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

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

Mark Twain

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

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


But I Digress…..



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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Now, stop questioning Obama’s legitimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Haaretz:

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

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

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

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

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

Book it Don-O!

Bogeyman Down!

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

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

– End the wars

– Bring the troops back home.

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

– Dismantle the TSA.

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

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

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

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

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

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

Dancing With The Corpses

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

-Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress….

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outback’s Shameless Corporate War Profiteering

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


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


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

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

Hmmmm..

But what do the dead say?

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

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

So it goes…

Hey Old Man, Who The Hell Are You Gonna Kill Next?

Nice to see another mass murderer and war criminal from the Bush administration hit it big. The Donald has a new bestselling tome, Known and Unknown which is a runaway hit, rocketing up the sales charts (largely thanks to bulk buys from fascist organizations related to that foreign pig Murdoch and the normal right wing fascists). I want to give a big shout out to Donald Rumsfeld, just another example that crime pays in the USA as long as you have the important connections.

Very apropos to Rummy as a tribute is this brilliant song by Roger Waters to all of the war pigs entitled “The Bravery of Being Out of Range”

You have a natural tendency

To squeeze off a shot

You’re good fun at parties

You wear the right masks

You’re old but you still

Like a laugh in the locker room

You can’t abide change

You’re at home an the range

You opened your suitcase

Behind the old workings

To show off the magnum

You deafened the canyon

A comfort a friend

Only upstaged in the end

By the Uzi machine gun

Does the recoil remind you

Remind you of sex

Old man what the hell you gonna kill next

Old timer who you gonna kill next

I looked over Jordan and what did I see

Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris

I swam in your pools

And lay under your palm trees

I looked in the eyes of the Indian

Who lay on the Federal Building steps

And through the range finder over the hill

I saw the frontline boys popping their pills

Sick of the mess they find

On their desert stage

And the bravery of being out of range

Yeah the question is vexed

Old man what the hell you gonna kill next

Old timer who you gonna kill next

Hey bartender over here

Two more shots

And two more beers

Sir turn up the TV sound

The war has started on the ground

Just love those laser guided bombs

They’re really great

For righting wrongs

You hit the target

And win the game

From bars 3,000 miles away

3,000 miles away

We play the game

With the bravery of being out of range

We zap and maim

With the bravery of being out of range

We strafe the train

With the bravery of being out of range

We gained terrain

With the bravery of being out of range

With the bravery of being out of range

We play the game

With the bravery of being out of range

 
Enjoy it while it lasts Rummy…Satan is sharpening the tongs on his trident as I write this.
 
EE

Militarist Masturbation

FOX NFL crew in Afghanistan.
Maybe Terry Bradshaw wasn’t really so dumb that he couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the first two letters after all, as former Dallas Cowboy and lottery winner Thomas ‘Hollywood’ Henderson once said but like all chickenhawks he can’t resist the allure of the uniform even if though he never have the guts to wear one in service to anything other than the Pittsburgh Steelers. Much to my horror I turned on the electronic crackpipe for my weekly fix of NFL football on Sunday only to see the pregame jockocracy for FOX in Afghanistan where our fine young men are being blown to bits while the CIA supports the illegal heroin trade. You have to hand it to that vile Aussie roo-fucker Rupert Murdoch, he is nothing short of the modern melding of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Goebbels and by fucking GOD can he furnish the pictures for the wars.

Hitler dabbled in crude forms of television back in his heyday, it never amounted to much given the lack of modern technology and the grim reality that the entire Red Army was about to descend on Berlin with all of the viciousness of the Dick Armey of Darkness leaving Der Fuhrer with other things to deal with but imagine what could have been had the Nazis actually managed to WIN the war. It would be exactly like FOX’s flag sucking NFL pregame show today, a miracle of propaganda for millions of unemployed drooling, beer-addled slobs looking for meaningful work and wantin’ to open a giant can of Murkan whup ass on them sand niggers after the terrurst [sic] raghead ran amok at Fort Hood and gunned down a bunch of our precious little green Army men. It’s another strange contradiction in this land of stupidity and nationalism that were they blown up by the Taliban or whatever druglord’s CIA backed army that they happened to stumble upon it wouldn’t merit a mention, Americans don’t want to know much about their cannon fodder unless their deaths can be used to justify more murderous war crimes and profiteering. Shit, stuff like this must even make an aesthetic like renegade General Stan McChrystal’s dick get hard. It is the most overtly fascist thing that I have seen since General Petraeus goose-stepped out in full dress regalia to flip the coin at last year’s Super Bowl.

