The Silent Pardner

In yet another occurrence of suspicious timing the slippery one himself, Osama Bin Laden pops up with an audio taped announcement to proclaim that the recent cutting off funds to the new Palestinian government was proof that there is a “Zionist crusader” war on Islam while calling for a militant force to go forth to Darfur to fight that dastardly U.N. that is so despised by the neo cons, the Left Behinders and now apparently Osama himself.

George W, the messianic man’s ultimate goal is, you guessed it, leading a modern day American backed Christian crusade against Islam.

One hand washes the other.

It all comes down to a game of my God can kick your God’s ass with zealots and their flocks.

As for Bin Laden’s accusations it sure doesn’t help the cause of the United States when the Secretary of State is accused of leaking information to agents of a foreign government who are Israeli lobbyists. Just what we need to stoke the fires of the great holy war, a government that reinforces the claims of Bin Laden by using cabinet level officials as conduits to the very Zionists that are the hated enemy to Arabs throughout the Middle East.

What happened to impartiality?

It sure seems like our foreign policy has sento been wandering through the desert of Tim LaHaye’s ‘Christian Worldview’ like Moses was sent into the desert by the Pharoah.

Doesn’t it occur to anyone who is sane that Bush and Bin Laden’s ultimate goals are so conducive towards the fulfillment of the other’s that they may as well be partners (that’s pardners in Texas talk hoss). Bin Laden aka Tim Osman has always been a convenient asset, whether it being leading Mujahedeen warriors with CIA backing against the Soviets in Afghanistan. allegedly (he has never been tried) masterminding the attack on America on 9/11 (the day that changed everything) and therefore giving the neo cons, the secret team and the theocrats the opportunity to hit the reset button on over two hundred years of U.S. history or conveniently popping up three days before the 2004 presidential elections in what was such a blatant campaign commercial that I am surprised that a huge Bush-Cheney banner wasn’t in the background.

And now on the very week of the national release of the Riefenstahl-esque propaganda opus United 93 here he is again! What did I say about relaunching 9/11 in the public consciousness? Expect to see a lot more of good ole Tim Osman as well as a gradual increase in the fear mongering that has played so well in the past with the American sheeple, this time over Iran’s WMD’s and the new ‘New Hitler’ whose smoking gun could be in the form of a mushroom cloud coming to a city near you. According to the new WH Chief of Staff Josh Bolten’s 5 Point Plan for the rescue of the Bush dictatorship:

4) Reclaim security by playing tough with Iran (On Iran, “Democrats will lose”).

That’s a given that the DLC will lose….again. Their regurgitated Rove channeled through Lakoff Culture of Corruption promotional blitz and cowardice in challenging the dangerous failed policies of hegemony in the guise of ‘preemptive war’ will leave the party of Hillary and Joe once again holding a flaming bag of dogshit come Wednesday morning November 8th as they will once again be outflanked on the right by the experts and their Washington elitist pollsters intent on hair splitting and sucking up to corporate looters will badly backfire.

The only other one of Bolten’s points worth addressing here is this one:

5) Court the press (offer Tony Snow of Fox News the job of White House press secretary)

This would be ideal for the White House. Snow will undoubtably be a far more efficient shill and prevaricator than the dough faced Scott McClellan and FOX-ify the message to the spineless dolts (with the exception of Helen Thomas) in the press corps. My first question to Snow if this comes to pass and it appears that it will would be:

“Gee Tony, does your recent colon surgery make you an asshole without an asshole?”

Iran Propaganda Watch: In a blatant move to deflect anger over rising gas prices Friday’s media agenda was to feature prominently the comments of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that rising oil prices were “very good”

“The increase of the oil price and growth of oil income is very good and we hope that the oil prices reach their real levels”

This was like a war cry sent echoing throughout Peckerwood Nation and unfortunately the ignorant red state bastards grinding their teeth in xenophobic rage while gassing up their confederate flag adorned vee-hickles are incapable of realizing that Bush’s oil company cronies aren’t exactly crying themselves to sleep over the recent price spike.

Lee Raymond, Exxon-Mobil’s $ 400 million dollar baby (that’s just the retirement package) certainly wasn’t.

Bin Laden is certainly not shedding tears in his cave over skyrocketing oil prices, this is the man after all who once said that oil should be at least $100 per barrel.

And despite his empty rhetoric about an investigation into rising gas prices which would be about as credible as an internal audit by the Corleone family into alleged improprieties in their olive oil importing business. Bush is certainly not weeping into his own pillow that he carries with him wherever he goes, especially not when Bolten’s list also includes more sucking up to Wall Street.

The backers of Bush and Cheney as wall as the Islamic militants certainly seem to a lot of common interests.

Bush is using your taxpayer money to subsidize the petrodollar piggies too, last year’s GOP energy plan throws somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 billion dollars in subsidies to to the oil and gas companies….I wonder how much Bin Laden’s cut is?

And Finally: With all of the play over the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and Bin Laden the big story that slipped by was over a new set of Pentagon plans to be able to launch increased clandestine activities in the GWOT, upping the ante while leaving the definition of ‘the enemy’ as clear as mud. Rummy continues to consolidate his power.

This plan details “what terrorists or bad guys we would hit if the gloves came off. The gloves are not off,” said one official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Of course in the misdirection strategy that the neo cons have employed so successfully for years the new Bin Laden story was a convenient cover for the Wa Po piece on the besieged Rummy’s counter offensive. Herr Rumsfeld has rebounded rather nicely given that it was only a week ago that former generals, politicos and even some in the media were calling for his head on a platter over the Iraq debacle and the looming attacks on Iran.

Then the king publicly propped him up while making cosmetic changes elsewhere including throwing Scotty McClellan, the world’s most unconvincing liar over the side and the loyal sycophants came to Rummy’s aid.

The neo con plants in the press also closed ranks including die hard raving and drooling shill Charles Krauthammer who invoked the movie Seven Days in May in doing all but declaring Rummy’s critics as traitors who were aligned with the same anti war liberal leftists that have been so successfully demonized by the fascist slime machine since the inconvenient fact that the country’s ass was kicked in Viet Nam, another illegal war waged mainly for the benefit of the profits of the military industrial complex and sold to a credulous public on the premise of attacking the windmills of another phantom enemy.

Will This Nightmare Ever End?

Cain Was Right

CAIN WAS RIGHT
by Brett Smits

“Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Able your brother?’
And he said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’”
— Genesis 4:9

The Town Car hummed down the highway in the April night like a shimmering white ghost as Robert Barnes leaned back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. He supposed that a vehicle upgrade would be in order at some point, maybe an Audi. Unfortunately, a foreign car wouldn’t fly with the constituents so he would probably have to go American. How about a Buick? Buick’s were nice, safe and even Tiger Woods drove one. Barnes didn’t really like the Town Car, but he liked the image it projected.

Wealth, status, power, authority – all were important to the Boomers and their remaining parents. Those people had grown up in an era when the roadmap to success traveled through a variety of General Motors vehicles, when being able to afford a Cadillac was the ultimate symbol of showing you’d made it to the top. Those people were very important to both Barnes and the Party for the most elementary reason that they voted in droves. So much as he would like to push an Audi past 120 sometime, he knew that his interests were better served by a Buick.

Jesse hung up his cell phone and looked over at Barnes, careful to keep one hand on the wheel.

“That was Fred Downing. The article in Rising Tide is finished and he’s going to e-mail a copy for our review.”

Barnes smiled and nodded at the man across the seat from him. Jesse Treadway was his assistant, sharp and efficient and a damn fine staffer even if he did look disturbingly like Miles from the old TV show Murphy Brown. A glowing profile in the Party’s official magazine was just the thing to mark Barnes as one of the hot young stars and help fuel his jump from junior state senator to the U. S. House and beyond.

“There is one problem,” said Jesse.

“What now?”

“It’s your brother, Billy.”

***

The night air was cool and the wind swept down from the Rockies onto the prairie. It was a good feeling after being cooped up inside all day in hermetically-sealed, climate-controlled buildings. The country has its own beauty and Barnes missed being able to see the stars the way they shone out here.

He punched the number by memory into his cell phone and hit send as he leaned against the balcony railing. Home, even if he had left there at eighteen and never looked back. It would always be home and deep down, he knew that nothing would ever change that fact.

One ring. Two.

“Hello?”

“Billy.”

“Bobby!” The voice betrayed little, if any, surprise. “What’s the occasion? I haven’t heard from you since mom died. Shouldn’t you be up at the Capitol trying to ban gay marriage or something?”

Barnes flinched at the memory, happy that his brother couldn’t see the reaction. As if you don’t know why I’m calling, fat ass, he thought. He took a calming breath and reminded himself of the issue at hand.

“C’mon, Billy. I’m just doing my job and giving my constituents what they want. After all, they read the Bible, and like the good Book says, it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

“Surely you aren’t calling me to discuss the views of your mentally retarded Red America supporters? I think you know where I stand on that.”

“I think you know why I’m calling you,” said Robert. “It’s one thing for my brother to be a nut, because every family has a black sheep. But when you start messing with my livelihood, I have to get involved. I want to talk to you and I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon.”

“What a coincidence,” replied Billy. “So will I. Why don’t you show up around fiveish and I’ll have you for dinner?”

“I wouldn’t presume to impose on you.”

“Nonsense. I must insist. I have a wonderful surprise for you.”

“Billy, I’m not interested in looking at your pornography or meeting your life partner.”

“Oh, I wish I had one just to see you squirm, but it’s nothing like that. I’ve been doing some renovations on the old place and I think you’ll like them.”

“Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow at five,” said Robert and he hung up the phone. You could choose your friends, but not your family and although that wasn’t in the Bible, it should be. Billy had always been a pain in the ass of a younger brother and this latest idiocy was no exception. He would have to get Jesse to move some things around so he could fit the visit into his schedule.

Barnes grumbled and walked back inside his hotel room and over to his valise. He rotated the dials to the correct combination, popped the locks and opened the lid. The striated grip of a 9mm pistol protruded from the flap.

“I’ve got a surprise for you too, Billy.”

***

Five miles away from town down RR15, William Barnes hung up the phone. It was a wall mounted yellow rotary model, circa 1975. GE, not Nokia, was the manufacturer and the retro look fit in well with the rest of the room.

Renovations? Now that was a laugh because Billy was a bachelor in his mid-thirties and tended to wear things like overalls and a long bushy beard. The farm hadn’t changed since he inherited it from his parents ten years ago and probably never would. Designer suits and fancy cars were Robert’s thing, not his.

Which was funny, because during his rise from County Assessor to the state Senate, Robert had aligned himself as champion of the little man – those same people wearing the overalls and driving the ’85 Ford. As usual, perception and reality seemed to be mutually exclusive things. The locals voted for that Man of the People Robert Barnes and sneered openly at Democrats, liberals and other elitists. Of course the fact that Senator Barnes was much more the friend of large corporations rather than the farmer never seemed to trickle down to his constituents.

Billy walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward his office. Past the faded yellowing wallpaper and the few family pictures left hanging on the wall. He knew he should fix that sort of thing, but it just didn’t matter to him. Maybe if he ever got married, but that was unlikely because his job was his life and when he walked into the office it was obvious that said job was not farming.

In contrast to the rest of the farm, the office was sparkling clean. There was an L-shaped desk along the wall with a 21” flat panel monitor sitting on a Dell Desktop computer. Over to the right, a laptop was hooked into a network printer and a Linksys router. A Motorola cable modem sat nearby, its activity lights blinking green and amber.

For all the nauseating paeans to the bounty of the Internet that the public had been force-fed over the years, connectivity did have its benefits. It let all sorts of people who would have been normally compartmentalized in their tiny corners of Middle America go national. After all, it enabled Billy to become one of the most vicious left-wing bloggers online.

GWFCUKSTIK.blog.com (with the deliberate misspelling to get past the domain name police) was generating a rabid following with thousands of hits per day. He pulled no punches in his satire on the President and the ruling party, skewering them for their crimes, pretension, and hypocrisy. When there wasn’t anything newsworthy, he would make things up just to stir the pot, descending into the mud to wrestle the giants of the Right much like Jacob and the angel.

