Dancing With the Corpses

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

-Charles Bukowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress....

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outback's Shameless Corporate War Profiteering

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


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


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

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

Hmmmm..

But what do the dead say?

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

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

So it goes...

Let Them Eat War: Mr. Obama Joins the Club

The moment the first explosions rocked Libya I knew that Barack Obama had just locked down another four years in the White House. This was his initiation, his right of passage, just like laying in a mock coffin and sucking off upperclassmen in the Skull and Bones tomb. By definition every U.S. President is a war criminal and our very own proud owner of the Nobel Peace Prize finally has that most precious of things, a war that he can claim as his own. Not that Afghanistan and Iraq which continue to burn, bankrupt and morally pollute didn’t qualify Obama for the exalted title of war criminal in chief but they are really Bush’s wars, now the Pope of Hope has pissed his name into the snow. Of course there is all of the happy horseshit about the international seal of approval including that of the United Nations but ultimately is is more war for a nation that remains to become weary of such bloody and ultimately futile adventures. The national credit card was long ago maxed out on wars of choice, the monstrous sword of Damocles that is the national debt hangs over the heads of every American currently alive and whomever happens to be born here over the next fifty years but there is always more support for America's favorite pastime - killing brown people.  

Eight years to the day after the abortion that was George W. Bush dialed up the attack on Iraq Mr.Obama took time off from his NCAA tournament bracket and green-lighted the attack on the devil Col. Gadhafi who like the earlier version of the "New Hitler", Saddam Hussein is killing his own people. Now there is change that you can believe in! Never mind the blatant hypocrisy of not launching a similar attack in support of those seeking 'democracy' in Bahrain courtesy of our great friends in the House of Saud (the irony that 15 of the alleged 19 September 11th 'hijackers came from Saudi Arabia is lost on the American sheeple) seeking to preserve their tyrannical and corrupt regime. Now that the warfare state has become the preeminent power in America, only nosing out the genocidal Wall Street speculators whose taste for rotting flesh that they can pick for their daily sustenance and who right now are in an orgy of mania on the level of hardened pederasts as they rut with each other in the commodities pits placing futures bets on crude. The D.J.I.A. (Dick Jammed In Ass) was up 178 points today despite the lack of positive real economic news that benefits the ordinary fucked-over schmuck who is now left to contemplate the coming of five-dollar a gallon gasoline and has yet to get a handle on the accompanying hyper-spike in food prices that will follow like a category five blast of an economic hurricane after the initial tidal surge. In a bit of news that I find both somewhat encouraging for a bizarre reason and terrifying the first signs of violence and rage connected to double digit food inflation manifested itself at a San Antonio, Texas area Taco Bell where a customer named Ricardo Jones went batshit over a price hike on his bag of Beefy Crunch Burritos and engaged in a potentially deadly standoff with local police after he fired an assault rifle at police. Such incidents are to be expected in a culture where gun violence is revered but somehow it seems to be crossing a line when an extra 3.50 tacked onto a bag of burritos could lead to a Heat style shootout with the blue boys.

Think that Obama is going to save you from the rapacious looter capitalist flesh-eaters? Think again, not only is the Pope of Hope now a real live War President but he got the message from the 2010 elections that anything other than boot-licking obedience to the banksters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outsourcing pimps and the rest of the corporate pigs will not be tolerated. Look for Obama to assume the traditional position for commander in chief when it comes to the finance oligarchs, assume the position of footstool and don't ever think of fucking with them again and they will be very kind to his reelection campaign. Barry O. is assured of another term for his willingness to have all of America take a haircut so that the Wall Street casinos can have plenty of comp chips to gamble with. Not even Wall Street and the Chamber are insane enough to tolerate even in moments of amusement the possibility of a Sarah Palin presidency leaving the rapidly fading star of the scumbaggers to embark on some sort of world tour to pitch the virtues of entrenched American stupidity, gross ignorance and xenophobia, today's stop will be in Israel where she will do Wasilla style crack-ho style lapdances for Bibi Netanyahu who likely only is going to spare the time wasted in bothering with her out of some sense of honor among thieves and a gift to his most reliable fifth-columnist William Kristol. Hell, Bibi entertained Fred Fucking Thompson in the run-up to the 2007-2008 GOP primaries so maybe hosting Palin is for sheer entertainment value, it has to be more exciting than trying to converse with a cadaver like that marble-mouthed lug of a bad actor.

