Tea Norwegian Style: Will Anti-Muslim Crusade Bring Blood to America For 2012?

 

“This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.”

– Neocon propagandist Jennifer Rubin

Nordic avenger Anders Breivik, in executing his murderous attacks last Friday in Oslo has forever had his ticked punched as a heroic figure to the extreme right-wingers of the same sort that have eaten America from within with their virulent hatred. Breivik or Anders Behring Breivik in sticking with the favored propaganda technique of the thoroughly rotten media who since the days of Lee Harvey Oswald always assign all three names to political murderers, a blond-haired blue-eyed fanatic was a Christian who loved guns, hated Muslims and “cultural Marxists” slaughtered 76 people in a rampage that rocked Norway. The majority of Breivik’s victims were gunned down at a government youth camp on Utoeya Island where the shooter, dressed as a policeman conjured up dark European memories of the Waffen SS as he carried out his executions in an icily detached militaristic manner. Using high-capacity magazines purchased from the U.S., the terrorist stalked and taunted his victims, laughing as he ended their lives in a hail of bullets and vengeful fury.  Breivik brought to mind notorious American terrorist Timothy McVeigh when he built a massive bomb, using up to six tons of fertilizer to detonate in front of government offices near the Parliament building. Fortunately for Norway, the fertilizer bomb was not as devastating as the one that took down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995 or the carnage and body count would have been far worse. Breivik, like McVeigh is a Christian and this fact is downplayed in the American media in the standard cynical attempt to not have the powerful “terrorist” label applied to a non-Muslim.

Attributed to Breivik was a manifesto that clocked in at an Ayn Randian 1,500 or so pages entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence in which the shooter railed against Muslims, Marxists and inclusive multi-culturalism which he blamed for the ruination of Europe. Sound familiar? Breivik’s misinformed, racist rage is embodied in America’s Tea Party, a post-Bush rebranding of the Republican dead-ender base, largely made up of Evangelical Christians, Breivik would have been right at home within their ranks. His “manifesto” was chock a block full of standard right-wing boilerplate, much of it plagiarized from the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and several American neoconservative anti-Muslim hate merchants the likes of David Horowitz, a diabolical propagandist who has been instrumental in the long-running Naziesque persecution of university and college professors and Robert Spencer, a Mephistophelean self-proclaimed expert on Islamic terrorism. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com nailed Breivik and his domestic ideological allies dead on in his recent piece entitled The Crusader:

It had to happen: the rise of a “counter-jihadist” terrorist outfit that is the mirror image of al-Qaeda. That it first arose in Norway, rather than, say, in the US, is just a coincidence, although I’m sure Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Norwegian mass murder in Utoya, has his American collaborators, as he claimed in his manifesto, “2083: A Declaration of European Independence,” [.pdf] and an accompanying video. Indeed, a good many of the sources he cites in “2083″ – which is basically a compendium of previously published works by others – are American. Material from David Horowitz’s website, Frontpagemag.com, figures prominently, along with articles taken verbatim from the Horowitz-affiliated “Jihad Watch,” run by professional hater and make-believe “scholar” Robert Spencer.

Breivik’s “book” is a mishmash, half diary of his careful preparations for the attack thrown together with anti-Muslim materials and boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the importance of faith, family, and community – Breivik lifts an entire section of a screed on “Cultural Conservatism” by the late Paul Weyrich – totaling well over a thousand pages. Thankfully, we don’t have to plough through this disjointed “compendium,” as he calls it – which shows signs of being hastily thrown together in preparation for his international debut as the Norwegian Timothy McVeigh, just like his Facebook page and his Twitter account. Breivik created a much more coherent video version which gives us a lot more clues about why he murdered 90-plus (at last count) of his fellow Norwegians in the name of fighting Islam.

Breivik’s racist rage is embodied in America’s Tea Party, a post-Bush re-branding of the Republican dead- ender base, largely made up of Evangelical Christians weaned on a perversion of the teachings of Christ. Here in The Homeland the right-wing electronic sewers vomit up anti-Muslim filth on a daily basis to those seeking scapegoats for their miserably fucked up lives. Hating Muslims is to many on this great star spangled lemming farm as American as apple pie and the propaganda is reinforced by a bastardized version of Christianity that meshes perfectly with the far right policies of Israel. The weaponized death cult of the Armageddon centric, Left Behind visions of apocalyptic doom triggering the return of a new Jesus, cleansed of his pesky liberal values such as compassion for the poor and downtrodden sells well with the same sort of rubes and haters who already eagerly embrace racism due to their mostly southern heritage. The insidious and immensely powerful Glenn Beck, fresh off of his recent visit to Israel to prep for the 2012 anti-Obama onslaught invoked the Hitler Youth to describe the Norwegian youth camp where Breivik pranced among bullet-riddled young corpses. Not that such vileness is limited to the American extreme right and their highly paid demagogues, HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher is a similar source of anti-Muslim propaganda, most recently when the dope-addled, oversexed host welcomed the utterly vile Ann Coulter who once stated that “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”.  Demagogues like Beck and Coulter are legion and a gargantuan, well-funded fascist propaganda apparatus comprised of media outlets, think tanks, front groups and money laundering PACs ensure that the haters will have troughs of bloody meat upon which to feast, that much is a given. What is troubling though, is when the anti-Muslim bigotry gains the necessary crossover appeal that is provided by a guy like Bill Maher who cloaks his hatemongering in the guise of atheism. Real Time With Bill Maher is a sinister escalation in the propagation of the inflammatory attacks on Muslims as well as a covert vehicle for Republican and state propaganda as it masquerades as a liberal leaning program while offering forums to those whose loathsome views should discredited by any truly decent society. The tolerance of such hateful feculence only enables the violent and the murderous who will soon be delivering their vengeance upon our very own multiculturalism that they bask in the benediction of the media propagandists that they are not alone. And they shall swim in the rivers of blood as though they were frolicking naked in the fountains at Lourdes. 

Indoctrinating Americans to Hate Muslims

The pocket media, after initially and incorrectly pouncing on the events in Norway as yet another outbreak of Islamic jihadism not only cooled on the story entirely but pretty much flushed it down the memory hole in that it didn’t fit the standard narrative. Breivik is just the latest example of the right-wing killer or violent freak not given the time of day in America, just like David Adkisson, Bruce Pardo, Scott Roeder, Byron Williams and every other white man with an axe to grind with the scapegoats served up by the fascist propagandists we can’t dare have the concept that white Christians engaged in acts of political murder are in fact terrorists. In the early breaking news reports multiple U.S. news outlets rushed to judgement that the terrorism was of the Islamic variety, chief offenders were the insipid Washington Post screed queen Jennifer Rubin who was hired last year, as the WaPo geared up for the festival of hate that would be the 2012 presidential elections. Rubin, who previously wrote for such neocon vomitories as Commentary and Weekly Standard has been prolific, shrill and wrong during her tenure at the mockingbird’s nest. On the day of the attacks Rubin like a buzzard on a corpse was out front in exploiting the dead to push her standard right-wing Israeli cant to propagate the outright lie that there was a jihadist tie, complete bullshit as could be expected from one who once wrote a fawning piece about the type of scum that Breivik was inspired by entitled Onward, Christian Zionists which slavishly honored Pastor John Hagee and his fifth column organization CUFI or Christians United for Israel. In what should be a warning shot to all on the tsunami of anti-Muslim filth that is coming for the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, CUFI has that it “represents the soul of the Tea Party.” I will speak more about the role that Israel is going to play in next year’s elections later on, the important thing is to focus on the narrative as a whole and the role of anti-Muslim demagoguery as the most essential element.

Blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald has written about the double-standard in the U.S. media when it comes to acts of terrorism and white extremists who are downplayed as loose cannons, lone nuts and crazies vs. the orgy of anti-Muslim hysteria that accompanies any act that plays into the larger narrative of the great war of civilizations that is sold by neocons. He blow the whistle on the shameless lies in his piece that is entitled The Omnipotence of Al-Qaeda and the Meaninglessness of “Terrorism” as well as in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. I excerpt from both below:

From The Omnipotence of Al-Qaeda and the Meaninglessness of “Terrorism” :

For much of the day yesterday, the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.  The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as James Fallows notes, remains at the Post with no corrections or updates.  The morning statement issued by President Obama — “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring” and “we have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks” — appeared to assume, though (to its credit) did not overtly state, that the perpetrator was an international terrorist group.

But now it turns out that the alleged perpetrator wasn’t from an international Muslim extremist group at all, but was rather a right-wing Norwegian nationalist with a history of anti-Muslim commentary and an affection for Muslim-hating blogs such as Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugged,Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.  Despite that, The New York Times is still working hard to pin some form of blame, even ultimate blame, on Muslim radicals (h/t sysprog):

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.

“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist.  Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs in government buildings or go on indiscriminate, politically motivated shooting rampages.  The NYT speculates that amonium nitrate fertilizer may have been used to make the bomb because the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, owned a farming-related business and thus could have access to that material; of course nobody would have ever thought of using that substance tomake a massive bomb had it not been for Al Qaeda.  So all this proves once again what a menacing threat radical Islam is.

From the Democracy Now interview:

My first reaction was to be pretty surprised about how—or not really surprised, but just struck by how intense the media coverage was and the media interest was in this attack. Obviously, it was a heinous attack. When a government building blows up, when someone goes on an indiscriminate shooting rampage aimed at teenagers, it’s horrific. And yet, at the same time, the United States and its allies have brought killing like this, violence like this, to numerous countries around the world that receives a tiny fraction of the attention that this attack received, a tiny—it prompts a tiny fraction of the interest in denouncing it and in declaring it to be evil. And it just struck me that when we think that Muslims are responsible for violence aimed at Western nations, it receives a huge amount of attention in the American media, and yet when the United States brings violence on that level to Muslim countries, kills an equal number of civilians, dozens of people killed by drone attacks and the like, and tons of people killed that way over Afghanistan over the past decade, it barely registers. I mean, an attack like this, this level of death in Iraq, for example, or Afghanistan, would barely register on the media scale.

