Guns: From Their Cold, Dead Hands

I guess the question is, how paranoid do you want to be? How many guns does it take to make you feel safe?

-Stephen King

 We live in a sick society. We are saturated in violence, at once a byproduct of our bloody, not to be talked about real national history as well as the electronic brain washer that is the television. How many, just think about this for awhile now… how many simulated murders does the average American child witness courtesy of the tee vee by the time he/she reaches adolescence? America has always been an overly violent country, our official history, written by the victors as always and then gussied up and given a red, white and blue coat of shellacking before being spoonfed to the lemmings while God Bless America plays in the background  is rife with murder. We can of course start with the butchering of the original indigenous inhabitants in the name of greed but given the name of Manifest Destiny, a nice little nugget of propaganda before the Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels, Frank Luntz century. So really, when a heinous mass slaughter by a heavily armed lunatic, say in an Aurora Colorado movie theater during the debut of a new Batman movie or at Virginia Tech, Columbine and even despite it’s horrific pre-Christmas timing in Newtown Connecticut one eventually becomes numb and cynical. Really, in a society that reveres gun violence, treats it as a religion actually is it ever a surprise when it does happen?

And while there is always a temporary national ‘discussion’ over gun control (it’s way too late for that now) the inevitable happens. The murder industry dispatches their squadrons of lobbyists to cajole, bribe and intimidate our cowardly feckless political whores and the firearms and ammo manufacturers mount the inevitable public relations assaults on the body strewn beachhead of common sense to ensure that profits will never suffer. And as always the insane right-wingers are whupped into a frenzy by the fear pimps and morally bankrupt payroll propagandists the likes of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and their ilk exhort the paranoids and freaks to go out and buy more guns and ammo as the murder industry locks in their gains after the are convinced that the big gun confiscation is coming.

Then there are the worst of the worst, takethe maniacal, unhinged ghoul that is Wayne LaPierre, Grand Poobah of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Wayne is the top pimp for the gun industry and is doing his damned level best to shrilly muster the support of the paranoid Boobus Americanus who has watched too many Clint Eastwood movies and whose knowledge of history has been strained through John Wayne’s dirty undershorts into stockpiling guns and ammo. You see, the Kenyan in the WHITE House is coming to take the guns away, you see, it was all a U.N. communist plot, time to rouse the rabble, circle the wagons and get ready for the jack-booted big gubmint thugs soon to be landing in the very front yards of god fearin’ good Americans in those sleek, silent big black helicopters. LaPierre, a man devoid either dignity or a soul recently used the national horror of the Sandy Hook massacre, a slaughter under the Christmas lights of innocent six and seven year children by a mentally ill freak with access to his equally deranged armed to the teeth survivalist mother’s gun collection to shill for even more guns. He is a vulture picking the flesh from the bones of murdered children and a vile pederast who molests them while they lie in their sad little graves, lives of promise stolen away by more greed and a predilection for national fascism by a diseased fifth column that has existed for far too long.

Recently there have been some bugs put up the ass of LaPierre and the other fiends. Prolific author Stephen King came out with a wonderful little tract of an e-book simply entitled “Guns”. King makes his case against the multimillion dollars of NRA/murder industry agitprop and predictably caught hell from the dirty cowards and their mindless, over-armed and always hostile as they are stupid minions. King, being a man who has made a pretty damned nice living off of selling violent stories attacks LaPierre’s blaming of the mass shootings on a culture of violence, movies, mayhem and video games. I disagree with King here, the cultural aspects of violence ARE a result of media but a dumbed down, jacked up on Jesus juice, fucked over by parasitical predatory capitalism populace exposed to that garbage should not be allowed to easily and legally stock up on assault weapons. But that is beside the point because King’s money paragraph is right here –

Men (it’s always men) who go postal and take out as many innocents as they can may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. The don’t arrive at the scenes of their proposed slaughters armed with single-shot .22s or old-style six-round revolvers of hte sort Jimmy Cagney was waving around at the end of Public Enemy; they bring heavy artillery to the gig. Some back down, but when they don’t carnage follows, the kind that gives cops and EMTs nightmares for years afterward. One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander’s last meal. 

Wow. Do you think that would get their attention? LaPierre, a craven coward can grab a mop and clean up the mess that the product that he shills for creates when in the wrong hands, and he can bring along that mangy, putrid, draft-dodging, baby daddy has been shock rocker Ted fucking Nugent to clean up his vomit. 

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A New American Idol

Just when it appeared that our national disgrace of a media couldn’t get any worse they continue to surprise. Last night’s reprehensible airing of the crazed ravings of Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui represents a new low in a profession ‘journalism’ that is now beginning to challenge the long held status of politicians and child molesters for the lowest possible form of scum on Earth. Why in the living fuck other than to exploit the human suffering and of course grab ratings would NBC air the goddamned thing while the memorial services were still in progress and the victims not even buried? We all know the answer, the race to the bottom continues and well…if it bleeds, it leads. NBC only briefly got the jump on their precious exclusive but was of course rapidly followed by every other parasitical media organization looking to not fall too far behind in the Nielsen ratings. This is fucking intolerable – is there such a thing as crossing a line in this country anymore? Electronically assisted mental masturbation long ago passed reading as an acceptable pastime so is it any wonder that we suffer the curse of having the dumbest fucking population in the entire world? Sweet Jesus what an embarrassment, but what else can be expected from a nation of swine whose two most recognizable figures are George W. Bush and Michael Jackson. I wonder if FOX already has lined up the rights for Richard McBeef?

The Brain Colonists: The blowback resulting from the failure of the mainstream media to present an accurate and relevant storyline on issues of true importance is only now becoming evident and this latest sordid episode is an exclamation point on just how decadent, ignorant, mean and terminally fucked that the electronic crackpipe has made Americans. The emergence of an unbelievably dumbed-down populace – or at least the majority of it that chooses to live vicariously through a 24/7 orgy of bloodbaths, serial killers, pederasts, sports and celebrity – are primarily the ones who are responsible for the crimes of the despotic Bush regime, the ongoing losses in the relentless class warfare that the wealthy have been waging for the last quarter century since ‘The Gipper’ rolled into Washington with a bag full of tricks and Morning in America snake oil and the ruinous war in Iraq and god forbid, the glorious appearing of the upcoming one in Iran that the neocons and the Rapture ready lumpen Republicans so heartily advocate and live for.

