Category Archives: Terrorism
Print the Legend: The Official Death of Osama bin Laden
Living the Good Live
So he wasn’t in a cave after all. Osama bin Laden, master marketer of mass murder, loved to traffic in the image of the ascetic warrior-prophet. In one of his most famous videotapes, he chose gray rocks for a background, a rough camo jacket for a costume and a rifle for a prop. He portrayed a hard, pure alternative to the decadent weakness of the modern world. Soft Westerners and their corrupt puppet princes reclined in luxury and sin while he wanted nothing but a gun and a prayer rug. The zealot travels light, his bloodred thoughts so pure that even stones are as cushions for his troubled sleep.
Now we know otherwise. Bin Laden was not the stoic soldier that he played onscreen. The exiled son of a Saudi construction mogul was living in a million-dollar home in a wealthy town nestled among green hills. He apparently slept in a king-size bed with a much younger wife. He had satellite TV. This, most of all, was fitting, because no matter how many hours he spent talking nostalgically of the 12th century and the glory of the islamic caliphate, bin laden was a master of the 21st century image machine.
No Hollywood filmmaker ever staged a more terrifying spectacle than 9/11, which bin Laden conjured from a few box cutters and 19 misguided martyrs. When the Twin Towers collapsed, he became the real-life answer to the ruthless, stateless and seemingly unstoppable villains of James Bond fantasy. It was necessary then, to find him and render him mortal again, reduce him to mere humanity – not just as a matter of justice but as a matter of self-defense.
They could have captured him, but that would lead to the hassle of putting him on trial. Besides, what if he revealed his long connection with the CIA and US officials? Can’t have that. So the kill order was given, along with a quick disposal of the body, mafia-style (as in “sleeping with the fishes).”
So it goes….
Al Qaeda the Phantom Menace
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!
Fred Thompson? Why Not Fred Flintstone?
Still desperately seeking to reincarnate the right-wing crackpot, commie basher, fink and phony western hero turned Social Darwinist pitchman Ronald Reagan the flailing remnants of the juggernaut that was the Republican party is casting a longing eye towards that little glass screen and getting high off of the fumes of that sweet opiate high that emanates from the national cult of celebrity. After last week’s national fucking embarrassment of the South Carolina GOP debate exposed the gaggle of goofballs competing for a shot at King George’s throne and all of the powers of the unitary executive as a bunch of amoral hucksters, charlatans and fear pimps the Republicans need to rapidly find a plan B. Outside of Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s daring to bring up the real stuff and not the sideshows of fear, abortion and those damned homosexuals the bunch that was trotted out in Columbia were just more of the same finely suited shills for a nation gone to seed.
Rudy Giuliani: His pompous grandstanding and misinformed smackdown of dark horse Paul’s introduction of the unwelcome and alien concept known as reality was a testament to both his shameless pandering to the red state fascists as well as his sole ownership of that holy grail of Republican politics that is 9/11. After all, he did happen to be the mayor when the fucking attacks took place and he was in the streets as he likes to boast primarily because the oily ass clown had his command center in WTC7 – you know, the building that just happened to fall down hours after the twin towers were hit? And did I forget to mention that his wife was once employed by a company that murdered dogs?
Mitt Romney: Another Massachusetts flip-flopper with the looks of a matinee idol and the charm of a repo man but make no mistake, Romney is a slithering snake who will sell out everybody in his quest for the White House. Hell, John ‘Frenchy’ Kerry rode the straight talk express compared to this ‘Bean Town’ bullshit artist who is the most conniving rat outside of Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award winner “The Departed”. Romney is a triangulating flim flam man trying to parlay his anchorman good looks into landing the GOP nomination by advocating expanding Gitmo because we just aren’t fucking torturing enough people already. Would you buy a car from this man?
John McCain: Another flip-flopper trying to have it both ways on every issue while at the same time sucking up the black ops political fixers of the Bushreich who laid him low with slander and push poll insinuation in South Carolina in 2000 and recently departed radical cleric Jerry Falwell. McCain is as corrupt as they come despite the ‘maverick’ media hype, don’t forget the Keating Five scandal and his unholy alliance with that bloodsucking little prick Joe Lieberman. There was the great Baghdad market photo op where he needlessly exposed our troops to harm and that likely resulted in the abduction and slaughter of 21 of the market workers whose lives were sacrificed for the Manchurian candidate’s vainglorious stroll through the Mesopotamian charnel house.
