The Police State Isn’t Coming, It’s Already Here

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable”.

– Eric Hoffer

Not that I care very much for John Rutherford of the Whitehead Institute, a notorious right-wing think tank but as the old adage goes – even a broken clock is right twice a day. In his latest piece entitled ” ‘Boston Strong’: Marching in Lockstep with the Police State. Rutherford, who backed that ugly tramp Paula Jones in her lawsuit against the horndog in chief Bill Clinton cuts through the flag-swaddled dreck to call a spade a spade. Boston was placed under MARTIAL LAW last Friday, a day that will prove to be as dark as any in this nation’s history when all is said and done with. The Rubicon was officially crossed on April 19, 2013 and the only thing that is more disturbing than the massive show of paramilitary power in Beantown is the degree that it has been accepted, just another feature of “The New Normal”. 

I will now excerpt from Whitehead’s piece  –

 

Whatever the threat to so-called security—whether it’s rumored weapons of mass destruction, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—it doesn’t take much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched, and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.

As journalist Andrew O’Hehir observes in Salon:

In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing. We agreed to give up most of our enumerated rights and civil liberties (except for the sacrosanct Second Amendment, of course) in exchange for a lot of hyper-patriotic tough talk, the promise of “security” and the freedom to go on sitting on our asses and consuming whatever the hell we wanted to. Don’t look the other way and tell me that you signed a petition or voted for John Kerry or whatever. The fact is that whatever dignified private opinions you and I may hold, we did not do enough to stop it, and our constitutional rights are now deemed to be partial or provisional rather than absolute, do not necessarily apply to everyone, and can be revoked by the government at any time.

Particularly disheartening is the fact that Americans, consumed with the need for vengeance, seem even less concerned about protecting the rights of others, especially if those “others” happen to be of a different skin color or nationality. The public response to the manhunt, capture and subsequent treatment of brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is merely the latest example of America’s xenophobic mindset, which was also a driving force behind the roundup and detention of hundreds of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men following 9/11, internment camps that housed more than 18,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and the arrest and deportation of thousands of “radical” noncitizens during America’s first Red Scare.

To be a Muslim in America today it to be “Juden” in 1930’s era Germany, already the persecution machine is ramping up. It may not exactly be September 11,  2001 but it’ll do.

It is astonishing to witness the degree that unquestioning American lemmings so easily acquiesce to the rapidly tightening of the iron fist of state. This is what happens when a society is conditioned to live in fear. There was a time not so long ago where being forced to take off one’s shoes at an airport and being aggressively frisked by government goons would have elicited outrage. This is no longer the land in which we dwell, the sate and those who profit from it have seized on the September 11^th 2001 events to justify any and all foreign aggression and the stripping of rights here at home. No perceived offense is too small to add more paramiltary equipment and training to local police forces, already augmented by the Homeland Security Gestapo. The bad assed bogeyman Osama bin Laden may now be sleeping with the fishes but leave it to the Neocon embeds, Dick Cheney’s stay behind network and the ever complicit state media to ensure that there will be new arch villians and “monsters” to arm the police against, now it is the brothers Tsarnaev who serve as our Emanuel Goldstein. As I sit here sipping my morning cup o’ joe there are forces desperately looking for any sort of ginned up linkage between the Chechens who set off their dastardly shrapnel bomb at the Boston Marathon and overseas groups, like the Manichean devil Al Qaeda. It is very, very essential for the America that we now exist in to keep the already cowardly public in a state of constant fear. I recall a book that I once read entitled American Terminator that examined the role of Hollywood movies as an essential propaganda tool for shaping and reinforcing the basis for a mythical American exceptionalism and its desire for empire. The following passage is from that book which I strongly recommend to everybody with an interest in just how celluloid serves as a delivery device that is very useful in the indoctrination process.

Fear is essential: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid’ is the American condition.

To live in America is to be beset by fear, anxiety and insecurity, to be surrounded by potential harm, enemies and evil intent. And the wolf is always at the door. A nation of optimists is the more usual self-representation of America. Repetitively, Hollywood films conclude with a resolution, a rescue, and the winners ride off into the sunset or snuggle into a warm embrace that reassures us they will live happily ever after. The formulaic ending, however, is necessary because the plot, the narrative, is founded on and propelled by fear and anxiety, the dark essential underpinning of the American condition. For America fear is an original, natural condition, the inescapable birth rite (and birth right), the inherited condition of a fragile existence that must constantly be defended. Without fear there is no America; constant recourse to fear is the motivating force that determines its actions and reactions.

That was until 9/11 and the brain freezing FEAR of potential terrorism in the USA became the ultimate talisman of the state.  Herman Goering had it absolutely correct when he famously said:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”

And as Whitehead puts it

As the events in Boston have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every country. The same propaganda and police state tactics that worked for Adolf Hitler 80 years ago continue to be employed with great success in a post-9/11 America.

And the public of course always buys it, quivering, sniveling, pissing in their pants and practically screaming “please….take my freedom away”. Already, the Boston lockdown has provided cover for the TSA (an un-American entity that should be shredded into a million pieces and cast to the winds so counter to the concept of freedom that it is) to revoke the recently granted permission to carry miniature pocket knives onto airplanes. Really, just how fucking stupid are Americans if they believe that something so small as this can be used to actually highjack a plane? Americans watch too much television and too many movies, a decade and a half ago if a potential hijacker would have pulled out a mini-swiss army knife he would have been laughed off the plane. But the official state conspiracy theory of September 11, 2001 has become gospel that a group of losers who were allegedly well enough trained to take over jet airplanes with nothing but a box cutter and then to utilize their simulator flight training to pull off precision military daredevil piloting that even the most crackerjack pilots in the world would have trouble with has worked. It has worked out so well that any questioning of said official conspiracy theory is treated as a great apostasy and will have one immediately shunned by those whose worldview has been shaped by such lurid dramas as “Homeland” and “24”, but I am not going to go there this morning.

My oh my how the black vans will roll…

Happy 10th Anniversary: The Orgy Of 9/11 Exploitation

 

In the US on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with “A Day of Remembrance,” a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma.

– Paul Craig Roberts

Ten years gone. The big lies of 9/11, that oh so glorious day in America when the reset button was flipped on over two hundred years and the country flipped full blown fascist were cemented into place forever over the weekend. One of the only institutions more respected by the star-spangled sheep than the blessed military, the National Football League played an enormous part in promulgating the new normal and glorifying the society changing event that has come to be justification for plunder, wars without end, a colossal police state and the undercurrent of anti-Muslim hatred that will soon lead to blood in the streets. It was a day when corporate advertising took full advantage of the exploitation of the 9/11 dead (no mention ever goes to the the tens to hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians murdered by the U.S. military and our allies in the endless and phony war on terror) and used the occasion to pimp their products. Not that this is entirely precedent setting, the Republican party was cashing in on the ‘terrorist’ attacks while the smell of rotting flesh still wafted in on the morning breezes in lower Manhattan. The appropriation of 9/11 by corporations is only the obvious evolution of the moral decay that has a once mighty nation up against the ropes, staggering like a punch drunk palooka and just struggling to avoid the knockout blow. 


Being a football fan for years the NFL season opener had long been a festive event. There was beer, parties and barbecues followed by a day spent immersed in football. Not this year, the repulsive promotion of the new American religion of 9/11 was too much for me to take, I spent the majority of the afternoon monitoring the games on the internet. I skipped all of the pregame ceremonies, the usual pregame shows where buffoons like Terry Bradshaw (once accused of being so dumb that he couldn’t spell cat if he was spotted the first two letters) and grinning shit salesman Howie Long would ensure that sports and war metaphors would become interchangeable. FOX’s NFL for example had long been in the war propaganda business, Murdoch the old dog knew fully well that pushing right-wing political agendas would be his bread and butter as his cancerous media empire metastasized across the globe and he knew that faux patriotism and sports sold to the masses. It was on Veteran’s Day weekend back in 2009 that FOX set up it’s NFL show studios in Afghanistan, with all of the assclowns who never wore the uniform in actual service were dressed up in their cammies like fake soldiers. Bradshaw looked the most ridiculous of all, like a bizarre form of movie parody of an out of touch general. Not that FOX is unique, the porcine Peter King was traveling around to NFL camps this year in his militarized motorcoach to cover the warmups to the big 9/11 kickoff party. Peter King being the prolific and long-tenured football writer for Sports Illustrated not the porcine I.R.A. terrorist sponsoring neo-McCarthyist Republican congressman from Long Island. The big 9/11 whoop de doo was the one reason why I absolutely knew that the NFL’s labor strife would be over in time for the big games of Sunday past. 

What little football I did watch (I popped in for about ten minutes of the Steelers vs. Ravens game) made me glad that I just skipped the rest. When fuckwad CBS announcer Jim Nance took a cheap shot at Pittsburgh running back Rashard ‘the Fumble Machine’ Mendenhall for his TWITter comments expressing distaste at the unseemly celebrations over bin Laden’s alleged assassination. Nance even seemed to invite violence and harassment to be heaped on Mendenhall throughout the year in making the inference that he could expect to receive hostile receptions on the road. This is what happens when the official state religion of 9/11 needs to deal with heresy, it’s just too primitive to go around and cut people’s tongues out anymore. The games were even more overly militarized than normal, take this account from Glenn Greenwald’s piece The Meaning of Political Rituals Like 9/11 Day:

 

Not just 9/11 Day but everything connected to it was constructed to deliver and implant a very politicized message, over and over.  Consider this email I received from a friend in South Florida after he attended an NFL football game last night in Miami:

 Let me describe the patriotic display at last night’s NFL opener. Men with machine guns at all entrances, to scare off the terrorists. Pat down on the way in, to make sure [my wife] and I weren’t carrying plastic explosives. A moving national anthem with troops out on the field spelling out U.S.A. A moving tribute to the thousands who perished in 9/11 and to our nation’s brave response to that atrocity (which was, of course, the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world). A U.S.A., U.S.A. chant. Then a Stealth B2 Bomber flew over the stadium, followed by fireworks. At half time, a US Army paratrooper squad jumped out of a plane and landed on the field. Maybe next week they’ll shoot some missiles from unmanned drones.

Does anyone want to claim with a straight face that these ceremonies are apolitical, devoid of political messaging?  Everything about 9/11 — how it’s talked about, how it’s described, how it’s commemorated — is all designed to impart very specific political messages, and that’s been true since the day it happened.

The Fumble Machine wasn’t the only one getting publicly pilloried, New York Times columnist and noted economist Paul Krugman drew the wrath of the establishment for his dead on blog posting on that holiest of days that the post 9/11 era is one of shame not valor, glory and remembrance:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

I would disagree with Krugman on the commemorations being subdued, there was plenty of still warm bloody red chunks of meat shoveled into community troughs by the pocket media and the usual pigs lined up to eat the slop. Of course the knives were out and buried in Krugman’s back and not only from the fascist right-wingers but from the same sissified liberal suckup bloggers that I have denounced for years, the ass-kissing, yuppie social climbing types typically found at Daily Kos which is about as leftist as Stalin. Rather than get off on a tangent here about the dismal state of the so-called progressive blogosphere and it’s miserable failings I just will say that I have been doing this for over six years now and I have had more than my share of run ins with the foul types of cretins who sell out to achieve the coveted posting positions at the “A” list prog blogs, especially that foul orange nest of pit vipers. While I have worked with many dignified and talented people I just had to split from it all and just do my own thing. I can attest that elements of the dreck that passes for “the left” online are every bit as foul as their mouth-breathing fascist counterparts only in their own sordid little ways.

Krugman’s piece drew a blistering response, how DARE he blaspheme by actually telling the truth? I mean just how fucking un-American is that anymore? The piece even made war criminal Donald Rumsfeld barf up his Metamucil and cancel his subscription to the NYT. The question goes unasked why a hardened neocon like Rummy would even have a subscription to the damned librul [sic] rag in the first place. Perhaps it has more than a little bit to do with the New York Times having played an integral part in allowing the Bushreich to lie American into attacking and invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Remember Judith Miller? She was Scooter Libby’s fuck-bunny who abused her prominent position with the NYT to promote the bullshit story about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Not that Saddam didn’t at one time actually have WMD, shit he gassed his own people. The dirty little back story is that he got the WMD including the toxic gas from American corporations, the same corporations that good ole Rummy was shilling for when he was sent over to Iraq by Reagan back in the 1980s. Saddam and Rumsfeld were thick as thieves, ever wonder why Hussein was tried and strung up on a murder beef that didn’t include the gassing at Halabja? Sure couldn’t have any of that shit about Rummy coming out in court now could we?

