I am convinced that every day reality gets a little bit harder to satirize.

But in our conversation, my friend did inform me that she laments the fact that her world-view is so singularly focused. And that’s fine–I bear her no ill-will. I appreciate that she can honestly acknowledge that there are gaps in her worldview, and certainly we all have certain issues to which we devote greater attention and emotional investment than others.

Nonetheless, it is only my friend’s sense of awareness (and, I suppose, my affection for her) that keep my feelings of disdain at bay.

Reproductive rights are shaping up to be a potentially decisive factor in the upcoming election, transforming women’s uteruses into a battleground on which contentious political battles will be fought. Abortion is of course a “wedge issue”–i.e., one of the few issues in which there is an observable difference between Democrats and Republicans, even though it’s often more rhetorical than actual–and thus political office-seekers are gleefully exploiting it in order to keep straying voters in dutiful lockstep behind one of the two major parties. In other words, the right-wingers are convinced to vote Republican by insinuations that Satan-worshipping abortionists are going to kill and drink the blood of their children, while liberals are brought into line by Democratic politicans who tell their prospective constituents, “You think my policies are bad? Well that guy wants to take away your right to choose.”

What gets lost amid the hysteria? How about our wanton militarism, the expansion of imperialist projects overseas, and the systematic murder of brown people who stand between us and a shitload of oil–all of which are eagerly perpetuated by members of both ruling class parties. The wages of bipartisanship is death.

It seems like every time I log into Facebook I see that at least a half-dozen articles have been posted about vicious Republican assaults on the reproductive rights of women. What I don’t see are articles about Pakistani children who’ve had their limbs blown off by Obama’s predator drones or of the protesters in Egypt and Bahrain who are being brutally suppressed with American arms and funding. Granted, I likely wouldn’t see these stories anyway, but especially not in an election year when all the good liberals are frightened into obedience by the Democrats who use fear as a means to silence dissent and preserve the status quo. Terrible actions committed by Obama and his criminal friends become, for all intents and purposes, invisible, and only scary Republican rhetoric is able to penetrate the progressive ear canal.

For the record, I support without reservations a woman’s access to legal abortion services. The issue at hand is not whether legalized abortion should be supported; rather, it’s a question of the mindset of those who care more about their right to convenient sex than the right of others not to be bombed and killed by the United States military.

The hypocrisy of the so-called “pro-life” crowd is so obvious as to be self-evident: Most of these people are not “pro-life,” they’re just anti-sex. Period. The vast majority of these people don’t give a flying fuck about actual human beings killed by American bullets or clusterbombs or–to bring the point home–by an inability to acquire health insurance coverage. It is that simple: they don’t care about human life, they just want to return America to a simpler, more innocent time in which Christian values were even more explicitly promoted by the government and in which women had no sexual freedom–just as the lord intended.

I realize that I’m preaching to the liberal choir, so here’s where I sing off-key: The willingness of progressives to excuse or justify the slaughter of innocent people, crushed under the wheels of American war machines, is comparably despicable. It’s a pact with Satan. To continue to cheer on war-loving Democrats because they’ll pay lip-service to your chosen cause is in my opinion morally indefensible.

I have a tendency to overstate arguments and paint with too broad a brush, so let me add a caveat. I’m cynical and I’m a realist, so I don’t have any illusions that a liberal wet dream of a third party will somehow rise to power and instigate a utopian era of peace and prosperity. So if a friend were to tell me that she hates the Democrats–in fact, she finds the thought of voting for them to be so revolting that she can actually taste the acrid bile rising in the back of her throat–and is truly outraged by their lawlessness and love of murder, but that she feels obligated to vote for them because there is at least a single issue–and an important one–on which they are preferable to Republicans and so pragmatically it is preferable to support the evil that is slightly less egregious than the other, I wouldn’t object. It’s an argument I can accept, however grudgingly.

What I can’t accept, though, is a culture of Democratic hero-worship which heaps praise and adulation upon evil men and women who cause unthinkable suffering but who opportunistically and for reasons of political gain endorse a cause that liberals find appealing.

Officials in the International Atomic Energy Agency are meeting in Iran this week for the second round of talks in a month on the status of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, a meeting that could potentially stymie efforts in the West to preemptively strike Iran.

