Category Archives: propaganda
The Pigman and the Pigskin
Hitler was good in the beginning, but he went too far.
Mad Man in a Roomful of Mirrors
Americans love a good revolution, as long as they are not the ones taking to the streets. In what would appear to be an Iranian version of the Bush crime family election theft of 2000 it appears that the New Hitler Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stolen the Iranian election. It was all there, polls that didn’t support the results, a corrupt power structure and even the state run media to pop in ala Bush’s cousin John Ellis of FOX ‘News’ came out and called the election in Dubya’s favor. But it was a rigged game, I will never forget the shit-eating grins on the Bush family as they sat clustered around a big screen television on that terrible night of November 7, 2000 – they knew goddamned well that it was rigged. I am sure that the mad mullahs and ayatollahs were just as smug just before the Iranian election was called (prematurely) for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Champagne corks were also popping at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) because with their poster boy for deviltry, global terrorism and anti-Semitism still in power they had scored a body blow against Barack Obama for daring to reach out from the confines of imperialist madness in his Cairo speech. The propaganda mills began to churn faster, the attacks against Obama were ratcheted up and the GOP gauleiters placed on high alert.
You have to give it the Iranians, at least they are out raising hell over a perceived theft of their election, how long did it take Americans to get out in a similar way after the second blatantly stolen election in 2004? We are still waiting for that revolt. This one though, at least at first glance is appealing to Americans because it is on television, a spectator sport of bone crushing violence and passion that puts even the NFL to shame, it makes for marvelous viewing as one is ensconced upon a sofa paying homage to the digital living room god. The Green Revolution is on, but what if it’s bullshit? If there is one thing in the post 9/11 wasteland of Der Homeland that I have learned to be it is skeptical of absolutely everything. First let me say that I have no love for that unshaven demagogue Ahmadinejad or for that matter for the religious zealots who run him. I believe that it would be a damned good thing were he, his paramilitary goons and the clerics were to be chased down and shot like rabid dogs Ceauşescu style in the streets of Tehran. Shit, they could decapitate the bastards and march around with their heads on sticks for all that I care.I hate thug regimes and take to theocracies even less kindly, they should all be torn to bloody pieces and their remains buried in fields sown with salt for all that I care. But I for one do remember the 2002 U.S. backed coup d’état in Venezuela that failed to rid the world of that horrible little socialist man Hugo Chavez and given the amount of agitation in Iran this could be another example of destabilizing a regime by fomenting rebellion and manipulating public opinion.
The network news, the corporate cable cesspool and the nattering nabobs of nonsense that are the talking heads are all discredited, you can immediately throw out most of that gibberish as propaganda. Now however there is the alternate media and such technology enabled information tools as You Tube and Twitter that are able to circumvent the normal and easily controlled information streams. During the recent Burma/Myanmar revolts it was the new technology that allowed for communication to continue, Iran is an example of this on a larger scale with even more advanced mediums available. Why is it that they work so hard on filtering and censoring the internet in full blown goon states like China? The internet is the biggest threat to tyranny that has ever existed and since China is the prototype of what our very own government is desperately trying to do in controlling dissent here, often under the cover of fighting child pornography, chasing down loosely defined and ‘dangerous’ right and left wing extremists and the utterly ludicrous and lame crackdown on cyber bullying. The protectors of the oligarchy are keeping an especially keen eye on Iranian protests and the ability to pass on information. That however is a story for another time, I am sure that all savvy bloggers are aware of the threats that they pose to a corrupt establishment and the coming pushback.
The pictures that are coming out of Iran are quite powerful, beatings, shootings, bloody young people trying to duck and cover truncheon swing black suited state paramilitary goons but the information itself is what is suspect, what if Ahmadinejad really did win the election? I have witnessed in the past days an irrational exuberance on the blogs and boards in support of the latest and greatest color coded revolution but be mindful that Mirhossein Mousavi is just another puppet of the imperialists, just like Mikheil Saakashvili, the tie chewing little twit in Georgia. Mousavi allegedly has ties to the ultimate players in Iran-Contra including Michael Ledeen. Now that Americans are throwing in with the protesters, jubilant, cheering, twittering, it makes the PNAC boys jobs that much harder when it comes to bombing them…or does it? Glenn Greenwald weiged in with the following on yet another neocon contradiction:
From: The “Bomb Iran” contingent’s newfound concern for The Iranian People
I’m going to leave the debate about whether Iran’s election was “stolen” and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they’re talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge). But there is one point I want to make about the vocal and dramatic expressions of solidarity with Iranians issuing from some quarters in the U.S.
Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country — actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz entitled “The Case for Bombing Iran,” and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he “hopes and prays” that the U.S. “bombs the Iranians.” John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol — with typical prescience — hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.
Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way — just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called “attack on Iran” or “bombing Iran” in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many — obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it’s some abstract decision in a video game.
While many neocons like the oozing, fetid Daniel Pipes actually came out and endorsed the mad Mahmoud in the runup to the election the tactic now has shifted to bringing pressure on the Obama administration for intervention on the behalf of Mousavi. I have to admit that it really makes one want to vomit when an onerous old vulture like John McCain works his grampers into a twist over unfair elections. I sure as hell don’t remember him saying anything after Bush stole the White House in 2000 while the wounds from the area where his balls used to be prior to being ripped off by the Karl Rove machine in South Carolina was still smarting. The cringing but still loudly barking old dog yapped “I’m disappointed, it is an American principle ever since our founding that we are dedicated to the principle that all are created equal and the fact is they have the right to free elections and to select their leadership” – I haven’t seen anything from the other two stooges (Lieberman and Graham) yet but I am sure it’s out there as well because just like the sun coming up in the morning Moe and Jack are always in tune with Manny. Hell, hearing any Republican giving lectures about stolen elections is hysterical, kind of like being given lessons in dinner table etiquette from Jeffrey Dahmer or marital fidelity from Senator John Ensign. These people have absolutely no fucking shame whatsoever, their hypocrisy is as blatant as the Democratic party’s fecklessness.
So to close here I offer up some food for thought and please do take it seriously. Despite the blather and bombast that goes along with their political rhetoric and rank demagogy what if the neocons are deliberately instigating the mayhem in order to push the devil Ahmadinejad into a violent, over the top Tiananmen Square style put down that will further reinforce the years long propaganda campaign to demonize him? After all, it is already out there courtesy of Seymour Hersh among others that money has been being pumped into Iran for covert operations that would destabilize the regime. There is still conflicting information on what really happened in Iran so be cautious. There is a crackdown in progress and instigating the protesters into more violent action against the regime may very well result in the sort of ugliness and bloodshed that will only crystalize the neocon version of Ahmadinejad as the New Hitler and in additon to a failed revolution that we are treating as a spectator sport we will have a resurgent push to bomb all of those green flag waving freedom fighters into bloody bits – just collateral damage folks, we have seen this movie too many times.
False Idols, Armchair Patriots and Girlie Men
They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and class less and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
-John Lennon
That Mrs. Clinton has used the quintessential Republican tactics of fear, racism, slander and balls out demagogy to relentlessly saturate the media with Karl Rove style campaign commercials packed with insinuation, anti-American accusations (Obama didn’t wear one of those ridiculous motherfucking flag pins) and guilt by association slime jobs (a real hoot considering the Clinton association with global arch criminal Marc Rich and Ollie North’s little Mena cocaine trafficking operation when they were in the Arkansas governor’s mansion which is a story for another time) to pull of the great bait and switch that will allow the elitist fat cats to repudiate the will of the voters once again. I am sure that everyone reading this is intimately familiar with it all and probably as close to being ready to vomit as I have been so I will spare you the sordid details. I do find a good deal of sardonic humor in the Clinton smears of Mr. Obama being some sort of nefarious operative of an anti-American cartel, especially when it comes from people who regularly consort with such exclusive globalist clubs like the Bilderberg Group, The Council On Foreign Relations and the caviar munching cloud dwellers in Davos.
The one thing that really sticks in my craw though is this entire tsunami of horseshit regarding Mr. Obama’s truthful comments on the “bitter” fucked over by the system small town dullards who have a known proclivity to“cling” to guns, religion and xenophobia in order to smear a little bit of magic balm on that big bite out of their asses that has been chomped off by the looter capitalist empire of greed. Only in America is it an ultimate sin to engage in the lost art of truth speaking, the land of Horatio Alger where old saws like “the streets are paved with gold”, “grab the tiger by the tail”, “when you wish upon a star”, “the glass is half full”, “the little engine that could” and Christ knows how many others there are have been used with great success to tell that one big lie that this is a land of bountiful fruits and great opportunity to all who just seize the straps of that star spangled jackboot and pull themselves up out of the shit and squalor into their palatial palaces of destiny.
The key has always been to pimp the falsehoods of American greatness and opportunity for all to live long and prosper and the dirty little secret is that the fear stricken, television addled, undereducated, unsophisticated sheep ALWAYS allow themselves to be hornswoggled by the traveling salvation shows into voting against their own self interests by lining up behind the geek tent barkers at the latest and greatest carnivals of perversion to throw in with god, guns and greatness against the hated brown menace and the evils of heathen libruls who come bearing gifts of abortion, sinfulness and a festering hatred of all things that are great in America, like John Wayne but I’ll get to him in a little while.
The rot that eats away at America today is built largely on the foundation of that great “elitist” lie. What could possibly be more elitist than the high-rolling Republican pigs snorting laughter as they continue to peddle this crapola to the hayseeds while they lock in their gains from the nearly three decade long looting spree that would NEVER even have been possible were it not for the gullibility of the easily offended and little minded small town dopes, heartland hicks and rubes in peckerwood nation (both north and south of the Mason Dixon Line).