Not the sort of thing to endear him to his decidedly conservative neighbors, nor of course to his brother. Robert, God help him, would rise high in the hierarchy and go national, maybe even all the way to the top. However, having a family member who attacked your bosses on a daily basis might impose a glass ceiling on such ambitions. Thus, Robert’s reappearance and sudden desire to talk, as if they were estranged lovers going on “Oprah.”

There would be accusations and threats, probably a summary demand to cease all such actions. But Robert wouldn’t get his way and then things would really get ugly. Such a confrontation was inevitable and Billy had been planning for it for a long time. He laid his hand on a small, leather-bound volume next to the laptop and smiled.

***

“I don’t like this, boss,” said Jesse as he stared at the farm through the windshield of the Town Car. The place seemed to slumber in the spring afternoon, the sun reflecting opaquely off of the windows and closed front door. The car was parked alongside the drive leading to the place, a narrow gravel track a good hundred yards back from the road. It was ten minutes until five.

Barnes didn’t give a damn what Jesse thought. For all his uses as an assistant, the kid definitely wasn’t the Delta Force when it came to things like this. If you needed someone to leak a few quotes to the press or do research on the finances of your opponents, Jesse was your man. When it came to storming into the breach, however, some things were best done oneself.

“Trust me,” said Barnes. “I know my brother and he’s never been one to listen to reason. He got poisoned by all that liberal bullshit as a teenager and he’s never been the same.”

“And if he doesn’t listen to reason?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Give him a hug?”

Jesse turned pale and Barnes pressed on. “Look, we aren’t playing a fucking board game here, we’re playing for high stakes. I intend to go a long way in the Party and I will not have my career hit a wall because of my shithead brother and his lies. Hard men are the ones who get ahead in the Party and I will be hard enough to do what needs to be done. I’m going to go all the way and I plan on bringing my friends with me. Are you tough enough to come along?”

Jesse swallowed, then nodded.

“Good. Give me ten minutes and then come through the front door with the affidavit. Make sure you keep your gloves on. We’ve got people that will take care of us afterwards, but let’s not make it any harder on them.”

Barnes got out of the car, feeling the gun in the pocket of his suit jacket with a gloved hand as he walked toward the farm.

***

Billy Barnes sat at the kitchen table, nursing a bottle of Bud and mopping the sweat from his brow with a sleeve. The plan which had seemed so crazy was on the verge of fruition, needing only Bobby to walk in the door for it to succeed. The book lying on the table was the key.

The book, sitting there in its ancient leather-bound cover was a grimore, a tome on demons. The plan was spawned of a drunken night surfing the Internet and was such a wild idea that Billy had instantly rejected it as foolishness. But why not, when you thought the thing through? He wasn’t going to get a gun and shoot his brother or find a hitman to do the job for him. Why not let one dark force devour another?

Unfortunately, there was surprisingly little good information bouncing around online and only by probing the darkest corners of satanic chat rooms and websites did he find the name of a book that might help. Armed with the title, it had been ridiculously easy to order the thing from the used book dealer page of Barnes and Noble’s website. One-stop shopping for all your demon summoning needs.

Once he possessed the grimore, things had progressed in fits and spurts but he finally reached a level of proficiency. Then it was simply a matter of baiting the trap with a blog posting he knew would force Robert to respond. Something nasty enough to threaten his precious standing and draw him here so the show could begin.

A knock sounded from the front room and Billy rose and walked over to the cellar door and pulled it slightly ajar. He could feel the power and the rage of the thing waiting in the pentagram down there and felt a brief pang of fear in the pit of his stomach. This whole thing felt wrong, but he had come too far to put on the brakes and he turned and walked to meet his brother.

***

Robert Barnes swept imperiously through the door, impeccably dressed as always in his charcoal pinstriped suit and conservative tie. He briefly surveyed the living room and kitchen, viewing them for the first time in twenty years. If the event kindled any type of nostalgia or emotion, it didn’t show on his face. Perhaps a faint twist of the lips indicating contempt, but nothing more.

“What’s the matter, Bobby? Not happy to be back home?”

Robert crossed the room and stood with his arms folded. “This isn’t my home.”

No shit, thought Billy clutching the grimore as he said, “Want a beer?”

“What I want from you is an explanation for this!” answered Robert. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and threw it to Billy.

“No, I take that back. I don’t care why you did it. What I want from you is a retraction that you are going to sign and put on your goddamned Blog saying that you were wrong. Or you lied. Anything, but you’re going to take it back.”

Billy unwadded the paper and suppressed a grin. There, under the banner GWFCUKSTICK was the headline “STATE SENATOR DINES WITH GAY LOVER.” Then there was a picture of said senator, Robert Barnes, with another man, both sitting at a table in their sober business suits having drinks. Other than the headline, there was nothing in the picture to suggest anything untoward happening. A lot of people would shrug and say “So what?”

But those people weren’t the core of the good Senator’s constituency. They weren’t the ones who were going to send him to Washington D. C., or write the checks that would make him a national player. It would all come down if this accusation stuck, because you could lie, cheat, steal, even kill, but you couldn’t have that pink star sewn on your shirt. Not unless you wanted to fade quickly back into obscurity and sell insurance for the rest of your life.

Robert Barnes didn’t even remember meeting the man at the fundraiser. He was always meeting someone and how was he to know that the damn guy was that rarest of birds, the openly gay Republican businessman? Was he set up? It didn’t matter because what was done was done and you couldn’t undo the past. But you could fix the present.

“I can’t retract the truth, Bobby. That picture isn’t doctored.”

“No, but the headline is, you idiot! It’s a lie and you know it. So I’m going to call my assistant and he’ll bring in the retraction for you to sign. Then we can go back to not seeing each other and making sure this sort of thing never happens again.”

Billy shook his head. “Not going to do it.”

“I think you will,” said Robert softly, infuriatingly.

“You don’t rule the world, Bobby! You can dazzle the morons and do your guest appearances on Fox News while you wreck this country, but not everyone believes your bullshit. You can buy the elections, you can buy the news, but there are thousands of people like me who will bring you down!”

“Buy? Buy?” asked Robert incredulously. “You asshole, you can’t buy what isn’t for sale! A lot of people seem to agree with me and vote for me and send me letters and e-mails supporting what I stand for. Who are you to tell them they’re wrong?”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the pistol. “Time is up. You either sign it now or your dead hand will.”

Billy merely smiled and spoke a word, a nonsense word Robert couldn’t believe that he heard correctly. Then there was a noise like something big was coming up the stairs and the cellar door began to swing open.

***
Jesse Treadway could hear the argument building to a crescendo as he stepped up to the front door. He hesitated on the porch, his hand on the knob, not wanting to be a part of whatever was about to occur. This wasn’t the way they said it worked when you debated the system in the YR meetings back in college. No, those were more about volunteering and making yourself useful to the local organizations and candidates, positioning yourself for a job. This was something disturbing and different and only the twin fears of failure and Robert Barnes drove him to turn the knob and step into the final seconds of his life.

***

The thing emerged from the cellar just as Jesse stepped into the kitchen. It was slumped, misshapen with no neck and an ebony body that seemed to drain the light from the room. The eyes glowed a baleful red and its mouth opened to reveal twin rows of razor sharp teeth set in jaws a good foot-and-a-half across.

Robert Barnes’s face was set in a look of shock that was priceless and the gun dropped from his numb fingers, thudding to the linoleum. Time hung suspended for a moment as if weighing a balance to see which would be the first victim. Then fate intervened as Jesse Treadway shrieked and turned to run.

“Kill them both,” commanded Billy feeling his stomach do a roll as he did so. Guilt? He would worry about that later because his main concern was going to be getting the demon back under his control. The grimore said that once those things started killing, they were hard to stop.

Terror lent Jesse speed but a taloned hand seized his throat before he made it halfway down the hall. He was yanked backwards and his legs pinwheeled in mid-air and his glasses clattered off the wall. He grabbed the black hand, desperately trying to loosen the vice-like grip that was crushing his windpipe. The effort was wasted as the demon shoved his head into its mouth and ripped it off. A jet of blood shot up and splattered the ceiling and wallpaper. One gulp and the demon dropped the still jerking body to the floor and began to close in on Robert Barnes.

“Goddamn you, Billy,” he whispered.

Billy laughed. “Taking the name of the Lord in vain will just get you in trouble with your Christian Coalition buddies. Why don’t you get God to save you? Surely a righteous man who has been to so many prayer breakfast photo-ops merits saving?”

The demon moved closer and Robert held up his hands as if to ward off the coming blow. Billy smiled, feeling the flush of victory. There was no telling how far this could go. Today Robert Barnes, tomorrow Karl Rove.

Then Robert said something and the demon stopped and… bowed? It was Bobby Barnes turn to smile as the thing turned toward Billy. This wasn’t part of the plan.

Billy screamed the command and mangled the pronunciation in his panic. “Fuck!” He fumbled then dropped the grimore. It seemed to fall in slow motion and by the time he looked up death was reaching for him.

“How- how did you…” he stammered.

Robert grinned. “You know I like to play both sides, Billy. A lot of us do, because you never know who is going to win and it helps to back the right horse.”

He looked at the demon. “Do it slowly.”

The screams began.

***

Robert Barnes closed the door of the farmhouse with a gloved hand, feeling for the gun in his pocket with the other. He had already made a phone call and this would all be taken care of, but he was too cautious to leave such evidence around. It was a shame that his brother killed himself in a fit of remorse after signing the retraction. Even more the pity was the disappearance of young Jesse Treadway. That was inconvenient as well, since Barnes would have to wait an appropriate time before hiring a replacement.

He got in the car and drove off without looking back. There were bigger and better things on the horizon and he had no time for home anymore.

We here at Station Charon are always on the lookout for new and unique talent and would like to proudly announce that Brett Smits will be joining the team as an occasional fiction contributor. In these bizarre pre-Apocalypse days when truth has become stranger than fiction it is refreshing to find somebody whose fiction is still pretty damned strange.

By Brett Smits

Spinning Righteous Indignation

“The media is more powerful than our government institutions, but we are squandering that power”

– Carl Bernstein

The Washington Post of course bears a share of the blame for the loss of media credibility that has led millions to the blogosphere but you would never know it from a recent story on the unfairly labeled Angry Left. In a page A01 article by David Finkel that ran over the weekend the Post featured a profile on left wing blogger Maryscott O’Connor and her website My Left Wing. It began like this:

In the angry life of Maryscott O’Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O’Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Followed a paragraph later by:

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers “malevolent,” a “sociopath” and “the Antichrist”? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as “Satan,” or about Karl Rove, “the devil”? Should it be about the “evil” Republican Party, or the “weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving” Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says “I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned”?

Now that’s one hell of a way to start a story that goes on to document O’Connor and other bloggers’ anger at the Bush junta and is sprinkled thoughout with snarky comments on both the featured subject as well as other bloggers taking to cyberspace in order to vent about the gross injustices and criminal actions of this rogue government. Finkel does his damnedest to portray O’Connor as some kind of chain smoking, former alcoholic with serious anger control issues and while at times well written the article itself is about as fair and balanced as FOX. There is precious little mention given to the extreme hatred of the right wing that rational Americans have been subjected to other than a passing reference about the left fighting back after years of absorbing the inflammatory rhethoric of Republicans and other conservative groups. I would suggest that Mr. Finkel do a follow up in the interest of being ‘fair and balanced’ and featuring quotes from any of the right wing blogs that serve as collection tanks for the flotsam and jetsam of American society that is white alpha male anger, Finkel needs to interview some conscripts in the Ditto Head Army like this one that I found on some site called Little Green Fuckballs or something along those lines.

The Washington Post looks at the sick, raging, impotent world of the moonbat blogosphere, with a profile of a woman totally obsessed with hatred. It’s amazing how closely this matches my mental image of these lunatics.