CRUISE MISSILE LIBERALS LOVE WAR TOO!

The most disgusting thing of all regarding Obama and his wars, both in terms of military ordnance dropped on civilians and the ongoing war on civil liberties at home is just how down with it all that the liberals are with it all. Liberals, especially liberal Democrats LOVE war, as long as it can be wrapped up in some sort of a self-righteous humanitarian guise.The Libyan adventure gives them one that they can line up and salute for. It has been a long and sad regression on the 'left' since Rahm Emanuel and the conniving Democrats were able to successfully ostracize the anti-war movement back in the run-up to the Pelosi-Reid majority in 2006. Not only was impeachment of the Bushreich war criminals off the table but the law was laid down that any such criticism of the wars was taboo. Afghanistan was embraced by the Democrats as 'the good war' while the Iraq debacle was chained to Bush's neck like an albatross. Cindy Sheehan was excommunicated after she served her purpose to the corrupt and cynical DLC/Corporatist Democrats, MoveOn.org was bitch-slapped after they dared to question the motivations of the great General Petraeus and the assemblage of sycophants and travelers the likes of Ariana Huffington, Cyber Stalin Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and their ilk all fell into line and for the sake of political (and lucrative career enhancing) expedience all learned how to just stop worrying and love the bomb. Obama was elected in a landslide, reneged on his implied promises to close Guantanamo Bay, restore accountability and the rule of law and draw the wars down and the useful idiots on the 'left' all got onboard. Whether it was the silence over matters that would have in years past had them screaming for Bush's head on a pike or a rethinking of antiwar stances to now make supporting the obviously neocon ginned up Iran Green Revolution or biting on the bait of Time Magazine's cover of the Afghan woman with her nose cut off (see above picture) the once pacifist 'left' became apologists for Obama's murderous actions. Even Code Pink renounced their principles and whored out to the war machine once their guy had the keys.

And today as the bombs and cruise missiles continue to rain down on Libya there is more of the same sort of fatheaded liberal apologists, whether it be the insipid Bill Press who is on Sirius/XM morning drive time radio with the daily DNC talking points or the windbag Juan Cole on Antiwar.com Radio the support for this latest filthy, anti-constitutional attack on a country that didn't do one goddamned thing to threaten America was as vomitous as it was definitive as to the true character of the state worshipping hypocrites that they are. Chris Hedges pegged the liberals dead on for the cheese-eaters that they have become, first in his savage and dead bang diatribe Liberals are Useless and later on in his book The Death of the Liberal Class. Hedges, who has come to be the moral voice of these most immoral and diseased of times hits it spot on again in his recent piece Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand that speaks to the abject failure of American liberal institutions as they have been subverted with nary a whimper by a decades running coordinated and now unstoppable fascist/militarist element juggernaut:

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Why is it that there is never any money to find socially beneficial programs, education, the rebuilding of a crumbling infrastructure, renewable energy programs or anything that is useful to actual human beings in America but there is always money for war? This speaks to a deep cancer in our society, our precious green and camouflage clad ‘heroes’ have been glorified through movies, television shows, print media, toys and video games that worship war. Ike knew what the hell he was taking about when he warned of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the accompanying costs to a society that at the time was filled with wonderful capability, economic and scientific advantage and a gold plated reputation coming out of World War II that was only beginning to be tarnished by the rise of the CIA, the brutal public murder of President Kennedy and the subsequent Vietnam War. Something went terribly awry in America around the time of the JFK killing and the same institutional elements behind that coup d'etat are still calling the shots. All else is subservient to the agenda of the American war machine,

As if any more confirmation that Obama was just a lightweight version of  Lyndon Baines Johnson without the social programs was needed the attack on Libya makes any more argument on that one moot. Mr. Obama was nowhere to be seen in Madison during the mass protests that none of the corporate media deemed worthy of coverage, choosing instead to focus on created news like a few dozen or so geriatrics, losers and deluded and easily duped freaks flying Gadsen flags and wearing those faggy Revolutionary War style wigs and tri-color hats descending on town hall meetings to vent their frustration at the mythical death panels that in real life reside inside insurance claims departments. He will however be seen pimping his manhood over the ongoing attacks on Libyan civilians. Hey, Bill Clinton bombed the shit out of Belgrade and contributed to the starvation and misery of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with his bombings and sanctions, cruelty that his own Secretary of State Madeline Albright went on 60 Minutes to obscenely justify as acceptable.