The other aspect of it, though, is what you referenced in your question, which is, when it was widely assumed, based on basically nothing, that Muslims had been responsible for this attack and that a radical Muslim group likely perpetrated it, it was widely declared to be a “terrorist” attack. That was the word that was continuously used. And yet, when it became apparent that Muslims were not involved and that, in reality, it was a right-wing nationalist with extremely anti-Muslim, strident anti-Muslim bigotry as part of his worldview, the word “terrorism” almost completely disappeared from establishment media discourse. Instead, he began to be referred to as a “madman” or an “extremist.” And it really underscores, for me, the fact that this word “terrorism,” that plays such a central role in our political discourse and our law, really has no objective meaning. It’s come to mean nothing more than Muslims who engage in violence, especially when they’re Muslims whom the West dislikes.

AND –

That you would think that—you would think that in response to this attack, we would end up doing things like, for example, profiling Nordic males or tall, blond Americans, tall, blond, Nordic-looking people at airports, or would start to, for example, engage in surveillance on the communications of people who belong to right-wing groups in Europe, or you look at the people who inspire these attacks, people like Robert Spencer or Pamela Geller, people who engage in this sort of strident anti-Muslim commentary who inspired this individual. You know, we look at Islamic radicals who we allege inspire violence, such as Anwar al-Awlaki, and we target them for assassination—due-process-free killing—even though they’re American citizens. Of course, none of these measures are going to be invoked against right-wing ideologues who are anti-Muslim in nature. And you would expect that Peter King’s hearings, if he were really interested in the threat of violence or terrorism, would be expanded to include what we now know is a very real threat, and yet it isn’t, which simply underscores that those hearings, like so many of these measures done in the name of terrorism, is really just a vehicle for demonizing Muslims, restricting their rights, subjecting them to increased scrutiny. It’s about Islamophobia and not about terrorism.

The American media has reliably and dishonestly pimped the big lie of Islamic terrorism while deliberately ignoring the dangers of the fascist elements within whose delusions and fanaticism are nurtured. The parasitic Rupert Murdoch has influenced the slow societal degradation to the brink of a hot civil war by unleashing the corpulent diabolical menace to humanity that is Roger Ailes to build the Republican propaganda machine that he conceived of during the Nixon years. FOX along with the multitude of front groups and a cadre of deeply embedded operatives honeycombed throughout the media will continue to successfully promote the hatred for it is they who will reap the rewards of the coming unrest. There is neither the will nor the integrity of a corrupt Justice Department and a complicit Congress to bother to try to investigate where the funding comes from in regards to what could be an ongoing treasonous subversion of the American political system and should be addressed as providing aid and support to real terrorists – the terrorists that are the real danger and not the phony threat of Islamic jihad. As the brilliant writer Chris Hedges put it recently in a column entitled Your Taxes Fund Anti-Muslim Hatred:

The major candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency, including Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, along with television personalities such as Bill Maher, routinely employ hate talk against Muslims as a way to attract votes or viewers. Right-wing radio and cable news, including Christian radio and television, along with websites such as Jihad Watch and FrontPage, spew toxic filth about Muslims over the airwaves and the Internet. But perhaps most ominously—as pointed out in “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace,” a report by PoliticalResearch Associates—a cadre of right-wing institutions that peddle themselves as counterterrorism specialists and experts on the Muslim world has been indoctrinating thousands of police, intelligence and military personnel in nationwide seminars. These seminars, run by organizations such as Security Solutions International, The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, and International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, embrace gross and distorted stereotypes and propagate wild conspiracy theories. And much of this indoctrination within the law enforcement community is funded under two grant programs for training—the State Homeland Security Program and Urban Areas Security Initiative—which made $1.67 billion available to states in 2010. The seminars preach that Islam is a terrorist religion, that an Islamic “fifth column” or “stealth jihad” is subverting the United States from within, that mainstream American Muslims have ties to terrorist groups, that Muslims use litigation, free speech and other legal means (something the trainers have nicknamed “Lawfare”) to advance the subversive Muslim agenda and that the goal of Muslims in the United States is to replace the Constitution with Islamic or Shariah law.

And –


The effects of this campaign of racial hatred are being felt throughout the Muslim community. Those with Muslim names are routinely harassed at airports, and many who wear traditional Muslim dress report mounting cases of verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Muslim children endure taunts in schools. Muslims complain of intrusive surveillance, unconstitutional profiling and frequent mistreatment by law enforcement. The practice of Islam, especially in its traditional forms, is now viewed by many as a sign of criminal intent. And with the rise of the surveillance and security state—we now have 854,000 people working in our domestic security apparatus and 800,000 more employed as police and emergency personnel—national law is being turned into an instrument of overt repression against a religious minority.

The groups that Hedges identified, particularly Jihad Watch were hugely inspirational to Anders Breivik and those who run these organizations have the blood of innocents on their hands, not that any of them give a fuck about it.

And Thursday, in an amazingly fortuitous bit of serendipity the corrupt media had found (surprise-surprise) a new Muslim “terrorist” again by Thursday. Pvt. Nasser Abdo was arrested for an alleged bombing plot at Fort Hood, TX, the second Muslim “terrorist” incident at the installation that can now be shrieked about by those same U.S. hatemongers who nurtured Breivik’s animosity. Abdo has all of hallmarks of a classic patsy, he was alleged to be against war and being charged with possession of child pornography. Here in Der Heimat there is no need to construct elaborate covers because of the endemic stupidity of the American people. The bust will only serve to bury the story of the white Christian terrorist once and for all and get the narrative back on track that Muslims and ONLY Muslims can be “terrorists” here in Murka.

“Israel today, Israel tomorrow, and Israel forever.”

– Pastor John Hagee

“Anyone who follows the one God of Abraham knows that we will be judged, as a people and as a nation, on how we treat Israel,”

– Glenn Beck

2012: The Great Republican Crusade: With the bad ass bogeyman Osama bin Laden now officially declared dead, the fascist Republican party having zero credibility on how to fix the economy other than more tax cuts for the rich and the dismantling of social programs the key to regaining the Presidency and the rest of Congress is to mobilize the shock troops and send them forth on a holy war. Christian jihadists are mobilizing; there are a good many Anders Breiviks right here in America who are just itching for the chance to bag their limit of their hated enemies. Sleeper cells of angry and violent white folks, jacked up on Jesus juice and armed to the teeth are chock a block within the Republican base, a veritable army of ideologically driven, brainwashed by years of religious and capitalist propaganda and perpetually pissed off at the “multiculturalism” that Breivik was driven by. Given the gaggle of reprehensible, full blown lying authoritarian freaks running for the Republican nomination and the potency of the raw, stripped to the bones power of sheer hatred we now are at a point where playing to the base, especially the scumbaggers has the potential to produce a series of brutal hate crimes, vandalism and organized thuggery the likes of Kristallnacht. Just this weekend the LaCrosse, Wisconsin headquarters of the activist group We Are Wisconsin, which was championing the recall efforts of the Koch Brothers backed fascist Republican state government was destroyed by a suspicious fire. While the investigation is still in progress as to the cause of the fire would it surprise anyone if it were an act of political violence? If this is the case expect everything to immediately be taken to the next level by the loyal adherents of the fascist cancer that has eaten this country from within.


To me personally, the most shocking thing about Breivik’s killing spree is that it happened in Norway and not right here in Der Homeland. There has long been a very sinister campaign to foment anti-Muslim bigotry, the coin of the realm for the neocon right-wing and their Christian Zionist brigades, this has been especially the case since 9/11, the American Reichstag Fire but has spiked with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. While Obama has still maintained the boot-licking fealty of the United States government towards the state of Israel he has been less deferential to the war-crazed Netanyahu regime than his predecessors. With right-wing Likudniks and their neocon American fifth-column hellbent on igniting a global conflagration that will make WW II look like a skirmish by unleashing an attack on Iran they have found Obama to be a recalcitrant obstacle to their agenda and one that must be removed.  It has been monumentally helpful to the Israeli extreme right to have been able to manifest it’s policies within the pseudo populist pack of useful idiots that is the Tea Party who will never be able to accept a black man in the WHITE House.  

In Obama, pretty much a feckless, worthless stooge of Wall Street looters in my opinion and by the actions of his lamentable administration has proven to be a classic villain to the fascist American right. The very fact that Obama’s skin is of a darker pigmentation ensures that there will always be a driving counter-force among that certain element of the population that are hardened, multi-generational racists but when the sleazy insinuations that he is illegitimate resonates throughout the degenerate Republican party base. Note the potency of the incredibly asinine long-running farce about his birth certificate that only came to a head when the ultra-slimy  opportunist pigfucker Donald Trump actually was gathering momentum as some sort of dark horse candidate with his noise pollution about said document. The one moment when Obama finally proved to have a small degree of political canniness came when he produced the birth certificate, blew up the pompous asshole Trump in a brutally mocking monologue at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and for good measure announced the extra-judicial assassination of one time CIA asset Osama bin Laden the same weekend. That the entire Birther movement blew up as the carnival of idiocy that it always was and the black propaganda campaign that was being prepped and was ready to roll out with another bulk purchase extravaganza book by the loathsome ass Jerome Corsi and promoted by Joseph Farah and Fox went up like so much a bag of flaming dogshit only temporarily halted the onslaught. The armies of darkness that are the fascist shocktroops regrouped and will not so easily be chastened as they troll for killers, brutes and goons and the American Anders Breivik.


Glenn Beck pushes the narrative that Obama has betrayed Israel and as the defacto leader of the Republican fascist Tea Party movement is going to be an integral figure in mustering the troops against the infidel Obama. Beck has already been across the pond hitting the hustings over in God’s chosen land, honing his chops for the big show next year by preaching well established lies about the “vaporization of Israel” and accumulating the necessary gravitas with the extremist Netanyahu-Lieberman government to mobilize the domestic fifth-column. Beck has a highly publicized, massive anti-Obama rally slated to be rolled out in the holy land later in August which in another of those slick Orwellian bumper sticker slogans has been dubbed Restoring Courage. The Jerusalem Beck rally that is a warmup to the many domestic Nuremberg style events is being heavily pimped by American Christian fascist groups, notably radical cleric Pat Robertson  among many others. The hard core Israeli ideologues have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Religious Right, just as they do with European racist groups in promoting the anti-Muslim crusade. Rather than venture too deeply into the wormhole that is the long-running Israeli penetration of U.S. based religious groups, likely much of it through the head of the serpent that is The Council For National Policy , I will save that for another time because there is plenty to be said. Rest assured, the level is ominous and represents, and I am not engaging in excessive hyperbole – an existential threat to whatever remains of our once vibrant democracy.