Well the mental image that I match up with one of these loser devotees to the Cult of Coulter is one of some ugly, single, underemployed, thirtysomething social miscreant sitting alone hunched over a computer in mommy and daddy’s dark basement typing anti-liberal diatribes out with one hand while paying homage to Mistress Ann with the other. The right wing blogosphere virtually drips with the poison of venomous attacks on gays, foreigners, liberals, blacks, Jews, illegal immigrants and is equally filled with more myopic and demented testimonials to their great and mighty stong daddy, protector, fuehrer and ‘war president’ you can shake a swastika at, the Good Germans of our society are also on the blogosphere and they are as pathologically angry as they are mentally deranged. Finkel does his story much discredit by his failure to offer the other side of the story that the media is always fixated on whenever it comes to criticism of the right or the policies of the robber barons, war mongers and global bandits that have become too commonplace in the early years of the New American Century.

It should come as no surprise in considering the Washington Post’s ongoing slide into the realm of the charlatans of the media entertainment complex that it would resort to broad brushing of left wing bloggers as Bush Bashers, the standard drivel of the right when dismissing criticism of the great and mighty leader. Is there any more ridiculous two-word term in today’s abbreviated cultural language than Bush Bashing which is regularly used by corporatist media hacks as a rationale for criticizing the insane miscreant who by all indications is dead set on not only finishing off the anal rape of the middle class undertaken by the sainted Ronald Reagan but also in his knee jerk stomp down on the accelerator, putting the pedal to the metal on the runaway Rapture Bus that is careening towards the end of the cliff, much to the horror of any rational persons left in this insane celebrity worshipping lunatic asylum of a country and unfortunately, we are all in the back seat and helpless to change the disastrous course.

Yet speaking out against injustice is Bush Bashing, I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, the same status has never been afforded to the ongoing vilification of Bill Clinton that is currently running on nearly fourteen fucking years! Every goddamned time that I go grocery shopping I am subjected to numerous tabloid headlines ranting about Clinton’s sexual exploits, alleged marital problems and alien love children. My God, do the editors of The Washington Post actually utilize the services of their in-house shrink Charles Krauthammer, the neo con shill who is crazier than a shithouse rat? Personally, I would rather undergo psychotherapy conducted by the notorious Dr. Sidney Gottlieb whose legendary MKULTRA LSD/mind control experiments for the CIA still send a cold chill up the spine.

Don’t bother answering that question, any so called newspaper that proudly wraps itself in the aura of greatness that belongs to massively disappointing sellout and Bush hagiographer Bob Woodward has the integrity of any other third rate shit sheet in what passes for news in post 9/11 America where the reset button has been hit on over two centuries of democracy and freedom of the press because of a massive fuck up by a shit ball junta of former oilmen and military industrial complex lackeys that just happened despite the presence of a trillion dollar intelligence infrastructure.

Good God, it is as if ANGER has had absolutely nothing at all to do with the rise of the fascist right in America today. These people are the most ignorant, bigoted, pissed off, resentful, anal-retentive whining cry babies of the ‘culture of victimization’ that they ride like Bhoddi in the movie Point Break chasing after that one killer wave that will give him the ultimate consummation of his criminal karma. The Republicans as a whole, much like the Ex Presidents surfer gangsters of that seminal post-Reagan era action flick are absolutely convinced that the ends justify the means. Cruelty and Social Darwinism are the karma of the insidious right wing cancer that is eating away at the very foundations of American society like Pat Robertson’s termites.

Being accused of being angry, shrill, rude, hostile or crude should be worn as a badge of honor when the labeling comes from the mainstream media. It is the death knell of a prehistoric beast caught up in a tar pit of tabloid trash, VNR’s, distortion of the news in the name of presenting both sides to one story, administration cheerleading, obsessive focus on the corporate bottom line and therefore a loss of the public trust.

No wonder The Post is pissed off.

The rise of the blogosphere as a legitimate forum and place to find the uncensored news serves as a counter to a diseased media culture pimping infotainment out and calling it news. Katie Couric as CBS anchorwoman? Give me a fucking break! My nausea over CBS announcement that America’s Sweetheart would be occupying the same position that was previously held by giants the likes of Edward Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather was aggraved even more because it came on the very day after I finally saw George Clooney’s excellent film on journalists and courage during the insipid McCarthy era Good Night and Good Luck, I had to work to suppress the urge to actually vomit into my sugar frosted flakes when reading of the Couric coronation in my morning paper. CBS under the incompetent piece of shit Les Moonves has not not only reached bottom but has set up camp and is bringing in all of the necessary equipment in order to start drilling in search of new depths.

And get ready for the reemergence of the Natalee Holloway storyline, nothing obscures the real news like missing white teenage females, there is real crossover appeal from the usual trailer trash and retirees to the perpetually bored television junkies of middle America who have an insatiable appetite for such swill. The Duke rape story is also getting a shitload of play today off of the allure of it’s featuring of brutality and prurient sexual behavior, I mean who in the flying fuck even cares about lacrosse other than the slimy little rich pricks and daddy’s boys named Chad and Wendell whose tickets in the game of life are punched at birth much like George W. Bush’s was. I can at least understand the feeding frenzy over NBA star Kobe Bryant’s lurid rape trial, he at least was a celebrity. The focus on the Duke pukes is merely more news cycle filling sewage to eat up available air time that could be better spent on issues that matter. The two pronged assault of Duke and Holloway will also distract from the potentially catastrophic stare-down between two lunatic zealots in Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, holy warriors who both need to be teleported back to the days of the Crusades where they belong as well as the generals revolt against Herr Rumsfeld who is now encircled and only protected by sycophantic career ass kissers like Peter Pace, Richard Myers and Tommy Franks.

Anyhow, I Digress:

Blogging is a form of empowerment to those not content to be good Germans and goosestep in formation like lemmings off of the end of the cliff to the commands of an insane and inflexible leader figure and his corrupt one party dictatorship. Their view has been marginalized and their voices eliminated from the mainstream discourse, there are after all at least 56 million Americans who actually voted against George W. Bush and that was before his ratings were in the toilet, before Hurricane Katrina exposed his administration as a circus laden with incompetent clowns and cronies and before civil war broke out in Iraq. Bush also won by his and Shooter Cheney’s massive invoking of fear and 9/11 during every stump speech and was assisted by a dirty sliming of John Kerry by the insipid Karl Rove smear campaign ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ and the inability of the Democrats and their candy-assed Washington pollsters and consultants to launch a successful counterattack. There was also the Dan Rather setup over the forged National Guard papers showing that our cokehead in chief had a less than illustrious and honorable tenure in the pseudo military while his peers like Kerry were taking enemy fire in Viet Nam that deserves an assist.

Of course the feckless Democrats did their chances no good by failing to recognize the lessons of past defeats borne on the crimson tide of southern resentment toward perceived elitists from the North East that has stuck in their collective craw since the days of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Mix in a massive mobilization from the many political tentacles of the GOP masquerading as churches and subsidized by the taxpayers to function as party operatives, extreme voter irregularities in the state of Ohio, massive disenfranchisement of traditionally Democratic black voters, the failure of the media to air any negative news about Bush Inc. that could potentially influence voters and the presence of so many untested and notoriously ‘mistake’ prone electronic voting machines manufactured by companies with deep Republican ties and the 2004 debacle was a done deal. Of course an early Wednesday morning surrender by Kerry despite his campaign vow to ensure that all of the votes would be counted this time made any potential irregularities irrelevant. Kerry turned out to be every bit as lame as Gore in the end but equally adept at waving the white flag of surrender like the Frenchie that he was so often accused by the fanatical, knuckle draggers on the right insisted that he was.

Then again maybe the deal was already done and sealed with a Skull and Bones handshake who in the hell really knows what goes on anymore or who to trust in these hideous days. At any rate when all was said and done there were at least fifty six fucking million anti-Bush votes and there is a lack of proportion given to these views in the corporate media and therefore the blogosphere is a logical result of taxpaying American citizens seeking another forum for their views.

While Maryscott O’Connor’s response to the Finkel piece that was posted on the always excellent Daily Kos was gracious and very well written in addressing some of the writer’s descriptions as well as the massive email response that the article generated it was still a very troubling story on many levels. First and foremost being is its adherence to the standard MSM laziness template to always find a descriptive two-word, oversimplified and trite ‘bumper sticker’ phrase for ADD/TV afflicted Americans this is deceptive and dishonest. Finkel and the MSM choose to conveniently pigeonhole millions of morally outraged citizens as simply ‘The Angry Left’ as if there is no true reason for the righteous indignation at the outright arrogance, thievery and grossly immoral repugnance of the Bush junta and the despicable, corrupt thugs that are the Republican party goon squad who have hijacked America. Maryscott O’Connor may be fine with most of what Finkel writes but personally I feel that it smacks of the same underhanded, yellow journalism that has been the norm for the past twenty five years as the extremist free market buccaneers and theocratic fascists have risen to prominence on the back of a well funded movement to subvert genuine reporting in favor of a dumbed down mix of infotainment, perversion, celebrity and corporate funded video news releases and public relations puff pieces foisted off on an overworked and uninformed public as journalism which incidentally is a dying art in the post 9/11 wasteland that used to be America.

Finkel’s piece also seems to express surprise that anyone would have the unmitigated audacity to even casually suggest that George W. Bush and his neo con mafia should be according to an Eschaton blogger named Dave’s posting:

“I just want to see these [expletive] swinging from their heels in the public square”

Finkel infers that such language is mean and cruel which while technically true fails to note that these days are the golden era for meanness and cruelty in the good ole US of A. Hell, in the ugly post 9/11 era of fear,loathing,sadism and paranoia where the Bush administration itself are the world’s chief advocates for sexually perverse torture up to and including endorsing that a child who has his testicles crushed by a pair of pliers is perfectly acceptable conduct in the new ‘reality’ of the mythical War on Terror.

Actually comments such as Dave’s are a sign of the times and are pretty goddamned tame compared to some of the things that I have personally written about the fascist cocksuckers in the White House and Pentagon on my own blog Station Charon over the last nine months or so. Shit, I might add that having to be seen swinging by their heels ala Mussolini in the public square is far too good for these rotten fucking rat bastards.

A more appropriate punishment would be an ugly public scourging accompanied by a good old fashioned horse whipping, a bit of synchronized sodomizing with chemical flashlights, being forced to lick the balls of extremely agressive guard dogs and then being smeared with menstrual blood and driven naked through the public square for a trial held while the bastards are placed in stocks and then upon conviction for treason being whisked away for an extraordinary rendition from which they may or may not return to be locked away in orange jumpsuits in tiny cages for a nice long tropical vacation at Club Gitmo with no reading material except for damp, dog-eared copies of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series and Michael Moore’s ‘Dude Who Stole My Country’.

Finkel hasn’t the slightest fucking idea of what angry truly is.

It is no mystery that the institutional failure of the MSM is causing a reaction of mass hysteria and a circling of the wagons against the marauding savages of the Angry Left in the blogosphere. The Post needs to do something, anything to stop the bleeding even if it means attacking and denouncing bloggers for the sheer hell of it. Maryscott O’Connor and her fellow Angry Left bloggers are merely fighting the good fight and are patriots as opposed to the predominant right wing nationalists who currently control the political system and the media and in a very ironic way they are succeeding by filling a need that the mainstream media can no longer be counted on for. It’s the personification of the dogmatic worship of markets that the Wall Street greedmongers have preached from on high while pillaging our country. The Post’s reaction can be expected especially when examining the wisdom of Gandhi himself who once said:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

If the Washington Post’s recent job cutting announcement and public relations fiasco over their Golden Boy Bob Woodward’s participation in ratting out an undercover CIA agent are any indication then O’Connor and the Angry Left bloggers are indeed on their way to winning, their overhead is lower and their credibility isn’t for sale unlike the whores in the mainstream press.

By Ed Encho

Easter Basket

HAPPY EASTER!

