Neocon Hack Jonah Goldberg Mocks Trump Supporters as Being in Need of an Intervention

A big name writer for a prominent national political publication has launched a scathing attack on those who support maverick Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump’s astonishing popularity has the D.C. establishment shitting in their britches and the protectors of the elite denizens of that big imperial city along the Potomac are circling the wagons. The Donald has been smacked down by longtime establishment pundits the likes of George Will and Charles Krauthammer - both of the Washington Post editorial page - but now a new tactic is emerging of smearing and slandering his supporters.

We last saw this dastardly plan implemented during the rise of the Tea Party when a legitimate state of distaste and disgust with Emperor Barack Obama and his corrupt regime led to a huge backlash and the GOP retaking the House back in 2010. The Tea Party folks, an eclectic mixture of libertarians, social conservatives, fiscal hawks and the remnants of the Ron Paul movement were dismissed as cranks and racists by the same bought and paid for media that is now savaging Donald Trump and his supporters. Hey, I fell for all at one time but a lot of those folks were played both ways and were unwitting pawns in the big political game of racial indignation. This cuts both ways too. 

The article in question is a scurrilous hit piece featured at The National Review online by longtime pundit and blogger Jonah Goldberg and is an example of just how low that the presstitutes and propagandists will go to protect their sacred cows. Mr. Goldberg can be described as being a member of the influential neoconservative gaggle which always promotes foreign wars no matter how ruinous and costly and with no regard to the short and long term detrimental effects on the American people. Goldberg mocks Trump and basically calls out those who have been flocking to his rallies and speeches as nothing more than suckers, rubes and chumps while calling for the “Trump-pets” to undergo an intervention similar to what would be delivered to drunks and drug addicts.

The entitled Goldberg’s poison pen is ablaze in the piece entitled “Trump Fans, It’s Time for an Intervention” from which I excerpt the following:

Truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played. I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.

Now, before I go on, let me clarify a few things. I get it. The base of the party is angry. They’re angry about Obama’s lawless chicanery on immigration. They’re angry about the GOP’s patented inability to cross the street without stepping on its own d*ck and then having to apologize for it. They’re angry that the Left’s culture warriors are behaving like an invading army that shoots the survivors even after they’ve surrendered. They’re angry that Republicans have to bend over backward so as not to offend anyone, while Democrats have free rein (and at times free reign) to do and to say as they please.

Enter Trump, stage left. He makes no apologies. He’s brash. I can understand why some see him as a breath of fresh air. If you want to give him credit for starting a worthwhile debate about sanctuary cities and illegal immigration, fine. I think that argument is way overdone, but certainly reasonable enough.

AND

Trump supporters need an intervention. I want to sit them down at the kitchen table, reach into a manila envelope, and pull out the proof that he’s a fraud.

The most troubling defense is this claptrap that he “tells it like it is.” Well, first of all, no he doesn’t. He tells it the way you want to hear it, which is an entirely different thing. He is like William Jennings Bryan, only his cross of gold has an all-you-can-eat buffet under it, and looks remarkably like a capital “T.”

Trump is even less truly conservative, but he’s trying to speak in an even grubbier dialect of conservatism. And, having grown up in the tabloid politics of New York, he’s better at faking it.

Eventually, I suspect, this will be the cause of his undoing. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know about conservatism, and at some point he will say something that even his biggest fans will recognize as a damning revelation about the real man beneath the schtick. The only question is whether he implodes before or after he does permanent damage to the GOP’s chances in 2016.

Goldberg goes on to lay out the case that Mr. Trump is the one who is actually the RINO and not three quarters of the rest of the field including the king in waiting “Jeb!”. His piece is a litany of horseshit and cherry picking that is as shamefully misleading as most of the rest of the tripe that is cranked out by the intellectual guardians of the beltway ruling class like link sausage made out of tainted skunk meat. He is a professional drive-by shooter, a specialist in knee-capping and a practitioner of the dark artistry of ad hominem attacks but he manages to make a pretty good living at it.