The ONLY reason that the Republicans can get away with their elitism and hypocrisy is that they so successfully have tapped into the psyche of Americans in order to milk the indoctrinated minds of the masses of asses trained to be obedient little flag suckers from the first day that they are made to stand and recite the pledge of allegiance. The uproar over the latest feast of lemming food is an affront to the intelligence of all but the most willfully ignorant haters and if there was any semblance of decency left in the media this would be an affront to it. The latest tempest in a teapot of media manufactured manure is nicely addressed by one of the finest and most underappreciated essaysists out there Joe Bageant in his recent piece that is appropriately entitled Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality:
Obama’s remarks were not in the least controversial and just plain boring in terms of content. Certainly not newsworthy.
Yet he had no sooner closed his mouth than this media manufactured hell broke loose. “Oh my gawd,” they screamed. This guy has the unmitigated gall to suggest that their might be some bitterness out here in the lily white realms of Grant Wood, grange halls and Methodist church suppers! Right here in River City!” — where the combination of God rhetoric and Chamber of Commerce boosterism have managed to ban the word from public discourse. Even the mention of it can be explosive, simply because there is so much of it stuffed inside working folks, inside the lockbox of denial that comes with being the citizen of a culture in collapse.
The larger point here is that all of the coordinated thuggery used to turn the most eloquent and hope eliciting figure that the Democratic party has been able to roll out since JFK himself has been reduced to a finger diddling, non-bowling, egg headed girly man who is a consort of the dreaded legion of serendipitously appearing Al CIAda bogeymen who wants to kill your babies in the middle of the night, hangs out with sixties radicals and black militant preachers whose primary offense is to engage in calling for God to damn his most damnable of empires of filthy avarice and blood. The Clintons and the larger DLC corporate octopus that passes for an ‘opposition’ party have gone directly to the tried and true Republican dark bible of bullshit, a veritable grimore from which evil spells of deviltry and manipulation are conjured up to turn compost heap dwelling swamp toads into princes and the American idols upon which our false religion of greatness, patriotism and providence desperately needs as pitchmen. But I digress, I was talking about phony right-wing iconography and the true agenda concealed behind the cloaking device conjured up by the corporatist media that is now being co-opted by the Clinton cultists of doom who are preaching it like gospel.
Blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald’s latest book Great American Hypocrites takes a great look at the lying gutless chicken hawks and highly compensated weasels of the Republican party who have so successfully created an impeccably conceived (at least in terms of deep seated psychological tendencies) marketing campaign of what is really a product that is so terminally fucked, fraudulent and inferior that if any corporation would try to similarly foist off such a preposterous piece of folderol they would be rapidly sued for their flim flammery. It is all such a blatant con job that even the Roberts SCOTUS couldn’t possibly take this horseshit seriously.
Central to the right-wing mythmaking machine is the depiction of their male leaders as swaggering tough guys in the iconic mold of an American cowboy and brave, steadfast warrior. Above all else, Republican leaders are invariably held up as exuding the virtues of traditional American masculinity – courage, physical strength, “regular guy”ness, and most of all, a willingness and ability to stare down America’s various and numerous enemies – in war, if necessary – and defeat them through superior strength.
The reality, in virtually every case, is the opposite. Those who end up as leaders of the right-wing movement in America have nothing in their lives to demonstrate any actual courage, physical strength, or any of the warrior virtues they desperately strive to exude. Their only “toughness” or masculine “tough guy” credentials are from cheerleading as they send others off to fight wars, never to fight in any themselves. Just like John Wayne, their masculine toughness comes from the costumes they wear, the scripts they read, the roles they play – never from the reality of their own lives.
While Republicans have ensured that virtually every asset of America bears the name of Ronald Reagan – including a glorious battleship, the USS Ronald Reagan – right-wing tough guys who never spent a day in the military protested and mocked endlessly when it was announced, in 2005, that a submarine would be named after Navy veteran Jimmy Carter. Carter is a graduate of the Naval Academy, having attended during World War II. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, and he rose to the rank of lieutenant. He was personally selected by Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” for the top-secret nuclear submarine program, where Carter enrolled in graduate work in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the precommissioning crew of the Seawolf, America’s second nuclear submarine.
And
Greenwald spares no armchair patriot, this puncturing of the gasbag Rush Limbaugh is brilliant: Limbaugh is a physically weak individual, wallowing in a life of depraved hedonism, who has never displayed a single act of physical courage. He avoided combat in Vietnam by claiming that an anal boil rendered him unfit for service (and, once he became famous as an über-warrior, said nothing when a Limbaugh biographer falsely claimed it was due to a football injury).
And
While the civilized world has recoiled in horror at the excesses and war-hungriness of the United States over the last six years, the only real complaint from our right-wing war cheerleaders about the commander in chief is that he has not given them enough torture, secret prisons, wars of aggression, barbaric slaughter, and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable, because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong. And nothing provides those feelings of strength better than revering a tough-guy male leader and mocking liberal males as weaklings and losers.
The term “chicken hawk” (in the context of war) is much used, debated, and discussed, but its true, most revealing meaning is rarely made explicit. Although there is no formal definition for it, the chicken-hawk criticism is not applicable to someone who merely (a) advocates a war and also (b) will not fight in that war and/or has never fought in any war. After all, the vast majority of Americans in both political parties meet that definition. The war in Afghanistan was supported by roughly 90 percent of Americans, as was the first Persian Gulf War, even though only a tiny fraction of war supporters actually fought in them.
Something more than mere support for a war without fighting in it is required to earn the chicken-hawk label. Chicken-hawkism is the belief that advocating a war from afar is a sign of personal courage and strength, and that opposing a war from afar is a sign of personal cowardice and weakness. A “chicken hawk” is someone who not only advocates a war but believes that that advocacy is proof of the same courage required of those who will actually engage in combat.
One of the nation’s most consummate chicken hawks is, unsurprisingly, one of the loudest advocates of sending others off to fight in endless wars: Weekly Standard editor, Fox News contributor, and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol. Kristol’s central political view is that those who advocate sending other Americans off to fight in more and more Middle Eastern wars are themselves strong, resolute, principled, and brave. But those who oppose sending others off to fight in those wars are weak, cowardly, spineless appeasers.
The idle rich, the rentiers, the industrialists and Wall Street were looking for a champion and in Dutch they found one and they crowned him for his efforts. The hatred of having to share the wealth contributed to the wars at home against labor and the middle class as well as a series of brutal U.S. backed extreme right-wing regimes putting down `leftist’ movements in Central America. The horrors of the torture states and blood soaked counterinsurgencies sponsored by covert CIA operatives and cowboys like Ollie North are an ugly blight upon our history that will never be removed.
The Reagan era also institutionalized the freewheeling style of fuck you anything goes vulture Capitalism that has gutted today’s economy, destroyed our manufacturing capability, wrecked the regulatory agencies that were created to keep corporations and Wall Street looters at least somewhat honest and the environment clean, seriously undermined the public education system, crippled organized labor and made the Social Darwinist race to the bottom line the nation’s economic religion. CEO’s became folk heroes and the poor were shamed into blaming themselves for losing the birth lottery.
Reagan also blamed government for all social problems, he often invoked the crowd pleaser that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Truthfully Reagan and the so-called conservatives love government – as long as it is government that works to further their own self-interests and to keep the rabble in their place. Reagan style government consists of an exponentially growing military machine, a surveillance industrial complex, agencies that bestow taxpayer money to radical religious groups (Christian Socialism), corporate welfare and an enforcement arm that allows the government to meddle in every aspect of the lives of Americans who don’t share the same `values’ of the ruling elite.
Reagan style conservatism wants to invade citizen’s homes, regulate what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, meddle in the education of their children by deliberately undermining the public educational system, promote a virulent state favored religion that has been hijacked by fanatics, destroy social programs like Medicare and Medicaid and of course that crown jewel of leveling the playing field Social Security. Reagan was able to successfully dupe the people that big government was the problem, the unspoken caveat being that only those governmental agencies that served the people, held industry accountable and protected the rights of the American worker were evil. Big government is even better when it is used as the foundation for a police state that acts to crush dissent and political opposition to Anti American, neo-fascist policies.
And the Star-Bellied Sneetches were exalting the coronation of their new king from the get to, the Washington air was filled with the musk of greedheads in heat, their delight in having a fox as the henhouse gatekeeper bordered on orgasmic. Haynes Johnson’s excellent book on the Reagan era Sleepwalking Through History describes the atmosphere at the inauguration as follows:
It was the costliest, most opulent inauguration in American history, and some of the scenes gave credence to critics who likened it to “a bacchanalia of the haves”.It was an outpouring of wealth and privilege. At National Airport, corporate jets were parked wing to wing on the tarmac. The airport was unable to accommodate the private planes seeking space. They touched down, dropped off invited inaugural guests, then departed to bring back more. One group of Indiana Republicans traveled to Washington in an elegant railroad car once owned by J.P.Morgan. Limousines were the preferred symbol of status. “They give you a feeling of pride and accomplishment,” explained a Republican national committeeman from Salt Lake City, “They give you a feeling of enthusiasm for your leaders”
So brisk was the limousine business that all available ones in the capital were quickly leased. Calls went out to dispatch others from as far south as Atlanta and as far north as New York. They poured into the city, vanguards of a new era bearing special inaugural plates with names of the corporations that had leased them. Gliding up to museums and galleries and other public buildings, they discharged women in designer dresses and diamonds and men in formal wear. Society page writers, with press entry credentials to the private festivities, strained for metaphors to describe the display of affluence. Hotel coat racks, laden with mink, “looked like furry beasts.” At Sunday brunches in Georgetown, “furs swallowed the beds.” At a black-tie-and boots Texas party, “a perfumed herd of thousands drank beer and wore emeralds.”
