Dancing With The Corpses

“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose”

-Charles Bukowski

Kirstie Alley glided across the dance floor, shaking her stuff, her gracefulness belied her girth and made her the early favorite to become the new avatar of all that is right in America, Dancing With the Stars is finally back. ABC, learning a lesson after last season’s near fiasco when waves of Teabagger activists stormed the online polls and nearly voted Bristol Palin America’s as favorite dancing queen, potentially alienating millions of non-Sarah Palin worshippers. The redultant big ratings turd that would have been floated in the punchbowl had the less talented teenage birther of bastards been allowed to steal the title. Opting for a lineup of less politically divisive ‘stars’ this time around DWTS gave Americans just the sort of sweet, sweet spike of mental morphine delivered digitally through the electronic crackpipe. The two-minute hate directed at whore-mongering cokehead Charlie Sheen has abetted for at least the time being, Obama’s new war and the nuclear travesty in Japan stealing most of the airplay. Americans love this stuff, it’s one hell of a distraction, I am waiting for some savvy entrepreneur to contract out to the oligarchy and start manufacturing giant balloons of Sheen’s head to fill with helium and fly in front of gas station price signs. Such is life on the big star spangled lemming farm , where the inhabitants graze away placidly in front of their big screen living room gods while awaiting the big culling of the herd. 

Ordinary Americans you see can’t be bothered with the reality of the corporate wars waged under the big lie of spreading democracy and taking the fight to those who hate us for our freedoms and way of life. Truth is that we really aren’t as free as advertised (just take a good look around someday) nor is U.S. democracy any other thing than what H.L. Mencken once remarked as that “every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”. Democracy in Der Heimat today is voting on American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, the real elections are nothing other than a Hobson’s choice between two compromised, corrupted and amoral charlatans who were chosen precisely because of these traits by the oligarchy. Elections in American you see are a win-win situation for the pigs that run the system, given a false sense of legitimacy by a naive, childlike belief that change can still be realized at the ballot box/electronic voting machine when the entire democratic process is an illusion in itself. Sure there are the standard cultural populist issues that pollute the ballot and ensure that the most enormously stupid and hateful among us show up in sufficient numbers so as to make it a good show but when it all comes down to it there is no substantial difference between America’s two rotten and irredeemably debased and venal political parties. There is really no substantive differences in the policies of the state itself no matter which party ‘wins’ control over the spoils system, the corporate giveaways only accelerate, impoverishing millions in the process, the police state continues to metastasize as the cancer on a once much more free society that it is and most importantly of all …the wars continue. Not that Americans want to hear about them rather than the standard idiotic jingoist hogwash smothered in patriotic bullshit, there are dancing and talent contests to watch, ballgames to enjoy and the daily Vulcan style mind meld with their beloved telescreens to continue uninterrupted by any sort of reality lest their exoskeleton of denial be punctured. 

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

This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.

Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

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

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

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

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

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to the history of the ‘good war’, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by the fire-bombing of civilian areas. Before Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima the land of the rising sun had been brought to it’s knees by a long-running series of B-29 incendiary bombings led by General Curtis LeMay a ruthless efficiency obsessed madman with the nickname of “Bombs Away LeMay”. LeMay led a withering series of bombings on 64 Japanese cities with the worst being the flaming hell from the skies unleashed on Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945 when nearly one hundred thousand human beings were incinerated. So intense was that bombing that according to one writer, Nicholas Von Hoffman, that the heat “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters”. LeMay once said that “killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”. The murderous actions of the U.S. government against the non-caucasian enemy du jour in any of our great imperialist wars and conflicts including Barack Obama’s humanitarian bombardment of Libya as well as the financial windfall that the destruction of lives and infrastructure reap for the moneychangers and blood barters rarely if ever intrude on the consciousness of the masses of asses who couldn’t be bothered with the slaughter that is carried out on their taxpayer dime. Kilgore Trout’s’ The Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and dumbed-down  philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as the reality doesn’t intrude upon their futile pursuit of happiness. I know people who regularly flock to local air shows when they take place every year to marvel at the military planes, drool over the displays of armaments, eat, drink and be merry with that one big disconnect from reality ensuring their pleasure. Aerial bombardment and cruise missiles are not only extraordinarily expensive but also representative of the sanitized killing and innate gutlessness of modern drone warfare where airstrikes can be launched from a distance in the comfort of air conditioned command centers by men with video screens and joysticks. Roger Waters accurately described it as the Bravery of Being out of Range:

In something more contemporary than World War II atrocities one needs only to read Chris Hedges’ latest gut-wrenching essay The Body Baggers of Iraq. In the piece, Hedges who is the preeminent moral voice in this feculent cadaver of a republic pulls back the red, white and blue bunting on the blessed glory of war that is revered by armchair patriots. He details the story of Jess Goodell, a worker in the Marine Corps Mortuary Affairs unit whose job was to “collect and catalog” the corpses and possessions of those poor, fucked-over “heroes” who paid the ultimate price so that Americans could remain free to be decadent, slothful, timorous, self-obsessed nitwits whose only Earthly purpose is to be ready to bare their jugulars whenever the monsters that are the corporate vampire class are ready to feed. The piece is not for anyone possessing either a weak stomach nor an animal instinct to remain in denial about the glamorous and noble nature of war that they have been sold through movies and television. War is a vile, stinking morass of human misery, blood, vomit, dead babies, shattered lives and those who have gotten obscenely wealthy and powerful in turning the filth, fury and soul-sucking degradation into just more revenue flows that they use to gamble in the markets on more defense stocks that feed the demon that can never be full enough of the gore and gold upon which it feeds. To once again quote the late, great Hunter S. Thompson..”All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.” It has worked wonders for the psychotics who run this place now and while that precious nugget of real truth is an even bigger bout of skull-fuckery that is best left to the hard core truth-seekers and cynics…

But I digress….

The Body Baggers of Iraq is just awesome in it’s sustained intensity and you will never see anything even remotely resembling something like this in even the most ‘liberal’ bastions of the corporate propaganda system that serves as the media here in Fortress USA. I excerpt the following from that piece:

The unit processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said, almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed, especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” The harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and become their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again—followed by a series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.

“They make these Marines do what they call ‘bitch’ work,” Goodell said. “They are assigned to be someone else’s ‘bitch’ for the day. We had a guy in our platoon, not in Iraq but in California, and he was overweight. He was on remedial PT, which meant he went to extra physical training. When he came to work he was rotated. One day he was with this corporal or this sergeant. One day he was sent to me. I had him for an hour. I remember sending him outside and making him carry things. It was very common for them to dig a hole and fill it back up with sand or carry sand bags up to the top of a hill and then carry them down again.”

The unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves, usually by putting rifles under their chins and pulling the trigger.

“We had a Marine who was in a port-a-john when he blew his face off,” she said. “We had another Marine who shot himself through the neck. Often they would do it in the corner of a bunker or an abandoned building. We had a couple that did it in port-a-johns. We had to go in and peel and pull off chunks of flesh and brain tissue that had sprayed the walls. Those were the most frustrating bodies to get. On those bodies we were also on cleanup crew. It was gross. We sent the suicide notes home with the bodies.”

—

“One of the first convoys we went to was one where the Army had been traveling over a bridge and an IED had exploded,” she said. “It had literally shot a seven-ton truck over the side and down into a ravine. Marines were already going down into the ravine. We were just getting out of our vehicles. We were putting on our gloves and putting coverings over our boots. I was with a Marine named Pineda. I was coming around the Humvee and there was a spot on the ground that was a circle. I looked at it and thought something must have exploded here or near here. I went over to look at it. I looked in and saw a boot. Then I noticed the boot had a foot in it. I almost lost my lunch.”

“In the seven-ton truck the [body of the] assistant driver, who was in the passenger seat, was trapped in the vehicle,” she said. “All of his body was in the vehicle. We had to crawl in there to get it out. It was charred. Pineda and I pulled the burnt upper torso from the truck. Then we removed a leg. Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting out hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso but you need to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh. The contents did not resemble a human body.”

The members of the mortuary unit were shunned by the other Marines. The stench of dead flesh clung to their uniforms, hair, skin and fingers. Two members of the mortuary unit began to disintegrate psychologically. One began to take a box of Nyquil tablets every day and drink large quantities of cold medicine. He was eventually medevaced out of Iraq.

“Our cammies would be stained with blood or with brains,” she said. “When you scoop up the meat it often would get on the cuffs of our shirts. You could smell it, even after you took off your gloves. We weren’t washing our cammies everyday. Your cuff comes to your face when you eat. Physically we were stained with remains. We had a constant smell like rotten meat, which I guess is what it was since often the bodies had been in the sun and the heat for a long time. The flesh had gone bad. The skin on a body in the hot sun slides off. The skin detaches itself from the layer beneath and slides around on itself.”

—

Her unit once had to recover two Marines who had drowned in a lake. It appeared one had leapt in to save the other. The bodies, which were recovered after a couple of days by Navy divers, were grotesquely swollen. One of the Marines was so bloated and misshapened that the body was difficult to carry on a litter.

“His neck was as wide as his bloated head, and his stomach jutted out like a barrel,” she writes in the book. “His testicles were the size of cantaloupes. His face was white and puffy and thick. Not fat, but thick. It was unreal. He looked like a movie prop, with thick, gray, waxy skin and the thick purple lips. We couldn’t stop looking at these bodies because they were so out of proportion and so disfigured and because, still, they looked like us.”

It was hardest to look into the faces of the dead. She and the other members of the mortuary unit swiftly covered the faces when they worked on the bodies. They avoided looking at the eyes of the corpses.

Once, the unit had to process seven Marines killed in an explosion. Seven or eight body bags were delivered to the bunker.

“We had clean body bags set up so we could sort the flesh,” she said. “Sometimes things come in with nametags. Or sometimes one is Hispanic and you could tell who was Hispanic and who was the white guy. We tried separating flesh. It was ridiculous. We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We were trying to do the best we could sorting it out. We had the last body bag come in. We opened up the body bag and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us. We got used to a lot of it. But the heads worked the other way. They affected us more strongly as time passed. We saw on the heads the expressions of fright and horror. It made us wonder what we were doing here.”

She processed one Marine whose face was twisted at the moment of death by rage. The face of this Marine began to haunt her.

“I had this feeling that something awful had occurred,” she said. “The way he had come in and stiffened he had this look to his face that made my stomach curl. It looked angry. Often expressions on bodies would look fearful and hurt. The faces looked as though they had received death. But this face looked like he had given death.”

She and the other members of the unit became convinced they could feel and hear the souls of the dead Marines they had processed and housed in their reefers.