As of today Krugman is a dead man walking, he is so fat a high-value target to the filthy neo-Nazis in the Republican establishment (as well as the rats of the Democratic Obama led corporatists and Wall Street looters) that he will be the new Dan Rather. His bloody scalp will soon be brandished as a trophy, if I were Krugman I would put a lock on my hamper to prevent the underwear sniffing punk Andrew Breitbart or any of his latent pork sword swallowing acolytes from being the ones bearing the tomahawk.

The NFL while wallowing in nationalism and rolling out the military worship barely even paid homage to a true hero, formerly one of their own: Pat Tillman. Tillman left a promising career with the Arizona Cardinals to go and enlist in the Army Rangers after the American Reichstag Fire, it was the patriotic thing to do right? As so much of our current history is a perversely Bizarro reinvention of World War II strained through the electronic crackpipe that is the television Tillman was to place loyalty to country over personal fame and fortune. But 9/11 was not your grandfather’s Pearl Harbor but rather the “New Pearl Harbor” of the cunning, amoral pack of jackal neocons of the Project For The New American Century. Tillman quickly realized that it was all just bullshit and had turned against the wars, who knows what he thought about 9/11 but he was communicating with Noam Chomsky and had a story to tell when he would return home – except he didn’t.

From Dave Zirin on Tillman:

 

In 2004, President George W. Bush appeared on the Jumbotron at Arizona’s Sun Devil stadium to address the combat death of former NFL player turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman.  Bush said: “Pat Tillman loved the game of football. Yet, as much as Pat Tillman loved competing on the football field, he loved America even more… Courageous and humble, a loving husband and son, a devoted brother and a fierce defender of liberty. Pat Tillman will always be remembered.”

But Sunday— while NFL teams around the country commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—Pat’s name was only mentioned before the game in Arizona.  In stadium after stadium, in pregame show after pregame show, as the NFL’s 9/11 commemoration strategy was rolled out with lockstep discipline, Tillman’s name was conspicuously absent.

George W. Bush certainly got his moment in the spotlight, receiving a standing ovation by 70,000 fans at the Meadowlands. On other football fields, massive flags were unfurled, “official NFL/9/11 logos” were unveiled, soldiers were cheered, Reebok’s “We Will Never Forget” 9/11 gear was worn, and yet it was as if Pat Tillman had never existed.

Tillman was an atheist so the holy war bullshit didn’t resonate with him and one of Dick Cheney’s JSOC hit teams likely were the ones who blew his insubordinate fucking head off.  The official story of being killed by “friendly fire” are bad enough, it puts a damper on the original ‘poster boy’ for American militarism in the new American century, not a thing to throw to the masses of asses on the holiest day of all. That Tillman was shot in the head at close range by his own side, his clothes and diary destroyed and a massive coverup effort undertaken speaks of even darker things. The NFL is far more interested in selling merchandise, advertising and currying the favor of powerful interests than in doing anything so gauchely unpatriotic as telling the truth, an unforgivable sin in The Homeland.

 

 

The New Normal For the 9/11 Generation

Adolf Hitler was more interested in the children who would be the future of his thousand year Reich for all that they would know would be his worldview. It is very similar her in Der Heimat. Our youngest citizens have known nothing other than the fear, fascism, hatred and perpetual warfare that were set into motion ten years ago. They will grow to adulthood in a society where airport checkpoints manned by drooling government goons and the ever present all-seeing eyes of Big Brother are a part of daily life. On Sunday they even trotted out the war criminal George W. Bush as though he were some sort of fucking dignitary despite the truth that after spending the morning of 9/11 with his nose buried in My Pet Goat and then flying around the country on Air Force One like some sort of chickenshit while the treasonous Cheney and Rummy were running the show. And when it comes to chickenshits who has anything on that diseased little turd Eric Cantor, the bespectacled Virginia Republican Majority Leader whose face looks like the logo on the New England Patriots helmet. In an act as brazenly shameless as corporations using 9/11 tributes to sell hamburgers and other crap Cantor took a break from screening anti-Muslim propaganda films on behalf of his Israeli buddies to introduce HR 391 – the resolution to “Never Forget” 9/11, or rather the official big lie of 9/11. In true GOP fashion it was another ghoulish use of the dead to push their decidedly fascist, anti-American political agenda. Then again, pissing on the 9/11 dead is nothing new to the Republicans who had the most kick ass club in the bag once the war criminal Bush grabbed a megaphone and climbed atop that pile of debris at “Ground Zero” while the rubble was still smoldering. As H.L. Mencken once remarked, “imagine a gentleman and you will have imagined everything that he is not”.

I could go on and on about the dishonor of America’s behavior in the aftermath of 9/11 but what’s the point? It was a lamentable display of all that his country has come to stand for that was force fed to us all last weekend, the corporate NFL’s corpse humping being the cherry on top of the shit cake. Guys like Krugman and Chris Hedges had the best takes but there were many, many others who saw this travesty as the charade that it truly was. Hedges, always with a unique perspective flayed the myth by reintroducing the “jumpers” or those who perished in the World Trade Center towers but have been erased from collective memory by a treacherous media. Hedges’ 9/11 10th Anniversary piece is entitled A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe and I excerpt the following: 

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.

I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.

Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.

The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.

Hedges’ piece evokes an account of the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, another bit of history that has been revised to the benefit of the rapacious looter capitalist state.  Even in their gruesome war justifying lies, lies responsible now for ten years of death and torture, human misery and looting the treasury Americans love their subterfuge sunny side up. People jumping out of a burning building and going SPLAT doesn’t fit that mindset, the mindset of a lemming, a lemming now in freefall down the rabbit hole, and it still doesn’t understand that the rabbit hole is a grave.

Print the Legend: The Official Death of Osama bin Laden

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell

 H. L. Mencken

I would have to say that in my opinion the greatest thing about the officially announced death of our very own Emanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden is the sheer joy of watching the Republicans having to eat their own shit. There is something wonderful about the super-sized helping of humble pie served up with one of those nice little toothpick American flaggie things planted in the middle of their slab now that the rotten fascist fifth columnists and neocons have been robbed of the most kick ass club in the bag, their shameless exploitation of the ‘terrorist’ attacks of 9/11/01 for political gain. The GOP has utterly terrorized the rubes, suckers and suburban Sally soccer moms for nearly a decade now, fundamentally altering the country in the process. You can bet the house on it that the fear and terror cards along with the inevitable Obama is a secret Muslim who along with buddies Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan attended wild drug fueled orgies where satanic ritual sacrifices were held were key components of their 2012 strategy. Remember the wild rumors about Hillary’s secret lesbian trysts in the White House and the Christmas tree adorned with crackpipes and dildos? That one was a children’s bedtime story compared to the volcanic eruption of lies, filth and toxic spew that the Koch Brothers money was funding this time around. The narratives were already well under way and likely were very costly, direct mailings, whisper campaigns, retainers for think tank scum like Dinesh D’Souza and his ilk for their libelous bulk purchased books all are going to have to be scrapped because in  less than a week it is all gone, it went up like a bag of flaming dogshit. To all those who have been justifiably revolted by this all too predictable heinous tactic of assassination though black propaganda and a corrupt media that amplifies and disseminates it just enjoy the sweet schadenfreude along with a side of delicious irony. 

Bin Laden is dead! The release of this week’s latest edition of Time Magazine, the official ‘news’ magazine for the establishment with the evil one’s stock picture with the traditional red X though it ensures that despite the caterwauling of the squealing little swine birthers, degenerate America hating pigs like Orly Taitz, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the neocon propagandists the official account is now locked down by the impenetrable firewall of conventional wisdom. Sure they can warble about having to see the pictures like the hilariously desperate Sarah Palin (perhaps she can finagle some sort of trade bartering beaver shots of Bristol for the pics of the now dead bin Laden) who still doesn’t understand that her political career is over and that she is well into her next phase of being a gross parody of herself, not that she wasn’t always a parody from the git go. Yes, they are going totally batshit over in the big carnival tent of the Republican party, barker in chief Donald T.Rump can now focus on selling tickets to the feces eating contest in the geek section. It is astonishing to behold, the party of shoot first ask questions later is bemoaning the capping of the unarmed uber terrorist and in what is the most hilarious thing of all the corporate media is now suddenly concerned about international law and did the execution of Osama violate it. Hell, that one is hilarious, nearly spit coffee on the keyboard when I read that. Just where in the fuck was the corporate media and the concern for international law when George W. Bush launched his illegal wars, bombed the shit out of civilians, presided over a vile and sadistic regime that made torture an official U.S. policy or for that matter when Obama continued to endorse predator drone strikes on civilian weddings? Double standards and it shows just how rotten to the core that the consolidated and interlocking media in this country has become. Oh, and now here’s a real knee-slapper, the Republican whiners, continuing with their well-established culture of victimhood are pissy that none of the credit for taking out bin Laden is being given to Dubya or to his immoral and illegal torture programs. But at least it’s consistent since they never saw fit that there should have been any of the blame  assigned to him despite the damned inconvenient fact that the 9/11 events occurred during his watch. Perhaps there can be a commemorative edition of My Pet Goat issued in order to honor Bush for his heroism on that morning. 

God Dammit, they cut into Celebrity Apprentice!

It is pretty obvious that the story of bin Laden’s assassination by Seal Team 6 is the official story of the state and it is already being reinforced with the same type of groupthink promulgated by the corporate media that followed the original attacks. While the release of any actual photos of the body have been nixed by Obama on the grounds of national security the government has released bin Laden home videos that are making their way about the internet and media megaphones today. The post death storyline goes to great lengths to play down the mythic capacity of the man once built up to be the baddest motherfucker in the valley of the shadow of death. There have been stories describing bin Laden as “unkempt”, “bored”, “shabby”, “frail” and “weary”. There have been stories on the contents of his medicine cabinet, did he have eczema or some other skin condition? Was he using a form of Viagra? Xanax? Interestingly enough nothing seems to have been found that would indicate treatments for kidney failure. The official propaganda gains new layers by the day, this from an article in Time’s Special Report issue:

Living the Good Live


So he wasn’t in a cave after all. Osama bin Laden, master marketer of mass murder, loved to traffic in the image of the ascetic warrior-prophet. In one of his most famous videotapes, he chose gray rocks for a background, a rough camo jacket for a costume and a rifle for a prop. He portrayed a hard, pure alternative to the decadent weakness of the modern world. Soft Westerners and their corrupt puppet princes reclined in luxury and sin while he wanted nothing but a gun and a prayer rug. The zealot travels light, his bloodred thoughts so pure that even stones are as cushions for his troubled sleep.


Now we know otherwise. Bin Laden was not the stoic soldier that he played onscreen. The exiled son of a Saudi construction mogul was living in a million-dollar home in a wealthy town nestled among green hills. He apparently slept in a king-size bed with a much younger wife. He had satellite TV. This, most of all, was fitting, because no matter how many hours he spent talking nostalgically of the 12th century and the glory of the islamic caliphate, bin laden was a master of the 21st century image machine.

The deconstruction of the uber-fiend, peddled for years, most relentlessly by the insidious Bush regime to hold political power and justify their wars and associated criminality was well under way. The Republican party owned 9/11, wielded it as a trusty bludgeon and used it without mercy as they eviscerated the United States Constitution, turned torture into the guiding principle of national policy, looted the treasury and doled out ever more lucrative contracts to mercenaries and private war profiteers on the taxpayer dime. Whenever it was questioned one of those timely bin Laden videos or tapes just happened to pop up, up went the color-coded terror alert and the nuisance of having to come up with answers went away. For example when Osama bin Laden just happened to pop up on a video four days or so before the 2004 elections it provided a ringing endorsement for the terrorism of Bush and Cheney and with a bit of help in Ohio courtesy of Karl Rove’s election stealing machine the king was coronated anew for four more years of hell. The Republicans seized bin Laden and along with him the mythic menace of the destroyer of worlds, it was as though George W. Bush had pulled the magical sword Excalibur from the stone of the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center and the use of the tragedy for political expedience was already official policy while the rotting flesh of the victims still hung heavy in the lower Manhattan air.

