The Blood Barters

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

-Bob Dylan “Masters of War”

Somewhere within that great morass of collective national ignorance are the great stories of our untaught and largely suppressed history and the real heroes who inhabit it. They are the real heroes whose sacrifice and efforts in building a great nation and a truly compassionate and progressive society are in direct conflict that those who have mounted a decades long drive to erase their efforts and to remake America into the cruel fool’s paradise of a militaristic, Social Darwinist, monopoly capitalist spoils system where the less fortunate are subordinated to be lesser humans, servants and cannon fodder for the never ending wars on which the engine of empire is fueled in the early days of this sordid new American century.

In our past lie the keys to our future but in the revisionist reworking perpetrated by the greatest propaganda machine that the world has ever known it will never be understood by the majority who take solace in tough talking cowboys and ‘plain spoken’ men who provide easy answers for an increasingly complex and dangerous world. History is always written by the victors rather than the vanquished and in a country where the victors have been corporatists, reactionary right-wingers and the military industrial complex it is no wonder that we are spoon fed distortions, oversimplifications and outright lies as history. The indoctrination into the warrior world of laissez-faire monopoly capitalism, the worship of the state and the acceptance of the grand destiny of God’s chosen empire begins with the constant onslaught of televised imagery, the war toys and the desensitization of violence and condoning of the exploitation of others from the earliest days of cognitive capability.

Television is the greatest tool for indoctrination and central programming that ever has been invented – bar none and to the corrupt oligarchy it is gospel. The tabula rasas of impressionable children have already been subjected to consumerism, class exploitation and the acceptance of a national mythology and the requisite violence by the time they even get to the classroom where the job will be completed by a system that no longer in any way encourages critical thinking and individualism – only acquiescence, obedience and conformity are desirable…those not adhering are then culled out and will face the lifelong stigmatism that has only two destinations, death or a place in the burgeoning network of privately owned, for profit prisons – another growth industry in America that nearly rivals that of the great war machine itself.

The blame for the dark cloud of willful ignorance upon the land over the true consequences of the waging of war lies not only with the purveyors of the immaculate Hollywood fantasies that transform industrialized slaughter into grand, glamorous adventured dripping with glory and valor but also with the media in its entirety (excluding the alternative media of course which lacks the firepower to compete with the corporate goliaths) that drums out the hypnotic cadence about the glorious potential that lies in the grand adventures that war brings along with that most precious of commodities that is American exceptionalism. Add a punditry composed of psychopathic hired guns who routinely decry pacifists and war critics as traitors while omitting the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of the luminaries of the right-wing attack machine have never worn a uniform in the service to the country.

The ongoing psyops campaign is relentless and has been far too successful in gene splicing Sinclair Lewis’ domestic fascism with a dystopian vision that not even Orwell himself could have imagined. Note this story citing a defense industry think tank that distorts the looting of the treasury and racking up of unpayable war debt like a plague upon the unborn by making the argument that the ongoing occupation of civil war ravaged Iraq as a “relative bargain”. I mean give me a fucking break, this is what happens when highly compensated ‘experts’, bean counters and paid public relations flacks are retained to use a shadowy, state run media apparatus to sow disinformation and outright lies.

The story that did not merit much in the way of real coverage from the media conglomerates, their boards packed with members of interlocking directorates who also serve the energy cabal and defense contractors is the scandalous news that Halliburton will soon be fleeing the USA to relocate it’s corporate headquarters to Dubai. When the potential for something even remotely resembling oversight on Dick Cheney’s former (and some may argue current) employer suddenly becomes possible with a Democratic Congress armed with subpoenas and questions on no-bid contracts, mismanagement, war profiteering and outright looting then HAL is outta here.

That is the way that it always goes with the blood barters in the defense industrial complex to whom the cynical jingoism and invocations of patriotism don’t mean jack shit when it comes to trafficking in human misery, death and pestilence. The blood barters only see the color of money and not red, white and blue like the miserable dupes who they always so easily exploit to send their young off to die in illegal wars fought for greed and the imperialism of a rapacious strain of militarist capitalism run amok. But hey, war is all about glory, John Wayne, apple pie and the shoveling of the big lie of spreading democracy as though it were so much manure.

And leave it to the media to play down or otherwise skew the coverage of anti-war protests and the anti-war movement in general by low balling crowd counts, giving equal time to dead ender, right-wing counter protests by giving representatives (often ditto head dopes whose bellicosity and twisted world views mimic those of Michael Savage and other fascist propagandists) space in stories for their statements even if they happen to be outnumbered 100-1 in the interest of being ‘fair and balanced’ and always finding the one burned out hippie stoner in the crowd who is festooned with peace signs and carrying a guitar.

Jack Booted GOP Brownshirt Thugs?

The Washington Post’s latest bit of sleazy yellow journalism in the aftermath of yesterday’s march on the Pentagon is a perfect example of this tactic (note that while the counter demonstrators were a minority that the piece is spun decidedly to the right). Here is a portion of the story of the sort of jack-booted Republican thugs that turned out to harass the protestors think back to the Tom DeLay sponsored goon squad that terrorized Miami-Dade County in 2000 and stopped the recount – all that was missing yesterday was the Horst Wessel Song as a battle hymn (note that while the story does say that they were a minority the spin is decidedly to the right).

