Sleeping With The Enemy

It was as outrageous as it was surreal, George W. Bush the man who would be emperor issued a decree that he will veto any legislation aimed at derailing the sale of the control of six major U.S. ports to Dubai Ports, a United Arab Emirates based company with one hell of a lot of Republican connections including grumpy old Bob Dole, a company with lots of ‘grease’ that would now be in charge of major shipping operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

“They ought to listen to what I have to say about this. They ought to look at the facts, and understand the consequences of what they’re going to do. But if they pass a law, I’ll deal with it, with a veto.”

Then Bush snapped at a reporter who dared to try to pin the king down with a question that wasn’t the typical softball lobbed by the stenographers in the press corps.

“I don’t view it as a political fight. So do you want to start your question over? I view it as a good policy.”

The man who has never used the veto once during his iron fisted ‘strong daddy’ rule is now threatening it over selling our ports to the Arabs? Hasn’t the administration propaganda shops been working diligently, spending at least 1.6 Billion Dollars on public relations and deceptive advertising to support their Orwellian salesmanship? Hasn’t a good portion of the outlay of tax payer and privately funded propaganda gone towards demonizing Arabs and Muslims? The key premise of the ‘War on Terror’ is that the enemy is only those Arabs who aren’t in collusion with the sleazy rip-off artists who are running the government. There has been no outcry from either the Bush junta or Condi ‘Mounds Bar’ Rice over the fact that fifteen of the nineteen alleged 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and accessories in the United Arab Emirates figured prominently in the terrorist plot by providing aid and support and the ruling monarchy bestowed legitimacy to the same Taliban theocratic regime that offered sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden and his jihadists.

So the man who has been allowed to declare a war on the constitution is now cutting deals with regimes that support terrorism? Even FOX’s propaganda cash cow 24 doesn’t have twists like this. Then again, the Bush administration once cut a deal with Libya didn’t it? War on Terror my ass! If there was ever definitive proof that it was all a lie engineered to give rise to a domestic police state and globalist empire this is it.

Homeland Security jefe and Boo Radley lookalike Michael Chertoff hit the Sunday talking head bullshit circuit to pimp the idea to the public that the monstrous, ever starving raging deity of ‘free trade’ had to be sated even if it meant that ports were going to be turned over to a country whose government was one of very few to recognize Mullah Omar’s Taliban as the rightful rulers of Afghanistan. Bush’s bid to allow the port deal to his and Cheney’s UAE cronies is so vile, rotten and unscrupulously shady that even his usual stooges in congress are crying foul.

Representative Peter King (the other one) of New York who is chairman of Der Homeland Security Committee as well as one of Bush’s most consistently reliable lackeys is even coming out against the outsourcing of American port operations to a longtime supporter of terrorism:

“I will fight harder than ever for this legislation, and if it is vetoed I will fight as hard as I can to override it”

Then there was the spectacle of pathalogical liar, taffy faced hypocrite and shameless conniving opportunist Bill Frist who rushed to the forefront to ‘oppose’ the turning over of the nation’s busiest ports to the ‘enemy’ although the Wall Street Journal, the megaphone of crony capitalism unsurprisingly played to their base, the Glenfiddich quaffing, cigar smoking, Lexus driving east coast elite with the following pontification on their op ed page:

“Yesterday Mr. Bush defended his decision to allow the investment to go ahead, and he threatened what would be his first veto if Congress tries to block it. We hope this time he means it.”

Other than the Wall Street ‘Urinal’ and drug addled Rush Limbaugh even the operators of the conservative echo chamber were piling on over this with such a fervor that you would think that Bush was caught receiving a blow job in an oval office closet. The best commentary however was offered by liberal blogger David Sirota in cutting through all of the bullshit to nail the real culprit, the culture of greed engendered by Reagan’s looters and corporate raiders:

“There it is in all its glory: the Establishment publicly pushing the idea that absolutely nothing should matter – not even security concerns – other than preserving the mobility of capital. And that is ultimately what ‘free’ trade is really all about – allowing capital to move freely all over the world, without regard to any labor, human rights, environmental and – yes – security concerns.”

By Wednesday afternoon the outrage was in abundance as Bush was finally gored by his own ox by a media machine that had been fueled on pure high octane fear since the morning of September 11, 2001 when Karl Rove determined that the World Trade Center attack could and would be used for political haymaking and in conjunction with the neocons and the theocrats proceeded to do exactly that in transforming the United States into a bully of a garrison state that flexed unilateral muscle abroad and battered a quivering citizenry into submission in Der Homeland.

The White House spin machine is approaching category 5 strength after the unanimous condemnation that this most corrupt of all of the deals with the devil perpetrated by Rove Inc drew. Americans have a right to be outraged given that this shameless pack of charlatans wish to have their cake and eat it too by using fear to extract compliance and sheep like loyalty while dickering without regard to national security matters with the same ‘Islamofascists’ that are regularly denounced during King George’s many scripted infomercials. I nearly pissed in my pants laughing over the brazen audacity of the FOX propagandists trying to accuse and tar non Bush administration bootlickers for bigotry and Islamophobia. Jesus H. Christ, the entire Republican party platform is so thoroughly built with the smoldering bigotry of southern hostility to civil rights and desegregation, gay bashing and misogyny that if even a small amount of its planks were to be removed the entire fucking structure would come down faster than the very twin towers that have been so shamelessly exploited by Rove and all of the rest of the unprincipled jerk offs like him for the past five fucking years!

Now the utterly preposterous claim that Bush was “out of the loop” and not informed of the deal is being used as a firewall tactic to protect the morally bankrupt, degenerate little despot.

Great defense, he’s not a crook only an idiot. The best propaganda always contains a morsel of truth.

Herr Goebbels would be proud.

Collateral Damage

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost it’s way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

– The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

If Mick Jagger and the boys had any balls left whatsoever they would have opened the garish free market capitalist travesty that was the Super Bowl XL halftime show with the roiling menace of their classic Gimme Shelter followed by Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man despite their pre-arranged set. Once the anal retentive fuck-sticks who run the heavily censored corporate media were able to scrape their jaws off of the control room floor would they have cut the power to the entire set? If a line like “you can make a dead man come” is too provocative for the childlike minds of the year’s biggest infomercial what would a triple barreled blast of pure sixties rebellion do? A nation obsessed with graphic details about fucking but adverse to any similar graphic details about dying ugly….especially when the dying occurs in an illegal foreign war of intervention that is far more complicated than the bunting draped patiotic horseshit that is now so ubiquitious at national sporting events and other hoohah that distracts the simple minded.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five he uses the books of a fictional science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to insert social commentary into his overall story. One of ‘Trout’s’ tales addressed the strange contradictions of a society that will accept with open arms one who kills civilians with state sanction during wartime while ostracizing one for silly, superficial reasons:

The Gutless Wonder: This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Vonnegut of course was present at Dresden on the night that allied bombers laid waste to the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, a historic city as well as a non-military target with little or no air defense system that was packed with refugees and prisoners and was targeted by bombers that incinerated over one hundred thousand civilians. Vonnegut spoke of seeing the boiled bodies of schoolgirls floating in a water tower through his character Billy Pilgrim and also of being forced to dig through the wreckage in the aftermath to find “corpse mines” and described the odor of the bodies:

“They didn’t smell bad at first…but then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”

He also spoke of a character, another soldier who died of the dry heaves from having to go down into a corpse mine and being overcome by the stench:

“He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up”

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to our nation’s war history, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by bombing of civilian areas nor the bombing of Viet Nam nor the brown skinned dead in any other foreign imperialist adventure undertaken by the politicians and their wealthy backers who cash in on the destroyed lives and flesh of those who become victims so that they may live opulent lives of carefree exploitation. I do want to make the statement that in doing so I am differentiating between ‘combatants’ and what is deemed to be acceptable ‘collateral damage’ to those dropping their bombs or launching their shells and missiles from far away lest they actually have to bear witness to the devastation. ‘Trout’s’ Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and cruel philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as it doesn’t intrude upon their pathetic and selfish little lives.

I want to at this time take an opportunity to recognize it here for the sake of the memory of the dead and perhaps the hope of the living that we can one day finally recognize war for the profitable, industrialized slaughter that it is by listing a few accounts:

“The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then – to my utter horror and amazement – I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.” (Margaret Freyer: Dresden Resident)

“The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate. I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring was facing me. “Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores,” I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart.” (Otto Sailer-Jackson: Dresden Zookeeper)

“We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames. We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub”. (Lothar Metzger: Dresden Resident)

Among other things Vonnegut later wrote:

“You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

And of course he is correct, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualites. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’ fine film the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as published in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of agrression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations.

The graphic examples of civilian ‘collateral damage’ aren’t something that the public want to see or know about, they like their wars sanitized, neat, convenient, and morally clear along the lines of a John Wayne movie or other simplistic celluloid trash. Americans are mostly ignorant and express indifference at the true suffering of war and are generally the most mindless and unenlightened citizens of the world’s most dangerous of empires. We as a society gorge ourselves on violent fantasy on television, in movies and in video games reveling in every beheading, rape, dismemberment, shooting, knifing, incinerating and bludgeoning as long as we can remain safely detached and free from ever having to consider the actual consequences of violence. This is hypocrisy, a society so conditioned to accept the abominable as long as it is a part of the great American myth of righteousness and destiny glorifies death but when that death is real, nobody wants the gory details of what is perpetrated in our name. The exception being the near masturbatory glee that the mutilated and widely displayed corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein elicited from a voyeuristic public addicted to sensationalistic cheap thrills. The bullet riddled bodies of the sons of Saddam were constantly and graphically displayed in order to feed the bloodlust necessary for rabid and continued support of the war against the Islamic savages.