The catering business had never been better. “There are ten times as many parties this inaugural as last time” said Jeff Ellis of Ridgewell’s, a firm that had been waiting on Washington’s social-diplomatic set for generations. Ridgewell’s alone served more than four hundred thousand hors d’oeuvres during the pre-inaugural parites. “I’ve never seen anything like this” Ellis remarked happily. “These people have really fine taste. Rather than shrimp salad, they want the whole shrimp.”
The elitist power brokers knew this and with his Hollywood background Ronald Wilson Reagan was the perfect front man for the myriad of their ideological schemes and voodoo economics that would wage war on progressive society and deal a staggering blow to fairness and equality in the land of plenty. It was the great national regeneration decade and that fabulous and almighty leader was our champion, the iconic president who would make things right, who would deal harshly with those bastards in Iran unlike his milquetoast predecessor, who would restore the national glory and make us that shining city on the hill. After a prolonged darkness clouded by nuance it was morning in America again, black was black and white was white it was Pleasantville in the US of A and as the they say in the movie “what’s outside of Pleasantville?” – it was perfect, it was Americana and it was Ronald Reagan was our national treasure.
Those were the days, the 1980s, the demarcation point from reality and the base camp for our national descent into the abyss of post the 9/11 world of fear and globalist economics. But I am getting ahead of myself here. The Reagan years were the period when America went back to the future in pursuit of that mythical period of greatness and nostalgia that Kevin Phillips wrote about in Post Conservative America. It was a time where a nation wounded by the twin betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate failed the test and rather than gathering together to shape a future that would prevent the amoral interest of a greedy ruling class and their corrupt system from ever again resulting in such disaster we as a nation looked into the mirror and were horrified at the monster glimpsing back, we were in denial and in desperate need of a return to better days. As Phillips so aptly put it:
“More precisely, the 1980s must be considered a decade following a twenty-year period of turbulence in which the American people lost their first war, saw a number of prominent leaders assassinated, their first President forced from office, their currency at one point lose 95 percent of its value against gold, and generally came to feel that their “Heaven-bless’d nation” was somehow no longer favored.”
The possibilities were infinite, an increasing prosperity for the well to do and government cheese for the rest. The days of ketchup as a school lunch vegetable, Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, Rambo exacting blood vengeance in Vietnam, Sonny and Rico kicking ass clad in Armani, Marty McFly and Doc time tripping in a flying De Lorean, J.R. and Alexis flaunting wealth and power, MTV in every household through the miracle of cable, televangelism exploded and took the first steps towards allowing video preachers to become political kingmakers and the personal computer became a force that would eventually transform every aspect of our lives and society. We were mesmerized by the images on the tube, the VCR made available fantasy at the fingertips in your very own living room and the bread and circuses made it all the easier to ignore the looting and dismantling of the infrastructure in the background.
“In the eighties the symbiosis between Reagan and television raised new questions. Was it possible the predominant values of success, winning, fame, and fortune that television transmitted into American homes had begun to manifest themselves in the character of the country? Were Americans becoming what they saw? Were they being held hostage by the miracles of their own technical inventions? Did their repeated exposure to fictional happy endings create an appetite for more of them in real life and make it more difficult for them to face lifes realities?”
“Reagan affected television and the viewing public in two significant ways. First, and most important, was the power of his own soothing personality. Both he and television offered new opportunity for diversion and helped breed a new passivity in public life. Under Reagan’s lulling spell and the television trance, increasing numbers of Americans became spectators instead of participants. Politically and personally they were couch potatoes.”
Couch Potatoes Who Bought The Myth and Continue to Do So
To reiterate my point, nearly every serious problem that we face today is rooted in the surrealism of the Reagan years and the ability of the administration to utilize the fixation with the tube to gradually turn up the temperature on the pot in which the boiling frog sat slowly cooking to death in such gradual incremental increases in heat that it didn’t even notice. The frog was us and it continues to be us as the ruthless servants of the Establishment that are the Clintons are using the same “tougher than the rest” strategies to prevent any realistic chance at national salvation and reform to once again keep going back to the future.
Pennsylvania is our new beginning to a story that is nothing more than a mediocre remake of those rootin-tootin freak shows that we have been weaned on for so long that we believe that they are reality.
What the fuck is next? Morning In America II.
By Ed Encho
On Little Cats Feet
I recently had the opportunity to catch the late Aaron Russo’s provocative and controversial America: Freedom To Fascism . While it was an uneven film (in my opinion far too much time was spent on the tax segment) and had a tendency to become drawn out it is a worthwhile watch that I would recommend primarily for supplementary knowledge to those who already have a basis in the true reality of a rotting system gone to fascist seed. The movie is far too much for newcomers still soundly asleep in a world of make believe and television. Regarding the film, I can certainly understand why the subject matter is so volatile (the title itself is so in your face that it alone ensures censorship in the corporate media) and the widespread acceptance of even a small portion it would be very dangerous to the established order. The film has been largely suppressed by the mockingbirds of the MSM (swift boated when mentioned at all) who along with the bought politicians are nothing but servants of a filthy and corrupt oligarchy.
The same cone of silence also extends to the two outstanding BBC documentaries by filmmaker Adam Curtis. The Power Of Nightmares explores the parallels between the neocons and the Islamists and dares to debunk the war on terror as nothing more than being conjured up for the sake of political expediency. The Century of The Self examines the origins of the use of propaganda in manufacturing consent in America based on the ideas of Freud that were used to combine the ideas of capitalism and democracy. Both are fascinating and are absolute musts for those seeking to make sense of all of this insanity. Neither been aired domestically nor are they available on DVD for the obvious reasons that they represent a serious threat to the illusory world that we now inhabit. These two are every bit as incendiary as Russo’s film although on a different level in that they make a damning case against beliefs long held dear by pulling back the curtain to allow a glimpse at the ugliness behind. They are both widely available online.
America: Freedom to Fascism is far more militant of a film in that it dares to attack the sacred cows of the legitimacy of the federal income tax as well as the Federal Reserve System itself. I felt that the inordinate amount of time spent in attacking the tax system took away the very serious issues that are addressed after the opening. Russo trots out tax protesters, former IRS agents and to his credit does make a case that there is no law that actually requires a federal tax on individual income. You can argue that six ways till Sunday and you are always going to lose because as the familiar saying goes “you can’t fight city hall” and there is no way in hell short of an outright revolution that the federal government is ever going to cave in on their sucking out of money from the average working Joe.
I think that a far more compelling argument would be to state that there is a systemic problem where there is taxation without representation unless you are a high roller or a tax cheating corporation – either of which is able to unfairly rig the system so as to not pay their fair share. The class war that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan and was the midwife to hellspawn like the insipid Grover Norquist has been nothing other than a looting spree and a mass redistribution of wealth unseen since the days of the robber barons and gilded age exploitation. No surprise since Karl Rove is on record as idolizing the infamous Mark Hannah but that is a story for another time. In short the tax portion of this film detracts from the rest of it and leaves it open to attacks from those who like to pigeonhole tax protesters as ‘money cranks’ and extremist fanatics.
When American: Freedom to Fascism finally gets past the hurdle of the overly long income tax segment and into more sincerely important territory is when the transition is made for a look at the Federal Reserve System itself. This is an area where Americans (including myself) are lacking in even rudimentary levels of knowledge over this monolithic Ponzi scheme that has it’s hooks into every single one of us. Russo does well in giving a high level overview of this banker’s cartel and the unaccountable power that it has over not only our national economy but to each and every American who entrapped in an inescapable web of debt as a fly stuck in a spiders we. The Fed is an entity created by banking interests to ensure that their rapacious practices and vulture capitalism would be a preeminent force in enslaving debtors in perpetuity to a system where money is created out of nothing and backed by nothing and which facilitates the practice of state sanctioned usury.
Rather than even attempt to explain the complexities of the Federal Reserve and the con game of fractional reserve banking – I am certainly no financial genius although I do have an acute sense of smell for something rotten I suggest that readers all do their own research and draw their own conclusions. Russo’s film is only a jumping off point for taking a knife to the stinking carcass of a looming economic disaster due to this particular house of cards built on a foundation of greed. Check out G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature From Jekyll Island, he is in the film and is able to cut through the banking and financial jargon to make a case against The Fed in layman’s terms. The only problem that I have with this book is that it is referenced often by fringe elements of the extreme Christian right (and the paranoid anti-United Nations freaks fed by the delusions of Timothy LaHaye and the Secretary General Antichrist of the Left Behind empire) who also take issue the monetary policies of this country but I would not let that discourage anybody from taking a look at it. There are many other books and other materials out there to back up Griffin and to expose the system as the debt slavery sham that it is. I would recommend the short video Money As Debt as essential viewing – and pass it around too!
It is when America: Freedom To Fascism gets into the rise of the police state and the surveillance society when it is at it’s best. The erosion of civil liberties and the implementation of programs more commonly associated with totalitarian systems since the Reagan era (and even prior to that but that is a seriously indepth topic for another time) that have been accelerated during the reign of the Bush-Cheney-Neocon Axis of Evil is an existential threat to America. The corporatization of our voting processes through black box vendors like Diebold make all elections subject to being rigged by those with vested interests and proprietary software place the machines outside the authority of local elections officials. As Joe Stalin once famously said: “Those who vote decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything”. Stalin would be undoubtedly be a high level neocon were he alive today.