The pernicious nature of war not only destroys flesh and buildings, it destroys lives of those who survive and then must cope with the horrific and immoral acts that their government has ordered them to participate in. Those with a conscience like Goodell are haunted by the experience and are able to channel it into some sort of action that is redemptive, such as speaking out with the truth. Others, take for example Army Specialist Jeremy Morelock of Wasila, Alaska (how ironic) and the “Kill Team” who was just sentenced to 24 years in prison for his murdering for fun of Afghan civilians. While Morelock becomes the example and the sacrificial lamb for the ongoing carnage in America’s wars. How many other Jeremy Morelocks are not going to be brought up on charges and will return home one day, trained killers with sociopathic personality disorders and who will be absorbed into the police state apparatus as law enforcement personnel? Food for thought isn’t it?

Outback’s Shameless Corporate War Profiteering

To borrow from the Marine Corps vernacular referenced in the Hedges’ piece one could accurately peg the majority of Americans as “shit bags”, “fat nasties”, “money fuckers” and “slaves” so worthless and pathetic they have been during the rise of the fascist state. More of the lemmings here in God’s chosen land of plenty pour our their emotions in acts of lunacy like mourning the death of multi-millionaire movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor, a woman who lived the good life and through her the inhabitants of idiot nation lived vicariously, just as they do when it comes to all of the false idols that they sanctimoniously deify while the wallow in the shame, cowardice and willful ignorance that passes for their pitiful little lives. I remember back in the days after the prior vainglorious Emperor George W. Bush unleashed the full fury of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq back in 2003, at that time gas was still cheap, the grand fraud of the Wall Street housing bubble was years from reaching critical mass and piggish and still traumatized by the ‘terrorist’ attacks on 9/11 were braying for blood. The roads were filled with mega-sizes SUV’s and goddammit if there wasn’t one of those idiotic fucking yellow ribbon magnets on the ass end of each one. It was futile trying to convince the average American dumbass that their over-consumption of the precious black gold was what our heroic military ‘heroes’ were being sent into the meat-grinder to kill, be maimed for life or die for. Back in that day those who dared to question were shouted down as “traitors”, “terrorist-appeasers”, “enemies of the state” and the worst of all pejoratives…”unpatriotic” back when it was scary to dissent against Bush’s maniac crusades for neocon doctrine. Those were disturbing times for those of us who were only starting to come to the realization (as with me) that it was all bullshit, before the early internet insurgents….after years of relative ‘peace’ it was a total war of civilizations. Eventually though the truth became to seep out, the internet gave many of us a place to organize and educate ourselves and the always greed-crazed corporate carnivores latched onto the wars as another marketing tool. 


The wars have not only not been televised to Americans but are now shamelessly used by corporations who equate patriotic fervor with profits. The participation of national restaurant chains like Outback Steakhouse in Operation Homefront are cynically used to sell steaks and blooming onions to blooming idiots (I wonder how that meat would taste if Chris Hedges’ piece were slipped into the menus), Wal-Marts are festooned in the red-white and blue despite an inventory of poorly constructed garbage made in China and “support the troops” has become a guaranteed money maker to lure consumers. The worst offenders of course is FOX and nothing is more indicative of their cheerleading for murder than the NFL coverage, take for example the use of Veterans Day weekend in 2009 to promote the ‘patriotism’ of the foreign pig Rupert Murdoch. FOX’s pregame show was held on a set in Afghanistan (see Militarist Masturbation) where ex jocks and grinning shit salesmen like Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw immersed the FOX brand in the sort of glorification of the war machine that would do Leni Riefenstahl proud. There is no important football game that doesn’t feature a tax dollar wasting flyover and this year’s Super Bowl in Jerry Jone’s gauche Texas temple of avarice was vomit inducing so soaked in red-meat flag waving and war worshipping hyperbole was it. It goes over real well with those who in the true modern American way love to park their fat asses on their couches in front of their big screen televisions and cheer for others to die just as long as they don’t have to do the fighting.


I will close with this excerpt from the classic antiwar book by Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun:

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm..

But what do the dead say?

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say that I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die.

So it goes…

All Hail General Petraeus!

That the great American General David Petraeus is an five-star bullshit artist comes as so real revelation to those of us who have been watching him operate for years. The SURGE was the most successful piece of propaganda in modern American history, turning a brutal and costly sucking-black hole of blood and chaos in Iraq into a golden-hued triumph and then gone flickering into the recesses of the collective American mindset as they turned their channels. The SURGE was so brilliant that Helicopter Ben Bernanke used a similar strategy in pimping a devastated economy, ruined by degenerate Wall Street gamblers and on permanant taxpayer life-support into the near miraculous GREEN SHOOTS of recovery. Well, nearly two years after Chairman Ben’s vaunted 60 Minutes infomercial the economy is still in ruins, inflation is skyrocketing and food costs driven into the proverbial stratosphere are rapidly destabilizing the globe. So when I read the recent Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings entitled King David’s War I was not one bit fazed when it was revealed that the man on the white horse was utilizing propaganda and perception management to keep his war in Afghanistan in it’s rightful place in the line at for funding priorities. Only in America could a country that is unravelling as quickly as this one is, infrastructure crumbling, jobs fleeing to cheap labor Meccas, a failed political system and a crusing debt to China could such ruinous wars of choice continue to drain the nation’s coffers.

Despite the legend erected around him by Republican syscophants like the McCain-Lieberman-Graham three-headed monster and his own oversized ego and crackerjack public relations team Petraeus has always been less miracle worker than he is a product. The high water mark for King David came in early 2009 when he goose-stepped out to the middle of the NFL logo in full dress regalia to flip the coin at Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa. A national television audience, a massive display of militarism with the thundering flyover barely drowning out the roar of the crowd for the American Caesar (or General James Mattoon Scott) and the loving adoration of a nation braying for the blood of brown skinned Muslim devils reveled in the near orgasmic release of energy of that moment. Petraeus was also riding high after the SURGE PR campaign that convinced millions that their hero had finally won the Iraq war and brought some degree of revenge for that damned Saddam Hussein’s support of the 9/11 ‘terrorist’ attacks. Petraeus was in another of those cheap, warmed over versions of real American history honored like the second coming of Eisenhower, a welcome comparison for a man with long-term political aspirations. Only a few years ago, he had been dissed in an ugly public manner by his former boss Admiral William Fallon as an “ass-kissing little chickenshit”. Fallon of course paid the price for his candor, being sent packing by the Bushreich high-command, the final straw being an interview that he did for Esquire magazine back in 2008.

The legend of General Petraeus continued to grow in stature with the successful SURGE that has been touted by every self-interested politically connected asshole in order to present the illusion of not being defeated in Iraq because as Christ knows, America WINS wars. Or at least America WINS wars when the war effort isn’t being undermined at home by a liberal fifth column, a Commie liberal media and dope-smoking draft dodgers, long-haired stinky hippies and black militants rioting on the nation’s cities, so the myth goes. The war machine DID learn one hugely important lesson from the Vietnam debacle and that it was imperative that the perception of the public had to be managed in order to gin up support for future imperialist ventures. With the reinstatement of the draft being political suicide in that it would immediately result in a mass antiwar movement when hundreds of thousands could be plucked from their living room sofas and transported into a real live war zone and therefore being out of the question the public had to be convinced to support or even better forget about ongoing military occupations to plunder on behalf of corporations. Reagan hit paydirt with the Blitzkrieg of global military power Grenada, Poppy Bush kicked ass on former CIA asset and big time narcotics trafficker Manuel Noriega and the first Gulf War was a spectacular masterpiece of stage managed propaganda brought into the living rooms of millions courtesy of CNN. Add to that a decade of high profile ass-whupping propaganda films such as Rambo, the Chuck Norris Missing in Action series and other sordid lesser movie franchises that re-fought the Vietnam war and the seeds had been planted, the bitter taste of defeat washed from our mouths.

Then of course came the granddaddy of them all, the lynchpin upon which the reset button could be hit on the entire society and justify an Orwellian future of never ending wars – 9/11. Before the bodies had even been pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center the Bush-Cheney junta was already plotting the new world order as exemplified by The Project For The New American Century or PNAC.  The alleged ‘terrorist’ attacks” (attacks pulled off with something like a super military style precision that would seem to be beyond that which a bunch of guys in caves could hope to pull off) would launch the expansion of the U.S. global empire. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played off of Junior Bush’s Oedipal complex to goad him into invading Iraq to finish the old man’s job. First though, there would have to be the strike against the land where the supposed 9/11 materminds had plotted the attacks from and were presiding over a network of terror camps (note the stock footage of the masked men and the monkey bars) from – Afghanistan. Never mind that Afghanistan is historically famous for having chewed up empires like the Brits and the Soviets, we Americans would never repeat the mistakes taught by history and get bogged down in a brutal and primitive quagmire. A quagmire that nearly ten years later would require the genius of the brilliant General Petraeus to save us from but more on that in a little while. With Afghanistan attacked first and the public’s blood boiling after the 9/11 attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act rammed through Congress like shit through the proverbial goose and any influential road blocks being eliminated when the anthrax letters started being received by key members of the Democratic party Senate leadership and news anchors the game was on.

The ramping up of the apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to the attack on Iraq was like a loundening drumbeat of the tom tom’s at some sort of bizarre island ritual where the natives get jacked up on some sort of magical hallucinogenic concoction and then go and slaughter animals as tribute to their gods. In our case, here in the new American HOMELAND our god was and always has been war. The entire country went through some sort of strange and inexplicable phase of indoctrination by propaganda and intimidation by the now common denunciations of “traitor”, “unpatriotic” and “terrorist sympathizer” to tamp down the opposition to phase two of the American conquest of the Middle East and Eurasia. When the deal was done, Colin Powell’s lies at the United Nations enshrined as truth and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction ready to be loosed upon our preciously innocent American children while they slumbered in their comfortable beds the order was given and the Baghdad lit up like the Fourth of July with a sustained Shock And Awe display of  U.S. taxpayer dollars. And of course it was all on television….and the lemmings ate it up as usual.

Fast forward to early 2011, Iraq has largely  been relegated to the memory hole with much thanks to the miraculous SURGE. George W. Bush’s wars have become Barack Obama’s wars and the situation in Afghanistan, while predictably forgotten by most Americans and erased from the corporate media in favor of the latest Charlie Sheen update is continuing to deteriorate. This even after King David Petraeus found himself plucked from his posh post at CENTCOM in Tampa and sent off to work his magic in the land where empires go do die. When Rolling Stone published an article that portrayed General Stanley McChrystal, the four star clown then running the Afghan circus in a very nasty light of insubordination and disrespect it was the final straw for even the jelly-spined Obama who summoned him to Washington and ‘accepted his retirement’. The article, The Runaway General was written by Michael Hastings who won the coveted Polk Award for his efforts. King David’s War is his followup and can’t have made the great man Petraeus very happy, unconfirmed anonymous reports allege that the puckering of his asshole could be heard all the way from Kandahar. The piece brilliantly lays out the levels to which Petraeus will plumb in order to cynically ensure that his media polished halo continue to glow. The great general, acting on behalf of Boobus Americanus to preserve our precious way of life cajoles, bribes, threatens, grandstands and allies himself with bloodthirsty, illiterate murderous, drug trafficking thugs like Col. Abdul Razzik to keep the war effort going. If the U.S. is relying on a guy Razzik, a real nasty piece of work by anyone’s standards to ‘win’ the war then it is further evidence of the damnation of America’s soul. Not that it troubles King David, who the Hastings piece brilliantly sums up in this statement:

A better nickname for Petraeus might be the Godfather: He is relying on a network of warlords and drug runners that he himself once called a “criminal syndicate”.