I have to agree with Chris Hedges, Liberals ARE Useless....take my word for it, I ran with the pack for long enough before I was shunned as a leper for daring to say the obvious that if it was wrong under Bush, then it is also wrong under Obama. But being excommunicated from the world of the dueling cults of the jackass and the elephant is just fine with me. 

Meet the New Nazis, Same as the Old Nazis

The corporate media on Sunday sought to play on both the gullibility, the emotions and the misplaced sense of patriotism of the public when launching this bullshit biscuit into the lemming feeding trough. Gadhafi said the strikes were a confrontation between the Libyan people and "the new Nazis," and promised "a long-drawn war."

"You have proven to the world that you are not civilized, that you are terrorists -- animals attacking a safe nation that did nothing against you," Gadhafi said in a televised speech.

The Colonel might just be onto something there. The Homeland (formerly the USA) is currently engaged in an endless series of wars of conquest, employs a blitzkrieg style of attack strategy (shock and awe) in the initial attacks of target countries, is currently engaging in a campaign of ruthless persecution of a religious minority (the anti-Muslim hysteria), runs a gulag of secret prisons and torture facilities, has a government that not only spies on ordinary citizens but encourages them to spy on each other and rat out disloyal or bad citizen type behavior, employs a kangaroo court justice system in which ordinary citizens can be brought up on vague charges (terrorism) or just disappeared (the stripping of Habeas Corpus) and disappeared. All of this is facilitated by a pack of vicious thugs who worship state power (teabaggers and Christian Zionists) and was set into motion by a modern day Reichstag Fire (9/11). Then there is that magnificently efficient system of state propaganda in the corporate media that Herr Goebbels would have been proud of. In Der Heimat versus Hitler’s Nazi regime though at least the trains ran on time and the German infrastructure was the advanced envy of the world, so much that Eisenhower modeled the intrastate highway system after it. Today, in 2011 the roads are pocked with automobile chewing potholes and other defective surfaces, the bridges are crumbling and even when the government tries to do something to shore it up and look to the future as in the national high-speed rail initiatives American Nazi apparatchik in waiting like Florida Governor Rick Scott turns town the money in order to nurture the hatred of his own personal S.A. the teabaggers. Make no mistake, with the coming wave of hyperinflation and dollar devaluation there is going to be plenty of opportunity for the real goons to assert themselves after Obama’s piss-warm and utterly feckless regime which has failed to change anything falls and then the pogroms will begin.

When taking into consideration the OSS/CIA (Wall Street’s enforcement arm) post-WW II assimilation of thousands of Nazis, including serious war criminals into the service of American finance capitalism under the guise of waging the Cold War it’s apparent that the Third Reich didn’t really lose the war, it just changed venues.

Just my two cents

EE

All Hail General Petraeus!

That the great American General David Petraeus is an five-star bullshit artist comes as so real revelation to those of us who have been watching him operate for years. The SURGE was the most successful piece of propaganda in modern American history, turning a brutal and costly sucking-black hole of blood and chaos in Iraq into a golden-hued triumph and then gone flickering into the recesses of the collective American mindset as they turned their channels. The SURGE was so brilliant that Helicopter Ben Bernanke used a similar strategy in pimping a devastated economy, ruined by degenerate Wall Street gamblers and on permanant taxpayer life-support into the near miraculous Green Shoots of recovery. Well, nearly two years after Chairman Ben's vaunted 60 Minutes infomercial the economy is still in ruins, inflation is skyrocketing and food costs driven into the proverbial stratosphere are rapidly destabilizing the globe. So when I read the recent Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings entitled King David's War I was not one bit fazed when it was revealed that the man on the white horse was utilizing propaganda and perception management to keep his war in Afghanistan in it's rightful place in the line at for funding priorities. Only in America could a country that is unravelling as quickly as this one is, infrastructure crumbling, jobs fleeing to cheap labor Meccas, a failed political system and a crusing debt to China could such ruinous wars of choice continue to drain the nation's coffers.