When Beck is finished polishing his act and the Republican candidates are well into their anti-Muslim rhetoric, a good deal of which is already being pushed by the likes of guaranteed losers like Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and their ilk look for a multi-billion dollar blitz of rancid propaganda featuring the conjured up threat of the replacement of the Constitution with Sharia Law and the Antichrist that is Barack Hussein Obama as the cat’s paw of the reconstructed Islamic caliphate. Leave it to the idiot choir to foment the hatred and rouse the rabble, much like Palin did at her ugly 2008 campaign rallies where the most base instincts of the moral reprobates were sated with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” and that sleazy little Obsession DVD was sent out in the Sunday papers of millions of Americans in crucial political battleground states. Many of the same people whose work was inspirational to Anders Breivik were also associated with the Obsession DVD including David Horowitz and his malignantly depraved pals. It was no coincidence that Muslim children were gassed at a Dayton, Ohio mosque during Ramadan during that period. The man who is likely going to benefit the most from the ongoing debt ceiling tango by leveraging his Tea Party clout to overthrow the drunken idiot John Boehner as Speaker of the House is one Eric Cantor who has much riding on the promotion of anti-Muslim sentiment. The rising star Cantor is the go to guy in the Republican party when it comes to promoting the interests of Israel over those of the United States. Cantor not only was a co-sponsor of a Capitol Hill screening of the Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West in 2006 but recently also promoted another propaganda film by the Clarion Fund entitled Iranium which advocates a first strike against Iran before it is able to obtain nuclear capability. Look for this meme to be central to the 2012 Republican campaigns. Cantor is of immense value to the extremist Israeli agenda and provides a critical bridge to the Tea Party and the Republican Evangelical Christian base. Note this story from The Baltimore Jewish Times:

Cantor knows that it’s good branding to be known as the only Jewish congressman in the House majority — if nothing else, it gives him a monopoly of sorts.

“It increased his influence a thousand-fold,” says William Daroff, a lobbyist for the Jewish federation system. When he lends his name to events like a Capitol Hill screening of a new anti-Iran movie, “Iranium,” produced by the conservative Clarion Fund, “it just gives it much more of a hechsher [special certification],” Daroff says.

But his efforts to combat earmarks and budget waste come before any ethnic solidarity: Jay Ipson, head of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, says Cantor had proven unwilling to secure federal grants for the organization he’d helped get up and running. “He was at one point thinking about getting us financial help from Washington, but then when the economy started looking not so good, he swore off any assistance for anybody,” says Ipson, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania who is known for wearing a cowboy hat everywhere, including synagogue.

When asked about his Jewish Republican status, Cantor says, “You know, my faith goes with me in everything I do. … You know, again, I don’t think you ever go far from sort of the moral compass that you were given when you were brought up in faith. So I can only say that I grew up in a very active and vibrant Jewish community, and then a larger civic community in Richmond that didn’t happen to be Jewish also contributed to who I am and what kind of officeholder I hopefully am.”

Many of Cantor’s most ardent supporters aren’t Jewish. When John McCain called Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, in the summer of 2008 looking for advice on who to pick as a running mate — at a time when Lieberman, who campaigned for McCain, was being mentioned as a contender — Land suggested the Arizona senator look at Cantor, who was already doing Jewish outreach for the campaign. (The other person Land recommended in that call was Sarah Palin.)

“Cantor would have helped tremendously in states which would be a very close race, in Virginia, obviously, but in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, and he’s the only Republican in Congress who’s Jewish and pro-life,” says Land. “He stood out as a comer from the very beginning — he’s very bright, very energetic, very concerned about the issues we care about.”

Juanita Duggan, the former Philip Morris lobbyist, echoed Land’s comments and told me a story about spiriting Cantor to a Tax Foundation dinner when he was still in freshman orientation, after the 2000 election.

“He knew just what to do,” Duggan says proudly. Then, she joked, “I am the honorary chair of the ‘Eric Cantor for President 2012’ committee.” When I asked her why, she says a Jewish nominee would cement the idea of the GOP as “the pro-Israel party” — just as it would also ease the path of a Southern conservative to the White House.

“Having the first Jewish president be a Republican,” she says, brightly, “would be a wonderful thing.”

Just as Cantor is a player in slyly pushing the anti-Muslim agenda out of his own personal ambition and amoral cynicism to be able to hoodwink the rubes “I pray on Saturday with a Southern accent” as the little snake is quoted in the above piece, so too is another man of great ambition with serious clout with the American fascists. Texas Governor Rick Perry has been more often mentioned as a serious contender for the 2012 Republican nomination as an antidote to the ideologically impure Mitt Romney. Perry is a culture warrior to die for when it comes time to trotting out a champion against the hated Obama and he is backed by the lunatic fringe teabaggers as well as the Christian Right. A recent story that is as scary as it gets states that Perry is now receiving foreign policy prepping by none other than Douglas Feith. Feith, the man who ran the Pentagon Office of Special Plans during the early years of the Bushreich was instrumental in producing the policy paper for Bibi Netanyahu entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm which was a prequel to the notorious doctrine of the Project For The New American Century (PNAC) whose open longing for “A new Pearl Harbor”, which was achieved when the World Trade Center was felled on September 11, 2001 has come to define our world ever since. 

In rolling out newly acquired heavy artillery like Beck and CUFI the neocons are about to get back into the game – not that they ever truly left.

 

The Tea Party: America’s Khmer Rouge

While I remain unconvinced that the ongoing Punch and Judy show over the raising of the national debt ceiling is nothing more but a gambit to destroy Social Security and Medicare, leading to their theft and redirection to the depraved gamblers on Wall Street there is one thing that is certain – the Republican party is a terrorist organization. I have long maintained this very simple truth about this deranged pack of anti-American fascist jackals and their relentless army of neo-confederates, Rapture zombies, teabagger freaks whose blistering hatred for traditional American values is every bit as advanced and savage as their 1930’s German historical counterparts once was. They are looking for the conditions where the system can be damaged to the point where the berserkers can be loosed, goaded on to engage in pogroms and the smorgasbord of scapegoats that are regularly served up by the likes of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Glenn Beck and thousands of even more vile although lesser paid instigators until the streets run red with blood. Providing that the debt ceiling “debate” isn’t anything more than another deceptively promoted by a corrupt media shearing of the sheep to keep the Wall Street predators ensconced in their mansions in the Hamptons and partying on their yachts and private jets this may be the time that the shit really does hit the fan.

The phony grass roots Tea Party, a post -Bush re-branding of the most rotten, ignorant and vicious elements of the Republican base conjure up comparisons with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. So intent are these white skinned crybabies at “getting their country back” from the black man in the WHITE House that they clamor for the destruction of the entire country, as the infamous Vietnam saying goes “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”. While the actual effects of not raising the debt ceiling are unknown other than it would blow a hole in the ongoing Wall Street pillaging it would vastly affect the average American schmuck on a far greater level. Assuredly interest rates would rise which the finance industry shills say would hurt lending, as if these scumbags were in the money lending business anyway with banks and corporations hoarding cash but the trickle down effect would likely be devastating. In our uniquely American brand of fascist country trickle down economics aka cutting taxes for the rich has zero benefit for the working class. But as Bush in his waning months and then OBushma in his first two and a half years such schemes are wonderful little hooks to sell the rubes so that the gambling losses of the big Wall Street banks are socialized through government confiscation of taxpayer dollars is just one more knife in the backs of Boobus Americanus. I am amazed at how, on a weekly basis that prices at the local grocery stores continue to rise, gas prices are on the way back to 4 bucks a gallon again and the GOP pledges to focus on job creation have devolved into the standard treasonous pledges to not raise taxes on wealthy chiselers, keep the gays from getting married and out of the military, Muslim bashing and here in the diseased penis of America otherwise known as Florida – anti-bestiality laws. Not that the latter would be a necessarily bad thing were it to encourage the scumbaggers to not reproduce.

But I digress ….

The fascist Republican party as it exists today in the advanced stages of it’s mutation would be nothing more than an object of mockery were it not for the dregs of society that comprise the party base, the serious haters and jacked up on religion crusaders who are hellbent at destroying America from within. They have very serious ideas about the type of society that they desire and would use every bit of law enforcement power of the very government that they so proclaim to despise in order to ensure that their hated enemies, gays, libruls [sic], feminists, Muslims and assorted other non-white, non-Christians. The blacks can be put back in their place because Christ knows that Obama cannot be allowed to reassemble his ACORN forces to mount an assault to enslave the white race and that would happen save the useful boot licking uncle Toms like Allen West, the savage anti-Muslim bigot Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas. The teabaggers and their religious right brothers in arms though have a particular hatred for intellectualism that borders on sheer fanaticism. As I stated earlier, this sort of hard core focused rage and the need to crush all who do not conform under their jack-boots is as vigorous and as unyielding as that of the Khmer Rouge along with their Year Zero social reform policy.

A came across a very horrifying bit from a 1974 Chicago Tribune account on the Khmer Rouge:

“I was very frightened when I saw the Khmer Rouge [Tea Party] saw off the neck of a civilian [gay, Muslim, liberal etc] with the sharp edge of sugar palm leaves,” said Preap, standing amid a cluster of refugees beside a row of flimsy huts.

“They spent three days cutting his head off,” said Preap. “They sawed a little one morning, and then in the evening, and finally the following day in the morning and then in the evening, and finally the following day in the morning and night.

“They made the victim stand up while there were cutting in front of hundreds of people living in the Khmer Rouge area. Then they held him up when he could stand no longer.”

The episode was not just an isolated case but one of many I heard during visits to refugee camps. Khmer Rouge soldiers also have used the knife-like edges of sugar palm leaves to lop off the heads of Cambodian officers captured while overrunning nearby towns and military installations.