It was the most despicably grotesque immersion in the barrel of shit that is war pornography propaganda since George W. Bush danced the two step like Danny Fucking Kaye with his plastic turkey in Baghdad on Thanksgiving. And it’s only getting worse from the looks of it, as this disgustingly phony Barack Obama administration pimps ‘CHANGE’ while bestowing the power of the state upon insurance industry parasites to force the peasants into buying into the big scam, the coming escalation of the Afghanistan heroin protection racket is coming. Just look at this Newsweek revisionist history swill about how Vietnam could have been WON to float the idea out there again like a Bouncing Betty. It’s almost like we are back in the 80’s and John Rambo is going back to whup ass, followed by Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren. And you wonder why I am pissed off at chrome domed, privileged establishment lapdog Terry Bradshaw dressed up like fucking George S. Patton jacking off into the mouths of moron America during halftime, even whaleshit eventually settles on the bottom of the sea, for the war pornographers at Fuckin Fox they only set up a Halliburton rig and start drilling.

The one thing that I really didn’t understand about the NFL’s radioactive treatment of the Grand Poobah of white populist propaganda was how hypocritical it is of a sports league to bar Limbaugh from the fraternity of assholes while reducing itself to nothing more than a nationally televised regular recruiting venue for the ruinous illegal wars that have destroyed this country both morally and financially over the past eight or so years. The creeping militarism that has so debased us as a society should not be something that in any sane country would be viewed as some sort of holy virtue but it should rather serve as a pox upon us, a scarlet letter of shame on our foreheads scribbled by Satan’s claw dipped in the blood of a freshly decapitated Palestinian or Iraqi child. Were we less sophisticated there would just be parades of missiles and tanks and planes and trains and automobiles and thousands and thousands of precious little green men, after all, that’s the way that it is done in any dictatorship and by fucking GOD it is worshipped by all in the OPEN. Here in the star spangled land of misfit toys it is somehow treated as though it’s dirty, has to be sanitized and delivered by smooth talkers like Jimmy Johnson, it’s the moral equivalent of lurking in alleys to score blow jobs from foreclosed soccer moms turned crack ho’s. Does FOX know any shame? Then again, would Jack Bauer crush the testicles of a child with a pair of pliers?

FOX, the slime dispenser that it is used Veteran’s Day as an excuse for their worshipping of war but it was only a convenient excuse, one wonders if there will soon be a day when the NFL pregame studio is festooned with Birther, Deather and teabagger paraphernalia with good ole Terry Bradshaw and the others dressed up like Redcoats. I have to give CBS credit, they were just true to their corporatist ways by trotting out Jared Fogle for the thousandth something time, a manufactured celebrity selling shit sandwiches. On FOX there was Howie Long with that big shit-eating grin as he preened in his cammies thinking that he was back on the set of Broken Arrow again, all that was missing was George W. Bush strutting across the deck of the aircraft carrier in full Maverick regalia and Chris ‘Pinky’ Matthews drooling over his codpiece.

Today the propaganda mills are in full throated roar, the alleged Fort Hood ‘shooter’ is being tied to the Iman of the mosque of the alleged 9/11 ‘hijackers’ (black ops patsies) that was allegely visited while they were being trained for that oh so glorious day in American history that must be remembered, seared into our little lemming consumerist consciousness and revered for it as nothing else has justified the transformation of a democracy into a corrupt police state as well as justified the wars without end. If there has been a bigger disappointment with the Obama administration than the ongoing wars, corporate sellouts and failure to hold the Bush regime criminals accountable then it has been the use of their phony War on Terror rhetoric to justify the continuation of this shit. These are dangerous times of mass insanity, when Goldman Sachs executives like the reptilian Lloyd Blankfein have the audacity to proclaim that his usurious tower of moneychangers is doing God’s work while using their ownership of the government to stockpile flu virus vaccine while the poor, dumb, impoverished military worshipping. Jesus juicing schmucks go without and it’s not universally denounced then we truly live in Never, Neverland.

