Cenk Uygur

Cenk Uygur is a regular commentator on the Huffington Post website. He makes a lot of sense to me so I’m putting one of his articles on my blog today, along with some comments by readers.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right… By Cenk Uygur

As the song goes, "I got the feeling that something ain't right ... Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you." That's the feeling I get everyday as I listen to the leaders of Iran and America drive us further and further down the road of war.
The whole world must feel like we are stuck in the middle as Bush plays the clown on one side and Ahmedinejad plays the joker on the other.

Ahmedinejad, the so-called President of Iran, is either crazy or doesn't know how crazy we are. Either he wants to push Iran into war because he thinks it will help rally Iranians around his fundamentalist government because of nationalist fervor (which actually is quite rational, the part he's missing is the part where we hunt him down and kill his sons and find him buried in a spider hole). Or he thinks he can taunt us and push us around because we couldn't possibly be crazy enough to start a third war in the Middle East. Boy, he really doesn't know us at all.

Today, an Iranian military leader said Iran would strike Israel if it were attacked. I'm sure they would. And it would be a sound strategy in order to gain the sympathy and help of their neighboring Muslim countries. But saying that only aggravates the already far too aggravated situation.

This is only the 189th irrationally hostile comment the Iranian leadership has made in the last two months. If they don't want war, they've got a funny way of showing it.

On the other side, we have a slightly more irrational world leader who is even more volatile - the President of the United States of America. George Bush isn't about to lose a crazy-off with anybody. How sick is it that there is a legitimate debate about who's crazier, the leader of Iran or the leader of the United States?

If you don't think that's a legitimate debate, take this short quiz:

Was it Iran or the United States that committed these following acts of aggression?
A. Threaten nuclear war on another country.
B. Invade a country that did not attack it.
C. Occupy a country for over three years while claiming to give it "freedom."
D. Organize the violent overthrow of the other country's leader.

For all its bluster, Iran has never said they would consider using nuclear weapons, let alone any weapons against the United States of America. Whereas, George Bush steadfastly maintains that he will keep the option of using nuclear weapons against Iran on the table.

Iran did not attack Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. Iraq attacked, partly at our behest. And they eventually used weapons against Iran that Don Rumsfeld sold Saddam Hussein. Whereas we have attacked Iraq -- twice now. One was at least to defend an ally; the other was a senseless act of aggression against a nearly defenseless country (and by the way, we are now losing this war against a country that originally had no significant weapons when we invaded it - how incompetent does a Secretary of Defense (yes, that same Don Rumsfeld) have to be to get fired around here?).

Iran has not occupied another country in hundreds of years. Nor did they plan the assassination of William McKinley or JFK. But we have been occupying Iraq with our 150,000 troops parked in Iran's backyard for the last three years. And many years ago, we did depose Iran's elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh and replace him with a Shah (otherwise known as a King).
Yeah, those crazy Iranians. They're dangerous.

Any idiot wrapped around an American flag can yell and scream about how he is a patriot as he sends off other people's kids to die. He can shove a whole apple pie in his face and make out with a TV just to show how truly American he is. And he can get all outraged at the facts I just presented and call me anti-American. But it doesn't make the facts go away.

We're also the same country who came to the rescue of the entire free world when it was in jeopardy during World War II. We rebuilt our enemies and showed historic magnanimity through the Marshall Plan. We built the edifice of international cooperation when we set up the United Nations. We treated our enemies with respect and made them admire and ultimately emulate us. This is what made America the greatest country on earth. Not preemptive wars, not jingoism, not first strikes, not false pride, not arrogance and not acts of overt aggression.

We were made great by our silent acts of heroism and our graceful benevolence. And now the people who cheapen this on a daily basis have the nerve to call us un-American.
I am repulsed that we have a leader more unstable than the radical head of Iran. Iran, for all its boastful strut, has not threatened to attack us, let alone with nuclear weapons they don't have (and couldn't possibly have for another ten years). We're the local bullies on the block who are doing the majority of threatening.