One thing to remember about guys like Jo-Berg is that he is an elitist himself, the type that former Vice President Spiro Agnew once referred to as “nattering nabobs” and “effete intellectual snobs” and the one thing that such swine truly fear is that one day enough folks will wake up and begin to throw the con artists, charlatans, racketeers and false prophets who have hijacked our democracy out of power. That would then force hordes of overpaid, careerist, ass-kissing douchebags and apologists like Mr. Goldberg to go and get real fucking jobs.

Jonah Goldberg is a scummy cocksucker from the word go as well as a child of privilege and opportunity. His mommy Lucianne paved the way for this wretched propagandist with her work on the Monica Lewinsky scandal where she helped to manipulate the moronic Linda Tripp into getting that famous sperm-covered blue dress. That is the one big thing with the neocons be their surnames Kristol, Podhoretz or Goldberg - nepotism rules but that is why they would be perfectly happy with either Bush or Clinton in the White House come 2017.

Neocon Propagandist Accuses Texas “Right Wingers” of being Tools of Vladimir Putin

Since the onset of hostilities in Ukraine last winter, the Obama regime and the State Department have been churning out some real whoppers in order to juice arms sales to European client states. The reviled Russian leader Vladimir Putin has become America’s version of Emmanuel Goldstein and the shills in the media ministry of propaganda are eager to provide the woefully uninformed sheep with their “Two Minutes Hate” to jump start the Cold War.

The prime motivation behind foolishly instigating a conflict with a nuclear armed Russia always seems to have been based on profiteering from perpetual warfare at the expense of providing anything of value to Americans who are being screwed daily by their corrupt government. Now we have the greatest whopper of them all being fed into the media lie machine and it coincides perfectly with the Obama occupying government’s soon to be launched war on dissidents that is being piggybacked onto the national backlash against the Confederate flag. We are now being told to believe that Putin himself is behind the Texas secessionist movement and other dissident groups.

According to a story published by Politico Magazine entitled “Putin’s Plot to Get Texas to Secede” the Kremlin has infiltrated the Lone Star State in something that is so ludicrous that it would be shot down by Hollywood were it a movie script as being beyond belief. The piece, written by one of those payrolled hacks that are so often used ever since the laws against the U.S. government propagandizing its own people were quietly repealed two years ago is a real doozy. A masterpiece of bullshit that you practically need to wear a ventilator to slog through so odious is the piece.

I excerpt the following from “Putin’s Plot to Get Texas to Secede”:

Nathan Smith, who styles himself the “foreign minister” for the Texas Nationalist Movement, appeared last Spring at a far-right confab in St. Petersburg, Russia. Despite roaming around in his cowboy hat, Smith managed to keep a low-key presence at the conference, which was dominated by fascists and neo-Nazis railing against Western decadence. But at least one Russian newspaper, Vzglyad, caught up with the American, noted that TNM is “hardly a marginal group,”and quoted Smith liberally on the excellent prospects for a partial breakup of the United States. Smith declared that the Texas National Movement has 250,000 supporters—including all the Texans currently serving in the U.S. Army—and they all “identify themselves first and foremost as Texans” but are being forced to remain Americans.  The United States, he added, “is not a democracy, but a dictatorship.”  The Kremlin’s famed troll farms took the interview and ran with it, with dozens of bots instantly tweeting about a “Free Texas.”

For Russians, this was delicious payback. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union two decades ago, many Russians have come to blame the United States for their plight; a seething resentment over U.S. culpability in the loss of Russian national power is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin is so popular. It has only worsened since the United States has led an international effort to isolate and sanction Moscow over its annexation of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine.

And

It’s unclear just how high up these propaganda efforts go in the Kremlin. But it can hardly be an accident that last December, in the midst of the ruble’s parlous plummet, Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at putative Western hypocrisy. “As soon as they succeed in putting [our bear] on a chain, they will rip out his teeth and his claws,” the president growled.

The think tank dweeb who wrote this steaming pile of horseshit is a guy named Casey Michel (rhymes with Michelle) who seems to have found his calling and the admission that “It’s unclear just how high up these propaganda efforts go in the Kremlin” is such vintage bullshit – unattributed sources, rank speculation – that it could have been uttered by Obama himself.