Duncan Hunter, Tommy Thompson, Manny, Moe and Jack are irrelevant and I won’t even bother including in the group the three retrograde moron poltroons who proclaimed that they didn’t believe in evolution or Ron Paul who as a man who dared to bring up that inconvenient about the disastrous blowback that occurs due to our longstanding foreign policy of stealing resources, propping up murderous dictatorial regimes and spreading ‘democracy’ at gunpoint. He has already been mocked and marginalized by the fifth columnist shills in the pocket media and will very soon be unceremoniously dumped from the ‘debates’. The LAST thing that the Republicans or the establishment in general wants is a party pooper who could give away the whole game.
To further stack the deck for mass consumption (aka lemming food) the ‘debate’ was held in front of a Foxed up, carefully screened audience of Neanderthals, outright sadists and red state fascists and knuckle-dragging peckerwood morons straight out of Mississippi Burning who would be certain to whoop it up for the cameras whenever the designated fascist talking points were spewed. Take the raucous applause when the goodfella Guiliani tried to shank Paul for his comments on bombing and blowback which would form the basis for the operatives and FOX fifth-columnists to launch their swift boat attack, or the hoots of approval during mentions of torture which in the pre-9/11 world was something that the bad guys resorted to, back before America the land of the free and home of the brave took that dark journey through the looking glass and emerged as Amerika land of the fearful and home of the slaves.
The latest American hero, psychotic torturer Jack Bauer’s name was mentioned with only slightly less reverence than that of the Gipper during the previous get together showing with ever more clarity the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality in TV nation.
I already looked at the dangerous influence of FOX’s smash hit 24 in one of my recent posts entitled Jack Bauer: America’s Favorite Nazi and the barrage of references to torture and Bauer by men seeking to wield the power of what is arguably the world’s greatest military machine and intelligence network should terrify any sane citizen of this rapidly deteriorating republic as well as those who it targets as it’s enemies: both foreign and domestic and if I were Michael Moore I would be seriously looking into applying for citizenship in a country without an extradition treaty with Der Heimat, but more on him later.
It is quite obvious that none of the buffons onstage stands a snowball’s chance in hell against the long pre-selected candidate of the financial oligarchs, the blood barters and AIPAC to carry the day in a general election (presuming that it hasn’t already been fixed by Karl Rove’s chicanery) against Queen Hillary. The philandering fascist dwarf Newt Gingrich is still threatening to slime his way into the race like a starving rat crawling into a house through a dryer vent but his liabilities far outweigh his massive ego so he is toast even if he did appear on James Dobson’s national brainwashing network to give a mea culpa over his adulterous ways. None of this had to happen either, but the carefully cultivated successor to that great phony western hero iconography George Felix Allen went down in a blaze of ugly public racial comments, hubris and lurid tales of stuffing deer heads into black folks’ mailboxes during a Senatorial reelection campaign so completely bungled and mismanaged by the lamentable Dick Wadhams that it could have been Bob Schrum in disguise. But alas, when the dude ranch desperado went down to James Webb last November the GOP was left in the lurch without the next Reagan. As the day is getting later and the situation more dire it is now time for the great man on horseback to ride to the rescue and turn back the hordes of secular liberal varmints and renegade paleoconservatives.
Here comes Fred Dalton Thompson to continue to drag America back to the future.
After the GOP hype machine and the pocket media echo chamber gets finished pushing the supposed virtues and credentials of yet another bad actor as Reagan redux the neocons will have their champion. Personally I have always thought that Thompson sucked as an actor. He spends the majority of his onscreen time towering, glowering and mumbling in a voice that is reminiscent of a man with a mouthful of marbles or Mushmouth from those old Fat Albert cartoons. His performances are totally unimpressive and devoid of any actual thespian skills to all but the red state yokels who are still addicted to reruns of The Dukes of Hazard. But that is strictly my opinion, others see him much differently.