Today more people vote on cheese talent shows like American Idol than in most elections. Ignorance is bliss and there is nothing more blissful than a herd of sheep transfixed by the cheap and easily accessible fantasy world of the electronic crackpipe. I always am fascinated by some of the random samples of comments made in Jerry Manders’ fairly obscure but very thought provoking book Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television:

“I feel hypnotized by television”

“Television sucks my energy”

“I feel like it’s brainwashing me”

“I feel like a vegetable when I’m stuck there at the tube”

“Television is an addiction and I’m an addict”

“My kids look like zombies when they’re watching”

“TV is destroying my mind”

“My kids walk around like they’re in a dream because of it”

“Television is turning my mind to mush”

“TV is colonizing my brain”

Television also creates insecurity and mental illness, viewers of too much television are often unable to make the differentiation between fantasy and reality, look at the rise in school shootings and generally deviant violent behavior. They live vicariously through the imagery designed to sell them caricatures of a lifestyle that they in turn believe that must be lived up to in order to be ‘normal’. The barrage of imagery as well as its calculated usage to influence the psyche by those whose craft is manipulation has a devastating effect on Americans. The inability to detach oneself from television worlds breeds violence, insecurity, greed and other such undesirable behavior. This is especially true for children who are very impressionable, there are highly paid marketing firms who specialize in trying to get the products and or ideas of those who pay them seared into the minds of kids from the earliest age possible in order to create lifetime customers. Is this evil? If not outright evil it is certainly devoid of any sort of decent ethical principle but then again isn’t this exactly the sort of deviant behavior that unchecked capitalism is intended to produce?

Will there be a time when television fantasy, physical reality and dreams become indistinguishable to some? Is that time already here? The psychological dependence on television to create identity and loyalty should be a national shame. Generations that have been born into the cable television era have become more violent, more superficial, more unquestioning and most importantly, far dumber than those who were their predecessors. The rise to power of the evil regime of Adolf Hitler was borne on the wings of massive public rallies, fantastic gatherings steeped in the power of nationalism, symbolism, fire, resentment and demagogic ravings of destiny. The most famous of the state sponsored bacchanalia being the 1934 Nuremberg rally, meticulously choreographed and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl. Triumph of the Will would become the benchmark for all German propaganda. The national madness of the German people can be seen in these rallies and films, the unraveling and descent of a sophisticated society into pure primal evil was enabled and facilitated by their entertainment. With television there is no need for mass rallies, the demagoguery and imagery can be delivered directly into living rooms now.

The Madness of Senator McCain: Mancurian McCain continues his ugly death spiral by bursting into – I shit you not – a tuneless rendition of Bomb Iran sung to the tune of the Beach Boy’s Barbara Ann in front of a hooting audience of South Carolina peckerwood yahoos who hooted their approval. Ironic that in the very state where Karl Rove took his balls seven years ago that the pathetic old man may have finally (and mercifully) ended his political career. Cheer up peckerwoods, there is always Fred Thompson (the gravelly voiced big dude from Curly Sue and The Hunt For Red October) – who knows, the party’s standards are so low that a bad actor has become their iconic father figure so anything is possible with Hanoi John going down in flames, a ghoulish Gotham drag queen, a serial flip flopper from Massachusetts and an oversexed philandering fascist dwarf as potential successors to Le Enfant Terrible who is going to be one tough fucking act to follow.

From My Cold Dead Hands: The last few days worth of harping and political posturing for gun control is as nauseating as the oligarchy mouthpieces trying to tie the VA Tech slaughter to Bush’s bullshit war on terror. Let’s get this straight, in the ‘great society’ built by Republican fascists and eugenics freaks there has never been a more necessary period in American history for the citizenry to be armed to the fucking teeth. This country is so awash in guns and so poisoned by the media’s lucrative culture of violence that anybody who doesn’t own a gun is at serious risk of being swallowed by the food chain that is the end product of Social Darwinism. Let me reiterate my point from a recent posting- there is a renegade private army for hire out there called Blackwater that is totally fucking unaccountable and does not operate under any sort of what would pass for acceptable law – translation: a ruthless and unconstitutional band of Nazis. Just what in the fuck do you think that this mercenary force, a highly trained army of killers with the best weaponry that money can buy and that was founded by extremist right-wing dominionists and rogue former intelligence operatives is going to do when it rolls into YOUR town? Don’t worry about calling a cop because they won’t be there to save you, get the point? Go forth and buy guns and ammo, fuck any past reservations that you may have had, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars – this is not your founding father’s USA. When Blackwater comes a calling it needs to receive a Fallujah style welcome – Gestapo goon squads for hire are just plain un-American and smashing fascism is as patriotic as it gets!

Bring Me The Head of Alberto Gonzalez: And finally, I love the desperate defenses of that sleazy little prick Alberto Gonzales by right-wing mockingbird hacks who play up the racist angle that the damned racist Democrats are trying to take down a successful Hispanic man who is the victim of a lynch mob mentality for doing nothing wrong in his whoring out the functions of the Justice Department to Karl Rove, Corporatists and the knuckle dragging extremist base whose idea of good schoolin’ is a phony degree from Regent University. The reverse flea flicker playing of the race card by same bunch that fans the fires of bigotry by engaging in a crowd pleasing ‘war on wetbacks’ while fielding a presidential candidate named Tom Tancredo is as sincere as the media’s bullshit excuse of the airing of Long Duck Dong turned Terminator footage was newsworthy. I used to think that I was among the most cynical persons wandering the face of planet shit, kind of like Caine in Kung Fu but compared to the soulless, amoral and devious motherfuckers running the system I am obviously a rank amateur.

M.C. Rove & Institutionalized GOP Racism

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.

-Eric Hoffer

In a surreal display at the annual gathering of pigs formally known as the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner GOP Reichmaster Karl Rove put on a show for the ages. Rove turned faux rapper in a performance that was very obviously yet another of the barely concealed Republican attacks on blacks, this time by mocking the hip-hop culture. More disturbing was the reaction of the White House sock puppets and beltway elite media mockingbirds who reveled in the strange fertility dance that signified the bastard consummation of the Republican criminal empire and the guardians of liberty that is supposed to be a free press. The media mongrels were delighted and enjoyed the show nearly as much as they did Le Enfant Terrible’s and ghoulish and tasteless lost WMD routine while our troops were taking casualties in a foreign land three years ago. Note that the same gathering of pompous administration lackeys were hardly amused at Stephen Colbert’s brutal dressing down of the ‘war president’ where titters of nervous laughter was overwhelmed by the sound of forks scraping on fine china and the sound of puckering assholes.