As war protesters marched toward Arlington Memorial Bridge en route to the Pentagon yesterday, they were flanked by long lines of military veterans and others who stood in solidarity with U.S. troops and the Bush administration’s cause in Iraq. Many booed loudly as the protesters passed, turned their backs to them or yelled, “If you don’t like America, get out!”

Several thousand vets, some of whom came by bus from New Jersey, car caravans from California or flights from Seattle or Michigan, lined the route from the bridge and down 23rd Street, waving signs such as “War There Or War Here.” Their lines snaked around the corner and down several blocks of Constitution Avenue in what organizers called the largest gathering of pro-administration counter-demonstrators since the war began four years ago.

The vets turned both sides of Constitution into a bitter, charged gantlet for the war protesters. “Jihadists!” some vets screamed. “You’re brain-dead!” Others chanted, “Workers World traitors must hang!” — a reference to the Communist newspaper. Some broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner” as war protesters sought to hand out pamphlets.

“Bunch of hooligans in motorcycle jackets!” one war protester shot back.

The large turnout surprised even some counter-demonstrators. Polls show public opinion turning against the war in Iraq, and the November election was widely seen as a repudiation of the administration’s policy.

So well-coordinated has the pro-war media become in the aftermath of Vietnam and the placement of right-wing operatives in every news outlet in America to parrot think tank created, focus group tested messages that reduce the entire anti-war movement (even though it happens to be a veritable melting pot of every demographic segment of America) into the same cartoon figures and caricatures that have been used to deviously and often subconsciously manipulate mass opinion ever since the military industrial complex and the corrupt system upon which it depends upon was deal that very serious one two punch of the fall of Saigon and the outing of Richard M. Nixon as a malevolent criminal. Nixon alas was only a symptom of a virulent stain of neo-fascism that while having long existed in this country has grown increasingly powerful in an inverse relationship to the decreasing attention spans and chronic intellectual shortcomings of the pubic at large. In reference to the media I love this line from Charley Reese (a small part of a larger overall condemnation of power from his latest column that I am stealing a portion of for my own purposes) that: … just remember that money buys whores, and whores service their customers.



Such is the culture of the Bushreich, where the sanitized, misleading and dishonest portrayal of American virtues and our divine moral superiority are exalted and those heroes from the past who spoke out have been effectively lost in a time warp. There is one great voice that does not turn up in textbooks and his message was a condemnation of the callousness of the blood barters and his voice was one that spoke from experience. He is the highly decorated (two medals of honor) former USMC General Smedley Darlington Butler.

General Butler was one of the earliest critics of American intervention and the plundering of foreign countries for the benefit of Wall Street looters who were all too glad to trade lives for profit. Butler wrote the scathing War Is A Racket that was a no-holds barred indictment of the early military-industrial complex. Butler told it like it was, not a convenient thing for the revisionist historians who write the textbooks to indoctrinate the good little Americans in the religion of the always great, always righteous and blessed land of plenty.

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”

“During those years, I had as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best that he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Wall Street has always had a vested interest in dabbling in war and death, despite all of the rah- rah red meat exhortations of patriotism or more appropriately nationalism that serve to keep the masses energized those who operate behind the scenes only real loyalty is to wealth and in maintaining the interests of the elite – those who will never lose sons or daughters in any of the hellish wars that are waged primarily for their benefit. A connection that the overwhelming majority of the rest of the peasants will never be able to make due to an incessant barrage of propaganda and corporate brainwashing via the electronic crackpipe to keep the rabble in line.

I recently had an opportunity to catch Eugene Jarecki’s movie Why We Fight that offers a very serious and dare I say bi-partisan look into the corruption of the military industrial complex and the dangers that it poses to American values. President Eisenhower warned of this in his farewell address over four decades ago but it went unheeded and the ongoing wars, military actions, occupations, weapons sales to other countries that have become a constant of American life ever since are a growing blight on our nation’s soul.

The best thing about Why We Fight is that it is immune to the sort of Rovian swift boating that followed in the aftermath of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that had the weak kneed sissies on the DLC controlled ‘opposition party’ running for cover. The film features a cross section of neocon ideologues, politos and serious analysts including John McCain, Chalmers Johnson, Gore Vidal, Gwynne Dyer, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Karen Kwiatkowski among others and is inclusive to viewpoints from both sides of the ideological spectrum. This movie is not to be taken lightly and try as they may to discredit it the Republican slime machine will not be able to make hay so easily as it was when turning Moore into a caricature (a puppet terrorist in the ultra-sardonic and overly scatological Team America: World Police) or for the Democrats to find a convenient scapegoat for their fecklessness and inability to win elections. This is a powerful, truthful and enduring film that asks serious questions that the used car salesmen and charlatans that are our ‘elected’ representatives are not going to want to answer.