Later in the Time piece there is this:

No Hollywood filmmaker ever staged a more terrifying spectacle than 9/11, which bin Laden conjured from a few box cutters and 19 misguided martyrs. When the Twin Towers collapsed, he became the real-life answer to the ruthless, stateless and seemingly unstoppable villains of James Bond fantasy. It was necessary then, to find him and render him mortal again, reduce him to mere humanity – not just as a matter of justice but as a matter of self-defense. 

And it has been done, Barack Hussein Obama has stolen away the mighty sword while at the same time the Mighty Wurlitzer of the pocket media not only ensures that the truth of the death of the evil one will be that of the official story of the state but that the original dogma of the attacks themselves would be reinforced for all time. With the establishment of the official historical account (which as the maxim goes, written by the victors and sanitized to omit the dirt) not only does the questioning of any part of the 9/11 story become intolerable by bin Laden himself is being body scrubbed with his past CIA association being denied by think tank hacks like Peter Bergen in his prominent WaPo piece entitled Five Myths about Osama bin Laden. The usual gaggle of reliable neocon stooges like Charles Kraüthammer patting themselves on the back while trumpeting the great success of the phony war on terror, the sadists and authoritarian freaks on the right-wing decrying any criticism of torture, in Time’s case making apologies for the ugly Americans celebrating the demise of the bogeyman with their idiot “USA,USA,USA” chants and viciously cracking down on those who happen to wander off the star spangled lemming farm. Take for example Pittsburgh Steelers running back whose most recent claim to fame was a key fumble during the Super Bowl that pretty much sealed his team’s doom. Both barrels were turned on Mendenhall this week for his daring to use TWITter to weigh in on the orgy of glee during the national barbecuing of bin Laden’s ass – “those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn in hell and piss on his ashes, I ask how would God feel about your heart?… What kind of person celebrates death?”. For this the man was descended upon as if by a biblical plague of flesh-eating bats by the pocket media kingmakers, flag-sucking drones and assorted other imbecilic dwellers of the most befouled gutters of the mind. Were this a more primitive (or in our case futuristic) society, Mendenhall would have been quickly an ruthlessly hunted down, his tongue ripped out with fire heated iron tongs and his wayward fingers chopped off so as to never again engage in such heresy as well as to sent an example for others. 

We have been here before, any dissent from the Bush administration’s blatant usage of the 9/11 event for reasons of politics and settling an old score with Saddam Hussein were affixed with the scarlet letters of traitor and anti-American. This is just the reverse form of the same primitive defense of the official religions. When it comes to doubts about the ceremonies, false idols and totems any who dare to utter the blasphemies must be dealt with summarily and with extreme prejudice. Any really serious examination of the scaly underbelly of the angry beast with millions of electronic eyes that is the Homeland in the new American century must be taken with a familiarity of the allegory of Plato’s cave. Once you have been outside don’t even bother to venture back to try to enlighten the other slaves for ye shalt be damned for your efforts if not drawn and quartered by a team of Clydesdales. 

Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.

– Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

Maybe the real truth of the bin Laden story is that his former sponsors and associates within the American establishment finally just wanted to write the end to his story, tie up that last loose end because to do anything else would ensure a demise, sucked under in the quicksand bog of the wars without end. Obviously spooked by the recent Standard and Poor downgrade of the U.S. debt perhaps it was just an acknowledgement of that which is obvious in that the wars, especially the bottomless money pit in Afghanistan are destroying the country in ways that bin Laden or any other foreign enemy ever could. The bin Laden execution brings to mind the scene from the classic film Apocalypse Now when finally reaching the river’s end Captain Willard is delivered to the compound of Colonel Kurtz who had gone rogue and was as a result marked for death by his own country’s military leadership in order to terminate his command:

Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.

Kurtz: It’s no longer classified, is it? What did they tell you?

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.

Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?

Willard: I’m a soldier.

Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

Osama bin Laden was never going to stand trial, not in this Empire, not with what he knew. Despite the best efforts of the professional propagandists and spin doctors to downplay his longtime involvement as a valuable instrument of U.S. policy, most notably with the Mujahadeen in the proxy war against the Soviets back in the Reagan years in Afghanistan. What is now existent in popular culture as a noble effort, Charlie Wilson’s War for example with the all-American Tom Hanks playing the flamboyant Texan Republican who used his seat in the U.S. Congress to promote arming Islamic radicals, a Reagan pet project right up there with letting good ole Ollie North run guns and drugs to fund arming the Latin American death squads. Were bin Laden to have a forum the potential revealing of such a duplicitous history could prove to be immensely embarrassing and in our sugar-coated, sanitized and flag-draped narrative we couldn’t possibly admit to colluding with criminals, dictators, Nazi war criminals or Muslim fanatics in order to further an agenda largely dictated by corporations and plutocrats. Best to just send in the hit squad and be done with it, if that’s what actually happened. 

Media analyst Danny Schecter puts it well in his piece Nailing Osama Bin Laden: Was it a military or amedia operation? Why now?

They could have captured him, but that would lead to the hassle of putting him on trial. Besides, what if he revealed his long connection with the CIA and US officials? Can’t have that. So the kill order was given, along with a quick disposal of the body, mafia-style (as in “sleeping with the fishes).”

But we will never really know will we?

I have always personally believed that he was dead, at least since shortly after the towers fell and I have never been convinced that he played anything more than an ancillary role in the 9/11 attacks. The attacks as they occurred couldn’t have been carried out by anything less than a multi-national alliance of serious and I mean stone cold professional military personnel, intelligence pros, mole networks largely compartmentalized to provide plausible denial and government officials with the clout to influence both the behind the scenes preparatory work as well as the following cover-up. The weakest part of the entire story to me has always been Osama bin Laden and his flight-simulator trained Islamic fundamentalist fanatics like Mohammad Atta, Ninjas with box-cutters who could overwhelm a multi-trillion dollar intelligence colossus, circumvent the entire national air defense command, dupe U.S. allies and their intelligence services and then pull off with crackerjack precision three daredevil direct hits on U.S. buildings with such damage being done to the structures as to defy the basic laws of physics. Americans are stupid though and swallowed it all, rolled over and gave up their rights and begged for more tyrannical enslavement as their tax dollars were funneled to private military contractors (mercenaries) and private   intelligence firms operating with impunity, zero oversight and no loyalty except to the bottom line. Maybe in the movies Bruce Willis can assemble a crew of losers, party freaks, misunderstood geniuses and hard-assed oil patch roughnecks who could be trained by NASA in less than two weeks to go into space and destroy a killer asteroid but this is reality and when something smells like bullshit there is a 99.9 % chance that it IS bullshit.

The entire official story of 9/11 is one big lie but it is now a lie that like the assassination of President Kennedy will live on while any naysayers will be stigmatized and ghettoized in the predictable manner that “conspiracy theorists” are always treated by a corrupt state seeking to keep its skeletons in the closet with the doors nailed shut. What is now occurring is the death of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as the national wound that was ripped open on that Tuesday morning in 2001 begins to scab over there will be no tolerance for those who continue to pick at it. Already in the days after the big announcement there is a real chill in the air and the establishment is in all likelihood implement the Cass Sunstein plan to “cognitively infiltrate” groups that question the official government fairy tale of 9/11. Personalities who had previously done much good work in investigating 9/11, for example alternative media firebrand Alex Jones has essentially discredited himself through his willingness to feast upon the fruit of the poisoned tree that was the finally and hopefully permanently discredited Birther movement (which smelled like an Israeli black propaganda campaign from the get go) and as a result of this been immersed in a vat of horseshit. While playing fast and loose with themes friendly to the Council For National Policy like global warming denial and pandering to bigots for ratings by demonizing Meskins any of Jones’ skepticism at the serendipitous death of bin Laden is easily mocked despite the legitimacy of such questions. There are others as well calling bullshit on the bin Laden murder and they will surely face immense difficulty and much scorn in pursuing this line of skepticism. My personal advice is that it just isn’t worth it, there are too many other areas that are in more need of serious attention than wailing away at the tar baby that is Osama bin Laden. Again, where is the body? Why the changes of story? Why now? I defer to recent work by Paul Craig Roberts The Agendas Behind the bin Laden News Event and Russ Baker More Questions on bin Laden for provocative reading and unlike Alex Jones they have not self-immolated. 

This may sound like a cop out but as far as I am concerned an official admission that the man is dead works fine for me, whether it happened last weekend or nine years ago is at this point moot to me. In the end what is most important is that we are able to exit the bizarre, down the rabbit hole because it just may end up being a grave, parallel universe that we were catapulted into when the planes hit the building on September 11, 2001. That will have to suffice right now for nothing will ever have even the remotest chance of returning to a state of semi-normality or what is going to pass for that unless we are able to get some closure and an escape from the neocon Republican fear mongering that has mired us in unwinnable, bankrupting and immoral wars of occupation based on lies. Barring a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks, which by the way is NEVER going to happen, I personally think that it is best to just accept the official story of Osama bin Laden’s death as it has been put forth by the state and it’s organs. Face it, the story may have that now familiar rottenness about it but it’s just time to move on beyond the horrors of the last decade. 

I recall that one great line from the famous western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance :

“when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”

So it goes….

Flag Suckers Rejoice as Obama Waves bin Laden’s Bloody Scalp

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

Mark Twain

The local marine life has yet to begin to digest the rotting carcass of the now officially deceased arch-enemy of Murka, Osama bin Laden but the bottom-feeders of the American political system and it’s media support system are in full feeding frenzy. USA! USA! USA! is being chanted at sporting events following the rendition of the bloody good nationalist anthem the Star Spangled Banner or the ode to the incestuous breeding of war religion and nationalist frenzy “God Bless America”. The beer-sodden buffoons watching the pro basketball and hockey playoffs in swanky tax payer subsidized venues as well as in thousands of smaller gatherings across the fruited plain are whooping it uo. In the third day of orgasmic national euphoria following the coming out party of one Barack Hussein Obama, a man who was born in the USA and now has bagged the mother of all trophies much to the enduring shame of the swine, vermin and useful idiots that used to be the vastly overrated political force of nature called the Tea Party. You almost have to feel for the poor Republican fascist slobs who bet the entire house on their ability to infiltrate, hijack and then manipulate that now pitiable mass of angry, low-information, pasty, lard-assed and perpetually pissed off white folk into a re-branding of the same old god n’ guns, gay bashing, racist garbage that had been their ultimate trump card for decades. The Republican Tea Party, not that long ago heralded as real change that you can believe in by the propaganda organs of the oligarchy such  as the vaunted Wall Street Journal has suffered monumental and irreversible damage in less than a fortnight. It is almost surreal that just last week the full throated roar of the corporate media propaganda machine and their newest celebrity avenger, the Donald, were closing in on the wounded and feckless Obama, a man  equally detested by the pigs who hide their vitriolic bigotry under the cover of the Republican party banner as well as his own base for his callous and endless series of betrayals. Then lightning struck, the storms rolled in much like ravenous destructive tornadoes through the very heart of peckerwood nation in Alabama and Obama emerged forever changed, toughened by the scrum and brandishing the bloody scalp of the villain of all villains, Osama bin Laden like a powerful talisman. 