In the aftermath of the porcine Rove’s bizarre rapper routine it’s fitting to take a look at the continuing use of racism as a political tool. It is the most kick ass club in the bag for the Republican party and is invoked often, both overtly and subtly for the sole purpose of fueling the hateful demagoguery that continues to tear down and pollute what passes for discourse in this sick joke that is the new American century.

While it can be said that those who are not Caucasians generally face an overall more inclusive society than in the days preceding the civil rights movement there is still a very dark and ugly undercurrent of racism that thrives in this country today. This undercurrent of animosity runs especially deep with conservatives and it is the preferred currency of trade amongst those seeking to climb the ladder in the Republican party hierarchy.

The GOP has successfully played the race card in order to capitalize on resentment over desegregation since the sixties. That was the decade upon which nearly ALL of the cornerstones of the Republican temple of hatred were laid. Along with civil rights, women’s rights, liberalism, hippies, rock music, sexual freedom and the need to smack down any who would dare to question corrupt and unprincipled authority if not the establishment itself all sprung from the Sixties. But that is a topic for another time – it is the insidious use of racism that we are going to look at here.

The Republicans have institutionalized racism since the days of Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy. It was a plan that sought to divide and conquer by fomenting racial enmity. It was immensely successful in charting the path to GOP power by capitalizing on the festering resentment in the deep south over their being forced to accept their ‘devils’ as equals instead of relegating them to subhuman status. The epitome of the charlatan as politician that was Ronald Reagan tapped into this when in 1980 he shamelessly pandered to the peckerwoods in Philadelphia, MS the site of the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. The film Mississippi Burning was based on that tragic incident where animosity and raw hate combined in brutal murder that opened the eyes of a nation in torment to the cruelty and repression within. The Gipper used this carefully chosen forum to continue the sly peddling of the demagogy of race baiting that would form the cement for the next quarter century of disastrous conservative rule:

“I believe in states’ rights. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment”

Preached doddering Dutch to the delight of hordes of sweaty, knuckle draggers and ignorant peckerwoods assembled at the Neshoba County Fair.

The importance of Reagan’s speech was the inclusion of the code word ‘states rights’ being newspeak that fanned the flames of racism. The late Lee Atwater admitted as much in a 1981 interview with historian Alexander P. Lamis that was published in his book Southern Politics In The 1990’s

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’

Atwater incidentally was the man who as a campaign strategist for Poppy Bush was behind the lowball sleaze of the Willie Horton commercials that helped to bring down Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. One of Atwater’s protégés was an ambitious and amoral man of some renown in recent history, a man named Karl Rove who continued Atwater’s legacy by using an orchestrated clandestine slime campaign based on innuendo that Senator John McCain had fathered a black child to lay waste to his momentum in the 2000 GOP primaries and catapult George W. Bush into a lead that he would never relinquish. Under the destructive influence of Bush’s Brain American politics have disintegrated into an orgy of slander, racism, religious discrimination, swift boating, slander, fear, hatred and animosity of a level that has now begun to feed upon itself, growing exponentially with each diatribe by a hired propagandist.

On this past Martin Luther King Day, the psychotic extremist rabble rouser Michael Weiner, more commonly known as Michael Savage, used his nationally syndicated radio show to launch into a standard racist diatribe:

But basically, if you’re talking about a day like today, Martin Luther King Junior Day, and you’re gonna understand what civil rights has become, the con it’s become in this country. It’s a whole industry; it’s a racket. It’s a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males’ birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn’t qualify for it.

Savage and his fellow fascist talkers routinely offer up chunks of bloody red meat to fill the bellies of the beasts. Their vitriol is like music to the ears of the reactionary right that has made race baiting into an art form. That hatred when combined with their media dominance and finely tuned echo chamber stokes the fires of bitterness at a society run badly off course that has cast aside so many for profit. Recent events and economic trends have made it possible to make racism itself more inclusive so as to make any non-WASP a potential target.
In the aforementioned film, Mississippi Burning Agent Rupert Anderson played by Gene Hackman, a good ole boy who had renounced the racism of his upbringing mused aloud:

Where does it come from, all this hatred? You know, when I was a little boy… there was an old Negro farmer liveddown the road from us, name of Monroe. And he was… Well, I guess he was just a little luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule. That was a big deal around that town. My daddy hated that mule. His friends kidded him that they saw Monroe ploughin’ with his new mule… and Monroe was gonna rent another field now that he had a mule. One morning that mule just showed up dead. They poisoned the water.

After that there was never any mention about that mule around my daddy. One time we were drivin’ past Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He’d just packed up and left, I guess. Gone up North or somethin’. I looked over at my daddy’s face….and I knew he’d done it. And he saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and he said…”If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?”

But after all, this is the big melting pot of America and the racist hatred has immense crossover appeal due to recent events as well as the immense structural damage to the prospects of working American families due to the class warfare that began under the sainted Reagan. The economic resentment over the gutting of the economy by outsourcing, offshoring and importing cheap labor to as the talking point goes ‘do the jobs that Americans won’t do’ has created a cottage industry for trashing Mexicans and illegal immigrants. We have unaccountable yahoo paramilitary forces patrolling our borders, violent anti-immigrant video games, nutball celebrities like Ted Nugent appearing at Republican inaugural events decked out in the Confederate flag and spewing epithets and inflammatory language, and an over the top hard core flaming racist freak like Colorado’s Tom Tancredo who is the latest Republican to throw his hat in the ring for 2008. Maybe he can give George Felix Allen a jingle to see if he is interested in joining the ticket since he’s looking for a new gig now.

The right-wing demagogues have made hay with breeding distrust and fear to the extent that every Arab or Muslim living in this country must fear for their lives. They are on the hit list by both a renegade government as well as the pitchfork bearing mobs who are incited by the rants of pigs like Glenn Beck, Weiner, Malkin and every other hater with a soap box and a sly wink from the right-wingers who own the major media. Look at the idiot Republican Virgil Goode who recently savaged newly elected Democrat Keith Ellison who was a Muslim for asking to be ‘sworn in’ in the traditional photo op on a Koran rather than a bible. Never mind that the Koran in question actually once belonged to Thomas Jefferson .