I suppose that Petraeus, like Colonel Kurtz was winning the war ‘his way’, and another Hastings piece that is actually succeeding in finally putting a weed up the asses of the right people, again for Rolling Stone and entitled Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators may be the one that seals the deal for Petraeus. Of course the general with a true idea on the value of propaganda, P.R. and other little white lies, half-truths and prevarications has ordered an investigation, it will predictably be about as credible as Tony Soprano and Silvio Dante doing an internal audit of the Bada Bing Club blooks. Could it be that General Petraeus is about to reap the whirlwind of his own bullshit? With the Rolling Stone articles pissing on his presidential parade after it was already seriously damaged by Obama’s exile of Petraeus to Afghanistan. The King David piece speaks of tensions between Gen P. and Obama who allegedly felt had been bent over (what a surprise) and butt-fucked by the Pentagon and it’s agents in escalating the conflict which according to unnamed sources were becoming increasingly wary about a potential Petraeus 2012 bid and were seeing him “..as a general on his white horse”, according to an unnamed senior U.S. military official. With his medal bedrecked showboating for the media Petraeus would have been a big hit with the right-wingers who are now desperately in search of a new champion since the political career of Sarah Palin went down in a blaze of idiocy, violent rhetoric and the televised murder of animals that proved too much for even cable TV diehards to take. The GOP is now, at least being exposed as the pack of sleazy, opportunistic jackals primarily interested in wresting control of the lead position at the golden trough shorn of their most visible leader Palin. The glue that keeps the nutjobs, war freaks, Raptureheads, nationalists, Birthers and brokedick peckerwood Jesus freak base together has been a charismatic cult leader and let’s face it, Newt Gingrich is not that man (the Birchers HATE him) and Michelle Bachmann is just a more deranged version of Palin and an embarassment. The exposure of Petraeus as a pathological and cynical con artist is a devastating blow to the Republican party as a whole and to the rest of America in that it practically ensures a second term of Obama’s Bush Lite.

Hasting’s first article displays the arrogance of King David when he is quoted as telling his spokesman that the White House was “fucking with the wrong guy”. Then came the McChrystal debacle and the assignment of Petraeus to what might as well have been the Aleutians. When Obama summoned the recalcitrant Stanley McChrystal back to D.C. and then in an unexpected whirlwind turn of events accepted his “resignation” it sent shockwaves through the administration’s war council. So sudden had the shitcanning been and so contrary to the positive lobbying on his behalf despite his obvious disregard for civilian authority that the perpetually conniving Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bush appointee Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen were not expecting Obama’s decision. Even more surprising was the annoitment of the great General Petraeus, his superior to replace him because as stated in the piece, “If Petraeus can’t do it, the thinking went, then no one can – and no one back home could blame Obama for losing with Petraeus in charge.” It was a political master stroke for Obama, at once hanging the war that the neocons and Petraeus had so long propagandized in favor of like a millstone around his neck and taking out his most potentially dangerous political opponent at once. It is one of those extremely rare instances when the mythical Obama as the cool and collected mastermind, like Michael Jordan just sizing up the opposition before systematically thrusting the dagger through their hearts and shredding the defense like so much Reagan surplus cheese actually can be seen and the O-Bots and apologists momentarily vindicated. Then of course Obama continues to do what he does best, cut deals with fascists, redistribute wealth upwards to his Wall Street  benefactors, screw the poor and push through increasingly obscene violations of civil liberties that Bush never could have dreamed of getting away with.

Now that Petraeus, up to his ass in alligators in the Afghan swamp and resorting to cutting deals with thugs and murderers like Razzik as well as turning a blind eye on the drug trade is desperate, he is a four star rat on a treadmill and history is cranking up the speed. So despearate is Petraeus now that his subordinates are unbelievably running psy ops campaigns on Senators, not that this isn’t routine procedure but that it is felt that blood thirsty death junkies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman have to actually be conned into supporting more murder in the name of the almighty American empire. The wheels are coming off now, Petraeus’s talking points are sounding more like those of Karl Rove or Frank Luntz by the day, the latest and most bizarre being that Afghan parents are burning their own kids to make the U.S. look bad. There are rumors circulating that the great general is about to quit his Afghanistan command and the collateral damage of the civilian body count exploding thanks to the Petraeus COIN method which is being exposed as a sham are indicative of a desperate and cunning charlatan working frantically to save his rapidly diminishing political future. I suppose that he could always slink back to Der Homeland in shame and become a cause celebre and hero to uber fascist right-wing degenerates, much like Douglas MacArthur after he was shitcanned by President Harry Truman in Korea for his insubordination. MacArthur in his time may have also believed that “they are fucking with the wrong guy”. It is actually quite fitting that Petraeus would be presiding over the long running Afghanistan clusterfuck which has no end in sight – after all, it’s better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.

Petraeus or no Petraeus, the wars will continue because as obedient little historical revisionist flag-suckers we Americans have the slaughter of brown-skinned, non-Christians for our national glory in our blood. From the day that a child exits the womb the indoctrination of American exceptionalism, we are the good guys and the heinous lie that they ALL hate us for our way of life and therefore must be annihilated to preserve freedom and democracy ensures that the wars will never end. This very morning Obama and the establisment are in the process of plotting another foreign adventure  in Libya (their bankers must be getting nervous), this latest use of raw force will be justified under the left cover of a humanitarian intervention, the sort of hogwash that was peddled to the useful idiots to justify escalation in Afghanistan because of the brutality towards women. Time Magazine featured the war porn of a noseless Afghan woman on the cover to pimp the war to the butterflies, moonbeams, zebras and fairy tales liberals who never met a war that couldn’t be justified under such phony pretenses of protecting human rights. The neocon mighty wurlitzer propaganda machine is already churning as well with the ludicrous claims that the financial collapse was all the fault of those damned dirty Ay-rabs, this Washington Times post has the title: Financial Terrorism Suspected in 2008 Economic Crash, credited to another of those evil little reports that are assembled in Pentagon propaganda chop shops. The headline does have one thing right though, the crash was the result of financial terrorism only the terrorists weren’t wearing turbans and red headbands, rather they were wearing thousand dollar suits and floating off of the coast of the Hamptons in yachts while their derivatives exploded like the financial weapons of mass destruction that they were. War and lies and credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and tainted, buffoon presidential candidates like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are proof that you can sell anything in America. As Mencken once famously remarked, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” or something along those lines. Welcome to Chumpland and stock up on canned goods because the real financial terrorists of Wall Street are bidding up commodities (especially oil) and whiling away their time before unleashing their latest mass casualty attack on America, a Roman orgy of gross speculation: C.M.B.S. 2.0.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. [Please note these are 1935 U.S. dollars. To adjust for inflation, multiply all figures X 10 or more]

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

– General Smedley D. Butler

Just my two cents

EE

Main Core, PROMIS and the New American Fascism

In this revised and updated version of my four-part series entitled Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government I am going to both clarify and build upon concepts of what was originally written over a period of nearly a year beginning in late 2008. It is essential to now place the surveillance state in a context that takes into account the administration of Democratic president Barack Obama. For those who believed that the George W. Bush presidency was a horrific aberration in all of its constitution desecrating glory and that a changing of the guard to more responsible leadership would lead to a rollback of the creeping fascism that emerged from the ashes of World War II, assumed control by coup d’etat with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and then became dominant in the aftermath of the ‘terrorist’ attacks of September 11, 2001 the initial fourteen months of the Obama administration should be a wake up call. As writer Naomi Wolf summed it up during a controversial recent interview piece:

“Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever.”

Of course those who are familiar with the concepts of the deep state or the permanent government it is unsurprising that any president, despite the figurehead status is ultimately subservient to the monstrous powers of the state, at times groups that are fully aligned with the shadow government such as former “Vice-President” Richard B. Cheney and his warmongering neoconservative cabal are better able to enforce their agendas as they mesh with the radical, militarist imperialism that is at the core of the American state and that primarily serves the interests of a multi-generational oligarchy, the financial cartels, the big energy conglomerates and most importantly the military industrial complex.

The real business of America is imperialism and preservation of the empire at all costs, today, in this darkest of historical periods that militarism and institutionalized need for conquest has come home to roost and to wreak economic devastation on the populace. The loss of economic opportunity along with the need to preserve corrupt institutions and the failed political system that serve them will soon lead to massive civil unrest, this much is certain and there are signs of it now, largely confined to the extreme right that serve as shocktroops to the criminal Republican party to ensure that the criminal Democratic party will be forced from control of the spoils system and their servitude to the oligarchy. This will ultimately not remain confined to the extreme right and the co-opted Republican -FOX News led Tea Party movement that is already undergoing fragmentation as the undercurrent of political violence percolates, driving off many angry and desperate Americans who sought refuge in it’s ranks.

Thus the necessity for the police state and the high-tech totalitarian systems of control that will continue to be implemented under the premise of the phony war on terror but have always been intended to serve as a firewall between the elite and the rabble. There is no longer the ability to beat the swords back into ploughshares and the oligarchy will preserve itself and the war machine at the expense of the citizenry. As Randolph Bourne once wrote “war is the health of the state”, and as we enter the second decade of the new American century it will become increasingly necessary to use a militarized police machine and an advanced technological surveillance colossus to maintain order, suppress dissent and continue to provide grist for the highly lucrative, for-profit prison industrial complex that will ensure that Oceania will always be at war.

EE

Part One: Main Core and PROMIS

“Over the last two weeks I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong.”

(Excerpt from Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s draft letter of resignation to President Bush, dated March 16, 2004, which Comey did not in the end send.)

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull”

– George Orwell: 1984

Suppose that the United States government, or more likely an unaccountable privatized intelligence colossus empowered by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and fueled by the rampant cronyism of a system long ago gone rotten had a surveillance tool capable of peering into the most private aspects of American lives on a whim.

Now suppose that the new growth industry of a previously unthinkable futuristic police state was already in place, fully operational and has been actively been being utilized for domestic spying for years even before the World Trade Center and Pentagon were struck on that pristine Tuesday September morning that irreversibly ensured that our rendezvous with a destiny of becoming a full blown fascist society would be fulfilled. What if this surveillance industrial complex was in possession of a database that was so large and so powerful that not only could it instantly process and retrieve the most minute or intimate aspects and details of the lives of American citizens but was also able to utilize extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities to actually predict likely patterns of future behavior.

Such a huge database would be able to use cutting edge technology that is largely funded by taxpayer dollars and awarded to unaccountable private corporations through the typical business as usual, crony capitalist no bid contracts to create the most invasive tool of oppression this country has ever seen. This database would rely on software that was capable of performing highly sophisticated forms of social network analysis based on block modeling technology in order to monitor all forms of electronic communications including telephone, email, chat, Twitter and cell phones and personal digital assistants, satellite navigation systems, all internet searches, all credit card transactions, all book purchases, all grocery or other store purchases, all travel arrangements, all library records, utility usage, all bank activity and down to what is watched or listened to as entertainment in all American homes.

