can fool close to half the people in the USA, George, but you can't so easily fool the rest of the world. Personally, I am advocating boycotts of US goods just for starters. These people have gotta learn the hard way, it seems.

Kos is deep into the partisan Democrat jungle of conjured positive energy, the need to renew, choose a better candidate and all that. "I got my hair cut yesterday..." Man, that used to be the cop-out line that ex-hippies used in the 60s. How appropriate.

Antiwar.com is - as always - firmly on message:

Bush no longer has to weigh the political risks of the Iraq war.

“We had to stop some operations until the (U.S.) elections were over,” said a senior Iraqi Defense Ministry official who requested anonymity because he is not an authorized spokesman.

“The Iraqi government requested support from the American side in the past, but the Americans were reluctant to launch military operations because they were worried about American public opinion. Now, their hands are free.”

PS: I am not really familiar with these names mentioned by Mark LeVine, but I am going to go and learn about them:

As Antonio Gramsci warned us seventy years ago, a “war of maneuver” or frontal assault on an advanced capitalist state by the Left cannot be won. Instead we need to dust off our copies of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and buy a copy of Subcomandante Marcos’s dispatches from the Lacondan jungle. Then perhaps we can find clues on how to fight a better and more efficient “war of position” against the terrifying prospect of four more years of George W. Bush.

Alternet is totally DOOM AND GLOOM. Even if they do have damn good writers.

Doonesbury lifts the old spirits as always, if if the strips were probably done pre-11/2.

Riverbend at Baghdad Burning is totally disgusted, just like me:

To the red states (and those who voted for Bush): You deserve no better- I couldn't wish worse on you if I tried. He represents you perfectly... and red really is your color. It's the color of the blood of thousands of Iraqis and by the time this four-year catastrophe in the White House is over, tousands of Americans, likely.

And Michael Moore?... I was hoping he would come through with something very interesting, like video-taped proof of voter fraud. But he has just conceded.