The expectation that the West would somehow be forced to back off from its hawkish rhetoric and bellicose stance toward Iran because of any actions on the part of the IAEA is strikingly absurd. Glaser’s stance seems all the more bewildering when a few paragraphs later he points out:

Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and has not demonstrated any intention of doing so, according to the U.S. military and intelligence community. The latest IAEA report, while exaggerated in the media, confirmed Iran’s nuclear material was not being diverted to a weapons program.

Still, hawks in both Israel and the United States insist on believing Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons. The government of Israel, currently led by the right-wing administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been decidedly for a preemptive military attack on Iran, while the Obama administration has pushed back, preferring instead to cripple the Iranian economy through harsh economic sanctions and support proxy terrorism against Iranian civilians.

In other words, the IAEA already came out and said, “Uh, hey guys, Iran sucks but they aren’t building nukes,” and the West heard, “Uh, hey guys, Iran sucks ___ they _____ building nukes,” and roared back, “WHAT? THOSE FILTHY MUSLIMS! THEY WILL PAY!”

That’s because, as Arthur Silber has perceptively pointed out, the facts don’t matter. Not at all. He writes, “To state the argument very briefly: “intelligence” is always irrelevant to major decisions of policy. If you’re arguing about the intelligence and what it allegedly shows, you’re going to lose.”

It doesn’t matter if the Iranian government cooperates with the IAEA inspections, and it doesn’t matter if the inspectors discover no evidence that Iran is producing weapons. The “hysterical war talk” will persist in the U.S. and Israel until the hawks get their war with Iran. And let’s not kid ourselves, here: one way or another, they’ll get their war. They always do.

As U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon arrived in Saturday night to discuss the Iranian nuclear issue with top Israeli officials, a U.S. official has told Haaretz that all the messages from Israel in recent months pointed to the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran.

…

Speaking to Haaretz on condition of anonymity, a senior U.S. official said that in the past six months the messages reaching Washington from Jerusalem have increasingly pointed to the likelihood of an Israeli strike, more so than in the previous two years. “We think that Israel still has not decided whether to attack or not, but it is clear to us that it is being considered seriously,” he said.

The U.S. administration wants Israel to wait a few months in order to give the international sanctions against Iran a chance before deciding on an attack. A few days ago, officials in Tehran expressed a readiness to resume negotiations with the six main powers.

The U.S. administration wants to wait a few months and give the sanctions a chance to do…what, exactly? Stop Iran from building the nuclear weapons that U.S. and Israeli officials say they aren’t building? Or maybe convince leaders in Tehran to give western corporations access to their oil?

Let’s compromise and say that American and Israeli officials actually do believe that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, or at least nuclear weapons capabilities (the latter of which is quite likely–I’d sure as hell want nukes if the most powerful military empire in the history of the world had me surrounded with military bases and troops and daily threatened to wipe me off the  map), and that they are deeply concerned about this state of affairs. Why are the U.S. and Israel concerned about Iranian nukes? Could it be because Israel wants to be the only player in the Middle East with nuclear weapons at their disposal? Could it be that Iranian nukes would act as an effective means of deterrence against western imperialism and military aggression in the region? Could it be that they would stymie our pursuit of total global hegemony and control of the world’s oil resources? No, no, it must be that those crazy bloodthirsty Muslims want to commit national suicide by lobbing a couple bombs at Israel, thus ensuring their complete obliteration from the face of the earth. That seems like a more reasonable explanation.

The article had several other knee-slappers as well as those quoted above, like

In other news affecting the region, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned on Friday of the dangers facing the United States in the Middle East. Speaking at a “town hall meeting” with officers and soldiers at a U.S. Air Force base in Barksdale, Louisiana, Panetta recited a long list of challenges facing the United States military establishment in an era of deep government cutbacks.

“We face the whole issue of rising turmoil in the Middle East,” Panetta said. “I mean, God, any one of those countries in the Middle East could blow on us – from Syria, which is already in turmoil, to Egypt, to Yemen, to a number of others.”

and

Panetta’s warning came just days after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, failed, in a visit to Egypt, to dissuade Cairo from going ahead with criminal proceedings against 19 Americans affiliated with prodemocracy organizations in the country.

Oh yes, “prodemocracy organizations.”

Officials in key parts of the Obama administration are increasingly convinced that sanctions will not deter Tehran from pursuing its nuclear programme, and believe that the US will be left with no option but to launch an attack on Iran or watch Israel do so.