Take Liz Garrigan of the ‘Nashville Scene’ writing at Mockingbird Central more formerly known as The Washington Post. By the time that she gets done building up Fred with her slavering columns like ‘He Sure Can Act The Part’ Thompson will be right up there behind Jesus and Jack Daniels in the Volunteer State and on the rise nationally. Here is a few paragraphs of Garrigan’s nauseating tripe:
Like voters everywhere, we Tennesseans want our politicians to be part professor, part John Wayne. But the top-tier candidates in the GOP field so far — John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney — somehow lack that magic merger of smarts and swagger, which is probably why nearly half of Republican voters say they’re still waiting for the right candidate. Well, their John Wayne is standing just outside the corral.
He is Fred Dalton Thompson, and while he’s no admiral, he has played one in the movies. The former senator is also the third man from our humble horizontal Southern state to be touted as presidential material in the past year, after former Senate majority leader Bill Frist and former vice president Al Gore. Thompson has yet to raise a nickel — or a presidential posse — but grass-roots Republicans from the East Coast to the West already see the man with the low drawl and the towering stature as their political savior. But is he?
It wouldn’t be the first time a B-list actor united the country. In fact, part of what this former ladies’ man has going for him is widespread Ronald Reagan nostalgia. That, and he’s a refreshing contrast to the calculating likes of Gore and even Frist: He’s a guy with a Senate legacy of bipartisanship and even-handedness. (When he led the Senate investigation into 1996 campaign-finance irregularities, he targeted not just the Clinton-Gore White House but Republicans, too.)
And he knows how to play the political game. At the start of his Senate race in 1994, Thompson was a high-dollar Washington lawyer and lobbyist who drove a Lincoln Continental, lived in a condo and wore dark suits and ties to even the most folksy barbecue-and-beans Tennessee campaign appearances. But nobody — nobody with an echo, anyway — accused him of being phony when he eventually decided to prop up his flailing bid with, well, props: a getup of jeans and work shirt and some down-home locomotion in the form of a used cherry-red Chevy pickup truck that he drove across the state and featured in television ads to transform his campaign.
All of which makes him some combination of brilliant and lucky as hell.
But there’s more to it than that. Unlike his Democratic native-son counterpart Gore, who was picked apart like so much Tennessee roadkill in 2000 for his campaign-consultant-directed wardrobe transformation from dark suits to warmer tones, Thompson was rewarded for his makeover from slick silk-stocking lawyer to accomplished hayseed. In 1996, when he won election to his first full term, more Tennesseans voted for Thompson than for any other politician in state history.
RETCH! To cut through the party line bullshit and put it in layman’s terms Fred Dalton Thompson is just the latest version of a bad product made palatable by a crackerjack marketing campaign. Thompson has also endeared himself to the angry hordes of white male loser Michelle Maladong/Glenn Beck watching miscreants with his attacks on Michael Moore for his visit to Cuba during the filming of his new movie SiCKO. Moore’s last movie Fahrenheit 9/11 went far too easy on the fourth generation criminal George W. Bush for my liking but it was effective and exposed some ugly truths to millions of Americans who had been kept in the dark. Attacking Bush and the war is one thing but SiCKO goes after the very paymasters of Thompson and his ilk – the health care lobbying leviathan that finances the legislative fornication at the Washington whorehouses where business is conducted. Look for lots of cash to come sluicing into Thompson’s campaign from that particular group of johns.
Thompson also has the trick of feeding red meat to the jihadists of the Republican base down as he is the lead attack basset hound going after the hated Moore. The GOP vendetta against Moore for his trip to Cuba is just more of the same standard use of the government as an arm of the Republican party Gestapo that has become commonplace during the reign of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil. Thompson is just reading from the same tired old script in flogging that old Cold War nag that just doesn’t get too many folk outside of the most dug in enclaves of dead ender members of the John Birch Society or the raving lunatic Cubans in the Miami area who have already tried once to book the Orange Bowl for an orgy of ghoulishness when Fidel does kick or the mental midgets who watch FOX. Thompson and Moore have had a go round with Freddy spewing invective about internment and Moore challenging the big man to a debate on national health care. Thompson of course did the manly Republican thing – he declined. “I have been looking at my schedule Michael and you know I don’t have time for you” during a staged photo op where the new Reagan was smoking a Cuban cigar.