Why We Fight zeroes in on the bastard relationship between Dick Cheney and Halliburton – we essentially have a government contractor as Vice President, in the movie he is referred to as a “rolodex man” Outsourcing of military duties such as cooking, cleaning etc are outsourced for profit to private contractors like Halliburton. This is one of the fundamental ways in which the military had changed under the leadership of corrupt men like Cheney. When I did my time about a quarter of a century ago we had our own enlisted men performing the often dehumanizing duties like cleaning the ‘shitters’, cooking and working in support positions such as personnel and logistics.

This use of highly paid ‘contractors’ is a criminal scam designed to bilk the taxpayers into funneling more money to the parasitical firms in Cheney’s rolodex. Now all of these functions are spun off to contractors who then bilk the American taxpayers for billions in order to perform the same functions that our servicemen and women used to do. Talk about a royal scam, this is it. The disturbing rise of private mercenaries is also quite troubling, especially at a time when our own military is being destroyed and I’m sure that I’m not the only one in America questioning the true intent of the Cheney-neocons and unaccountable private armies for hire as provided by firms like Blackwater but that is a story for another time.

The movie is even more important today as the neocon madness is about to be escalated with an impending attack on Iran that is inevitable given the goading by Israeli hard-liners meddling with the U.S. political appartus. This great column by Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo along with it’s links is well worth your time in reading if only to see the extent of the danger of having a foreign government (and an extremist one at that) in the driver’s seat of the Rapture bus. Absent some very serious and immediate action by Congress to begin to reign in the monsters that have run amok then we are all in for some seriously troubling times with wars without end, continuing domestic unrest as the population is divided and pitted against one another as a diversion and the dead bodies on America’s tab piling as fast as the blood barter’s ill gotten gains. As Plato once famously stated: “Only the dead have seen the end of the war” and you can bet the house that there will be plenty of them as long as their deaths can be turned into another revenue stream.

Fetus Wars

An ugly intramural skirmish has broken out amongst the professional haters of the extremist ‘Christian’ right. The reactionary elements that have held sway over the blistering agenda of bigotry and hatred through the manipulation of phony moral issues like gay marriage and abortion are apoplectic that they are losing members of the flock to those who preach more rational, more traditional Christian values rather than the apostasy of the generations of strip mall and mega church fundies weaned on the ultra-violent Left Behind pulp fiction novels of Timothy LaHaye and their apocalyptic dementia that has transformed Jesus Christ into some sort of malevolent avenger intent at returning to earth to murder millions for the glory of the Rapture pimps.

Now for the first time being challenged in the ideological arena by Christians with true humanitarian values more in line with the prince of peace rather than the god of war the hucksters, hate mongers and goats among sheep are striking out. The usual fifth columnist, anti-American activist suspects including James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, Donald Wildmon and Paul Weyrich recenty blasted National Association of Evangelicals director Rev. Richard Cizik in a letter reeking of brimstone for daring to suggest that taking a stand against global warming as a moral issue that –GASP – was destroying God’s earth.

The American mullahs called for Cizik’s head on a platter for daring to deviate from the more politically successful homosexual witch hunts and that wonderful 3 card monte scam that is the Orwellian named pro-life movement. God forbid that the hidden agenda of the well connected right-wing lynch mob’s true agenda is exposed which is evident by Tony Perkins’ comments: We’re saying what is being done here,” Mr. Perkins said, “is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders.” Hitler hated liberals too, and in taking a look back at history homosexuals were only an appetizer for the Third Reich’s voracious appetite for human suffering…but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The entire abortion farce is as essential a lure to victims as is candy to a schoolyard pedophile when it comes to the snake oil salesmen of the Religious Right. The animosity that fuels the movement is largely fueled by a highly organized, well-funded activist machine that uses the power of the so-called pro life crusade to tap into the inner anger of the economically disenfranchised who have been victimized by the ravages of years of Reaganaut greedheads conducting a take no prisoners looting spree and a savage war on the middle and lower classes.

This raw anger is then harnessed by opportunistic, power mad televangelists and assorted other shamans and is channeled into a vicious backlash against the perceived evils of liberalism and world that they blame for all of their misfortune and the demonizing of women’s rights that is represented by Roe V. Wade is an opportune and fat target. For abortion is a super charged emotional issue that can be cloaked in Manichean terms by propagandists and right-wing wordsmiths and it is especially successful in pandering to those who are the most ignorant and has spread like mutant kudzu through the red states in peckerwood nation.

Thomas Frank’s excellent book What’s The Matter With Kansas takes a hard look at the 1990’s rise of religious extremism on the basis of using abortion as a war cry against modern progressive society. Frank analyzes the nation’s hard rightward lurch by looking at that most mythical bastion of Americana that is the state of Kansas. Hell, what could be more reminiscent of the baseball, hotdogs, mom and apple pie version of that great white picket fence land of yore, Oz and Bob Dole than the crappy Midwestern state that has long been the most agonizing place that motorists have had to drive through to get to someplace else. Militant anti-reproductive rights vampire Randall Terry and Operation Rescue had made similar connections between Kansas and the American psyche and descended like a plague of locusts on Wichita for massive rallies and civil disobedience during the so-called ‘Summer of Mercy’ back in 1991 that was Mecca for the rubber fetus crowd – Pat Robertson, James Dobson and others gave fire and brimstone speechs at a Nuremberg style rally in Cessna Stadium (home of the Wichita State Shockers) to a fired up mob of culture warriors. Any resemblance between the huge rally and footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will is purely coincidental.