The fact that we are having a serious discussion in this country about attacking yet another nearly defenseless country should sicken us to our core. Yet, we are unfazed. Two days ago, the Jerusalem Post reported that we have already asked permission of Turkey to use their airbases for strikes against Iran. This is not theoretical planning. This is real.

You don't go to the extraordinary step of asking permission from a neighboring country for their cooperation in air strikes unless you are deadly serious about actually carrying out those strikes. It is not a small diplomatic favor. This is far from the standard planning that the Pentagon does for any contingency. This is the revving up of the war machine.

In ironies that know no ends, we apparently offered Turkey a nuclear reactor if they helped us to get rid of Iran's nuclear reactors. Yeah, that's just what we need, another country in the Middle East with a nuclear reactor.

I'm a Turkish-American. So, the fact that Turkey is an ally is not lost on me. That being said, it would be insanity to put a nuclear reactor in Turkey to avoid one in Iran. Does anyone on this administration think? Which dumb idea contest did this jewel win?

It must have been hard to unseat previous dumb idea champions like: 1. Painting a plane in the UN colors and hoping Saddam shoots it down. 2. Considering an attack on the headquarters of Al-Jazeera, a news organization in the middle of a civilian city in an allied country. 3. Using white phosphorus against Iraqi cities after we said we invaded Iraq because Saddam used chemical weapons against Iraqi cities.

There were so many honorable mentions that space limitations don't allow for me to list them all. But among all these horrific ideas, George Bush - again - wins the prize. He's going to give a nuclear reactor to another country in the Middle East if they allow him to bomb the non-existent nuclear reactors that are not yet built in Iran. And possibly carry out this attack with nuclear weapons.

They've broken the irony meter.

Luckily, Turkey isn't nearly as dumb as we are. It turned down the request. But you remember what happened the last time it did that. We carried out the attack anyway. If George Bush goes through with this foolhardy and barbaric idea, he will go down in history as one of the biggest warmongers of all time.

We often talk about the warlords in Afghanistan or Africa. But we have the ultimate warlord here. He's started two enormous wars already and he's just getting warmed up.

With fundamentalist clowns to the left of us and Bush administration jokers to the right, I feel like we are all stuck in the middle together. The people of Iran might not be able to stop their crazy leader, but we're supposed to live in a democracy. We're supposed to have power over our leaders. What are we doing to end this madness?

And here are a few comments by readers:

Bush is the worst American of all time, period.

Cenk: American people, more specifically, hard-core supporters of President Bush are in a deep denial stage of just how dangerous he is... sort of like when a person is diagnosed as having potentially terminal cancer and they wish to deny it away until the symptoms overwhelm them and they succumb to the ravages of the disease. Bush has spread a cancer throughout US policy, causing sky-high and going higher oil and gasoline prices (profitable for some, including the Bush and Cheney families), the lasting historical damage of 9/11, NSA spying and the incompetence of Katrina relief... and now creating Iran as an outside enemy of the US to further distract domestic US attention of the ongoing important real issues facing America.

So how do we - ordinary people with ordinary lives - stop this fascist war machine? That's the column I want to see.

Always keep in mind that madness trumps everything else. You can't talk to, negotiate with or mollify madness. That being said, America needs to find a way to banish the NeoCon cabal which would keep America in war for entire 21st century in its efforts to dominate and reshape the world in some nightmarish version of a benign dictatorship ruled by ignorant, arrogant son(s) of the overprivileged.

Is it really a question of what are we doing to end this madness, but more of a question of what CAN we do? The base of the right, coupled with the 32-percenters still cheer on their King unconditionally, because he speaks to them on their level, the lowest common denominator.

Awesome Cenk! Keep the good work coming. To point out the madnesses of King George is what patriotism is all about. How shameful it is to have a president that compares in craziness with his Iranian counterpart.

This is a great analysis of this corrupt, crazy very dangerous administration. Send it to every elected official. They need to see the real facts written in plain English.

Cenk: Nice piece. You go. No more war. It's all a hype today. Where's the Secretary of Peace? Hasn't anybody looked at the pictures of Hiroshima lately?