I have personally been on record on a fairly consistent basis throughout the years as believing that Osama bin Laden was in fact dead. Somehow it was hard to imagine a prolonged period of longevity for a man accused of heading up the greatest ‘terrorist’ attack in U.S. history who was dragging around a dialysis machine though the most rugged parts of the Afghan mountains. Who knows, maybe he did survive in order to be hunted down and have a couple of caps busted into his skull over the weekend by U.S. Navy Seals who were likely under orders not to take him alive. But if that is the case, then it really brings about far more troubling questions, for example why exactly was he still alive, living in pretty nice digs in a Pakistani military town? That the United States would NOT have known about this sooner and taken him out for his alleged crimes would lead a skeptic to believe that just maybe he was still alive for a reason. Perhaps a reason like just maybe he was still an active intelligence asset, laying low and kept under protection by an ally in Pakistan until he outlived his usefulness or perhaps he was going to go rogue and spill his guts about his days in the semi-employ of the USA. This would explain the killing and subsequent dumping of the body, after all, dead men tell no tales but the absence of a body also begs the question of whether any of it is real at all, I always keep thinking about what a son of a bitch it must have been to lug around that dialysis machine though the Hindu Kush.


But I Digress…..



All that George W. Bush ever had was Saddam’s gun, now Mr. Obama has the mojo and has grabbed a ride upon the back of the raging beast of a new nationalism while the Republicans and their hideously botched and badly whupped angry white male teabaggers slinked away with nary a fig leaf to provide cover for their now embarrassingly inadequate pee pees. They have once and forever been exposed as the bald-faced lie that they always were – Tea Party my ass!. Newt Gingrich? Please, get the fuck out of here. The Donald? Like his pet birthers, his sorry, obnoxious ass is yesterday’s garbage. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? You gotta be fucking kidding, the Thelma and Louise of the neoconservative movement are so yesterday now, shorn of their Obama the Muslim and Sharia law cant, whatever remains of the GOP isn’t about to let those two dizzy, crazed bitches drive it over the cliff. Mike Huckabee? Even Mr. fascism wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross has turned on the free-falling star demagogue Glenn Beck. Mitt Romney? The smartest of the bunch from the get go, he has announced that he is skipping the gathering of loons and closet Nazis that is the Republican party debate later this week. Ron Paul? His anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties stance is anathema to the party of the plutocrats and blood drinkers. With a wave of Ayn Rand worshipping Koch Brothers owned governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Florida taking flak and alienating more non-dead-enders by the minute, their Republican state legislatures eschewing their once promised work on jobs and economic rejuvenation to instead focus on revoking women’s rights, busting unions, cutting budgets for all but their crony projects and destroying education as we know it are about as popular as genital herpes and will likely be either recalled or voted out of office in the next election cycle. 

This is the metaphorical perfect storm for the Republican party, a collection of America hating, fascist fifth columnists that should have been eradicated when George W. Bush’s helicopter lifted off the White House lawn but survived only because they could appeal to the emotions of those whose gullibility knows no bounds and whose stupidity is incomprehensible. They are now facing their Götterdämmerung, it must be pretty bleak down in the bunker as the Russian army is closing in and it’s going to be sweet justice to see them hoisted on their own petard of 9/11 and the War on Terror. With the only card left to play, the coming holy war over the raising of the debt ceiling, the GOP is on the brink of suicide, failing to raise the bar is only going to drive away the moneychangers who will side with the now heroic Obama. The exodus of plutocrats other than the Bircher Koch Brothers whose family fortune came from their daddy building oil refineries for Stalin will leave the party rather than face the prospect of a limit be placed on the national credit card that funds their addictions. In the end, which is coming soon, the fascist Republicans who through decades of sociopathic and cocksure, ruthless Mayberry Machievellian cynicism combined with a regressive ideological perversion courtesy of a symbiosis with the delusional tent preachers who hit it big off their ability to mobilize Rapture freaks, stone crazy dimwits and recalcitrant neo-confederates has ensured that it would carry within it’s pustulent, sweating belly the self-destruct mechanism that will soon be triggered. 


Any sane Republican (and that is pretty much an oxymoron these days) is like Ripley heading for the escape pod on the Nostromo. There has never in the history of this country been an entity that is so desperately in need of a purge, a massive makeover and a mange dip than the GOP. Once a legitimate entity with much to offer it shed itself of those who were rational but were deemed to be heretics by the neocon utopians, loyal Americans like economist and former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, now a prolific writer who has spent the better part of the last decade trying to fight the brownshirts that took over his party, rudely casting out the rational in favor of the greed-crazed monsters and the war freaks. A good deal of what ails America today is due to a failed political system, an opposition party that lives in a reality based world and has more at stake than a lust for power backed by a deranged mob of berserkers seeking to use the power of the state to punish their enemies and erect their perfect society has no future. That is going to become very apparent to all but the dumbest of the dumb, the purebred haters sequestered behind the cornbread curtain who were I a religious man would venture to suggest just reaped the wrath of God when the tornadoes came.

Certainly Looks More Real than the Other Fake Videos and Pictures of “UBL”

Sweet Serendipity: Little more than a week ago Barack Obama was little more than the exemplification of failure at every level, the economy is still horrible, gas prices are spiking, joblessness is rampant, an out of control Federal Reserve continues to shovel more and more counterfeit money into the maw of a crack ho economy. There are also the wars that are multiple, costly and unwinnable, his enemies smelled blood and were closing in for the kill, allegedly a swarm of private investigators were allegedly dispatched to Hawaii to hunt down the real story of Obama’s birth certificate, the tabloid media was drooling over the prospect of a long-running and cruel crucifiction running up to the primaries. Then, in some sort of though the looking glass Horatio Alger story the President sweeps like a whirling dervish from the outhouse to the penthouse and in an act of raw blasphemy in a culture that reveres celebrity and greed as the highest of all human virtues rudely evicts reality television star and real estate swindler Donald Trump from it. 


Obama, now ironically eight years to the day that his predecessor George W. Bush landed on the deck of the USS Lincoln in a Top Gun style flight suit that boasted a codpiece that must have had John Holmes rolling over in his grave, has the nation eating out of his hand. Now a country filled with dangerous freaks whose basic understanding of life can be summed up by their basic ability to comprehend an us versus them, cinematic, fantasy view of the world as it has been fed to them by John Wayne, Dirty Harry, Rambo, Jack Bauer or any other renegade,bad assed, rule-breaking tough guy has at least for the moment united in support of Obama for his successful slaying of the ultimate evildoer. Were he a serious man with serious solutions he would use this rare opportunity to seize the controls of the good ship America and drive it out of the rancid and regressive wormhole that it plummeted into after 9/11 thanks to the political exploitation of the horror of that day. First and foremost, get the fuck out of Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. Now is the time to declare victory in the phony war on terror and come home. Maybe it’s just bullshit and fantasy that Obama can claim to have won the GWOT but it is just a different spin on the Reagan won the Cold War myth, and Christ knows that Obama has been open in his admiration of The Gipper. It will be hard to not do the rational and right thing for the country and just leave that sucking black hole of money, drugs and death, especially if the early reviews from the sycophants in the media carry any currency with our newest Murkan hero, here is a sampling:

From Dana ‘Skull and Bones’ Milbank over at the Washington Post

The White House advance team put the presidential podium at an odd angle in the East Room, so that an oil painting showing George Washington would be in the shot behind President Obama. This made it appear from a certain view that Washington was patting Obama on the back.

It’s not such a stretch to think that the first president would join the backslapping over Sunday’s killing of Osama bin Laden. Heck, even Dick Cheney was congratulating Obama.

From David Frum, former Bush speechwriter responsible for coining the phrase ‘The Axis of Evil”

Now, stop questioning Obama’s legitimacy

So much to say about the long-awaited visiting of justice upon Osama bin Laden.

But there’s one effect on U.S. domestic politics that deserves a thought:

Here’s hoping that we have at last seen the end of this ugly insinuation that there is something less than fully American about the black president with the exotic name.

On Wednesday came the release of the long-form birth certificate that provided the final decisive refutation of the birther lie that the President Obama was born elsewhere than the United States.

On Saturday at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the most visible proponent of that lie, the blowhard TV tycoon Donald Trump, was publicly ridiculed in front of an audience of 3,000 people, without a voice to excuse or defend him.

And then late Sunday, the president told the nation of the execution of his order to shoot and kill bin Laden.

The success of the bin Laden operation is a great moment for the United States — and not only for the United States.

But it is also a deservedly bad moment for some of the destructive forces in American public life, for those who have substituted for ordinary politics a sustained campaign to brand Obama as an outsider, as un-American, as non-American.

From Haaretz:

When Obama yesterday called former President George W. Bush to inform him of the end of the decade of the exhausting hunt, both knew that without Bush’s wars in Asia, Obama would not have been elected president, and that after being elected, he continued on his predecessor’s path in fighting terror and interrogating prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. He used the same secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and the same commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

But since everything is personal and everything is a matter of timing, Commander in Chief Obama will get all the glory and will hope that Petraeus doesn’t give in to Republican wooing to retire from the military and run against Obama. To judge by the outburst of public enthusiasm, bin Laden’s end has put to rest doubts about Obama’s devotion to his homeland and to concerns that he is soft and sympathizes with Islam. More than his birth certificate, his speech in which he waved bin Laden’s scalp has crowned Obama head of the American tribe.

It is hard to now imagine something as borderline retarded as demanding Obama’s college transcripts to show that he unfairly benefited from Affirmative Action being taken with any seriousness outside of FOX or any other gaggle of cyber idiots; and so much for the now neutered storyline about Obama’s father being kicked out of Harvard. In a land where George W. Bush can brag that he was a “C” student at Yale and whose grandfather Prescott Bush‘s Union Banking Corporation was actually shut down by FDR for laundering money for the Nazis under the Trading With the Enemies Act such hypocrisy only serves to further illustrate the infantile willful ignorance of the public at large as well as the enduring success of a bought and paid for corporate media that ensures that huge demographic segments remain electronically lobotomized.

In the land of America in the New American Century there is no shortage of idiots, the system needs them to remain that way in order to exist. Barack Hussein Obama stared into the jaws of the monster and through a combination of luck, cunning, hubris of the opposition or something else has survived. 

Barring the Mayan predictions of the 2012 end of the planet Mr. Obama is assured of another four years in charge of the armed madhouse. 

Book it Don-O!

After Bin Laden: Onward to Weimar or Back to America

Now that the death of Osama bin Laden, allegedly the kingpin of the ‘terrorist’ attacks on September 11, 2001 that threw the United States into a bizarre parallel universe where war became peace and lies became conventional wisdom in a land where a choking, always present fear was the coin of the realm has been announced, it is a strange period, an interregnum. It is like that certain  ‘moment of clarity’ that alcoholics occasionally experience, the one time that they can emerge from their disease, see the wreckage of their lives and be shocked into corrective action. In any sane country this could be a moment to reflect upon what we have become, all as the neocon tools and their propaganda have insisted has been justified on the existence of this evil evil man. We have had our civil liberties shredded, the Constitution has been gutted, the insane doctrine of preventative war has led to a Middle East and parts of Eurasia aflame, the bodies of both the guilty and the innocent can be stacked more than halfway to Jesus. We have seen our airports turned into abominable places where law abiding citizens are treated with suspicion, ruled over by drooling TSA government thugs, forced to remove our shoes, march silently through the naked body scanners promoted by the corrupt former head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, the ‘pat downs’, a grossly Orwellian term that in true American style puts a nice sugar coating on sexual assault have become more aggressive, children are felt up in front of their parents, potentially causing lasting psychological damage and if anyone dares to complain about it, the TSA has now come out and stated that they would be targeted for even more harassment.

Police departments have been militarized under the guise of fighting terrorism, a term that has over the last decade morphed into something as vague as to label legitimate political dissent as terror. The country has established a vast network of secret torture gulags or black sites, extraordinary rendition (or kidnapping) is standard operational procedure. Torture by the way now is the official law of the land, thanks to a sadistic gang of psychopaths in positions of power and assisted greatly by foreign media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose state favored, right-wing propaganda machine FOX polluted millions of minds with their insipid torture promoting series 24 featuring America’s favorite Nazi Jack Bauer. We are all spied on constantly, arms of the national security state such as the NSA are out of control and engage in data-mining and predictive analytic patterning that comes very close to Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and the Department of Pre-Crime, if not official government entities then the spying is farmed out to the private intelligence firms that have raged through the nation like a mutant form of kudzu, all of it is being funded on the backs of the taxpayers who are forced to pay for our own enslavement. Chances are that if you live in a major city you have at least one fusion center where military, big government and local police intersect to spy on you. Habeas corpus is a thing of the past now and any American could find themselves scooped up and disappeared, just like in Stalin’s Russia or in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, totalitarian states that were built on the big lie of protecting the people from terror.