The outrage over the images was made all the more conspicuous by it’s absence.

A while back, after the early afterglow of ‘Shock and Awe” had subsided and when the truth was slowly starting to seep out that “mission accomplished” was just another two word phrase along the lines of bull shit and cluster fuck I read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper that had dared to display the gruesome hanging of the charred corpses of four ‘contractors’ who were killed by a mob in the Iraqi city of Fallujah which would go on to be severely punished later. Some ridiculously dumb bitch had the audacity to write expressing her “outrage” that she actually had to explain this to her children. Americans love their wars as long as they don’t actually have to see what is being done in their names. As for the four ‘contractors’ I have no mercy and nothing but contempt for them, they were mercenaries, nothing but parasites that move from host to host preying on human misery for both the thrill and the money that comes with it but that alas is lost on those who shelter their spoiled children from all but electronic video violence. I doubt that she bothered to dash off a similar protestation over the bloody display of the war trophies that were the sons of Saddam.

What is lost in translation was the fact that the government was contracting mercenaries to do the wet work for the military. It is obvious that they were targeted for a reason, quite possibly the torture or murder of friends or family members of the rioters during one of the death squad raids that are now common in Iraq. I find the ongoing use of these ‘contractors’ to be repugnant and abhorrent, not only are they far more highly paid than the actual members of the military but they operate independent of any sort of congressional oversight and bear no accountability for their actions. I have no sympathy for bastards like that who are cruel violence junkies and arrogant psychopaths more into it for the thrill of the kill than the actual money. Just think of how great that a heroin addict would find it if he could be paid for riding the dragon. The assemblage and widespread use of private armies by the Pentagon is a very foreboding thing and may prove to have extremely grave consequences to us at home if their existence becomes acceptable to the general public and future domestic operations are commenced. Blackwater, one of the top mercenary firms was providing ‘contractors’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and no doubt these paramilitary goons already have contingency contracts lined up in the event of a ‘terrorist’ attack on the homeland.

I am not merely being callous over the violent fate of the ‘contractors’ , I just have far more sympathy for the innocent victims. Victims such as the Hassan family whose seventeen members were packed into a 1974 Land Rover in the early days of the invasion and were driving toward their dream of democracy and freedom from the evil savagery of Saddam. Instead of democracy, this family (the grandfather was dressed in his finest garment, a pin striped suit to look American for the celebratory occasion of their deliverance) was slaughtered in an unimaginably horrific manner by a nervous American soldier at a checkpoint who panicked and unloaded a barrage of military ordnance into the oncoming vehicle. Eleven members of the family were destroyed, not just killed but destroyed…as a veteran you can appreciate the power of military weaponry. Lamea, the pregnant wife of Bakhat Hassan survived the attack that turned the vehicle into an abattoir in which she described as follows:

“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off, my girls — I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”

An army public relations officer stated that it was “A miscommunication with civilians” after which the surviving members of the family were offered monetary compensation for their loss. As Bob Dylan once sang “money doesn’t talk it swears” and the true obscenity in this tableau is that we as Americans are so ignorant of the culture of others and so empty in our very souls that anybody could possibly offer money as a remedy for this atrocity. Unfortunately things such as this don’t get much play in the American mainstream media, there is always a Michael Jackson, Laci Petersen, Tom and Katie, Bennifer or Kobe Bryant to exploit in order to save some pathetic cunt from having to explain the insanity and abhorrence that is a war being waged in her name to some pathetically spoiled child who is pampered and indulged on the now traditional journey to become a selfishly ignorant and obese adult in the land of plenty while the impoverished children of the third world are dying of starvation.

Fallujah would go on to perish for our sins, targeted for destruction by a series of brutal military operations to quell the insurgency and to avenge the deaths of the mercenaries and to wash the bitter taste of public humiliation from the mouths of war planners. In a series of sieges that reduced the city to rubble civilians as well as combatants were targeted, snipers targeted ambulances, access to the main hospital was blocked, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and the ‘collateral damage’ was significant. A foreign documentary entitled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre was produced and showed that the U.S. military was using incendiary White Phosphorous in the assaults. The video is highly recommended although not for those without a strong stomach, the evidence is as brutal as the imagery of the burned bodies. Of course this would never be allowed to air in the homeland. The media downplays the truth that is the charnel house of Iraq, there is always a king’s crusade to glorify or a celebrity to worship or a lurid sex scandal to lasciviously salivate over. Just another day in the empire according to the corporate press of the ruling party.

For real journalism and truths about the bloody quagmire we must utilize foreign sources, a sick joke in a land where a free and unimpeded press is supposed to act as a vital check against the tyranny of madmen. Dahr Jamail is essential reading for those who seek to stay informed as is Robert Fisk whose brutal honesty would serve as a slap across the face were any domestic sources permitted to carry his columns on a regular basis. Were the corporate media to have any balls or the majority of the public have any brains this is what they would be reading:

So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 – and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands – Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project. The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered. “He was bringing supper home for our family in Palestine Street but he never reached our home. Then we got a phone call saying we could have him back if we paid $50,000 [£27,500]. We didn’t have $50,000. So we sold part of our home and many of our things and we borrowed $15,000 and we paid over the money to a man in a car who was wearing a keffiyeh scarf round his head. “Then we got another phone call, telling us that Hassan was at the Saidiyeh police station. He was. He was blindfolded and gagged and he had two bullets in his head. They had taken our money and then they had killed him.” There is a wail of grief from the yard behind us where 50 people are waiting in the shade of the Baghdad mortuary wall. There are wooden coffins in the street, stacked against the wall, lying on the pavement.

The American public has neither the time nor the stomach to trouble themselves with vagaries as this and the absence of the widespread syndication of Fisk’s work is a testament to a nation of selfish, apathetic, timorous fools who are far more concerned with halitosis than the stench of burning and rotting corpses that is so commonplace in the wars fought in their name. The atrocities of course take place in any war, war is a horrible thing, not something of valor and honor but an exercise in sorrow, death, destruction and the piles of stinking corpses and shattered lives that are left in the aftermath, such is as it always has been and always will be in the future. A public too accustomed to the sanitized death and violence of their false little worlds of television and video games and never forced to confront the real thing.

And So It Goes…

The military industrial complex has a vested interest in hiding this from the general population and of perpetuating the myths through propaganda. Hiding behind impugning the patriotism of others and invoking empty sloganeering such as ‘support the troops’ is not only of the lowest form of morality but of the highest form of cowardice and in the case of those who turn their magnetic ribbon stickers sideways to represent the Jesus fish, hypocrisy and apostasy. A large number of Americans ignorantly spout the jingoist phrase “nuke them all” when referring to non-Caucasian, non-Christian countries, specifically those in the middle east. This only reinforces their stupidity and lack of knowledge of the true horrors of war borne by those whose only crime was in happening to be citizens of a regime deemed to be an enemy of the American state and therefore subject to the full wrath of the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal that will always be restocked by the merchants of death that are the defense contractors.

Our cultural priorities have become so fucked up, corrupted and polluted that a glimpse of a woman’s nipple shown on national television dominates all media coverage and elicits outrage while the illicit occupation in Iraq with women and children being blown apart into bloody bits in the name of the never ending and all encompassing ‘war on terror’ does not make it into the national psyche who are more interested in getting their next hit of vicarious celebrity living off of the electronic crack pipe. Our idiot king has alienated us from the rest of the world and the psychotic court jesters of his rogue administration only continue to conspire to lead us all down the path that will ultimately conclude with the destruction of the very ideals of a democratic society if not the lives of those not only here in America but throughout the world. The crack down on dissent is coming that much is certain, too many people are starting to become restless and beginning to ask questions for it not to.

The equilibrium of international relations has not only been upset by these fools and charlatans but sent off spinning into the depths of some bizarre parallel universe in which up is down, wrong is right, truth is ignorance and war is peace. We have begun the journey down the rabbit hole, let us hope that the rabbit hole does not eventually end up being a mass grave. We are now on the precipice of the new crusades, a war of civilizations and religions perpetuated by those both ignorant of history as well as world culture.

We are now playing for keeps.

Collateral Damage

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost it’s way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

– The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

If Mick Jagger and the boys had any balls left whatsoever they would have opened the garish free market capitalist travesty that was the Super Bowl XL halftime show with the roiling menace of their classic Gimme Shelter followed by Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man despite their pre-arranged set. Once the anal retentive fuck-sticks who run the heavily censored corporate media were able to scrape their jaws off of the control room floor would they have cut the power to the entire set? If a line like “you can make a dead man come” is too provocative for the childlike minds of the year’s biggest infomercial what would a triple barreled blast of pure sixties rebellion do? A nation obsessed with graphic details about fucking but adverse to any similar graphic details about dying ugly….especially when the dying occurs in an illegal foreign war of intervention that is far more complicated than the bunting draped patiotic horseshit that is now so ubiquitious at national sporting events and other hoohah that distracts the simple minded.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five he uses the books of a fictional science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to insert social commentary into his overall story. One of ‘Trout’s’ tales addressed the strange contradictions of a society that will accept with open arms one who kills civilians with state sanction during wartime while ostracizing one for silly, superficial reasons:

The Gutless Wonder: This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Vonnegut of course was present at Dresden on the night that allied bombers laid waste to the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, a historic city as well as a non-military target with little or no air defense system that was packed with refugees and prisoners and was targeted by bombers that incinerated over one hundred thousand civilians. Vonnegut spoke of seeing the boiled bodies of schoolgirls floating in a water tower through his character Billy Pilgrim and also of being forced to dig through the wreckage in the aftermath to find “corpse mines” and described the odor of the bodies:

“They didn’t smell bad at first…but then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”

He also spoke of a character, another soldier who died of the dry heaves from having to go down into a corpse mine and being overcome by the stench:

“He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up”

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to our nation’s war history, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by bombing of civilian areas nor the bombing of Viet Nam nor the brown skinned dead in any other foreign imperialist adventure undertaken by the politicians and their wealthy backers who cash in on the destroyed lives and flesh of those who become victims so that they may live opulent lives of carefree exploitation. I do want to make the statement that in doing so I am differentiating between ‘combatants’ and what is deemed to be acceptable ‘collateral damage’ to those dropping their bombs or launching their shells and missiles from far away lest they actually have to bear witness to the devastation. ‘Trout’s’ Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and cruel philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as it doesn’t intrude upon their pathetic and selfish little lives.