Much to the delight of the right wing spin machine and their phony War on Easter propaganda campaign the day has come at last and the godless secular liberals have once again failed to take the Christ out of Easter even if he has been replaced by the capitalist Easter Bunny in much the same way that Santa Claus elbowed him aside for Christmas. My local Target store was flooded with families yesterday buying baskets, stuffed bunnies, jelly beans and peeps and will today gather together to eat ham and turkey dinners and celebrate the coming of the Easter Bunny, some will even celebrate the bloody execution of Christ and the Armageddon Clock will move just a tick or two closer to the big day when he returns to rip the guts out of the non-believers according to famed Rapture pimps Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The prayers around the dinner tables and within the houses of worship of many will center around the eager anticipation of when God’s Earthly instrument George W. Bush will give the order to launch the attack and send the bombers on their holy mission to drop their payloads on Iran. And praise be that the preacher in chief will not participate in tomorrow’s Egg Roll at the White House which will be attended by GASP….gay folks.

Peckerwood Pandering: Get ready for an onslaught of divisive nationalist bigotry, the yahoos are approaching keening season and the charlatans and theocrats in the GOP are all too willing to play along with the America hating religious zealots. The standard gay bashing and anti flag burning amendments are being prepared for congressional debate as soon as the worthless bastards return from their latest fucking extended vacation. The American Ayatollahs are once again tightening down the thumb screws over the perceived slight that is a lack of attention being paid to their regressive agenda and launching veiled threats to their Republican lackeys in Washington who are all too willing to start a holy war if that what it takes for them to retain their seats in congress and therby renew their license to steal.

Of course it was none other than the taffy faced flip flopper Bill Frist who was among the first to chime in:

“When America’s values are under attack, we need to act”

The defender of ‘values’ speaks with a forked tongue as he always does when preaching to the madhouse choir whose morality is strangely selective and doesn’t extend to tolerance or compassion for the poor, both of which were espoused by Jesus Christ himself before the fundies hijacked the religion to advocate a jihadist agenda of persecution, war, Social Darwinism and the ousting of science from American Society. The eleventh commandment as far as Frist and the moral reprobates in the GOP are concerned is : thy religious bigotry shalt be appeased by the theocratic party so help us God. Then there is the flip side of the coin for the standard racists and ant brained nationalists that make up a good part of the party base, they are just a bit too liberal for the American Nazi Party but are welcomed with open arms to the GOP big tent. There will be much demagoguery to round up the Mexicans and criminalize flag burning (you can definitely count on Queen Hillary’s support on this one Bill) to get the KKK contingent revved up for November.

The obsession with the flag burning thing has always mystified me for the all too obvious contradiction that by living in a supposedly free country I should be able to do any goddamned thing that I want to the flag, incidentally most of these are now made in China but that’s a topic for another time. The other elephant in the room is just what exactly constitutes desecration of ‘olde glory’ to begin with. Hell, there are flag napkins, flag dog sweaters, flag undies, flags waving over damned near every used car lot in the land as enticements to patronize their patriotic businesses to buy your Japanese made cars, flag merchandise out the wazoo including even flag adorned condoms that could be used for anal sex. Of course logic and consistency have never been Republican strong points, that’s why FOX is so popular.

The renewed GOP push for desecrating the constitution was of course applauded by influential whacko Christo fascist leaders like Gary Bauer and Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council who stated:

“It seems like for only six months, every two years — right around election time — that we’re even noticed”

“Some of these better pass…You notice when it’s just lip service being paid.”

It would be too much to expect for a true patriotic American in government to reply to the hate mongers and theocrats that the only lip service that they are deserving of is for once being told to kiss my ass and if you want to live in a theocracy move to Iran.

Same Old Smears: Nanny, nanny, nanny goat! Facing what could be a catastrophic loss of control over Denny’s House of Pigs in T-minus 7 months and change the right wing slime machine was bound to come after one of the few honorable members of that shit stained chamber in John Conyers of Michigan. The charge? Having once had members of his staff baby sit his children. Oh my god, it’s like yesterday once more with the media microscope jammed up the ass of Bill Clinton so that the rat fuckers could bring down an investigation whenever he so much as farted off key. Conyers of course would be in the enviable position of House Judiciary Chairman with a change over to Democrat control and an outspoken critic like he would likely relish the thought of having the balls of the entire Bushist junta in the palm of his hand waiting for a good squeeze. The CNN story didn’t get much play other than in the right wing echo chamber because it is old news having happened years ago and the accusations made by disgruntled former employees, at least one of whom was fired. You gotta love the right wing and the corporate media monkeys for using a story of alleged illicit babysitting to show that the ‘culture of corruption’ cuts both ways even if it pales in comparison to the really serious stuff like bribery, influence peddling, money laundering and a button on Jack Abramoff’s speed dial, if this lurid little tale catches fire anyplace other than FREEP or The Drudge report it will go over huge with the same crowd whose prurient desires were once stoked by the 24/7 orgy of coverage over the spoo on Monica’s blue dress.

We Can’t Let This Continue: The delicious irony is in the ultimate truth of those words straight from the horse’s mouth that belongs to Bush’s surrogate mommie Condi Rice herself. Rice, a woman not satisfied with the thousands of mistakes made in Iraq or getting into a pissing contest with Herr Rumsfeld chimed in regarding what else, the coming war with Iran. The latest neo con wet dream of launching an all out attack against Iran that would allow a fanatical lunatic whose name just happens to be Bush his latest chance at achieving messianic status by bringing about the conditions for Armageddon as well as allowing the fanatics in Israel one more opportunity to wag the dog that is the United States now an obvious proxy (to all but Americans) for their own designs on conquering the Middle East. They have to be practically pissing themselves laughing in Tel Aviv at just how easy it has been to play Bush and his Straussian, Christian Zionist puppeteers as useful idiots.

By the way, in an earlier column I wrote of the unfair labeling as ‘anti-semitic’ any who dared to question official Israeli state policy and lo and behold a wonderful report just happens to be available that puts it all in perspective in a much more eloquent manner than I myself am capable of. I am providing the link to this masterpiece that cuts through all of the bullshit of this country’s ridiculous proclivity for the appeasement of a state that has more against our national self interests than any number of our so called enemies and does an excellent job of exposing the strength of the Israeli Lobby as well as their anti-American suppression of the truth regarding their motives.

You WILL NOT read this in the American corporate media for obvious reasons:

The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

And here is a link about just how quickly that the anti-semite label is applied by the Israeli lobby and their stooges in the corporate media and this report was pounced upon and soundly denounced as such by the usual suspects. The pompous self serving ass that is Alan Dershowitz who once joined up with the Dream Team along with the rest of the O.J. Simpson pimps slimed out of his hole to launch a personal offensive attack against the authors who speak painful truths about just how easily that our foreign policy is manipulated by the Israelis.

Just Let the Bastards Fight Their Own Damned Wars!

Kurtz Nears River’s End

“We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army…. “

Neo Con Icon Colonel Walter Kurtz

The ultimate in Rovian strategy is about to be rolled out just in time for this November’s mid-term elections: Armageddon! The next stop along the route for the rapture bus is already being scheduled for Tehran and it’s gonna be a big one from all indications according to the latest by the great Seymour Hersh who just released a piece so controversial that the White House army of dissemblers and spinners are in D Day mode. The flacks had already been deployed to issue blanket statements of denial and to impugn Hersh’s credibility and muddy the waters over the allegations by a former intelligence official that a huge bombing campaign is being seriously prepared to use against Iran including the potential usage of low yield nuclear weapons. The planning is “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” and according the article the crazed warmongers of the neo con cult of death have dug in their heels to remove the nuclear option from the table specifically the madman across the water who ominously believes that no future administration will have the will do drop the nuke….I just have this picture of our crazed emperor himself riding the bomb downward as though it were a Texas rodeo horse ala Major ‘King’ Kong in the climax to the classic Stanley Kubrick flick Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The irony is that today’s underground bunkers are filled with the same fascist types that were so wonderfully parodied in that great early sixties satire.

Hell, the lunatic fringe dwelling snake oil salesman in chief even slimed out of his spider hole of denial in order to play down the same attack that his Pentagon propagandists had been laying down the groundwork for over at least the last six months by poo-poohing any suggestions of a military offensive against Iran as “wild speculation” although it is not nearly as wild as the hair up Bush’s ass that he is somehow acting as God’s man on Earth and while his ardent followers may love his messianic zeal any serious psychiatrist would immediately be able to diagnose a psychopath with serious delusions of grandeur as well as a fascination with his ability to use his power to bring death to all who oppose his vision, this is the adult version of the boy who once thrilled over stuffing firecrackers up the asses of frogs and then squealing with glee when they exploded.

It was very ironic that an earlier story exposed the Feed My Frankenstein techniques of the Pentagon propaganda chop shop artistes and their manufactured mythology of the greatly manufactured threat of the dreaded and omnipotent Zarqawi albeit in the context of the playing on the Iraqi distrust of foreigners while ignoring the two plus year of domestic mind control games and horseshit that has been shoveled out of the same location to American audiences desperately in need of a bogeyman to explain just how Iraq could turn into such a bloody fuck cluster of a disaster that only an undertaker could appreciate.

The spin cycle may be on full speed but who are you going to believe, one of the few remaining true investigative journalists or an administration composed of pathological bullshit artists who don’t bother with the truth and lie as a first, second and only option? Notice the recent revelations that Bush himself had authorized the leaking of the intelligence leading to the discrediting of Joseph Wilson over the forged Nigerian yellowcake documents but had the power to have it ‘declassified’ in what is shaping up as what appears to be a lynchpin of their legal strategy in the upcoming Scooter Libby trial. With such serial mendacity and chicanery over issues of true national security like the attacks on Wilson it is unbelievable the same salivating GOP jackals who decried Bill Clinton’s legalistic hair splitting (“it depends on what the meaning of is is”) are now conveniently ignoring the likelihood that this rogue administration has engaged in acts of utterly blatant treason. Maybe if their beloved king G.W. Bush has his cock stuffed into someone’s mouth when he verifies the nuclear launch codes to drop the bunker buster that triggers global warfare there will be some sort of mass outcry from the phony ‘moralists’ and false prophets who inhabit the extreme right flank but somehow I doubt it.

George W. Bush is a hellbent, dysfunctional terrorist with the mindset of a messianic madman along with the integrity of a dirt dwelling snake exactly like his evil twin and unscrupulous megalomaniac groomer Karl Rove. Turd Blossom was apparently fully cognizant of the lack of any sort of consensus over the reliability of reports over the intended use of the much trumpeted in the run up to Shock and Awe aluminum tubes that could be used by Saddam for centrifuges but still insisted on suppressing the contents of a critical memo from the public for political reasons. Now Rove and his insane neo con collaborators have obviously decided that the best way to allow the GOP to remain in power is to roll out campaign 2006 to the sound of carpet bombing and damn the consequences, if it leads to World War III that is all the better to pull the fundamentalist Left Behind dead enders to the polls and along with recurrent gay bashing and rabid anti-immigration sentiment can be a potent witches brew indeed, all that is missing is eye of Newt.

If there are still enough loyalists to America itself left in the military high command who haven’t been purged by Herr Rumsfeld and are even slightly considering the possibility of a coup now would be a good time to roll with it. The worst that can happen is that the attempt will fail much as the July 1944 attempt to take out Adolf Hitler (and therefore decapitate the Nazi war machine before Germany itself was immolated did and that ended badly for the plotters with many being stung up with piano wire) but what the fuck, if there was ever time for a hail mary this is it, after all that’s exactly the same conclusion that the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Rummy Axis of Evil have reached, it’s going to take some serious desperation to cheat the hangman.

Pieces of Hersh’s New Yorker story are incendiary and should have every rational American terrified that the emperor and his lackeys have not only finally gone off of the deep end but are determined to drag the entire world kicking and screaming into the abyss along with them in order to see their insane vision through to its bloody end. Bush and his neo con crazies have even gone as far as to formally begin referring to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a new Adolf Hitler in a redux of the same hogwash that led to the debacle in Iraq (Saddam used to be the New Hitler) that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands and is plunging the country into a death spiral of debt through its massive daily costs as well as the Cheneyites who piss away the contents of the treasury like drunken sailors by funneling money to well connected private contractors and mercenaries.