As is evident from Newton McPherson Gingrich’s latching onto the Religous Right’s agenda like a barnacle on the bottom of a garbage scow it is a must for every neo-fascist political prick with a disdain for constitutional democracy and delusions of grandeur to curry favor with the American Taliban. Aspiring nominee and shameless phony Mitt Romney has been spending a fortune sucking up to the anti-democratic tendencies of the Religious Right extremists and Jerry Falwell is going to have to undergo surgery to remove Manchurian McCain’s nose from where it has been permanently imbedded between the fleshy cheeks of his big fat ass.

Then there is the savage anti-gay onslaught that is encouraged at every step by demagogues who won’t be happy until they incite pogroms and the streets are running red with blood. This has proven to be a big winner as a red meat issue to the pathetic losers looking for scapegoats for their own failed lives and has irresistible allure to the Republican party apratchik as well as their God squad Gauleiters. Even nice guy NFL Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy’s luminous halo is being drawn over to the dark side and coming to resemble the light of the fires of hatred and intolerance rather than the beacon of Christlike compassion that the media would have you believe. The first black coach to win a Super Bowl is essentially spitting on the hard fought sacrifices by Civil Rights activists who rebelled against bigotry and won by making an appearance in front of a militant anti-gay group with an affiliation to Christian jihadist James Dobson’s Focus On Family. Maybe he and Ann Coulter can lead the choir in an inspiring rendition of Burn the Faggots at The Stake!

When defending Dungy’s visit to the temple of hate with a lame press release “Coach Dungy’s feelings on the importance of marriage and family are well known” the Colts themselves are as guilty of hypocrisy and endorsing these theocratic fascist groups through their lack of action. If there is a time when the NFL could and should make a serious example that they condemn discrimination of all sort then Dungy and the Colts should be slapped with a serious penalty – imagine the uproar if a white coach made a guest appearance at a Ku Klux Klan or similar white supremacist gathering.

I never did get a good handle on all of this cloaking of raw bigotry, vicious scapegoating and dehumanization in the language of “pro-family” and “pro-marriage”. If the Religious Right really gave a rat’s ass about family they would not be serving as brownshirts for a rapacious monopoly capitalist system that leaves families in disarray and children hungry, uninsured and entrapped in a desperation that will last a lifetime. Increasing poverty and hopelessness it seems is the desired result of the theocratic fascist movement which as Chris Hedges put it in his great American Fascists: The Christian Right And The War On America is necessary to create a “culture of despair” that makes recruitment to this most anti-democratic of movements much easier for the reptillian Elmer Gantry style preachers looking to build the strength of their local bunds.

The pro-marriage angle is just more of the same horseshit, economic problems are among the top contributors to stress on relationships and the Calvinistic attitude towards piling up Earthly rewards as a show of God’s favoritism is anathema to Christ’s work to minister to the poor, the sick and the downtrodden. When was the last time that Jerry Falwell or any of the maggots in the mix ever even pretended to give a tin shit about the plight of America’s homeless?

There is also nothing about divorce in the gospels of the hate mongers, it would seem to me that any movement that is truly interested in propping up the institution of marriage would look into strengthening the bonds of matrimony by offering financial counseling, community outreach and sermons and lessons accentuating the positive virtues of building a strong family structure by emphasizing the sacred vows. Of course such a focus would strongly condemn adultery, the practice of which the last time that I looked was actually one of the motherfucking Ten Commandments! This would of course be inconvenient for the serial philanderers amongst the flock including the politicians and the mega-church ringmasters. Hell, maybe a bit more focus on propping up the family rather than knee jerk phantom issues could even prevented a fine Christian man like Pastor Ted Haggard from wandering northward in search of anal sex and crystal meth.

The ugly truth is that the entire pro-family/marriage movement is as big a fraud as the culture of life that cares so much for it that it condones and does so with smugness and self-righteous glee at the wanton slaughter of brown skinned, Muslim children on the front lines of the battle of Armageddon. Save the fetus, slay the child – double bonus points said child happens to be incinerated in a blaze of napalm or white phosphorous.

It’s all nothing more of the same standard slick marketing, chicanery and fraud that has been so perfected by McCarthyist Republican trolls over the past half-century or so. It is all about power, and it is all about hate and anybody who dares to tell you anything else is pissing on your leg and telling you that it’s raining. In American Fascists Hedges often refers to his mentor Dr. James Luther Adams who had witnessed first hand the rise of the Nazis while in Germany in the 1930’s:

Adams, finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfield. Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of gay and lesbian Germans of their civil rights was largely cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimized tactics, outside the law that would soon be employed against others. Adams said that homosexuals would be the first “social deviants” singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.

 I have always strongly suspected that George W. Bush was not really the one to be afraid of, that he was only a willing dupe who would allow the constitution to be gutted, torture to be codified, a police state infrastructure put into place and the ground sown for a true tyranny as vile and destructive as any since Hitler’s Reich.