It would then be able to use the data to not only find links between persons who already know and interact with each other but to categorize each individual into a particular group that possess similar behavioral and purchasing habits. These groups could then be further divided into subgroups and further analyzed in order to determine under some loosely defined and largely unknown guidelines whether they could potentially represent a threat. While all of this may sound like some sort of futuristic dystopian nightmare straight out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and Precrime, it is very real and it goes by the name of Main Core.

For example, if you are selling say a bicycle and you run an advertisement in your local newspaper or on Craig’s List or some other internet board and you just happen to receive a call from a Muhammad who is interested in buying your bicycle and this Muhammad happens to have certain friends who may have relationships with an organization that is determined by some unknown criteria to be a potential terrorist organization. With the surveillance capability of Main Core and with the resources of massive bureaucracies at the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security such an innocent contact would set off a series of flags that would categorize the conversation as sufficiently suspicious to merit further examination.

Once that has been analyzed (likely in real time) the call that you received from Muhammad would then in all likelihood place you in the requisite database and at the very best would subject to an increased level of scrutiny by government and any number of unaccountable private intelligence firms. These are institutions with the power to then take control of your banking account (in an action that could be justified as prevention of the flow of funds to ‘terrorists’) and further monitor your own network of family, friends, acquaintances and co-workers who also could be suspect to being defined loosely as potential ‘terrorism’ sympathizers. At worst your life could become a nightmare of abduction, indefinite detention without access to the U.S. legal system, mental abuse, torture and perhaps eventually murder. The system is in place, 9/11 has been used as the excuse for expansion of police state powers and our government over the past two administrations has rendered habeas corpus irrelevant, codified torture and warrantless wiretapping and created a network of secret prisons. The underlying concept that is behind Guantanamo Bay prison is to create a legal black hole into which even American citizens can be thrust into under the guise of being “enemy combatants” or the even more sinister “enemy belligerents” as proposed in the new John McCain-Joseph Lieberman civil liberty destroying Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.

This technology is being used today absent any form of legitimate oversight or controls, in fact it is expanding exponentially and will continue to do so absent any sudden mass injection of honor and morality to a congress that depends on the entire war on terror paradigm to retain political power. This despite the considerable damage that has already been done to the constitution which was for all intents and purposes eviscerated with the privacy and judicial protections effectively nullified by Bush, Cheney and there army of legal experts such as David Addington and John Yoo who specialized in circumventing the laws of the land. Despite the fallacious campaign rhetoric of President Obama that promised change nothing has to this point in time been done to reign in the massive police state powers that were largely installed by his predecessor. If anything, Obama has institutionalized the surveillance state and escalated the wars of imperialism. His failure to hold accountable any member of the Bush administration for myriad crimes against the republic has rendered any concept of a criminal elite dug into our political establishment being subject to the law into a mockery. Much like President Bill Clinton did when he failed to investigate and prosecute the criminals of Iran-Contra the rogue elements have been effectively been given a pass from our constitutional law professor in chief. As with Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama is simply a product, a smiling new face as the putative head of the empire while the real business of warfare, profiteering and immense transfers of wealth to the oligarchy continue.

It is though a very sophisticated form of fascism that we are living under in America today, unlike the more outwardly obvious regimes from the past. Author Bertram Gross published a book back in 1980 that was entitled Friendly Fascism, Jim Garrison once said that “fascism would come to America in the name of national security”, and author Kevin Phillips in his 1983 book Post-Conservative America warned of the potential of an “apple pie authoritarianism” and a coming society in which: “the Star Spangled Benner would wave with greater frequency and over many more parades; increased surveillance would crack down on urban outbreaks and extreme political dissidents”. This very accurately describes post 9/11 America where any semblance of reason has been abandoned for cheap jingoism and flag-waving pimped off as patriotism. Criticism of authority has made into potential treason by the highly paid shills for neoconservative doctrine and corporate looters, sloganeering and demagoguery have replaced discourse, critical thinking is becoming extinct and just as George Orwell so accurately predicted Big Brother is now watching over us, protecting us and ensuring that we understand that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

There still exists not only a militarized police force but a vast gulag network of top secret prisons and ‘detention facilities’, not to mention the for-profit prison system that should be the shame of the nation. Add in the now quaint and antiquated pretense of being innocent until proven guilty, the increasingly brazen attempts by those in charge of Homeland Security such as Senator Joseph Lieberman with his kangaroo court Senate committee, the revelations that Obama advisor Cass Sunstein (a horrifying possibility to one day end up on the Supreme Court) favors the most draconian style of crackdowns against free speech and inquiry as was promulgated in a 2008 article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures”. According to Sunstein, groups that dare to research the all too common blanket pejorative “conspiracy theories”, a longtime defense of the ruling elite to discredit the official conspiracy theories were a threat to the credibility of the government and should be stamped out. Sunstein advocates a COINTELPRO style infiltration of such groups using government agents and paid operatives to undermine the efforts of any attempt to debunk the official conspiracy theory. Sunstein specifically singles out those believe that “the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law.” I am reasonably certain that if finding out the truth behind the American Reichstag Fire is something that should be verboten then I can only imagine what he and his ilk would think about what I am discussing here. Now there is change that you can believe in.

But I digress

Main Core has received some attention in two 2008 articles, one a piece by investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup (which also looks at Continuity of Government programs but more on that in a little while) and Tim Shorrock that is entitled Exposing Bush’s Historic Abuse of Power. Both articles tie Main Core to the now legendary PROMIS software, an extremely advanced program designed to aid federal prosecutors in case management tracking. PROMIS could pull and put together a wide range of data from disparate sources into a single record. The PROMIS software was created by INSLAW Inc., a company owned by a former NSA intelligence officer named William Hamilton. PROMIS was to have been licensed to the U.S. government in the early 1980’s before the technology boom became widespread but was then stolen by the seamy officials in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. The software was modified for espionage purposes to include a ‘back door’ that could be used for spying on those that it was sold to and in a detail that should be especially relevant with the economic crisis that threatens to crash the global financial system, the software could also be used to track in real time (in order to manipulate?) stock market transactions, once can certainly speculate as to how such a tool could have contributed to an economic catastrophe as we are now facing if it were used for such a thing. It is important to keep in mind the period when PROMIS was stolen in the early 1980’s and the fact that the techology boom was still years in the future which should give one an idea to just how far advanced and therefore how important that it was to those who would use it in order to promote a sinister agenda.

Shorock’s piece goes into the relationship between PROMIS and Main Core in some detail:

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

Hamilton’s company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors’ Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. “It operates just like Google,” Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software — and its outstanding ability to search other databases — to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA’s use of PROMIS involved something “so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem,” Hamilton told me. He added, “I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core.” Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw’s behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.
Hamilton says James B. Comey’s congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft’s dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. “It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans,” he told me.

Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government’s use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, “he turned white as a sheet.”

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

The INSLAW/PROMIS story reached deep into the darkest bowels of an increasingly secretive and malevolent National Security State that had manifested itself in the Reagan administration. The arms for hostages “October Surprise” deal that helped to sink Jimmy Carter’s bid for re-election leading to the Reagan-Bush hostile takeover of America, Iran-Contra, BCCI, media manipulation (see Robert Parry’s excellent special report for Consortium News that is entitled Iran-Contra’s ‘lost chapter’), Oliver North’s swashbuckling adventures involving weaponry and drugs, a shadow government and subversion of Congress were all were components of Reagan’s administration. Reagan, a career corporate shill presided over a government that he hypocritically railed against for its intrusiveness and yet his regime would serve as an incubator for the very shadow government that would one day rise again with the Supreme Court’s 2000 installation of George W. Bush as president despite evidence of a stolen election. Bush II’s administration was stocked with many of the key operatives of Reagan and his father’s regime being given key positions in the most brazenly lawless administration in history that brought America to the brink of fascism.

Ketcham’s The Last Roundup is particularly of interest in that he examined the now infamous 2004 visit of Bush administration officials Alberto Gonzalez and Andrew Card to the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft who had been stricken with pancreaitis after acting A.G. James Comey refused to sign off on the reauthorization of what was an illegal surveillance program related to Continuity of Government. The story is fascinating in that it not only illustrated the length to which the Bush-Cheney junta would go to in order to keep their illegal programs in place but also for the high speed chase through the streets of Washington and the race up the hospital stairs that Comey engaged in to beat Gonzalez and Card to the sedated Ashcroft to take advantage of a sick man. When John Ashcroft actually comes out looking like a heroic figure it becomes very apparent of just how grossly un-American that this flagrantly criminal administration truly was. James Comey went on to give testimony to Congress over the hospital room showdown and more details are available from blogger Glenn Greenwald in his piece entitled What illegal “things” was the government doing in 2001-2004? and in Barton Gellman’s book Angler with excerpts published in the Washington Post. Journalist Murray Waas also has done a story on whether then A.G. Alberto Gonzalez created a set of falsified notes in order to provide a cover story for what occurred while trying to bully Comey and Ashcroft into signing off on the obviously illegal surveillance program.

Excerpts from The Last Roundup are bone chilling:

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a “national emergency.” Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a “natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,” while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.” According to one news report, even “national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad” could be a trigger.

Let’s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a “parallel government” that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

And –

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of “militants” and “American negroes,” who were to be held at “assembly centers or relocation camps.” In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Just what those “new programs” might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

Martial law is a very serious possibility with it having now been established that the executive branch can exercise dictatorial powers during a “catastrophic emergency” (as put forth in the Bush administration’s NSPD-51) which is defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy or government functions”. President Obama has done absolutely nothing to roll back any of this and as the axiom goes about absolute power corrupting absolutely this new administration is a prime example. There is little to no resistance to these sweeping accumulations of dictatorial powers either on the pathetic excuse for the American left (which is more interested in exploiting socially divisive wedge issues like immigration and same sex marriage) or in the ridiculous, co-opted Tea Party Movement that has no problem with either a police state run amok or the ongoing militarism that feeds the war machine. Both are morally bankrupt and willfully allow themselves to be used as pawns by a two-headed monster of a one party fully cancerous capitalist dictator ship that supports an immoral and thoroughly corrupt plutocracy. They may one day get a clue and recognize the real enemy but it likely won’t be until they are being transported to debtor prisons, forced labor camps or detention facilities. For those skeptical about martial law in the U.S. I would suggest that they simply look at the city of Pittsburgh lockdown during last year’s G20 conference.

