WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

Cover Up? No. A local inquiry would undoubtedly decide that this was an accident, stupid, but an accident. Since this would not be legally actionable, that would be the end of it. The Army does not think it has an obligation to inform the public when its people "screw up."

Step back and look at this from the perspective of the whole war. The decision to invade Iraq and to introduce a heavily armed and very capable modern fighting force to an urban combat environment led directly to that moment in Baghdad when two men, probably in their mid-twenties, decided to kill a group of unfortunates on the street below. The conditions of the war made this sort of thing inevitable.

In a very real sense the Bush Administration itself killed these people. [my emphasis]

The second group without a clue are liberals who buy into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Glenn Greenwald is in this camp. Greenwald insists that things like killing of Iraqi civilians in the Wikileaks video and Abu Ghraib are just standard operating procedure for American soldiers, and not aberrations from the norm. ...

I didn’t and don’t support the Iraq War, but the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing. I understand the nature of news, and it will never change, but “Soldier Does Right Thing, Follows Orders And Respects Lives Of Others” will never be a headline. When things like this and Abu Ghraib pop up the reason they are news is because they are deviations from the norm, not as Greenwald and others claim like Fox News caricatures of liberals, the standard posture of the military. [emphasis in original]

She was the best tea party representative I've ever seen --- a perfect face for the angry Bircher club to which she also belongs, the Friends of Liberty[.]

I was blown away by this interview and frankly, a little bit chilled. She's mild-mannered, reasonable, utterly sincere, decent and true. Yet, she watches Beck because he "makes her think" and she reveres Jim DeMint, the most radical of all the rightwing Senators. This lovely woman believes in the raw, violent politics of the Hobbesian jungle in which it's every man for himself. I'm sure she doesn't see it that way. Her politics aren't grounded in real life but in abstract concepts. She certainly doesn't seem defensive or even aware that her political heroes are considered radical extremists. But then if you only watch Fox news, listen to talk radio and live in the town known for its proximity to Ruby Ridge and the Aryan Nations compound you probably don't realize that your views are not held by the majority of Americans.

Stout is finding great meaning in her life with her politics and that's great. But I think she is a perfect example of the danger of the right wing noise machine and its amazing ability to speak to that need. She belongs to something. She's connecting with people. It's giving her life purpose. And because she's living in that media/movement cocoon she truly believes that almost agrees with her. It's very powerful stuff. And considering what it is that's giving her so much meaning, it's pretty frightening as well.

During an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday, Gingrich was asked how the campaign was going in the final week.

"Slightly more moving our way," he replied. "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. ...

“How a mother can kill her two children, 14 months and 3 years, in hopes that her boyfriend would like her, is just a sign of how sick the system is and I think people want to change. The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days.”

The former Speaker's rise and fall is a modern epic of spurious moralizing.

Gingrich defined his own fraudulence in the methods he used to achieve power. A central theme of his propaganda lexicon was the "breakdown in public manners and morals" he blamed on liberalism. He recommended that when Republicans discussed themselves and their party's values, they should use words such as moral, crusade, and family. When they talked about Democrats, he urged them to emphasize terms like decay, sick, liberal, permissive attitude, antifamily and bizarre.

As he drove the Republicans toward their takeover of Congress, the portly firebrand plugged his movement's morality with evangelistic fervor. "You have absolutely, in the abstract, a cultural civil war going on," he told US News & World Report in 1992. "A nihilistic hedonism and secular belief pattern is by definition involved in a religious war with a spiritual system."

While he blathered on about the culture war, Gingrich's close associates waged a private jihad on Bill Clinton. In the closing months of the 1992 election, Chicago financier Peter Smith, a top contributor to Gingrich's GOPAC fund, hired the Georgian's consultant and confidant Eddie Mahe and two Gingrich lawyers to dredge up dirt about the Democratic nominee's sex life. They focused on a far-fetched tale about an affair with a black prostitute in Little Rock that had produced a male "love child." Their objective was an old-fashioned sexual smear, tinted with race.