This much has happened already and the kingmakers are still conducting auditions for the chosen one who will be the future Führer of the Fetus Wars and finish the job of swapping out the Constitution for the Malleus Maleficarum.

By Ed Encho

Another Day In Der Heimat: Captain America Snuffed

In a star spangled bummer Marvel comic book icon Captain America, a stalwart of good ole fashioned head smashing patriotism since the days when he opened a can of whip ass on Nazis, the Red Skull and Hitler himself is reputedly being killed off in a perfect example of how art so often imitates life here in Der Heimat. Times change, it was about a year ago that DC comics rolled out their grand red meat project Holy Terror Batman pitting Batman against none other than the nefarious Osama Bin Laden – the caped crusader was likely summoned by George W. Bush himself by a secretive bat signal beamed out from the White House roof since the ‘war president’ had failed to smoke him out as promised and who better to call in than millionaire Republican donor Bruce Wayne’s alter ego. But those were the days when 9/11 was still the most ass kicking club in the bag for Rove and the fear-mongering Republican neo-fascist swine and national disillusionment hadn’t turned into festering outrage over the mounting body count in Iraq, the despicable treatment of the politically inconvenient wounded as exposed by the great recent Washington Post stories on Walter Reed Hospital (grumpy old GOP lackey Bob Dole has just been summoned to the rescue in order to save face for the king)….and before the neocons were cutting deals with Bin Laden’s buddies to use as proxies against Iran but more on that later. Cap’s reported demise is a perfect metaphor for these sick times in this sorry land of the doomed, the apathetic, the greed heads and the terminally fucked. But I digress…

It sure as shit isn’t a perfect world like the one in which comic book heroes roam, dispense frontier justice and good and evil are strictly defined – that much we know but would it really take one to look at the long awaited day of reckoning for I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and the office of the treasonous Vice President as a damned good start? Now that Cheney’s lackey Scooter has been convicted for perjury and obstruction for his role in the extremely convoluted process of leaking CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to a myriad of media elitists in a setup full of blinds, double-blinds, cutouts and smokescreens that would put Tom Clancy, John le Carré and Robert Ludlum to shame it would be nice if the establishment press would do it’s fucking job for once and use yesterday’s verdict as a jumping off point for a flurry of investigations that could for once return some measure of dignity to a once honorable profession long ago taken over by self-interested, career oriented whores, shills and flacks for the metastasizing social cancer of zero sum corporatism and the ruling oligarchy.

As Libby juror Denis Collins let loose in yesterday’s prominent interviews Scooter was the “fall guy” (or more appropriately put a firewall to Cheney and the neocons) for a much bigger, far more sinister network operating to undermine American security, cut deals with foreign governments hostile to American interests and implement a fascist police state on the back of a bogus, never ending war on terror. Collins stated that which was so painfully obvious when he was quoted as saying:

“It was said a number of times, ‘What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s Rove … where are these other guys?”This could be a perfect opportunity to go straight for the throat of the fascist monster that has been gnawing away at American values since long before the passel of utopian parasites jumped aboard their addle brained, brand name host George W. Bush.

Congress should immediately announce hearings (rumors are already flying to that effect) into the real extent of the neocon lies that have mired this country in the life-sucking, blood soaked quagmire that is Iraq. Cheney should be ousted, Addington should be ousted, Rove could be frogmarched out in handcuffs and slimy Iran Contra pricks like Elliot Abrams who resurfaced like a colossal shit sucking leech in this criminal administration could finally be held accountable. They would have to build an entire new wing at Gitmo to house all of the felons and traitors who could be exposed. That roiling spring of filth The American Enterprise Institute could be investigated and the dual-loyalist agents of a foreign government exposed as the disloyal, traitors that they always have been. Maybe it is too much to hope for but wouldn’t it be nice to see the mainstream media focusing on the actions of PNAC instead of the headline grabbing exploits of Brittney Spears and her shaved dome…what the fuck’s the difference anyway to the moron vassals and serfs in the rotting empire when it comes to their next hit off of the electronic crackpipe?

The Libby verdict could also serve to expose the Iran Contra style Secret Government that has long since operated in the shadows and which is anathema to the very concept of America. The restoration of the House of Clinton could be prevented, the imminent rise of Jeb Bush to the presidency could be stopped dead in it’s tracks as both crime families have links to the clandestine networks that subvert congress, form bastard alliances with foreign governments, run drugs and guns and carry out brutal search and destroy campaigns against ‘leftists’ who stand in the way of a rapacious global capitalism that rapes, pillages and destroys in the name of imperialism, crusade and avarice.