With events unfolding as they currently are it is especially troubling to note that the “economy” is one of the criteria that would trigger the declaration of martial law, the current economic crisis along with the lack of will to do what it takes to make corrections rather than bailing out and essentially giving amnesty to the Wall Street looters who are responsible for it only guarantees that the collapse when it does come will be much more devastating. A 2008 article in The Army Times revealed that troop deployments would now include ‘Homeland’ duty under the command of NORTHCOM. Assignments will allow for an increased public visibility (translation: getting Americans used to seeing troops on the streets) and will have a stated purpose as follows: “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.” If action by the military (and the unaccountable mercenaries from privatized ‘security’ firms like Blackwater now Xe) is decided to be merited by the unitary executive and a state of martial law declared, then what exactly is going to happen to those “8 million” names that are classified as “potentially suspect” that are in the Main Core database? For any skeptics on martial law I would ask that they just do a quick bit of research on the lockdown of the city of Pittsburgh for the G20 meetings in 2009 as well as contingency plans for large scale quarantines during the H1N1 swine flu panic of that same year.

That Main Core and PROMIS are linked raises some provocative questions in regard to intent of elements of the government to subvert the constitution as a matter of national security policy as well as the ability of the shadow government to usurp the legitimate leadership. When referencing the shadow government it is imperative to realize that the term is used loosely as if by some crazed conspiracy theorist but refers to the actual parallel infrastructure that exists and has existed for years that is the Continuity Of Government (C.O.G.) program. The rogue elements have been using PROMIS for illegal surveillance (likely also for money laundering to fund off the books operations) purposes at least since the 1980s. In The Last Roundup, Ketcham also references a 1993 piece from Wired Magazine entitled The INSLAW Octopus that examines the use of PROMIS for extra-constitutional activities by none other than Lt. Colonel Oliver North:

Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ’s command center.

Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North’s FEMA dealings was dropped.

North’s involvement with Continuity of Government programs including REX 84 has long been known and while Lt. Colonel North likely is no longer is active in such programs (at least not to the knowledge of anyone) a larger part of the C.O.G./shadow government infrastructure continued to breed in darkness and secrecy and on that most glorious day for American fascism, 9/11/2001 went live under the guidance of one of its most ardent and longtime architects, Vice President Richard B. Cheney. Continuity Of Government will be discussed later in this essay.

The secrets of Main Core, PROMIS and other variations and evolutions of the oppressive tools of an out of control power structure are the crown jewels of the rising fascist police state and and every effort has and will continue to be vigorously employed to stifle any investigations through the official channels. The means to prevent disclosure will not stop with official government actions, lawsuits and classifications of national security, as we will see, there is a trail of dead bodies of those who have gotten too close for comfort to these programs and their offshoots. An important thing to understand is that the spying is not only being conducted by domestic forces (there are many connections to our “ally” Israel as well) and likely includes political dirty tricks and blackmail as well as the monitoring of the work of reporters and potential whistleblowers so as to bring to a halt any opposition to the ongoing illegal warrantless surveillance.

Now if PROMIS was being used by Lt. Colonel North as a part of REX 84 back in the 1980’s when the Continuity of Government plans were being tweaked, FEMA was being set up for the eventual incorporation into the massive Department of Homeland Security and financial transactions as well as communications already being monitored what does that say about the current state in which we all find ourselves in? The ability to monitor dissent is the key element of any tyrannical regime for it facilitates control, allows for the identification of associates of threats to the system, intimidation, forced confessions and show trials. We are well on the way towards all of this is America, note the new focus on using the police state to monitor the more independent elements of the Tea Parties, the ones that can’t be assimilated into the Republican Borg but with the acts of political intimidation and threats of violence make for a convenient excuse to expand the spying powers. In a sardonic way it is easy to find some humor into this recent monitoring of some of these people for they were for the most part silent and largely supportive of the Bush-Cheney administration’s USAPATRIOT Act (which our new president recently extended) so it is somewhat amusing to see them about to be hoisted on their own petard but any sense of schadenfreude is short-lived because this is gravely serious.

The list of potential enemies of the state will change with administrations but the one thing that will remain consistent is that the use of unconstitutional spying will only continue to evolve along with technology and the always necessary fearmongering to keep the sheeple in line. None of this expanded power is about protecting us from those who hate us for our way of life and can easily be turned into ‘terrorist’ bogeymen by a media propaganda machine that Joseph Goebbels would be proud of; it never has been.

The real purpose is to facilitate the implementation of a fascist dictatorship in America.

To be continued…

American Whup Ass!

We are the champions – my friends
And we’ll keep on fighting
Till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
Cause we are the champions of the World

The brief interregnum is now over. The naive belief that things were gonna be different can now be shelved along with last year’s Christmas decorations and the change that was supposedly on the way was just another cynical ploy to keep the suckers in check. Last night, before one of the George W. Bush style military prop audiences at West Point the new emperor shed his sheep’s clothing and announced that yes indeed, America was back, bad to the bone and ready to whup some ass on those fucking sand niggas who attacked us on GAG – September 11, 2001. Now the Pope of Hope wasn’t strutting across the deck of an awesome war toy like the USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit and a bulging codpiece but it was vintage Bush nonetheless, dig this little line from the long awaited speech. “It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak”. And so once again we find more imperialism, murder and atrocity being predicated on the Hitlerian big lie of 9/11. As the old saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same and in this diseased and nearly dead year of 2009 in the land of crushed hopes and broken dreams, after those filthy scum Wall Street bankers had rolled back the clock to the good ole days of big bonuses and endless casino gambling so has the establishment rolled back the clock to 2003. Bush Lite Obama and his dirty recycled Clinton rat cabal have put their seal of approval on a never ending crusade and will use the full power of the state to shakedown an already impoverished nation of subjects to fund it.

Of course the cruise missile liberals who are nothing other than apologists for this criminal rat bastard administration will spin the promised three year withdrawal as yet another masterplan by the Michael Jordan of politics who is just setting up that one big play…still. In reality though, the three year withdrawal is the equivalent of “baby, I promise to pull it out before I come” and in three years the military presence will be greater, the investment in blood and treasure will be used as yet more justification to continue escalation – like a degenerate gambler who continues to double down even after the mortgage payment has long been pissed away the answer will of course be to feed more human chattel into the meatgrinder. Hell, that’s just the way it is, it has ALWAYS been this way and Gen. Smedley D. Butler was goddamned right when he dared to utter the ultimate American blasphemy that “war is a racket”. And not only is war a racket but any goddamned fool who tries to say that the Democratic party is less hellbent on imperialism and war than the more overtly fascist Republicans is a know-nothing, chattering ass, a lemming in a land that has already been overrun by the insipid things and deserves nothing less than to be denounced and mocked. Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat, FDR was a Democrat and LBJ was a Democrat and they all three presided over monstrous wars. Bill Clinton missed out on the big one that would give him the necessary body count to burnish his credentials as a member of the fraternity of war criminals but he sure bombed the shit out of Belgrade and presided over the crushing economic sanctions that led to the misery of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children just because Saddam had the temerity to piss off Poppy Bush.

The point is that as a Marxist acquaintance once told me is that both capitalist parties are killers, only one is better at pretending not to be than the other. It’s like comparing Hitler and Stalin and just because the Russians were WW II allies sure as shit didn’t mean that the butcher Stalin was a good guy. Barack Obama is just another charlatan, a cynical whore of a calculating politician and we were all played for fools for believing anything different (and I apologize to those who tried to tell me so), I should have voted for Nader or McKinney, not that it would have made any difference in the end though, the escalation would still be happening because this country is flat out fucking addicted to war. I have yet to see the response from the neo Nazi Republicans today, I am sure that the escalation won’t be enough, I did catch the imbecile McCain pontificating on the television again after the speech but turned it off. Why that filthy son of a bitch who is solely responsible for the plague that is Palinism is given ANY credibility by the corporate media is a testament to just how deep the rot runs. John Sidney McCain III cut his teeth making anti American propaganda videos for the Communist Vietnamese, he has certainly honed his skills as a longtime shill for the real empire of evil that is the Military Industrial Compex captured United States government.

I am sure that the caterwauling on the right will be loud today, we are now back in the morass of national insanity, fear and loathing that rolled out of 9/11 like the putrid cloud of rotting flesh and politically expedient lies belched forth by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil. The Beckers and the Palinazis will be like rabid starved dogs pouncing on a chunk of maggoty meat over Obama’s horseshit withdrawal flim-flammery and FOX will be blazing with bunting draped, faux patriotic warmongering. That much is assured, the diseased dogs of the Republican mass movement ‘conservatism’ will be howling and howling for the emperor’s head on a pike for not giving the blessed General McChrystal all the little green army men that he asked for. Barack Obama will be denounced for letting Osama bin Laden escape, after all, he has always been a secret Muslim who wasn’t even born in the US of A. I can hear it all now, in fact it’s starting to scare me because I know what the fuckers are thinking even before they do, it’s like a serial killer profiler and the lunatics are in my head. Too goddamned much for so early this morning.

I can say one thing however, whatever the Palinazis, Beckers and teabaggers throw at Obama over his lukewarm response to the war on terror that requires nothing less than total genocide he will deserve for it is he who is now invoking the terror talisman to justify his own depraved political agenda. Let the man be hoisted upon his own petard.

Just my two cents over the mornin’ cup o’ joe

EE

Veteran’s Day: The Dishonor of War Worship

Today is Veteran’s Day, a day of war worship in an immoral and rotting empire fueled by more wars. There will be plenty of sanctimonious asses posturing and pontificating patriotism, politics and ‘glory’ on the usual right-wing vomitories like FOX. Hell, FOX even got into it all early this year with Sunday’s travesty NFL pregame show where privileged phonies like Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and the other moron ex-jocks dressed up like toy soldiers to shill for the black ops assassin General Stan McChrystal’s bloodlust in overrunning Afghanistan with more American troops, cannon fodder that will not be treated with the reverence of the green Army cadavers of Ft. Hood. I mean who would have given a tin shit if the hallowed Ft. Hood 13 had been blown to smithereens by a mortar round ten seconds after they stepped off the plane to Afghanistan? It suits the neverending war agenda to paint the poor saps as victims you see, and it fuels the fires of both intellectually and economically impoverished Americans to blame it all on the horrible Muslim man who according to the usual anonymous sources is affiliated with al CIAda and if the terrursts [sic] are already carrying out nefarious plots on our military bases well Sally Soccer Mom, just how long will it be before they are blowing up your children in our shopping malls? All rank horseshit, exploited by traitors and cowards to send others to die in the wars that they are too gutless to serve in. Today a military veteran I want all of the right wing war lovers to line up in a single file line and come and kiss my big fat ass….oh, and don’t forget to salute me first you filthy chickenhawks.

Veteran’s Day Storytime: From Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun

Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can’t rob and you take away some of his liberty. You’ve got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It’s just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it’s a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let’s fight for liberty and he can’t show you liberty. He can’t prove the thing he’s talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?

No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody came gabbling to him about liberty- what did he mean next time? There wasn’t going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said let’s fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I’m not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I’ve got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we’re talking about and just how much of that liberty we’re going to have. And what’s more mister are you as much interested in liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty and I think you’re a goddamn fourflusher talking through your hat and I’ve already decided that I like the liberty I’ve got right here the liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girt I think I like that liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won’t get and ending up without any liberty at all. Ending up dead and rotting before my life is even begun good or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don’t care for some.