What truly bothered me yesterday was the outpouring of national bloodlust over the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden. There were parties, fans at sporting events chanted USA! USA! USA!, the media was filled with slavering platitudes and other dreck celebrating the death of the evil one, even Sports Illustrated got in on the national orgy of vengeance slaked with ace football writer Peter King (not the I.RA. terrorist supporting, anti-Muslim wanna be McCarthy from Long Island who shamelessly used the news to deliver a kick to the hated Obama and to endorse torture) leading off his weekly column with a bit of red, white and blue rah rah. There were homages paid to national unity anew, just like that warm feeling of a national mob mentality that largely existed after 9/11 itself, never have I seen such an orgy of rapturous glee over an assassination. It could be that this is just a cathartic moment, one where a people beaten into submission by fear and yoked by a fanatical government hellbent on creating a police state finally rid themselves of both their demon and the fear that has enslaved them while they were beggared, ripped off and foreclosed upon to finance the hunt for the national villain .

More likely though it will be something far darker as things in the new American century have a tendency to be. The renewed unity comes at a time of severe economic privation, an increasingly restive populace fed a constant stream of anti-Muslim propaganda to dehumanize ‘the enemy’ and a fascist political party in the Republicans that is looking for that man on the white horse, desperately seeking to return to power in order to force their dystopian vision of a society upon others and now there is a police state infrastructure to back it up. The past week may have beaten back the more vile elements when Obama produced his long form birth certificate and newly minted GOP gladiator Donald Trump was publicly ridiculed but the bin Laden death (sans body as it may be) could rather than provide the aforementioned catharsis could instead go the other way and serve to justify all that has taken place since the day the planes hit the buildings. It is already being spun that the fascist, surveillance, torture state was instrumental in bagging the bad ass bogeymen, as the end justifies the means and the wars could despite the looming bankruptcy of the country be expanded rather than winded down now that bin Laden is officially deceased.

The beast has been loosed and now it has acquired a taste for blood….

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

EE

After Bin Laden: Onward to Weimar or Back to America

Now that the death of Osama bin Laden, allegedly the kingpin of the ‘terrorist’ attacks on September 11, 2001 that threw the United States into a bizarre parallel universe where war became peace and lies became conventional wisdom in a land where a choking, always present fear was the coin of the realm has been announced, it is a strange period, an interregnum. It is like that certain  ‘moment of clarity’ that alcoholics occasionally experience, the one time that they can emerge from their disease, see the wreckage of their lives and be shocked into corrective action. In any sane country this could be a moment to reflect upon what we have become, all as the neocon tools and their propaganda have insisted has been justified on the existence of this evil evil man. We have had our civil liberties shredded, the Constitution has been gutted, the insane doctrine of preventative war has led to a Middle East and parts of Eurasia aflame, the bodies of both the guilty and the innocent can be stacked more than halfway to Jesus. We have seen our airports turned into abominable places where law abiding citizens are treated with suspicion, ruled over by drooling TSA government thugs, forced to remove our shoes, march silently through the naked body scanners promoted by the corrupt former head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, the ‘pat downs’, a grossly Orwellian term that in true American style puts a nice sugar coating on sexual assault have become more aggressive, children are felt up in front of their parents, potentially causing lasting psychological damage and if anyone dares to complain about it, the TSA has now come out and stated that they would be targeted for even more harassment.

Police departments have been militarized under the guise of fighting terrorism, a term that has over the last decade morphed into something as vague as to label legitimate political dissent as terror. The country has established a vast network of secret torture gulags or black sites, extraordinary rendition (or kidnapping) is standard operational procedure. Torture by the way now is the official law of the land, thanks to a sadistic gang of psychopaths in positions of power and assisted greatly by foreign media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose state favored, right-wing propaganda machine FOX polluted millions of minds with their insipid torture promoting series 24 featuring America’s favorite Nazi Jack Bauer. We are all spied on constantly, arms of the national security state such as the NSA are out of control and engage in data-mining and predictive analytic patterning that comes very close to Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and the Department of Pre-Crime, if not official government entities then the spying is farmed out to the private intelligence firms that have raged through the nation like a mutant form of kudzu, all of it is being funded on the backs of the taxpayers who are forced to pay for our own enslavement. Chances are that if you live in a major city you have at least one fusion center where military, big government and local police intersect to spy on you. Habeas corpus is a thing of the past now and any American could find themselves scooped up and disappeared, just like in Stalin’s Russia or in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, totalitarian states that were built on the big lie of protecting the people from terror.

What truly bothered me yesterday was the outpouring of national bloodlust over the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden. There were parties, fans at sporting events chanted USA! USA! USA!, the media was filled with slavering platitudes and other dreck celebrating the death of the evil one, even Sports Illustrated got in on the national orgy of vengeance slaked with ace football writer Peter King (not the I.RA. terrorist supporting, anti-Muslim wanna be McCarthy from Long Island who shamelessly used the news to deliver a kick to the hated Obama and to endorse torture) leading off his weekly column with a bit of red, white and blue rah rah. There were homages paid to national unity anew, just like that warm feeling of a national mob mentality that largely existed after 9/11 itself, never have I seen such an orgy of rapturous glee over an assassination. It could be that this is just a cathartic moment, one where a people beaten into submission by fear and yoked by a fanatical government hellbent on creating a police state finally rid themselves of both their demon and the fear that has enslaved them while they were beggared, ripped off and foreclosed upon to finance the hunt for the national villain .

More likely though it will be something far darker as things in the new American century have a tendency to be. The renewed unity comes at a time of severe economic privation, an increasingly restive populace fed a constant stream of anti-Muslim propaganda to dehumanize ‘the enemy’ and a fascist political party in the Republicans that is looking for that man on the white horse, desperately seeking to return to power in order to force their dystopian vision of a society upon others and now there is a police state infrastructure to back it up. The past week may have beaten back the more vile elements when Obama produced his long form birth certificate and newly minted GOP gladiator Donald Trump was publicly ridiculed but the bin Laden death (sans body as it may be) could rather than provide the aforementioned catharsis could instead go the other way and serve to justify all that has taken place since the day the planes hit the buildings. It is already being spun that the fascist, surveillance, torture state was instrumental in bagging the bad ass bogeymen, as the end justifies the means and the wars could despite the looming bankruptcy of the country be expanded rather than winded down now that bin Laden is officially deceased.

The beast has been loosed and now it has acquired a taste for blood….

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

EE

Bogeyman Down!

I awoke this morning to see the screaming massive headline DEAD in my morning newspaper all above the fold, momentarily thinking that it may have referred to Dick Cheney I immediately removed the protective plastic bag to see that lo and behold – Osama bin Laden, the baddest badass bogeyman of all has finally been killed. Not that I believe this horseshit (the man has in all likelihood been dead for years) and that it would lead the Monday news cycle is a tried and true propaganda technique it should for the first time in years give jobless, foreclosed and beaten to a pulp with fear Americans something to feel good about. Despite my skepticism, this certainly is a political boon for Obama and it’s gong to be fun watching exactly how the Koch Industries funded Tea Party is going to try to spin this to use it against the hated BLACK man in the WHITE House. The day after the evisceration of the turd Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent’s dinner and less than a week after the release of the long form birth certificate the ‘death’ of the monstrous bin Laden has to really drive the neocons batshit.

So, rather than to further comment on the big news story I would think that the more important matters of discussion would be anything that includes dismantling the fascist imperialist state that was constructed with the use of the American Reichstag Fire, 9/11 as justification.

– End the wars

– Bring the troops back home.

– Take the naked body scanners out of airports and destroy them.

– Dismantle the TSA.

– Break the Department of Homeland Security into a million pieces and scatter it to the winds.

– Drastically cut military spending and use the money to put Americans back to work by redirecting it towards desperately needed infrastructure reconstruction.

– Redirect the majority of counter-terrorism resources into a relentless effort to take out the real terrorists, the treasonous looters on Wall Street. No amount of money should be spared in breaking up their criminal finance cartels and jailing the crime bosses.

– I was going to suggest finally closing Gitmo but now I would say to keep it open as a penal colony for the Wall Street banksters.

Anyway, I’ll chime in more on this very interesting development later.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

Ding Dong the Bad Man is Dead

I awoke this morning to see the screaming massive headline DEAD in my morning newspaper all above the fold, momentarily thinking that it may have referred to Dick Cheney I immediately removed the protective plastic bag to see that lo and behold – Osama bin Laden, the baddest badass bogeyman of all has finally been killed. Not that I believe this horseshit (the man has in all likelihood been dead for years) and that it would lead the Monday news cycle is a tried and true propaganda technique it should for the first time in years give jobless, foreclosed and beaten to a pulp with fear Americans something to feel good about. Despite my skepticism, this certainly is a political boon for Obama and it’s gong to be fun watching exactly how the Koch Industries funded Tea Party is going to try to spin this to use it against the hated BLACK man in the WHITE House. The day after the evisceration of the turd Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent’s dinner and less than a week after the release of the long form birth certificate the ‘death’ of the monstrous bin Laden has to really drive the neocons batshit.

So, rather than to further comment on the big news story I would think that the more important matters of discussion would be anything that includes dismantling the fascist imperialist state that was constructed with the use of the American Reichstag Fire, 9/11 as justification.

– End the wars

– Bring the troops back home.

– Take the naked body scanners out of airports and destroy them.

– Dismantle the TSA.

– Break the Department of Homeland Security into a million pieces and scatter it to the winds.

– Drastically cut military spending and use the money to put Americans back to work by redirecting it towards desperately needed infrastructure reconstruction.

– Redirect the majority of counter-terrorism resources into a relentless effort to take out the real terrorists, the treasonous looters on Wall Street. No amount of money should be spared in breaking up their criminal finance cartels and jailing the crime bosses.

– I was going to suggest finally closing Gitmo but now I would say to keep it open as a penal colony for the Wall Street banksters.

Anyway, I’ll chime in more on this very interesting development later.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

Alex Jones: Conspiracy Crank or Captain America?

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance

-Hunter S. Thompson

Let me get this out of the way right out of the gate, I am personally very ambivalent towards the work of talk radio firebrand and documentary filmmaker Alex Jones. I have followed his work on and off for a good number of years now and am still not completely sure of what drives him, who backs him and what his true motivations are. His radio show and films are a mixture of contradictory ideas that while highly informative too often rely on standard Bircher style anti-United Nations conspiracies, illegal alien (translation: Mexican) bashing diatribes, global warming denial and wild-assed tirades against fluoride in water, chem.-trails in the sky and pseudo-religious hogwash not to mention the tolerance of idiotic Birther nonsense. Jones also was one of the earliest promoters of the Obama ‘Joker’ minstrel show poster which he of course denies as being racist despite it’s obvious intention to resonate with a certain black-hating, southern-fried, white-power element. Too bad, because there is much great information mixed in as well, a borderline anarchist view of a society that truly deserves rebelling against and spot on attacks on the loss of civil liberties that were it not for the inclusion of the aforementioned dubious material would surely garner the Austin, TX flamethrower one hell of a lot of crossover appeal. While I am but an armchair quarterback when it comes to these things, I consider much of the work of Alex Jones to be cutting-edge and brilliant but just as much to be counter-productive.  I admit that Jones is first and foremost one hell of a showman, his rants are volcanic and put other hosts to shame. While pigs like Rush Limbaugh and stone-greedy charlatans like Glenn Beck fill their diatribes with standard Republican party establishment tripe, dog whistle terms, cynical glorification of the system that made them into millionaires, dumb it down for the easily duped cretins and wrap it all up in a big star, spangled package of pure unadulterated horseshit, Jones dares to be intellectual in a country that is increasingly hostile to thinkers. Not that I would compare Alex Jones to the less than dynamic duo frontmen for the cult of angry white dittohead dopes, he is far too anti-establishment in his denunciations of the rapidly closing iron fist that is the American police state, neocons, the dumbing-down of society, endless war and other things that are held so dear by the sanctioned propaganda mouthpieces for the establishment.

