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America's First Terror War
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Today's Stories May 28, 2007 Bill Quigley May 26 / 27, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Franklin Lamb Jean Bricmont Gary Leupp James Petras William Peace Judith and John Sharpe Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Democracy in Iraq, Tyranny at Home? Jonathan M.
Feldman Dave Lindorff Missy Beattie Mike Whitney Badruddin Khan Ron Jacobs Zoe Blunt Arjun Chowdhury, Heather Gray N. D. Jayaprakash Joe Allen Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
Robert Jensen David Vest John Stauber Evelyn Pringle Corporate Crime Reporter Susan Rosenthal,
MD Roberto Rodriguez Steve Fournier Patrick McElwee Robert Weissman Website of the Day
Franklin Lamb Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fantina Norman Solomon Dave Lindorff Sen. Russell
Feingold Fred Gardner Mike Whitney Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury
and Mark Hoffman Caroline Paul Eva Liddell Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Rev. William
Alberts Joe DeRaymond Sudhanva Deshpande
Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Rannie Amiri China Hand Zoe Blunt Nivien Saleh Website of the Day
Robert Fisk Joshua Frank Harvey Wasserman David Mos Masumoto Sonja Karkar Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff Jeffrey Kolakowski Evelyn Pringle Jim Baumer Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Nicole Colson John Ross Stephen Fleischman M. Shahid Alam Ron Jacobs Peter Rost, MD Alan Farago Paul Buchheit Website of
the Day
May 19 / 20, 2007 Andrew Cockburn Uri Avnery Peter Gelderloos Saul Landau Robert Fantina Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Jean Daniels Reza Fiyouzat Missy Beattie Robert Alvarez Sonja Karkar Dave Lindorff Jeff Sher Julian C. Holmes Clancy Sigal Prairie Miller James Murren Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 18, 2007 Adam Jones Sharon Smith Christopher Brauchli Peter Rost,
MD Denise Maloney Pictou David Swanson Ali Khan Susan Rosenthal,
M.D. Samer Assad CP News Service Website of the Day
May 17, 2007 Tariq Ali Yifat Susskind Dave Zirin Brian J. Foley W. John Green Eric Johnson-DeBaufre Badruddin Khan Martha Rosenberg China Hand Dan Vojir Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Ashley Dawson Joshua Frank Corporate Crime
Reporter Ray McGovern Glen Ford Joe Bageant Sonja Karkar Mickey S. Huff John Chuckman Kaz Dziamka Website of
the Day
May 15, 2007 Michael Neumann Patrick Cockburn Ashley Smith Marc Gardner Dave Lindorff Ben Terrall Ron Jacobs Harvey Wasserman Marcus Mabry Dr. Susan Block Website of the Day
May 14, 2007 Jennifer Roesch Jeffrey St.
Clair George Bisharat Diane Wachtell Ramzy Baroud Rosemary and
Walter Brasch Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Roberto Rodriguez Jonathan Culp Website of
the Day
May 12 / 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Diane Farsetta Ralph Nader Jean Bricmont Marcus Breen Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Fred Gardner Juan Santos
Eve Bachrach Missy Comley
Beattie Ron Jacobs Niranjan Ramakrishnan Susie Day Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend May 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Kathleen Christison Mike Ferner John Holt Laurie Hasbrook Christopher
Brauchli Margaret Kimberley Dave Lindorff Nicole Colson John V. Walsh Website of the Day
May 10, 2007 Tariq Ali Patrick Cockburn Neve Gordon Marjorie Cohn David Rosen Alan Farago John Hellman Kathy Rentenbach BANCO Richard Rhames Website of the Day
Jeff Leys Patrick Cockburn Glen Ford Paula Rothenberg Kathryn Weber John Chuckman Jordan Flaherty Dave Lindorff Stephen Lendman Website of
the Day
May 8, 2007 Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Corporate Crime Reporter Ralph Nader Malini Johar Schueller Juan Santos Dave Zirin Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Eamonn McCann Website of the Day
May 7, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Greg Moses Rannie Amiri Fitrakis / Wasserman Fred Wilhelms Ramzy Baroud Bruce K. Gagnon T. W. Croft Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn William Blum Uri Avnery Franklin Lamb Fred Gardner Lawrence R.
Velvel Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Carla Blank Linn Washington,
Jr. Stephen F. Jackson P. Sainath Anthony Papa James T. Phillips John Ross Stephen Lendman Ben Terrall CounterPunch
Newswire Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 4, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Azmi Bishara Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Bob Fitrakis Janet Kauffman Website of
the Day
May 3, 2007 Jeff Halper Christopher
Brauchli Dave Zirin Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fisk Mike Ferner Mike Whitney Pham Binh Dave Lindorff Michael A.
Johnson Website of the Day
May 2, 2007 Saul Landau Dr. Susan Block Carla Blank Margaret Kimberly Kevin Zeese Carlos Villareal Michael Dickinson Tim Shorrock Alevtina Rea William S.