Hell’s fire guys had always been fighting for liberty. America fought a war for liberty in 1776. Lots of guys died. And in the end does America have any more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn’t fight at all? Maybe so I’m not arguing I’m just asking. Can you look at a guy and say he’s an American who fought for his liberty and anybody can see he’s a very different guy from a Canadian who didn’t? No by god you can’t and that’s that. So maybe a lot of guys with wives and kids died in 1776 when they didn’t need to die at all. They’re dead now anyway. Sure but that doesn’t do any good. A guy can think of being dead a hundred years from now and he doesn’t mind it. But to think of being dead tomorrow morning and to be dead forever to be nothing but dust and stink in the earth is that liberty?

They were always fighting for something the bastards and if anyone dared say the hell with fighting it’s all the same each war is like the other and nobody gets any good out of it why they hollered coward. If they weren’t fighting for liberty they were fighting for independence or democracy or freedom or decency or honor or their native land or something else that didn’t mean anything. The war was to make the world safe for democracy for the little countries for everybody. If the war was over now then the world must be all safe for democracy. Was it? And what kind of democracy? And how much? And whose?

Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly so we know in advance what we’re getting killed for and give us also a first mortgage on something as security so we can be sure after we’ve won your war that we’ve got the same kind of freedom we bargained for.

And take decency. Everybody said America was fighting a war for the triumph of decency. But whose idea of decency? And decency for who? Speak up and tell us what decency is. Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels that an indecent live one. Make a comparison there in facts like houses and tables. Make it in words we can understand. And don’t talk about honor. The honor of a Chinese or an Englishman or an African negro or an American or a Mexican? Please all you guys who want to fight to preserve our honor let us know what the hell honor is. Is it American honor for the whole world we’re fighting for? Maybe the world doesn’t like it. Maybe the South Sea Islanders like their honor better.

For Christ sake give us things to fight for we can see and feel and pin down and understand. No more highfalutin words that mean nothing like native land. Motherland fatherland homeland native land. It’s all the same. What the hell good to you is your native land after you’re dead? Whose native land is it after you’re dead? If you get killed fighting for your native land you’ve bought a pig in a poke. You’ve paid for something you’ll never collect.

And when they couldn’t hook the little guys into fighting for liberty or freedom or democracy or independence or decency or honor they tried the women. Look at the dirty Huns they would say look at them how they rape the beautiful French and Belgian girls. Somebody’s got to stop all that raping. So come on little au’ join the army and save the beautiful French and Belgian girls. So the little guy got bewildered and he signed up and in a little while a shell hit him and his life spattered out of him in red meat pulp and ho was dead. Dead for another word and all the fierce old bats of the D.A.R. get out and hurrah themselves hoarse over his grave because he died for womanhood.

Now it might be that a guy would risk getting killed if his women were being raped. But if he did why he was only striking a bargain. He was simply saying that according to the way he felt at the time the safety of his women was worth more than his own life. But there wasn’t anything particularly noble or heroic about it. It was a straight deal his life for something he valued more. It was more or less like any other deal a man might make. But when you change your women to all the women in the world why you begin to defend women in the bulk. To do that you have to fight in the bulk. And by that time you’re fighting for a word again.

When armies begin to move and flags wave and slogans pop up watch out little guy because it’s somebody else’s chestnuts in the fire not yours. It’s words you’re fighting for and you’re not making an honest deal your life for something better. You’re being noble and after you’re killed the thing you traded your life for won’t do you any good and chances are it won’t do anybody else any good either.

Maybe that’s a bad way to think. There are lots of idealists around who will say have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for even dying for. If not then we are worse than the beasts of the field and have sunk into barbarity. Then you say that’s all right let’s be barbarous just so long as we don’t have war. You keep your ideals just as long as they don’t cost me my life. And they say but surely life isn’t as important as principle. Then you say oh no? Maybe not yours but mine is. What the hell is principle? Name it and you can have it.

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously.

They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm.

But what do the dead say?

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy] Did they say I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am and I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth choked with worms?

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk a;bout are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die. But all the little guys who are too busy to fight should be left alone. And all the guys who say death before dishonor is pure bull the important thing is life before death they should be left alone too. Because the guys who say life isn’t worth living without some principle so important you’re willing to die for it they are all nuts. And the guys who say you’ll see there’ll come a time you can’t escape you’re going to have to fight and die because it’ll mean your very life why they are also nuts. They are talking like fools. They are saying that two and two make nothing. They are saying that a man will have to die in order to protect his life. If you agree to fight you agree to die. Now if you die to protect your life you aren’t alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn’t say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn’t say I will spend all my money in order to save my money. He doesn’t say I will burn my house down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.

And all the guys who died all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world safe for democracy to make the world safe for words without meaning how did they feel about it just before they died? How did they feel as they watched their blood pump out into the mud? How did they feel when the gas hit their lungs and began eating them all away? How did they feel as they lay crazed in hospitals and looked death straight in the face and saw him come and take them? I! the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you’ve given it away you’d ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever?

You’re goddamn right they didn’t.
They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in the* minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.

Hey, Didn’t John McCain LOSE the Election?

I am a war criminal; I bombed innocent women and children”



-John McCain

From the treatment by the corporatist whore mainstream media you would think that John McCain was somehow still relevant. In the latest example the old loser and self-admitted war criminal is whoring himself out to the lazy cretins who masquerade as journalists in shilling for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. McCain is ordering President Obama to make the decision on sending more troops into the meatgrinder NOW. I have to say that the ongoing forum for this asshat who has become a fixture on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit and as much a frontman for the Military Industrial Complex as the old phony Ronald Reagan was for the rising fascist tide is rather astonishing but not unpredictable. Anyone with any sense at all learned long ago not to trust a goddamned thing that the pocket media has to say even if they never even heard of Operation Mockingbird.

McCain of course is an amazing charlatan, his allure continues despite the ugly discrepancies in his personal story of the Vietnam war hero who returned home after getting the shit kicked out of him in the Hanoi Hilton. But there are inconsistencies, for example the inconvenient truth that many of his fellow prisoners hated his guts for cooperating with the enemy for some favorable treatment like the Admiral’s son that he was. The Hanoi Hilton songbird was I believe the term that is used in describing the old goat. The right wingers seem to have no problem that he made propaganda videos for the Communists that undermined the war effort but hey, when you have Hanoi Jane to spit on and kick around who needs the Make Believe Maverick? Also why is Mr. McCain never called out in the corporate press for his obstruction of the investigation into the POW’s that were left behind in the Nam? Perhaps they were knowledgable of the Golden Triangle heroin trade, or they were operatives under military cover? Lots of questions but in the fawning corporate clown media they go unasked.

A big question on Afghanistan that goes unasked is just what is the role of the CIA and black ops specialists in the heroin trade there? Puppet President Hamid Karzai’s brother has been linked with the drug trade and the CIA according to recent reports. So what does Mr. Keating Five have to say about that? Interestingly, according to Justin Raimondo’s latest piece over at the excellent Antiwar.com the leak of the sotry may have been deliberately undertaken to discredit the former UNOCAL ‘consultant’ who was sent to Afghanistan post 9/11 as our puppet leader. I excerpt from Raimondo’s Karzai as Diem (subtitled: Afghanistan as Vietnam) –

Whoever leaked this was trying to hurt Karzai. Why would certain US officials and military officers be eager to do that? Well, because Karzai’s corrupt administration is an obstacle to their war plans: with the Fashion Plate in the Afghan equivalent of the White House, and his brother collecting tolls from drug traffickers, selling the war in Washington is becoming increasingly difficult. The only way to win support for Obama’s planned escalation, and tamp down dissent in Congress and the general public, is to clean up the Afghan government’s act – and that means dumping Karzai & Co.

As the internal debate within the Obama administration heats up — with hawks centered in the military and the neo-neocon thinktanks (CNAS, the Center for American Progress, etc.) agitating for a full-scale “counterinsurgency” strategy, and “doves” (i.e. realists) opting for a focus on “counter-terrorism” aimed at al-Qaeda – the gung-ho escalators clearly want to ditch Karzai, while the realists posit he’s the best we can hope for in that environment.

The hawks are committed to a counterinsurgency theory which demands the US get down and dirty with the insurgents, with US troops mingling with “the people” and taking risks in order to “protect” them from the Taliban. But what if the people don’t want to be protected – or, instead, seek protection from the Americans? Such a question is never asked by these pompous “theorists,” who, like their neoconservative predecessors, are in thrall to a theory that cannot work and should never even be attempted.

So perhaps old man McCain will soon have something to say along with his fellow stooges Joe ‘the wandering Jew’ Lieberman and Lindsey Graham (whose Gomer Pyle singsong can’t be taken seriously can it?), the three headed monster that always ends up on the side of the militarist bastards and of course their war criminal proxy state Israel. There seem to be lots of mysterious leaks lately, for example this little breaking story about the Congressional ethics investigations that just happened to have been ‘mistakenly’ placed on a file sharing network by a low level staffer. Note that in this story the names all happen to belong to the jackass party. Not that I think that it’s a bad thing to weed out the filth from the Democrats but with the ongoing battle royale to kill health care reform (aka the lynchpin of dismantling the fascist capitalist slave state) and launch a gigantic regional escalation of military hostilities from Iran to Pakistan one must look at the cynical ulterior motives of every one of these leaks. Notably the name of one AIPAC whore Jane Harman appears in the story which will assuredly mean that there will be no really serious investigation as it involves Israeli espionage, bribery and blackmail that could if exposed take down at least one government. With any investigation of Harman and Israeli trickery sure to be quashed it’s a logical conclusion that one would suspect that the intention of the leak is only to embarass and discredit Democrats.

So of course the old war criminal won’t have a problem with that, it will give him something to talk about while his cock is in David Gregory’s mouth come Sunday morning. The bottom line is that it’s all about escalating the war, pouring in more troops to protect the energy and drug routes and McCain is the preeminent shill for industrialized slaughter and the spoils that it brings to the well connected. The man is so crooked that he has to screw his pants on every morning and only in a militarized lemming colony such as Murka could this Napalm sniffing swine be given the sanctimonious credibility that he is afforded let alone the time of day. The Obama administration’s waffling is starting to put a burr up the asses of the brass and the special operations killers, much in the way that John F. Kennedy once did. McCain will showboat, jump through flaming hoops and ensure that the quisling media is there to cover the whole bizarre flea circus so that Stan McChrystal can get his Operation Phoenix in gear and the decks can begin to be cleared for the imminent ascension of Emperor Petraeus.

Note: What is NOT leaked is the damning testimony of Sibel Edmonds that fingers arch neocons and McCain associates Richard Perle and Douglas Feith in a massive web of corruption, sexual blackmail and Israeli-Turkish espionage that reaches to the highest levels. Other than in some of the better areas of the alternative media and blogosphere this story is taboo for obvious reasons.

