Daniel Patrick Welch's Columns
No Change for Me: I Want Bills
" And before the cynics call me cynical, I believe firmly that hope springs eternal, and that true and lasting change is the only real hope for our country and our world. It is the peddling of false hope that constitutes a war crime." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"The made-in-USA tinderbox is unstable and about to blow, and the war profiteers and their puppets lighting the fuse have no concern for us. The enormous and dangerous forces against them only means more war, more contracts, and more profits." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
Oldthinkers Unbellyfeel Bushsoc
" How did these guys ever get away with making fun of the Politburo for so long? I see a bunch of paunchy old white guys barely stirring from their catatonia long enough to rubber stamp the diktats of other paunchy old white guys, all a bit too sclerotic to dance even at their own War Party." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
The Left's Unwarranted Giddiness Over Election Gains
"No one in the party leadership will convincingly challenge the sickeningly bloated war budget.... As with the 'mismanaging the war' critique, attacks on the biggest pork barrel in world history will be muted and targeted to appeal to the amorphous center scared to death by warmongering propaganda." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"... the Libby indictment is not about perjury, or Scooter Libby, or even about Valerie Wilson. It is merely a window into a vicious and immoral government that feels itself to be above the law--a long pattern of illegal and repugnant abuse of power to punish perceived enemies and squelch dissent. The ultimate goal, is of course, the worst: to be left unfettered in its prosecution of an illegal and unnecessary war." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"The American fascists, who already thought they had a mandate from God, now think they have one from the American people. Not that any true believer needs any imprimatur other than the former, but hey, it can't hurt." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"What the world needs is a sustained, vigorous, coherent and unyielding opposition to the policies that have brought us to this point. None of that will come from any new administration." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"Americans got a glimpse inside the undisclosed location that is the mind of Dick Cheney, and a good whiff of the stench that hovers above his neocon fantasy view of the world. It should be enough to make people run for the exits. But then, it should have been enough a long time ago." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
A tune by Daniel Patrick Welch.
Good for Business, Bad for the People
A review of "Fahrenheit 9/11" by Daniel Patrick Welch.
No Apology Necessary--Off to the Hague!
"As we watch the horror unfolding before our eyes like a giant time-delayed broadcast, a deeper horror should also be setting in. The entire discussion surrounding the 'revelations' of mistreatment of Iraqis by the US (does bombing water purification plants count as mistreatment?) has taken on a sickening, surreal turn. I feel like we are watching 'things fall apart'....The center, indeed, does not hold, and we are witnessing the spiraling out of control of almost every element of our perception: moral compass spinning aimlessly, intellectual ground slipping, right merging with wrong, a sort of Mad Imperial Tea Party. Up is down, day is night, and war is peace as we descend Down the Spider Hole." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch and Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde.
When Good Men Don't Do Nothing
"Alexander Cockburn calls the gay marriage hoopla a 'sidestep on the road to freedom,' basically by saying that since the institution itself is a bourgeois sham, it does not further human progress by shackling yet another demographic in its tentacles." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch. I think gays would do well to shun the institution that has oppressed them for decades instead of trying to embrace it. They don't need the State's permission to get married.
"This has got to be the most repulsive cabal ever to have seized control of the levers of power in US history. While we wait in vain for the fires of their hellish neocon psychosis to burn themselves out, they just keep getting worse and worse." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"We continue to call our baseball championships the World Series, oblivious to how quaint and naive, at best--or arrogant and self-absorbed, at worst--it has always seemed to the rest of the world. This has been the hallmark of Americans' role in the world--a curious blend of ubiquitous involvement paired with near-total ignorance." Column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"Only the Americans have the sovereign right, drunk with power and arrogance, to threaten to try the invaded in US courts for 'war crimes.'...Then again, it is a fiction to think that the access will be freer under the watchful eye of the US military occupation. Government minders are no match for tanks shelling your hotel." An EXCELLENT column by Daniel Patrick Welch, who's like a combination of Robert Fisk and Mark Morford.
"Robert Jackson, the Chief Justice at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, wanted to make sure above all else that the Nazis know that what they did wrong 'was not that they lost the war, but that they started it.' This act-unprovoked aggression against a fellow sovereign nation-state was the first and most reviled of all war crimes, precisely because the chaos of war makes all others possible." An excellent column by Daniel Patrick Welch.
"The fact is that even if it does 'end quickly,'...an attack on Iraq will result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, mass murder by any reasonable standard. Aside from the sheer inhumanity of such an act, Americans need to make opposition to this horrific disregard for human life a centerpiece of the opposition campaign." Column by new Root Striker Daniel Patrick Welch.