It’s a veritable Pandora’s Box of nightmares for the oligarchy – if it is opened that is and that is against the odds given the current level of systemic corruption that infects both the government and the major media outlets in the Heimat as it could blow the lid off of the entire rigged game and peel back the facade of legitimacy that is used to conceal the duplicity of some of America’s so-called allies. Was the Plame outing and the subsequent shutdown of the WMD intelligence brass plate shop Brewster Jennings only a simple act of revenge against a war critic or was it a part of something far darker? Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan brought this up on Tuesday’s Scarborough Country that the real story is actually the forged Niger documents themselves and exactly what purpose did that clumsy act of espionage serve? Here is the transcript:

SCARBOROUGH: … there are people on both sides that are afraid to open up this can of worms, afraid to investigate what Libby did, what Cheney did, what Rove did, what the president did because it will reflect badly on everybody up there.

BUCHANAN: It will reflect badly on those who gave those guys a blank check. But one question which is really relevant, Joe. Why did Cheney ask the CIA to look into Niger? Because they had a report out of Italy, forged documents saying the Iraqis were going for yellowcake, which meant they‘re working on a nuclear program, which would frighten every American into going to war. Who forged those documents? Why don‘t we have the answer to that? Some foreign agents or foreign intelligence agents forged those things to get us into war with another country. That‘s what I want to know, not that Scooter Libby foolishly went up there and lied in his teeth.

Craig Unger did a good piece on this very question in Vanity Fair that examined the documents last year called The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed. He also recently wrote another very revealing piece on the hidden agendas of the neocon madmen and the Israeli hard liner connection to the planned and now ready to rip attack on Iran that will kick off World War III called From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq from which I will offer up a few relevant paragraphs below:

The neoconservatives have had Iran in their sights for more than a decade. On July 8, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s newly elected prime minister and the leader of its right-wing Likud Party, paid a visit to the neoconservative luminary Richard Perle in Washington, D.C. The subject of their meeting was a policy paper that Perle and other analysts had written for an Israeli-American think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic Political Studies. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the paper contained the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a new Middle East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the paper asserted, Israel and the U.S. could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East.

“It was the beginning of thought,” says Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American policy expert, who co-signed the paper with her husband, David Wurmser, now a top Middle East adviser to Dick Cheney. Other signers included Perle and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy during George W. Bush’s first term. “It was the seeds of a new vision.”

Netanyahu certainly seemed to think so. Two days after meeting with Perle, the prime minister addressed a joint session of Congress with a speech that borrowed from “A Clean Break.” He called for the “democratization” of terrorist states in the Middle East and warned that peaceful means might not be sufficient. War might be unavoidable.

Netanyahu also made one significant addition to “A Clean Break.” The paper’s authors were concerned primarily with Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but Netanyahu saw a greater threat elsewhere. “The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran,” he said.

Ten years later, “A Clean Break” looks like nothing less than a playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many of the initiatives outlined in the paper have been implemented—removing Saddam from power, setting aside the “land for peace” formula to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon—all with disastrous results.

 The usual defenders of the Bushreich media mockingbirds in the Money Changer’s Gospel (The Wall Street Journal) and the Neo Con Gazette (National Review) are already in full Pardon Scooter mode with Rupert Murdoch’s shitrag New York Post bringing up the rear and the loose cannon on deck that is the boorish Chris ‘Pinky’ Matthews is featuring another juror by the name of Ann Redington who is sympathetic to Libby and imploring Bush to pardon the little traitor – war is good for GE and cleaning the neocon house isn’t conducive to keeping the stock prices up, especially with a market that is going schizo. A presidential pardon would be right in line for a piece of shit like Scooter, Daddy Bush and Bill Clinton have already set the precedent on granting amnesty to global criminals like Iran Contra operators Caspar Weinberger, Robert McFarlane and Eliott Abrams, terrorists like Orlando Bosch and tax cheating double agents of foreign governments and manipulators of global capital and commodities like the ultra-sleazy scoundrel Marc Rich – in an interesting bit of trivia Scooter Libby was Rich’s lawyer – such are the nature of the incestuous relationships within the oligarchy.

Sleeping With The Devil: Speaking of incestuous and dangerous relationships with allies of dubious intent Seymour Hersh’s latest bombshell in the New Yorker entitled The Redirection is an absolute must read for a look at the sheer audacity of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil and the neocon operators who treat foreign policy as though it were a game of Risk. According to Hersh’s piece the cloak and dagger types in the neocon mafia are funneling money to militant jihadist groups with sympathies towards Al-Qaeda and the sectarian violence that is killing and maiming American soldiers by the day and that sleazy little rat fucker Prince Bandar (aka Bandar Bush is back as a player). The House of Saud, Bandar and Israeli hard-liners are now working in concert with Cheney’s goon squads and other Sunni regimes to foment anti-Shiite violence in the region. American Enterprise Institute fellow and dual loyalist thug Michael Ledeen has a term for such Iran-Contra style subterfuge: Creative Destruction. Here is a sampling of the article:

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”)

The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.

The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy—it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.”

“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.” Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq,” he said. “It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.”


AND


The Administration’s effort to diminish Iranian authority in the Middle East has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia and on Prince Bandar, the Saudi national-security adviser. Bandar served as the Ambassador to the United States for twenty-two years, until 2005, and has maintained a friendship with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. In his new post, he continues to meet privately with them. Senior White House officials have made several visits to Saudi Arabia recently, some of them not disclosed.