There is a look at the increasing use of RFID chips for tracking purposes. These little electronic spying devices were rolled out by corporations ostensibly to manage inventory but are being used increasingly to monitor consumer behavior and demographics for marketing. The technology is here right now and is examined in depth in the book Spychips by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, a copy can probably be picked up used on Half.com or some other online bookseller but this is not futuristic paranoid stuff…it’s real. Worse the corporatists and interests within the government have designs on using this and similar technologies to use for social control. Pets are already being implanted with tracking chips and the fear mongering media uses lurid stories of child abductions to soften up the public for implantation into humans. The possibility that Americans one day in the not distant future will be tracked and managed like a laboratory rat faster than you can say Amber Alert is an imminent danger! Of course our friends in the mainstream media will soothingly assure the public that it is only for our own good and will protect us from the ‘terrorists’ and that any who object are conspiracy theorists or more ominously those who have something to hide. After all, what good American wouldn’t trust the word of Homeland Security?
The Orwellian USA PATRIOT Act that was rolled out in the aftermath of 9/11 guarantees that the police state was already in the planning stages and waiting for an opportunity. The attacks presented that to a ruthless fascist elitist element who had rose to power on the backs of an idiot scion with a brand name and a rigged election took advantage of that opening. And have used every minute since that day to destroy the American system and that ‘goddamned piece of paper’ the U.S. Constitution. This was all planned. Paranoid? It’s a compliment in these days of mass ignorance, fear and apathy. I strongly recommend this movie despite it’s flaws because it scares the living shit out of the establishment. It can either be purchased or it is widely available on the internet as are the Curtis films. See them all now….while there is still time but the clock is ticking.
And now with the public growing restive and the war plans for Iran still on the table with that pesky Admiral Fallon out of the way the neocons and the oligarchy are desperately trying to complete their deal with the devil, the consumation of which led to 9/11. They are like rats slowly clambering on top of each other while drowning in a septic tank largely filled with their own shit and as the dead enders that they truly are would rather go with the scorched earth plan than face the condemnation and justice that they truly deserve….just look at Dick Cheney, do you really think that you can negotiate with terrorists like that?
Basically just fuck them, keep it up truth seekers, rebels and patriots because every little bit of research is yet another slice in the death of a thousand cuts that these global fascists are incurring which will ultimately bring them down. To hell with their scare tactics, just keep circulating the information and circumventing the mockingbirds in the mainstream media. A decentralized swarm attack is the most successful of all battle plans and hundreds if not thousands of individual researchers working to dig up information is what will ultimately dig these fuckers’ graves and god willing we can all live long enough to piss on those graves.
And pay heed to your Second Amendment rights, arm yourselves to the teeth now while you still can before the fascists are able to disarm America through creeping ‘legal’ incrementalism and before the goon squads are able to capitalize on an event where they can pile into their black vans and start picking up the future residents of those KBR camps.They are coming, they are coming to take you down. To take you down to Chinatown and make no mistake that there will be any mercy or a functional system of due process to resort to when the jackboot kicks in your door.
By Ed Encho
Flag Pin Fascists
With patriotic tears
We got the same old men
With the same old fears
Standing at attention
Wrapped in stars and stripes
They hear the phantom drummers
And the nonexistent pipes
-Don Henley, If Dirt Were Dollars
The flag pin thing really rubs me raw for some reason as though putting some ridiculous little metal symbol (likely made in China anyway) on your clothing somehow makes you more American than others, it’s as superficial and dishonest as all of those idiotic yellow ribbon magnets that used to adorn the backs of gas sucking SUV’s before the actual costs of Republican wars of aggression made them too expensive for the average American to drive so now they sit in the garages of over-mortgaged, over-priced McMansions.
The reich wing screeching is now reaching an ear splitting pitch over the failure of Barack Obama to display his ‘patriotism’ by wearing that crappy little pin that belongs more appropriately in a historical context in some European countries where symbols were of the utmost of importance – post Weimar Germany comes immediately to mind as does Communist Russia or for a more international flavor Maoist China. Despite their standard propaganda the modern day Republican Party actually cribs a good deal of their tactics from various authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
Coming in the aftermath of the manufactured outrage over Michelle Obama’s statement that was somehow twisted into her not being proud to be an American (personally speaking I am ashamed to be one right now for obvious reasons but I will leave that for another time) and the Clinton dirt diggers leaking of that oh so Islamic picture of Mr. Obama to the Drudge Report (now a bipartisan dumping ground for fascist filth) the keening of the chickenhawks over his lack of that shitty little pin is offering up a glimpse at exactly the divisive, scorched Earth campaign that the cult of the dung encrusted elephant is going to be running once again as November nears. The porcine propagandist, grand master Karl Rove himself was out pimping the red meat fake patriotism on FOX last week:
Rove: “Look, with all due respect, he is a very left-wing Democrat. He came out of a very radical background in organizing. His record in the Senate is the most liberal, according to the ‘National Journal.’ He has been a conventional far-left Democrat. And we ought to recognize that. As a result, he has these associations and these people he has been comfortable being with who are not in mainstream America. Look, after 9/11, when he said true patriotism did not consist of wearing a lapel pin – – an American flag lapel pin on your lapel, but instead speaking out on the issues, he was basically, with the back of his hand, being very dismissive to millions of Americans who thought it was a patriotic act to put a flag pin on their lapel.”
Colmes: “Does he lack patriotism because he does not wear a lapel pan? Is he basically saying, patriotism isn’t about a pin? That is his point of view.”
Rove: “Alan, I didn’t say that. What he said was that people — he was implicating that people who did wear a flag on the lapel were not true patriots. My point is not — in America, you get to decide whether you want to wear a flag lapel pin or not. What he did though was say, it was true patriotism to speak out on the issue, not to wear a flag lapel pen. He was the one questioning the patriotism of people with flags on their lapels.”
Colmes: “I didn’t get that from what he said. What I got –“
Rove: “Read the statement carefully. He said, true patriotism — quote, true patriotism consisted of speaking out on the issues, not wearing a flag lapel pin.”
Colmes: “He wasn’t questioning people who wore it. He was questioning the war.”
Rove: “No, he was questioning the patriotism of those who did put a flag on their lapel. Admit it. I’m not questioning his patriotism. But he certainly questioned the patriotism of millions of people who felt the simple gesture of putting the flag on their lapel was a patriotic act, and it was.”
Mr. Rove, the man largely responsible for the ongoing exploitation of the 9/11 victims for political gain and the body count from the illegal wars that he acted to sell for the sake of the ‘permanent Republican majority’ (it sounds so much like the Thousand Year Reich that it is eerie but then again Rove has copied Goebbels at every opportunity) continues to rise exponentially is like a bad case of genital Herpes, he just won’t go away. Well if the Democrats had anything even remotely resembling a spine Rove needs to be rebutted with two little inconvenient truths that will never rear their heads even outside the FOX ministry of propaganda studios and they are:
1: Sticking feathers up one’s ass no more makes one a chicken than wearing a flag lapel pin makes one a patriot. (In Rove’s case a gerbil is likely a more desirable object but only speculation on my part because all of those White House logs detailing the visits of one Jeff Gannon have disappeared down the memory hole:
and
2: The great misconception that the flag pin somehow is representative of 9/11 is total horseshit, actually the Republicans who defended arch criminal Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate hearings wore them too. Republicans love to have fun with little thingies like that as is evident from all of those thoroughly tasteless purple band aids that adorned lapels to mock John Kerry during the 2004 Republican National Convention.
It is of little surprise that such criticism comes from chickenhawks and armchair patriots who never had the guts to serve, with the exception of John McCain (a self-admitted “baby killer” and “war criminal”) none of those who are braying the loudest about Obama’s lack of that silly assed little flag lapel pin ever even bothered to put on a uniform in service to their country. As a military veteran myself I find this sort of rhetoric deeply offensive, almost approaching the level of revulsion and contempt that I have for those whose real idea of supporting the troops is sitting on their asses in front of the television and pumping their fists like they were cheering for a goddamned football game while the body bags continue to come home containing the remnants of what used to be our finest young men and women who were blown to kingdom come for the freedom of dittoheads to remain snake mean and willfully ignorant.
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. They are the armchair patriots, and they are being used by fifth columnists who really do hate us for our freedoms. The insistence of the most vile of all, the Republican party, a group that has come to symbolize the darkest of all American traits to ‘wave the bloody flag’ and tar all others as disloyal and treasonous is a low point in our nation’s history.
Of course being a Democrat he is by that very association deemed `unpatriotic’ and a `coward’ in using the dastardly labeling of 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 tyranny enabling double speak and race baiting, they have a little something for everybody.
Festering resentment towards women? Welcome to the party.
Hate Arabs, Mexicans and Blacks? Step right in.
Do you fear those that want to kill us because they hate us for our freedoms? Worry not.
Think that the liberals are destroying the country? We do too.
Interested in killing em all and letting God sort em out later? Yesssss.
Are you on God’s side? Hallelujah, so are we.
Do you think Muslims are terrorists and agents of evil? That’s why WE are going to kill them.
Do you want to defeat the homosexual agenda? We are on your side and God is too.
The Constitution? It’s just a goddamned piece of paper, we have our flag pins!
The Republicans have made hay out of their twisted exploitation of the phony patriotism tactic and they only continue to piss on the graves of every American serviceman who ever gave his life for this country with their exaltation of fascism swaddled in the stars and stripes. Give me reality, not some whacko fantasy about who is more patriotic than the rest. To use the words of George Bernard Shaw “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to other countries because you were born in it”. I am conducting a trivia contest as to which 1930’s nation was the one where patriotism and the worship of the almighty state were exalted above all else.
A nice little patriotic swastika adorned lapel pin is the prize to the lucky winner.
John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?