I want to at this time take an opportunity to recognize it here for the sake of the memory of the dead and perhaps the hope of the living that we can one day finally recognize war for the profitable, industrialized slaughter that it is by listing a few accounts:

“The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then – to my utter horror and amazement – I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.” (Margaret Freyer: Dresden Resident)

“The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate. I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring was facing me. “Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores,” I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart.” (Otto Sailer-Jackson: Dresden Zookeeper)

“We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames. We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub”. (Lothar Metzger: Dresden Resident)

Among other things Vonnegut later wrote:

“You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

And of course he is correct, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualites. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’ fine film the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as published in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of agrression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations.

The graphic examples of civilian ‘collateral damage’ aren’t something that the public want to see or know about, they like their wars sanitized, neat, convenient, and morally clear along the lines of a John Wayne movie or other simplistic celluloid trash. Americans are mostly ignorant and express indifference at the true suffering of war and are generally the most mindless and unenlightened citizens of the world’s most dangerous of empires. We as a society gorge ourselves on violent fantasy on television, in movies and in video games reveling in every beheading, rape, dismemberment, shooting, knifing, incinerating and bludgeoning as long as we can remain safely detached and free from ever having to consider the actual consequences of violence. This is hypocrisy, a society so conditioned to accept the abominable as long as it is a part of the great American myth of righteousness and destiny glorifies death but when that death is real, nobody wants the gory details of what is perpetrated in our name. The exception being the near masturbatory glee that the mutilated and widely displayed corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein elicited from a voyeuristic public addicted to sensationalistic cheap thrills. The bullet riddled bodies of the sons of Saddam were constantly and graphically displayed in order to feed the bloodlust necessary for rabid and continued support of the war against the Islamic savages.

The outrage over the images was made all the more conspicuous by it’s absence.

A while back, after the early afterglow of ‘Shock and Awe” had subsided and when the truth was slowly starting to seep out that “mission accomplished” was just another two word phrase along the lines of bull shit and cluster fuck I read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper that had dared to display the gruesome hanging of the charred corpses of four ‘contractors’ who were killed by a mob in the Iraqi city of Fallujah which would go on to be severely punished later. Some ridiculously dumb bitch had the audacity to write expressing her “outrage” that she actually had to explain this to her children. Americans love their wars as long as they don’t actually have to see what is being done in their names. As for the four ‘contractors’ I have no mercy and nothing but contempt for them, they were mercenaries, nothing but parasites that move from host to host preying on human misery for both the thrill and the money that comes with it but that alas is lost on those who shelter their spoiled children from all but electronic video violence. I doubt that she bothered to dash off a similar protestation over the bloody display of the war trophies that were the sons of Saddam.

What is lost in translation was the fact that the government was contracting mercenaries to do the wet work for the military. It is obvious that they were targeted for a reason, quite possibly the torture or murder of friends or family members of the rioters during one of the death squad raids that are now common in Iraq. I find the ongoing use of these ‘contractors’ to be repugnant and abhorrent, not only are they far more highly paid than the actual members of the military but they operate independent of any sort of congressional oversight and bear no accountability for their actions. I have no sympathy for bastards like that who are cruel violence junkies and arrogant psychopaths more into it for the thrill of the kill than the actual money. Just think of how great that a heroin addict would find it if he could be paid for riding the dragon. The assemblage and widespread use of private armies by the Pentagon is a very foreboding thing and may prove to have extremely grave consequences to us at home if their existence becomes acceptable to the general public and future domestic operations are commenced. Blackwater, one of the top mercenary firms was providing ‘contractors’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and no doubt these paramilitary goons already have contingency contracts lined up in the event of a ‘terrorist’ attack on the homeland.

I am not merely being callous over the violent fate of the ‘contractors’ , I just have far more sympathy for the innocent victims. Victims such as the Hassan family whose seventeen members were packed into a 1974 Land Rover in the early days of the invasion and were driving toward their dream of democracy and freedom from the evil savagery of Saddam. Instead of democracy, this family (the grandfather was dressed in his finest garment, a pin striped suit to look American for the celebratory occasion of their deliverance) was slaughtered in an unimaginably horrific manner by a nervous American soldier at a checkpoint who panicked and unloaded a barrage of military ordnance into the oncoming vehicle. Eleven members of the family were destroyed, not just killed but destroyed…as a veteran you can appreciate the power of military weaponry. Lamea, the pregnant wife of Bakhat Hassan survived the attack that turned the vehicle into an abattoir in which she described as follows:

“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off, my girls — I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”

An army public relations officer stated that it was “A miscommunication with civilians” after which the surviving members of the family were offered monetary compensation for their loss. As Bob Dylan once sang “money doesn’t talk it swears” and the true obscenity in this tableau is that we as Americans are so ignorant of the culture of others and so empty in our very souls that anybody could possibly offer money as a remedy for this atrocity. Unfortunately things such as this don’t get much play in the American mainstream media, there is always a Michael Jackson, Laci Petersen, Tom and Katie, Bennifer or Kobe Bryant to exploit in order to save some pathetic cunt from having to explain the insanity and abhorrence that is a war being waged in her name to some pathetically spoiled child who is pampered and indulged on the now traditional journey to become a selfishly ignorant and obese adult in the land of plenty while the impoverished children of the third world are dying of starvation.

Fallujah would go on to perish for our sins, targeted for destruction by a series of brutal military operations to quell the insurgency and to avenge the deaths of the mercenaries and to wash the bitter taste of public humiliation from the mouths of war planners. In a series of sieges that reduced the city to rubble civilians as well as combatants were targeted, snipers targeted ambulances, access to the main hospital was blocked, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and the ‘collateral damage’ was significant. A foreign documentary entitled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre was produced and showed that the U.S. military was using incendiary White Phosphorous in the assaults. The video is highly recommended although not for those without a strong stomach, the evidence is as brutal as the imagery of the burned bodies. Of course this would never be allowed to air in the homeland. The media downplays the truth that is the charnel house of Iraq, there is always a king’s crusade to glorify or a celebrity to worship or a lurid sex scandal to lasciviously salivate over. Just another day in the empire according to the corporate press of the ruling party.

For real journalism and truths about the bloody quagmire we must utilize foreign sources, a sick joke in a land where a free and unimpeded press is supposed to act as a vital check against the tyranny of madmen. Dahr Jamail is essential reading for those who seek to stay informed as is Robert Fisk whose brutal honesty would serve as a slap across the face were any domestic sources permitted to carry his columns on a regular basis. Were the corporate media to have any balls or the majority of the public have any brains this is what they would be reading:

So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 – and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands – Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project. The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered. “He was bringing supper home for our family in Palestine Street but he never reached our home. Then we got a phone call saying we could have him back if we paid $50,000 [£27,500]. We didn’t have $50,000. So we sold part of our home and many of our things and we borrowed $15,000 and we paid over the money to a man in a car who was wearing a keffiyeh scarf round his head. “Then we got another phone call, telling us that Hassan was at the Saidiyeh police station. He was. He was blindfolded and gagged and he had two bullets in his head. They had taken our money and then they had killed him.” There is a wail of grief from the yard behind us where 50 people are waiting in the shade of the Baghdad mortuary wall. There are wooden coffins in the street, stacked against the wall, lying on the pavement.

The American public has neither the time nor the stomach to trouble themselves with vagaries as this and the absence of the widespread syndication of Fisk’s work is a testament to a nation of selfish, apathetic, timorous fools who are far more concerned with halitosis than the stench of burning and rotting corpses that is so commonplace in the wars fought in their name. The atrocities of course take place in any war, war is a horrible thing, not something of valor and honor but an exercise in sorrow, death, destruction and the piles of stinking corpses and shattered lives that are left in the aftermath, such is as it always has been and always will be in the future. A public too accustomed to the sanitized death and violence of their false little worlds of television and video games and never forced to confront the real thing.

And So It Goes…

The military industrial complex has a vested interest in hiding this from the general population and of perpetuating the myths through propaganda. Hiding behind impugning the patriotism of others and invoking empty sloganeering such as ‘support the troops’ is not only of the lowest form of morality but of the highest form of cowardice and in the case of those who turn their magnetic ribbon stickers sideways to represent the Jesus fish, hypocrisy and apostasy. A large number of Americans ignorantly spout the jingoist phrase “nuke them all” when referring to non-Caucasian, non-Christian countries, specifically those in the middle east. This only reinforces their stupidity and lack of knowledge of the true horrors of war borne by those whose only crime was in happening to be citizens of a regime deemed to be an enemy of the American state and therefore subject to the full wrath of the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal that will always be restocked by the merchants of death that are the defense contractors.