Note the phrase “are increasingly convinced,” which sounds much better than “never thought in the first place.” I don’t believe for a second that Washington truly believed that imposing sanctions would “deter Tehran from pursuing its nuclear energy program,” and sanctions certainly weren’t going to accomplish U.S. policymakers’ ultimate goal in Iran: regime change–to kick out those currently in power and replace them with more compliant leaders who will make nice with Israel, withhold support from Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, most importantly, acquiesce obediently when Uncle Sam reaches out to wrap his bloated fist around China’s oil spigot. As Chris Floyd wrote on the subject of sanctions:

That is a scenario often touted by our high and mighty mongerers: squeeze an enemy regime until the people rise up and get rid of a ruler you don’t like. Of course, as we saw in Iraq, a people driven to their knees by murderous sanctions rarely have the strength or capability to overturn a regime. In fact, the leaders of sanctioned regimes are almost always strengthened (and enriched) by sanctions.

But unlike some bitter cynics, I happen to have great faith in the abiding intelligence of our betters. I believe they know perfectly well that sanctions will not drive the Iranian regime from power. Instead, I think the current strategy here is two-fold.

First, while long-running sanctions do not in themselves overturn a regime, they do make the entire country much weaker. Infrastructure falls apart, society crumbles, communities wither, families fray, the people themselves become physically weaker — indeed, they can die in droves, in multitudes, as in Iraq. All of this makes for a much softer target when you finally decide to pull the trigger on military action.

Second — and I think much more relevant to this case — there is the hope that ever-tightening sanctions will provoke a violent response from the victim, thereby “justifying” a war of “self-defense” against the “unprovoked” attack. The series of escalating provocations being carried out by Washington and its allies, chiefly Israel — including an increasingly open program of assassinations — is clearly designed to goad the Iranians into a casus belli retaliation.

So when I read that U.S. officials are now publicly expressing doubt about the efficacy of sanctions and are instead–always warily and with the appearance of considerable thought and eventual resignation–starting to claim that we or Israel will need to attack Iran after all to prevent them from developing the nuclear weapons that we don’t actually think they’re building, it  makes me just a little bit skeptical of the whole damn foot-dragging enterprise. Now they can inform the citizenry that indeed they’ve exhausted all other options–options that were not really options to begin with–and can generate more sympathy when they say, “Hey, we tried, but it didn’t work, and you don’t want all those crazy Muslims in Iran to get nukes, now do you?”

I appreciate the thoughtful, well-informed analyses of those who say that war is unlikely and that sections of the American intelligence and military communities are sincerely advocating against war with Iran. But regardless–and I hope more than anything that I am wrong here–it feels like the writing is on the wall and that by the end of this year, one way or another the United States will be marching into Tehran–or trying to topple it with bombs.

Today at his blog Rob Payne articulates this point explicitly:

Obama with help from congress is doing what a republican could never get away with. Cutting through the crap we can call it an out and out attack on Social Security. Congress has completed their part of the task which continues the cut in the taxes that pay for Social Security calling it “a very good deal for Americans.” As originally conceived Social Security paid for itself and was solvent for at least the next 25 years if not a good deal longer. Now money to pay for Social Security must come from elsewhere.

Go read the whole thing–it’s not long. I love reading Payne because he doesn’t mince words, and he accurately characterizes Obama as a criminal who is trying to steal your money. Keep that in mind the next time you bump into a Democratic acquaintance: he or she is deliberately going to vote in the upcoming election for a criminal who wants to steal your money and give it away to his friends on Wal-Street.

If you feel so inclined, maybe sock that Democrat in the jaw and hope it knocks a little sense into ‘em.

This was on my mind today as I read an article by historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter entitled “Can Obama avert war with Iran?” In the essay, Porter argues that the president–walking a precarious diplomatic tightrope and trying to avoid awakening the wrath of the Israel Lobby in the United States–is actively trying to dissuade the Israeli government from unilaterally launching an attack on Iran:

President Barack Obama has finally begun in recent months to signal to Israel that the United States would not get involved in a war started by Binyamin Netanyahu without US approval. If it is pursued firmly and consistently through 2012, the approach stands a very good chance of averting war altogether. If Obama falters, however, the temptation for Netanyahu to launch an attack on Iran, indulging in what one close Israeli observer calls his “messianism” toward the issue of Iran.