“I am a war criminal; I bombed innocent women and children”
-John McCain
So in what should be no surprise to anybody it turns out that John McCain is really no different than say Rudy Giuliani outside of military service of course but I’ll get to that in awhile. He is a charlatan, a philanderer, a hypocrite, a panderer and a man whose judgment and hair trigger temper should not allow him to occupy the oval office, that is if anything resembling a change is really to occur. McCain has always portrayed himself as this great incorruptible figure who would stand up against the special interests, reign in the torture state and work in something resembling bipartisanship that would somehow defuse the festering hatred that has transcended the ‘my team vs. your team’, win at all costs corrosiveness that has created factions in America that could one day equal the kind of generational hatred that is passed down in Europe and far less exceptional places that God’s other chosen land. He was a maverick, he was different and even Mr. Republican himself the great Rush Hudson Limbaugh III who is the personification of every single element of the GOP hates his guts but then the story broke.
The damned liberal New York Times in typical style as the propaganda arm of the great commie liberal conspiracy that has been doing it’s damned best to over throw this great and mighty country had the audacity to launch a dastardly smear campaign against McCain with a story of a potential affair with a telecommunications lobbyist that was really so much more than the lurid sort of lemming food sex scandal that the American idiots regularly wallow in. It really isn’t about sex at all but about corruption, about the great John McCain wallowing in the slop with lobbyists, lying to cover it up, bringing pressure on the Times to withhold the story until after Super Tuesday and then there is that ugly little thing about playing games with the campaign finance laws. So despite the frenzied attempts by the neocons to change the subject to the damned liberal New York times over Manchurian Mac’s alleged sexual dalliances the far bigger bombshell in the story is that the ‘straight talk express’ is nothing more than another corrupt business as normal whore house shuttle. There undoubtedly will be more on this story of corruption, lies and the public relations spin that has allowed for the canonization of yet another of the scoundrels who have so thoroughly contributed to the moral rot of the empire, you can count on that.
What the Times story does to a larger extent is to catapult the propaganda and allow for a look at McCain’s serial dishonesty, his fervor for war and his veracity as a ‘war hero’. Put quite simply, any man who comes out in favor of preserving the Bush-Cheney junta’s dictatorial right to use water boarding, a torture method so foul that it was used by the masters of the Spanish Inquisition while trying to parlay his own past as one who was tortured into political power while playing up his victim status as a POW who was also reportedly tortured is amoral, cynical and exploitative. A portrait of a career charlatan is only slowly emerging although the signs have always been there back to his involvement with the Keating Five scandal and running up to his hijacking of the Iraq war and occupation as his hallmark issue stating that despite the obvious facts that ‘stuff was getting better’ when the carnage raged and the bodies stank in the streets, rotting and being eaten by packs of starving dogs outside of the Green Zone. There was that ridiculous stroll through that market with Lindsay ‘five rugs for five bucks’ Graham with nearly half the fucking army in tow that was exposed as so much stagecraft during that now famous 60 Minutes segment last spring and McCain’s political aspirations appeared to be on life support. But that was before the Surge and the Vichy Democrat’s surrender on efforts to stop the war that they lied about in order to be given control over Congress in November 2006. McCain was suddenly off the ropes and back in business again.
And like Flintstone with “Gazoo” every time that McCain found himself in trouble on Iraq he just invoked “General Petraeus” and was out of any jam and his symbiotic relationship with Joe Lieberman which went over well with the same high rolling Jews that fund the campaigns of those of both parties who are acceptable to the neocons as well as his shilling for the American Enterprise Institute put Insane McCain back in the game again. He used the wizardry of a master in getting out in front with the game plan to incinerate everything that moves within 1000 miles of Israel which of course makes the Raptureheads pee in their undergarments in anticipation of their teleportation while the world immolates. But the “Surge” isn’t working, it has all been one gigantic bait and switch in which taxpayer money is buying time by paying off Sunni insurgents not to fight Americans. That dirty little deal along with the ethnic cleansing have more to do with the reduction of violence along with the hermetically sealed media than any real political success. It’s all to buy time so that dirty little fuck up in Mesopotamia doesn’t play havoc with the election or any of the two chosen neocons who would be warmonger in chief, McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And if McCain is so brazenly lying about his holier than thou bullshit about being different and above corruption you really have to wonder how much else of his tailor made for mass consumption by the moronic, television addicted lemmings is also more of the same bullshit. Could he also be lying about Vietnam?
Let’s talk about Nam, that nasty little quagmire in the American subconscious always waiting to be sprung like a bouncing betty whenever it is politically opportunistic, we are still fighting that fucking war and will continue to fight that fucking war until we as a nation are ready to collectively acknowledge the accumulated weight of all of our military interventionist sins and to seek atonement. That John McCain can continue to trade on his Vietnam record as he runs his campaign on the promise of more war for the rest of all of our lives even if it bankrupts us and rapes the futures of those who have yet to even be fucking born. Now I have a lot of problems with this great narrative that McCain has constructed for himself about being this great war hero, first let me say that there is absolutely nothing fucking heroic in dropping bombs on civilians and McCain himself has come out and admitted this when questioned during interviews, he correctly called himself “a war criminal” during another 60 Minutes interview back in 1997.
The Democrats and the more flaccid spined liberals out there with their pet issues snap to attention when it comes time to bestow their platitudes on the great and almighty war hero John McCain who will happily continue to send young men and women to their deaths if and when he snags the keys to the war machine. I have always found this sort of deferential treatment to be not only pathetic but self-defeating as well, the quisling Dems to use a sports analogy are all too happy to spot their opponent a two touchdown lead before they even take to the field for the opening kickoff. This is an area where I am flummoxed especially after the treatment that was given to John Kerry (a foofy haired elitist doofus who actually was something of a war hero) when he was savagely swiftboated by a Karl Rove operation back in 2004. Of course Kerry also came out against the war in his now legendary winter soldier hearings that peeled back the flags from the faces of the armchair patriots and the deniers which was and to this day is still a big taboo in a country that bathes in the blood of the innocent that are murdered by the war machine that has made death out top national export. It is far easier to decry Kerry for statements such as:
“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Glorifying a man like McCain for whistling Dixie and then bombing the fuck out of people who he didn’t even have the guts to look at when they were sucking in jellied fire with their dying breath while vilifying Kerry is so typically Amerikan. McCain saluted the flag, did time in the Hanoi Hilton where according to who you believe received favorable treatment and then he made anti American propaganda videos of the same sort have carved a scarlet letter of “treason” onto the forehead of Jane Fonda for the last three and a half fucking decades not to mention every person who speaks out against our great wars of conquest rather than to just be a God kissed patriotic American who is content to watch television, go shopping and be a productive little cog in the murderous machine of industrialized murder that is our grand stinking capitalist empire of rot and death.
John McCain is no war hero, he is a war criminal that is plain and simple and in addition to being a war criminal he is also by definition a terrorist for committing terrorist acts against unarmed civilians and no amount of hand wringing fake moralizing is ever going to overturn that ugly and rancid little fact. War IS terrorism and no man who praises war as a way of life as does McCain is nothing other than a terrorist himself. Consider the irony of that particular statement for a minute and the now institutionalized phony war on terror that has brought the war, eternal war home to America as our way of life. None other than that flaming leftist Patrick J. Buchanan acknowledges that war is terror in relation to the bombings of Japan that would bring about an end to World War II and spawn the post war era of as Gore Vidal calls it “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. Buchanan despite the blanket discrediting he receives both by the pathetic mess that passed for the left these days and the neocon right is actually spot on about many things in these horrible days of a rotting empire and he asks the question: “But if terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?”
The dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualties. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun. Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’s excellent documentary the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.
In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.
On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as referenced in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of aggression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations. The truth is that America has a long history of employing and glorifying war criminals, Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both George Bushes were the pros but John McCain is a rising star who with his star-crossed past and maniacal zeal to wage war could yet challenge every one of them when it comes to racking up the body count, and he already has kills on his personal ledger.
Considering how McCain has been right up there with putting his seal of approval on George W. Bush’s torture state despite the alleged hell that he endured while a POW not only makes the story itself suspect but any man who has undergone that sort of torture and who comes out in defense of torture is a goddamned hypocrite and is unfit for any sort of high political office let alone that of Commander in Chief.
John McCain’s free pass as a strait shooting war hero needs to be revoked for it is now apparent that he is neither.
Eugenics American Style
One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.
-Trent Reznor
I have seen the future and it is Idiocracy, a movie that is more outright horrifying than Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Brazil or any other dystopian vision because it is already happening. I’ll get to that in a little while because something has been troubling me for awhile and I need to get it off my chest because it relates to the movie or could at least serve as a prequel. If ever there were to occur an American version of the Renaissance rest assured that it will not be centered in South Carolina, the capitol of peckerwood nation. The recent painfully embarrassing performance of Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton whose rambling, clueless and nonsensical answer to a question of why did she think that approximately 1/5 of young Americans were unable to find the USA on a map is a searing indictment of the mass stupidity that permeates this country today in the era of American Idol, Survivor and other simple-minded gravy for the brain that passes for entertainment post 9/11.