The entire thing can be read here but unless you have a high tolerance for bullshit you may want to stay away. It is a very interesting bit of timing in that Texans are antsy about what for all intents appears to be a live martial law exercise called Jade Helm that is about to go down. While the feds and their media propagandists have gone to great lengths to demonize anyone who questions Jade Helm as a crank, a tin foil hatter and a conspiracy theorist there is a long history of a fondness for martial law with the feds. It was after all Democratic party hero Franklin D. Roosevelt who rounded up innocent Japanese Americans during World War II, stripped them of their liberty and property and put them into internment camps. There were also programs like Lt. Colonel Oliver North’s REX 84 and God only knows what other sort of schemes have been drawn up for the day that the shit hits the fan.

So now it is really getting bad because once hostilities inevitably develop with Russia, and they are well on the way thanks to Obama’s lunatic Defense Secretary Ash Carter (can’t we bring back someone rational like Donald Rumsfeld?) who has been sliming around in Europe to sell American arms to NATO countries. Once Putin officially goes from being just a guy who humiliated Obama by forcing him to eat a shit sandwich with a vodka chaser by sinking the 2013 attack on Syria into the leader of a country that the U.S. is officially at war with what do you think is going to happen to Texas secessionists and those who dare to question operations like Jade Helm?

Neocon Propagandist Jennifer Rubin Absolutely Explodes Today

For not the first time in her illustrious career as the yappy, prolific neocon water-carrier at the Washington Post and high priestess of bullshit Jennifer Rubin cites the work of arch Iran-Contra criminal Elliot Abrams in making the case for a Middle Eastern war to end all wars. In a piece today - one of a whopping SIX that bear Rubin's byline as of suppertime this evening - the felon and spouse of an insane racist Elliot Abrams is cited in a piece entitled "Leading from the front is . . . Israel?!". I don't know if Rubin and Abrams consider the shelling and murder of four young Palestinian children playing soccer on a Gaza beach as "leading" but given the eliminationist rhetoric that has been directed at their hated enemies they may just as well be conveying the message directly from  the now fully amok Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu so intent it is at lying America into the war that he doesn't have the stones to fight himself.

Abrams is one of those figures who continues to pop up like a bouncing betty along the blood-soaked trail that the USA!, USA! USA! has embarked upon stretching from the Reagan era and the Latin American death squads, to Iran- Contra to wars of the Bush-Cheney administration and most recently as a source for tidbits of wisdom dispensed to the likes of Rubin for one of her trademark poison pen daggers in Obama's back. The Rubin piece, prior to the words of Abrams starts out like one of those artillery shells being lobbed at civilians in Gaza and of course, as they always have relentlessly done pushes for a US strike on Iran. Excerpting from Rubin:

The Obama administration blundered badly on Syria, first in not intervening quickly before jihadists entered the fray and then in erasing a red line on (repeated) use of weapons of mass destruction. To the delight of Syria’s senior partner in Iran, the United States, as it had in Iraq, also set a timetable for complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. Reticence to protect gains in Iraq, excessive effusiveness when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power and frayed relations with Israel emboldened and encouraged Iran and increased the profile of surrogates such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. How could it not have that result? Indeed, U.S. allies, including Jordan and post-Morsi Egypt, went public with complaints.

The Obama administration blundered badly on Syria, first in not intervening quickly before jihadists entered the fray and then in erasing a red line on (repeated) use of weapons of mass destruction. To the delight of Syria’s senior partner in Iran, the United States, as it had in Iraq, also set a timetable for complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. Reticence to protect gains in Iraq, excessive effusiveness when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power and frayed relations with Israel emboldened and encouraged Iran and increased the profile of surrogates such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. How could it not have that result? Indeed, U.S. allies, including Jordan and post-Morsi Egypt, went public with complaints.

We now see how that plays out in the Gaza war and in the nuclear negotiations going on in Vienna.