Despite the legend erected around him by Republican syscophants like the McCain-Lieberman-Graham three-headed monster and his own oversized ego and crackerjack public relations team Petraeus has always been less miracle worker than he is a product. The high water mark for King David came in early 2009 when he goose-stepped out to the middle of the NFL logo in full dress regalia to flip the coin at Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa. A national television audience, a massive display of militarism with the thundering flyover barely drowning out the roar of the crowd for the American Caesar (or General James Mattoon Scott) and the loving adoration of a nation braying for the blood of brown skinned Muslim devils reveled in the near orgasmic release of energy of that moment. Petraeus was also riding high after the SURGE PR campaign that convinced millions that their hero had finally won the Iraq war and brought some degree of revenge for that damned Saddam Hussein's support of the 9/11 'terrorist' attacks. Petraeus was in another of those cheap, warmed over versions of real American history honored like the second coming of Eisenhower, a welcome comparison for a man with long-term political aspirations. Only a few years ago, he had been dissed in an ugly public manner by his former boss Admiral William Fallon as an "ass-kissing little chickenshit". Fallon of course paid the price for his candor, being sent packing by the Bushreich high-command, the final straw being an interview that he did for Esquire magazine back in 2008.

The legend of General Petraeus continued to grow in stature with the successful SURGE that has been touted by every self-interested politically connected asshole in order to present the illusion of not being defeated in Iraq because as Christ knows, America WINS wars. Or at least America WINS wars when the war effort isn't being undermined at home by a liberal fifth column, a Commie liberal media and dope-smoking draft dodgers, long-haired stinky hippies and black militants rioting on the nation's cities, so the myth goes. The war machine DID learn one hugely important lesson from the Vietnam debacle and that it was imperative that the perception of the public had to be managed in order to gin up support for future imperialist ventures. With the reinstatement of the draft being political suicide in that it would immediately result in a mass antiwar movement when hundreds of thousands could be plucked from their living room sofas and transported into a real live war zone and therefore being out of the question the public had to be convinced to support or even better forget about ongoing military occupations to plunder on behalf of corporations. Reagan hit paydirt with the Blitzkrieg of global military power Grenada, Poppy Bush kicked ass on former CIA asset and big time narcotics trafficker Manuel Noriega and the first Gulf War was a spectacular masterpiece of stage managed propaganda brought into the living rooms of millions courtesy of CNN. Add to that a decade of high profile ass-whupping propaganda films such as Rambo, the Chuck Norris Missing in Action series and other sordid lesser movie franchises that re-fought the Vietnam war and the seeds had been planted, the bitter taste of defeat washed from our mouths.

Then of course came the granddaddy of them all, the lynchpin upon which the reset button could be hit on the entire society and justify an Orwellian future of never ending wars - 9/11. Before the bodies had even been pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center the Bush-Cheney junta was already plotting the new world order as exemplified by The Project For The New American Century or PNAC.  The alleged 'terrorist' attacks" (attacks pulled off with something like a super military style precision that would seem to be beyond that which a bunch of guys in caves could hope to pull off) would launch the expansion of the U.S. global empire. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played off of Junior Bush's Oedipal complex to goad him into invading Iraq to finish the old man's job. First though, there would have to be the strike against the land where the supposed 9/11 materminds had plotted the attacks from and were presiding over a network of terror camps (note the stock footage of the masked men and the monkey bars) from - Afghanistan. Never mind that Afghanistan is historically famous for having chewed up empires like the Brits and the Soviets, we Americans would never repeat the mistakes taught by history and get bogged down in a brutal and primitive quagmire. A quagmire that nearly ten years later would require the genius of the brilliant General Petraeus to save us from but more on that in a little while. With Afghanistan attacked first and the public's blood boiling after the 9/11 attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act rammed through Congress like shit through the proverbial goose and any influential road blocks being eliminated when the anthrax letters started being received by key members of the Democratic party Senate leadership and news anchors the game was on.

The ramping up of the apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to the attack on Iraq was like a loundening drumbeat of the tom tom's at some sort of bizarre island ritual where the natives get jacked up on some sort of magical hallucinogenic concoction and then go and slaughter animals as tribute to their gods. In our case, here in the new American HOMELAND our god was and always has been war. The entire country went through some sort of strange and inexplicable phase of indoctrination by propaganda and intimidation by the now common denunciations of "traitor", "unpatriotic" and "terrorist sympathizer" to tamp down the opposition to phase two of the American conquest of the Middle East and Eurasia. When the deal was done, Colin Powell's lies at the United Nations enshrined as truth and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction ready to be loosed upon our preciously innocent American children while they slumbered in their comfortable beds the order was given and the Baghdad lit up like the Fourth of July with a sustained Shock And Awe display of  U.S. taxpayer dollars. And of course it was all on television....and the lemmings ate it up as usual.