Such incredible ignorance is a primary reason (along with rampant corruption and electoral fraud) that George W. Bush is the two-term reigning king of Idiot Nation. So thoroughly indicative was her example of damning this brain dead colony of shambling zombies whose gray matter has been rendered into so much mental mush as a result of the constant assault by charlatan politicians, too much religion, tabloid trash culture, too many video games and an overdose of television torpor that establishment boob Matt Lauer of the Today show had to feature her in a nationally televised do over in a desperate attempt to shore up confidence in the moronic progeny of Ronald Reagan’s shitheel generation that we really can’t be that stupid can we? While being soundly defeated by fellow former Confederate states Mississippi and Alabama for the dubious honor of being the fattest state in the nation the embarrassing performance that was a smash hit on You Tube of Miss Teen South Carolina should ensure that the Palmetto State will remain among the largest bastions of ignorant, knuckledragging, regressive, red state fascist raptureheads in the Republican empire of the reconstituted Confederacy born out of Richard M. Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Of course the south couldn’t have become the incubator of the ‘perfect’ American for the Republican thousand year reich without a good amount of that old time religion updated to mesh perfectly with the authoritarian types and their war on civilizations. That long haired liberal swine Jesus Christ had to be taught the error ways because a peacenik commie who preached against the evils of wealth was incompatible with his new role as pitchman for corporate dominance and global empire. Thanks to the influence of John Nelson Darby and assorted other lunatics with their premillennial dispensationalism that was juiced by the apocalyptic ravings of Hal Lindsay and later the highly influential Timothy LaHaye of the multi-million selling pulp trash Left Behind series Jesus V.2 now preached the gospel of ‘fuck the poor’, only walks on water when it is on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and flies through the skies with the help of an F-14 that he uses to drop napalm pods on brown-skinned Muslims to the delight of the zombies in the Rapture death cult.
Very little is as simplistic as an abandonment of reason and total surrender to religion as an escape from the cruelty of looter capitalism and the complexities of a technological society with no use for the dumb. It has always worked that way since the earliest civilizations with their worship of the sun god vs. the darkness devil and the promise of an afterlife to those legions of slaves who would taste nothing other than the whip of repression as they erected grand temples so that some rotten son of a bitch of an early version of today’s greedy and vainglorious psychopathic leaders could have his face carved onto on a statue or sphinx. Everything was a result of the favor or the anger of God or the even more simplistic and all encompassing master plan of the almighty. I have to simultaneously experience a sadness and a need to sardonically chuckle every time that some red state simpleton praises God for surviving the natural disaster that just wiped out everything that the rube had and this sort of childlike sort of primitive thinking is exactly what the cynical party bosses, CEO’s and war criminals want because a submissive drone with no actual concept of reality makes a good foot soldier.
The astonishing level of regressive thinking in the United States over the past quarter century or so has saddled the country with an oversexed, mean-spirited, grossly ignorant and maladaptive blight of tens of millions who bear a large share of the responsibility for the erosion of American prestige, morality and economic might that have us teetering on the precipice of something really ugly that could come any day with a government full of war crazed ideologues, a financial system that has been rigged and manipulated by the avarice of the Gordon Gekko/Ayn Rand cult to the point where the entire fucking world economy is on the brink of collapse which is only further facilitated by the 24/7 running of the printing presses at the Federal Reserve and an indolent mass of television lobotomized consumers growing restive now all the credit cards have been maxed out and the rapidly devalued McMansion is no longer a piggybank. We are all fucked thanks to the morons responsible for gross abominations like the Creation Museum or the Holyland Experience and the wart on the ass of humanity that is the Bush administration.
But I digress.
About a month or so back I caught Mike Judge’s brilliantly scathing Idiocracy on DVD, it was deemed unsuitable for any sort of widespread theatrical release by Fox Studios which deliberately buried it and has largely been ignored by a corporatist media obviously uncomfortable with the movie. The should be afraid because Idiocracy just fucking mocks the dumbing-down of American society that is largely the result of the deterioration of mass media, the rise of southern fried religion and the relentless war on the human condition by the rapacious plague of corporatization and a form of looter capitalism that has become cancerous. I have never seen a movie that is so in your face and that obviously made the Fox honchos very uncomfortable because they are largely a culprit in the ongoing process that has stupified what was once a well informed country with real values. The movie is a bit juvenile and overly loaded with scatological references but that is the point it is trying to make and those who don’t get it bring to mind the famous poker saying that if you don’t recognize the rube at the table it’s you.
The plot features Army dullard Joe Bowers, a man of completely average intelligence and a prostitute named Rita who are the subjects of a secret military hibernation experiment of limited duration. Well things go awry and the officer in charge is ensnared by a sex scandal bringing shame and a base closure and a much longer nap for Joe and Rita who don’t wake up until they are freed from their test chambers during the great garbage avalanche of 2505. They are awakened to find a world that is totally FUBAR, the infrastructure is crumbling and looks as though it were designed by idiots (or privatized out to greedy contractors skimming their cut at the expense of quality), the commercialization of society is complete with corporate logos everywhere and characters named after fast food and commercial products “Dr. Lexus”, “Frito” and “Beef Supreme” among them who speak in crude tongues, hurl insults and pejoratives and berate Joe for “talking like a fag”. It’s as though red state social engineering has created a Karl Rove style Republican dream of a reverse master race of abject morons with hair trigger tempers and a birthright of simplicity – George W. Bush’s anti-intellectualism on steroids. The entire population has become twentieth generation trailer trash who in a gross parody of Social Darwinism have outbred those with any intelligence or discretion. The opening few minutes that show how this happened are as classic as they are painfully true with the educated put off reproduction for their careers while the rednecks bred like rabbits.
Centuries of consumerism and too much television have dumbed down the populace to the point of borderline retardation and the greatest advances in technology are huge multi-screened televisions, huge devices that allow for multiple reality trash programs to be presented simultaneously while the viewer is ensconced on a huge plush chair sucking down goo from a tub while reveling in the delights of shows the likes of Ass, Ow! My Balls and the Masturbation Channel. Those three examples are the descendents of current era moronic programming like Cavemen, Jackass, The Biggest Loser and the explosion of potty humor as entertainment provided by movies featuring such Earthly delights as diarrhea daquiris, cacophonies of farts and belches, flying wads of semen used as hair gel and horny teenager boners buried in mom’s homemade apple pie that have made the society dumb and dumber as well as ruder and coarser. Corporations like Starbucks now offer handjobs as an enticement to buy a latte and Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers – the corporate satire is as hilarious as it is mostly absent from the media and society today and the part of the movie that takes place at St. God’s Memorial Hospital with the health care system being reduced to a combination fast food joint/casino is down and out classic.
The society that Joe finds himself in is mean, greedy and stupid and the police are drooling overly agressive thugs. After a series of mishaps and an IQ test he is summoned to the White House by President Camacho because he is now the most intelligent man on the planet and up to the task of solving the food crisis that plagues America. The crops are dying because instead of using water (that stuff in the toilet) they are irrigated by mega selling sports drink Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. Joe suggests using H2O and is met with incredulity by the mantra of “It’s got electrolytes.” After causing massive social unrest and unemployment with replacing Brawndo which happens to be the nation’s biggest employer with his idea Joe is taken to an arena for a gladiatorial style event that is a wild combination between Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the local monster truck extravaganza that is televised on FOX which to no surprise is much the same as it is today other than the appearance of the anchors. Joe eventually triumphs and saves the day when the crops grow again and becomes a truly honored hero of Uh-merica. His best advice is to turn off the TV and read something once in awhile and everyone lives happily ever after albeit still bearing the millstone of stupidity passed down by their ancestors.
It’s good advice and should be heeded by a nation gone to seed who don’t bother to pick up a book because the remote for the mind vacuum is much easier to heft and actually reading is just too much of a strain. An astonishing amount of the population don’t even read one book a year let alone a newspaper. Another great suggestion would be to stop choosing politicians based on absurdities like the price of haircuts, their taste in foods (jelly beans, pork rinds), what type of pet they have, their stinking hypocrisy masked by their piety, their promise to open a can of whup ass on ‘terrorists’ and whether or not they are the type of guy that you kin have a beer with. With George W. Bush we have finally seen the rise of the ‘I am a dumbass and he talks just like me’ candidate and anybody who is that fucking dumb just can’t wrap their limited mental capacity around such a thing as a rigged election or two. The scariest thing is that it could get even worse with Fred Thompson, the pope of peckerwood nation being looked upon as a Reaganesque figure by many of the same dopes responsible for Bush Jr. and the threats by the degenerate, sociopathic freaks on the extreme ‘Christian right’ making noises about a third party – can you say Judge Roy Moore? Fred Thompson as a legitimate candidate is a prerequisite to the vulgar smack down champ in the White House in Idiocracy.
If anybody thinks that it is inconceivable that the country would one day be populated by retards if allowed to continue on its current course then they aren’t paying attention. Just pay a visit to your local Wal Mart, megachurch or shopping mall and do some people watching because the prototypes are everywhere. And let’s face it, when the two most internationally known Americans are George W. Bush and Michael Jackson you know we have serious fucking problems and these are further compounded by the big news story of the day is about Britney Spears getting her California drivers license which only further illustrates that we are on the fast track to the land of Idiocracy.
by Ed Encho
The Petraeus Dog and Pony Show
With King George’s shameless proclamation last night that things have improved so much in Iraq that he can start bringing some troops back home(just like a pickpocket giving you ten bucks as a gift after lifting your wallet) Petraeus Week is now in the books. The “Surge” has received due credit as a heaven sent panacea for the blood soaked debacle in the desert and the PNAC plans for regional conquest (or as loony Ledeen likes to call it “creative destruction” are back on track. Even Osama bin Laden made yet another of those amazingly serendipitous appearances that always happen to occur just when the Bush-Cheney junta needs to pull a bogeyman out of the hat although skeptics are wondering just how the big spooky was able to get ahold of O.J.’s fake beard. Of course ‘The Juice’ could probably use it himself right about now given the coming 24/7 media feeding frenzy over an alleged hotel room theft that will knock every relevant event out of the next few news cycles. The sixth anniversary of 9/11 came and went and was amazingly subdued compared to the vast orgy of right wing demagoguery and bombast used to exploit the victims in the past and other than the few memorials the day’s biggest event was the congressional testimony of ‘Potemkin’ Petraeus. Now, perhaps I am being overly cynical but there just may be a coincidence in scheduling the sales pitch on that particular day to once more time shore up the big lie that Iraq is somehow related to 9/11. Hell, I know that I’m a cynic but I have nothing on the rotten bastards who actually run the circus.