Our cultural priorities have become so fucked up, corrupted and polluted that a glimpse of a woman’s nipple shown on national television dominates all media coverage and elicits outrage while the illicit occupation in Iraq with women and children being blown apart into bloody bits in the name of the never ending and all encompassing ‘war on terror’ does not make it into the national psyche who are more interested in getting their next hit of vicarious celebrity living off of the electronic crack pipe. Our idiot king has alienated us from the rest of the world and the psychotic court jesters of his rogue administration only continue to conspire to lead us all down the path that will ultimately conclude with the destruction of the very ideals of a democratic society if not the lives of those not only here in America but throughout the world. The crack down on dissent is coming that much is certain, too many people are starting to become restless and beginning to ask questions for it not to.

The equilibrium of international relations has not only been upset by these fools and charlatans but sent off spinning into the depths of some bizarre parallel universe in which up is down, wrong is right, truth is ignorance and war is peace. We have begun the journey down the rabbit hole, let us hope that the rabbit hole does not eventually end up being a mass grave. We are now on the precipice of the new crusades, a war of civilizations and religions perpetuated by those both ignorant of history as well as world culture.

We are now playing for keeps.

Collateral Damage

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost it’s way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

– The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter

If Mick Jagger and the boys had any balls left whatsoever they would have opened the garish free market capitalist travesty that was the Super Bowl XL halftime show with the roiling menace of their classic Gimme Shelter followed by Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man despite their pre-arranged set. Once the anal retentive fuck-sticks who run the heavily censored corporate media were able to scrape their jaws off of the control room floor would they have cut the power to the entire set? If a line like “you can make a dead man come” is too provocative for the childlike minds of the year’s biggest infomercial what would a triple barreled blast of pure sixties rebellion do? A nation obsessed with graphic details about fucking but adverse to any similar graphic details about dying ugly….especially when the dying occurs in an illegal foreign war of intervention that is far more complicated than the bunting draped patiotic horseshit that is now so ubiquitious at national sporting events and other hoohah that distracts the simple minded.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five he uses the books of a fictional science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to insert social commentary into his overall story. One of ‘Trout’s’ tales addressed the strange contradictions of a society that will accept with open arms one who kills civilians with state sanction during wartime while ostracizing one for silly, superficial reasons:

The Gutless Wonder: This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Vonnegut of course was present at Dresden on the night that allied bombers laid waste to the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, a historic city as well as a non-military target with little or no air defense system that was packed with refugees and prisoners and was targeted by bombers that incinerated over one hundred thousand civilians. Vonnegut spoke of seeing the boiled bodies of schoolgirls floating in a water tower through his character Billy Pilgrim and also of being forced to dig through the wreckage in the aftermath to find “corpse mines” and described the odor of the bodies:

“They didn’t smell bad at first…but then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”He also spoke of a character, another soldier who died of the dry heaves from having to go down into a corpse mine and being overcome by the stench:

“He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up”

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to our nation’s war history, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by bombing of civilian areas nor the bombing of Viet Nam nor the brown skinned dead in any other foreign imperialist adventure undertaken by the politicians and their wealthy backers who cash in on the destroyed lives and flesh of those who become victims so that they may live opulent lives of carefree exploitation. I do want to make the statement that in doing so I am differentiating between ‘combatants’ and what is deemed to be acceptable ‘collateral damage’ to those dropping their bombs or launching their shells and missiles from far away lest they actually have to bear witness to the devastation. ‘Trout’s’ Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and cruel philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as it doesn’t intrude upon their pathetic and selfish little lives.

I want to at this time take an opportunity to recognize it here for the sake of the memory of the dead and perhaps the hope of the living that we can one day finally recognize war for the profitable, industrialized slaughter that it is by listing a few accounts:

“The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then – to my utter horror and amazement – I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.” (Margaret Freyer: Dresden Resident)

“The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate. I had known for one hour now that the most difficult task could ever bring was facing me. “Lehmann, we must get to the carnivores,” I called. We did what we had to do, but it broke my heart.” (Otto Sailer-Jackson: Dresden Zookeeper)


“We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames. We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub”. (Lothar Metzger: Dresden Resident)


Among other things Vonnegut later wrote:

“You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

And of course he is correct, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualites. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’ fine film the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

“On the nights of March 9 and 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat”, according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as published in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of agrression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations.

The graphic examples of civilian ‘collateral damage’ aren’t something that the public want to see or know about, they like their wars sanitized, neat, convenient, and morally clear along the lines of a John Wayne movie or other simplistic celluloid trash. Americans are mostly ignorant and express indifference at the true suffering of war and are generally the most mindless and unenlightened citizens of the world’s most dangerous of empires. We as a society gorge ourselves on violent fantasy on television, in movies and in video games reveling in every beheading, rape, dismemberment, shooting, knifing, incinerating and bludgeoning as long as we can remain safely detached and free from ever having to consider the actual consequences of violence. This is hypocrisy, a society so conditioned to accept the abominable as long as it is a part of the great American myth of righteousness and destiny glorifies death but when that death is real, nobody wants the gory details of what is perpetrated in our name. The exception being the near masturbatory glee that the mutilated and widely displayed corpses of Uday and Qusay Hussein elicited from a voyeuristic public addicted to sensationalistic cheap thrills. The bullet riddled bodies of the sons of Saddam were constantly and graphically displayed in order to feed the bloodlust necessary for rabid and continued support of the war against the Islamic savages.

The outrage over the images was made all the more conspicuous by it’s absence.

A while back, after the early afterglow of ‘Shock and Awe” had subsided and when the truth was slowly starting to seep out that “mission accomplished” was just another two word phrase along the lines of bull shit and cluster fuck I read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper that had dared to display the gruesome hanging of the charred corpses of four ‘contractors’ who were killed by a mob in the Iraqi city of Fallujah which would go on to be severely punished later. Some ridiculously dumb bitch had the audacity to write expressing her “outrage” that she actually had to explain this to her children. Americans love their wars as long as they don’t actually have to see what is being done in their names. As for the four ‘contractors’ I have no mercy and nothing but contempt for them, they were mercenaries, nothing but parasites that move from host to host preying on human misery for both the thrill and the money that comes with it but that alas is lost on those who shelter their spoiled children from all but electronic video violence. I doubt that she bothered to dash off a similar protestation over the bloody display of the war trophies that were the sons of Saddam.

What is lost in translation was the fact that the government was contracting mercenaries to do the wet work for the military. It is obvious that they were targeted for a reason, quite possibly the torture or murder of friends or family members of the rioters during one of the death squad raids that are now common in Iraq. I find the ongoing use of these ‘contractors’ to be repugnant and abhorrent, not only are they far more highly paid than the actual members of the military but they operate independent of any sort of congressional oversight and bear no accountability for their actions. I have no sympathy for bastards like that who are cruel violence junkies and arrogant psychopaths more into it for the thrill of the kill than the actual money. Just think of how great that a heroin addict would find it if he could be paid for riding the dragon. The assemblage and widespread use of private armies by the Pentagon is a very foreboding thing and may prove to have extremely grave consequences to us at home if their existence becomes acceptable to the general public and future domestic operations are commenced. Blackwater, one of the top mercenary firms was providing ‘contractors’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and no doubt these paramilitary goons already have contingency contracts lined up in the event of a ‘terrorist’ attack on the homeland.

I am not merely being callous over the violent fate of the ‘contractors’ , I just have far more sympathy for the innocent victims. Victims such as the Hassan family whose seventeen members were packed into a 1974 Land Rover in the early days of the invasion and were driving toward their dream of democracy and freedom from the evil savagery of Saddam. Instead of democracy, this family (the grandfather was dressed in his finest garment, a pin striped suit to look American for the celebratory occasion of their deliverance) was slaughtered in an unimaginably horrific manner by a nervous American soldier at a checkpoint who panicked and unloaded a barrage of military ordnance into the oncoming vehicle. Eleven members of the family were destroyed, not just killed but destroyed…as a veteran you can appreciate the power of military weaponry. Lamea, the pregnant wife of Bakhat Hassan survived the attack that turned the vehicle into an abattoir in which she described as follows:

“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off, my girls — I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead.”

An army public relations officer stated that it was “A miscommunication with civilians” after which the surviving members of the family were offered monetary compensation for their loss. As Bob Dylan once sang “money doesn’t talk it swears” and the true obscenity in this tableau is that we as Americans are so ignorant of the culture of others and so empty in our very souls that anybody could possibly offer money as a remedy for this atrocity. Unfortunately things such as this don’t get much play in the American mainstream media, there is always a Michael Jackson, Laci Petersen, Tom and Katie, Bennifer or Kobe Bryant to exploit in order to save some pathetic cunt from having to explain the insanity and abhorrence that is a war being waged in her name to some pathetically spoiled child who is pampered and indulged on the now traditional journey to become a selfishly ignorant and obese adult in the land of plenty while the impoverished children of the third world are dying of starvation.

Fallujah would go on to perish for our sins, targeted for destruction by a series of brutal military operations to quell the insurgency and to avenge the deaths of the mercenaries and to wash the bitter taste of public humiliation from the mouths of war planners. In a series of sieges that reduced the city to rubble civilians as well as combatants were targeted, snipers targeted ambulances, access to the main hospital was blocked, hundreds of Iraqis were killed and the ‘collateral damage’ was significant. A foreign documentary entitled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre was produced and showed that the U.S. military was using incendiary White Phosphorous in the assaults. The video is highly recommended although not for those without a strong stomach, the evidence is as brutal as the imagery of the burned bodies. Of course this would never be allowed to air in the homeland. The media downplays the truth that is the charnel house of Iraq, there is always a king’s crusade to glorify or a celebrity to worship or a lurid sex scandal to lasciviously salivate over. Just another day in the empire according to the corporate press of the ruling party.