Now from all indications of late, as the long belated Iranian attack is pushed forward by Israeli fifth columnists and the treasonous military brass that they are allied with and with the REAL unemployment rate around 20 percent with the jobs permanently gone, the corporate plunders having cut the flesh to the bone for the sake of the filthy dollar we shall have our holiday stockings filled with fear and the jolly fat bearded man who is the avatar of American capitalism, Santa Claus will be replaced with visions of another bearded man dancing along with sugarplum grenades in the sleeping heads of babes. Osama bin Laden is coming a callin’ just in time for Christmas and the holiday stockings will be filled with fear, that you can count on and FOX’s demonic elves are already working overtime in their little shop of horrors to fill his sleigh.

As Roy Baty once said, “quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it?, That’s what it is to be a slave.”

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

New Management, Same Bogeymen

I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.

-Hunter S. Thompson

Other than the flogging to death of the usual horseshit talking point by the pocket media kingmakers, this one being the Team of Rivals which is the most vomit inducing three word phrase since Joe the Plumber, the early days of the incoming Barack Obama administration are seeing the establishment resort to the same old bread and butter that so served the ruinous Bushreich. I speak of course of the demonic and omnipotent global terrorist network al Qaeda (or more appropriately al CIAda) which has enjoyed a major renaissance since our ‘transformational’ (translation: same old fascist bullshit) election.

In recent days the circle jerk propagandists have invoked the fear and terror card early and often in stirring up dread and beating back those godless libruls who would dare to question the established dogma of the “center-right nation” by demanding that the chosen one be held to account for some actual change rather than just another cynical ploy for the American suckers along the lines of a P.T. Barnum saying that we have all come to hold so dearly. God forbid that the rapidly collapsing house of cards that is American looter capitalism to EVER be seriously challenged nor the global network of militarism and black ops that it uses as a defense mechanism. That the empire is collapsing is apparent to all but the most loopy Sarah Palin worshipping shitheads and assclowns but the chiselers, the looters, the moochers and the war freak blood barters are doing everything that is still within their power to prop it up, slap a fresh coat of paint on it and sell it as the greatest holiday deal of them all, roaches, termites and cracked foundation be damned.

Yesterday saw the official announcement that the U.S. is indeed in a recession and has been since last January (so much for all of that hucksterism of the fundamental soundness of the economy) which simply means that conditions have deteriorated beyond the point of lying anymore and still being able to dupe the disciples of CNBC’s preening court jester Jim Cramer and his can’t miss institutionalized buffoonery. This fucker is going down hard, the clever little manipulations of statistics that were so well exposed by Kevin Phillips in his recent book Bad Money no longer work. Chairman Ben can’t scramble enough helicopters to meet the looming threat of another depression and the temple of the moneychangers known as the Federal Reserve is unable to further cut interest rates. This quasi-governmental monstrosity created to protect the interests of Wall Street bankers has been strapped by panicky actions, lies and more damned lies, a quisling Congress that imbued Goldman Sachs criminal Hank Paulson with dictatorial powers at Treasury to steal American taxpayer money to buy worthless counterfeit paper. The Fed is dead and a huge and ugly globalization of the financial system is coming and coming soon, there is simply no other way to deal with cleaning the shit out of the diapers of high-rolling Wall Street trust fund babies.

So what is one to do? Christmas is coming, daddy and mommy are unemployed and facing foreclosure and junior and sis are caterwauling over the thousands of dollars in new toys that they have been bred to expect are their god given rights. It’s as Herman Goering once famously said:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY.”

So the answer is obvious, the incoming administration (while I am withholding judgment for the time being) is sending too many signals that it will be but another tool of the existing establishment and is going to double-down on the wars of conquest that we as a society have become inculcated with since birth. Of course there was the sweet potato pie serendipity of the Thanksgiving eve Mumbai terrorist attacks which were of course immediately blamed on al CIAda through insinuation by a media propaganda machine that has become more discredited by the day. Now that a story has actually surfaced that somebody in U.S. intelligence community actually warned of just these sort of attacks it reeks of the same sort of false flag daredeviltry but on a much smaller scale than that great day when our history was erased by ultra fascist coup plotters: 9/11/2001! This whole thing stinks and knowing full well the history of the PNAC boys, the immoral Kissinger crowd and big time Machiavellian schemers like Zbigniew Brzezinski it seems like a perfect excuse to change venues for the wars that are our reason for existence to Pakistan by pinning the blame on them. Dare I say that I am more than a bit cynical and very justifiable so after last years big lie that Benazir Bhutto died by hitting her head on the sunroof instead of being murdered in cold blood. I also must say that the hypocrisy of many on the left now that the Democrats are back in power by embracing flagrant acts of agression and militarism as long as they are the ones in charge is already beginning to bubble up like the worst form of digestive bile.