Last November, Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a surprise meeting with King Abdullah and Bandar. The Times reported that the King warned Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back its fellow-Sunnis in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw. A European intelligence official told me that the meeting also focussed on more general Saudi fears about “the rise of the Shiites.” In response, “The Saudis are starting to use their leverage—money.”

In a royal family rife with competition, Bandar has, over the years, built a power base that relies largely on his close relationship with the U.S., which is crucial to the Saudis. Bandar was succeeded as Ambassador by Prince Turki al-Faisal; Turki resigned after eighteen months and was replaced by Adel A. al-Jubeir, a bureaucrat who has worked with Bandar. A former Saudi diplomat told me that during Turki’s tenure he became aware of private meetings involving Bandar and senior White House officials, including Cheney and Abrams.

 AND

 The Saudi said that, in his country’s view, it was taking a political risk by joining the U.S. in challenging Iran: Bandar is already seen in the Arab world as being too close to the Bush Administration. “We have two nightmares,” the former diplomat told me. “For Iran to acquire the bomb and for the United States to attack Iran. I’d rather the Israelis bomb the Iranians, so we can blame them. If America does it, we will be blamed.”

Interviews with Hersh about the explosive revelations of The Redirection are all over the internet including at Democracy Now and Antiwar.com just to name a few – if you don’t have time to read the piece at least download the programs and listen to them.

This could get really ugly very, very quickly unless the brakes are applied to the neocon express that is careening towards Armageddon much to the delight of the royal order of the rubber fetus in the rapture death cult. Outing the entire global conspiracy could be huge if the mainstream media finally has been shamed into doing it’s fucking job – bigger than diapered astronauts, Brittney, Anna Nicole or even the holiest of holies that is the latest daily pedophile story.

It is highly unlikely that any of this will be afforded the proper scrutiny by the media and the political hacks that is essential to maintain a functional democracy but with Captain America dead and America itself not far behind even the most cynical amongst us have to find something to hope for.

by Ed Encho

Dems Play Croquet While Iraq Burns

“Off With Their Heads!”

-The Red Queen

Vacation’s over and I’m back with a vengeance! While it is certainly nice that Iran has not yet been attacked the shoddily constructed house of cards that is Wall Street and the global economy is in trouble, the stock market is having a panic attack, gas prices have gone up by nearly forty fucking cents a gallon in the last goddamned week here in South Central Florida and the horrifying ongoing fascination over that disgusting pig Anna Nicole Smith’s sordid and trashy existence is coming to an end leaving the mass media maggots to find another carcass to feast upon now that her body has been planted.

While bombs the haven’t been dropped on Tehran the big stink bomb that is the new and as some would like you to believe improved version of the Democratic party is ticking ready to detonate and spray a deluge of the same foul shit mist that it has basked in ever since the DLC corporatists latched onto the coattails of Saint Ronnie Reagan for a ride on the gravy train of Gordon Gekko style monoply capitalism.

The feckless bunch from the jackass party just can’t seem to get a grip. The pathetic excuse for an opposition party is so terrified of the stigma of the right-wing manufactured cartoon stereotypes of their past (hippies, Vietnam era peaceniks and college protestors, civil rights marches and most importantly of all principle) that they have gone to the extent of cutting off their noses to spite their faces by junking the legacy of their true greats like Roosevelt and Kennedy. Hell, they have even let that conniving little shit George W. Bush steal Harry Truman from them!

Now after having won both houses of Congress by riding a wave of anti-war sentiment the fumbling, stumbling, bumbling Democrats have chosen to punt, dithering away precious time with ridiculous non-binding resolutions and dog and pony shows like the 100 hour agenda. At this rate it won’t be long until minority status beckons again – really though, what’s the difference? The Dems are still played like a Stradivarius by Karl Rove and generally bullied by Republicans who are such masters of hypocrisy that they can get away with filibustering with aplomb only months after threatening to torpedo the procedure. . What is the difference between now and when DeLay and Frist were running the Capitol Hill con game??

Spineless, morally vacant ass clown Democrats refuse to exercise their constitutional obligations and control of ‘the purse’ by cutting off war funding to end the debacle that they were complicit in creating through their complete roll over before giving the war party a blank check in the first place. Either they are afraid of being called on the carpet by such brave patriots who have so well served their country like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity or the fear of upsetting the AIPAC apple cart and disrupting the ample flow of easy campaign cash from “The New York money people” as Wesley Clark called the high rolling Zionists who are down with the regional brutality espoused by Bibi Netanyahu, Likudnik hard liners, their winged monkeys on the Christian right and the ideologue neocon moles within the U.S. policy making apparatus. Carl Levin is even calling for action against Syria for God’s sake, when will this long national nightmare end? The Democratic party establishment has only served to use the recent elections to further reinforce the Praetorian guard around the emperor and in order for any real change as well as a return to sanity they too must be taken out come November 2008 and replaced by progressive or third party candidates who are not slaves and lackeys to the cartels of powerful anti-American, anti-labor, pro-war special interest groups. The dog and pony shows and half measures in the face of the destruction of America from within would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high and we all deserve better than DLC frauds dicking around to protect their stake in the rigged game while the streets in Baghdad run red with blood and the streets of America are increasingly filled with those who have been chewed up and spat out by the compassionate conservatives.