For real journalism and truths about the bloody quagmire we must utilize foreign sources, a sick joke in a land where a free and unimpeded press is supposed to act as a vital check against the tyranny of madmen. Dahr Jamail is essential reading for those who seek to stay informed as is Robert Fisk whose brutal honesty would serve as a slap across the face were any domestic sources permitted to carry his columns on a regular basis. Were the corporate media to have any balls or the majority of the public have any brains this is what they would be reading:

So we are going to support the myth. As the headless bodies are found along the Tigris, as the mortuaries fill up, as the American dead grow far beyond 1,700 – and, let us remember, the Iraqi dead go into the tens of thousands – Europe and the rest of the world still support the American project. The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered. “He was bringing supper home for our family in Palestine Street but he never reached our home. Then we got a phone call saying we could have him back if we paid $50,000 [£27,500]. We didn’t have $50,000. So we sold part of our home and many of our things and we borrowed $15,000 and we paid over the money to a man in a car who was wearing a keffiyeh scarf round his head. “Then we got another phone call, telling us that Hassan was at the Saidiyeh police station. He was. He was blindfolded and gagged and he had two bullets in his head. They had taken our money and then they had killed him.” There is a wail of grief from the yard behind us where 50 people are waiting in the shade of the Baghdad mortuary wall. There are wooden coffins in the street, stacked against the wall, lying on the pavement.

The American public has neither the time nor the stomach to trouble themselves with vagaries as this and the absence of the widespread syndication of Fisk’s work is a testament to a nation of selfish, apathetic, timorous fools who are far more concerned with halitosis than the stench of burning and rotting corpses that is so commonplace in the wars fought in their name. The atrocities of course take place in any war, war is a horrible thing, not something of valor and honor but an exercise in sorrow, death, destruction and the piles of stinking corpses and shattered lives that are left in the aftermath, such is as it always has been and always will be in the future. A public too accustomed to the sanitized death and violence of their false little worlds of television and video games and never forced to confront the real thing.

And So It Goes…

The military industrial complex has a vested interest in hiding this from the general population and of perpetuating the myths through propaganda. Hiding behind impugning the patriotism of others and invoking empty sloganeering such as ‘support the troops’ is not only of the lowest form of morality but of the highest form of cowardice and in the case of those who turn their magnetic ribbon stickers sideways to represent the Jesus fish, hypocrisy and apostasy. A large number of Americans ignorantly spout the jingoist phrase “nuke them all” when referring to non-Caucasian, non-Christian countries, specifically those in the middle east. This only reinforces their stupidity and lack of knowledge of the true horrors of war borne by those whose only crime was in happening to be citizens of a regime deemed to be an enemy of the American state and therefore subject to the full wrath of the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal that will always be restocked by the merchants of death that are the defense contractors.

Our cultural priorities have become so fucked up, corrupted and polluted that a glimpse of a woman’s nipple shown on national television dominates all media coverage and elicits outrage while the illicit occupation in Iraq with women and children being blown apart into bloody bits in the name of the never ending and all encompassing ‘war on terror’ does not make it into the national psyche who are more interested in getting their next hit of vicarious celebrity living off of the electronic crack pipe. Our idiot king has alienated us from the rest of the world and the psychotic court jesters of his rogue administration only continue to conspire to lead us all down the path that will ultimately conclude with the destruction of the very ideals of a democratic society if not the lives of those not only here in America but throughout the world. The crack down on dissent is coming that much is certain, too many people are starting to become restless and beginning to ask questions for it not to.

The equilibrium of international relations has not only been upset by these fools and charlatans but sent off spinning into the depths of some bizarre parallel universe in which up is down, wrong is right, truth is ignorance and war is peace. We have begun the journey down the rabbit hole, let us hope that the rabbit hole does not eventually end up being a mass grave. We are now on the precipice of the new crusades, a war of civilizations and religions perpetuated by those both ignorant of history as well as world culture.

We are now playing for keeps.

The Enemy

Excellent commentary by William Rivers Pitt of truthout.org also see following story on Herr Rumsfeld and the coming information war….time to saddle up! With the sale of six major U.S. ports to Dubai (a huge story all but missed by the fucking incompetent idiot MSM shithacks who were all high off of the fumes of the Dick Cheney ‘hunting accident’ tail that was turned into yet another Karl Rove propaganda opus through their gross ineptidude and lack of journalistic integrity) it should now be crystal clear than when the ‘War on Terror’ was declared that this fascist administration had already decided that the ‘terrorists’ are all those who dare to exercise their first amendment rights in opposing the rogue empire rising on the banks of the Potomac. An animal is most dangerous when it has been cornered and these skunks have their collective backs to the wall.

The Enemy

By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t Perspective
Friday 17 February 2006

They called it “Cyber Storm,” and it was a war-game exercise run last week by the Department of Homeland Security. The war game had nothing to do with testing the security of our shipping ports, borders, infrastructure or airports. “Cyber Storm” was testing the government’s ability to withstand an onslaught of information and protest from bloggers and online activists.

“Participants confirmed,” wrote the Associated Press, that “parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose “Web logs” include political rantings and musings about current events.”

Say what? Online expressions of political opinion are so dangerous that the Department of Homeland Security must war-game scenarios to deal with them? Bloggers are potential terrorists now? Bloggers are the enemy? Last week, as far as DHS was concerned, they were.

We hear a great deal about enemies these days. Don’t criticize the war, or you’ll embolden the enemy. The enemy is clever and cruel. Stick with the White House and we’ll defeat the enemy. Since the Bush administration no longer likes to mention the name Osama bin “Stayin’ Alive” Laden in public, lest everyone remember a dramatic promise long broken, any specific definition of an enemy changes with the moment.

Sometimes, the enemy is in Iraq, and we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. Sometimes, the enemy is in Iran, allegedly toiling with all its collective might to manufacture nuclear weapons. Sometimes, the enemy is in Palestine, where Hamas used George W. Bush’s exported democracy to take over the government. Sometimes, the enemy is an American face on a television offering criticism of the White House. Last week, the enemy was a blogger making a political expression.

The enemy is never in Saudi Arabia, though that nation is the very birthing bed of international terrorism. The enemy is never in Israel, though that nation’s far-right leadership has been a good deal of the impetus behind the Bush administration’s calamitous push into Iraq. The enemy is never in China, even when they smack our planes out of the sky, because they own a substantial portion of our debt. The enemy is never in Pakistan, though that nation’s fundamentalist wing allies itself with the Taliban, and though they actually do possess nuclear weapons. The enemy is occasionally mentioned as being in North Korea, but not often, because we want no part of that fight.

For a time, the enemy was in the United Arab Emirates. Two of the hijackers of the September 11 aircraft were citizens of the United Arab Emirates, and the funding behind those attacks was wired through the UAE’s banking system. Republican and Democratic Senators believe the UAE has been used as a conduit for the proliferation of nuclear technology.

That was then, however. A company named Dubai Ports World intends to spend $6.8 billion to gain control of the management of shipping ports in New York and New Jersey, as well as in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami. Dubai Ports World is foreign-owned, but is backed financially by the government of the United Arab Emirates. In other words, a nation suspected of being a significant player in the September 11 attacks is being allowed to take control of our borders. For the record, US ports handle an estimated two billion tons of cargo annually, with only 5% of that cargo undergoing inspection. The deal has already been granted regulatory clearance by the White House.

We hear a great deal about enemies, both real and contrived. Let us ponder, for a moment, the existence of another enemy so insidious that it operates fully in daylight but beyond control. This enemy seeks to destroy the rule of constitutional law in the United States. This enemy seeks to destroy the seed-corn defense against tyranny in this nation, the separation of powers. This enemy gathers more and more power to itself to achieve these goals, and uses fear and division to do so. This enemy will lie with impunity, stonewall endlessly and ruin anyone who might disrupt its plans.

This enemy stood by and did nothing while a major American city was devoured by the ocean. When New Orleans was drowned, many voices were raised in panicked unison that the White House must do something, and do something now. A conference call was held between key members of the Department of Homeland Security and other administration officials on August 29th, the day the catastrophe began for real. Investigators are seeking the transcript of this call, but administration officials claim the transcript has somehow disappeared. There are many transcripts of calls before and after this one, but the five-hour call on August 29th, the specific call investigators want to see, simply cannot be found.

This enemy deliberately reached out and destroyed the career of a deep-cover CIA agent named Valerie Plame, because her husband dared to criticize the White House about its “uranium from Niger” lie regarding Iraq. Plame, among other things, worked clandestinely to track any person, group or nation that would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists; in other words, Plame worked to track the individuals this White House never fails to label as the enemy. Her work was derailed and her network destroyed because this White House did not want any discussion of the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, despite miles of claims that the stuff was there.

TruthOut correspondent Jason Leopold reported this week that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is refusing to turn over incriminating emails to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, emails that allegedly indicate the involvement of Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking administration officials in the unmasking of Agent Plame. “The emails Gonzales is said to be withholding contained references to Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity and CIA status and developments related to the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” reported Leopold. “Moreover, according to sources, the emails contained suggestions by the officials on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments [Plame’s husband] Joseph Wilson had been making about the administration’s pre-war Iraq intelligence.”

I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was recently indicted by Fitzgerald for lying under oath during the investigation into this matter. Recently, Libby stated that he was authorized by his superiors to expose the classified name of Valerie Plame. Given his position, Libby’s main superior is none other than Cheney himself. Cheney recently claimed that he is authorized by an Executive Order to declassify any information he pleases. “I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions,” said Cheney this week. “There’s an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president.”