Democracy and any history other than the revisionist brand matters nothing to these lunatic fifth columnists who despise all that American stands for. There is the slanderous treatment of Barrack Obama and the manipulation of his name to embed the in the public subconscious a link with Osama Bin Laden that even somehow made it onto CNN. With a media like this being an active accomplice to the racist machinations of the ruling Republicans is it any wonder when some red state yahoo idiot threatens to hold pig races next a mosque for the sole purpose of offending the Muslim worshippers?

Racism is a cancer and it ravages societies, destroying them from within. Yet at the same time racism is gospel preached to an endless supply of converts by demagogues with political agendas. The Republican perpetual hate machine is fueled by racism, that and the fear and without them it could not exist. The demagogues preach to the masses from their electronic pulpits. They seek to pander to those seeking an answer for all that has gone wrong in their pathetic and failed lives. Lives in most cases that have been made miserable by the power brokers behind the demagogues who they have come to worship.

The hatred, the fear, the racism it is their benediction. It is in the hate that they seek shelter, the ability to salvage something resembling self worth from the cruel world. Ultimately in choosing to affix their sins to scapegoats they find a sort of salvation, but ironically it comes at the cost of ultimate damnation as they are consumed by their anger and their victims made to suffer for the expedience of those who seek to make them outcasts. If you ain’t no better than a (insert epithet here) then who are you better than?

Lee Atwater died of an inoperable brain tumor in 1991, cut down in his prime. He did however experience something of an epiphany that brought about reflection and change. In an article published shortly before his death in Life Magazine he wrote:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

While I am highly skeptical of deathbed conversions it may be that facing the end of one’s mortal existence does provide an unprecedented opportunity for introspection. A self-analysis stripped bare of the deceits and hypocrisies of a daily existence for even a lifelong parasite like Atwater. Perhaps staring down the barrel at impending death is what it takes for a renunciation of the sins of a life spent sowing the seeds of hatred. Atwater is correct when he refers to it as a tumor of the soul. That it is – and as torn and frayed as this country is now that it has metastasized it may be terminal, especially if M.C. Rove has anything to do with it.

Symbiotic Failed States

Another great hard hitting piece by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, this guy is always on the money and is a truly principled conservative in a party of Bush worshipping, Jesus juicing, dual loyalist yahoos.

Failed States: The US and Israel
By Paul Craig Roberts

Growing references by the US and Israel to the Muslim Middle East as a collection of failed states are part of the propaganda campaign to strip legitimacy from Muslim states and set them up for attack. These accusations spring from the hubris of many Israelis, who see themselves as “God’s Chosen People,” a guarantee of immunity instead of a call to responsibility, and many Americans, who regard their country as “a city upon a hill” that is “the light of the world.”

But do the US and Israel fit the profile of successful states – or are they failed states themselves?

A compelling case can be made that the US and Israel are failed states. Israel allegedly is a democracy, but it is controlled by a minority of Zionist zealots who commit atrocities against Palestinians in order to provoke terrorist acts that are then used to perpetuate the right-wing’s hold on political power. Israel has perfected blowback as a tool of political control. The Israeli state relies entirely on coercion and has no diplomacy. It stands isolated in the world except for the US, which sustains Israel’s existence with money, military weapons, and the US veto in the United Nations.

Israel survives on life support from the US. A state that cannot exist without outside support is a failed state.
What about the United States?

The US is an even greater failure. Its existence is not dependent on life support from outside. The US has failed in another way. Not only has the state failed, but the society as well.

The past six years have seen the rise of dictatorial power in the executive and the collapse of the separation of powers mandated by the US Constitution. The president has declared himself to be “The Decider.” The power to decide includes the meaning and intent of laws passed by Congress and whether the laws apply to the executive. President Bush has openly acknowledged that he disobeyed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and unlawfully spied on Americans without warrants. Bush and his Attorney General could not make it more clear that their position is that Bush is above the law.

It is also Bush’s position that he is above the Constitution. Bush and his Attorney General maintain that as commander-in-chief in “the war on terror,” the executive has the power to decide the applicability of civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. The US Department of Justice (sic) has taken the position that this decision is an executive decision alone beyond the authority of the judiciary and the legislature.

An enfeebled and eviscerated Congress has acquiesced in the growth of executive power, even legislating unconstitutional executive powers into law. The Decider has grabbed the power to arrest people on accusation alone and to detain them indefinitely without charges or evidence. He has obtained the right to torture those whom he arrests. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to the US president, declares the Regime. Bush has obtained the right to commit people to death in military tribunals on the basis of hearsay and secret evidence alone.

The Bush Regime has succeeded in moving the American state off the basis on which the Founding Fathers set it.

The Bush Regime led the American people to war in Iraq based entirely on lies and deception. This is a known and undisputed fact. Congress has done nothing whatsoever about this monstrous crime and impeachable offense.

Under the Nuremberg standard, unprovoked aggression is a war crime. The US established this standard. Bush has violated it with impunity.

Bush and his Attorney General assert Bush’s power to attack Iran independently of a Congressional declaration of war or any form of congressional approval. Bush claims that his power to attack Iran is merely an extension of his present power to conduct war in Iraq, a power seized on the basis of lies and deception.

Congress has taken no action to disabuse Bush of his presumption.

Bush’s preparations for attacking Iran are highly visible. The entire world can see the preparations and expects the attack. Congress is mute in the face of a catastrophic widening of a war to which a large majority of the American people are now opposed.

In national elections three months ago, the American people used democracy in an unsuccessful attempt to restrain the Bush Regime from its warmongering ways by defeating the Republican Party and giving control of both houses of Congress to Democrats.

Instead of acting, the Democrats have postured.

Indeed, some have joined Bush in his warmongering. Hillary Clinton, regarded as the frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, recently declared at an affair hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading instigator of war with Iran, that Iran is a danger to the US and a great threat to Israel.

Hillary’s claims are preposterous. Israel has large numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Iran has none. Iran has no ability to harm the US and would have no motive except for the Bush Regime’s gratuitous provocations.

A state in which a leading contender for the presidential nomination can make utterly absurd claims and suffer no consequence is a failed state.

The United States is a failed state, because in the US it is not possible for leadership to emerge. Politics is controlled by powerful interest groups, such as AIPAC, the military-industrial complex, transnational corporations, and “security” agencies that are accumulating vast amounts of unaccountable power. The American people spoke in November and it means nothing whatsoever.