“They want the victims to suffer more and to serve as examples for people,” said one informant. “They denounce them as traitors before the crowd.”

“I had to join the Khmer Rouge army or they would have killed me,” said Preap. “Those who refuse to serve they send to their deaths. They walk thru villages telling the people to follow them, and the people must obey.”

When the shit does inevitably hit the fan, exactly what the fascist Republican party wants, these will be the enforcers to hunt down dissenters to the privatization of all that remains, the roads already paid for by the taxpayer will be sold to corporations and plutocrats and the tolls will be crippling to those who travel upon them. Public water systems will be hijacked by profiteers and as in Bolivia, the collection of rainwater will become against the law, the populace has already been largely converted into a nation of rats and snitches courtesy of the fear mongering after 9/11 and if you are found in violation you will be subject to having a pack of foaming at the mouth lunatics wearing tri-corner hats, Captain America costumes and waving Gadsden flags show up at your door to cart you off to the public head-sawing. This makes for one hell of a hedge for the oligarchy and their Republican stooges. And this is exactly why I have recommended that progressives start very seriously rethinking their non-violent tendencies, the street thugs will be the first to be unleashed when the whole thing implodes for the regular folks and a failure to be ready to organize and to respond appropriately will only result in your own heads becoming trophies upon the pyramids of human skulls that they will so enjoy building as a tribute to their fascist leaders.

What Progressives Fail to Understand: This Is War

 

If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.

-Sun Tzu

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

-Ezra Pound

While America continues along the evolution into an authoritarian, fascist state that stands for nothing more than eternal war, upwards redistribution of wealth and the eradication of the social safety net it is imperative that progressives understand one thing – this is and always has been a war. The opposition, being the thug Republican right-wing machine that has seized the levers of control of the state has realized this from the outset and their victories have been legion. Despite the premature victory celebrations and naïve triumphal spirit after the 2008 election of Barack Obama amongst the sad detritus that passes for the “left” in this new American century it should be obvious to all but the most myopic and steeped in denial that nothing has really changed. The Democrats, a failed and compromised political party that long ago left behind any semblance of decency, concern for the working class, liberalism and morality have after only a brief period of holding huge governing majorities capable of enacting real change crumbled, without so much as a whimper. Obama came into office, riding a wave of energized voters, a crackerjack efficient political machine and a mandate, yes a mandate to set things right after eight years of rule by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil. It is all gone now, timorousness (and amateurish bungling) on the part of the new president, cowardice among the Democrats in Congress and a series of mind-boggling capitulations, retreats and triangulations somehow allowed a fascist political party in the Republicans, seemingly discredited only two years earlier and on the ropes to regain the initiative and control of the government Not only did the Republicans seize control of Congress but it did so with a with a newly energized wave of monstrous animosity, racism and riding upon a pale white horse named blood revenge that the new wave was determined to leave their enemies with nothing but their eyes to cry with.

That the fascist Republicans were able to so easily set the agenda during the first two years of the Obama administration leading up to the “shellacking” suffered by the Pope of Hope in November 2010 should surprise nobody. The chronically weak and pathetic leadership of the Senate by Harry Reid , the former boxer turned politician was instrumental in the failures to attain even minimal change and one has to wonder exactly what forces truly drive the agenda of the one time Nevada Gaming Commissioner. Obamacare, is an abject joke, a backdoor giveaway to the blood-sucking insurance industry parasites who now have the power of the state backing them to strong-arm Americans into buying their overpriced, crappy product but it is what valuable time, energy and political capital was wasted on. With the Senate already being a collection of largely corrupt, venal, pompous and entitled tools of banks, corporations, the military and in at least one highly visible case Israel it was simple to ensure that no meaningful health care reform would ever be created, given that the top Senator in charge of the legislation was one Max Baucus who was in the hip pocket of the health care industry it was all a charade. The selling out of America has become a bipartisan effort and campaign cash or in layman’s terms bribery is the coin of the realm. With the thorough hijacking of the political system by big money, a stacked judiciary and a Supreme Court that has even less respect for the U.S. Constitution than George W. Bush with their landmark Citizen’s United decision to further enable the buying of government by plutocrats and corporations, backed by a media machine that peddles lies, sensationalism and legitimizes dangerous highly paid demagogues as though their ‘opinions’ actually are serious we simply must admit that the game has already been lost. The extreme right-wing, being big money, energy and finance cartels, avaricious corporations and their millions of shock troops brainwashed by a bizarre doppelganger dogma of Christianity along with the twenty percent or so in the society who are authoritarian personality types have near total control now and are soon coming for the rest of it.

That the left and progressives have failed and failed miserably is not shameful, especially when understanding the decades long, enormously costly and coordinated with military style precision efforts to thoroughly destroy all meaningful change that has occurred in America since the early 20th Century. To comprehend the concerted effort to undermine New Deal programs and liberal ideals one must first realize that the spawn of the Robber Barons never went away gracefully into the good night after hard-fought and often costly in terms of life and liberty wins by organized labor. Despite the decades long onslaught of predatory capitalist propaganda the unions that helped to build this country into an economic powerhouse with a middle class that was the envy of the civilized world, a progressive education system, a mighty infrastructure and public institutions that actually acted in the interests of the American people and the betterment of the society as a whole. When you see the smoldering wreckage that we have been reduced to in 2011, thanks to he hijacking of the system by fascists, the decimation of organized labor, the assault on public education, rampant historical revisionism and the erosion of our public institutions by right-wing termites eating away from within it is hard to suppress the urge to vomit.

The war that so many denied even existed has been lost and the primary reason why it has been lost is that liberals and progressives have failed to realize that it was always a war in the first place. Not only a class war but also a war against American freedoms, values and basic human dignity. It took decades to destroy the country and it would be magical thinking to believe that it isn’t going to take decades to beat back the fascists and take the country back, many of us will not see the completion of this in our lifetimes but it is time to organize and to begin the formation of a resistance. The political system is no longer functional, we live in a failed state that has succumbed to the cancer of fascism, writing letters to Congress, wasting time on boycotts, engaging in internet campaigns with the self-centered, ipad wielding twerps that congregate at grand galas of collective masturbation like Netroots Nation and carrying signs in the streets does not work. It is time to fight back, as the writer and social activist Chris Hedges says: “We will be saved only with the birth of a new militant radicalism, one that defies all formal power structures including the Democratic party.”

It is time to find a stomach for a donnybrook, the time for debate and hope for change at the ballot box has passed, the corruption is too deeply entrenched and there is too damned much at stake for anything less. As I previously stated, the right-wing and the fascist fifth columnists have ALWAYS treated the battle for America as a WAR, as arch-conservative political activist Ralph Reed once remarked: “I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” 

“Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.”

-Mao Tse-tung

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

-Henry A. Wallace

Part II: A Rigged Game

Make no mistake about it that the attack on progressive and traditional liberal ideals in this country has been a long running, ideologically fueled, dog eat dog jihad dating back to at least the era of the despised “class traitor” Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. The pigs who run this filthy sty, many of them descended from elitist stock have opposed every bit of social and labor progress that was won at such a cost by our forebears. There were once Americans who organized and did so at great risk of injury, imprisonment and their very lives who fought to implement a system that eventually resulted in a strong middle class, largely the result of the clout of the labor unions, unions that are now in the final stages of eradication. That such progress was allowed to be rolled back to the darkest days of worker exploitation and the excess of rapacious greed that thrives in an unequal society is our enduring tragedy, that it was done without a fight is our enduring shame. Now in 2011 the final stages of the great dismantling are to borrow a treasured propaganda nugget of a corrupt media – picking up steam. The ongoing battle over raising the debt ceiling is garbage as is the sudden panic over the national credit card and the deficit, none of the swinish squealers who bleat in phony sanctimony about “the future of our children” gave a rat’s ass when the Bush administration had the national credit card and was maxing it out like a stoned teenager on ruinous wars, tax cuts for the rich and giveaways to the financial fraudsters whose worthless mortgage backed securities and derivative instruments blew a hole in the economy. The real goal of the “new normal” and the crushing austerity that will be enforced is to eliminate what remains of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs. They are coming for Social Security and Medicare and as the brilliant social critic George Carlin pegged it dead bang in one of his most scathing rants The American Dream:

And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

The intention of the fascist looter class has always been to impose a new feudalism on those who are not in “the big club”.  The great wars of the 20^th Century provided the oligarchy with the cover needed to dismantle dissent and movements for economic justice in this country. With the Woodrow Wilson administration determined to feed Americans into the charnel house that was Europe during World War I, a conflict that the United States had no business being involved in and that made industrialists and Wall Street speculators obscenely rich there was the Espionage Act of 1917 (currently in the process of being revamped in order to use against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange) and the Sedition Act of 1918. Promulgated by the state to stomp on criticism of the blessed war the power of the state was marshaled into also putting down the hated by the establishment American  Socialists, notable Eugene Debs who was imprisoned for his blasphemy of the capitalist war machine. The laws were used to justify the rounding up, persecution and deportation of radical leftists, notably during the Palmer Raids by an already thoroughly rotten to the core Justice Department.  The economic collapse triggered by criminal plunderers on Wall Street leading to the Great Depression eventually led to the social reforms of Roosevelt and their institutionalization. World War II, “the good war” fought by “the greatest generation” was sold as a great conflict of good versus evil for the fate of the future of human civilization itself but the war was essentially a clash of empires with the greatest spoils being won by the United States of America. Few bother to consider the hypocrisy of destroying the devil that was Hitler through an alliance with a man who was possibly an even greater tyrant, mass-murderer and evil incarnate that was Josef Stalin.