This is a new trend for the White House: rendering an illegal act legal retroactively by fiat. The trend manifested itself in another area of illegal activity by the White House, the warrantless wiretapping of thousands of American citizens by the National Security Agency, in defiance of the black-letter law contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. For several weeks now, Congress has been threatening to hold hearings on the matter. Bush advisor Karl Rove worked feverishly behind the scenes to keep such hearings from taking place, and has succeeded. Rather than investigate the matter, Congress will instead rewrite the FISA law, thus rendering retroactively legal White House activities that blatantly broke the law.

We hear a great deal about enemies these days, and many of them are quite real and quite perilous. It is difficult to imagine a more perilous enemy, however, than the one operating out of Washington today. This enemy would set itself on high, beyond control or censure, and create of itself that permanent faction James Madison so earnestly warned us of. This enemy deletes or hides evidence of its calumny, or simply alters existing laws that would otherwise derail its plans. This enemy destroys lives out of hand, lives by the tens of thousands, and reaps a pretty profit in the process.

The difference between the enemies we hear about and the one in Washington is simple and deadly: only the enemy in Washington can annihilate the constitutional government we have enjoyed for more than two centuries. The idea that is America cannot be terminated by terrorists or rogue states. Were the nation entire to be somehow obliterated, the idea that is America would endure. Only its keepers can kill it completely. They are well on their way.

“As nightfall does not come at once,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, “neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness.”

We must deal with the enemy within the halls of our government, the enemy whose power to destroy far outstrips any enemy beyond our borders. In doing so, we save that which is unique in the world. In doing so, we deal a death blow to all other enemies. In doing so, we save ourselves from that darkness.

US lags in propaganda war: Rumsfeld

By Daniel Trotta

The United States lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Pentagon chief said today’s weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

“Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but … our country has not adapted,” Rumsfeld said.

“For the most part, the U.S. government still functions as a ‘five and dime’ store in an eBay world,” Rumsfeld said, referring to old-fashioned U.S. retail stores and the online auction house, respectively.

Rumsfeld said U.S. military public affairs officers must learn to anticipate news and respond faster, and good public affairs officers should be rewarded with promotions.
The military’s information offices still operate mostly eight hours a day, five or six days a week while the challenges they faces occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rumsfeld called that a “dangerous deficiency.”

Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy of the opposition Democratic Party immediately criticized Rumsfeld as missing the point.

“Clearly, we need to improve our public diplomacy and information age communication in the Muslim world,” Kennedy said in a statement. “But nothing has done more to encourage increased Al Qaeda recruitment and made America less safe than the war in Iraq and the incompetent way it’s been managed. Our greatest failure is our policy.”

Rumsfeld lamented that vast media attention about U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq outweighed that given to the discovery of “Saddam Hussein’s mass graves.”

On the emergence of satellite television and other media not under Arab state control, he said, “While al Qaeda and extremist movements have utilized this forum for many years … we in the government have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences.”

Spoken like a true bullshit salesman. Maybe now that the U.S. trade deficit is at catastrophic levels and there is insufficient manufacturing infrastructure remaining (a vicim of Reagan’s neoliberal free market buccanneers) we can make FOX News our top export.

2+2=5

Why We Fight

Holy Propaganda Batman! Is Nothing Sacred?

“They (sic) are a superstitious cowardly lot so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts, I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…a…a…”

-Nocturnally fixated millionare and GOP donor Bruce Wayne

You know that the fear based society has reached the penetration point of popular culture when even Batman himself is being used as a propaganda venue for propagation of the big lie of the evil and omnipotent menace of Al Qaeda. This is just the latest front in the great neocon psyop of indoctinating the masses to the incrementally suffocating quagmire of the post 9/11 police state. Der Homeland of Amerika is under total control by a very real fascist menace that just ratcheted down the clamps a bit tighter when the suck-assed, gutless, corporate bought, despotism enabling eunuchs of the DLC in The Temple of Hillary once again caved in and moved to extend the USA PATRIOT Act indefinitely so be on the lookout for the black vans (batmobiles?) to be coming soon to a neighborhood near you. I am posting the Batman story below in it’s bizarre entirety (and highlighting key Karl Rove talking points) followed by more commentary:

Holy propaganda! Batman is tackling Osama bin Laden
By Harry Mount in New York

In his latest adventure, Batman will dispense with his old enemies, the Riddler and the Joker, and take on Osama bin Laden instead. In Holy Terror, Batman!, a new graphic novel by the Batman writer Frank Miller, the Caped Crusader will take on al-Qa’eda when his home town, Gotham City, which is based on New York, is attacked by terrorists. “It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a piece of propaganda – Batman kicks al-Qa’eda’s ass,” Mr Miller told a San Francisco comic book convention. “It just seems silly to chase around the Riddler when you’ve got al-Qa’eda out there.

“Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for. It’s an explosion from my gut reaction of what’s happening now, a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against.”

Holy Terror, Batman! does not have a scheduled publication date. It is unlikely to appear until next year at the earliest, when it will do battle with Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, which was just released in America.

In this compendium of all his statements, bin Laden does not name Batman personally, but attacks America as “the Great Satan” for exporting a culture of pornography and violence.

Jesus Fucking Christ…is nothing sacred anymore in this surrealistic fever dream of post (or maybe pre) millennial Amerika? First Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer, the sociopathic fascist anti-hero of FOX TV’s hit terrorist propaganda piece 24 becomes the nation’s top infomercial for torture and Gestapo paramilitary police goon squad tactics and now the caped crusader himself has been conscripted and sent to the front lines in the war on the constitution and rational thinking. The media goes for the jugular when Deadeye Dick Cheney blasts a hunting buddy/GOP crony and then waits to sober up prior to calling the authorities but only after letting him him slide for five mother fucking years over the numerous occurances of far more serious acts of continuous lying, subversion of democracy and general defilement of over two centuries of American diplomacy and values that flout the legitimacy of the law itself. It was a feeding frenzy unseen since Bill Clinton dropped his goo on Monica’s blue dress or at least since the saga of Lacie and the fetus.

Then the reptillian Cheney does make an appearance on FOX of course and at the end of the interview states that he has the authority to declassify confidential information and in essence blow the entire Scooter Libby indictment out of the water on another fraudulent pack of lies, damned lies and treasonous criminal activity. Cheney is the man behind the curtain, the great OZ himself pulling the levers from his undisclosed location as he manipulates the masses into blind acceptance of the neo con agenda, if you want to know the true machinations of the reactionary right movement you have to keep an eye on the Dick. If the Cheney interview were recorded using TIVO equipment you can actually see his forked tongue flickering in and out if you run the replay on super slo-mo.

According to the Rove/neocon script that has become incorporated into the entertainment industrial complex you continually hear of the danger of militant Islamic fundamentalists seizing control of nuclear weapons either through procurement on the black market or by overthrowing a regime in a country like say Pakistan or Iran. What you never hear is the danger of extremist Christian fundamentalists doing the same and we are a hell of a lot closer to that happing with their ascendancy through the American system to a terrifying proximity to having in their possession the launch codes for our own nuclear arsenal. These are the lunatics that we should be worrying about, they are the ones whose dogma includes assisting in bringing about a middle Eastern confrontation that will bring down a fiery Armageddon and enable the return of Jesus to slay all evil doers. Maybe Robin will even show up for that show.

As far as fear-mongering for political advantage, the neocon agenda and the phantom menace of Al Quaeda a great and highly recommended BBC documentary called The Power of Nightmares is out there on the internet. Of course it will never be seen in America via television or even a DVD release because of it’s thesis undermining the very ‘war on terror’ that has become as commonplace in Amerika today as the ‘war on communism’ (by the way, a good case is made that that was all bullshit as well in the documentary) was for four decades running before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first house of Bush.

Thrown Under The Bus

The Kiss of Judas

“For me, this is a second betrayal. First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me.”

-Paul Hackett

“So now…with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark…that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

-Hunter S. Thompson

Judas Iscariot’s price was forty pieces of silver, the gutless punks who comprise the detestable entity that is the DLC unceremoniously cashiered up and comer Paul Hackett of Ohio for a much cheaper and more vile rate so as to allow for the ability to continue pimping their now hollow scam as the flim flam men of a purported opposition party. Blue Chip Harry Reid and Charles Schumer were the middlemen who officially slipped a shank into Hackett’s back, discarding him after he ceased to be useful to their corrupt control of the party machinery and their fear began to grow that he would represent a populist reformist threat to their endless flow corporate graft and fealty to the beltway elite. Hackett’s anti war stance and criticism wasn’t compatible with the bellicose militarism of Queen Hillary and he had to go before he became too big a voice that may have drowned out that of the future whore to the military industrial complex. The man who once denounced propagandist Rush Limbaugh as a “fat assed drug addict” was deemed to be a loose cannon on deck by the political party steeped in cuddling up with the enemy and far more comfortable with the likes of Joe ‘The Wandering Jew’ Lieberman than any potential usurpers who may disrupt business as usual.

Caught off guard as usual by the ensuing public relations fiasco of cutting loose the man who up until recently they had been trumpeting as a rising star the power elite attempted to put a spin on this latest beltway consultant clusterfuck by having DLC shill talk radio host Ed Schultz interview Hackett during drive time and to plant the seeds that he was soon to be the victim of a ‘whisper campaign’ accusing the Iraq veteran of war crimes in advance of an imminent ‘swift boat style attack’, how like a Karl Rove operation….or was it backed by the DLC in the same manner that they took down Howard Dean in 2004?

