As the Army Times put it on Sept. 30, 2008 (link at my sig), the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team came back from Iraq to be ready "to help with civil unrest and crowd control" as well as the usual "massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

Emphasis on the "civil unrest and crowd control" - once people found out just how far the Bush regime was willing to go to impose its will. After all, dictatorships rely on armies to help with civil unrest and crowd control. And now we see the genesis of the basing of these soldiers on American soil - the Dictatorship Memos.

For awhile we knew only about the troops, and the apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, but hadn't seen the truth underlying their deployment. Combat troops fresh from battle in Iraq, now on call for use in America?

The Dictatorship Memos - they make it all clear now. But y'know, I think those combat troops are still there...

It's not about journalism. It's about competition. Get it first. If you don't get the story, somebody else will, because journalism has no standard of conduct or professionalism anymore.

That means that if you have the ethics to refuse unwarranted anonymity, the next guy will say, "Ethics? What ethics?" and run with the story, guaranteeing he'll get the next story, too.

So what if the story is wrong? No problem. People forget.

So what if you're being used by government officials with agendas? That's what you're there for - you're an insider, you've been granted access for which you're cravenly grateful, and the role you play is to be used, manipulated, dictated to. You welcome the abuse of your profession because the rewards are many; you fool yourself into thinking you're still a journalist.

You'd think these faux journalists would be embarrassed, but no. They get the headlines, they get the access, they get on TV, they get famous, they get money, they get the book deals. They don't get laid off. Genuine journalism has no chance against these kinds of perks - at least not among faux journalists who left ethics back in j-school.

Krugman talks about "zombie banks." What we're seeing is zombie journalists. And given the brain-dead state of most journalistic venues, I'd say they're winning.

What he did is unconscionable. Now of all times, when his popularity is at a peak, when the country is behind him, now is the time to take down loudmouth demagogues like Schumer and the rest of the gang. What's happened to Obama's vaunted campaign crew now that they have the power to exert their public appeals from the bulliest pulpit ever? Obama's got to learn to go over the heads of Congress when he needs to, to call on the public to take Congress down a few pegs - god knows the public has had more than its fill of Congressional partisanship, which too often takes the form of provincial catering to lobbyists and campaign donors and one-issue bigots, and the public knows exactly how shallow and tacky these people are. Obama needs to tell the country what it already believes - it's in our and Israel's and Palestine's interests that we be even-handed, for peace with mutual respect among all parties, that Palestinians deserve better and that Israel, while needing security, has to meet them halfway - and two steps in that direction would be to stop evicting Palestinians from their own land and building settlements for the most reactionary of Jewish Israelis, and to stop attacking these poverty-stricken people with over-the-top weaponry and savagery. Obama saying these things point-blank to the public and asking them to deluge their congressmembers with these demands with threats to vote against them in the 2010 primaries, could actually get some movement. Congress may not like it, but they really don't like anything anyway, except campaign "donations," and they fear everything except the status quo. It's sickening that Obama is letting himself be steamrolled by the likes of a two-bit hack like Schumer on such a vital issue that involves lives and deaths and destruction on a scale and of a persistence that threatens American interests - not to mention our pretensions to moral leadership - throughout this vital and volatile region.

Where are those Obamaballs, huh? Maybe we should let Michele set these people straight. Obama is playing it too safe at a time when he has the power to change the world's worst failure and put the region on the road to success and peace and reconciliation. Israel cannot survive without us, and neither can the Palestinians. There could not be a better time than now, and yet...Obama dithers. This is not leadership. And no, it's not too soon - the time is exactly right for him to rescue this situation, take the power away from Schumer and Aipac and let some rational people start running our policy.

Right now, I'm ashamed of what he's let happen to Freeman.