Mr. Big takes a perp walk (WP)

If you haven’t had time to read up on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, consider Eugene Robinson’s useful appropriation of everybody else’s reporting in his “column” yesterday (May 17). If you want analysis, try here, or consider any other newspaper.

Robinson, a once-promising journalist sent abroad to South America and London, proved with his posting to plum posts that in his years at a newsroom desk job he had honed his workplace politics.

That the Washington Post passes off Robinson’s regurgitation of every newspaper and newswire’s reporting, plus his puerile insight that DSK is — wait for it — a “dinosaur,” is the admission of the prehistoric status of the newspaper and its tired old pundits, who have nothing new whatsoever to add.

The “government shut down” is fake

The social security checks, the tax refunds and the snail mail will go out. “Nonessential” federal employees (Are any truly essential? Is anyone?) will be deprived of their BlackBerrys.

Suffering comes cheap. Just like “we” fight wars far away and with little disruption, with the socioeconomic refuse of our society who have no other option but to “volunteer.”

The reason politicians are willing to go to the “brink” is that their is nothing beyond it but a roomful of cushions.

Want a real shut down? Close everything federal down. Last one out turn out the lights.

Then we’ll see how unnecessary government really is.

Better a government shutdown than to give even one more cut to the GOP

Barack Obama wants four more years? He has to show those of us who voted for him some of that “change” he promised and stop giving in to the Republicans, Wall Street, the war industry, etc. How about some change for the rest of us?

Sorry, Nicolas, it’s too little, too late in Libya

The time to act and swiftly end Libyan suffering has passed and gone. Dictator Disputed Spelling’s warning of a “long war” seems right on the mark, as the U.N. “no-fly zone” only impedes his wiping out the cornered rebels and the DS regime can simply wait them out.

The Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force distinctly bars occupation of Libyan territory by any foreign country. This is consistent with international law, something U.S. government officials usually think doesn’t apply to them (unless there’s some advantage in it), but is somewhat short of what would be needed to take a principled stand.

The other measures are all namby-pamby rules most modern dictatorships, including the Libyan regime, circumvent routinely without much fuss. What did you expect from a bunch of comfy diplomats with unfettered parking rights in New York City?

Oh yes, French President Nicolas Sarkozy may yet get his desired bounce in the polls by playing the banty rooster, but let’s not forget who and what we’re talking about.

France hasn’t won a war since the Louies and has calmly aided Iran’s nuclear program to assure its oil supply. Besides, the echo of Sarkozy’s (anti-Arab) immigrant baiting is still resounding and the ink on his expulsion of the Roma has just barely dried.

We’re not talking about righteous Lincolnian indignation here.

Is the UN resolution on Libya a case of sending Gordon Pasha?

There’s a precedent for the temporizing that led the major powers to delay a United Nations resolution on the use of force in Libya until the rebels were painted into the tightest of corners by Dictator Disputed Spelling. One Major-General Charles George Gordon was dispatched to the Sudan in 1884 to make precisely the same ineffectual show of concern on the part of Britain toward another African nation.

Back then there was a fanatical Muslim leader, the Mahdi, who led a rebellion that forced British troops to evacuate the Sudan. Prime Minister Gladstone then sent Gordon.

“When the Mahdi floats me down the Nile, the government will assume a pained expression and tell Her Majesty, ‘We sent Gordon, we did the best we could,’ ” says Charlton Heston in the role of Gordon to Ralph Richardson, playing Gladstone, in the 1966 film Khartoum.

Gordon knew that his mission was, as the perfidious Western powers of the present know the Libya resolution is, merely an empty gesture, a conscience-salving sham in the face of human suffering in a neo-colonial outpost valued only for its resources.