When the war was over and much to the delight of the looter class, Roosevelt finally dead, it was a seamless transition to carve up the spoils and then turn on Stalin, he was on longer useful as an ally but would provide a malevolent figurehead for the enduring menace that was Communism, a true enemy of fascism and would be used as blanket justification for the wars, witch hunts, bloated defense budgets and societal transformation until the day when the U.S.S.R. imploded. The 1950s saw the decimation of the remnants of the real left with the inspiration for today’s debauched harassment of Muslims – McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (likely a personal hero of current fascist Governor Scott Walker) holding hearings, law abiding Americans being harassed into taking loyalty oaths, the carnival of perversion that was the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) serving as a vehicle for a vicious, conniving shit named Richard M. Nixon to slime his way into power by publicly kicking in the spleen of a needed blood sacrifice named Alger Hiss. Nixon’s trademark shamelessness and anti-Commie demagogy greatly contributed to the rise of a virulent, flag-swaddled fascism that was exemplified in the John Birch Society and the new wealth of the western sunbelt. This toxic movement would vomit up Ronald Wilson Reagan, the avatar of a savagely anti-American fifth column who to this day is canonized as a saint, the Lenin figurehead for the great revolution of which we now find ourselves as victims of as it nears the endgame.

The tumultuous 1960s with the heinous atrocity of the Vietnam War following the brutal and still unsolved assassination of President John F. Kennedy would prove to be a boon to the fascists, especially those that are now concentrated in the Republican party. The Civil Rights Movement would ensure that unrepentant racists, especially southerners would shun the Democratic party for generations, the chicken-fried version of bastardized Christianity would act as an accelerator and preserve the region for the GOP for going on four decades now. The antiwar movement was a bonus and during the political resurrection of Richard Nixon that culminated in his 1968 election until his fall a young ideological media wizard named Roger Ailes would ensure that the social upheaval that marked the era would be given a black face or adorned with hippie beads and peace signs. The 1960s were going to be the last time that the establishment would ever be confronted with a serious threat to the status quo and the lessons of that era were well learned by the fascist right. The revolt against the war and the demand for economic and social justice just may have succeeded were it ever to be allowed to have serious leadership. The movement was efficiently and mercilessly decapitated in little more than two months in 1968 when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both conveniently taken out, victims of the same sort of “lone nut” that always is able to circumvent security, escape surveillance and show up at the exact optimal moment of opportunity when a threat to the status quo has to be eliminated.

The Vietnam War, social unrest associated with it and later the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon, the at the time high priest of politics as war set the stages for the crusade against social justice that would follow. The fascist right-wing and American big business fully understood the importance of controlling the media, Ailes taught Nixon of the potent tool of television, a medium that had yet to explode into its full potential as a method of social indoctrination and brainwashing as it did with the advent of cable and satellite technology. The 24/7, hundreds of channels television revolution would nicely coincide with the coronation of Ronald Reagan as America’s founding father, hell, how could anyone ever imagine anyone else being president? The Powell Memorandum, which laid out the blueprint for the media takeover and establishment of propaganda organs and “policy” organizations, known as think tanks was already being implemented. The post-Vietnam era saw the creation of a legitimized network of institutions devoted solely to ensuring that corporate power and those who would be tools of the oligarchy would be served. Nixon was a master at exploiting the resentments of others, of pushing the right buttons, of lies and scurrilous attacks that pitted American vs. American that would come to define the future of American politics. I highly recommend the great book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein to those who may be interested in a fascinating chronicle of the Nixon years that birthed the present.

The Heritage Foundation, one of the most prominent of the right-wing think tanks was funded by money from Robber Baron descendent Richard Mellon Scaife and the John Birch Society influenced Coors family. The Manhattan Institute was founded by longtime Wall Street/CIA/OSS figure William Casey. The Cato Institute was founded by the Koch Brothers (their great family fortune came from building oil refineries for Stalin) whose longtime influence is only now finally coming to light. Cato was a part of a fascist right-wing project to clean up libertarianism, transforming it in the public eye from a loose collection of true anarchists, antiwar and anti-state, pot smoking, free spirits who had to be brought to heel to promote the true party agenda which would mirror Koch and the other plutocrats’ financial interests.  These 1970s organizations joined the already established American Enterprise Institute, a prolific pro-war, looter capitalist advocacy snakepit along with all of it’s Neocon spinoffs, The Hoover Institute , The John M. Olin Foundation and a myriad of others, tentacles of the fascist right-wing octopus. Rather than get bogged down in this particular area I would refer readers to the fine David Brock book entitled The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How itCorrupts Democracy. Brock heads up one of the lone the progressive counterparts in the hated Media Matters for America, a watchdog group so loathed by the right-wing that it has been demonized incessantly on the Rupert Murdoch terrorist FOX network. Brock by the way is no stranger to right-wing lowball dirty tactics and strategy, he was a former operative who developed a conscience and joined the battle against fascism. Brock is also gay and was ostracized by the virulent elements of the GOP who years later likely rue the day that they persecuted the wrong man.

The most dangerous as well as the most secretive of the think tanks is the Council For National Policy. The CNP, is where the shadow government types or to those who on the left who may be typically squeamish of such a term – the intelligence agency rogues, the ends justify the means types who waged the dirty wars against the commie devils in Southeast Asia and Central and South America joined forces with John Birch Society veterans, big Texas oil money, right-wing media moguls and Christian theocrats. Real hard-liners such as General John Singlaub and Lt. Colonel Oliver North joined other ‘luminaries’ such as Nelson Bunker Hunt, the right wing beer magnate Coors Family, Paul Weyrich, Edwin Meese, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schafly, revered by teabagger swine Glenn Beck’s idol Cleon Skoussen and a roster of members continually updated to include influential right-wingers of the day, and movement types as John Ashcroft, Grover Norquist, DeVos Family members including mercenary kingpin Erik Prince, Birther propagandist Joseph Farah, Rick Santorum and even possibly even former DHS head Michael Chertoff  the man who has been instrumental in putting naked body scanners into the hands of authoritarian, sexual molester TSA goons in our national airports who was a prominent speaker at a CNP gathering in 2006 along with North, John Bolton and Robert Bork. Unfortunately, the current member list is guarded like the crown jewels themselves and the organization shuns questioners. 

The fascist Republican takeover of America could not have been successful without a militant, dedicated army of activists and shock troops. Before there the phony grass roots corporate media darling Tea Party existed there was the mobilization of the true believers that are the Religious Right – America’s own Taliban. CNP was founded by the Reverend Timothy LaHaye, the creator of the Rapture death cult bible that is the multi-million dollar franchise of the Left Behind series and eerily seems to be adaptable to promote a crusader’s view of the Middle East and the need to promote the policies of Israel and the American empire’s control of the key oil producing regions. Joining LaHaye is a who’s who of Christian zealots, the late Rousas J. Rushdoony, widely acknowledged as the father of Christian Dominionism, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer and D. James Kennedy. The CNP and the think tank networks are little understood by most progressives and liberals who still believe that change can be effected at the ballot box, they know nothing of the organizational structure that they are up against in a war for America. The CNP by the way vetted and gave their blessing to Sarah Palin as John McCain’s 2008 Republican party presidential  running mate. The Council For National Policy seems to be far more than a think tank, it smacks of being the serpent’s head of a serious fifth column fascist element, the presence of Singlaub and North, both no strangers to black ops would seem to give that idea some credence, much deeper investigation of this organization needs to be undertaken, I would refer readers to this recent piece by Robert Parry: The GOP’s CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country toSweep Back Into Power.

Rather than further spend time on the fascist right-wing infrastructure I am not going to bother with the thoroughly controlled and corrupt corporate media, this in and of itself presents the largest obstacle to any sort of derailing of the fascist juggernaut. Following the model established by Father Charles Coughlin the fascist right hit it big with Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, his hectoring demagoguery was broadcast to tens of millions at the crucial time when the early stages of Reagan’s dismantling of the system had to be sold. There was nothing like the pigman’s rubbing salt into the raw wounds of those whose farms had been busted out, whose lives who had been destroyed and who were easily duped into finding scapegoats in order to protect those who were responsible. Limbaugh bred an industry of strident electronic hatemongers who fulfilled the warning of the reviled liberal former WW II era Vice President Henry A.Wallace:

 

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

With the aforementioned Powell Memorandum stressing the importance of the control of the media to control the future of America this mission has been accomplished, give a big assist to neoliberal Bill Clinton and his Telecommunications Act of 1996 for the dismantling and consolidation spree that has allowed for the majority of Americans to be woefully under informed and mesmerized by lurid local stories foisted as great national crises while the country is gutted by the fascists. There may yet be some hope that the Rupert Murdoch media empire will take a big hit with the still breaking British hacking scandal, a rancid illustration of the collusion of government figures with kingmakers like Murdoch but despite tactics that undoubtedly pale next to what FOX and other components of the right-wing Republican machine are doing in America. With new revelations on the attempted exploitation of 9/11 victims phone calls this could be a spear jammed into the belly of the beast but it is not likely to get much play in our media. There will always be another dead child, sex scandal or ginned up terrorist plot to deliver the electronic opiate to the masses of asses, and perhaps NFL season will soon open after the union has been busted – move along, there’s nothing to see here.

The fascist right-wing and the corporate state have already won, our political system has been reduced to nothing more than political theatre and an ongoing duel between two criminal entities in the full blown fascist Republicans and the fascist lite Democrats to control the spoils system and obtain the regal privilege of being the ones that get to yoke the slaves and deliver them to the man.Were the RICO laws to ever be seriously enforced then the two money parties and their Wall Street and corporate owners would be targeted, then that would be in a society that respects the rule of law, unfortunately we don’t live in one.

There is no hope to dismantle this machine, it’s even money that it will self-destruct though but not until every last bit of blood is extracted from the average American, every bone has been ground to provide sustenance to the machine and then there is the high-tech, militarized police state that has been constructed since September 11, 2001 to deal with matters once it happens. At this point it is no longer anything but a silly fantasy to expect that the system can be changed through the calculatedly eroded process that was once called democracy, too much damage has been done for too long a period. America is in a very dark place today, it is not often that I am in agreement on anything at all with the Neocons but I must say that their intellectual father Leo Strauss was onto something when he blamed liberal Weimar Germany and the feckless opposition to the Nazis for the horrors that would follow, he was right. Philosopher Karl Popper hit the target as well:

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” 

The time has come for progressives to realize that this is war, always has been war and their naivete to realize this has led us to this point.

Let the resistance begin. 