Ironically Michael Moore is being targeted for prosecution by the Bushist junta under the Trading With The Enemies Act which those who don’t rely on the corporatist pocket media for their information will instantly recognize that this is the same law under which the assets of George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush’s company were seized by FDR for doing business with Hitler’s Nazis. And if what I have heard about the Cuban footage in SiCKO is true then Moore has really done it by daring to rub Rudy and the 9/11 party’s noses in a big pile of the same bullshit that they have been shovelling down the throats of Americans for the past five and a half fucking years. The first responders on 9/11 who are suffering from inhaling toxic substances – which Rudy and the government tried to cover up – were taken to Gitmo by Moore to find that the terrorists interned there get better health care than they do. This is going to be a bomb that will detonate in theatres across the land next month unless the Bushists are able to get their way and suppress it which will be a public relations disaster of unprecedented proportions that even Big Fred won’t be able to overcome.
The Republicans are going to learn pretty quickly that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Instead of continuing to cling to a failed set of anti-American ideologies like a life preserver adrift in a sea of shit it is time to just come clean and admit what is obvious – Reaganism, neoliberalism, imperialism and globalism along with the tapeworm economy that they are all dependent upon DO NOT FUCKING WORK! They have been robbing us blind, dismantling the middle class, selling off the national infrastructure to foreigners, looting the treasury, eradicating the Constitution, setting up a police state, turning the USA into a world pariah and now with the importation of unregulated food ingredients from China just to make a few more fucking bucks they are poisoning us. When in the Hell is enough enough? Do babies have to start dying from the same tainted imported shit additives that have already killed thousands of pets before Americans get off their fucking asses, put down their goddamned remote TV controls and take to the streets to scream “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”?
So instead of rolling out Franken Freddy as yet another pitchman for the same disastrous shit isn’t it time for the Republican party to try something different while there is still an existing framework for a political system in America?
How About – Be Like Ike? For a party so steeped in the past it would refreshing for a change if they would pick another era other than the stone age to emulate.
Fortress Of Fear
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
-H. L. Mencken
Prepare yourselves for the next big thing with the authoritarian right-wingers and the faux Democrats who serve as guardians of the oligarchy for it is coming and coming soon. The wonderful folks over at the RAND Corporation have just rolled out a comprehensive study on terrorism and shopping malls. How fortuitous that a massively publicized Utah mall shooting happened to occur the very week of the report and a blueprint for the transformation of America’s malls into the latest bastion of the creeping fascist police state had already been prepared. Kind of brings back all of those fuzzy memories of the USA PATRIOT Act doesn’t it?
Just when the ghoulish milking of the rapidly cooling gobdobblers of that prematurely deceased sow Anna Nicole Smith had slowed down a bit from the 24/7 circus maximus coverage that drowned out the spiraling Iraqi carnage, rumors war with Iran, the Scooter Libby trial, the sudden case of puppy love that Republican Senators (and that slimy little prick Joe Lieberman) had acquired for the filibuster and the ongoing needless sacrifice of more young Americans we had a winner as America’s next big thing. And even better yet, a story that would have the cowardly lemmings shitting in their pants. The premature demise of the American Goddess of the gauche only served as a warning as to the potential dangers of a bad diet, a neurotic personality, promiscuity, drug abuse and the consequences of a relentless quest to suck the poisoned cock of celebrity (to paraphrase crime writer James Ellroy) but a story that had the potential to once again put the awesome might of the Republican fear machine back online.
Not only did the Salt Lake City shopping mall shootings dominate the media coverage for several days, courtesy the flock of well-placed mockingbirds but the shooter was a Muslim to boot! Talk about the fear pimps hitting the fucking jackpot! If the hysterical overreaction to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force lite-brite style finger flipping boxes that practically closed down the entire fucking city of Boston a few weeks back made a mockery of the quivering leg-pissing culture of anger and anxiety that is so prevalent post 9/11 wasteland of Amerika then the Trolley Square Mall killing spree has propagandists in Der Heimat nearly pissing their own pants in sheer delight. The war on terror can once again be exploited because there are Muslims running wild and the may be coming soon to a mall near you! Be afraid…be very afraid!
