Like the vast majority of well known former government officials Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense for both Bush Jr. and Obama has capitalized on his gig to write a tell all book and the early excerpts have elicited a near orgasmic response from the punditry. Gates book, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" firmly embeds the hatchet between the shoulder blades of the narcissist in chief and the knives are out in a media attracted to sensationalist sleaze, tabloid tales and best of all political back biting. Not that Obama doesn't have it coming, his administration's contempt for the press, accountability and most of all whistleblowers is among the worst in history. One of the revelations from gates is that early in his first term Barry wanted to launch a criminal investigation against the New York Times over leaks, this should endear him to lunatic congressman Peter King but is another disturbing example of how viciously this administration treats those who dare to tell the truth. Obama's Justice Department under the leadership of the mercilessly vindictive Eric Holder is an affront to any concept of American decency and illustrates the level of distaste that Obama, himself a constitutional law professor has for the actual document. Some of the coming stories and screeds will provide an opportunity for those wanting to point out the blatant hypocrisy of El Presidente but others, like this piece from washed up beltway courtier Bob Woodward are just the bitter ravings of an old man who long ago lost any credibility and has become nothing more than an elder hack with a great seat for the ongoing beltway circle jerk.
The early victor of the media scrum - occasionally interrupted by “Idiocracy" style updates on the freakish washed up former basketball player Dennis Rodman - is definitely Gates. The Obama White House is in damage control mode over Gates’ manifesto particularly over tales of Obama’s petulance and according to the fomer SECDEF a perceived lack of “belief” in his own strategy regarding the now twelve year running clusterfuck in Afghanistan, a morass of futility that if not escaped from soon will chew up the American empire as surely as it did the Brits and Russians. Bloodsucking war freak Senators McCain and Graham will find it hard to restrain themselves in rushing for the nearest interview to use Gates’s book to bludgeon Obama with and if not cautious could injure themselves in a similar manner to the author who is sporting a neckbrace. While I have not read the book (yet anyway) the exponentially multipying reviews, spin pieces and political drive by shootings are great because quite frankly both Gates and Obama are rotten, lying bastards, charlatans and war criminals of the type who in a more sane era would have found themselves swinging from the end of a rope at Nuremberg. It is actually pretty damned funny for a change when it comes the “he said… she said” type of political cat fight that the state-corporate media revels in promoting - if Chris Matthew's head doesn't explode on the set of MSNBC's Hardball tonight like a scene from the old sci-fi movie Scanners it will be a minor miracle.
The Wall Street Journal (The Moneychanger’s Gospel) has an extensive excerpt from the book beginning with a money quote of “I may be the secretary of defense, but I am also an American citizen, and there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that. I quit”. That alone would be worth the price of the book if it were a tale of internal bickering with Obama himself but alas it refers to a congressional hearing, no doubt one of the many ludicrous dog and pony shows staged by the self-promoting horse’s asses on the hill who normally revel in dragging guys like Roger Clemens into their hearings over something as idiotic as steroids in baseball. Gates also pegs Congress which currently enjoys a public approval rating somewhere in between genital Herpes and pedophiles perfectly in summing up his encounters with that corrupt collection of bought off swine, rank lunatics, con artists and tax dole suckling grand standers as: "inquisition-like treatment" from members of both parties whom he said were "creating a kangaroo-court environment in hearings, especially when television cameras were present." Darrell Issa are you listening? While the last two U.S. Presidents have been utter failures, frauds, professional liars, tyranny enabling incompetents who have combined to drag the one time honorable reputation (paid for in blood) reputation of the United States through a vat of pig shit their faces belong on Mount Rushmore when compared to the enemies of the American people and the planet whose miserable asses sit in the U.S. Congress. Score one for Gates for telling like it is here.
More problematic for the author is his tendency to slime Barry (and to a lesser degree the babbling idiot Joe Biden) while giving a free pass to George W. Bush whose penchant for shoot from the hip solutions to complex problems, inability to string together more than two coherent sentences, king sized Oedipal complex that made him easily manipulated by Cheney and Rummy and "sharp elbowed political gurus" led him to start the two disastrous wars in the first place. Obama may be playing the political angles and it is now being insinuated that his purported lack of "belief" in his own Afghanistan strategy led him to feed American servicemen and women into a meat grinder for cynical purposes these wars are after all wars that were started by Bush and Cheney and their neocons. Obama's campaign rhetoric has already been exposed as horseshit of the most cynical type and we are all still mired in Afghanistan with no exit in sight, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay is still open for business and Iraq is awash in civil war and sectarian violence but were it not for Bush none of these disasters and blights upon America would have happened. So Gates himself is as full of crap as Obama and those seeking to spin his memoir solely as a condemnation (deserved but shared with Bush) of Barry and the boys. I also don't imaging that the author takes much time out of his 600+ page jeremiad to bother to explain his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
Gates truly brings to mind the old LBJ comment that it's better to have them inside of the tent pissing out than outside pissing in and a pissing contest is what it is all about, one that is going to make Gates, his public relations representatives and his publisher wealthy off of the coming windfall of the media tour to hawk the book. Obama will surely land a seven figure deal for a similar opportunity to tee off come 2017.
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