Here is a passage from the Hersh piece that sums it up:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

If you read the Hersh story there is the inevitable reference to protecting Israel, the small warlike state that believes that it is possessed of divine providence and has an inordinate amount of influence over U.S. policies especially with the neo con nuts and the Bushist theocrats. Israeli aggression is a major contribution to Middle Eastern problems and it is very unfortunate that this country allows that theocratic military powerhouse to dictate policy to the extent that it does. Of course any criticisms of the actual policies of Israel invite a storm of anti-Semitic denunciations to any who dare to make them and this of course is utter bullshit. There is nothing whatsoever anti-Semitic about questioning the bellicose nature of the destructive policies of that self righteous, over militarized nation that is reaping the whirlwind for it’s cruelty and for the most part barbaric treatment of Palestinians, note this story which of course won’t be covered by the Couric Broadcasting System or any other corporate toady media outlet in the U.S. As far as the pro Israeli lobby in the U.S. is concerned any criticism whatsoever of the wrong headed policies of their government is immediately equated to some brutish Nazi thug throwing babies into concentration camp furnaces.

Radical Jewish activists are as much or more influential as those of their intellectual cousins who are the theocratic Christo-fascists only they are one hell of a lot more sophisticated. This is mainly because while one group seeks to produce lawyers, doctors, politicians and other social assets from their progeny the other is satisfied with churning out ignorant, knuckle dragging regressive peckerwoods who are happy either working for Walmart or performing some other menial lowlife white trash job, living in a trailer, watching fast colorful cars drive around in circles on the tee-vee and waging an unwinnable war against centuries of science and enlightenment cloaked in the ridiculously insulting euphemism of Intelligent Design, the brood of the end timers are social miscreants and that’s just the way that the power stucture likes them. Not to malign Wal Mart greeters or Waffle House cooks of course and the elder Bush once allegedly said something along the lines that world needs shoe-shine boys too or something along those lines although it was the grocery scanner that ultimately did him in. Poppy suffered more damage to his ego than even his reputation by losing to Bill Clinton with an assist to Ross Perot in the days before his idiot bastard son decided to become some heinous parody of a James Bond villain bent on world domination. I realize that this analogy reeks of stereotyping but you have to admit that it certainly has an equally overpowering fragrant smell of truth.

So Just Fuck Israel! I am an American and I am sick and fucking tired of having the bullshit that somehow the policies of that lousy little theocratic desert shithole are of such great importance to our foreign policy that we essentially have to sell our souls to the devil in order to ensure that they can exist so as to exercise their divine right to drive bulldozers over children and use their advanced and U.S. subsidized military to brutally crush those who often are still armed with no better than the same fucking weapons that they used at the beginning of this ridiculous fucking 2,000 year old holy war. No wonder that they have to resort to blowing themselves up along with whatever poor bastards just happen to be in the immediate vicinity when they pull the ripcord on their explosive vests…they are all victims of the same collective madness and whether the blood soaked butchers are named Sharon, Arafat or Bush they are still bartering the lives of the innocents away, their flesh cruelly shredded and desecrated for political expediency and strategic advantage.

Hey, all of the militant Israelis can quote me on that and denounce me as an anti-Semite for not buying into the standard propaganda and arrogance that the Israelis are somehow God’s chosen people and to hell with the rest of the world. And especially fuck the fanatical Christian Zionists in America who enable their right wing Israeli counterparts by donating money and support for their playing their part in the crazed prophesies that will bring about the rapture and the return of Christ. I stongly suspect that it is only a matter of time until recently elected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet the same fate as the last moderate Yitzhak Rabin who was assassinated in 1995 by a right wing religious zealot. The maniac who pulled the trigger is of the same type that are popping up throughout the world like mutant mushrooms out of piles of cow dung after a rainstorm and the militant Israeli version would likely find it perfectly acceptable to display lamps in their settlement living rooms with shades made out of the skin of Palestinians and would have no qualms if their children were to frolic in bubble baths using soap made out of the rendered corpses of their hated enemies. The true enemy is radicalized religion itself and every nation has it’s own extremists who in any sane society would be locked up forever in the darkest depths of fetid dungeons where they would be isolated and unable to poison the minds of those most susceptible to falling under their evil sway.

Attacking Iran and in to a large extent the concept of ‘transforming’ the Middle East to begin with are based in protecting Israel as well as allowing U.S. corporations and oil companies to create a permanent presence in the volatile region and the Muslims whose historical knowledge is the flip side of of American ignorance sees through the crusader state agenda. Democratizing or otherwise magically transforming the region will never happen as long as the U.S. is seen as an extension of Israel by the natives who will fight to the last man to preserve their way of life and expunge the infidels. The Bushists are shitting concrete blocks over potentially losing their rubber stamp lockstep congress come November and facing a Democrat controlled legislative body with a mandate and a serious bent to avenge the bullying abuse and the humiliations of the DeLay years and hold real investigations into the dirty dealings of the past five years with subpoena power and a man of integrity in John Conyers of Michigan in the driver’s seat on the House Judiciary Committee.

They could soon rue the day that they dismissively relegated Conyers’ call for a serious investigation into the Downing Street Memo to a basement room no bigger than a closet and likely reeking of mildew and dirty mop water last year. Backed into a corner, the neo cons are now turning to the scorched earth plan in rather than to risk the chance of being brought up on the charges of treason that they are so richly deserving of.

Colonel Kurtz is indeed near the end of the river, he has now gone totally fucking insane and his boat is filled to the brim with others even more deranged than he is.

As The Shit Flies

Signs of Ugly Days Ahead in Bushland

Down Goes The Hammer: Tom DeLay, one of the nastiest Republican rat fuckers in all of that party’s sordid history of rottenness officially fell on his sword and surrendered like the same Frenchies that the GOP fascists have made a cottage industry out of vilifying. Toxic Tom, is bailing out as an indictment in either the ugly Jack Abramoff corruption scandal or the Texas campaign finance probe is looming and the Orkin man is rapidly closing on America’s number one cockroach.

DeLay went out as the diabolical liar that he always has been and always will be spinning his exit as trying to take the high road to avoid a savage run for his congressional seat come November and he wanted of course to spare the GOP the embarrassment of having him around as an albatross. DeLay has far bigger legal fish to fry than any potential electoral contest, Tony Rudy, one of The Hammer’s former right hand men just copped a plea in the Abramoff investigation and is likely singing like a diva to the feds right in order to save his own skin. The heat is about to get turned up so high that even a servant of Satan like DeLay is going to find himself dancing like a rat on a hot tin roof, maybe he greasy little fuck can fry in his own oil.

How ironic, DeLay resigns nearly a year to the day from the death of Terri Schiavo who he tried to latch onto as a meal ticket just like the parasitical scum that he is although even in retreat the greasy, gap-toothed, charlatan goat couldn’t resist trying to play the standard GOP God card in order to stoke the pathological persecution complex of the evangelical fundies:

“We have been chosen to live as Christians at a time when our culture is being poisoned and our world is being threatened…. the enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won.”

Spoken like only a true enemy to the very concept of all that Jesus Christ actually stood for can possibly say it, these degenerate Tim LaHaye novel thumpers have done more to destroy the Christian religion than any other political movement in over two thousand years and are truly deserving of whatever riches that their deals with the devil hath purchased them, it’s a shame that the millions of misguided flockers who comprise the GOP party base will one day be roasting in the pits of Hades along with DeLay, LaHaye, Falwell and Beelzebub himself. Now that DeLay is pretty much history it is time to focus attention on the other lackey of the extremist fundamentalist right, Bill Frist, a man who is capable of landing on all sides of any issue as lithely as any of the stray cats that he abducted and butchered while studying to be a surgeon.

And what would any big name disgraced Republican be without a nationally televised electronic blowjob? Pinky Matthews as expected lovingly fellated a bowed but unbroken DeLay on his MSNBC Republican infomercial ‘Softball’. While Pinky slavered and drooled, DeLay sniped at the soon to be coronated Queen Hillary and revealed for all just what is really up the asses of all of these angry white alpha male Republican scumbags:

“Nothing worse than a woman know it all”

There you have it, good old boy GOP misogynist tendencies on full display for all. That is in a nutshell an explanation of what really bugs these guys, to them the traditional job of a woman is to just lay on her back and spread her legs and take orders from strong daddy, that’s the way of the mythical nuclear family. They feel intimidated by the incursion of females into their ‘man’s world’, unless of course it happens to be Ann Coulter mounting them from behind with a 14 inch polyurethane strap-on dildo. Coulter incidentally referred to DeLay as “incredibly honorable” during a recent FOX appearance….which is a message to Hot Tub Tom that he better grab a tube of KY and prepare to grab his cheeks because the demented dominatrix may be honing her pink rubber sword with a new parking spot for it in her evil mind.

“It’s time for me to go do something else”

DeLay said in an exclusive interview on what else…FOX News.

Yeah, like grabbing your ankles in the joint, getting butt fucked and then emerging to become a ‘leader’ of the religious right like Nixon’s goon Chuck Colson. Maybe it will work out ok for DeLay after all when all of the trails are over, maybe he can have Karl Rove as a cellmate (at least he can be on top then) and perhaps the coming time away will also allow DeLay to get more in touch with his feminine side in order to have a bit of empathy and respect for the opposite sex.

The Values People: You can add yet another name to the constantly growing number of exposed Republican perverts and sex freaks. Brian J. Doyle, a honcho with the Department of Homeland Security has been arrested in a sting operation for soliciting online sex and sending pornographic videos to a Polk County, FL Sheriff’s Office deputy who was posing as a child. Doyle is just the latest entry on the long list of hypocrites passing themselves as family values oriented men who if not actually residing in the closet themselves certainly have their share of skeletons in there. The DHS seems to have far more in common with the actual Third Reich than it’s Nazi like name when it is caught attracting sexual miscreants in a similar manner to the scum of society that filled the lower ranks of Hitler’s SA brownshirts as he and his party rose to power and before the Night of The Long Knives was used to purge the movement of the vilest of their scum, hey even prisons have their hierarchies and murders are of a higher caste than pederasts. the Republican party is no different but when a purely evil and megalomanical fascist like Rove with alleged family ties to Nazi Germany is the new reich’s chief talent scout and architect only a fool would expect anything else.

Is This Really Necessary Dept: What a bizarre movie tie in that the previously unreleased cockpit tapes from Air Beamer aka United Airlines flight 93 are being given their moment in the spotlight at the news cycle gobbling Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing by being played before what is likely to be an over the top apperance by knight in shining armor Rudy Guiliani. What purpose does this really serve other than to further incite the level of bloodlust and to further pin the scapegoat tag firmly onto the back of the nutty and unstable loser who will pay the price for the man that the loser Bush was unable to ‘smoke out’ and bring to justice. What a bunch of horseshit this all is but in a nation of brainless flies that have a tendency to flock to such road apples it will likely be a smash hit. Just what in the fuck does this have to do with the price of rice in China? The answer is that it reinforces the myth and continues the 9/11 re-launch project now in it’s second week. It should also juice the box office for the thoroughly tasteless piece of exploitative shit that is United 93 that odious piece of administration propaganda so repulsive that it is already under fire for the studio’s shameless insertion of trailers for the coming magnum opus of nationalist anti-Arab sentiment that will conquer the red states in a cold, brutal and efficient manner not seen since Sherman’s reign of terror cut a fiery swath through the confederacy.

Katherine Harris Update: The whore of Florida’s ill fated U.S. Senate campaign continues to unravel faster than her already tenuous grip on sanity. This story from the Tampa Tribune is an outstanding statement on both the desperation of Harris as well as her ongoing instability:

Questions Dog Harris Behavior
By WILLIAM MARCH and KEITH EPSTEIN

TAMPA – Changing locks on her campaign headquarters and accusing her staff of disloyalty and her own party of spying on her are signs of erratic behavior that some Katherine Harris staff members say has worsened since her father’s death.

Harris is restaffing her campaign and will announce new key staff members today, a campaign spokeswoman said Monday.