If the United States had no stomach for confronting Iran’s junior partner in Damascus, Israel has shown no hesitation and quite a bit of PR adeptness in pummeling Iran-backed Hamas. Former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams explains:

[Begin Abrams:] Hamas is losing this war badly and is unwilling to accept that defeat–whatever the cost to Gazans. Hamas has done little property damage in Israel, has not hit any symbolically important target, and has killed not one single Israeli. The Egyptian proposal would have stopped the fighting but not given Hamas any of its stated goals, such as getting the release of Hamas terrorists who had been exchanged for Gilad Shalit but recently re-arrested. Hamas also appears to want Turkey or Qatar to mediate the cease fire, because it views Egypt as deeply hostile under its new government.

 f Israel comes into Gaza, one has to assume some IDF soldiers will be killed. Perhaps then Hamas will claim a partial victory and agree to a cease fire. This is a polite way of saying Hamas feels it has not spilled enough Israeli blood and wants some- and of course is unconcerned about how many Palestinians will die.[End Abrams]

 Rather than a PR victory, Hamas is facing humiliation. It would arguably be the first defeat for the Iranians since President Obama took office.

The lofty gravitas of the felon Abrams is used to bolster the credibility of the Rubin smear job on how besieged, poor little Israel - whose citizens can be so safe from the Iron Dome missile shield system that they can lounge around, eat popcorn and watch the bejesus get blown out of civilians including children in Gaza - is leading the impotent US (a country that according to polls is sick of fucking war mind you) against the mad mullahs in Tehran and the imminent nuclear Holocaust. Total horseshit but when it comes to selling it Rubin is a master.

The other five pieces from Rubin - which must be a record  - are "Morning Bits" (wake up vomiting), a smackdown of our buffonish Secretary of State "John Kerry’s routine wears thin", a knee-capping of Queen Hillary the Inevitable "A communications problem, again!?" and more foreign policy advice from the fucking idiots who got us into this never-ending series of Middle-East wars "How we lost our Egyptian ally". Rubin goes on to practically blow New Jersey Democratic party Senator Robert Menendez - a man who allegedly has exotic tastes for foreign hookers which he now blames on Cuba in "Menendez for the defense" but the cherry on top of the shit cake is a magnificent crock of shit echo chamber floating of the lies of the most murderous war criminal in US history: former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney, a man who in any decent society would have long ago been tried and convicted for treason and war crimes and ended up swinging from the end of a rope ala Saddam Hussein is the preeminent go-to guy for the neocons these days and Rubin's piece,  "Terrorism deniers exposed" is a spectacular, bursting fireworks across the sky attempt to wash the stink of the neocon-Cheney Iraq disaster off of their mangy asses by - of course blaming Obama which the suckers on Fox will devour. I excerpt from this still smoking disinformation doozy:

If nothing else, Alliance for a Strong America, the project of former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, has performed a public service in calling attention to a report that received practically no mainstream news coverage. The Rand Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute put out a lengthy report in June that documents the extent to which terrorist groups have grown in numbers, strength and controlled territory at their disposal for operations. It is a damning indictment of the failure of the Obama administration to stem the tide of al-Qaeda and related groups and makes clear that the notion that al-Qaeda was damaged or on its heels was utterly untrue.

If you can smell the whiff of the musk of Darrell Issa, John Boenher, Sarah Palin and the rest of the loony tunes teabagging right-wing fanatics along with the obvious but slyly left in the background references to Benghazi and impeachment then you are more astute than the average American dumbass. Only a few days ago I believed that there was no way that the GOP would allow for an Obama impeachment and that such chatter was only a slimy fund-raising tactic but the neocons are in a feeding frenzy and it is likely going to happen much to the horror of what remains of the once rational Republican party.

Sane Republicans must be absolutely pulling their hair out over what is going to be a stupid and unpreventable massive self-immolation triggered by the neocon political terrorists who unwisely were not purged from the GOP after the Bush-Cheney disaster and the subsequent rejection of Mitt Romney. These dead-enders, with Dick Cheney as their Lenin are about to pull the ripcord on their suicide vests right when the party is poised to retake the Senate in November and if they can find a candidate with crossover appeal - Rand Paul for example  who is loathed by Rubin and her ilk - then they could actually manage to spare us all of an eight year reign of terror under Hillary. Instead, in their lunatic rush to re-invade Iraq, send the bombers on thousands of sorties over Iran and blind and biased support of the current Israeli government's latest kill-crazy rampage they would rather bring it all down in smoking ruins than take a back seat and shut the hell up by putting the interests of AMERICA first.