It has been a thoroughly disgraceful week that exemplifies how America has come to rot, our institutions infected with the terminal disease of systemic corruption, rampant perversion and raw hubris of Republican rule. The bin Laden video was just so over the top that it allowed what alcoholics often refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’ on just how far down the rabbit hole that we have gone since 9/11. The neocon’s on call fiend has actually managed to get younger since his last really big appearance when he endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket mere days before the 2004 election. Of course much of idiot nation that is already flying low with broken radar in an all encompassing fog of TV torpor buys this bag of horse manure lock, stock and smoking barrel like the good little fearful lemmings that they are supposed to be.
The hew and cry of the Republicans and their fifth columnist media shills screaming like the big authoritarian piss babies that they are over Move On’s General Betray Us ad is par for the course for the red team to whom decorum and rules are of no consequence when they don’t apply to their own tactics. The American Il Duce, Rudy Giuliani even deviated from his pathological ghoulish exploitations of 9/11 long enough to shriek with indignity that Hillary Rodham Clinton had smeared General Petraeus and attempted to tie her to Move On’s blasphemy of America’s newest military hero. The schoolyard bully mentality of a party of punks who go running to tattle to the teacher when they can’t keep the game sufficiently rigged in their favor makes the utter failure of the Democrats to fight back even more infuriating. The irony is that they would enjoy approval ratings much higher than inflamed hemorrhoids if they would embrace their base and Move On whose message is far more in line with the wishes of the American people than the crap shoveled out by the elitist filth and their pocket media. Another of this week’s big lies is that the centrist (aka Reagan Republican) Democrats who are denounced as though they were the second coming of Karl Marx are not nearly as outspoken about illegal wars as paleocons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts and most libertarians. Some of the most withering criticism of Petraeus, a PR flack with political ambitions masquerading as a soldier who was once described by his superior as an “ass kissing little chickenshit” and the off the chain criminal conduct of an administration run amok comes from the principled right who have been marginalized by the neocons. In fact two of the most outspoken blogs/websites against the Bush regime’s reign of terror are libertarian: Lew Rockwell and the outstanding Antiwar.com but they don’t get the establishment’s panties in a wad for the obvious reasons that the entire bogus left-right paradigm that pits us all against each other with sideshow ‘issues’ would be threatened and the sham democracy corporate status quo must be protected at all costs. There is a natural alliance with these people who are equally fed up Americans just waiting to bloom and any seriously minded politicians who sincerely are for reform would be foolish not to reach out.
The Dems are of course posturing and puffing about getting tough on Bush and Iraq and even threatening to block Alberto Gonzales’ likely replacement in rabid Republican ideologue Ted Olson but it’s all just window dressing and only suckers continue to fall for the same con over and over. By now we all know exactly what happens next with these feckless toadies, they just roll over and cave with nary a whimiper. Maybe they should just take Bobby Knight’s infamous advice that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it” rather than to continue insult our intelligence with meaningless rhetoric. While the charlatans are seeking capitulation and compromise American troops and dollars will continue to be fed into the meat grinder that is Iraq. Iran will also likely soon be attacked much to the delight of a certain highly influential special interest group that gives marching orders to the Dems (and that for the sake of argument shall remain nameless) and the Bush crime family will be free to continue their disembowelment of the constitution for another year and a half. It says one hell of a lot about the Democratic leadersheep when even the fucking John Birch Society is more of an advocate for the restoration of civil liberties than the Pelosi-Hoyer-Reid triad.
The elitist mentality of our beltway kings and queens was on full display during the Petraeus love fest. Not only did the entrenched establishment Democrat from the Show Me State Ike Skelton neglect to swear in the four star suck-o-matic for his testimony (Ray McGovern was ousted for bringing this up) but he was reportedly overheard referring to protesters as “assholes” This is the prevailing attitude by the Washington elitists to whom the First Amendment is just another annoying inconvenience. The real asshole is the entire stinking toxic waste dump inside the beltway and the rotten to the core gaggle solons who reside there. They are thoroughly vile, cowardly, corrupt and could give a rat’s ass about either the constitution or the people that they are at least in theory supposed to serve. Given the disgraceful conduct of this new Congress who were given a mandate for change it is long past time to stick an enema nozzle into the festering asshole that is the nation’s capitol and give the bulb a good hard squeeze.
The total failure to end this damned war or prevent the next one as well as the reluctance of any of the presidential candidates to take an aggressive antiwar, pro-worker stance shows why there is so much crossover appeal for a guy like Ron Paul who despite his problematic stance on other issues will END THE WAR. Americans are overwhelmingly against this crap, the illegal wars, the widespread looting, the plague of offshoring, the importation of low wage labor to take jobs that can’t be offshored, the subprime fiasco, unaffordable health care, a creeping police state and all the rest of the indignities of the past six and a half years and they want change.Sadly to this point the Democratic leadersheep and their inept strategists have been loathe to offer up anything other than fascism lite and that just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Bong Hits 4 Paris
In a massive news week chock full of highly important stories like the Washington Post’s massive Pulitzer Prize worthy four-part series on the nefarious machinations of one treasonous pig named Richard B. Cheney entitled “Angler”, a flurry of subpoenas unleashed against a criminal administration, imploding hedge funds, a full frontal attack on Brown vs. Board of Education that essentially overturns the landmark civil rights ruling and the coming return to the segregation of public schools, a Pakistani humanitarian crisis that has left a million people homeless and potentially viable recruits for a resurgent Taliban, another incident of ‘collateral damage’ in Afghanistan with the killing of innocent civilians by NATO bombs, more of the same reigning in of free speech (the non-corporate type) in the bong hits 4 Jesus case, opening the money spigots on corporate ‘free’ speech, more pro-corporate favoritism in bestowed upon the looters and leeches by the state’s involvement in the economy through the sanctioning of price fixing, another cowardly Vichy Democrat cave-in on the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine and the national release of SiCKO and the predatory vultures in the medical industrial complex’s massive counterattack through their compliant little whores in the press.
These were all stories that affect millions that would be considered newsworthy in a time prior to the creeping tabloidism of Rupert Murdoch, media consolidation and the blatant cheerleading for war and advocacy of the oligarchs that have reduced the Constitution to nothing more than “a goddamned piece of paper” to use the words of Dick Cheney’s sock puppet George W. Bush. The corporate media has again succeeded in acting as a palace guard for executive power run amok and instead of acting in the best interests of a democratic society per their first amendment responsibility the greedy moguls have once more served to wash away important events that truly affect lives in a flood of more of the standard lurid tabloid slime and lowball, dirty yellow journalism.
And when it happens the pathetic losers and American lemmings will be prostrated in front of their beloved big screen televisions to cheer on the further exploits of the freed goddess Paris while the split screens festooned with ‘patriotic’ digital images mark the rocket’s red glare as they begin hitting their targets in Tehran. But back to the latest fucking disgrace of the week for the corporatist media. Michael Moore was bumped for Paris Hilton Thursday on that reptilian world champion of divorces and staunch defender of pederast Michael Jackson known as the Larry King Live show. Moore was also banned from that gross temple of iniquity of capitalism gone horribly awry that is the New York Stock Exchange.
The hysterical hyping of the latest terrorist plot by those who want to kill us for our freedoms (HA HA!) was especially fortuitous to the secret government operating out of Dick Cheney’s office because it swallowed whatever smidgen of coverage that that serious transgression against the constitution was allotted. And of course in staying with the official narrative the explosive cars are linked to…drumroll please AL QAEDA the great bogeyman that through design has become a menace to the survival of the civilized world unseen since SPECTRE. James Bond saved the world from SPECTRE but who is going to save the world from al CIAda and the neocons who have infiltrated and overthrown the legitimate government of the United States?
Rejoice Rejoice for Paris Hilton is free and now so is Scooter Libby. Jesus Fucking Christ, I think that I am going to be sick!
The Great American Lemming Farm 
Year Of The Rat
Apr 2
Posted by ttuttle12
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save Us!”…and I’ll look down, and whisper, “No”.:
-From the journal of Rorschach
The day when our shared journey has led us to that proverbial fork in the road has come and the choice that we all make will shape the collective destinies of millions including the children and grandchildren of people who read this. The masses of asses, the haters, the dumbed down, the sheeple and the television addicted drone inhabitants of this rotting empire of avarice and dumbness seek a savior to lead the world’s largest lemming colony to deliverance. They long for a modern day Moses to part the seas of slime, a Jesus to offer salvation and a miracle worker to heal the sores of the lepers and the festering open wounds of the casualties of the war on sanity.
That they are largely inflicted wounds though and it is far too late for any sort of a chance at reconciliation, healing or deliverance, this bitch is going and it is going to go big time, there really is no other way. Well let me clue you in on a little something, miracles are for suckers, rubes and fools of which there is no shortage in this wasted land, this empire of avarice where modern day pharaohs cavort, fornicating in piles of money in the temple of greed. There are no saviors, there is no hope, Superman is not going to fly in to save the day and in what is really the cruelest little joke of all every aspect our lives have been built on lies constructed to control, exploit and manipulate us like cattle to be fed on as vampires and then shipped off to the slaughterhouse when we have served our purpose. Just as the desperate and agonized pleas to the almighty went ignored in the Nazi death camps, in firebombed Japanese cities, in the Cambodian killing fields and in the torture cells of Latin America there will in the end be no salvation, there will only be suffering.