The right-wing side of the blogosphere is aflame with anti-Muslim sentiment to begin with and the fact that the killer, a troubled 18 year old Bosnian refugee fits nicely into the Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Maladong and the rest of the reactionary fascist scum’s convenient catch all profile for ‘terrorists’ and is only going to contribute further to the irrational persecution of all Muslims by the roving army of ignorant shitheads that are an indigenous species in this tragically fucked up country. Muslims have been systematically demonized and viewed with wariness and suspicion as potential sleeper cell members ever since the twin towers went down and the electronic media thugs jump onto every opportunity to incite the pathologically xenophobic knuckle draggers who can’t be fucking bothered to educate themselves in the culture of others in any other manner than turning on FOX or Rush Limbaugh. These bastards won’t be satisfied until they are able to incite mass pogroms and there is blood running in the streets, much like their ideological cousins: Hitler’s brownshirts.
Decades of Hollywood propaganda have successfully imbedded the image of the Arab male as a swarthy, foaming at the mouth, sneaky, America hating savage and therefore the image is all too easily conjured forth whenever the government decides that it becomes necessary to use as a tool for manufacturing consent. The recent rolling out of the insipid slogan of Islamofascism serves to perfectly illustrates this strategy. I came across an extremely interesting little book awhile back called American Terminator which examines the affects of movies in shaping and reinforcing the basis for a mythical American exceptionalism and its desire for empire. The following passage is from that book which I strongly recommend to everybody with an interest in just how celluloid serves as a delivery device that is very useful in the indoctrination process.
Fear is essential: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid’ is the American condition. To live in America is to be beset by fear, anxiety and insecurity, to be surrounded by potential harm, enemies and evil intent. And the wolf is always at the door. A nation of optimists is the more usual self-representation of America. Repetitively, Hollywood films conclude with a resolution, a rescue, and the winners ride off into the sunset or snuggle into a warm embrace that reassures us they will live happily ever after. The formulaic ending, however, is necessary because the plot, the narrative, is founded on and propelled by fear and anxiety, the dark essential underpinning of the American condition. For America fear is an original, natural condition, the inescapable birth rite (and birth right), the inherited condition of a fragile existence that must constantly be defended. Without fear there is no America; constant recourse to fear is the motivating force that determines its actions and reactions.
The ruthlessly authoritarian Republican party has a history of using imagery and insinuation to spread the necessary fear that allows them to hold power. Blacks, gays, liberals, strong and successful women and hippies have all served as important segments of society that the GOP can scapegoat but there is nothing like the constant free-floating dread that a mysterious foreign enemy can evoke and when the Soviet Union disintegrated so did the Republican ability to exploit fear and loathing on a grand scale. That was until 9/11 and the fear of terrorism became their ultimate talisman.I would strongly recommend that any who have not had an opportunity to see Adam Curtis’ outstanding 3 part BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares to do so. It is a stunningly powerful piece that dares to pull back the curtain on the great bogus War on Terror and to call into question its very legitimacy. It will never be shown in this country as long as the neocon elitists need their bogeyman to justify their wars and their elimination of civil liberties but it is available on the internet for download at Internet Archive among other sites.
Then there is the latest Al-Qaida video. Is it just me or has anybody else noticed the different spellings of this most terrifying of all terrorist organizations in the mainstream media: Al-Qaida, Al Qaeda etc….just what the fuck is it or are these all different organizations altogether and we have been jerked around by a ruthlessly efficient propaganda machine for all these years? I can’t believe that such an on-message coordinated media machine would be so incompetent as to consistently botch the spelling unless it is deliberate. And take note that the word “Holocaust” has been inserted into this latest injection of mass propaganda for it’s sheer emotional value as well as a conflation with the comments of George W. Bush’s ideological soulmate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
This word has been popping up with increasing frequency as of late with the doomsday clock ticking towards our rendevous with infamy and a nuclear attack on Iran.Never has the fear been so pervasive than it is today and never has an American political party been so cynical, amoral and coldly manipulative in playing to the most base of instincts to retain their iron fisted authoritarianism as the neocon Bush administration. Our airports have already been transformed into fortresses of fear and checkpoints, bag searches, racial profiling, metal detectors, dogs and heavily armed security goon squads are coming very soon to a mall near you. Fear is their ace in the hole and as Herr Goering himself once so succinctly put it “It works the same in any country”.