The Loudening Drumbeat

The sleazy, subversive campaign to incite some demented loser to actually go out and take a shot at President Obama continues. As with JFK the fascist forces that really run this country are working desperately at setting into place conditions to mount another ‘intervention’ against one who threatens their war machine, their empire, their God given ability to loot and plunder with masturbatory glee. The above Pat Oliphant cartoon is brilliant in its audacity at calling it out as it is with the filthy Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News being the chief force in instigating a dupe to start to plan an assassination (which will of course be used as cover for the REAL plot that is likely being hatched in the darkest bowels of the institutions of the shadow government now). It is all so much like those days of Camelot interruptus, the Obama Joker poster is a modern day copy of the now infamous Bircher JFK Wanted For Treason posters only updated for modern moron society by cribbing from pop culture.

Was Hitler in Uniform on Cover of Mein Kampf?
The warning signs are ominous, ammunition shortages are at a record as angry white dumbasses arm themselves to the teeth for the coming race war against ACORN and Obama’s secret army and did you see…..why the nigger bastard was sitting within FEET of Moammar Qadaffi at the UN, you know, the UN, the ones who are going to carry out the implementation of the NWO, the one world government and the eugenics programs that will kill Christian white babies and rip God away from history. With the armed freaks ready to rile, their heads filled with FOX agitprop and dittohead dementia and marshalled by the beloved Glenn Beck (a man whose latest ghost written hunk of asswipe actually has him on the cover in a fucking fascist uniform), the man that a weird movement against Obama has coalesced. There is massive anger and unrest in Murka today and it’s not getting any better, each and every lie by the pundits and their whores in DC to prop up their bailed out stock market casino only exacerbates the fury as the Liliputiuns realize that trickle down economics only means that they are once again being pissed on by Gulliver.

This movement, due to the fecklessness of the left, the selling out by the Raht Emanuel wing of the Democrat party of the antiwar movement and the ongoing betrayal of labor only ensures that the victims of looter capitalism are ripe for the picking and the fascist element of this rotten empire of avarice and stinking viscera is running the harvest. I refer to my favorite blogger for a few comments on these folks, Glenn Greenwald from Glenn Beck and Left-Right Confusion:

Far more interesting than Beck himself is the increasingly futile effort to classify the protest movement to which he has connected himself. Here, too, confusion reigns. In part, this is due to the fact that these “tea party” and “9/12” protests are composed of factions with wildly divergent views about most everything. From paleoconservatives to Ron-Paul-libertarians to LaRouchians to Confederacy-loving, race-driven Southerners to Christianist social conservatives to single-issue fanatics (abortion, guns, gays) to standard Limbaugh-following, Bush-loving Republicans, these protests are an incoherent mishmash without any cohesive view other than: “Barack Obama is bad.” There are unquestionably some highly noxious elements in these groups, but they are far from homogeneous. Many of these people despised the Bush-led GOP and many of them loved it.

Add to all of that the fact that this anti-Obama sentiment is being exploited by run-of-the-mill GOP operatives who have no objective other than to undermine Democrats and return the Republicans to power — manifestly not the goal of many of the protesters — and it’s impossible to define what this movement is or what is driving it. In many ways, its leadership (both organizationally and in the media) is fundamentally at odds with the participants. How can people who cheered on the Bush/Cheney administration and who want to re-install GOP leaders in power (i.e., Fox News, Limbaugh, the right-wing blogosphere, GOP House members) possibly make common cause in any coherent way with those who are in favor of limited federal government power, reduced debt, privacy, and Constitutional protections — all the things on which the GOP relentlessly waged war for years? In one important sense, the “tea party” movement is similar to the Obama campaign for “change”: it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they’re part of the same movement.

But all that said, there are some identifiable — and plainly valid — underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That’s when conventional political language ceases to be useful.

Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties’ establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom — the Ron Paul faction — objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these “tea party” protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.

It’s a pity that the ones who are out there who could be swayed into joining a REAL populist movement that in any sane society would be dragging Wall Street bankers from their ivory towers and hanging them in the streets is so easily co-opted by demagogues and their well paid stooges. In America after multiple coup d’etats (the Kennedy assassination, 9/11), the creation of the National Security State to serve as an enforcer for the oligarchy and the gutting of the real left, the labor left, the socialist left we have allowed the piss reeking miscreants of the extreme right to drag out their soapboxes and lay the ground work for the coming civil war. American will be killing American in order to distract and protect the money power, the gutters will be filled with blood and the looting spree will be completed come hell or high water.

The pigs in Pittsburgh at the G20 have implemented a state of lockdown in the Iron Fist City, even if they were inclined to do so you won’t see a teabagger or Becker within a hundred miles of this gathering of globalists protected by a military lockdown. No, they are too busy out hoarding bullets and plotting to take down the Manchurian Candidate, goddammit…..can’t anybody even unnerstan that he ain’t one of us????? As General Stan McChrystal has his intransigence printed on the front page of the Washington Post to prevent the pulling out of the already lost and phony war in Afghanistan by this latest administration it brings to mind the animosity festering in that den of war criminals, The Pentagon that has haunted the building like a malevolent spirit since that Communist Kennedy bailed out on the Bay of Pigs and caved in to Kruschev.

A storm is coming….

Just my two cents over the mornin cup o’ joe

EE

Happy 8th Anniversary – Now Investigate 9/11!

Last night when I was watching the NFL grand kickoff festivities it just amazed me on how much more extravagant that the bread and circuses become as the American empire enters the stage of terminal rot. Eaten from within by looters using the full power of the state to confiscate the tax dollars of the American citizens for their financial gambling schemes and to throw anyone into a for profit prison gulag system who dares to complain about it as well as the termites and maggots like Rep. Joe Wilson who proudly serve as the guardians of the fascist oligarchy. Of course there is the menace of rising demagogue Glenn Beck and the full might of the shadow government that is all too happy to have a money loser as an ace propagandist, liberals extol the virtues of the boycotts by Beck advertisers but it doesn’t mean jack fucking shit – the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times has been a huge money loser practically since its inception but it’s true value is as a forum to distort and mold public opiniong, a launching pad for the slime, swill, sleaze and lies that reverberate throughout the right wing echo chamber media. Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace said it best:

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.

And today it is the 8th Anniversary of that sanctified day when the reset button was hit on 200+ years of American ‘democracy’ and the justification for the authoritarian surveillance state was set into stone with the obvious false flag attacks that occurred on that Tuesday morning when a special effects/psy ops extravaganza destroyed the World Trade Center, something hit the exact right side of the Pentagon to cause the least death and destruction and the national myth of the heroic Todd Beamer and the fighting passengers of United 93 became legend.

And the media pimped the American Reichstag Fire as though it were holy gospel. Now I can’t even watch a fucking football game without being bludgeoned by the lies.

There will be many, especially the knuckle-dragging, NeoNazi RepublKKKan shitheads out in force today exploiting the deaths of 3,000 American citizens on home soil like the necorphiliac corpse fuckers that they always have been – fucking jackbooted ghouls. The racist pigs will of couse never acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of dead brown people who were later slaughtered with the phony terrorist attacks used as the justification. Same phony attacks were used as justification for every rotten trangression of humanity, every revocation of civil liberties and every imposition by goons at the nation’s airports, football stadiums as well as the invasive Big Brother surveillance machine that has been unleashed upon us all.

The ugly truth is that there has NEVER been a legitimate investigation of what happened on 9/11/2001. There was the Kean Commission which was as laughable as the Warren Commission in it’s conclusions, just more whitewash delivered by a group of cover up artists, political cronies and military industrial complex lackeys. There was at one time a vibrant 9/11 Truth Movement but it has along with the Ron Paul Revolution has been hijacked by the drooling fear pimp and reactionary thug for hire Glenn Beck and there are condemnations and tin foil hats to be handed to all with legitimate questions of that day of national ‘rejuvenation’. The PNAC has never been investigated, the Anthrax attacks were blamed on a conveniently dead patsy, Richard B. Cheney has never been made to testify under oath about what happened on that morning from the PEOC underground command center, there has been so serious attempt to investigate or even acknowledge why the intercept procedures had been changed and why there were multiple war games going on which prevented any military response to hijacked airliners heading towards Washington and New York. And there is the fact about the hijackers themselves, in my opinion the biggest farce of them all:

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

The alleged hijackers were either complete phonies with well constructed histories that were immediately available for mass distribution through the media much like another patsy named Lee Harvey Oswald after another great national tragedy or their identities had been created as a cover for who they really were. The level of professional military caliber training needed to fly the hijacked airliners with the sophistication, skill and precision that they had to have been flown with in order to accomplish their mission almost certainly had to have been underwritten by a state with a highly advanced air force (of course the neo cons have done their best to inundate the public with the propaganda that it was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) , the question is which state? Considering that over three quarters of the alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia would it be too much of a leap in logic to consider that just perhaps they may have received training and practice either there or elsewhere? This is the one part of the official story that is the most malodorous and yet is easily accepted by Americans accustomed to living in a world of television and movie adventure fantasies.

Oh, and there is the strange contradictions that lead ‘hijacker’ Mo Atta was operating out of a flight school with a history of CIA black ops and had a fetish for cocaine, pork chops and pussy – hardly the behavior of a fanatic Islamist religious fanatic hellbent on self immolation.

The contradictions are endless and lies pile up like cordwood…just like the bodies in the illegal wars that used 9/11 as their justification. They can pile the bodies all the way up to fucking Jesus too for what it’s worth, nothing is going to change (except for the worse) unless there is a real and legitimate investigation by an independent commission of what the hell happened.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

The Great General Petraeus Dog and Pony Show

With King George’s shameless proclamation last night that things have improved so much in Iraq that he can start bringing some troops back home(just like a pickpocket giving you ten bucks as a gift after lifting your wallet) Petraeus Week is now in the books. The “Surge” has received due credit as a heaven sent panacea for the blood soaked debacle in the desert and the PNAC plans for regional conquest (or as loony Ledeen likes to call it “creative destruction” are back on track. Even Osama bin Laden made yet another of those amazingly serendipitous appearances that always happen to occur just when the Bush-Cheney junta needs to pull a bogeyman out of the hat although skeptics are wondering just how the big spooky was able to get ahold of O.J.’s fake beard. Of course ‘The Juice’ could probably use it himself right about now given the coming 24/7 media feeding frenzy over an alleged hotel room theft that will knock every relevant event out of the next few news cycles. The sixth anniversary of 9/11 came and went and was amazingly subdued compared to the vast orgy of right wing demagoguery and bombast used to exploit the victims in the past and other than the few memorials the day’s biggest event was the congressional testimony of ‘Potemkin’ Petraeus. Now, perhaps I am being overly cynical but there just may be a coincidence in scheduling the sales pitch on that particular day to once more time shore up the big lie that Iraq is somehow related to 9/11. Hell, I know that I’m a cynic but I have nothing on the rotten bastards who actually run the circus.