The people are enfeebled because the media no longer has independence. The US media serves as propagandist for the state. It cannot be otherwise in a highly concentrated media run not by journalists but by advertising executives protecting stock values that derive from federal broadcast licenses granted by the state.

Like the three monkeys, Congress sees no evil, the media speaks no evil, and the people hear no evil. In the US “news” consists of the government’s propaganda. “News” in America is exactly like the “news” in George Orwell’s 1984.

The US is a failed state, because it is not true to any of the principles upon which it was established. All over the world today, America is seen as a rogue state, a hegemonic evil, and as the greatest threat to peace and stability. In its new identify, America is the total opposite of the Founding Fathers intention. There is no greater failure than that.

Academics differentiate between failed states and rogue states. The US and Israel meet both criteria. The US and Israel lead the world in aggressive military actions and in killings of civilian populations. Both countries meet the main indicators of failed states as published in Foreign Policy’s 2005 Failed States Index.

The leading indicators of failed states are inequality (not merely poverty), “criminalization or delegitimization of the state, which occurs when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or ineffective,” and “demographic factors, especially population pressures stemming from refugees” and “internally displaced populations.”

All economic indicators show that income and wealth inequality is rapidly increasing in the US. The growth in inequality is the result of the state’s policy that favors shareholders and corporate executives at the expense of American workers.

The income differences between Israelis and ghettoized Palestinians are huge.

Trials and investigations of leading political figures in the US and Israel are an ongoing occurrence. Currently, the former chief-of-staff of the vice president of the US is on trial for lying to the FBI in an attempt to obstruct an investigation into the Bush Regime’s illegal disclosure of an undercover CIA operative. The accused claims he is the fall guy for higher ups.

In Israel the president of the country is accused of rape and faces indictment.

Both the US and Israel routinely ignore international law and are accused of committing war crimes by human rights organizations. The US Congress stands revealed as totally ineffective and unwilling to constrain the executive. The American people have learned that they cannot change the government’s policies through elections. By fomenting the demise of the civil liberties that they are sworn to uphold, President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales have delegitimized the American state, turning it into an instrument of oppression.

Israel’s policies in the West Bank have displaced a million Palestinians, forcing them to be refugees from their own land. Jordan is filled with Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian existence in the West Bank is being increasingly confined to ghettos cut off from farm land, schools, medical care and from other Palestinians. President Jimmy Carter has described Israeli-occupied Palestine as “apartheid.”

For decades in the face of public opposition the US government has encouraged massive legal and illegal immigration of diverse peoples whose failure to assimilate is balkanizing the US population. Economic refugees from Mexico are changing the culture and allegiance of entire sections of the American southwest, and racial animosities are on the rise.

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky defined one characteristic of a failed state as a “democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion.” We see this gap in Bush’s decision to escalate the war in Iraq despite the opposition of 70% of the American public. What does democracy mean if elected leaders ignore public opinion?

Another characteristic of failed states is the failure to protect their own citizens. Israel’s aggressive policies against Palestinians provoke terror attacks on Israeli citizens. These attacks are then used to justify more oppression of Palestinians, which leads to more terror. Bush’s military aggression in the Middle East is the main cause of any terror threats that Americans now face.

Another characteristic of a failed state is the departure of citizens. Many Israelis, seeing no future for Israel in the government’s hostility to Arabs, are leaving Israel. Among Israelis themselves, the legitimacy of the Israeli state is so endangered that the Knesset has just passed a law to revoke the citizenship of “unpatriotic” Israelis.

In the US a large percentage of the population has lost confidence in the government’s veracity. Polls show that 40% of Americans do not believe the government’s story that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Arab terrorists. Many believe the attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by elements in the Bush Regime in order to create public acceptance for its planned invasions in the Middle East.

A state that cannot tolerate moral conscience in its soldiers is a failed state. The failure of the American state can be seen it its prosecution of Lt. Ehren Watada. Watada comes from a family with a military heritage. His response to the 9/11 attack was to join the military. Diagnosed with asthma, he failed his physical, but persevered and ended up with an officer’s commission.

Watada’s problem is that he can recognize a war crime even when it is committed by a might-makes-right state. The Abu Ghraib prison tortures and the evidence that Bush deceived Americans about weapons of mass destruction caused Watada to realize that he was on the wrong side of the Nuremberg Principles, the UN Charter, and the US military code, which says American soldiers have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders. He signed up to serve his country, not to kill people for illegal and immoral reasons.

Watada refused to deploy to Iraq. He is being tried for refusing deployment and for suggesting that President Bush deceived Americans.
By now every attentive American knows that Bush deceived them, and our greatest patriots have said so. Watada is on trial for suggesting what everyone knows to be true. He is not being tried for veracity. He is being tried for speaking the truth.

Failure to deploy is a more understandable charge. There is no army if soldiers do not follow orders. However, as the US established at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, following orders is not an excuse for participating in war crimes. At the Nazi war crimes trials, it was the US that insisted that soldiers were responsible for using judgment about the legality of their orders.

That is what Lt. Watada did. His trial will not broach the subject of whether his judgment was correct. The evidence against him will merely be that he did not deploy.

By trying Lt. Watada the US government is insisting that American troops are not responsible for judging the legality of their orders, only for following them. The standard applied to WW II Germans is too high to be applied to Americans.

In a draft army, Watada’s refusal to accept illegal orders could be used by conscripted cannon fodder to derail the state’s intended aggression. However, in a voluntary army in which soldiers seek to serve, permitting Lt. Watada to have his conscience does not imperil the command structure. Others less thoughtful and less aware will carry forth the state’s enterprise.

The case against Israel and the US does not preclude some Muslim states from also meeting the criteria for failure. However, Iraq, an artificial creation of Western colonial powers, was driven into failure and civil war by American aggression. Iran, a nation with a 5,000 year history, is certainly not a failed state. The main failed states in the Middle East are those that are US puppets. They represent American hegemony, not the interests of their people.

What the US and Israel are attempting to do is to turn the entire Muslim Middle East into failed states, that is, into puppet regimes. By extending their hegemony in the Middle East, the US and Israel hope to prolong their own failed existence.