I don’t want to get any messages saying, “I am holding my position.” We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the enemy do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!

-General George S. Patton

Part III: Fighting Back

I have long drawn much scorn from those who should have been allies during my affiliation with the ‘left’, those who insist on never lowering themselves to the levels of those that seek to destroy them, they would still be arguing that even as they were on the cattle cars being trucked to the gas showers. I have long advocated for a counterattack against the fascists on their own terms, they understand nothing other than raw aggression, eye for an eye, frontier style ‘justice’. You cannot reason with them, especially those who are the zealots that comprise the shock troops, the brownshirts, the rabble and the street thugs. They need to be dealt with in the harshest of manner and if the time comes they need to be met with an appropriate level of violence that they themselves are fully prepared to use. There is really no other way, as an old Marxist acquaintance of mine liked to say, “you don’t debate fascists, you destroy them”, the fascist right, outside of their pederast style obsession with cannibalistic capitalism feared the unions because they understood this and confronted power with power. Were the real left still around today instead of the namby pamby collection of weaklings, sissies. utopian talkers and bleeding heart types that comprise the ‘left’ we would not have been overrun and crushed by sociopaths and their goons. As I previously referenced Neocon Leo Strauss he did understand one thing, that you cannot negotiate with those who would just as soon use your skull for a salad bowl. I encountered this failure to come to terms with this most basic of facts in terms of our current situation far too often with those of otherwise good intent who refused to view contemporary America in historical terms, particularly in comparison with Nazi Germany. I am fully aware of Godwin’s Law damning Nazi analogies and to me it’s just more of the same lame liberal bullshit. Not only are the Nazi’s the predecessors of today’s American fascists, specifically those who fly the Republican party’s bloody red flag perfect examples for the obvious reasons but everyone knows who the Nazis were and other comparisons would be wasted on ignoramuses such as those who are commonplace in Der Homeland circa 2011. Sadly too many of them are also entirely ignorant of the level of complicity that capitalist American interests including prominent industrialists and Wall Street bankers had in the building of Hitler’s death machine, that is going to have to wait for another time though. 

While I detest Neoconservatism and it’s merger of worship of the warfare state, it’s manipulation of religion, fear and nationalism in order to justify conquest and oppression both abroad and at home I find a good deal of merit in Strauss’s argument that it was liberalism that failed to halt the Nazi horror by not confronting it on it’s own remorseless rules of engagement while the movement was still nascent. Were the populist anger that was masterfully harnessed by Hitler and his minions been redirected back against his death cult with white hot vengeance how much suffering could have been averted? Human nature is not virtuous and good and beneath a very thin veneer lurks a pitch black innate need for destruction, an instinct in which survival trumps all else and the inconvenient truths of human history have proven time and again that our better angels will ultimately be overcome by our internal demons. History is also not linear, history repeats itself but never in exactly the same way and there will likely never be any sort of a murderous state that will be as ostentatious in it’s cruelty and cult mentality like the Nazis ever again. But the similarities are there between Weimar Germany and the America of the new century, the economic futility, the failed political system, the eroded civil liberties, the codification of torture, the disembowelment of the Constitution, the pollution of the judiciary, the militarizing of the national mind, the need for an enemy and most importantly of all, a right-wing movement already in a high state of readiness that is only awaiting their very own Führer.

But I Digress…..

With my differences with many progressives and liberals already well documented it was with much surprise that when on one of the radio shows that I listen to on a fairly regular basis, a regular caller got it. During the Bob Kincaid Show on the HORN, which stands for the Head On Radio Network (brilliant radio, listen and if you like it please kick a few bucks into the kitty for these people who are fighting the good fight, they need to pay the bills) on June 14th at around the 1 hr 19 min mark David in Maine, a cutting edge thinker hit the mark. David, understanding the futility of the current system, the stacking of the deck and the need for both urgency and assertiveness among progressives blew away guest host John Fox with his proposal for what he called a “universal progressive discipline camp”.  This was sheer brilliance, what David proposed was straight out of the Republican playbook, a hiring of the finest strategic minds from around the globe, military types to instill an iron hard brand of discipline into those who would attend. David was inspired by the Louis Theroux BBC documentary entitled Miami Mega Jail and the concept of GABOS an acronym for Game Ain’t Based on Sympathy. GABOS is the law of the jungle, as the subheading of the Guardian article that I linked to puts it so aptly – Want the bottom bunk? All you have to do is beat another inmate half to death. I was stunned, this concept in all of it’s primitive, remorseless honesty illustrates exactly the strategy of the fascist Republican right-wing. It is so simple, so astonishingly eloquent in it’s bumper sticker type of message that it could have been conceived by Frank Luntz (or Goebbels for that matter) himself. In the land of fuck you I got mine that is America the rich will reign and the rest of the peasants will in the streets engaging in knife fights for the daily ration of bootstraps that they are provided by their rulers. To the losers go the blade and to the ‘winner’ go to the for-profit prison system. 

The one key aspect of Miami Mega Jail that David referred to was a boot camp for inmates in which hard ass military professionals are brought in to give the prisoners one last chance. David talked about how a program such as this was necessary to confront the right, it would provide “toughness” and “discipline”, the sort of character traits that are absolutely critical to winning a war of attrition, building “an Army” so to speak. Mr. Fox was like most progressives more than a bit taken aback by the idea. Whether people want to admit it or not the Republicans have total control of the country now, they have utilized this very strategy, through their activist base organizations, their churches and their tea party bunds, their militias and their prayer groups they have already built an army and again, this has always been a war to them. David referenced spending some time at West Point during his call, it would take a veteran to appreciate this sort of thinking, as one who spent some time in the military myself I get it. In order to overcome a much more determined enemy, one that utilizes up to date strategy, is relentless and absolutely hates America as it is it is imperative to do likewise in order to combat it. He equated it with war college, but taking it to the next level…. this is a concept that I have long found alien to the ‘left’ with their small protests, emails, phone calls and letter writing, none of which is effective against an entrenched enemy who understands what it takes to win. There was a silence and then some fear, and it was palpable from fill-in host Fox who worried more about what Limbaugh and Beck would do were they to hear the show rather than how their ilk should be hunted down like rats. Were this a country with nads there would be a Scarface style hit team enroute to Limbaugh’s tony Palm Beach compound to scale the walls once the shit really hit the fan, they could saw off his ugly fat fucking head and mount it on a pike like something out of Lord of the Flies.

Let’s face it, the ‘left’ as it exists now are pussies, when they chased labor out of the new ‘left’ they discarded their backbones. Old labor, especially returning World War II veterans who belonged to unions would make very short work of the fascists who despite their numbers, their animosity and their braggadocio are as yellow as their silly-assed Gadsden flags and most of all they are stupid and blinded by their meanness. They are pack animals who have no taste for a fair fight and their leaders know this which is why they use their media to put a certain noble sheen on proto-fascist loudmouths like the vastly overhyped Tea Party, the remains of what was once a libertarian based antiwar movement. The ‘left’, once again proving that the one thing that they truly understand is failure never bothered to attempt to tap into the righteous anger in this country over the offshoring of millions of American jobs, the bailouts of financial terrorists on Wall Street who destroyed the economy and thanks to Obama, have been allowed to go back to their looting with impunity.  There was a serious attempt for an alliance between progressives and principled libertarians such as those who backed Ron Paul but have been chased out of their own movement by savvy Republican operatives. Alas, it never happened as if it ever could happen. One other thing that I fell out of favor with my progressive friends for was my advocacy for just that sort of broad-based coalition, we can argue about the differences later but the first and foremost priority needed to be restoring the rule of law and destroying fascism in America. 

As the great radical Saul Alinsky once put it, To fuck your enemies you’ve first have got seduce your allies. Former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement laments the demise of opposition to the wars during the Bush years, wars that continue to this day absent any form of resistance, the ‘left’, other than principled and consistent critics who have largely been relegated to the fringes of discourse are predictably missing in action. This from Ritter:

Bear in mind that in conflict you are in almost all occasions confronting an opponent who is determined to win as you should be. This opponent is looking for any sign of weakness on your part, and will be certain to exploit this weakness with as much decisiveness and ferocity that can be brought to bear. If you are not prepared to confront such an opponent, then don’t enter the field of battle. Conflict is not for the faint of heart. In conflict you must be prepared to knock your opponent down, and then, instead of offering a helping hand, hold your opponent down with the heel of your foot while you plunge a bayonet into his or her heart. You can be assured that your opponent would do the same to you.

AND –

The American progressive movement has not always been this devoid of leadership and structure. One only need to study the life and achievements of Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-based former criminologist who revolutionized the grassroots movements of the 1950s and 1960s into genuine political movements possessing real political power.

AND –

Simply put, if the antiwar/peace and justice movement can attract more people to its cause than their opponents can to theirs, then the antiwar/peace and justice movement will emerge victorious. Therefore, a governing principle when waging peace is to creadt an ideological foundation that is capable of appealing to the broadest possible segment of a given democratic society.

AND –

If his advice is taken then what will emerge will be a diverse coalition of interests who now finally understand that the system as it exists is run by global criminals who have no loyalty to America and actively have attacked everything that was great about her while usurping our democracy and undermining our freedoms and economic prowess. Wall Street looters and industrialists have always hated America because there was a system of governance here that afforded rights to all people and not only those with money. It has been a long time coming and the time to act is yesterday.

Sage advice from a man who is a military strategist, the type that David’s “universal progressive discipline camp” suggestion would likely welcome with open arms, note that Ritter advocates the OODA Loop Theory, something that progressives and liberals can chew on while they ponder how they could possibly have ever allowed Saul Alinsky to be stolen from them by the teabagger brownshirts? Pearls before swine I guess… 

As for the progressive-libertarian joint effort, it isn’t as far out as it sounds, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader get it as did 1960s radical activist Carl Oglesby but Paul is a “nutcase” despite his anti-interventionist, antiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-Federal Reserve stance and he wants to abolish the Gestapo TSA as well. Nader is poison to the Democrats and progressives/liberals who still believe in the functioning system despite watching Bush family operatives steal the 2000 election in Florida and then have not do a goddamned thing other than jerk off and point fingers at Nader when the Supreme Court put George W. Bush into the White House. Oglesby is a “conspiracy theorist” the dreaded pejorative that is used by all establishment lackeys and those enshrouded in comfortable cocoons of denial when they dare to ask serious questions. For even suggesting such a thing, even temporarily I was shunned as a leper, mocked and derided as much for that as for my inability to suck it up, turn the other cheek and be a pacifist. I must admit that I always had a bit of sympathy for the Jack Nicholson character, Colonel Nathan Jessep in the movie A Few Good Men, his methods were unsound and his arrogance was his undoing but he had it right when he barked that:

You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

The liberals and progressives are impotent and on the verge of extinction, of being hunted and persecuted in their own country simply because they never understood that there had to be someone on that wall to beat back the hordes.  Better get a clue folks, they are closing in now.