It has been a thoroughly disgraceful week that exemplifies how America has come to rot, our institutions infected with the terminal disease of systemic corruption, rampant perversion and raw hubris of Republican rule. The bin Laden video was just so over the top that it allowed what alcoholics often refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’ on just how far down the rabbit hole that we have gone since 9/11. The neocon’s on call fiend has actually managed to get younger since his last really big appearance when he endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket mere days before the 2004 election. Of course much of idiot nation that is already flying low with broken radar in an all encompassing fog of TV torpor buys this bag of horse manure lock, stock and smoking barrel like the good little fearful lemmings that they are supposed to be.

The hew and cry of the Republicans and their fifth columnist media shills screaming like the big authoritarian piss babies that they are over Move On’s General Betray Us ad is par for the course for the red team to whom decorum and rules are of no consequence when they don’t apply to their own tactics. The American Il Duce, Rudy Giuliani even deviated from his pathological ghoulish exploitations of 9/11 long enough to shriek with indignity that Hillary Rodham Clinton had smeared the great General Petraeus and attempted to tie her to Move On’s blasphemy of America’s newest military hero. The schoolyard bully mentality of a party of punks who go running to tattle to the teacher when they can’t keep the game sufficiently rigged in their favor makes the utter failure of the Democrats to fight back even more infuriating. The irony is that they would enjoy approval ratings much higher than inflamed hemorrhoids if they would embrace their base and Move On whose message is far more in line with the wishes of the American people than the crap shoveled out by the elitist filth and their pocket media. Another of this week’s big lies is that the centrist (aka Reagan Republican) Democrats who are denounced as though they were the second coming of Karl Marx are not nearly as outspoken about illegal wars as paleocons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts and most libertarians. Some of the most withering criticism of Petraeus, a PR flack with political ambitions masquerading as a soldier who was once described by his superior as an “ass kissing little chickenshit” and the off the chain criminal conduct of an administration run amok comes from the principled right who have been marginalized by the neocons. In fact two of the most outspoken blogs/websites against the Bush regime’s reign of terror are libertarian: Lew Rockwell and the outstanding Antiwar.com but they don’t get the establishment’s panties in a wad for the obvious reasons that the entire bogus left-right paradigm that pits us all against each other with sideshow ‘issues’ would be threatened and the sham democracy corporate status quo must be protected at all costs. There is a natural alliance with these people who are equally fed up Americans just waiting to bloom and any seriously minded politicians who sincerely are for reform would be foolish not to reach out.

The Dems are of course posturing and puffing about getting tough on Bush and Iraq and even threatening to block American Torquemada Alberto Gonzales’ likely replacement in rabid Republican ideologue Ted Olson but it’s all just window dressing and only suckers continue to fall for the same con over and over. By now we all know exactly what happens next with these feckless toadies, they just roll over and cave with nary a whimiper. Maybe they should just take Bobby Knight’s infamous advice that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it” rather than to continue insult our intelligence with meaningless rhetoric. While the charlatans are seeking capitulation and compromise American troops and dollars will continue to be fed into the meat grinder that is Iraq. Iran will also likely soon be attacked much to the delight of a certain highly influential special interest group that gives marching orders to the Dems (and that for the sake of argument shall remain nameless) and the Bush crime family will be free to continue their disembowelment of the constitution for another year and a half. It says one hell of a lot about the Democratic leadersheep when even the fucking John Birch Society is more of an advocate for the restoration of civil liberties than the Pelosi-Hoyer-Reid triad.

The elitist mentality of our beltway kings and queens was on full display during the Petraeus love fest. Not only did the entrenched establishment Democrat from the Show Me State Ike Skelton neglect to swear in the four star suck-o-matic for his testimony (Ray McGovern was ousted for bringing this up) but he was reportedly overheard referring to protestors as “assholes”. This is the prevailing attitude by the Washington elitists to whom the First Amendment is just another annoying inconvenience. The real asshole is the entire stinking toxic waste dump inside the beltway and the rotten to the core gaggle solons who reside there. They are thoroughly vile, cowardly, corrupt and could give a rat’s ass about either the constitution or the people that they are at least in theory supposed to serve. Given the disgraceful conduct of this new Congress who were given a mandate for change it is long past time to stick an enema nozzle into the festering asshole that is the nation’s capitol and give the bulb a good hard squeeze.

The total failure to end this damned war or prevent the next one as well as the reluctance of any of the presidential candidates to take an aggressive antiwar, pro-worker stance shows why there is so much crossover appeal for a guy like Ron Paul who despite his problematic stance on other issues will END THE WAR. Americans are overwhelmingly against this crap, the illegal wars, the widespread looting, the plague of offshoring, the importation of low wage labor to take jobs that can’t be offshored, the subprime fiasco, unaffordable health care, a creeping police state and all the rest of the indignities of the past six and a half years and they want change.Sadly to this point the Democratic leadersheep and their inept strategists have been loathe to offer up anything other than fascism lite and that just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

The Petraeus Dog and Pony Show

With King George’s shameless proclamation last night that things have improved so much in Iraq that he can start bringing some troops back home(just like a pickpocket giving you ten bucks as a gift after lifting your wallet) Petraeus Week is now in the books. The “Surge” has received due credit as a heaven sent panacea for the blood soaked debacle in the desert and the PNAC plans for regional conquest (or as loony Ledeen likes to call it “creative destruction” are back on track. Even Osama bin Laden made yet another of those amazingly serendipitous appearances that always happen to occur just when the Bush-Cheney junta needs to pull a bogeyman out of the hat although skeptics are wondering just how the big spooky was able to get ahold of O.J.’s fake beard. Of course ‘The Juice’ could probably use it himself right about now given the coming 24/7 media feeding frenzy over an alleged hotel room theft that will knock every relevant event out of the next few news cycles. The sixth anniversary of 9/11 came and went and was amazingly subdued compared to the vast orgy of right wing demagoguery and bombast used to exploit the victims in the past and other than the few memorials the day’s biggest event was the congressional testimony of ‘Potemkin’ Petraeus. Now, perhaps I am being overly cynical but there just may be a coincidence in scheduling the sales pitch on that particular day to once more time shore up the big lie that Iraq is somehow related to 9/11. Hell, I know that I’m a cynic but I have nothing on the rotten bastards who actually run the circus.

It has been a thoroughly disgraceful week that exemplifies how America has come to rot, our institutions infected with the terminal disease of systemic corruption, rampant perversion and raw hubris of Republican rule. The bin Laden video was just so over the top that it allowed what alcoholics often refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’ on just how far down the rabbit hole that we have gone since 9/11. The neocon’s on call fiend has actually managed to get younger since his last really big appearance when he endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket mere days before the 2004 election. Of course much of idiot nation that is already flying low with broken radar in an all encompassing fog of TV torpor buys this bag of horse manure lock, stock and smoking barrel like the good little fearful lemmings that they are supposed to be.

The hew and cry of the Republicans and their fifth columnist media shills screaming like the big authoritarian piss babies that they are over Move On’s General Betray Us ad is par for the course for the red team to whom decorum and rules are of no consequence when they don’t apply to their own tactics. The American Il Duce, Rudy Giuliani even deviated from his pathological ghoulish exploitations of 9/11 long enough to shriek with indignity that Hillary Rodham Clinton had smeared General Petraeus and attempted to tie her to Move On’s blasphemy of America’s newest military hero. The schoolyard bully mentality of a party of punks who go running to tattle to the teacher when they can’t keep the game sufficiently rigged in their favor makes the utter failure of the Democrats to fight back even more infuriating. The irony is that they would enjoy approval ratings much higher than inflamed hemorrhoids if they would embrace their base and Move On whose message is far more in line with the wishes of the American people than the crap shoveled out by the elitist filth and their pocket media. Another of this week’s big lies is that the centrist (aka Reagan Republican) Democrats who are denounced as though they were the second coming of Karl Marx are not nearly as outspoken about illegal wars as paleocons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts and most libertarians. Some of the most withering criticism of Petraeus, a PR flack with political ambitions masquerading as a soldier who was once described by his superior as an “ass kissing little chickenshit” and the off the chain criminal conduct of an administration run amok comes from the principled right who have been marginalized by the neocons. In fact two of the most outspoken blogs/websites against the Bush regime’s reign of terror are libertarian: Lew Rockwell and the outstanding Antiwar.com but they don’t get the establishment’s panties in a wad for the obvious reasons that the entire bogus left-right paradigm that pits us all against each other with sideshow ‘issues’ would be threatened and the sham democracy corporate status quo must be protected at all costs. There is a natural alliance with these people who are equally fed up Americans just waiting to bloom and any seriously minded politicians who sincerely are for reform would be foolish not to reach out.
The Dems are of course posturing and puffing about getting tough on Bush and Iraq and even threatening to block Alberto Gonzales’ likely replacement in rabid Republican ideologue Ted Olson but it’s all just window dressing and only suckers continue to fall for the same con over and over. By now we all know exactly what happens next with these feckless toadies, they just roll over and cave with nary a whimiper. Maybe they should just take Bobby Knight’s infamous advice that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it” rather than to continue insult our intelligence with meaningless rhetoric. While the charlatans are seeking capitulation and compromise American troops and dollars will continue to be fed into the meat grinder that is Iraq. Iran will also likely soon be attacked much to the delight of a certain highly influential special interest group that gives marching orders to the Dems (and that for the sake of argument shall remain nameless) and the Bush crime family will be free to continue their disembowelment of the constitution for another year and a half. It says one hell of a lot about the Democratic leadersheep when even the fucking John Birch Society is more of an advocate for the restoration of civil liberties than the Pelosi-Hoyer-Reid triad.

The elitist mentality of our beltway kings and queens was on full display during the Petraeus love fest. Not only did the entrenched establishment Democrat from the Show Me State Ike Skelton neglect to swear in the four star suck-o-matic for his testimony (Ray McGovern was ousted for bringing this up) but he was reportedly overheard referring to protesters as “assholes” This is the prevailing attitude by the Washington elitists to whom the First Amendment is just another annoying inconvenience. The real asshole is the entire stinking toxic waste dump inside the beltway and the rotten to the core gaggle solons who reside there. They are thoroughly vile, cowardly, corrupt and could give a rat’s ass about either the constitution or the people that they are at least in theory supposed to serve. Given the disgraceful conduct of this new Congress who were given a mandate for change it is long past time to stick an enema nozzle into the festering asshole that is the nation’s capitol and give the bulb a good hard squeeze.

The total failure to end this damned war or prevent the next one as well as the reluctance of any of the presidential candidates to take an aggressive antiwar, pro-worker stance shows why there is so much crossover appeal for a guy like Ron Paul who despite his problematic stance on other issues will END THE WAR. Americans are overwhelmingly against this crap, the illegal wars, the widespread looting, the plague of offshoring, the importation of low wage labor to take jobs that can’t be offshored, the subprime fiasco, unaffordable health care, a creeping police state and all the rest of the indignities of the past six and a half years and they want change.Sadly to this point the Democratic leadersheep and their inept strategists have been loathe to offer up anything other than fascism lite and that just isn’t going to cut it anymore.