The Abyss Looks Back

“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Blindness is a modern American tradition. I was once blind myself until the day that the scales fell from my eyes and I was finally able to see the entire system for what it truly is – a passel of interrelated myths, fallacies and outright lies. The system you see is designed to suppress any individual thought; keep you bewildered and buying commodities, consumer goods and a accpting a colossal line of bullshit as truth. You are to believe in the trappings of a parallel reality while shuffling brainwashed through an all consuming matrix of extremely well orchestrated and financed make-believe. A world where America is exceptional and just, where a radical reinterpreted Jesus is lord and capitalism is king; where vices are virtues and virtues likewise are vices. This is a ‘reality’ in which up is down, black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery and most importantly father always knows best. From cradle to grave there is an onslaught of sly, subliminal persuasive techniques that are constantly driven into our brains so subtly and so overwhelmingly that we don’t even notice them.

The simple fact is that the majority of the boiling frogs that are Americans are unable to comprehend even the most rudimentary concepts that they are living a meticulously fabricated lie that serves as a control mechanism with which to stigmatize or otherwise ostracize any who would dare to rise above the herd in order to speak out against the television culture that is the post-Reagan American fantasyland where it is always back to the future in search of a return to the ‘good old days’. Our society is a perfect example of the slaves in the great allegory of Plato’s cave, today’s Americans have undergone such a successful collective electronic lobotomy that they are completely unable to understand that their entire lives are nothing more than carefully formulated and constructed illusions, exactly like the shadow creatures that were projected on the walls of the cave to those who were physically restrained and unable to turn to see that what they believed was reality was merely the projection of shadow figures on the rock wall in front of them. Unlike those in the cave there are no physical restraints, save obesity and a constant exhaustion from overwork to restrain the slaves…it is all mental, the result of an illusory version of reality that has been fed to us since the earliest stages of our cognitive consciousnesses. As Earling Carothers ‘Jim’ Garrison once prophetically stated:

“In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.”

We are in that concentration camp of the mind now, we have been for quite some time and God help us all for what we have become in the aftermath of that terrible Tuesday in September 2001 when the gates of hell swung open and beckoned us to step inside. We were driven insane by our thirst for vengeance, deceived by our leaders into untertaking wars of conquest wrapped in the bloody cloak of righteous revenge and the always underlying but unspoken crusade for the cross, divided into factions and pitted against our very own families, friends and neighbors all under the watchful eye of a surveillance state controlled by monstrously insane war-hungry immoral men with a terrifying vision for the future.

Our contemptible media is at the root of all evil. It is obsessed with market share, controlled by corporatists and manipulated by the state to do it’s bidding. Herr Goebbels would be proud of the power of the all encompassing world of celebrity, sleaze and disinformation that underwrites our empire. Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of the real world and perfectly content to stay that way like cows grazing in a pasture unaware that they one day are destined for the slaughterhouse. Many have a tendency to overly spoil and deify their children often trying to live vicariously through their young ones who represent a chance at salvaging something from their own failed lives. Do you really think that even the most ignorant and insulated of all parents would still support illegal wars of imperialism with their accompanying ruthless psychopathic counter insurgency tactics if they were able to see the truth? How long do you think that it would take to pull out of Iraq if Americans were allowed to see the beloved babies of their dark complected third world counterparts brutalized, maimed and murdered, their mothers gang raped in front of their families? Real life shit like that may be too much to handle for happy consumer occupants of fantasyland but it is a daily occurrence as well as standard operating procedure for the good squads that walk point for the army of God’s capitalist crusaders.

The horror, the horror

Those who have flirted with the creatures that dwell in the darkness of the abyss and found them to be seductive can understand the dangers of such an embrace. When vengeance becomes as wonderfully exhilarating as a lover’s passionate kiss, when the corrosiveness of pure ideological hatred and the accompanying wrath become an obsession, all consuming, energizing then is when one is in most danger of losing one’s soul, or of finding it.

Unless you have been there you can’t understand.

Some pull back when there is what an alcoholic would call a moment of clarity and a glimpse at the destructive nature of frolicking with those demons is suddenly seen…it is shocking. Perhaps the worse thing to occur when flirting with the darkness of the abyss is that it is all too easy to drag others down into it as well, others who are not equipped to handle it. Some are driven insane, some go into deep denial and simply hit the disconnect switch while going about their daily lives as though the netherworld does not exist. The rulers of this country know all too well the sweet allure of the siren songs of the devils that dwell in the abyss, they embrace them, they love them and while engaging in orgies of great debauchery with them they drag the rest down into its ever blackening maw along with them.

In Steven Spielberg’s Munich the consequences of violence for the sake of revenge as well as the human costs are examined in a movie far more reminiscent to the serious and provocative films of the 1970’s when Americans were questioning institutions that had so badly gone awry leading to the devastating and bloody defeat of Vietnam and the scandal plagued administration of Richard M. Nixon and his thugs. I have always personally felt that the movies of that decade were far more real than what the social engineers pulling the levers of society have sold us as their version of reality today. We once openly questioned authority in this country and were sickened at what we were misled into accepting as true and just by the criminals who were our leaders. Munich is as unrelenting as it is courageous and the numerous denunciations by the extreme right and their Israeli lobbyist counterparts that the movie received through either disputes of the accuracy of the material or the demagoguery that it somehow offered sympathy to terrorists are a testament to it’s message. Munich is brutal in it’s graphic portrayal of violence but it is also brutally honest in presenting the idea that violence only feeds upon itself and builds to levels that will ultimately destroy the souls of men and nations, as Nietzsche famously said “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” The quest for revenge in the aftermath of the botched rescue of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team who were the doomed victims of a spectacular hostage crisis that played out on the world screen and that lead to a massacre by the Black September terrorist group as well as the mission of the government sponsored covert assassination squad to exact revenge that is portrayed in the movie shows the escalating toll on their humanity as well as ability of the opposition to also escalate their tactics in a bloody tit for tat tango that never ends until one side or the other is ultimately annihilated once and for all.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks we are trapped in this same cycle of violence and are too easily becoming monsters as a result. The simplistic wasteland that is the American mind is unable to conceptualize or otherwise draw any sort of correlation to the simple fact that violence always begets more violence which is then used as justification for even more violence and further bloodshed by both ‘terrorist’ groups as well as governments. It’s a fucking brutal dance and it only perpetuates itself with each further escalation. Older societies know this, they have seen it throughout their histories, America being a relatively new nation and still naive in the belief that we are somehow different do not understand this most basic aspect of human nature. Every action has the potential for a reaction, often one of unintended consequences or what is defined as blowback by the CIA. 9/11 was (if you buy the official story) an attack by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists on God’s chosen land ostensibly because they hate us for our freedoms, at least so goes the party line peddled by the propaganda pimps. What is never addressed by our craven and corrupt media is that the true reason why we are so reviled in much of the world is the result of our immoral foreign policy which is one of empire, exploitation and the choosing of sides in the ongoing Middle East conflict but even if we had an honest media it is doubtful that our pathetic and ignorant populace would be able to comprehend what it was told, the damage is just too great now, it will take several generations to correct and to even begin to do so will be to halt the momentum of our national descent into the flames of Perdition and our imminent rendezvous with historical infamy.