Alex Jones is now becoming more prominent thanks to not only the hosting of the now infamous interview with America’s public enemy number one Charlie Sheen but also in appearing in the snakepit that is the  popular women’s talk show The View that has an audience of millions. During the appearance, much to the chagrin of has-been Whoopi Goldberg, never-will be Elizabeth Hasselbeck and the queen herself Barbara Walters (who looked like she was about to have an aneurysm) Jones was wonderfully off subject. He defended Sheen but continued to plug his website www.infowars.com and interject relevant comments about the police state, George W. Bush’s by proxy murder of millions in his illegal wars, WTC7 and the TSA goons whose state-sanctioned sexual molestation is a brilliant example of just how far America has fallen. Jones also was featured in a recent Rolling Stone piece by Alexander Zaitchik entitled The Most Paranoid Man in America which despite the typical corporate media smear tactics, straw men and innuendo wasn’t nearly as vicious as the normally expected knee-capping of one who dares to ask the forbidden questions.  Jones himself commented on the article during a fairly recent show and while not praising the piece didn’t condemn it either. Of course the article resorts to the standard mockery and denunciation of crazy “conspiracy crank” ideas but so it goes in a nation of sheep where the truth is a horrifying thing that is deserving of shunning and were we living in either a more primitive or advanced society Jones would have his tongue cut out by the high priests of the temple. 

Jones can preach it though, like an apocalyptic prophet with doomsday rolling in, the day of reckoning for the sins of elite, the moneychangers and the war pimps for which we all will be bathed in the blood tide for, if not for our own moral shortcomings but for our collective failure to stop any of it. Launching into darkly funny rants invoking pop culture, history, political theory, scientific terminology, fire, brimstone and extrapolation his style isn’t for everyone, especially not for the squeamish or politically correct. The problem with Jones is that he does want to tie it all together into one gigantic global conspiracy and that makes him susceptible to being less logical and more biased in building the case to support his own research and conclusions. That is why the globalists, right-wing bogeymen like the deep-pocketed George Soros and the even more reviled Al Gore are such key pieces in the puzzle that Jones is assembling, their purported involvement in the use of the carbon taxes to enslave humanity conveniently ignores real scientific evidence of global warming in favor of a Koch Brothers friendly plan to keep their energy businesses running in full profit mode. Jones, while he doesn’t overtly use the Bircher’s grand global Communist conspiracy terminology directly often parrots the language, features far too many Council For National Policy (CNP) friendly guests and lays off serious criticism of big Texas oil and energy, the latter possibly being the prudent thing to do if based in Austin and within easy reach of the Texas mafia.

Not that there isn’t a massive global conspiracy…it’s just not a monolithic entity and is far more attributed to the ongoing evolution of capitalism into the final, cannibalistic and authoritarian manifestation where a global cabal of ultra-wealthy elitists will back the fascist corporate takeover of the entire planet – that is if they don’t destroy it first. Capitalism, not communism or socialism as the Birchers have long and loudly insisted is the most dangerous system in human history as is evident in 2011 as the world reaps the whirlwind of rigged markets, neo-liberal destruction of entire countries and the resultant unrest, genocidal and unstoppable financial speculation including in commodities such as oil and food that will combine to starve more people than Mao, Stalin and every other dictator in history combined. Goldman Sachs will bring down plagues of misery, famine, pestilence and suffering all in the name of global finance capitalism. In what has to be one of the grossest obscenities in contemporary history (and they are legion) the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Japan, a deadly trifecta of earthquakes, tsunami and now nuclear meltdown are in the American corporate media secondary to how the mass displacement, death and looming radiation poisoning of tens of thousands of innocent people will affect the fucking stock markets. To his credit Jones has been covering the Japan disaster extensively as of late and dare I say comes across as very left-wing in his criticism of the dangers of nuclear power.


Where the Birchers and others on the intellectual (versus the delusional neocon) spectrum of the right get it wrong is that they misinterpret the work of the influential historian Carroll Quigley , especially in the seminal Tragedy and Hope. In the book, his masterpiece Quigley writes of the behind the scenes power elite behind the curtain influence of ’round table’ groups that gather in secret and exert their influence over the publicly visible elements of the state. The Birchers and Cleon Skoussen, who is an idol of Glenn Beck (who pimps Skoussen’s manifesto The Five Thousand Year Leap) get it wrong with Quigley in interpreting the work as referring to global communism and socialism as the New World Order when in fact the groups that Quigley wrote about were primarily agents of global finance capital, the same global bankers that Jones so often condemns. Quigley himself disputed the interpretation of Tragedy and Hope by Skoussen who incidentally was an early member of the Council For National Policy. The problem with these types of analyses is that they too often focus on the influence of the old Eastern establishment, transnational types, particularly the Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission but at the same time pay no mind to the influential role of the powerful interests that rose out of the western states and the sunbelt, primarily big energy and defense, the new money. While I agree with them to some extent about the dangers of the rising police state bent on human enslavement through debt, global government (although corporate is conveniently omitted) and in the case of the Rockefellers and the other big wheels, the creation of a system of control that as Jones and others extrapolate to include embedded microchips (this is coming folks) and a taste for eugenics (Hitler got his ideas from the American elite) and ultimately a massive culling that will lead to the depopulation of the planet. What I take issue with is the idea that the threat from the “globalists” pales in comparison to that posed by their U.S. counterparts, particularly emanating out of the Council For National Policy and the predominant influence of powerful Evangelical Christians who have slowly and largely off the radar hijacked the American political system and to a good extent elements of the military. Not a good thing when a cancerous anti-Muslim/Islam bent is eating the country from within as a cancer, when bankrupting wars of imperial conquest are ongoing in Muslim countries and the crusader mentality is encouraged. The war of civilizations plays directly into the ideology of tens of millions of American Evangelicals hellbent on seeing the apocalypse in their lifetime so that they can be Raptured up to sit at the foot of God’s throne while the rest of us eat each other. This is very scary stuff and whenever any of it seeps out as to the religious motivations behind the wars the messenger must instantly be discredited, note the brutal pillorying of Seymour Hersh over a recent speech when he spoke of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), the Knights of Malta and the deeply entrenched Christian crusader mentality in the military. But Jones doesn’t go there which is one very serious problem that I have with him, he is not covering the BIG picture only selective elements, all of which are compatible with the Council For National Policy agenda.


Zaitchik’s Rolling Stone piece references the influence of the John Birch Society on a young Alex Jones:

Home life was intellectual, but not overtly political. “My parents were careful not to give me political views almost as an experiment to see what I’d turn into,” he says. “The closest thing to a childhood political training was some neighbors who were members of the John Birch Society. They’d come over for dinner and I’d be exposed to those ideas, starting at around age two.”

And

The most enduring influence, though, was a 1971 bestseller he found on his father’s bookshelf: None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Authored by Gary Allen, a spokesman for the John Birch Society, the book provided the cornerstone for New World Order conspiracies. According to None Dare, the federal income tax is nothing but a plot by a cabal of megarich “insiders” who work to suck the middle class dry and transfer its wealth to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. As a teenager, Jones read the book twice. “It’s still the easiest-to-read primer to the New World Order,” he says.

Hey, it’s not that the Birchers are bad people; they are for the most part loudly pro-American patriots, they just have a different view on many things but to ignore the fact that despite their more outrageous histrionics there is much common ground on a good many issues of great importance. I have myself on several occasions worked jointly with the organization on issues of agreement and unlike say MoveOn.org or other political action groups, I always get a return letter from my so-called Congressional representatives when using the JBS activism tools. Like all organizations, they continue to evolve but their focus on communism as the ultimate menace was and is wrong and is reflective of the formation of the JBS during the Cold War era when paranoia first became a virtue in America although of life as it is post 9/11 . For the record though, the JBS in it’s current incarnation is far more outspoken and progressive on civil liberties issues than either the Bush or Obama administrations. It is just that they are misguided and far too overly concerned with the external threats than those that are internal and have overwhelmed the traditional, reality-based conservatism of the past.


As for civil liberties this is where Alex Jones is the most effective, in attacking the vile transformation of what used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave into some bastardized version of Oceania, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany called The Homeland.There is no more of a passionate and ardent defender of American civil liberties on air than Alex Jones, and truthfully that sucks because it is due to problematic and uncompromising stances on such issues as illegal immigration  abortion (Jones is against it), failing to denounce the Tea Party movement after it had obviously been infiltrated and compromised by Neocon Republicans, Koch Brothers style global warming denial and a certain dark xenophobia relating to Mexicans (he accused Grindhouse spin-off flick Machete director Robert Rodriguez of fomenting a race war) he would have such crossover appeal that he would become a very dangerous man to the oligarchy. The one thing that this pathetically impotent, broken down and busted out lemming colony desperately needs (absent a functional political system) is a libertarian – progressive-green alliance that could find enough common ground to pose a serious and highly motivated threat to the current corrupt system. Jones, a libertarian who is a huge supporter of the former insurgent Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, a man whose anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties, anti-torture, anti-Federal Reserve and pro-America views make him anathema to the Neocon controlled GOP has gained much clout with thinking progressives for his principled stance on what ails America. Paul recently joined with the hated bogeyman of establishment Democrats, Ralph Nader in an alliance against the corporate warfare state so there is potential. Were Jones to reign in his tirades in order to appeal to a wider audience and using his skills as a showman and filmmaker he would be formidable indeed.


The Rolling Stone piece is actually about as fair a bit of writing about a guy with the controversial nature of Alex Jones is going to get in a major American publication. Certainly not a cowardly knee-capping, the article portrays Jones’ family life as being very normal, he “dotes” on his wife and children, “cracks jokes with his young staff” and is according to the author “shockingly sincere” in everything that he says. And the article makes it a point to emphasize that Jones has no tolerance for racism (Obama Joker posters and unruly Meskins [sic] aside) and is against the sort of anti-Semitism that is exemplified in many of the more extreme elements of the far-right. With any attacks on the Neocons and their insatiable bloodlust for global hegemony often resulting in knee-jerk and libelous accusations of anti-Semitism from the normal William Kristol, Israel Lobby and Alan Dershowitz influenced winged-monkeys it is important that one be wary of being accused as being nothing more than a ‘Jew hater’. Zaitchik’s piece makes a point of mentioning that Jones’ wife is of Jewish descent and I have on occasion when listening to his show often heard him respond to callers (more than a few so over the top that they are likely some of those paid actors who read scripts on radio shows) denouncing Jews in a harsh manner, this is good currency to have considering the highly coordinated activist presence of movement conservatives. And as for the ultra-slick, multi-millionaire, fish-belly white faux populist spokesman for the corrupted beyond redemption Tea Party that is Glenn Beck, a followup bit on how Beck has stolen from Jones, changed the message to one of partisan politics and deception and helped to build a proto-fascist army of American brownshirts who with the help of the vast right-wing conspiracy network of think tanks, front groups and local bunds of haters that can be bussed in to any hotspots, like they were to Madison, Wisconsin during the rebellion against Governor Scott Walker.


Zaitchik (and likely the editors) does make more than a few of the standard tricks and tactics used to discredit those who dare to ask the forbidden questions as wingnut ‘tin foil hatters’. For instance the sly references to the diseased little monster Jared Loughner, Loughner is said to have been a fan of the 9/11 Truth film Loose Change, as if that sort of guilt by association with a film that dares to examine the American Reichstag Fire hasn’t been now viewed by tens of millions of people who don’t go on kill crazy rampages. Jones is mocked for daring to question the official story and to ponder whether the Arizona shootings were in fact a “government mind control operation”. There is of course no reference to the longtime involvement of the CIA and military in mind control experiments such as MKULTRA, the obsession with trying to create ‘Manchurian Candidate’ style assassins (reference the work of a Colonel Thomas Narut found in the out of print Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart), there is one hell of a lot of money that is spent on mind control and Jones understands that, even if the sheeple don’t. Also the article seems to state that Jones’ belief in FEMA camps, total government tracking and fusion centers is absurd. Of course there is no mention is given to the ACLU’s report on the fusion centers that are hidden in plain sight just about everywhere now, Oliver North’s REX 84, Continuity of Government or the existence of these bizarre sort of detention facilities in America. This stuff is real and people had better get it though whatever may remain of their television lobotomized brains that they are there for a reason, and it’s not going to be a good reason. Of course such facilities must be downplayed, the blockbuster episode of TruTv’s hit show Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura dealing with the fusion centers, detention camps and police state (which Jones contributed to) was yanked off of the air and flushed down the memory hole by the an oligarchy hellbent on concealing the truth for as long as possible while the police state or as Jones refers to it, “the global, Stasi,Borg state” can be fully completed.