But in the past 10 days, Harris has:

• Had locks changed and posted a security guard at the door of her campaign headquarters in Tampa and had former staff members escorted in to retrieve their belongings.

• Told a gathering of supporters in Cocoa Beach on Saturday that the Republican Party had “infiltrated” her campaign staff to put “knives in my back.”

• Told a reporter that a longtime, trusted political adviser had leaked a story about her staff members quitting, then called back to retract the comments.

• Announced hiring her new staff without identifying them.

Those events come atop previous reversals and contradictions, including her announcement last month that she would spend her inheritance from her father on her campaign, which she changed, saying she would sell her assets.

Former campaign manager Jim Dornan, who left in November, called the most recent events in the campaign “unbelievable.”

“It smacks of real paranoia,” he said of the headquarters lockout and comments about infiltration. “That campaign staff was so loyal to her, and to be treated like that is absolutely unconscionable.”

In interviews over the past few weeks, speaking in confidence, former employees from Harris’ congressional and campaign staffs said the trauma of the unexpected death of her father has taken a toll.

“She’s in total meltdown. The campaign is in chaos,” said a longtime Republican operative who worked closely with Harris until recently. “She hasn’t mourned for her father.” Like many other former staff members interviewed, that GOP operative didn’t want to be quoted by name.

Many now seek other political jobs and don’t want to publicly criticize a candidate they have worked for.

Over the weekend, the last of Harris’ top staff members left the campaign, including campaign manager Jamie Miller, general consultant Ed Rollins, spokeswoman Morgan Dobbs and field director Megan Ortagus.

Media consultant Adam Goodman, who has worked with Harris through her political career, left a few days earlier. That followed the departures of pollster Ed Goeas, fundraiser Anne Dunsmore, Dornan, treasurer Nancy Watkins, two finance staff members and others.

On March 25, in comments to an Orlando Sentinel reporter, Harris blamed Goodman for leaking a story about her staff turnover. She called the newspaper back within hours to retract the statement.

In a statement Saturday announcing the hiring of new top staff members, she said, “Our campaign has re-launched with a new staff and is moving forward quickly. … We are stronger as a campaign today than we were yesterday.”

Dornan, who left the campaign after disagreements with Harris, said, “How she can say that her campaign is better is beyond me, when she had the best people in the country.”

Harris’ comments Saturday in Cocoa Beach reflect the antagonism between her and the Republican Party. Some party leaders have been downright hostile to her campaign because of worries that she can’t beat incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson and that her reputation would stoke turnout by Democrats eager to defeat her.

According to Florida Today, she told a gathering of Republicans, “I didn’t know I was going to get the knives in my back from my own party, and I’ll be honest, it’s infiltrated my campaign staff.”

She added, “For too long, we have been undermined by people in our own party and staffers in our own campaign.”

The newspaper also quoted Harris as saying, “I was told if I didn’t get out of the race, I would have an April surprise,” meaning a negative event for her campaign.

The Tribune asked to speak to Harris on Monday about the statements but got no response.

Meanwhile, former staffers were coming to the office to retrieve belongings. Receptionist Donna Alicoate said Miller was escorted into the office Saturday after locks were changed and a guard posted.

On Monday, campaign volunteer Art Burroughs, outside the entrance to Harris’ West Shore Boulevard office, said he was doing “just a little bit of a security thing” in escorting former staffers inside for belongings.

Campaign scheduler Jennifer DeBord said the new staff members would be announced today.

Harris said in a statement Saturday she had hired a campaign manager, fundraiser, advertising consultants, pollster, field director and press secretary. But campaign spokesman Brian Brooks said Monday a pollster has not been hired.

Burroughs is the brother of Dale Burroughs, a spiritual counselor and friend of Harris who, aides say, frequently travels with Harris on the campaign trail and sometimes introduces her at campaign stops.

Harris has been known for high turnover of employees in her congressional and campaign staffs and for her tendency to lose her temper in dealing with employees. Since winning her congressional seat in 2002, she has gone through several chiefs of staff and communications directors.

Former staff members cite three events they say have exacerbated those tendencies: her father’s death in January; her being linked indirectly to a bribery scandal involving illegal campaign contributions; and her decision to put $10 million of her own money into her campaign.

Two Words Best Describe Harris: CRAZY BITCH

The Collaborator

The straight talk express has jumped the tracks and media darling GOP ‘maverick’ finally is getting burned for his favorite tactic of playing both ends against the middle. McCain over the weekend proved that he is just another slimy Republican opportunist by cozying up to radical cleric Jerry Falwell, a man whose intolerance and psychopathic ranting he had not long ago criticized. McCain once again hit the Sunday morning gabfest circuit that he is so fond of being the self-promoter that he is and on NBC’s Meet The Press he told host Tim Russert that he did not consider that Falwell and his ilk were “agents of intolerance” as he did after getting savaged by their well coordinated South Carolina smear campaign during the 2000 primaries and chimed in with his 40 pieces of silver that the zealots of the radical religious right did indeed have a major role to play in the Republican party which has according to author Kevin Phillips has become America’s first religious political party in his recently released and excellent book American Theocracy.

Phillips is one of the true Republicans who now have no place an what has become an extremist machine bent on launching crusades and scrapping the constitution as the nation’s ruling document in place of their own very selective interpretation of the Christian bible. Moderates have regularly been kicked to the curb as conservatism has gradually morphed into a crazed cult of God headed fascists intent on bankrupting the country, packing the courts with Federalist Society judicial whackos, taking a scorched earth stance towards secular liberals and spreading their peculiar mutatant brand of faith throughout the world at gunpoint.

The symbiotic relationship between the GOP and the theocrats has been going on for a quarter of a century but with the rise of the neo cons it has mutated into more than the usual pandering for the votes of the yahoo contingent to the point where the lunatics have effectively seized control of the asylum. The congress has been packed with mainly southern agenda driven fundamentalists, the Bush-Rove White House holds prayer meetings and bible study and allows unprecedented access to more snake handling, speaking in tongues Jesus juicers than should ever be acceptable in a modern secular society. The Council For National Policy, an extremely influential policy group with a serious Jones for R.J. Rushdoony style Christian reconstructionist philosophy and the implementation of biblical law have become king makers and it becomes increasingly apparent that the keys to the nuclear arsenal are held by a man with a belief that fiery Armageddon is a necessity to trigger the return of Christ to Earth. A series of Middle Eastern wars are either in process or on the Pentagon planning board and there is a sneaking suspicion among many that the end timers are exerting an undue influence on U.S. foreign policy in order to bring about conditions favorable to the rapture and that tribulation that CNP founder Timothy LaHaye has slyly indoctrinated millions into believing through his violent and sleazy Left Behind media colossus.

McCain has agreed to give the commencement address at Falwell’s Lynchburg, VA based Liberty College where the reverend has created a law school specifically for the purpose of training legions of the flock in the reinterpretation of the law from a ‘biblical’ perspective and will churning out ‘lawyers’ like a plague of angry locusts or more appropriately termites with an insatiable hunger to eat their way through the wall of separation between church and state, a wall I might add that is considerably more flimsy today than at any time in U.S. history due to the Christian socialism of the Bush administration. When you lay down with wolves don’t be surprised to wake up one day missing a leg and three or four fingers. When asked by Russert about the imminent neo con attack on Iran, McCain further endeared himself to Falwell and his acolytes by stating:

“I think we could have Armageddon“

Fucking A! The end timers must have heard that and thought that they were already being raptured up to heaven but alas it was a false alarm and only an orgasm this time.

McCain was supposed to be a man with principles, a reformer who cared more about America than about simple politics but he has turned out to be the biggest confidence man of all and the media still is buying his bullshit although the public is getting wise to the act and his getting booed and heckled during a speech to union leaders is a sign that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. McCain has no integrity whatsoever, a self-serving charlatan of a whore who is emblematic of the current crop of hucksters seeking the 2008 GOP nomination Hell, at least being a smarmy pandering prick is second nature to a second generation scoundrel the likes of Bill Frist or George Allen.

Former POW John McCain may have never broken under torture during his agonizing stay at the Hanoi Hilton but then maybe Charlie never realized that capitulation and propagandizing could be easier obtained by simply pushing the right buttons than through repeated beatings and proddings with the end of a pungi stick. Caving in under repeated barbaric torture by the soldiers of Ho Chi Minh could be understood, caving in to the pressure to publicly kiss a rat bastard like Jerry Falwell’s big fat ass is tantamount to an act of treason by a man who increasingly appears to have more in common with the Manchurian Candidate with each passing day. Turns out that the admiral’s son who could have gotten an express trip out of Nam had he just played ball instead of trying to be an American hero decades ago now has the same integrity as Joe Shit The Ragman who sang like a canary, made propaganda films and anti American statements for Ho Chi Mihn and avoided spending years of his life getting the shit beaten out of him instead of being a pig headed sack of shit like McCain. Is it too late to label him Hanoi John?

McCain was supposed to be different, he was actually able to fraudulently push himself off on Americans as a ‘renegade’ and a ‘straight shooter’ and now this. The bus that he once called ‘The Straight Talk Express’ may as well have been a traveling brothel where cut rate blow jobs were dispensed to anybody who happened to have even chump change in their pockets. At least Bill Clinton only busted a nut into the mouth of a fat little trollop intern, McCain is pimping out his bodily orifices to the vilest of the vile and paying for them getting their jollies with the most precious of currencies that are honor and dignity, both of which are in short supply in the post 9/11 surrealism of the new American century. George W. Bush and his pirates may have pissed away everything that they had on high priced harlots but there is always a lowly skank like McCain who is perfectly satisfied in lining up for sloppy seconds at cut rate prices. McCain’s Maverick act is as obviously phony as George W. Bush’s was when he landed on the USS Lincoln to prance around in a flight suit in front of that now infamous Mission Accomplished banner.

I have to admit that McCain had me fooled, and any suspicion that he was an infiltrator that I may have had became cemented with his sucking up to Falwell. McCain is such a snake oil selling charlatan that he would probably suck off both Osama Bin Laden and the camel that he rode in on if he thought that there were as many Islamic fundamentalist fanatics in the U.S. as there are whack a doodle rapture masturbators. I am sure that Americans will feel much comfort in sending their sons to die in foreign holy wars with a leader who has more interest in pandering to those whose ideological underpinnings are one hell of a lot far closer to those of Bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini than they are to Jefferson, Madison and Franklin.

9/11:The Relaunch

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men

-Plato

Hollywood bad boy actor Charlie Sheen recently went off on The Alex Jones Show with some blasphemous questions regarding the holy covenant between George W. Bush and America that was borne on wings of destruction and consumated in an inferno of blood and burning flesh on the day that changed it all: 9/11/01. What Sheen said was no less than utter heresy to the manufactured reality of Karl Rove’s post September the Eleventh world in which subservience, cringing and a loyalty similar to Hitler’s own Good Germans are now the most desirable of all American to posess in the era of the ascendancy of the New American Century of Bushland Uber Alles. Jones, whose main site named Info Wars is an Austin, TX based radio host and outlaw filmmaker known for taking on stories and featuring interviews that that are way too volatile for the sucklings in the mainstream media and other than having an unfortunate proclivity of focusing at times on such favorite subjects of the extreme right wing as secret societies, one world government and the Illuminati his show is often on the cutting edge when it comes to the true grit involving the slow and incrementally unnoticable transformation of America into a fascist police state. Info Wars is a very well constructed website but you have to take the good along with the bad and the ugly in order to truly appreciate it.

Sheen dared to question the official story of that tragic and horrible day when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were laid to waste and the ensuing orgy of media coverage (psy ops?) horrified the entire civilized world while sending the majority of Americans into a deep funk of bitterness, bigotry, religous fanaticism and plain old fashioned fear and loathing that continues to this very day. 9/11 is the very backbone upon which the Bushist-neo con empire is built and any serious challenge to the legitimacy of their story is one million times greater a threat to their illegitimate reign of terror and relentless war against civil liberties than the shitball DLC poodles in the ‘opposition party’ or the neutered corporate media could ever even dream of mustering.