At least the Republicans are expected to be deplorable scumbags. The only thing worse than a fascist is a parasite only looking for self preservation and the ability to continue feeding unmolested. If the rollover on the Scalito nomination and all of the concerted stagecraft by the likes of Kerry and his flight from the globalist gathering in Switzerland to put on what basically amounted to a skit advocating a last minute filibuster was proof of the DLC betrayal of the discarded party base then the Hackett assassination is rock solid proof to progressives that their ‘representatives’ have crossed the Rubicon.

The callous betrayal of Hackett should send out a message loud and clear to all of those who have progressive views but have remained loyal to the Democrats out of the false hope that they would one day be able to regain power and return fairness and equality to America:

YOU IDIOTS….YOUR PARTY HAS LEFT YOU!

I implore all disenfranchised Democrats and progressives to do one of the following three things come election day this November:

1: Stay Home.

2: Vote Libertarian

3: Vote Green

The DLC needs to be eliminated and a complete removal from power and further handover of congressional seats to the GOP is necessary for the Vichy influence to cease and facilitate a return of voices who represent the working class instead of entrenched special interests. What fucking difference would it make anyway? The Republicans always can count on one thing above all others and that is a rollover of the unprincipled jellyfish on the other side of the aisle. Let the one party government be official, democracy is nothing but an urban legend these days anyway. The ship has already raked the iceberg, is rapidly taking on water and is doomed to end up on the bottom it would be better in the long run if it is booked solid with Republicans when it finally sinks.

Dr. Bob Mantooth: American Prussia

Life is full of lovely ironies. One of the primary tentets of our founding fathers was an abhorrence of militarism and all it’s trappings. A professional army was looked on by Jefferson as, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst a threat to democracy. This was in stern contrast to the Kingdom of Prussia and it’s cult of the jackboot created by Frederick William and carried on through Frederick the Great, Bismarck and the last Kaiser. One of the alleged goals of World War I for the U.S. was to crush Prussian militarism so it could never rise again.

So flash forward to January of 2006 and Jefferson is probably spinning in his grave like a top. Everywhere you go, you are inundated with appeals to patriotism, which basically means supporting the Bush-Cheney jihad wherever its big foot lands. Dissent is demonized and state legislatures open sessions by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge! Good God, this is America. We don’t pledge anything to symbols, even one I revere as much as the flag. We are supposed to be smart enough to realize that symbols are just objects and what is represented by them is more important than their physical form. Hitler would have loved the Pledge of Allegiance – after all, indoctination of the youth is the first step toward victory.

This brings us to the NFL, that great bastion of America’s true national pasttime. Now don’t get me wrong – I love football. I’m not some left-wing elitest who only watches the Independent Film Channel when he deigns to even turn on the demon box. Nor am I a Neckcar-loving, speaking-in-tongues, Judicial Sunday Red Stater. I love football (the fact that I love baseball anymore marks me as somewhat to the left as most Republicans aren’t smart enough to understand anything other than cars going in circles, but that’s another post), I have season tickets.

I support US soldiers – that is somewhat of a cliche, but it’s true. Most of them are kids stuck with a really bad job in a really bad place who aren’t getting paid jack and who are getting their benefits slashed by a Congress that wraps itself in the flag over and over again. I empathize with them and I hope that they all come home ok. But I don’t need a “Salute to the Troops” shoved down my throat before every freaking home game.

We have troops up from local bases, troops back from Iraq, flyovers by F-18s and Blackhawk choppers, or we go paramilitary and have the police out there marching in formation. This is the post-9/11 society at its craziest. The best thing is that not once, but twice, I’ve seen the army bring a batch of soldiers onto the field before a game to take the oath and either enlist or reinlist. Yes, that’s right, public induction into our armed forces before a suitably appreciative crowd.

The first time was at a Texas Rangers baseball game that was played on an August Saturday afternoon in 98 degree heat thanks to Fox TV. They trotted out all these 18 year-old kids and went through the whole dog and pony show. Then, at an NFL game later this year, there was a repeat, although these were all reenlistments. Brother you better stand up and cheer.

Sure you can abstain, just like you can be the weird little kid that doesn’t say the Pledge because he is a Seventh Day Advenist. Remember that kid in school? It sure went well for him at recess, didn’t it?

Look, I don’t say that you shouldn’t appreciate the thin green line standing between you and the enemy. Those countries who thought they didn’t need an army usually ended up speaking German or Russian. But the military was pumped up to sacred cow status as soon as the planes hit the towers and USA Patriot went through. Now they are almost beyond criticism and if you don’t fall all over yourself slobbering and bowing, you are unpatriotic. From there, it is a very short step to being unamerican, then being a terrorist enemy of the country and 1984 hits twenty+ years later.

The whole point of America is to be free to support or not support the military and at the very least, view it through the prism of professional skepticism. That is America, that is a democracy, that is “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” It isn’t witch hunts and Fox News and 24 and guys who ducked the big war of their generation suddenly wanting to bomb the crap out of everyone.

I don’t want to veer too far off my point or put up too long of a post, but we face a very devious and corrupt enemy here. One that is more than just the junta in the White House, one that has roots and tentacles running throughout corporate America and the money to buy anyone and anything. The NFL is just as corporate as GM, Enron or Clearchannel Communications – it’s about the bottom line and what sells. And Megadeth was wrong – Peace doesn’t sell, not here, not now.

I’ll close with a quote from former St. Louis Cardinal (and dirty hippie – although that is redundant because most hippies are dirty and seem to be rebelling more against soap than the system) Dave Meggesy in the forward to the book What’s My Name, Fool?

Meggesy played back in the 60s and became part of the counterculture, a fact that did not enhance his NFL career. Even back then the drum was beating and you could hear the jackboots ringing on the cobblestones…”

In the middle and late 1960s, the NFL’s support of the Vietnam War, with its jingoistic pro-military Super Bowl halftime shows, disregarded half the country’s opposition to the war. The NFL was in the ‘selling the war’ business.”

And they still keep selling it because there is no shortage of buyers.

Dead Eye Dick

The happiest man in America right about now would have to be Antonin ‘Fat Tony’ Scalia whose January 2003 deal with the devil during a Louisiana duck hunting trip with the erratic and trigger happy Dick Cheney (a man who once bagged 70 pheasants in a single day) allowed the V.P. to avoid disclosing critical information regarding closed door meetings with energy honchos during which maps of Iraqi oil fields were allegedly divvied up according to Judicial Watch. ‘Fat Tony’ decided to play ball with the godfather over potential Supreme Court hearings during a day that may have gone something like this:

“So how about it Tony? Can I count on your help?” said the gravelly, phlegm choked, whiskey soaked voice that cut through the cold Louisiana morning . Fat Tony grunted as he trudged through the knee deep, fetid, freezing bayou water, this was just one more time that he was going to have to stick his neck out for these greedy, corrupt assholes but it had definitely had its perks so far. Suddenly a burst of gunfire rang out from right behind Scalia, his spinchter gave way and he dived into the muck, quivering.

“Got one” cackled Cheney as he chambered another round into his twelve gauge pump shotgun. “Way to go sir, love to see it when someone gits one of the dark ones” exclaimed former GOP congressional hopeful and current card carrying KKK member David Duke who was serving as the guide on this trip. “Jesus Christ, what’s that smell” queried Cheney in a sarcasm laced voice as he was looking at the trembling Scalia lying on the ground. “Hee hee hee, he done shit his britches” snickered Duke. Cheney shook his head and chortled, “Tony, you best go sit in the other duck blind today, we can chat once you get cleaned up back at the lodge”.
Satirical seques aside it was a good thing for Fat Tony that he played ball and gave Bush Co and the Haliburton Man a free pass from scrutiny and legal accoutabilty, he didn’t end up getting blasted like poor old Harry Whittington, a longtime GOP lackey who was on the receiving end of a load of 28-guage buckshot during a Texas ‘quail hunting’ trip what is shrouded by mysterious questions such as why the news was not publicly reported for nearly 24 hours, isn’t it big news when the Vice President shoots somebody? Fuck, if it were Al Gore FOX News would be 24/7 with the story for eight months! And why did the Secret Service prevent local authorities from interviewing Big Time Dick, was he possibly intoxicated? Speculation will continue in that little area but the more inquiring minds will inevitably ask if the delay had to do with other ‘guests’ being able to make a clean getaway without having to deal with the scrutiny of an investigation.

This thing stinks more than a load of shit in a pair of camouflage huntin’ britches. Stay tuned for more on this as the MSM slinks away to make room for the real investigative journalists in the blogosphere.

Hypocrisy And Idolatry

The cowardly entity that is the right wing slime machine aka The Ministry of Truth is once again kicking into full hypocrisy mode and mashing down the overdrive button with the all of the usual suspects expressing outrage over the political content of some of the speeches given at the funeral of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King. The rain of electronic umbrage is directed primarily at the ‘audacity’ of Jimmy Carter who among others took to the microphone to bring scorn down upon the failed policies of their beloved king in his very presence who sat squirming around like a child with poo poo undies while the ‘Bush Bashing’ (I love that two word culture term from a party now on it’s thirteenth straight year of attacking the Clintons) went on in front of the dumb bastard. Bush had only showed up to begin with for an obvious attempt to pander to the black voters for the upcoming gay bashing opus that will be GOP 2006 which will mine the depths of Karl Rove’s playbook for every fear mongering, bigoted underhanded tactic imaginable in order to prey upon the most base and primal ugliness in the souls of voters, in other words it will be vintage Republicanism.