Sensational facts about the incident soon emerged that suggested quite the opposite [of Gingrich's vague suggestion that Democrats were somehow responsible]. Smith was neither a feminist nor a welfare mother; she wasn't even a Democrat. She was the stepdaughter of an affluent local stockbroker named Beverly Russell, who also happened to be the county chairman of the Christian Coalition and a member of the South Carolina Republican Party's executive committee. The nephew of a former governor and senator, he was just the kind of wealthy, well-connected gentleman cultivated by politicians like Gingrich. He even sang in the local Methodist Church choir.

At home, however, Bev Russell wasn't quite the ideal dad. Court records revealed that he had sexually molested his stepdaughter regularly after she turned fifteen. He had continued having sex with her for the following eight years - despite her two suicide attempts - until the weeks preceding her crime. While Russell's personal ideology had nothing to do with his monstrous behavior, he certainly shared the flair for sanctimony that is common among leaders of the political and religious right. "Of course, had I known at that time what the result of my sin would be, I would have mustered the strength to behave according to my responsibility," he said after the press exposed his relationship with his stepdaughter. If this grotesque tale left any impression on Gingrich, he never mentioned it. He was still exploiting family tragedy as propaganda a year later, when he blamed "the left" and "the welfare state" for the slashing murder of a mother and her children in Illinois. [my emphasis]

Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).

During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and - outside the Roman Catholic Church - remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.

Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests. [my emphasis]

It's more likely that they don't but fear them but find them useful, which is even more irresponsible.

In 1965 there was a common perception of reality. There isn't anymore. The tea baggers live in a FOX and hate radio drenched world of a different dimension. The most sane among them believe liberals are fomenting the violence by passing legislation they don't like. Most of them, however, literally believe that liberals are violently threatening them and they need to protect themselves. Bizarroworld.

It is a fact that the tea party is an overwhelmingly older, white and suburban crowd. It is true that Republicans in Congress are almost completely white. And it is also true, according to some black and gay Democrats, that a tea party rally against health-care reform at the Capitol degenerated into ugly scenes in which racial and homophobic epithets were used and spit flew on some members of Congress. There are suspicions that tea party anger boiled over into the spate of personal threats against Democrats who voted for the health-care bill.

That is despicable and deserving of condemnation. [Not quite the same as saying, "I condemn it", but whatever - Bruce] And the leaders of the tea party movement have to be careful about rhetoric that feeds fringe, militia-type anger that leads to violence.

Yet opposition to health-care reform from the tea party is not based on racism but self-interest. The older, whiter segment of the American demographic was at the heart of opposition to the president's health-care proposal because they feared cuts in their Medicare benefits or taxes hikes eroding their income. [my emphasis]

Where race comes into this picture of American political discontent is that a majority of whites, 52% according to a Gallup poll last month, say they see health-care reform as helping the poor, and that means lots of racial minorities. Only 20% of whites said the health-care reform will help their families. Majorities of Blacks and Hispanics, however, see the bill as helping their families.

That racial divide over health-care reform is exacerbated by the recession's tremendous damage to employment for blue-collar workers. Black unemployment remains nearly double unemployment among whites (16.2% to 9.7%), but that does not diminish the economic and emotional devastation being felt by whites, who are still the majority of the population and the majority of voters. [my emphasis]

Putting a racial lens on the tea party activists may also help Democrats by painting congressional Republicans into a corner as debate begins on immigration reform. Hispanic voters are going to be looking at Republicans and their tea party supporters for evidence of racism in any effort to block reform.

Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the "real Americans," while all who don't think or look like them are not.

And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace, the Alabama governor dubbed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter in a 2008 Slate article as "the godfather, avatar of a national uprising against the three G's of government, Godlessness, and gun control."

Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.

They, like Wallace's followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America.

A small fraction of the tea partiers' leadership are ambitious individuals who haven't been able to hold office in either the GOP or Democratic Party. Some are from fringe groups like the John Birch Society or the remnants of the LaRouchies. Others see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul's next presidential bid.

If tea party groups are to maximize their influence on policy, they must now begin the difficult task of disassociating themselves from cranks and conspiracy nuts. This includes 9/11 deniers, "birthers" who insist Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and militia supporters espousing something vaguely close to armed rebellion. [my emphasis]