Sheen is the son of actor and activist Martin Sheen, a man who in addition to playing President Bartlet on the successful television series The West Wing is a die hard liberal who has been arrested over sixty times, many for protesting U.S. military operations. Daddy Sheen also hangs out with Rob Reiner (the still stigmatized hated symbol of liberalism that was ‘meathead’ of bigoted America’s all time favorite television show All In The Family where Archie Bunker told it like it was and preached to the choir of a confused and angry society that was at the time overwhelmed by an avalanche of cultural changes and the shredding of long standing cultural mores), supports PETA, campaigned for Howard Dean and John Kerry and even visited Cindy Sheehan, who has now been made into a very convenient symbol of evil by right wing animosity as well as a target for their malignant nationalism and who is the modern day version of the still loathed Hanoi Jane. Sheehan became an unofficial spokesperson for anti-war Americans who lacked a legitimate voice in a craven congress that far more resembles a whorehouse than a chamber where the people’s work is conducted and she became a media sensation last summer that caused a cornered Dirty George no small amount of embarassment when her travelling protest show nicknamed Camp Casey (after the son who was served up as a blood sacrifice in Bush’s war) set up shop at the gates to the phony movie set that is Chickenhawk Ranch in Crawford, TX. Like Sheehan, Martin Sheen is a huge bogeyman of the extremist right even if he did play Captain Willard in the ultimate Viet Nam horror movie that is a favorite to many of them: Apocalypse Now.

Charlie Sheen has a history of personal problems that have long made him a favorite of the tabloid television celebrity culture that has droolingly jumped on every sex scandal (Sheen once dated a porno star and was among the names revealed to have been in the little black book of notorious Hollywood Madame Heidi Fleiss), drug bust and domestic problem like starved dogs wrestling over meat scraps and milked each and every story ad infinitum by using them as fodder for their tawdry and ridiculous infotainment programs that they so garishly pimp out as legitimate journalism. Hate-crazed, heinous, bile spewing, FOX falafel king and loofah wielding lothario Bill O’Reilly himself made the jump from tabloid television E-cheese to the big time as a right wing hack. O’Reilly is now the the very effective bully boy propagandist, demagogue and rabble rousing chief attack dog in Rupert Murcoch’s kennel of Republican hyenas where he holds court like a braying jackass pumped up on a mixture of high grade methamphetamine and the constant adrenaline rush of purely primal hostility.

The big question is why was there not the same amount of coverage awarded to Sheen’s 9/11 rant as to every other one of his serious social ‘transgressions’ which were found to be far more worthy of airtime? The story could have been spun as a continuation of the plague of his history of personal scandal as well as evidence of his descent into madness and he could serve as a proxy target for his father and his ‘Islamic terrorist supporting views’. Sheen’s off the chain commentary was a magnificent opportunity and ratings pull that would keep the voyeuristic viewers who live vicariously through their adulation of celebrity glued to their television sets for months. Yet the majority of the cable freak shows that normally salivate for smut and scandal left such a juicy chance for electronic vilification of a fairly big name go, it was a whiff, a gutter ball and a mulligan that defies explanation unless it of course was intentional.

There were naturally some attacks on Sheen but nothing approaching the electronic wall to wall coverage that many other lurid celebrity scandals and events routinely garner. This is especially telling considering the extremely volatile nature of his statements as well as the utter disregard (some would even say treason) that he displayed in denouncing the great historical re-launch of America that is the post September 11th era where the ultimate in revisionist history has been foisted off on the public by the neo con junta.

Why would the cult of celebrity and sensationalism deliberately ignore such bloody, juicy meat as an all out attack on Sheen? Is it because that just maybe some would take another look at the events of 9/11? Would some now take a look removed from the visceral emotions or that day and with renewed skepticism due to the now obvious conventional wisdom that the Bush administration are professional dissemblers and pathological liars who are incapable of telling the truth about anything? Now that the blatant lust for power and relentless quest to destroy civil liberties by the Bush-Cheney junta and their neo con agenda is well known and surpassed only by their theocratic corporatist party’s endemic taint of corruption and outright criminality would people begin to start asking some very serious questions about the myriad of inconsistencies and fallacies of that most fateful of days in modern American history?

And would they begin to make the obvious connections that a very specific group of people, institutions and ideologies were all big winners who reaped the benefits of that terrible Tuesday morning?

Sheen himself perhaps said it best:

“It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 percent of their targets: that feels like a conspiracy theory.”

Smearing any who question the official story of a government that is itself a conspiracy factory as ‘conspiracy theorists’ has always been an effective tactic in labeling those who dare to spout off against the party line as ‘kooks’, ‘tin-foil hatters’, loonies, whackos and any other number of pejoratives. The very existence of an agency like the CIA which has a mission to participate in whatever duplicity, espionage, false flag operations, murders and assassinations, money laundering, drug dealing, sabotage, election fixing, propagandizing, inciting revolutions and undermining foreign governments so as to promote U.S. business interests in foreign policy and allow the nation’s chief executive to operate behind the cloak of ‘plausible deniability’ shows with intentionally murky certainty that the United States government is itself in the conspiracy business.

Am I a coincidence theorist for noticing that a large number of stories involving 9/11 have been appearing in the MSM since the Sheen remarks first surfaced? It is as though a very subtle reinforcment of the national myth is occurring while flying under the radar:

The ’20th hijacker’ Zacarias Moussaoui’s heavily publicized trial of course. I addressed this in a few earlier posts this week for all of its bizarre, surrealism and news cycle dominating spin including the obviously unstable ramblings that he and shoe bomber Richard Reid (a duo more deserving fo being compared to Cheech and Chong than to Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) were to have hijacked another plane targeting the White House itself. And on and on it goes, it is expected that he will be given the death penalty, after all somebody has to pay as they always do in the great action movies and dramas and surely Moussaoui will be the one sacrificed in the absence of Osama Bin Laden himself who occasionally pops up in order to release fortuitiously timed audio and video tapes proclaiming war against the infidels.

One of my local newspapers The St. Petersburg Times ran a story about how a night watchman revealed that Mohammad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi who allegedly flew the planes that hit the WTC practiced their takeoffs and landings (what good are landings if you intend to crash your plane into a building?) at a Clearwater airstrip after it had closed for the night. Why the ‘watchman’ never came forward with the information during the original investigation is not addressed.

The Tribeca Film Festival will feature a movie called United 93 about the events aboard the plane that allegedly was taken over by the passengers led by the exploits of the heroic Todd Beamer who fought back against the hijackers and prevented a third target, presumably the Capitol from being hit on 9/11. The story lacked a happy ending with all of the insurgent passengers along with the hijackers losing their lives when the plane went down badly in a Pennsylvania field. It wasn’t a total loss though as the jingoism of the inspiring slogan “Let’s Roll” was born as an angry and visceral war cry for the perpetual War On Terror. The movie will likely be a smashing success and the inconvenient fact that it is pretty much all conjecture, exaggeration and maudlin bullshit will be glossed over by fawning and adoring corporate media critics. There is no way of knowing what actually happened onboard that plane and director Paul Greengrass whose efforts include an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum spy novel The Bourne Supremacy is just the man to handle this piece of propaganda. Outlaw cartoonist and columnistTed Rall did a good piece on the events of Flight 93 that I am providing a link to here.

Friday’s news cycle was gobbled up by the timely and some may say exploitative release of the call tapes of New York City 911 operators and emergency personnel on the morning of the WTC attacks with the screams for help edited out to show good taste.

Is it possible that somebody, somewhere had obviously decided that this was going to be 9-11 relaunch week so as to provide reinforcement? Not that Bush-Rove-Cheney and the neo cons would ever seek to manipulate mass opinion through the shameless exploitation of the raw emotions of Americans over upwards of 3,000 deaths would they?

As for 9/11 itself since the Sheen comments have reopened Pandora’s Box it would be a very appropriate time to examine some contradictions and for once ask the questions that have for too long gone unanswered so Let’s Roll!

So who really was flying those planes? – It should be obvious to anybody with half a brain that the daredevil type of piloting finesse that would be required in order to execute the precision high-speed maneuvers that resulted in devastating direct hits on both towers of the WTC as well as the Pentagon are not exactly what could be reasonably expected from training in small time flight schools for puddle hoppers, especially considering the caliber of the losers who were enrolled to hone their ‘skills’ for the devastating kamikaze strikes. It is inconceivable that the supposed suicide pilots would be able to undertake this mission on the strength of the official story of their amateur flight school training alone. This to me is the critically contradictory piece of called evidence in the official story that should be subjected to the most intense scrutiny possible because let’s face it, this is the real world and Bruce Willis may be able to learn how to become an astronaut in order to save the planet Earth by valiantly flying off to destroy a killer asteroid in about a week’s time but movies are movies and fantasy is not reality.

The alleged hijackers were either complete phonies with well constructed histories that were immediately available for mass distribution through the media much like another patsy named Lee Harvey Oswald after another great national tragedy or their identities had been created as a cover for who they really were. Investigative journalist Michael Ruppert pegged this dead on when he commented:

“I was very put off with the utter convenience of the evidence appearing, it was like Santa Claus dropping presents from his sleigh, we’ve seen that pattern before”

The level of professional military caliber training needed to fly the hijacked airliners with the sophistication, skill and precision that they had to have been flown with in order to accomplish their mission almost certainly had to have been underwritten by a state with a highly advanced air force (of course the neo cons have done their best to inundate the public with the propaganda that it was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) , the question is which state? Considering that over three quarters of the alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia would it be too much of a leap in logic to consider that just perhaps they may have received training and practice either there or elsewhere? This is the one part of the official story that is the most malodorous and yet is easily accepted by Americans accustomed to living in a world of television and movie adventure fantasies.

It is no secret that there is a long history of complex, incestuous relationships between certain highly influential Americans, former heads of state, private equity firms such as the Carlyle Group, the disgraced financial institution BCCI, the Bin Laden family, the Bush family and the House of Saud. Forget Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 which has been systematically discredited by the corporate right wing media and the lackey DLC sell outs the real information is out there and available in several books, Craig Unger’s House of Bush House of Saud, Robert Baer’s Sleeping With the Devil and Dan Briodi’s The Iron Triangle just to name a few. Have no doubt that Saudi Arabia played a pivotal role in pulling off the attacks, the only question is as to how large of one that it was and to what extent that the prostituting of domestic interests in covert ops, munitions dealing and oil politics played.

While the official story on the suicide pilots and their death squads there are many other issues that have never been sufficiently addressed by a truly independent investigation. Never mind that the Bush administration initially did everything within it’s power to stifle attempts for any investigation into the events of 9/11 and once pressure finally forced it to cave in the resulting Kean Commission was stocked with members whose questionable ties and unwillingness to use subpoena power or to compel testimony under oath of either Bush or Cheney who not only were allowed to be interviewed together but a number of restrictions and accomodations were made in order to limit the access to information when it came to document reviews of the presidential daily briefings (PDB’s). The 9/11 Commission was a meticulously staged dog and pony show that will go down in history with the Warren Commission and any number of serious questions were never addressed or were glossed over in addition to cementing the legend of the Islamic fanatic hijackers by the Kean Commission.

Other areas that practically scream out loud for an independent investigation:

What Happened to the Intercept Procedures?- When the famed professional golfer Payne Stewart’s private plane went off course shortly after takeoff in October 1999 due to a malfunction that ultimately proved fatal for the crew and occupants it was tracked per standard operating procedure by both NORAD as well as AWACS surveillance aircraft and fighter jets were at the ready to be scrambled in the event that the runaway plane approached a heavily populated area so as to shoot it down. On the morning of 9/11/01 after it was obvious that the hijacked planes were not routinely responding why were two of them allowed to make their way to the very heart of New York City and another to penetrate the air defenses of the nation’s capital to strike the Pentagon?