Predictably leading the charge was the pink and puffy right wing cable attack dog Chris Matthews of the pride of MSNBC Hardball which should long ago have renamed Numbnuts in honor of its spittle flinging host, an allegedly degenerate former juicer and womanizer whose decade and a half long hard-on over being snubbed for a public relations position with the incoming Clinton administration have driven the ‘man’ with a face as smooth and pink as a newborn baby’s buttocks on a relentless anti-liberal jihad. Matthews spends night after night and Sunday mornings as well tilting at windmills for the crowd who are not fucking whacko enough to worship at the church of satanic drivel on the FOX cable network but are as borderline crazy as shithouse rats chasing each other from electronic outhouse to outhouse by way of the glorious invention of the universal remote, that post space age marvel of modern technology that allows fat and ignorant television addicted slugs to cycle through hundreds of channels of e-shit without the bothersome strain of the physical exercise of lifting their fat asses off of their couches. Fulminating, overblown, blustering and pontificating talking head dorks like Chris Matthews are what pass as heroes to the pathetic social mutants and miscreants who long ago surrendered their roles in a just and participatory society to the siren song of cable t.v. and phony fucks like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, shills who pander to the basest instincts of the falsehood of the American dream.

The devotion of so much airtime to the wanton character assassinations of those eulogizing Mrs. King and ‘desecrating her memory’ is a phony as any of those staged George W. Bush public relations extravaganzas. FOX and it’s cheap imitators wouldn’t have given ten seconds of air time if a KKK rally would have been held in front of the church or if peckerwood Republican racists had disrupted the funeral with chanted racial epithets. They all came out to decry the audacity of using the funeral of a political figure to deliver eulogies making political statements. The Rupert Murdoch propaganda shitrag New York Post, a modern version of the infamous Julius Streicher’s immensely popular Der Stürmer which was only slightly less biased, vicously attacked Carter and proclaimed that his speech which denounced the illegal wiretapping that Mrs. King and her husband Martin Luther King Jr. were subjected to as:

“disgraceful performance yesterday at Coretta Scott King’s funeral marks him as the most shameless president of the 20th century”

What Der Sturmer’s editorial board failed to mention was that the only reason that George W. Bush didn’t earn that distinction is that his twin reigns of error and terror didn’t officially begin until the 21st century. For the most shameless president of the 20th century as well as the most cynical and shameless exploitation of the funeral of a political figure you couldn’t find a better example than that of the beloved fascist icon Ronald Wilson Reagan whose carcass was literally hauled from coast to coast and then back again in a wall to wall, seven day long media masturbatory love fest. The same grandstanding, self-righteous asses who so soundly denounced Carter’s comments treated the festival of pagan idolatry that was the Reagan funeral with the utmost of reverence and broadcast their propaganda into the wasteland of the American mind 24/7 for a solid fucking week. I’m surprised that ‘Pinky’ didn’t clamber onto the casket like a spider trying to poke his big butt-shaped head beneath the lid for some actual oral necrophilia by performing fellatio on the rigor mortis affected penis of the great one which would be fully befitting and ironically appropriate conduct for a media whore with lips for hire. Fortunately ‘Pinky’ didn’t get a chance to do his organ solo, the funeral would have lasted for weeks to accommodate all of the other maestros looking to blow their personal version of taps on the royal bugle and the old bastard’s body would have been getting pretty ripe by the time that the line had finally died down.

The politicizing of Reagan’s funeral by the right wingers was as utterly shameless an event that I have ever seen and it was truly a great day when they finally planted the old bastard. It was All Reagan All The Time, Reagan 24/7, Wall To Wall Reagan for a solid seven days in the sumer of 2004 as America canonized its new saint and iconic father figure for the ages. Ronald Wilson Reagan’s corpse was toted around the country like a grotesque sequel to Weekend at Bernie’s where it was displayed for crowds largely stocked with party activists to further incite the masses into their outpouring of grief for the president who pioneered American made modern mass media propaganda brainwashing. The intensely coordinated focus on the entire circus down to the most minute of details spewed from televisions, radios, newspapers and magazines relentlessly. In a stunning example of coordinated media complicity in manufacturing history and imagery both Time and Newsweek used exactly the same photo of Reagan for their covers that week. It was the smiling man in the cowboy hat that reinforced the falsehood that marked his presidency and now is destined to be his legacy, facts be damned.

Reagan Idolatry:

Many Americans other than myself likely watched in numb shock and horror as this entire tableau played out throughout the week of stagecraft and testimonials, it was surrealistic and eerie to see this sort of state sponsored deification in a democratic society, this sort of pageantry belongs in a totalitarian state, it was like seeing Lenin’s body in Red Square. Now it is only a matter of time until the statues start going up, the insidiously partisan Reagan Legacy Project has been working on reinforcing his image for years and is led by the now ubiquitous Grover Norquist, a radical conservative activist with access to the highest levels of power and a pathological desire to eliminate all social progress of the twentieth century who is also an advocate of Social Darwinism. It is a bizarre sign of these dark times where the most honest news article of the week came from the infamously right wing Wall Street Journal by Jacob M. Schlesinger entitled Operation Serenade: Laying Groundwork for Reagan’s Funeral and revealed that the entire spectacle had actually been planned for years, just waiting to be kicked off as soon as ‘The Gipper’ drew his last breath. The operation was conceived in 1989 and accelerated once Reagan was diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s Disease that would turn him into a recluse, hermetically sealed away from the public who may have had their memory of their great champion and destroyer of Communism tarnished were they to have to watch him deteriorate as he became older and increasing more senile by the day. Schlesinger provided a glimpse behind the curtain into just how the Republican imagery machine works parallel to the real world, constantly seeking ways to reinforce their message in the simplest and most vivid terms possible so as to connect with Americans who are content to receive their morsels of news in out of context sound bytes and meticulously crafted images. The men responsible for Operation Serenade consulted with logistics and media experts to plan camera positioning, crowd placement, portable toilet accommodations and even 50,000 mini American flags to be passed out to those who would show up to pay their respects to Reagan. Gary Foster, a key Serenade operative lamented that when Richard Nixon died that “I can’t tell you the picture, there was nothing memorable about it”, this would not be suitable for those who wanted to see their agendas permanently enshrined and embedded into the nation’s psyche as the rightward gallop into the twenty first century gains the momentum that will soon turn it into an unstoppable force.

From the beginning Ronald Reagan was a phony, a bad B movie actor who found his place as a pitchman for the conservative movement. Reagan was a rat bastard and a fink who sold out his Hollywood peers to the anti Communist rage of the McCarthy witch hunts of the fifties and used his tenure as leader of the Screen Actors Guild as a springboard to launch his political career.

His presidency was the result of an America struggling against itself to come to terms with societal contradictions brought on as a result of the civil rights movement, the counterculture of the sixties, the Vietnam War and Watergate and none other than William F. Buckley puts it best when using the following description in a column regarding Saint Ronnie: “.. a bumpkin with oratorical gifts pandering to American self-esteem”. Reagan was a man who put forth a strong father image and was able to reduce complex issues to their simplest terms, the better for a populace slowly undergoing the chronic dumbing down perpetuated by the cable tv explosion.

Nearly every one of the serious problems that America faces today as we struggle futilely to avoid the dark descent into corporate and religious fascism had its roots during the Reagan era:

-The empowerment of a nascent fundamentalist Christian political movement obsessed with becoming a political force and inciting a counter revolution against social progress as well as changing cultural mores and rolling back civil rights advances made during the sixties. This movement has now reached critical mass and they have succeeded into transforming Christianity into a fascist cult obsessed with rapture, theocracy and Armageddon. Most Americans are blissfully unaware that this extremely dangerous fringe element is now entrenched at the highest levels of power and the man with the nuclear launch codes regularly invokes divine providence as his justification for his radical agenda.

-Reagan’s foreign policy fiascos are still causing blowback today, most notably in Iraq and soon to be Iran or whatever other country that some nightmarish neocon wet dream of hegemony seeks to use as the next steppingstone towards empire. The arming of Saddam took place under the Reagan administration, right under the nose of the senile father figure, by a rogues gallery of criminals the likes of George Herbert Walker Bush, Casper Weinberger, George Shultz, Ollie North, John Poindexter, John Negroponte and the rest of the blood soaked bastards who teamed up to subvert the very underpinnings of the constitution during those eight vile years.

-The CIA may or may not have participated in running drugs into the country as an extension of the illegal Iran-Contra scandal, that is still debatable and we will likely never know the truth given that all of the Gipper’s papers have been swept away by presidential order of the son of Reagan’s imminently shady vice president and sealed in the vaults of his presidential library safe from the prying eyes of any serious investigators, not that any even exist in this day of the neutered, sensationalist, corporate, state run media. Whatever complicity that the CIA had in domestic criminal activities and overseas black ops will never be known but I strongly suspect that those already exposed are only the very tip of the iceberg.

-Also during the Reagan years there was the beginning of a rampant spree of free market fanaticism and deregulation that have eviscerated the middle class and sowed the seeds of today’s Walmart based economy that has facilitated the transformation of the United States into the largest debtor nation in the world. Deregulatory frenzy, elimination of the media fairness doctrine and a litany of policies and programs advocating a neoliberal, social Darwinist view of the most extreme nature. I would strongly recommend Haynes Johnson’s great book Sleepwalking Through History as a testament to the structural damage given to the country during the Reagan presidency.

Given the nature of the Reagan adoration society’s magnum opus of propaganda and exploitation by the same media hacks who virulently decry the speeches at the King funeral as using a funeral for partisan purposes is it any wonder as to why we live in the dumbest and most dangerous country in the world today?