The shame continues for the pocket media kingmakers with the revelations that major networks serve as nothing more than shills for perpetual war for perpetual peace as in this New York Times piece of the other day regarding the rotation of former military ‘experts’ onto the payroll to pimp for the ugly behind the green curtain wetwork of the empire. In an interesting footnote Maureen Dowd of the NYT just did a column on the offshoring of the news and a primary reason for that practice is that to anyone with a lick of sense the media has NO obvious purpose rather than to induce guffaws and trigger gag reflexes. The fact that Ms. Dowd is bemoaning the going rate of a penny a word to Indian scribes who while not local also are not elitist fat-asses and dick smoking appeasers to beltway power is ironic in that it was her own employer and felon Scooter Libby fuckbuddy Judith Miller whose ongoing lying on behalf of the neocons has largely been responsible for a mainstream press and legions of electronic crackpipe dwelling, smack talking jibberheads and big titted bimbos whose credibility is only slightly higher than a blob of whaleshit and only because whaleshit is on the bottom of the sea. Hell, how can you even expect to seriously compete with swarms of dedicated activist bloggers (most of whom incidentally largely do what they do for free), alternative news reporters with a taste for real investigative work and low cost overseas labor. This is what happens when the journalism schools of a rotting society focus on turning out politically correct, indifferent, careerist P.R. flacks who wouldn’t recognize H.L. Mencken if he rose from the grave and kicked them right square in the middle of their lazy asses.

But I digress..

The past several days have seen a veritably horn of plenty of stories about why we as Americans should never be allowed to emerge from our cocoons of ignorance and fear because THEY are out to kill us and there will be no serious CHANGE when it gets right down to it. Mr. Obama (a “House Negro” for empire according to an on cue chiming in by al CIAda number two Ayman al-Zawahri) will soon take possession of the nuclear football along with the keys to the White House but he is damned well going to have minders as is evident by the presence of veteran spook Bob Gates (at least he managed to stop the neocons from starting WWIII so he deserves a bit of slack I guess) and the queen of the Clinton Crime Family so that the continuity of skullduggery from Mena to Mumbai has now been officially sanctioned. The stories that are being pumped out like link sausage made with tainted skunk meat are hyping a looming biological weapon attack no later than 2013 (which conveniently will allow for four years of less ostentatious fear mongering from the Team of Rivals and a Pentagon plan to further erode Posse Comitatus and allow for the total implementation of the fascist police state in Der Heimat is one of Gates’ centerpieces. Time will tell whether Obama is sincere or just a likeable Fozzie Bear frontman for the same filthy and bloody imperialism but the early days post election are not encouraging.
Time will tell whether Obama is sincere or just a likeable Fozzie Bear frontman for the same filthy and bloody imperialism but the early days post election are not encouraging.

The twelve days of Christmas in 2008 is likely to culminate with Osama bin Laden sitting up in that pear tree, fear has long ago come to be as American as apple pie or more appropriately due to the seasonal festivities – pecan pie and egg nog (both of which in excess incidentally give me a bad case of the screaming shits).

Let the thieving lying swine and filthy blood sucking imperialist bastards go off and hold their massive holiday bullshit sale someplace else, we are way overstocked here in chumpland!

The War’s Over Rambo: We Lost

Rarely a column (especially one in an establishment shitrag like the Washington Post) is able to completely sum up a decades running American tragedy that has led to 2008’s march of the lemmings into the abyss like Harold Meyerson’s Why Were We In Vietnam? This piece in and of itself should be an essential part of the arsenal when it comes to the inevitable re-fighting of the Vietnam war that is going to go live soon as a key part of the upcoming presidential campaign. The Vietnam war, always just below the surface of the American subconscious (although a good amount of the population hadn’t even been fucking born when the choppers lifted of that embassy roof for the last time) like a trailside booby trap just waiting to be tripped anew by a ruthless post-Nixon political party of perverts, jackals, thieves, looters and thugs and their billion dollar propaganda machine. This piece is stunning in pointing out that ugly elephant in the middle of the room that is the pursuit of Vietnam as the latest destination in the off-shoring exodus, it seems like the availability of ever cheaper labor, the crack cocaine to Wall Street parasites and traitors is very alluring in the former Indochina.