Lind Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Fred Gardner Chase Madar Ralph Nader John V. Walsh Joshua Frank Leslie Radford Shaun Harkin Dave Lindorff Peter Rost,
MD Peter Linebaugh Website of
the Day
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May 28, 2007 "I am My Mom's Kid"Dr. Laura's Little MonsterBy Dr. SUSAN BLOCK So the "kid" of "my kid's mom" appears to have grown up into a sociopath. Yes, Derek Schlessinger, beloved soldier-boy scion of talk radio's Queen of Moralizing Mean, has shown the world just what it means to be Dr. Laura's kid. It seems that 21-year-old Deryk, a United States Army special forces paratrooper recently stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, is following in his famous mom's footsteps by producing his own "show" that attempts to entertain by spewing hate, intolerance, sexism, sadism, virulent racism and casual brutality. Deryk's mom's show is on radio. Deryk's show is on Myspace. Well, it was. Unlike his mom's long run on Hate Talk Radio, Deryk's Myspace page was soon cancelled. Myspace is a website where anyone with an email address can put on a multi-media show about their favorite subject themselves! - complete with photos, blogs, music and video. It's censored, of course (Rupert Murdock wouldn't have it any other way); no nudity or explicit sex is allowed. However, you can run a picture of yourself sucking on the barrel of a gun, as young Deryk Schlessinger did. You can also show "cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestationa photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned "My Sweet Little Habib"; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets," as Deryk's Myspace page featured, according to Matthew D. LaPlante who broke the story in the Salt Lake Tribune. Just as his mom's radio show is filled with fervor for war and neo-con puritanism, Deryk's Myspace blog was filled with enthusiasm for his mission: "Yes . . . FUCKING Yes!!! I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic (sic) and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don't." Despite such ardent assertions of job satisfaction, The US Army is not pleased.. Army spokesman Robert Tallman has officially declared the page to be "repulsive." The blog and Myspace page were credited to and included many photographs of Deryk, including the one of him sucking on the gun like the Reverend Ted Haggard sucking on a gay hooker, with a goofy look in his eyes as he gives the thumbs up with his free hand. Speaking of which, what's with all these lunatics posing with guns in their mouths? Seung-Hui Cho, the nut that shot up Virginia Tech, just did it in his public relations video. What is the gun-in-the-mouth pose supposed to show off - their brave and heroic fellatio skills? LaPlante goes on to explain:
This from the "kid" whose "mom" called gays a "biological error." What does that make her gun-sucking son? A nurtured nightmare? Dr. Laura is known for her harsh, rigidly moralistic, sex-unfriendly, anti-feminist advice, bullying style and boisterous support for the Bush administration's violent invasion and occupation of foreign lands. She preaches a strict approach to "family values" that she herself did not practice when she was young, married, cheating on her husband with Bill Ballance, the man that provided her start in radio. Bill is also the guy who took all the nude photos of Laura that are all over the web. Why did Laura switch so suddenly from being such a freewheeling swinger for women's rights to a sanctimonious "nag" cheering on a senseless war? Can you spell opportunism? Here's the story I heard around the time I was writing Being a Woman with Dr. Toni Grant, one of Laura's colleagues: When a right-wing phenomenon named Rush Limbaugh got the radio time slot before hers, and Laura saw Rush's ratings rise, she decided to go after his audience with a vengeance. She changed her politics 180 degrees, becoming the ultra-right-wing, liberal-bashing Dominatrix to the Dittohead Faithful, entertaining her vicariously sadistic audience by verbally beating up her hapless callers who didn't conform to rigidly held ideals of purity, monogamy, blind patriotism and "family values." Of course, Laura has never been one to practice what she preached, and her personal family feeling was on display when she had to claim the body of her 77-year-old mother from the LA County morgue ten days after it had been found rotting, unattended, in her apartment. Hypocrisy, shmypocrisy; "family values" proved golden for the ambitious Dr. Laura. She made millions off the slogan "I am my kid's mom." So is it any great surprise that the kid is a kind of monster? Laura sacrificed Deryk's youth on the altar of her ratings. Can you imagine how the kid of "my kid's mom" must have been teased in school? No wonder he was expelled by two different colleges before mom got the bright idea to sacrifice him yet again by sending him off to fight, kill and possibly die in Bush's War on Terror, so that she could have a fresh new slogan for her own rapacious Army: "I am the proud mother of a deployed U.S. paratrooper." Except now the "kid" is getting back at the "kid's mom." The "deployed U.S. paratrooper" is firing some serious public relations missiles at the "proud mother" Right-wing bloggers are frantically trying to defend their Mean Queen, saying it's not a parent's fault what her son does. But Dr. Laura is not just any parent. She has made a professional example of her parenthood. She is her kid's mom. She exploited this kid's very life for the sake of her ambition to rule the stay-at-home-mom culture. If any mom is responsible for her kid's behavior, this kid's mom is. Before I go on, I must confess I am not an unbiased observer of Dr. Laura's behavior. I've been feuding with the woman for over a decade, ever since she called me a "pseudo professional porn queen" in LA New Times. Ironically, this was just before her nude pictures were released on the Internet. Though I found the moniker quite amusing, I knew she didn't intend it for my amusement, but as a condemnation of me, my work and