 

The Real Reason To Damn Obama

“They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.”

-Huey P. Long

The only reason that I ever bothered with the so-called librul [sic] New York Times, a paper that mind you pushed as many falsehoods as others in selling the Iraq invasion was to read the regular Sunday column of Frank Rich. Rich was a prince among toads like the street pimp for globalization Thomas Friedman, the country club Jew snob David Brooks, the occasionally brilliant Paul Krugman, the bizarre Maureen Dowd and a cast of lesser bloviators. When Rich, after decades with the Times left this spring to become a regular at the less prominent New York Magazine I had little use for the NYT. The Times by the way despite the ongoing standard bitching and moaning from the fascist right-wing that has seized control of the media precisely because of the Hitlerian big lie of the liberal media is anything but liberal. The Times is just another propaganda organ of the status quo and like all newspapers are headed for the tar pits, shuffling off like the doomed dinosaurs that they all are. The dismal state of the media in this country is largely to blame for our collective march into the history books as an example of the latest empire to self-immolate, when news began to be managed so as to present “both sides” even when one side was obviously bullshit it ceased to be credible. The ongoing dismantling of investigative reporting, the closing of overseas bureaus and the necessity to dumb down reportage to appeal to a public (few of whom even bother to read anything) that continues to regress intellectually and the profit motive have all combined to push the newspaper industry toward it’s inevitable extinction. That however is a story for another time.

I haven’t read much from Rich until this week, just prior to the orgy of flag-sucking and raw gluttony that is the Fourth of July when he launched his own barrage of fireworks that is the dead-on piece that is entitled Obama’s Original Sin. Rich writing with his standard brilliance lays out the exact reason why Obama, despite the collection of brainless ass clowns who will spend the better part of the next year trying to out-Nazi each other to run against The Pope of Hope will likely be a one term president. Despite all of the moronic spew vomited up by the Koch Brothers funded band of costumed imbeciles that is the ridiculous Tea Party, the racist nonsense, the Israeli fifth column black propaganda about the secret Muslim horseshit and the even more absurd labeling Wall Street’s savior as some sort of Socialist or Commie the real reason why Obama is likely doomed is for his administration’s ongoing bailout and manipulating of the markets with Ben Bernanke’s funny money. Obama, from the beginning has been nothing more than a corporate media creation, a triumph of deceptive marketing right up there with the canonization of the old dunce that was Ronald Reagan and a foot stool for Wall Street’s avaricious gambling casinos. He had a historical opportunity to regulate these monstrous institutions of looter capitalist greed and failed utterly and abysmally, in the true Democratic party fashion.

Rich’s piece is about this very failure and I excerpt the following:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department’s bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era’s designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky “Fabulous Fab” Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It’s as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

Even now, on the heels of Bank of America’s reluctant $8.5 billion settlement with investors who held its mortgage-backed securities, the Obama administration may be handing it and its peers new get-out-of-jail-free cards. With the Department of Justice’s blessing, the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, is pushing the 49 other states to sign on to a national financial settlement ending their investigations of the biggest mortgage lenders. What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up. Time reported in April that the lawyer negotiating with Miller for Moynihan’s Bank of America just happened to be a contributor to his 2010 Iowa reelection campaign. If the deal is struck, any truly aggressive state attorneys general, like Eric Schneiderman of New York, will be shut down before they can dig into the full and still mostly uninvestigated daisy chain of get-rich-quick rackets practiced by banks as they repackaged junk mortgages into junk securities.

Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords. The administration’s much-hyped Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being sabotaged by Washington Republicans intent on blocking any White House nominee, whether Elizabeth Warren or some malleable hack, to lead it. “We can’t let special interests win this fight,” said Obama when he proposed the agency in October 2009. Well, he missed his moment to fight for both it and Warren, and the special interests won without breaking a sweat.

Rather than purge the crash’s crimes, Wall Street’s leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this “perfect storm,” and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and ­Masters of the Universe swagger is back. Even Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, about the only bank chief not to be caught with a suspect balance sheet or a $1,400 office trash can, has taken to channeling Schwarzman. In June, he publicly challenged Ben Bernanke about the intolerable burdens of potential regulation—this despite a 67 percent surge in JPMorgan’s first-quarter profits and a 1,500 percent raise in his own compensation from 2009 to 2010. As good times roar back for corporate America, it’s bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS’s reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America’s total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what’s most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he’s done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street”—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as “very savvy businessmen.”

 AND –

personal Zelig, the former Clinton Treasury secretary and Harvard Corporation stalwart Robert Rubin. In The Audacity of Hope, published in late 2006, Obama called Rubin, then busily cheerleading the excessive risk at Citigroup, “one of the more thoughtful and unassuming people I know.” Two years later, when Citi cratered and threatened to take the economy with it, Rubin demonstrated his unassuming thoughtfulness by denying that he had anything to do with the toxic investments that cost taxpayers a $45 billion bailout and 52,000 Citi employees their jobs.

In his unseemly revolving-door career, Rubin not once but twice sped the Citi apocalypse—first in government, where he and his eventual successor as Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, championed the deregulatory policies that facilitated the consolidation of too-big-to-fail banks, and then in his $15 million-a-year role as Citi’s “guru,” where, by his own later account, he had no idea what was in the worthless paper the bank peddled to greedy dupes. You’d think Obama would have dumped him faster than he did the Reverend Wright, but that’s misreading him. Obama is preternaturally secure on thorny matters of race—as his magnificent speech on the subject made clear—and could distance himself from his preacher with no ambivalence. It’s “unassuming” braininess that’s his blind spot.

And so a parade of Rubin acolytes entered the White House, led by Geithner, a nearly lifelong civil servant so identified with the financial Establishment that even Mayor Bloomberg mistakenly introduced him as a Goldman alumnus at a public event in New York last year. It’s Geithner’s influence on policy, however, not his persona, that proved fateful. Not until March 2010 did the White House get its first explicit, modest jobs bill through Congress.

Obama had taken office at a true populist moment that demanded more than this. People were gagging over their looted 401(k)s and underwater homes, the AIG bonuses, and the bailouts. Howard Dean rage has never been Obama’s style—hope-and-change was an elegant oratorical substitute—and had he given full voice to the public mood, he would have been pilloried as an “angry black man.” But Obama didn’t have to play Huey Long. He could have pursued a sober but determined execution of justice and an explicit, major jobs initiative—of which there have been exactly none, the too-small stimulus included, to the present day.

By failing to address that populist anger, Obama gave his enemies the opening to co-opt it and turn it against him. Which the tea party did, dishonestly but brilliantly, misrepresenting Obama’s health-care-reform crusade as yet another attempt by the elites to screw the taxpayer. (The Democrats haplessly reinforced the charge with marathon behind-the-scenes negotiations with insurance and pharmaceutical-­industry operatives.) Once the health-care law was signed, the president still slighted the unemployment crisis. A once-hoped-for WPA-style public-works program, unloved by Geithner, had been downsized in the original stimulus, and now a tardy, halfhearted stab at a $50 billion transportation-infrastructure jobs bill produced a dandy Obama speech but nothing else.

Obama soon retreated into the tea-party mantra of fiscal austerity. Short-term spending cuts when spending is needed to create jobs make no sense economically. But they also make no sense politically. The deficit has never been a top voter priority, no matter how loudly the right claims it is. At Obama’s inaugural, Gallup found that 11 percent of voters ranked unemployment as their top priority while only 2 percent did the deficit. Unemployment has remained a stable public priority over the deficit ever since, usually by at least a 2-to-1 ratio. In a CBS poll immediately after the Democrats’ “shellacking” of last November—a debacle supposedly precipitated by the tea party’s debt jihad—the question “What should Congress concentrate on in January?” yielded 56 percent for “economy/jobs” and 4 percent for “deficit reduction.”

AND –

There’s not much Obama can do to alter the economy by 2012, given the debt-ceiling fight, the long campaign, and nihilistic Capitol Hill antagonists opposed to any government spending that might create jobs and, by extension, help Obama keep his own. But the central question before the nation couldn’t be clearer: Who pays? The taxpayers bailed out the elite; now it’s the elite’s turn to return the favor. Massive cuts to the safety net combined with scant sacrifice from those at the top is wrong ethically and politically. It is, in the truest sense, un-American. Obama knows this, and he hit a welcome note last week when he urged some higher corporate taxes for hedge funds and the like. But his forays in this direction are tentative and sporadic. You have to wonder why he isn’t seizing the moment to articulate and fight for the big picture instead of playing a lose-lose game of rope-a-dope with the Republicans on their budgetary turf.

Some Obama fans think it’s tactical genius that’s holding him back—his fabled long ball. Americans are no longer as angry as they were in January 2009 so much as they are defeated, depressed, and jaded by the slow recovery and by four decades of raging inequality that tells them the deck is stacked no matter who’s in Washington. Better, then, not to ruffle these still waters—or those easily rattled independents fetishized by political consultants—and instead scare seniors about imminent Medicare cutbacks and plot deep-think policy initiatives that (like health-care reform) might fix America over time. But the voters’ placidity hardly augurs well for Democratic turnout in 2012. And it may not last. All that’s required is one more economic panic to shatter the phony peace and whip the rage back to center stage, once again to the right’s advantage.