From Meyerson and at length because I can’t do it justice otherwise:

Why Were We In Vietnam?

Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.

Worse yet, new labor laws are making it harder for employers to cheat their workers out of their wages and benefits. Many American businesses that do their manufacturing in China had warned against those laws; the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai had flatly opposed them. But the good old days of Maoist labor discipline, when the government could send tens of millions of skilled workers down to the farms to be toughened up and periodically tortured, are gone. Mao’s heirs, though not above a touch of torture here and there just to keep the system humming along, are concerned, as he was not, with achieving social harmony, even if that means compelling employers to sign, and honor, contracts with their employees.

Confronted with such appalling squishiness, what’s a good, cost-cutting American business to do? Many are fleeing south of the border — not our border (Mexico costs way too much) but China’s.

They’re bound for Vietnam.

According to a report by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out products for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct investment in Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007, while it increased just 14 percent in China.

The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn.

But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly cheap?

Vietnam’s edge, it seems, is political. “Communism means more stability,” Laurence Shu, the chief financial officer of Shanghai-based Texhong, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cotton fabrics, told Bradsher. This view, Bradsher reports, is common among Asian executives and some American executives, too, though they have the presence of mind never to say so on the record. After all, Vietnam, like China, outlaws independent unions. Absent free speech and free elections, no radical shifts in the government’s economic policies are likely to be sprung upon unsuspecting American businesses.

Now, far be it from me to begrudge the Vietnamese their moment in the sun before global capital finds them too costly and moves on to Bangladesh and Somalia. But didn’t we fight a war to keep Vietnam from going communist? Something like 58,000 American deaths, right? And now American business actually prefers investing in communist Vietnam over, say, the more or less democratic Philippines? In all likelihood, it would prefer investing in communist Vietnam to investing in a more chaotic, less disciplined democratic Vietnam, if such existed.

Let’s imagine, just as an exercise, that we’re trying to explain this to those 58,000 Americans and their loved ones. We could argue that by investing in communist countries, we’re pushing them toward democracy. But everything we know about China suggests that, in reality, such investments merely make authoritarian regimes stronger. We could argue that what we’re really doing is bringing communist nations into the world capitalist system. Then again, the effect of bringing into the global labor pool hundreds of millions of low-wage workers — people whose wages are held in check by both capital mobility and communist repression — is to hold down wages in democratic nations with advanced economies and with no national strategy to preserve and expand good jobs at home (i.e., in the United States).

Or we could argue that our onetime opposition to communism was noble and all that but that, unburdened by the illusions of the past, American business, backed by the American government, has realized that the problem with communism wasn’t that it was undemocratic but that it was anti-capitalist. And that once communism was integrated into a world capitalist system, its antipathy toward democracy not only wouldn’t be a bad thing but would actually be good. That is clearly the political logic that underpins our involvement with China. It’s a little dicier to say this about our growing involvement with Vietnam, since all those Americans whose names are on that wall on the Mall probably didn’t realize how compatible with global American enterprise Vietnamese communism would turn out to be or how the cause of democracy would turn out to have been of no real importance at all.

I guess a note from the American establishment to those men and women with their names on the Wall would be in order. Something like: Say, guys — sorry ’bout that!

Maybe the Vietnamese can now start manufacturing those crappy little flag pins that have so cheapened the concept of patriotism, they are nothing but merkins (a pubic wig, originally worn by prostitutes after shaving their genitalia to eliminate lice or disguise the marks of syphilis) anyway, displayed upon increasingly empty vessels who shamble about in a fog of fear and jingoism even as they are herded towards the network of fences that end at the shoot where the pneumatic air hammer stuns them in preparation of the slaughter. The ‘gooks’ can even take away the American flag business from China now that it is no longer a cost effective destination for labor arbitrage.

With ‘free trade’ that the flip-flopping charlatan John Sidney McCain III has just spent the better part of a week sliming his way through Latin America promoting as a shill for the rapacious, anti-American strain of virulent looter capitalism (how could you ever expect anything less from an elitist who owns EIGHT houses) that has cut a swath of economic destruction through Der Homeland it would seem that the issue of using Vietnam as the latest destination for exported American jobs while cloaking himself in the immunity of some sort of phony war hero is more than a tad hypocritical.