Why was there no attention paid to the collapse of WTC7? – Forget about the allegations by Sheen and others that the twin towers themselves were brought down by a controlled demolition, that dog will never be allowed it’s time to hunt for the obvious reasons that they were hit by the planes and every discrepancy can be therefore explained away despite whatever scientific evidence may exist. The real focus when invoking the controlled demolition theory is the collapse of a third building, WTC 7 which was 47 stories high and did not suffer any serious fire damage in the attacks so just what the hell happened? The 9/11 Commission did not see fit to address the collapse of WTC 7 which contained materials related to SEC investigations, why was this not addressed in the official report and how many files in ongoing investigations were destroyed? What else was in that building and why is it not a part of the official story of the events of 9/11?

What About the unexplained Insider Trading? – Immediately preceding the attacks there was a highly suspicious amount of market speculation regarding put options on United and American Airlines which incidentally were the two carriers whose planes were used in carrying out the attacks. It was obvious that somebody knew that the stock prices would suffer and was seeking to benefit financially. Who?

What of the Curious Tale of Sibel Edmonds? – FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has presented a provocative story that pre-9/11 intercept translations stated that threats of imminent terrorist attacks on specific targets had existed and were ignored. She was fired and despite findings that her allegations were credible by both 60 Minutes and some members of congress was slapped with a gag order under the state secrets provision by the Ashcroft Justice Department, the courts continue to rule against Edmonds to this day. Obviously the content of the intercepts would be highly embarrassing to both the U.S. government as well as to any other countries that were involved. In an article that was published in Vanity Fair magazine Edmonds alleged that House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay’s front man may have been involved in trading influence for payments from Turkish interests. Edmonds’ story is a very important piece of the puzzle and the Bushist one party government is doing everything within its power to suppress any information from going public.

What About the Anthrax Letters? – Given that the post 9/11 Anthrax attacks were used to instill even more fear into an already terrified and confused populace why has the investigation into these letters been stonewalled? After all, given the presumption that they were an offshoot of the 9/11 attacks should these have not been given equal priority in terms of tracking down those responsible due to the deadly danger that such biological weaponry would represent to the public at large? There are many curious aspects to this side story, first and foremost amongst those who were the targets of the original Anthrax letters: Democrat Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Democratic Leader of the Senate Judiciary Committee Pat Leahy, NBC Anchor Tom Brokaw, a strange mix of Democrats and the liberal media. Had the targets been Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter and FOX News Anchor Britt Hume would this have been pursued more diligently? For awhile the John Ashcroft led Justice Department had locked in on an apparent target named Stephen Hatfield but like the wrongly accused Atlanta Olympics bomber Richard Jewell (who became a scapegoat for the domestic terrorism of the hero of the anti-abortionist reactionary right Eric Rudolph) he was the wrong one or was he another red herring? The extremely potent weapons grade Anthrax in question was of such a concentration that was only capable of being created in a military laboratory and in an interesting footnote several prominent microbiologists died under mysterious circumstances in the months immediately following the Anthrax attacks, what gives?

The USAPATRIOT Act Blitzkreig- In the immediate aftermath of the attacks a monstrous bill that rescinded many long guaranteed by the constitution civil liberties that are our birthright as Americans was the Orwellian titled blueprint for totalitarianism already in the works only awaiting an opportunity? This doctrine for a police state was foisted off on a for the most part stunned congress before they even had a chance to read it. It was rammed through nearly unanimously after being assembled in the middle of the night as many bills are by this most radical of fascist Republican rubber stamp legislatures. In this document, and the coming PATRIOT ACT II are provisions that allow for surveillance of ordinary Americans involved in suspicious or loosely defined ‘terrorist’ activities that could likely include nearly any who seek to differ from the official state line. It is the enabling document of a fascist surveillance society and has become the most controversial piece of legislation of our time. Unfortunately, our so called leadership is determined to extend the original sunset provisions indefinitely and to place an unprecedented amount of power into the hands of the President. This is a dictator’s dream! It is a certainty that 9/11 was at the very least used as an excuse to implement this most cynically named assault on civil liberties under the cover of fear and darkness.

Other matters that also were not given sufficient attention:

The United States’ long history of CIA sponsored covert operations both foreign and domestic that have sowed the seeds of discontent worldwide and generate the potential for such blowback as the 9/11 attacks.

A neoconservative think tank, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) called for an agressive, foreign policy built on the conquering of the Middle East in a paper called Rebuilding America’s Defenses and stated that absent a New Pearl Harbor type of event that it was unlikely to be able to garner public support for such a radical doctrine of preemptive war. Here is a piece on that document including links from the always wonderful Information Clearing House.

The myriad of inconsistencies regarding the strike on the Pentagon, never mind some of the theories about it being hit by a missile that could be intentional disinformation. The selection of the least important part of that structure (it was being renovated) and the fact that an incredible in fact almost impossible maneuver had to be executed by the worst of the ‘suicide pilots’ in order to descend and come in at tree top level are lost in the wash among some of the other bizarre theories about what actually happened with American Airlines Flight 77.

The alleged ringleader Mohammad Atta in addition to having an appearance that is so menacing that central casting couldn’t have produced a better terrorist exhibited very strange behavior for a devout Muslim determined on immolating himself and others for the glory of Allah. According to reports Atta had a taste for booze, pork, lap dances and prostitutes that are extremely contradictory to the philosophies of militant Islam.

There are reports that multiple military training exercises were being conducted on 9/11/01 some including simulated hijackings. War games code named Northern Vigilance, Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior as well as a FEMA exercise in New York named Tripod II all occurred on 9/11/01. Is this a sign of some official complicity or was our entire national intelligence compromised by a foreign mole who was able to ascertain the moment of highest vulnerability in order to exploit U.S. air defenses to pull off multiple terror attacks? Given the agendas of certain groups within the U.S. Government as well as the absolute failure to bring any serious investigative pressure on the Saudi Arabians this never was mentioned in the official accounts. Was there complicity or did cozy relations and lax oversight allow for foreign intelligence moles to penetrate the system to the levels where all security measures were able to be subverted in order to allow for the attacks to occur.

And there are many more inconsistencies and unanswered questions.

There are a number of websites available where people are diligently working to piece together that real story of 9/11 and the events both leading up the that morning and the radical changes in its aftermath but caveat emptor. There is not any one particular site that is the definitive authority and despite many theories and allegations none offers a complete picture but there are both commonalities and supplemental material galore with each one offering something that is unique to the others and most are worth investigating and looking for common linkages so as to allow for an inquisitive minded individual or group to analyze the data and draw their own conclusion. I am listing a few here for any who may be interested in spending a bit of time these links can be pretty comprehensive, especially the one from Cooperative Reasearch that has an abundance of links. While there is no definitive answer on what the motivations, actions and ultimate end game was intended by the perpetrators and their facilitators the one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that the ‘official story’ is far from believable and while addressing many areas in detail the numerous obfuscations, omissions, straw men and red herrings undermine it’s credibility as a believable explanation.

Cooperative Research: Paul Thompson’s outstanding 9/11 timeline, the mother of all online resources that is often cited by most other researchers for it’s invaluable inclusion of links to actual news stories on 9/11. There is also a book available that covers many key aspects although due to the limited space it doesn’t offer the comprehensive overall picture that is provided by the timeline.

Oil Empire: A great online resource with an abundance of links also a propaganda matrix regarding hoaxes and disinformation, also many downloads are accessible from this site if you drill down a bit.

911truth.org: This is a good online resource that has several good links including some stuff by David Ray Griffin who has written two very good books on the subject The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

From the Wilderness: Unfortunately a paid membership site for full access but there are lots of free articles and links available. A lot of stuff on peak oil, covert operations and geopolitics.

Unwelcome Guests: An archive of independent radio shows many of them dealing with 9/11 including twelve consecutive hours of testimony and discussion of various aspects including many excellent guests and available for free download.

This is not by any means a comprehensive list, only a few suggestions and there are many other sites out there although caution needs to be used in avoiding what may be deliberately planted disinformation and poison pills so as to ultimately discredit the 9/11 truth movement itself. Alex Jones’ Prison Planet, Propaganda Matrix and Infowars are good but unfortunately tend to spin off a bit too much into standard right wing conspiracy theories but there is a lot of good stuff including videos and articles and downloadable interviews and the anti-Bushist invective is as good as any that I have heard anywhere else including the so-called liberal/progressive talk shows by DLC shills like Ed Schultz. I personally feel that Jones’ stuff is great entertainment despite the inconsistencies and some of the whacko guests that he features at times but he has a program to run and has to target to the audience that will allow him to continue to do so. Webster Tarpley is another who has some interesting things to say and has written a book entitled 9/11 Synthetic Terror that could be a good read if the interviews that I have heard from him are any indication. While exercising caution it is also of the utmost of importance in my view to at least look at as much as possible on not only 9/11 but the entire dark undercurrent of systemic malevolence that runs beneath the surface of the world in which we live: that is if you can handle it. Perception is reality to most of us and a glimpse behind the façade of that reality offers a very disturbing picture of the way that things really work.

While I have read many books and articles regarding this subject possibly the most provocative book that I have yet run across in addressing not only 9/11 itself but also in delving into many other aspects of a long rotting and corrupt system is Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon which in addition to examining 9/11 offers a great glimpse into many of the covert actions and behind the scenes machinations of a government that has been allowed to run amok. This book is full of information some of it is really mind-blowing stuff and his hypothesis on how and why it all happened is worth your time, it also provides many jumping off points for further research. The fact that Ruppert is the one who has been so widely discredited and his book ignored by the MSM makes it all another piece of the essential collection of 9/11 research work but most importantly are the chapters dealing with the CIA, black ops, PROMIS software, the for the most part forgotten anthrax mailings and the relationship between big business and drug money. Ruppert runs the aforementioned From The Wilderness website and there are many very good links to free material but I would recommend picking up a copy of the book itself for a research tool to any of those who are really serious about looking at a variety of angles and (as much as I loathe this ridiculous corporate cliche) thinking outside of the box.

Another great resource is the excellent and acclaimed 3 part BBC Documentary by director Adam Curtis entitled The Power of Nightmares which examines the history of the neo cons as well as Al Quaeda and their ideological underpinnings will unfortunately not be seen in America due to it’s heretical premise that the so called War on Terror is essentially an utter fraud created solely for allowing politicians to utilize fear as a tool to control the masses. This is available on the internet, one of the sights were it can be downloaded is at the Internet Archive based at San Francisco’s own Presidio.

The biggest fact of all is that the ‘official’ story of 9/11 has more holes than America’s social safety net after the withering assault by the pack of jackals that are the neo-liberal Social Darwinists from Reagan to Grover Norquist over the past 25 years. The unabashed truth is that the ‘official’ story stinks to high heaven and the sooner that the American people are able to shake free of their zombie state of fear and denial we will at least stand a chance of preventing the neo con fanatics from taking what is imminently going to be their next step, pulling the trigger in cooperation from Israel to launch a ‘preemptive attack’ on Iran.

The bellicosity and propaganda have been being pumped through the media feeding tube for months now, the Republicans are in serious jeopardy of losing control of congress in November and allowing the Democrats to begin investigating the events of the past five years with subpoena power. The Bushists and their neo conservative consorts could potentially be brought up on charges of treason and could use another massive ‘terrorist’ attack to not only justify kicking off World War IV but to implement every dissent crushing provision in the USA PATRIOT Act, and don’t forget about those camps that are being built by KBR.

This story from todays Washington Post as well as this one from the London Telegraph show that the neoconservative hydra continues to lay the groundwork for the totalitarian police state that is closer than even the most cynical amongst us think to becoming a horrifying reality.

If the country is ever able to shake itself free from the tendrils of the neo con Bushist death cult a truly independent investigation is not only warranted but is a necessity to not only determine who was truly behind the events of 9/11 and to hold them accountable for their complicity but to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again. The outlandish assertion that the horrors of September 11, 2001 has wiped out over two centuries of American tradition and values is a heinous lie that needs to be debunked if we are all to ultimately emerge from this era of madness and mass manipulation by the evil doers who have been allowed to rise to the pinnacles of power and to at least temporarily seize control of our destiny in order to promote their insane ideology.