Reaping the whirlwind of an immoral lie of a war

As with the watershed event of the Vietnam war that was the exposure of the atrocities committed by our own soldiers in the earthly hell of a charnel house that was ‘Pinkville’ or as it is more infamously known My Lai, the massacre in Haditha may finally drive home the caustic effects on a nation’s soul caused by an illegal war sold to both the soldiers and to the public on another pack of government lies. In March of 1968 an American company of soldiers crazed and drunk on vengeance ran amok and slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai. Women were raped, children including babies brutalized….they dragged it out, turned it into sport. The villagers who were not killed during the ‘festivities’ were eventually herded into a trench and murdered en masse by an deadly barrage of automatic rifle fire the ditch was filled with bodies and blood and the men who perpetrated the slaughter had become renegades. Once the story eventually leaked out, the public either went into denial that this sort of rampage could never be commited by our own always just military, rationalized that the communists did worse things or were outraged, ashamed and betrayed. Back then the media brought the horrors home into America’s living rooms and stories appeared in the newspapers when more than a wretched eleven percent of the populace bothered to read them but that was before the first amendment became a pejorative to large segments of the population and writers were real journalists and not public relations flacks or overly ambitious hacks determined not to let trivial matters like integrity or ethics block their career paths.

The government then as now with the Haditha massacre attempted to cover it all up and against the odds despite our woeful, dumbed down, homogenized corporate media the true story of Iraq attrocities are slowly seeping out and growing legs on the internet the last bastion for free speech in this sad country and one that has been targeted for extinction in its current form by the ruling party. It may be far too much to hope for but perhaps this time the carnage and horror of killing innocents may finally awaken a credulous, timorous self-centered American public out of their long, fear wracked post 9/11 fever dream which has been seized upon and cynically manipulated by a ruthlessly corrupt illegitimate junta with a festering contempt for liberty, truth and American values. The terror factor has been exploited at every opportunity, the propaganda incessant, the lies and deceit in using the weapons of mass destruction myth and the apocalyptic conjecture of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds within our cities became a constant drumbeat. In the run up to shock and awe debate was stifled, the legislature, itself irredeemably corrupt was cowed by their fear of being tarred as unpatriotic, upset with the lack of France’s backing for war they decreed that the capitol cafeteria would serve only freedom toast and freedom fries, god damn any country who would dare question American intent or stand of the way of our vengeance. The media became cheerleaders, the few honest news reporters who attempted to be true to their trade and to report to the public the news were smeared and subsequently banished from the airwaves. Big names the likes of Peter Arnett, Ashleigh Banfield and Phil Donahue had their careers damaged, their loyalty called into question while government PR shops pumped out feel good, nationalism wrapped in the flag, they peddled tales of wonder like the miraculous saving of Pvt. Jessica Lynch the all American femme fatale fighting machine; the staged toppling of Saddam’s statue in a mostly empty square and the ultimate sacrifice by former Arizona Cardinal safety Pat Tillman who gave up the holy grail of celebrity that is the dream life of an NFL star to serve his country in a time of crisis. All were eventually debunked as the garbage that they were and Tillman whose honest intent and dignity were exploited for propaganda purposes before he was killed by the guys on his own side in what as perfect a metaphor for this bloody clusterfuck war as it is an American tragedy. All were used as a cover for the intentions of an evil and treasonous government that is as hellbent on the spread of uber-capitalist imperialism abroad that it is on the robbery and incremental increases of its power at the expense of the very freedoms and civil liberties for the poor, dumb serfs here in the homeland.

The incredulity over Haditha that is expressed is as outrageous as it is unbelievable and in most cases ultimately insincere. The one that I most commonly hear is “but American’s don’t do things like that” followed by the stock lie of blaming the liberal media for blowing the whole thing out of proportion and as the insidiously stupid armchair patriots have a tendency to say “things happen in war” not that they would ever be bothered to get off of their asses and join the military to see for themselves . The truth is that it is all crap, Americans are as capable of atrocities as any other civilization in the history of man and the denial of this is the ultimate in arrogance. The myth of our exceptionalism must be taken down if we are ever to return to semblance of sanity in this morally deteriorating empire. Once Haditha became national news the typical coordinated damage control offensive was rolled out as it always is to provide cover for this criminal administration. Donald Rumsfeld’s personal military flack Gen. Peter Pace hit the Sunday morning electronic PR circuit to bandy about the latest talking point that the Haditha murderers acted in a rogue manner that is inconsistent with that of “99-point-nine percent of their fellow Marines.”

Bullshit I say!

The Haditha slaughter is only the very tip of a huge iceberg of immoral and illegal conduct by American personnel and thousands of mercenaries in the conduct of a vicious campaign of counter insurgency and ethnic cleansing and more will begin to escape the central control of the government information chop shops to seep out into the public domain. The true story of the razing of Fallujah has yet to be told along with the military’s use of incendiaries on civilians, it briefly leaked out but the information warfare pros quickly coaxed the genie back into the bottle but the devastation and human toll is too great to stay hidden forever. Just this past Wednesday a pregnant woman was killed by U.S. troops for failing to stop at a roadblock while rushing to the hospital. Such collateral damage is a given in a chaotic urban environment where there is no way to definitively identify ‘the enemy’ who could truly be anybody but didn’t the strategists learn this lesson by studying the guerilla morass of Vietnam? The ones who did were quickly given their walking papers in the run up to the bombing and invasion of Baghdad. Rummy, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith and the rest of the finely dressed war criminals who would prefer to fight their wars in the relative comfort of air-conditioned situation rooms filled with television screens and computer monitors instead of sweltering filthy streets stinking of rotting bodies, feces and garbage didn’t want to hear it.