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

The Obama presidency has been one endless series of failures, cave-ins, half-measures, broken campaign promises, capitulations and pissed away opportunities for change. The only good moment for the man who failed to close Gitmo or even better yet send Lloyd Blankfein and the rest of the Wall Street criminals there was the hit on the bad assed bogeyman of the past decade Osama bin Laden, days after a blistering dressing down of the pompous ass that is Donald Trump. Even that was a failure in that Obama failed to use the bully pulpit once again to wave our Emanuel Goldstein’s bloody scalp, perhaps it had something to do with the missing body but you get the point. That the fascist GOP is actually looking like an alternative to Obama in the form of Mitt Romney prancing about I his magic red, white and blue underwear is a stunning example of how badly that Obama has been up to this point. I really loved Rich’s line about the O-Bots, those who are the same type of apologists for Barry O. that drove the left so batshit during the Bush years. Rich wrote “ Some Obama fans think it’s tactical genius that’s holding him back—his fabled long ball.” To this I quote myself from a previous post entitled Money Doesn’t Talk: It Swears:

Day Of The Flag Suckers

Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.

-Richard Aldington

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

-Bertrand Russell

 They are the ones who are shouting the loudest for others to die in foreign lands, they are the ones waving the flag the most vigorously while undermining all that it is supposed to stand for and today being the Fourth of July, they are legion. America has a peculiar form of reverence of the flag as a symbol, not something that would be found in a free and more advanced society and more associated with traditional dictatorships, for example Weimar era Germany. Children are indoctrinated to pledge allegiance to the flag, a strange ritual in what is falsely advertised as a free country, the additional contemptuous phrase “one nation under god” having been slyly swapped out for the original “one nation under democracy” and has served as an integral rallying point for the cancerous fascist fifth-column that continues to grow stronger and angrier. The pure intoxication of mixing nationalist flag worship with a perceived divine mandate to conquer the world abroad while persecuting the hated liberals, gays, minorities and especially Muslims at home is as irresistible as it will inevitably be deadly.

Nowhere is the cancerous merging of nationalism and religion more prevalent than in the fascist Republican party and it’s brownshirt army of hostile useful idiots that is the Tea Party. Today is their day for they like all right-wing vermin have a monopoly on patriotism. They will gather across the land to swill beer and stuff hot dogs and apple pie into their blowholes, denounce the commie in the WHITE House who has become the unifying factor for the racist dregs of American society as they carry out the dirty agendas of plutocrats, our modern day domestic versions of the British aristocracy that this country once waged a revolution against. Rallies across the country, promoted heavily by the mega-billionaire Koch Brother and their hydra network of front groups, all with Orwellian names designed to play the patriotism card which they deal from the bottom of the deck will be attended by the worst of the worst of American fascists, specifically those who are running for the presidency on the Republican party ticket and will have the full backing of the angry rabble to take their country back and oust the dirty Manchurian Candidate, teleprompter reading socialist Kenyan darkie once and for all.

The wretched teabaggers, in all of their innate ignorance will gorge themselves to bursting, straining the seams of their red, white and blue Wal-Mart apparel and waving their blessed made in China flags, lounging around like the good ole boys in Mississippi Burning and holding court on Obama’s militant ACORN army, the implementation of Sharia Law, the United Nations gun-grabbers, the homosexual agenda and the prevailing greatness of our god-kissed capitalist Empire. Tonight, after darkness falls and when they get good and liquored up and are at their fireworks shows there will be a good many will be prowling the crowds looking for anyone who looks gay, isn’t white or doesn’t look sufficiently patriotic enough to beat to a bloody pulp, while individually the scumbaggers are as yellow as their Gadsden flags they like wild dogs hunt in packs. The sort of raw  and mean filth that gravitates to the one time libertarian, pro-civil liberties and anti-war, non-interventionist movement that was infiltrated and immediately taken over by the fascist Republican party (and I suspect a good deal of right-wing Israeli types) are a menace to decent society and an affront to everything that his country was supposed to have stood for. The hordes of Glenn Beck zombies, promoted heavily by longtime Republican operative Roger Ailes and funded by the Kochs, whose family fortune was derived in the decidedly un-American way by their daddy Fred building oil refineries for the tyrannical Russian despot Josef Stalin sprung into action like terrorist sleeper cells immediately after that helicopter trucked away George W. Bush like so much garbage. Their phony grass roots movement was a vehicle to mount a racism fueled backlash against Mr. Obama who despite his hypnotic message of hope and change has turned out to be just another corporate toadie, subservient to his Wall Street backers and too much of an invertebrate to challenge the status quo. This doesn’t bother the baggers though, they are perfectly down with stealing from the taxpayers to bail out chiselers and outright thieves and Obama has done nothing to overturn the worst abuses of the Bushreich that they never had a problem with prior to January 20, 2009.

Nobody waves the bloody flag like the fascist Republican party, a collection of slimy, degenerate blowhards who are determined to blow up the entire country and the already horrendous economy to oust the terrible black man from the house that Ronald Reagan built. Collectively they are the most dangerous threat that this country has ever faced and they have the muscle in their 9-12 movement goon squads and the dens of iniquity that are the Christian churches to back them up. It is lost on the knuckle-draggers, mouth-breathers and just balls out stupid peckerwoods that the party leadership, outside of the rare exceptions like John McCain and the new CIA Director General David Petraeus they are purely armchair patriots and apple pie authoritarians.

This anti-American political party could never carry the torch of patriotism were it not for their deception and demagoguery in playing to the most base and vile instincts of the perennially angry. Like any good purveyor of tyranny enabling double speak and race baiting, they have a little something for everybody.

Festering resentment towards women? Welcome to the party.

Hate Mexicans and Blacks? Step right in.

Want to round up and intern Muslims? You are truly patriotic.

Think that the liberals are destroying the country? We do too.

Are you on God’s side? Hallelujah, so are we.

Do you want to defeat the homosexual agenda? We are on your side and God is too.

The Constitution? It’s just a goddamned piece of paper, we have the flag!

The values volk are anything but patriotic and their value system is anything but American. Were one to read up on some history in say the mid-1930s, which country do you think would have won the hallowed national pride/most patriotic honor that was personified in a certain flag-worhipping political party?

The Republican swine always love to bray about flag desecration as well, fortunately we have been spared the annual showboating to pass anti-flag burning/desecration legislation the past few years as the wave of red, white and blew sewage that belched forth after the American Reichstag Fire that was 9/11. I always found their definition of the sanctity of Old Glory to be as hypocritical as it was nauseating. In the looter capitalist Homeland the flag is routinely desecrated by those seeking to use the symbolism to sell shit to morons, Wal-Mart, prior to the invasion of the Chinese products always used to tout their good old pro-American style of retailing. Sam Walton took his dirt nap in 1992 and the parasites who inherited his empire quickly adopted the same sort of loyalty to America that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street speculators and rapacious corporations that are addicted to offshoring jobs as though it is crack cocaine have used to bust the majority of a once great middle class back to zero.

But I digress….

If the flag is a sacred object then it is only logical to make ANY misuse of the national symbol a crime:

If  one were to use a patriotic, red, white and blue napkin to wipe my mouth after eating apple pie isn’t that desecration?

If one were to  use a patriotic latex condom to fuck a gay lover up the ass, isn’t that desecration?

If businesses use the stars and stripes in an advertisement to sell a product, isn’t that desecration?

If one chooses to put a stars and stripes sweater on a pet dog one day isn’t that desecration?

If one were to wear a red, white and blue striped bandana on my yearly run to Sturges isn’t that desecration?

If on that run, one paints their Harley’s gas tank to resemble the flag isn’t that desecration?

If one were to paint a flag in the center of a grass field for my High School football team opener isn’t that desecration?

And wouldn’t the National Football League, where every game is an orgy of symbolic reverence for war, the flag, militarism and controlled violence be guilty of desecration?

The willingness to use inflammatory language and then wrap it in the flag to induce emotional responses from certain segments of the population IS desecration.

Flag desecration? Let the Republicans wrap themselves in it, what could be more disrespectful than that. Consider their collective military service, despite their standard flag-sucking demagoguery that sells to the masses of asses the majority of them have never worn a uniform, or at least never worn one in the service of their country.

CHICKENHAWK ROLL CALL –

2012 Presidential Candidates

Michele Bachmann: Never Served

Newt Gingrich: Never Served (draft deferment to avoid Vietnam)

Herman Cain: Never Served (other than pizza of course)

Sarah Palin: Never Served (husband allegedly served in white supremacist militia group)

Mitt Romney: Never Served

John Huntsman: Never Served

Tim Pawlenty: Never Served

Rick Santorum: Never Served

Rick Perry: Never Served

Ron Paul: Vietnam veteran, served with honor but has zero chance because of his anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties and anti-Federal Reserve views.

Assorted other Right-Wing Vermin:

Eric Cantor: Never Served

John Boehner: Two months in US Navy – medical discharge
Mitch McConnell: Briefly in Army Reserve – another medical discharge
Joe Lieberman: Never Served

Allen West: Served but discharged for sadistic tendencies that have served the tea house Negro well in his rising political career as he targets gays and Muslims.

Chris Christie: Never Served (other than multiple trips to all you can eat mega-bar)

Marco Rubio: Never Served

Scott Walker: Never Served (anything other than the Koch Brothers)

Glenn Beck: Never Served

Andrew Beitbart: Never Served (other than Matt Drudge that is)

Bill O’Reilly: Never Served

Roger Ailes: Never Served

Jeb Bush: Never Served

Sean Hannity: Never Served

Rush Limbaugh: Never Served

Beginning to notice a pattern here?

I have neither the time nor the space to continue with the chicken hawk roll call but rest assured the aforementioned have plenty of company amongst their cowardly ranks.

They are Armchair Patriots, those who detest American values but wave the flag as though it were some sort of shield for their fascism.

Armchair patriots believe in war without their own personal sacrifice, they believe that war is the simplistic jingoism of the John Wayne, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies that they have been weaned on.

By the way, John Wayne never served either.

God bless the USA and may the rockets red glare now be just a little brighter come Tueday morning.

in say the mid-1930s, which country do you think would have won the hallowed national pride/most patriotic honor?

GOD BLESS AMERICA and our holy fucking flag!