Friday, January 12, 2007

Waltzing to Guantanamo



After six years of solid evidence that the President of the United States is a complete psychopath, he still has his defenders in right-wing enablers like San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders.



Not many other people in the country or the world are buying their line of murderous crap anymore...



...and after Wednesday evening's speech by The Decider on the need for more United States troops in Iraq, there was an explosion of small protests across the country on Thursday...



...including this noontime group in front of San Francisco's City Hall, organized by the internet advocacy group moveon.org. (See Jan Adams' accounts of other Bay Area protests by clicking here.)



Traditionally protests are held on the Polk Street side of the building, which left a number of reporters, including the Channel 7 ABC news team, confused about where the scheduled protest might be until I gently clued them in.



Adding to the utter surrealism of the moment were two high school bands from Australia...



...who happened to be marching around the Civic Center Plaza playing "Waltzing Matilda"...



...complete with a drill team.



From what I could gather, the bands had played in the Rose Parade earlier this month in Pasadena, and then had gone on tour, ending in San Francisco for their last days abroad.



The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau was somehow involved, and they were making a promotional video of the event with a freezing emcee in shorts.



A block away there was a large turnout for the weekly Quaker vigil in front of the federal building...



...where the informational flyers were noting that January 11th was the fifth anniversary to the day of the infamous Guantanamo prison in Cuba which is the flagship "store" for the United States' gulag of torture and murder.



It's long past time to put a stop to this.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mike,

do not read Debra, it's not worth it. She is the most disingenuous person, she is morally bankrupt. The only way I can rationalize a person like her is to assume she writes this stuff solely for the money, and under the assumption that if she does not, the Chron would pay someone else as it needs to provide "balance" and "fairness" in its editorial pages.

All you need to know about Debra:
http://cedichou.blogspot.com/2006/09/debra-saunders.html

Civic Center said...

Dear Ced: I make a point of NOT reading Debra, or the San Francisco Chronicle for that matter, since it pays her to write that crap. She's no different than the right-wing trolls who infest the SFGate political blogs trying to rile up all them lib'rals, or the blockheads that the Chronicle employs at their "Washington Bureau" to "analyze" the news. Now that Bush has gone outright Caligula on all of them, it's interesting watching these writers trying to back away slowly from their own monster.

Anonymous said...

Last year Saunders lionized Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok.) as a noble free spirit for standing up to the consensus on climate change. You could tell, reading it, that she sympathized. She's so noble, for contradicting what everyone can see to be true! In this strange world we live in, I can only conclude that she considers it her duty to contradict the views of the vast majority of her readers, because her paper thinks someone should be the contrarian. I like contrarians, but I agree with Cedichou. Her rhetoric is corrupted by a knee-jerk antagonism that has nothing to do with reality, or even what she really believe. In the end, she only really has faith in her paycheck.