That much my friends is assured, our past inactions have dug the graves for our hopes, our aspirations and have already sold our unborn grandchildren as slaves to pay for those wonderful plasma screen televisions, those vacations and those McMansions that were oh so great until the day that the bill came due and the hidden charges were exacted. The only thing that is now imminent is that each current day will be better than the next one and each next day will be better than the next one after that. The future is darkness, slavery, torture and murder for the deal with the devil was long ago sealed with a slimy dripping French kiss and now the repo men are prowling our foreclosure ridden national neighborhoods to round up the souls.
The soul hunt will provide slim pickings though in this sordid and rotting post 9/11 wasteland for there is little left to be had as far as souls go, they have already been sucked out by the machine. We are a nation of fearful sheep, hateful lemmings, good Germans, TV lobotomized zombies and ‘me firsters’ seeking to consume, consume and then sprint to the vomitories so as to return to consume more. Husks of human beings shuffle about in huge air conditioned shopping malls trying to fill their god shaped holes with cheap sweatshop produced clothing and Chinese made consumer electronics, compact discs and those wonderful new Blu-ray movies that will have the trendy scrambling to replace their hundreds of DVDs with the newer and more expensive versions. As Mencken once said “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” and every mall in this country should have that chiseled in stone on the façade an updated spin on “Arbeit macht frei” for the American Heimat. The shuffling, overweight throng a large percentage gibbering into cell phones about trivialities will shamble from chain store to food court to chain store shopping like the good little patriotic monkeys that they are. They will rack up all of this shit on their burgeoning ledgers of debt, purchased with plastic, the magnetic strips recording the usurious borrowing and ensuring that the passage to perdition has been booked. It is our national destiny.
It started with Ronald Reagan, the great plastic president rolled out by the oligarchy to sell the great story of that shining city on the hill, of national rejuvenation, of the grand star spangled restoration. After all, Vietnam and Watergate, stagflation, corrupt and failed institutions and a long overdue inward look at what ails us as a people was so seventies and such a bummer. Hell, it was time to kick ass and be proud to be Americans again and to bomb the living fuck out of anyone who dared to beg to differ. Maybe that is a bit of an inaccuracy though, it really didn’t begin with Reagan but rather metastasized, our character flaws had always been there which can be expected of a nation with the dirty little secret of genocide of the indigenous population although such foul truths were bred out of us or sanitized to the point where it was truly American to cheer for The Duke to put down them injuns, yee fucking hah! Reaganism was just the demarcation point from reality, Hannah Arendt wrote of the tactic of totalitarian regimes slowly constructing an alternate or parallel ‘reality’ which could then slowly be swapped out. The Reagan era was when America’s channels were changed and the seeds were germinating for the bastard birth borne as the end result of avarice, authoritarianism and denial getting down for a good ménage à trios that set us all on the path to 2008 and a nation of the damned. The four horsemen of the apocalypse in Reagan, George W. Bush, John Wayne and the Marlboro Man have already passed through and have cracked the seals to release the poison that has polluted our souls and stamped our ticket with historical infamy.
The time has arrived to make that nasty little choice between freedom or slavery, revolt or submission, liberty or subservience, acceptance or denial and life as a truly free and empowered human being or a half-life as a fearful broken dog condemned to a existence of nothing more than a revenue source for a dying system that demands nothing other than more, more, more. Americans have become drooling simpletons who prostate themselves before their beloved televisions, taking in the illusion sustaining next hit of E Crack, they fear everything, love nothing of true value, wallow in their delusions and proudly wear their willful ignorance as some sort of a badge of honor on their sleeves. We as a people have been largely reduced to cattle waiting to be chipped for the final plug into the control grid, subhuman husks shuffling around in shopping malls to fill that inner void that never seems close with consumer junk purchased with plastic, those marvelously conceived little magnetic strips recording the usurious debts and booking the passage to perdition as well as building records in massive databases that will soon be able to predict the future by examining trends, here comes pre-crime but why bother to worry about it, there is American Idol, ballgames and checks and balances because we are a country of greatness and destiny so help us God.
Too many out there are looking for the quick and easy fix, the happy ending and the one great savior who will make it all right again so that they can go right back to sleep. They gather at the foot of the mount to herald the coming of the messiah, whether it be the scheming queen and her vicious court of ax wielding thugs and high rolling financiers or the black Jesus the Democrats offer nothing more but the same snake oil in a shinier bottle and the lines have been forming for a run on the sales counter. The most naïve and delusional are bopping around on the so-called progressive blogs many of which have already been commandeered by party hacks as unpaid surrogates desperate for change at least but willing to walk straight into hell with their eyes wide open. They have learned nothing after the betrayal of the November 2006 Judas goats and they are being played as dupes once again.
The Democrats have played everyone for suckers, having shanked organized labor in the back, set up a sham system of super delegates to prevent anyone who would dare advocate for a return to the New Deal ideals rather than the chosen agenda of globalism, neoliberalism and perpetual war for perpetual peace. Those who would dare to stand for a strong middle class, American manufacturing might and a quiet patriotism not based on flag sucking and Duke Nukem foreign policy would never be allowed anywhere near the White House. The ideal new Democrat was Bill Clinton who took a chainsaw to social programs, backed sanctions that starved hundreds of thousands (at least) of Iraqi children, used the military against his own citizens at Waco, sold out the American worker with NAFTA, bombed the shit out of Bosnia, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, deregulated the communications industry and still found the time to slowly suck on cigars that he had inserted into Monica Lewinsky’s cooze in the White House. A real fucking Renaissance man indeed.
But a well kept and corrupt illusion of a political system is the intent of course, always has been and always will be. I quote from William Jefferson Clinton’s mentor Professor Carroll Quigley:
So there you have it, the feeble minded deniers with their standard knee jerk flinging of pejoratives like “tin foil hatter” and “misogynist” and “anti Semite” are only acting as guardians for this foul system while they bask in the glow of its malignancy for whatever personal reasons that they may have. Be they Republicans their hatreds are sanctioned and their fears of the brown people and the queers are assuaged by the great protectors of all that is good with Amerika and they will be goddamned thrilled to bust the skulls, torture and intern in concentration camps any who dare to disagree. They bathe themselves in the homilies of Rush Limbaugh and a myriad of radical clerics who defend the warfare state as though they were lepers frolicking through the fountains at Lourdes and they find comfort in their shared revulsion of all who are different. The Democrats also do their part in defending the big lie of democracy in that they are as equally devoid of substance and lacking of anything resembling true American ideals as their more bellicose cohorts. The Democrats have gone from FDR and Harry Truman’s party that championed the working classes and valued human dignity to today’s empty vessel that has long ago sold their souls to the company store.
JFK got his head blown off for daring to step out of line and to buck the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” and LBJ was a flawed man, instituting sweeping social reforms while leading this country into the charnel house that was Vietnam which to this day dominates our political discourse although with much subtlety. The Democrats are able to get away with this simply because they pander to a loose coalition of identity based groups, many of which hold views that are deeply offensive to many Americans whose ass backwardness overcomes the fact that they are often good hearted and well intentioned people who are easily manipulated by political charlatans. A good description of today’s jackass party was given in Situation FUBAR from libertarian Lew Rockwell’s website:
Certainly my friends nothing that you have seen here and throughout the blogosphere recently does anything but reinforce that theory. Meanwhile the wars go on and Iraqi
violence is up again.
The only certainty is that there will be more fear, war and oppression and quite possibly a system already strained to the breaking point will fracture completely. The global financial system is on the ropes due to the greed of the rapacious looters of Wall Street who are in the process of being bailed out by a Federal Reserve that is largely responsible for a large share of this nation’s fiscal woes and a propaganda campaign that is every bit the equivalent of the dog and pony show of General Petraeus’s “SURGE” is now being rolled out by Goldman Sachs lackey Henry Paulson to restore faith in our house of cards stock markets and get the suckers buying again. From all indications it is working with a massive rise of 400+ points in yesterday’s Dow Jones Industrial Average but don’t be fooled, the system is clogged with trillions of dollars in bad mortgage backed paper and the housing market is nowhere near bottom yet. Food prices are soaring largely due to the cash cow and political winner in the heartland great big pie in the sky that is ETHANOL which will contribute more to global starvation and a further erosion of household spending, this craze is like just another of those Ralph Kramden get rich quick schemes that always blows up but the candidates are milking it for all that they can get as they whore themselves across the plains and dine at feasts sponsored by Cargill and other agribusiness giants. We still have millions of uninsured, a decaying infrastructure, a mass exodus of American jobs and the roads built by American tax dollars are being leased to foreign corporations who can set their prices on tolls. And there is more of course but the cheap political games go on so why the fuck bother to go into a litany of all that has so obviously gone bad.
And all that far too many people on the current political left can talk about is who is being insufficiently politically correct, ideologically pure or whose minister happens to preach fire and brimstone against the sins of America. Hell, this is so self-destructive and fucked up and desperate that before long all of us rebels and naysayers may even start being denounced as anti-Americans and Al Qaeda operatives by those who are proud to declare themselves members of Team Democrat whose only desire other than to win that bag of baubles and jewels made of paste of political bragging rights is to keep the system that enables their ignorance and disingenuousness in place.
The sad and ugly truth is that none of the electoral politics matter anymore, it is our national destiny to be crucified upon a cross of ignorance for our own sins. For this there will be no absolution.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows that the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight is fixed
The poor stay poor and the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows that the boat is sinking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybodys got this broken feeling
Like their momma or there dog just died
Everybodys hands are in their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
-Leonard Cohen
By Ed Encho
Posted in Election 2008, Phony War On Terror, Political Commentary, Progressive Blogosphere, propaganda, Sham Democracy
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