Zaitchik also writes:

To Jones, what matters most is the “continuity of agenda at the top. When I called Clinton a Wall Street puppet, they called me a right-wing extremist. When I said the same about George W. Bush, they called me an anti-war communist. Now that I’m against Obama for the same reasons, mainline conservatives embrace me. When I attack the next right-wing ‘savior,’ they’re gonna call me a communist again.”

On the spiritual cancer of modern capitalism, Jones sounds more like Ralph Nader than a Fox Business channel libertarian. “Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives,” Jones says. “The globalists are smart and tell us sin is fun, sin is a red-­devil cheerleader. No — sin is cheating other people, it’s sending troops to die in illegal wars, it’s keeping people dumb so you can control, exploit and kill them.”

While in recent years Alex Jones has disproportionally focused his energy on attacking Obama, who has now proven that he really isn’t the second coming of anything other than the Bushreich, only a smoother, better packaged version of it (as I write this the teflon-coated bullshit salesman is preening and prepping for his very own war on Libya) – he was critical of Bush as well. While some of his newest films The Obama Deception and The Fall of the Republic are denounced by the pathetic excuse for the left as sinister propaganda it would be a nice bit of context were an earlier Jones film also be referenced. In 9/11: The Road to Tyranny there is an extended segment on the Bush Family Nazi history, bizarre ceremonies at Bohemian Grove , an annual gathering for the elite located in the northern California forest and covered the Nuremberg style rally in 2004 New York City that was the Republican Party convention. So Jones does denounce the entire rotten system despite the earlier mentioned policy omissions, he also regularly ridicules the idiotic notion that Osama bin Laden and al-CIAda have become convenient bogeymen to be dragged out to justify every Draconian assault on civil liberties and war crime committed by the empire. It was Alex Jones who correctly called the 9/11 ‘terrorist’ attacks before they took place and on July 25th, 2001 and according to Zaitchik “became the only radio host in America to begin his September 11th broadcast with a tirade against the U.S. government”, now that’s chutzpah! 

The Rolling Stone piece describes an incident from Jones’s youth when he realized that corrupt local police were involved in drug dealing which made a serious impression on him and would influence his life’s work:

It was in high school that Jones discovered a corrupt, Blue Velvet underbelly to his town. At weekend parties, he watched as off-duty cops dealt pot, Ecstasy and cocaine to his friends. “A truck would appear, sometimes with a guy still in uniform inside,” Jones recalls. “Then, on Monday, they’d have D.A.R.E. and drug-test us for football.” Jones, a young var­sity lineman, did not appreciate the irony. “I was like, ‘You want to drug-test me, when I know you’re selling the stuff?’ I called them the mafia to their face. At the time, I didn’t know anything about CIA drug-dealing.”
Things came to a head during Jones’ sophomore year, when he was pulled over while driving without a license, a six-pack of beer under the passenger seat. Jones told the cop he was corrupt and had no right to enforce laws. “They brought me to jail,” Jones says. “Afterward, one of the cops told me to wise up, or they’d frame me and send me away.” The following week, his father was so spooked that he sold his dental practice and moved the family to Austin. A few months later, Rockwall County’s sheriff was indicted on organized-crime charges.

As one who regularly researches “conspiracies” and other manifestations of the deep state it is very easy to become cynical once exposed to the established patterns of gross amorality, cloak and dagger operations and raw corruption as is embodied in the global elite but especially in the ruling oligarchy here in the U.S.A. That being said, once one really gets it about the way that things truly work, has been exposured to the darkest  aspects of all of the dirty little secrets of how elements of the U.S. government operate, the sordid alliances with mobsters, drug dealers, dictators and stone crazy maniacs it takes a certain type to not openly reject it all as lunacy, that is how successful that the indoctrination is. It is just way too much of a mindfuck for the average American to understand such grotesque perversions of the white-picket fence illusions of virtue and decency. America is always the good guy, a God kissed land of greatness, opportunity and righteousness, the global cop and the blessed spreader of that great myth that is democracy for that is the narrative that they have been weaned upon since their earliest days of cognition. When the curtain is pulled back exposing the horrors of imperialist exploitation, big financial cartel monetary chicanery, arms and drugs trafficking to fund off the books black operations, the destabilization of legitimate foreign governments, assassinations, death squads, CIA mind control experiments, false flag terror attacks, propaganda, mind controlled assassins, ginned up wars for profit, institutional corruption and a myriad of other gross transgressions by the powerful against the powerless is truly understood. When one realizes that conspiracies are the normal way of doing business then the indoctrination is broken and the mind freed from it’s red, white and blue chains. Not everyone can do it, it takes courage, an understanding that one will be forever shunned by those stills staring at the shadows on the wall of the cave and the fortitude to not give a damn. That is one hell of a big rock to roll in a society where critical thinking is discourage, conformity is demanded and those who dare to not fall in line will become pariahs. You see, once one gets a true glimpse behind the façade of our Potemkin Village on the primrose path to perdition then it is virtually impossible to look at anything the same way ever again. That is way too much for a people mesmerized by falsehoods spewed from the pocket media on their big screen electronic crackpipes that feed them the steady methadone of celebrity, reality tv, nonsensical millionaire worship, desensitizing faux murders on ultra-violent cop worshipping epics, lurid sex, war glorification, meaningless sports contests, potty humor that infantilizes the mind and other rot that has replaced reality in 2011. Simply put, there are alternate realities in post 9/11 America, only one of which is real and that one is Jones’ “global Stasi Borg state”

In my own opinion, Jones comes across as a true patriot albeit one who should lay off the caffeine and take a more methodical and reasonable approach. Rather than try to tie it up in one big long-term global plot by ruthlessly efficient, eugenics obsessed elite that spans centuries and is in the final stages of their “Endgame” he should focus with laser precision on all that has gone so horribly wrong in America and has flipped the country fascist and about three moves shy of being branded, yoked and sold to the man. I really prefer to look at how author Peter Dale Scott describes it in his foreword the 2008 update of his book The War Conspiracy:

“Thus I looked at these repeated-rule breakings together under the rubric “war conspiracy,” a clumsy term which in retrospect could have been improved on. At the time I made it clear that I was not pointing to some single group of guilty plotters, but to a “syndrome” of sustained collusion and deceit. I likened the process to a “floating crap game”, in which the players (and dealers) change, but not the motive of gain. This analogy in retrospect seems absurdly linear. I had stumbled, almost by accident, on a far more pervasive process of subversion of public order. Today I talk instead of a dominant mindset, one found in various power centers: the military, intelligence agencies, the media, and even universities.

No doubt my analogy of a floating crap game could be characterized as an example of what Richard Hofstadter called “the conspiratorial mentally or ‘paranoid’ style – for which important events in public life are best understood as the product of hidden, malevolent forces in history. But what shall we say of those people, usually in privileged stations of the Establishment, for whom “conspiracy theory”, as Murray Rothbard once observed, is “quite beyond the pale of correct thinking and permissible discourse?” Is their preference for non-conspiratorial explanations not really a psychological tendency? “Lone-nutism,” the Establishment’s answer to “conspiracism” in the case of the Kennedy assassination, can be carried to spectacular lengths, as when Allen Dulles in the Warren Commission applied it to the simultaneous shootings accompanying the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The obvious failing of comprehensive conspiracy theories which invoke a single “invisible government” is their tendency to attribute a wide spectrum of unrelated events to a single controller or group. Just consider the list of controllers that various authors have suggested: the Pinay Circle, the Safari Club, the Round Table, the Bilderberts, the Knights of Malta, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Jesuits, Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission, the American Security Council, the Mafia, to name only some. One ingenious writer has claimed that a Jesuit Freemason member of the Round Table inspired the Bilderberger meetings, where in turn David Rockefeller “broached the idea of a Trilateral Commission.” But even such a synoptic hypothesis will not begin to cover the disparate evidence of plural hidden forces at work.

What all the aforementioned groups have in common is some degree of connection to what I call the global overworld – that fraction of the few hundred superrich (whose combined wealth is estimated by U.N. sources to nearly equal the annual income of the poorer half of the world’s population), and their representatives who also use wealth to exert political influence.

In the end it all comes down to money and power, when in doubt always refer to the Golden Rule which is that those who have the gold make the rules. As the system itself which is unsustainable deteriorates by the minute, the dollar being devalued by a cabal of genocidal fanatics led by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and uncontrollable commodities speculation that is driving a wave of global insurrection it is imperative for those who are able to see it for what it is can come together. It may already be too late to salvage anything, but there is a certain intrinsic value in the dignity of the fight against that which is unjust. Make no mistake, the FEMA camps and police state that Alex Jones rails about are real and they will soon be occupied by those who dare to question the raw fascism of the new American century. No matter how flawed that his message may be at times there is no question that Jones is influential, has a dedicated following and is the antidote to the whores and charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who work for big money in order to distract, divide and hijack the revolution. It is going to take a unified effort to fight that which is coming, thanks to the internet and those who use it to expose the great lies there are millions who already awake and somewhere in the back of the minds of those who are not there is a gnawing feeling that things have gone horribly wrong, the right message with crossover appeal could be the spark that ignites the powder keg that the oligarchy is sitting upon but time is running out. 

Alex Jones is many things to many people, a veritable Rorschach test, but truly what he remains is an enigma.

by Ed Encho 

Why The Tea Party Loves Big Brother

I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.


-Jim Garrison

The falsely advertised anti-big government Republican Tea Party never utters a peep about the growth of the out of control police state that has been erected largely under the radar since 9/11. For a pack of GOP talking point spewing automatons seemingly concerned about massive growth of government, the ongoing pissing away of tax dollars on bloated bureaucracy, job creation and the huge deficits are totally down with the massive expansion of the Homeland Security Industrial Complex. This is just another one of the examples of the mass fakery of the Republican co-opting of the libertarian Tea Party movement. The biggest secret of all that the fascist leadership of the GOP doesn’t want to slip is that the original libertarian Tea Party (along with 9/11 Truth) were out in the streets protesting exactly that which the useful idiots of the Dick Armey of Darkness now fully embrace. As the storyline goes, the faux revolutionaries were incited to action by the staged tantrum of CNBC’s greasy derivatives pimp Rick Santelli, my local Tea Party bund chapter held a huge birthday celebration for the one year anniversary of the activation of the fifth-columnist sleeper cells that was Santelli’s orchestrated call to arms.  When it comes to being mortified at the  the rise of the police state, the unaccountable powers of government run amok and the incursions on civil liberties. The co-opted Tea Party of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and the rest of their ilk won’t utter one peep about America’s Stasi secret police. Instead, they will distract the Becked-up, FOX lobotomized zombies and their 9/12 bunds with more of the same smoke and mirrors about that horrible Negro in the White House, the coming black enslavement of whites, black revenge on the rightful white inhabitants of Der Heimat and the shrine to Islamofascism that is the mosque at the American Mecca that is Ground Zero and the despised secular socialist machine that will be used by the illegal aliens to put them all into prison camps.

Such is the state of our pitiful Idiocracy in the second decade of the new American century. While the country continues to be bankrupted by illegal wars sold by the lies of the charlatans in the ruling class, strip-mined by Wall Street gamblers and corporations that won’t be satisfied until millions more jobs are offshored to third world sewers where children work for pennies a day in sweatshops and the infrastructure is all sold off to foreign investors who will then tax Americans for driving on roads that they have already paid for, the buffoons that are the Republican jihadists joust at windmills while those who manipulate their feeble minds piss their selves from laughter on the way to the bank. The Founding Fathers feared the detrimental effect that a mass of poorly educated, indolent slobs would have on American democracy and are likely spinning in their graves today, especially galling is when said imbeciles adopt their language to in a historical context take to the streets and raise hell to ensure that the British Monarchy remains in power.