Fast forward to early 2011, Iraq has largely  been relegated to the memory hole with much thanks to the miraculous SURGE. George W. Bush's wars have become Barack Obama's wars and the situation in Afghanistan, while predictably forgotten by most Americans and erased from the corporate media in favor of the latest Charlie Sheen update is continuing to deteriorate. This even after King David Petraeus found himself plucked from his posh post at CENTCOM in Tampa and sent off to work his magic in the land where empires go do die. When Rolling Stone published an article that portrayed General Stanley McChrystal, the four star clown then running the Afghan circus in a very nasty light of insubordination and disrespect it was the final straw for even the jelly-spined Obama who summoned him to Washington and 'accepted his retirement'. The article, The Runaway General was written by Michael Hastings who won the coveted Polk Award for his efforts. King David's War is his followup and can't have made the great man Petraeus very happy, unconfirmed anonymous reports allege that the puckering of his asshole could be heard all the way from Kandahar. The piece brilliantly lays out the levels to which Petraeus will plumb in order to cynically ensure that his media polished halo continue to glow. The great general, acting on behalf of Boobus Americanus to preserve our precious way of life cajoles, bribes, threatens, grandstands and allies himself with bloodthirsty, illiterate murderous, drug trafficking thugs like Col. Abdul Razzik to keep the war effort going. If the U.S. is relying on a guy Razzik, a real nasty piece of work by anyone's standards to 'win' the war then it is further evidence of the damnation of America's soul. Not that it troubles King David, who the Hastings piece brilliantly sums up in this statement:

A better nickname for Petraeus might be the Godfather: He is relying on a network of warlords and drug runners that he himself once called a "criminal syndicate".

I suppose that Petraeus, like Colonel Kurtz was winning the war 'his way', and another Hastings piece that is actually succeeding in finally putting a weed up the asses of the right people, again for Rolling Stone and entitled Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators may be the one that seals the deal for Petraeus. Of course the general with a true idea on the value of propaganda, P.R. and other little white lies, half-truths and prevarications has ordered an investigation, it will predictably be about as credible as Tony Soprano and Silvio Dante doing an internal audit of the Bada Bing Club blooks. Could it be that General Petraeus is about to reap the whirlwind of his own bullshit? With the Rolling Stone articles pissing on his presidential parade after it was already seriously damaged by Obama's exile of Petraeus to Afghanistan. The King David piece speaks of tensions between Gen P. and Obama who allegedly felt had been bent over (what a surprise) and butt-fucked by the Pentagon and it's agents in escalating the conflict which according to unnamed sources were becoming increasingly wary about a potential Petraeus 2012 bid and were seeing him "..as a general on his white horse", according to an unnamed senior U.S. military official. With his medal bedrecked showboating for the media Petraeus would have been a big hit with the right-wingers who are now desperately in search of a new champion since the political career of Sarah Palin went down in a blaze of idiocy, violent rhetoric and the televised murder of animals that proved too much for even cable TV diehards to take. The GOP is now, at least being exposed as the pack of sleazy, opportunistic jackals primarily interested in wresting control of the lead position at the golden trough shorn of their most visible leader Palin. The glue that keeps the nutjobs, war freaks, Raptureheads, nationalists, Birthers and brokedick peckerwood Jesus freak base together has been a charismatic cult leader and let's face it, Newt Gingrich is not that man (the Birchers HATE him) and Michelle Bachmann is just a more deranged version of Palin and an embarassment. The exposure of Petraeus as a pathological and cynical con artist is a devastating blow to the Republican party as a whole and to the rest of America in that it practically ensures a second term of Obama's Bush Lite.