When and if those ludicrous public relations gimmicks used by McCain actually allow anyone other than another adoring sycophantic war freak to ask questions the ‘maverick’ should be called out on this but it of course he won’t be, it is just too dangerous to the entire bogus Vietnam storyline that has been constructed around the self-admitted war criminal. For all of his paeans to the moneychangers to even acknowledge that America has now sought out Nam as the latest and greatest Mecca for labor arbitrage would be as if he himself were to walk up to that black granite wall, whip out his dick and piss all over those names that are carved into it.

Not only are we prepared to export jobs en-masse to Vietnam but the ongoing cynical invocation of that goddamned fucking war has been used as a cudgel to brutally beat into submission those who were suckered into accepting all of that hogwash about the American Dream at face value only to see their pockets picked and their bank accounts sucked dry by those who cashed in on the four decade tragedy of fighting and re-fighting it, like some acid and viscera drenched version of the movie Groundhog Day. Manchurian McCain and the fascist Republican party will escalate the fighting in Vietnam in the next few months, count on it! The carpet bombing runs are already being planned, the napalm pods polished with loving care, the effigies of Hanoi Jane to be burned slowly stitched together.

The Republican Tet Offensive is coming and coming soon and their pimping of the ongoing revisionist history of the war that the hippies and liberals didn’t let us win, the horseshit of spitting on the troops and the media blame game are all going to spring this bouncing betty one more time for their war criminal candidate and free trader McCain, a man whose only ‘qualification’ for the job is his phony Vietnam narrative.

And once again the Democrats will be true to form, they will capitulate, dissemble, plant big wet, sloppy kisses on McCain’s mangy ass, triangulate, cower and likely even in some cases even contemplate fleeing to Canada to avoid the war rather than fight in what to them has been a lost cause ever since they allowed themselves to be labeled as the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion” and allowed George McGovern to be defined as some sort of anti-American pinko even though history has proven that he was right..

As no less an authority on Nam than Captain Willard once: “Saigon…shit, I’m still only in Saigon”

The Great General Petraeus Dog and Pony Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Blood Barters

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

-Bob Dylan “Masters of War”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Booted GOP Brownshirt Thugs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rummy And The Gutless Wonders

 

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.”

-President Theodore Roosevelt

They are the ones who are shouting the loudest for others to die in foreign lands, they are the ones waving the flag the most vigorously while undermining all that it is supposed to stand for. These are the Armchair Patriots, and they are legion. The insistence of the most vile of all, the Republican party, a group that has come to symbolize the darkest of all of the basest human traits and who love to ‘wave the bloody flag’ and tar all others as disloyal and treasonous is a low point in our nation’s history and is certainly the most scurrilous and rotten of periods since the days when Joseph McCarthy was persecuting political dissidents suspected of being “Communists”. Of course McCarthy was a Republican and so were his lackeys Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as well as his most prominent and outspoken living advocate: a woman named Ann Coulter.

Of course being a Democrat is by the very association deemed `unpatriotic’ and a `coward’ in using the dastardly labeling of Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Rove and the rest of the unscrupulous and yellow thugs who control the government, the media, the courts and by extension are the operators of the message machine that spits out the hateful swill that motivates the most reactionary and ignorant segments of the populace who represent their base. This anti-American political party could never carry the torch were it not for their deception and demagoguery in playing to the most base and vile instincts of the perennially angry. Like any good purveyor of evil that is expert in enabling double speak and race baiting, they have a little something for everybody just like their role models the Nazis but we’ll get to that a bit later.Festering resentment towards women? Welcome to the party. Hate Mexicans, Arabs and Blacks? Step right up. Think that liberals are destroying the country? We do too. Are you on God’s side? Hallelujah, so are we. Do you want to defeat the homosexual agenda? We are on your side and God is too. Are You Afraid? We promise to protect you. The Constitution? It’s just a goddamned piece of paper, we have the flag!

When you look beneath the flotsam and jetsam on the surface you will see that the values volk are anything but patriotic and their value system is anything but American. Flag desecration? Let the Republicans wrap themselves in it, what could be more disrespectful than that. Consider their collective military service, the majority of them have never worn a uniform, or at least never worn one in the service of their country.