The truly big story of the week despite the bought and paid for corporate media’s insistence that the great Mel Gibson-Brittney Spears alliance is of critical importance or of Tiger Wood’s slow and painful climb down from the cross on Golgotha to regain his rightful place as America’s Christ is Dana Priest and William M. Arkin’s Top Secret America series in the Washington Post. This is a story that were the teabaggers to practice what they preach instead of merely regurgitating Frank Luntz/Newt Gingrich slow-cooked gruel that should justifiably have them descending on Washington en masse to protest REAL tyranny. But of course the Tea Party doesn’t have any firm footing in reality outside the mess of illogic, madness and pumpkin seeds that fill up the space inside of Sarah Palin’s noggin. Lenin (Vladimir, not John to your teabagger morons) labeled tools like yourselves as “useful idiots” and it is proven on a daily basis. Whether shrieking like demented banshees about the government keeping their dirty hands off of their Medicare or serving as human carrier pigeons for the racist propaganda of degenerate scum like Andrew Breitbart, a diseased swine embitterd by his years of apprenticeship more than likely spent sucking farts out of Matt Drudge’s seat cushion. You really have to give the scumbaggers one thing though, they are predictable which is what makes them so valuable to the Republican fascists and to a larger degree to the oligarchy that rules this shithole. For a group so supposedly opposed to tyranny, socialism and a Soviet style state led by the black Antichrist they sure as hell don’t seem to be bothered by the most menacing, out of control and costly system of surveillance in human history. Think Again!

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.

-Vladimir Lenin

The new American police state never bothered Republicans under Bush and it doesn’t bother them under Obama, which it should. It’s another tell about just how fraudulent that the entire Republican Tea Party truly is, were they to despise and fear Obama as much as they do why in the fuck would they want the man to be allowed to preside over the most awesome surveillance colossus on the planet? Hell, you would think that they would be marching on Washington with their precious penis extensions (guns) to bring an immediate halt to a system that could be theoretically used by a dictator to haul their mangy, uneducated, unwashed asses to reeduction camps at any minute. But not in reality, the scumbaggers may have their litany of fallacious grievances that are funneled into their lizard brains by the electronic crack pushers like Glenn Beck n FOX but they don’t sweat the big stuff. Every reactionary party needs minions, stooges, thugs, spear carriers and shock troops. Like the Weimar era Germans who flocked to the Nazi Party the dregs of the country that are now the S.A. for the Republican party via the Tea Party are quite simply authority worshippers. There are  books that examine such a fanatical type of mentality, for example, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer , Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, and John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience,  ross-reference those with any decent historical volume of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia and it fits them to a Tea.. There is always a certain percentage of a population that are wired to worship authority, especially the sort of sociopathic type that uses demagoguery, slander, race-baiting and thinly veiled promises of blood revenge against those which the movement has been conditioned to hate and blame for the failures of both the system and their own pathetic, botched lives.

The allure of revenge is deeply embedded in the psyche of the authority worshipper and in actuality Obama is doing them a huge favor by failing to dismantle the police state, As the Washington Post series illustrates, the culture of surveillance is becoming even more deeply ingrained in America, the third installment which is entitled The Secrets Next Door describes the neighborhoods that surround the surveillance centers as affluent and with schools that:

The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.

This is perhaps the most horrifying sentence in the story, the children are being prepped to become the next generation of the American fascist police state, more appropriately the managers and bureaucrats who will run the system. The low-rent, economically ruined types who populate the Republican Tea Party will be the enforcers. The typical American sheep, now completely conditioned to hate, fear and distrust will become the spies, snitches, sneaks and stool pigeons who will direct the watchers and the thugs to those with unseemly and dangerous ideas. The oligarchy will be preserved, Wall Street will reign supreme, the wars will go on and only those who dare to question why will be targeted with precision and ruthless efficiency by the savage armies of droogs that are the Republican Tea Party. The indoctrination of the young into the fascist society of post-9/11 America is now entering its second decade and future generations will have known nothing other than what is now the permanent surveillance state, Orwell was a prophet.

This whole scenario has worked to perfection, once it was done under the cover of religion with the Christian extremists, Raptureheads and theocrats being the primary enforcers for fascist Republican social engineering plans. This worked out perfectly well for awhile until the fall from grace of homophobe Pastor Ted Haggard for smoking rock and chugging cock in a seedy Denver hotel room, the exposure of de-facto leader of the Religious Right, President George W. Bush exposed as the incompetent dunce that he always was courtesy of Hurricane Katrina, the death of Jerry Falwell and the massive Tom DeLay led overreach during the Terri Schiavo circus. The Religious Right had too many built in limitations to become a vehicle for Karl Rove’s permanent majority. The easily duped dittohead dolts in the Tea Party however do not have such limitations, they are able to wrap themselves in the flag with the full blessing of the propagandistic, jingoism spewing corporate media. There have been several recent bumps in the road, such as the recent focus on the intense racism within the movement (a virus that was carried in by Republicans) but the spinners, public relations flacks and Congressional Republicans are already working desperately to circle the wagons. The racism, were it identified and focused upon would be the one thing that could blow the whole game wide open and send the fascist Republicans back to square one in finding a turnkey movement. Not to worry though, when Bibi Netanyahu’s bootlicker Joe Biden comes out and denounces charges that the scumbaggers are a racist movement and the demented harpy Michelle Bachmann sets up an actual Tea Party Caucus within Congress to legitimize protect the American brownshirts it’s official that the political system has been fully infected and minus any sort of a mass counter-movement on the left (fat chance, they are too obsessed with waging the culture war crusade to institutionalize gay marriage than be bothered with preventing fascism) the rabble will continue to be conscripted into service for the new Republican Reich.

As I stated in my recent piece – Tea Party Racist? You Betcha! – the Republicans have long used race-baiting as a path to political power. Historically, nothing works better, the Arizona test programs for the discrimination against illegal immigrants being used in order to justify laws that potentially green light the overly zealous type of personality that is often found in police forces to shakedown naturally born American citizens for the color of their skin are already proving to be a phenomenal success. Soon, if not stricken from the books and stigmatized as the tools for tyranny that they are they will spread, become more inclusive and expand to include more than alleged Mexican illegals. The Constitution was eviscerated during the Bush years and Humpty Dumpty has not been put back together by the increasingly inept Obama administration. Habeas Corpus is gone, Posse Comitatus is gone, NORTHCOM is already operating in the U.S., the airports are filled with naked body scanners manned by drooling TSA goons and as the Top Secret America series shows, the surveillance system is growing exponentially. How long is it going to take for the fascist Republicans, once back in power with all of these tools at their disposal decide to do what past totalitarian regimes always did and start to eliminate the opposition? As with the Third Reich the early targets weren’t so much the Juden (Tea Party translation: blacks, gays, Hispanics, liberals, Muslims) as they were all who were seen as potential threats to the final solution. Now wouldn’t that make Michelle Bachmann’s pussy get wet?

The Epitome of Sheer Irony

The Tea Party sign in Iowa that drew much attention to the sinister nature of the miscreants who comprise the majority of the movement comparing Obama to Lenin and Hitler was ironically somewhat accurate. While it will be lost on the standard mouth-breathing type of imbecile that is attracted to the Republican Tea Party, the historical analogy is pretty accurate in that Hitler had the Gestapo, Lenin gave way to Stalin who had the NKVD and Obama (at least for a brief period before he is ousted from office) has Homeland Security. The failure of Obama in holding the Bushreich criminals accountable instead of granting total impunity to all future torturers, war criminals and moral reprobates will ultimately prove to the the final nail in America’s coffin. The Democrats are about to be wiped off the face of the map thanks to the betrayal of what remained of the party base who isn’t about to turn out in sufficient numbers come November to counter the storming of the polls by the Republican Tea Party out to ‘take their country back’. With an even more repulsive and reactionary Congress than under either Gingrich or DeLay in place there will be a near immediate drive to impeach Obama over some bullshit on the trivial level of Clinton’s blow job, say for failing to produce his birth certificate. That will further embolden the vicious swine on the extreme right for 2012 as well as weaken the spineless and flaccid Obama for the full Republican restoration. Of course the oligarchy is down with it all too, big business backed Hitler and Mussolini’s fascism was openly touted as corporatism. As robber baron Jay Gould once so aptly put it: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”. Let the streets run red with blood and the prisons be filled with the rational people, the real owners of this country will never let such trivialities get in the way of the perpetual profit machine.

The maneuvers by the fascists in this country are about three moves away from checkmate and they are unfortunately only becoming stronger and more deeply embedded. I am going to close with two articles that came out this week, the first from Ted Rall that is entitled Protofascism Comes to America and makes some important points about the fascist Republican Tea Party:

But racism is only one facet of a far more sinister political strain. It’s more accurate to categorize the Tea Party as something the United States has never seen before, certainly not in such large numbers or as widespread.

The Tea Party is a protofascist movement.

Robert O. Paxton defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Typical Tea Party rants fit the classic fascist mold in several respects. America, Tea Partiers complain, is falling behind. Like Hitler, they blame leftists and liberals for a “stab in the back,” treason on the homefront. The trappings of hypernationalism–flags, bunting, etc.–are notably pervasive at Tea Party rallies, even by American standards. We see “collaboration with traditional elites”–Rush Limbaugh, Congressmen, Republican Party bigwigs (including the most recent vice presidential nominee)–to an extent that is unprecedented in recent history.

Tea Partiers haven’t called for extralegal solutions to the problems they cite–but neither did the National Socialists prior to 1933. Then again, they’re not in power yet. Wait.

Exactly. Read any serious history of the Nazis, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War or other notable accounts as Sebastian Hafner’s Defying Hitler or Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free, and you can’t help but be terrified at the similarities to America today.

The second article is from the crusading blogger Glenn Greenwald, one of the first columns that I read each morning for information. This particular piece speaks of the deafening silence in the media, the establishment  and most importantly the government over the Top Secret America Series. While not exactly breaking new ground for most of us who follow the surveillance society one would have at least expected that this series, especially in a time of economic crisis as the massive waste of taxpayer money on a vast privatized spying apparatus could be better spent. The piece is entitled: Why has the Post series created so little reaction?:

Remember how The Washington Post spent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government — composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations — so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it. Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one? After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin — most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this — the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas.

And

It’s not hard to understand why. Why would the political class possibly want to subvert or weaken their ability to exercise vast spying, detention, and military powers in the dark? They don’t. Beyond that, as the Post series highlights, Top Secret America provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government. Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that. It’s probably best not to hold your breath waiting for Dianne Feinstein — the Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives in lavish wealth as a result of her husband’s investments in the National Security State (and whose Senate career has a way of oh-so-coincidentally bolstering their wealth) — to meaningfully address any of the issues raised by the Post series. Despite Feinstein’s rhetoric to the contrary, doing so is decidedly not in her interests for multiple reasons.

And

The secret, omnipotent National Security State highlighted by The Washington Post will endure and expand as is because those who control the Government (or, as Dick Durbin put it, who “own” the Government) benefit endlessly from it. Major scandals or citizen-infuriating crises can sometimes lead to some modest and easily circumvented restraints being placed on this power (as just happened with the recently enacted Financial Regulation bill), largely to placate public rage, but it’s simply impossible to conceive of the political class taking any meaningful steps to rein in a limitlessly powerful and unquantifiably profitable National Security and Surveillance State — at least in the absence of serious citizen revolts against it. That Post series produced so little reaction because what it describes — a Secret Government bestowed with the most extreme powers yet accountable to nobody — is something to which the nation, as part of our State of Endless War, has apparently acquiesced as a permanent and tolerable condition.

The most disturbing thing is that the people in this country do nothing to resist any of this, rather through their willful ignorance, their constant fear and their insistance on existing inside of state media enforced cocoons of denial they enable it. Some, in the case of the reactionary thugs, haters and fanatics in the Republican Tea Party embrace it as a weapon that will one day be theirs to use when it comes time for the cleansing. As Milton Mayer wrote of the rise of the Nazis to power: “Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany – not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted – or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”

Just my two cents

EE