Who is to blame?

The political forces whose misjudgment of the reaction of the locals in the aftermath of the original invasion…hey you pompous fucking assholes, they didn’t come waving flowers after all did they? Once the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq became became a detriment to maintaining sufficient political support for their Social Darwinist homeland policies to be implemented and allow for the fulfillment of the pathological determination to destroy all elements of the New Deal and Great Society it became apparent that the insurgency had to be crushed at all costs for the glory of the emperor. There was also a hurry to begin to expand the war throughout the Middle East working in a silent partnership with Israeli hardliners and it became necessary to ratchet up the intensity of excessively violent Phoenix Program style counter insurgency tactics including the covert sponsorship of death squads. Command should
certainly certainly bear the brunt of the blame but they are far from alone, immoral wars breed depravity and atrocity which are attracted like maggots to the corpses of the disappeared who are tortured and murdered and then left to lie decomposing in shallow graves.

The American people themselves should bear at least as much guilt as the marines whose fingers pulled the triggers for after all it was they who were led to believe that an illegal and immoral war like this could be fought on the cheap without the need for compromise or sacrifice on their part. Whipped into a xenophobic rage by the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon and continually by fed the mainline high of nationalism exhorted by the Republican party operatives and the neocons who wanted this war each for their own reasons we allowed ourselves to become disinterested and were fed distorted information in the form of carefully constructed public relations pieces in place of honest war reporting. We kept shuffling like George Romero’s zombies through our shopping malls and mega marts, exhorted the warlike Jesus of the Left Behind series en masse in our taxpayer subsidized mega-churches, gassed up our SUV’s and slapped yellow ribbon magnets on their asses and went about our daily lives oblivious to the long term consequences of our government’s actions that are being undertaken in our name.

After Abu Ghraib and the perversion of the sado-sexual horrors that occurred there made the world realize that not only were Americans misguided but something far worse, something more akin to evil, the malevolent decomposition of our damnable souls was momentarily glimpsed and then quickly hidden away by spin doctors who descended on Baghdad to hermetically seal the area to contain the bad news…and the truth. When Lyndie Englund, that ignorant little peckerwood slut dragged a naked Arab man around on a leash it was all of us Americans who where holding the end in the eyes of the world. There was much horror and outrage expressed over Abu Ghraib but it was quickly forgotten domestically, we had better things to do. There was American Idol, there was shopping, there were summer blockbuster movies and sports, there was fear of the terrorists, there was the Rapture to prepare for, Big Macs to be devoured, you know, the really important stuff.

The general American lack of truly serious outrage over Haditha is a result of our ‘freedoms’, we are free to remain ignorant, free to practice bigotry, free to gorge ourselves while the poor starve, free to be as mean as are capable of being, free to shop, free to remain detached, free to create our own little t.v. based realities, free to remain in denial, free to hate, free to worship the favored God of the state, free to empower George W. Bush and his extremists to act as our agents. Well here is something for the ‘free’ to contemplate for a bit of much needed perspective:

Just imagine yourself at home with your family. Say one day the front door is kicked open, your elderly father or grandfather who is confined to a wheelchair is the first to confront the heavily armed intruders, he is torn to shreds by a hail of automatic gunfire. Yourself and the rest of your family is terrified, shocked, confused, women are screaming, children crying, infants wailing, shouted orders and profanity in a foreign language fill the air. Furniture is thrown, heirlooms broken, your spouse, children, siblings, parents along with yourself are herded into a central room, violently handcuffed and forced to kneel. The pets are killed first…the tableu is dragged out for the sake of inflicting the most cruelty, maybe there are rapes first but certainly there are beatings, then the executions begin….you are forced to watch your family slaughtered like animals in front of you, it is agony watching them suffer, you want to die to be spared the horror but they are saving you for last.

Get the picture?

If we are hated as we are so often told by our government by the ‘terrorists’ for our ‘freedom’ and our selfish way of life with so many choosing to pursue their own ‘freedom’ to remain free of outrage or responsibility is it any wonder why this is so? We are free to our ignorance and callousness but we are no longer innocent once a certain line has been crossed. When we choose to remain ‘free’ of outrage when our soldiers begin murdering civilians the Rubicon has been crossed, morally it is the equivalent of the same type of butchery that occurred in My Lai, El Mozote, Srebrenica or the Warsaw Ghetto. And if we fail to act and hold criminals to account for their actions we are no better than the unquestioning good Germans who lived downwind of Auschwitz, Dachau or Treblinka.

The administration and our depraved government of WASP millionaires for WASP millionaires fear Haditha and they have every reason to. As with Abu Ghraib there is pictorial evidence in nothing is able to convey an idea to a badly educated, poorly informed populace like an image.

The truth is what is feared most, the lies have been so incessant in weaving the tapestry of evil that once a tread is pulled it could all potentially unravel and what then? Institutions such as governments and churches fear the truth as a vampire fears sunlight, once questions begin to be asked their entire control structure is threatened. The lies are exposed and the criminals in charge held accountable by a suddenly aroused and transformed mass angry at being duped. Once the myriad lies come to be known one with an inquisitive mind begins to wonder if it is ALL a lie.

Therein lies the danger with building a temple on a foundation of lies, noble or ignoble, it makes no difference because the truth is the ultimate trump card…. but will sheeple so long accustomed to living in the decadence of ignorance, materialism and irrational fear ever muster up the courage to play it?

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

The Silent Pardner

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

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

One hand washes the other.

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

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

What happened to impartiality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will This Nightmare Ever End?

Cain Was Right

CAIN WAS RIGHT
by Brett Smits

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There is one problem,” said Jesse.

“What now?”

“It’s your brother, Billy.”

***

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

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

One ring. Two.

“Hello?”

“Billy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

“And if he doesn’t listen to reason?”

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

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

Jesse swallowed, then nodded.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

“Goddamn you, Billy,” he whispered.

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

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

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

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

“How- how did you…” he stammered.

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

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

The screams began.

***

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

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

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

By Brett Smits

Spinning Righteous Indignation

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

– Carl Bernstein

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

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

Followed a paragraph later by:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder The Post is pissed off.

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

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

Anyhow, I Digress:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Ed Encho

Easter Basket

HAPPY EASTER!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

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

Just Let the Bastards Fight Their Own Damned Wars!