Does the United States dictate Israeli policy or vice-versa? Does the tail wag the dog? Is the dog trying to reclaim control over its own appendages? Gareth Porter suggests that Israel is attempting to manipulate the United States into pursuing military action which President Obama–yes, that President Obama, the one who dramatically expanded the war in Afghanistan, dropped bombs on Libya, and lobbied the Iraqi government to allow troops to remain past the withdrawal deadline–opposes and is trying to resist. Binyamin Netanyahu thus emerges as the individual responsible for exerting control over the situation, while the president of the United States is relegated to the status of an intercessor working from the sidelines trying to alter the course of events.

Porter writes that Netanyahu intends to “manipulate right-wing Israeli influence on American politics to make it impossible for Obama to stay out of an Israeli war on Iran.” This line of argument has a certain logic to it, but what Porter really means to write is that Netanyahu is trying to make it “politically inexpedient” for Obama to avoid war. One is left to wonder exactly how committed the president could be said to be if the fear of losing an election would be motivation enough to send troops into Tehran. His point is taken, though.

Porter goes on to point out that U.S. officials such as Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey have either intimated or else directly informed Israeli officials that the United States will not come to Israel’s aid should the country strike Iran without Washington’s permission. However, Porter argues, “Netanyahu had already put into effect his own counter-strategy, which is to use the influence of the Israeli lobby in Congress help the Republicans against Obama in the presidential election and to maximise the pressure on Obama to support an Israeli attack on Iran.” Of course, what I think Gareth Porter is failing to realize here is that the corollary is true, that if Obama sees his poll numbers faltering and seriously thinks he will lose the election to Romney, he might turn over his trump card and order an attack on Iran in the hopes that it will inspire Americans to patriotically rally ’round his presidency.

Though some of his officials have expressed apparent–though inevitably muted–frustration with Israel over the looming threat of an airstrike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, President Obama has also publicly restated his commitment to remaining militarily “in lockstep” with Israel were Iran to retaliate. This is where the issue of political speech comes in. Obama takes a bellicose stand while members of his administration urge restraint. Is Obama simply trying to appear tough to counter Republican assertions that he’s been weak on terror? (You’d think right-wingers would be pleased by the number of Middle Eastern children Obama has wantonly slaughtered with drones.) Porter opines that the divided voice of the administration represents shrewd diplomatic manuevering–instructing Israel to hold back out of one side of the mouth, and out of the other telling Iran that the crazy Israeli bastards will do it and we’ll be forced to intervene if they don’t play ball.

Gareth Porter constructs a solid case, but I remain skeptical about Obama’s intentions. I will concede, though, that it seems plausible that the president might really fear getting bogged down in Iran considering the negative repercussions it could have for his historical legacy (historians are known for ignoring the mild atrocities, but nobody can avoid tying Johnson to Vietnam). However, if it is indeed true that Obama would prefer not to get his hands dirty in Tehran, it’s important to remember that this is a decision based entirely on political and strategic calculations–on questions of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement–and is in no way influenced by even a semblance of concern for human rights or dignity.

Iran trumpets nuclear advances, deepening standoff

Try to keep in mind that Iran is legally entitled to pursue a nuclear energy program, that the American and Israeli intelligence community have repeatedly affirmed that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon, and that it is the nuclear-armed West which is demonstrating hostility and belligerence when you read paragraphs such as these:

Iran proclaimed advances in nuclear know-how on Wednesday, including new centrifuges able to enrich uranium much faster, a move that may hasten a drift towards confrontation with the West over suspicions it is seeking the means to make atomic bombs.

Tehran was driving home its resolve to pursue a nuclear program its hardline Islamic clerical leaders see as a pillar of power, protection and prestige despite Western sanctions that are inflicting increasing damage on its oil-based economy.

…

The United States and Israel have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy and sanctions are ultimately judged futile in reining in its nuclear activity.

…

If Iran eventually succeeded in introducing modern centrifuges for production, it could significantly shorten the time needed to stockpile enriched uranium, which can generate electricity or, if refined much more, nuclear explosions.

…

France said Tehran’s latest moves again demonstrated that it would rather ignore international obligations than cooperate. “These statements are an extra concern for the international community,” said deputy foreign ministry spokesman Romain Nadal.

“The Iranian military nuclear program constitutes one of the most serious threats to peace not only in the world but in the region. We are convinced that Iran continues to develop this program. (Today’s) announcements reinforce that conviction.”

In case I’m being too subtle, the implication is that Valentine’s Day makes me physically ill.

Hey, wait–where are you going? Come back!