my sexuality. Therefore, I asked her to apologize; when she didn't, I placed the "Block Curse" on her and started my notorious Dr. Laura Diaries. Then of course, Laura's naked photos were released, turning her into a national laughing stock and symbol of sexual hypocrisy. Shortly after that, she lost her TV show. But she's a scrappy little miscreant. Neither the Block Curse nor the curses of millions who abhor her high-strung sanctimony has substantially shrunken her bank account. Though ridiculed or actively ignored by most thinking Americans, she retains her syndicated radio show, her cottage industry in moral diatribes and tawdry warmonger jewelry supported by her impassioned "Army" of "I am my kid's mom" T shirt wearers. I should also say that I feel personally disturbed by Deryk Schlessinger's depiction of U.S. Army officers' appalling treatment of civilians in Afghanistan, a country that I fell in love when I visited there before Deryk was born, in the days when his mom was a nude model and a liberal. Many soldiers in Dr. Laura's Army have furiously issued form letters to editors of newspapers printing stories about the "kid"'s horrifying Myspace page. They can hardly defend the contents of the page (though many of them appear to be aroused by it); so they just protest that the page might not have been the brainchild of darling Deryk, but could have been the diabolical work of the "enemy." By "enemy," do they mean Al Qaeda, pro-choice feminists, the Afghan Taliban comeback committee or progressive gay members of the ACLU? Actually, Dr. Laura's Army sees them all as the "enemy." True, Deryk hasn't thus far confessed that he created the page, and there's a slight chance that he didn't (though he obviously posed gleefully for the photos). But really, if he didn't do it, why didn't he say so as soon as the camel dung hit the pr fan? Why didn't this kid's mom's publicist put out statements by young Master Schlessinger deploring that awful ugly Myspace page and vowing that he had nothing to do with it? Don't be surprised if such denials aren't released soon. But if young Master Schlessinger were indeed the innocent victim of a bad joke by some sort of "enemy," then the natural thing would be to say so immediately, which he did not. So, he almost certainly made the page or at least helped make the page. Lest you think that Deryk only fantasies about exhibitionistic sadism, just go on the Internet and you can find a video of a young man who has been identified as Schlessinger brutally grabbing, pushing down on the ground and then kicking a female protester at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, where he was attending as a Young Republican. Getting his political career off to a riproaring start! Well, he's only following the example of his President, and he is that mom's kid. And now here he is, a high-profile special forces paratrooper in the U.S. Army, praised like a God for his "courage" every day by his famous know-it-all Mom and her Army. "I brought my son up to be a warrior," the kid's mom gushes with pride. Yes, indeed. The U.S. Army is not so supportive. The Pentagon's solution to disruptive problem children like Deryk is to shut down access to a variety of video-sharing and social networking Internet sites, including MySpace, on its computer systems worldwide. Needless to say, this will close down an important line of communications between soldiers and the outside world. It reminds me of something I heard on The Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show. A woman called in to ask what she should do about her husband looking at porn on the computer. "Throw away the computer," was Dr. Laura's advice. Obviously, both Laura and the U.S. Army are tossing the baby out with the bathwater, throwing away all of the myriad positive benefits of cyber communications, because they are afraid of what people communicate. Perhaps they are right to be afraid. Perhaps there is a spirit within poor sicko Deryk that wanted to tear off the mask of hypocrisy that his mom wears so easily. Perhaps that's why he created the Myspace page. Perhaps this is, at the risk of sounding clichéd, a genuine cry for help. Perhaps Deryk created the page to say: Help me! I'm a scared, ironic human spirit trapped in the hard body and hard-ass mind of a rabidly militaristic, racist, sadistic, jingoistic patriot suckled by the toxic milk of my venom-spewing mom, trained by brutes to honor the bosses of the Bush Crime Family, raised to despise the weak and bully sensuous, so that I too can someday, if I survive, rule the world by force, fear and brutality. Please help me get off of the Path of Thanatos that my mom and this government have put me on, before I commit more atrocities against my fellow humans or pull the trigger on this gun in my mouth." The empathetic side of me imagines that this spirit is what propelled Deryk Schlessinger to create his appalling Myspace page. If this is indeed a cry for help, how can I, a therapist, not answer it? With this in mind, I want to offer 10 hours of free therapy to help Deryk come to terms with his abusive upbringing. Obviously, he'll need a lot more than 10 hours; but if he wants more, hey, this kid's mom can afford to pay for his therapy. But my cynical side says: Nah. Deryk created the page for the same reason that the Abu Ghraib prison guards smiled proudly and gave that same thumbs up as they took photos of themselves torturing prisoners: Deryk did it because he really thinks it's a cool think to do. He thinks its sexy. He thinks it's funny. He might think it's just "bully," as TR used to say, to be a bully. He might even think it's a smart step in his (and his ruthless mom's) path toward the U.S. Presidency. Considering the brutal antics of the current U.S. Sociopath-in-Chief, the kid might be right. Dr. Susan Block is a sex educator, cable TV host
and author of The 10 Commandments of Pleasure. Visit
her BRAND NEW BLOGGAMY & POST COMMENTS at http://www.drsusanblock.com/blog/blog.asp
Send comments to liberties@blockbooks.com.
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