Big Time Chickenhawks:

 

George W. Bush: Served in National Guard through the grace of a rich and influential daddy (then he didn’t bother to show up for his last year while addled on coke and no matter what the fuck what the right-wing activists who set up Dan Rather say….just fuck them all because in all likelihood they are sniveling chickenshit bastards too.)
Dick Cheney: Never Served (multiple draft deferments)
Condi Rice: Never Served(But once had oil tanker named after her)
Karl Rove: Never Served
Sen. Bill Frist: Never Served
Speaker Dennis Hastert: Never Served
Gov. Jeb Bush: Never Served
Sen. Rick Santorum: Never Served
Sen. Joe Lieberman: Never Served
Sen. George Allen: Never Served
Gov. Arnold Scharzenegger: Never Served (although his daddy once served in Adolf Hitler’s military)

The Neo Cons (PNAC’ers andthe architects of the war)

Donald Rumsfeld: Hooray…he actually served! (which makes him stick out like a turd in a punchbowl with the rest of this crowd even if he wouldn’t know the definition of ‘fascism’ if it ran up and bit him in the ass)
Paul Wolfowitz: Never Served
Richard Perle: Never Served
Newt Gingrich: Never Served
Eliot Abrams: Never Served
Douglas Feith: Never Served
Michael Ledeen: Never Served
William Kristol: Never Served (But was once nicknamed “Dan Quayle’s brain”)
Charles Krauthammer: Never Served

The Flag Waving Electronic Demagogues:

Bill O’Reilly: Never Served
Sean Hannity: Never Served
David Horowitz: Never Served
Michelle Malkin: Never Served (Although there is an unconfirmed rumor floating around the internet that she may be an anchor baby of somebody who actually did)
Ann Coulter: Never Served (and Godlessly so I might add)
Michael Weiner: Never Served
Rush Limbaugh: Never Served due to large cyst on ass (and by the way why isn’t anybody asking what this fat fucking deviate slob was fucking during his Viagra powered soiree through the Dominican – little girls or little boys….what a piece of shit)

Beginning to notice a pattern here? I have neither the time nor the space to continue with the chickenhawk roll call but rest assured the aforementioned have plenty of company amongst their cowardly ranks. They are Armchair Patriots, those who detest American values but wave the flag as though it were some sort of shield for their fascism. Armchair patriots believe in war without their own personal sacrifice, they believe that war is the simplistic jingoism of the John Wayne, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies that they have been weaned on. By the way, John Wayne never served either.

The F Word: And when they are not otherwise occupied in impugning the patriotism of loyal Americans the one-party ruling Republican government is engaged in their typical tricks of manufacturing their own version of revisionist history:

The latest and greatest talking point for the continuation of one-party Republican tyranny is the misuse of the actual term ‘fascism’ to only apply to Islamics and the invocations of World War II the good war in pimping their phony ‘war on terror’. The war on terror is a fake you ask? Heresy? No it is just politically expedient in that there is a vaguely defined enemy that can be used by the amoral snakes of the Bush junta for purposes of fear mongering and marginalizing of dissent. Just ask yourself this one main question: if the GWOT was anything more than hype and sloganeering then exactly why in the fuck are our borders still so porous? The Republicans are far more concerned with providing a constant flow of cheap labor to their corporate paymasters than in stopping the potential smuggling of WMD or the infiltration of terrorist elements into the USA. Then there is a NAFTA super highway currently under construction that will make it even easier for unchecked cargo to be trucked in from non-union ports in Mexico but that is a story for another day.

The truth is that the bottom line is more important to the one-party Republican government and the industrialists and corporatists that they loyally serve than the safety and security of average Americans.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led the vanguard of those desperate scoundrels in  Wednesday speech  in front of an American Legion gathering where he cowardly labelled the critics of this bastard of an administration and their foul war as appeasers of “a new type of fascism.” New is correct as this so called “new fascism” flies in the face of the true historical definition of such , a governing philosophy that has far more in common with that of the Bush administration than any of the Islamic theocratic regimes that the Rovians seek to ensnare in their public relations blitz to trash critics.

You have to give a hell of a lot of credit to those who see the slime and have the nuts and backbone to stand up for that which is truly American in denouncing this new McCarthyism. I would strongly suggest than anybody who doesn’t understand what true courage is to watch MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann’s excellent and truly patriotic denunciation of Herr Rummsfeld’s reprehensibly depraved comments while it is still available. Also check out this excellent piece by Thom Hartmann on the right-wingers’ attempts to redefine the term fascism in order to avoid drawing attention to their all too obvious association with it.