Hasting's first article displays the arrogance of King David when he is quoted as telling his spokesman that the White House was "fucking with the wrong guy". Then came the McChrystal debacle and the assignment of Petraeus to what might as well have been the Aleutians. When Obama summoned the recalcitrant Stanley McChrystal back to D.C. and then in an unexpected whirlwind turn of events accepted his "resignation" it sent shockwaves through the administration's war council. So sudden had the shitcanning been and so contrary to the positive lobbying on his behalf despite his obvious disregard for civilian authority that the perpetually conniving Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bush appointee Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen were not expecting Obama's decision. Even more surprising was the annoitment of the great General Petraeus, his superior to replace him because as stated in the piece, "If Petraeus can't do it, the thinking went, then no one can - and no one back home could blame Obama for losing with Petraeus in charge." It was a political master stroke for Obama, at once hanging the war that the neocons and Petraeus had so long propagandized in favor of like a millstone around his neck and taking out his most potentially dangerous political opponent at once. It is one of those extremely rare instances when the mythical Obama as the cool and collected mastermind, like Michael Jordan just sizing up the opposition before systematically thrusting the dagger through their hearts and shredding the defense like so much Reagan surplus cheese actually can be seen and the O-Bots and apologists momentarily vindicated. Then of course Obama continues to do what he does best, cut deals with fascists, redistribute wealth upwards to his Wall Street  benefactors, screw the poor and push through increasingly obscene violations of civil liberties that Bush never could have dreamed of getting away with.

Now that Petraeus, up to his ass in alligators in the Afghan swamp and resorting to cutting deals with thugs and murderers like Razzik as well as turning a blind eye on the drug trade is desperate, he is a four star rat on a treadmill and history is cranking up the speed. So despearate is Petraeus now that his subordinates are unbelievably running psy ops campaigns on Senators, not that this isn't routine procedure but that it is felt that blood thirsty death junkies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman have to actually be conned into supporting more murder in the name of the almighty American empire. The wheels are coming off now, Petraeus's talking points are sounding more like those of Karl Rove or Frank Luntz by the day, the latest and most bizarre being that Afghan parents are burning their own kids to make the U.S. look bad. There are rumors circulating that the great general is about to quit his Afghanistan command and the collateral damage of the civilian body count exploding thanks to the Petraeus COIN method which is being exposed as a sham are indicative of a desperate and cunning charlatan working frantically to save his rapidly diminishing political future. I suppose that he could always slink back to Der Homeland in shame and become a cause celebre and hero to uber fascist right-wing degenerates, much like Douglas MacArthur after he was shitcanned by President Harry Truman in Korea for his insubordination. MacArthur in his time may have also believed that "they are fucking with the wrong guy". It is actually quite fitting that Petraeus would be presiding over the long running Afghanistan clusterfuck which has no end in sight - after all, it's better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.

Petraeus or no Petraeus, the wars will continue because as obedient little historical revisionist flag-suckers we Americans have the slaughter of brown-skinned, non-Christians for our national glory in our blood. From the day that a child exits the womb the indoctrination of American exceptionalism, we are the good guys and the heinous lie that they ALL hate us for our way of life and therefore must be annihilated to preserve freedom and democracy ensures that the wars will never end. This very morning Obama and the establisment are in the process of plotting another foreign adventure  in Libya (their bankers must be getting nervous), this latest use of raw force will be justified under the left cover of a humanitarian intervention, the sort of hogwash that was peddled to the useful idiots to justify escalation in Afghanistan because of the brutality towards women. Time Magazine featured the war porn of a noseless Afghan woman on the cover to pimp the war to the butterflies, moonbeams, zebras and fairy tales liberals who never met a war that couldn't be justified under such phony pretenses of protecting human rights. The neocon mighty wurlitzer propaganda machine is already churning as well with the ludicrous claims that the financial collapse was all the fault of those damned dirty Ay-rabs, this Washington Times post has the title: Financial Terrorism Suspected in 2008 Economic Crash, credited to another of those evil little reports that are assembled in Pentagon propaganda chop shops. The headline does have one thing right though, the crash was the result of financial terrorism only the terrorists weren't wearing turbans and red headbands, rather they were wearing thousand dollar suits and floating off of the coast of the Hamptons in yachts while their derivatives exploded like the financial weapons of mass destruction that they were. War and lies and credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and tainted, buffoon presidential candidates like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are proof that you can sell anything in America. As Mencken once famously remarked, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" or something along those lines. Welcome to Chumpland and stock up on canned goods because the real financial terrorists of Wall Street are bidding up commodities (especially oil) and whiling away their time before unleashing their latest mass casualty attack on America, a Roman orgy of gross speculation: C.M.B.S. 2.0.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.


A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. [Please note these are 1935 U.S. dollars. To adjust for inflation, multiply all figures X 10 or more]

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

- General Smedley D. Butler