So thoroughly gutless are the Democrats, so timorous and so browbeaten into being called out for their lack of ‘patriotism’ for something like the millionth time that the majority party won’t even block funding for a looming attack on Iran. Once the missiles and bombs start to fly we will be Germany invading Poland, the bad guys, the aggressors, the new Nazis. History will not be kind to us nor should it be. But with our national reputation already long since flushed down the toilet by a neo-fascist junta that is assisted in destroying this country from within by the sad shell of what was once a party of the people that fears stealing the limelight from their thin-skinned queen in waiting more than the historical infamy of being accessories to the ruination of America and the slaughter and pestilence of the coming World War.

But with our reputation already long since flushed down the toilet by a feckless opposition party that fears stealing the limelight from their thin-skinned queen in waiting more than the historical infamy of being accessories to the ruination of America what’s a few trillion more dollars and hundreds of thousands of more bodies. Hell, by the time that this Vichy bunch gets done they can stack the dead all the way up to fucking Jesus.

The sad reality is that a one-time acquaintance of mine who happened to be a rabid Marxist is right, both parties are just corrupt factions of a rotting capitalist system, one is only more outright fascist than the other which is only better at pretending not to be killers. The efforts made by the corporatist wing of the Democrat party to go out of their way to withhold support from anti-war, progressive candidates in the run up to the November elections prevented an enormous landslide and kept out reformers intent on taking on the rigged game of a system itself.

The Republican slime machine is churning again while the defenseless Dems are stuck in neutral as a result of their deferential treatment to Hillary, AIPAC, Wall Street, corporate America and the defense/surveillance industrial complex. Uber-cunt Ann Coulter has emerged from her spider hole of shame after last year’s embarrassing plagiarism incident to call John Edwards a “faggot” at the grand fascist fiesta that is formally known as the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where the movers and shakers of the reactionary filth that is the neoconservative movement rub elbows and plot the further destruction of all that is decent and moral.

Such despicable comments by one of more prominent members of the stable of neo-Nazi mouthpieces of course gets no traction in the pocket media that has long held double standards when it comes to neo-fascist hate speech. I am always amused at Man Coulter’s playing of the homosexual card (previously invoked by the bitch goddess to slime the Clintons and Al Gore) because if person’s sexuality could be called into question it would be that of a horse-faced, forty something woman whose bread and butter is to portray herself as macho and whose whiplike tongue could dance on a G-Spot like an angel on the head of a pin. The Republicans always love to cast the first stone despite being a haven for pathological perverts, pedophiles, garden veriety queers and incorrigible sodomites whose numbers are legion and I don’t have the two days to devote to this post to list them all here. As with Hitler’s brownshirts there is some sort of alluring pull to the GOP that makes it a magnet for degenerate cocksuckers (and closet dykes for that matter), while I am not a psychologist there certainly seems to be a similarity between the deep seated needs by extreme right-wingers to dominate and humiliate, much like the uncontrollable urges of the vilest of pederasts.

Then there was Friday’s great story of the hidden college thesis of the Queen of Hearts herself that broke on MSNBC just as Ms. Rodham was getting her panties unknotted over the spot on comments of David Geffen. So utterly silly is the Hillary thesis story that it is of the utmost in fucking hilarity, only the complete imbeciles in the Bushist flock could possibly believe that Mrs. Rodham-Clinton is some raving leftist radical rather than an overly ambitious former Wal-Mart board member drunk on raw hubris and the opportunity to seize the brass ring where she can preside over the ongoing strip mining of the lives of the have-nots with the misfortune to have ended up on the bad end of globalization. Unfortunately this means any of those who do not belong to the rapacious cult of vampires of the global elite who the Clintons and the Bushes are servants of.

The ONLY reason why I absolutely know that the Saul Alinsky connection isn’t a plant by the Clintonistas seeking to burnish her so called liberal roots with the more left-wing elements of the party base is the shameless insertion of a standard smearing of Hillary along some lines from the dearly departed reich-winger Barbara Olson that would allow the Rovian propagandists to once again slyly milk the 9/11 fear factor. The fact that the reactionary bitch perished in a blaze of glory on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11/01 (therefore making the piece immune from criticism lest the memory of Babs be tarnished by any rebuttal) is a poison pill that even Herr Goebbels himself would be proud of but nothing ever changes with the Republican noise machine and there are always plenty of ignoramuses who hungrily lap up their bullshit. I do find the death of Olson to be one of lifes bitter ironies in that she was ultimately a victim of the anger, the futility and the relentless hatred of America that the impoverishment and subjugation of entire populations by the fascist right-wing Social Darwinist, greedheaded agenda that she so championed as a GOP shill were so very instrumental in creating. Just my two cents but it would be a very good thing for world peace and social justice if many thousands of the Barbara Olsons of this world including Ann Coulter would meet with a similar demise…..poetic justice I guess or karma or just a good ole helping of what fucking comes around fucking goes around!

Ahhh….it’s good to be back, so much to do so little time.

EE