It is not at all strange in these twisted and terrible times that the Republican talking points have now converted ‘fascism’ into Rovian newspeak but who are you going to trust, the wordsmiths who toil in Rove and Cheney’s underground chop-shops or a higher authority on the English language than even the Bush administration propaganda machine – ‘The Miriam Webster Dictionary’:

Main Entry: fas·cism
Pronunciation: ‘fa-“shi-z&m also ‘fa-“si- Function: noun
Etymology: Italian fascismo, from fascio bundle, fasces, group, from Latin fascis bundle & fasces fasces Often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. 

 

If you chose the former then a nice little patriotic swastika adorned lapel pin is the prize to you as a lucky ducky winner and official goose-stepping member of those in favor with Der Heimat and the New American Century.

If there were any sort of justice then treasonous, anti-American vermin the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rove whose naked greed is surpassed only by their lust for power would according to the great words of author Dalton Trumbo:

“Be hanged and drawn and quartered and paraded through the streets in small chopped up little bits and thrown out into the fields where no clean animal will touch them and let their chunks rot there and may no green thing ever grow where they rot.” 

 

And when you really get down to it hanging is far too good a fate for despicable pig-fucking traitors the likes of Ragged Dick and his longtime Nixon era partner in crime Donald Rumsfeld but drawing and quartering would be a damned good start.

It’s going to get nastier now, and you can count on it that the ruling Republican fascist government will be pulling every dirty trick out of the bag for the big fifth birthday party for our new American century when it rolls around in a little over a week.

Just how in the hell did we ever get to the point where we as a country could become so morally depraved that we would allow sleazy, immoral, unpatriotic, morally deficient, perverse, evil, greedy, criminally insane pieces of shit like Cheney and Rumsfeld slither their way into power riding on the coattails of the idiot bastard son of a former president to begin with? This fascist Republican regime and the anti-American goons who comprise this most despicable of all administrations in our history are God’s plague upon us all, a pox that will likely never be erased in the lifetime of any living reader of this posting. So contemptible has their repudiation of over two hundred and thirty fucking years of American values been that we will forever be tainted as a people, this bullshit has irreversibly damaged us both within and outside of our borders.

And as for Cheney, the bastard’s cardiologist should be declared public enemy number one.

You just know that Rove and the Republicans aren’t going to go quietly into the goodnight, scurrying away like cockroaches from the illumination of their dank, fetid, stinking nest. No, that’s not their style, there is far too much at stake here, far more than the stupendous fraud of defending the ‘honor’ of their insolent king.

The stakes are much higher than just pulling together to dutifully reinforce the myth of the moral clarity of the illegitimate king’s rapidly crumbling shit bastard facade of steadfast leadership or of covering up for the incompetence of the bad seed of global power broker George Herbert Walker Bush… it is the entire dishonest, unprincipled, evil, perverse, tainted, degenerate, immoral, rotten, debased, unscrupulous, corrupt, infected and impure nature of their toxically contaminated defilement of the entire system of American government and it’s illicit network of benefactors that is at risk of exposure to the long needed media scrutiny that such a shamelessly concocted stinking dung heap of an endeavor of misbegotten gains and outright reprobate behavior needs to keep it safely away from the public trust and in the sewers underneath welded shut manhole covers in which it belongs.

No, they are going to fight this as though they were ensconced in the parapets of the Alamo itself, and considering that so many of the principles would be facing so many criminal charges, indictments, prison time and financial ruin that the entire judicial system would be swamped for years. Gitmo would have to be converted to a penal colony to house each and every rotten piece of unprincipled reprobate garbage that currently holds power in this debased and foul country.

The fascists like the real terrorists are within our own borders – they are the Republican one-party government that has spread the blackness of unopposed tyranny around our land.
The armchair patriots will soon launch a withering carpet bombing barrage because there is nothing that they won’t do to prevent both a legitimately independent investigation into the causes of 9/11 or their treasonous criminal actions thereafter.

This is a time that will truly test the mettle of those who truly believe in the American ideals that have been discarded by the fascists in the Republican one-party rule in particular and the wicked members of the Bush administration.

I will close now with this all too relevant quote from the great Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.”

 

We were so much smarter as a society at one time in our history…too bad that we pissed it all away for chump change and a ticket to ride on the Rapture Bus.