But sanity is not something that the neocons have ever proven to be capable of is it? They are about as rational as any ideologically pure, suicide jockeys in history. Good luck to the Republican party in stopping them before they bring about the total collapse of not only this once great country but potentially human life on the planet itself.

The Neocon vs. Rand Paul Pissing Contest Rages On

Senator Rand Paul has taken withering fire from the cheerleaders for American interventionism and global conquest at gunpoint for he is a very serious threat to the warfare and surveillance state as it currently exists and if he is not halted before the 2016 presidential campaign the idea that we do not have to be a nation crushed by the yoke of perpetual war may take hold. Paul represents the increasingly influential emerging libertarian wing of the Republican party and with growing popularity with the younger demographic - the youth that Obama shit on after mobilizing them in 2008 with his siren song of false hope and chump change - he has the potential to for the first time in decades provide a serious alternative to the corrupt sucklers of Empire.

Fresh off of being smacked down with a blistering and ridiculous editorial in the Washington Post by the ever more bizarre Texas Governor Rick Perry who in the hilarious words of Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo is "dumber than a steer who’s been zapped by a cattle-prod and still won’t move" and in the opinion of some (myself included), is a man of such enormous idiocy and grotesque buffoonery that he actually makes George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein - Paul punched back. The Senator from Kentucky's rebuttal was featured in the gospel of the beltway Politico in a piece entitled "Rick Perry is Dead Wrong":

There are many things I like about Texas Gov. Rick Perry, including his stance on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. But apparently his new glasses haven’t altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly.

There are obviously many important events going on in the world right now, but with 60,000 foreign children streaming across the Texas border, I am surprised Governor Perry has apparently still found time to mischaracterize and attack my foreign policy.

Governor Perry writes a fictionalized account of my foreign policy so mischaracterizing my views that I wonder if he’s even really read any of my policy papers.

In fact, some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed, something he fails to mention. His solutions also aren’t much different from President Barack Obama’s, something he also fails to mention. Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.

Perry says there are no good options. I’ve said the same thing. President Obama has said the same thing. So what are Perry’s solutions and why does he think they are so bold and different from anyone else’s?

AND

I ask Governor Perry: How many Americans should send their sons or daughters to die for a foreign country — a nation the Iraqis won’t defend for themselves? How many Texan mothers and fathers will Governor Perry ask to send their children to fight in Iraq?

I will not hold my breath for an answer. If refusing to send Americans to die for a country that refuses to defend itself makes one an “isolationist,” then perhaps its time we finally retire that pejorative.

Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to send U.S. soldiers back into Iraq. Is Perry calling the entire country “isolationist” too?

And he is absolutely right, Slick Rick Perry has absolutely nothing to offer besides the same bitching that always erupts like a bursting, fully ripened pustule from a party that has nothing new to offer rather than a keening cacophony of bleating every time that Obama - who they hate - so much as scratches his ass. While it will not likely please the movers and shakers within the GOP the knee-jerk opposition of everything Obama is not a substitute for a winning formula which they should understand by now after getting thumped by the black dude in two presidential elections despite his gross incompetence. This is a party that is in need of new ideas rather than the same alarmist and race-baiting bullshit that plays well to the borderline cadavers whose daily sustenance of outrage is provided by FOX News which plays them like a pack of stupid fucking donkeys. Perry's new glasses are a nice touch too but Barry Goldwater voters are dropping like flies with each passing election cycle and Rand Paul and libertarian ideas will be like sipping from the fountain of youth for a party that clings to a corpse like Reagan rather than just walk through that door into the future and a brave new world.

Perry's anti-Paul diatribe was a gut-wrenching mish-mash of warmed over neocon talking points, bogus historical references and more references to the hallowed Ronald Reagan than you can shake that cattle-prod at - it was one of the most over the top, thoroughly asinine pieces of tripe that the WAPO has published recently and that says one hell of a lot considering the lower than whaleshit level of the competition. While Senator Paul is not the man that his father is and has a tendency to go along to get along he still towers above the recycled garbage like Rick Perry, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and blows away the sleazy political opportunists like Florida's Marco "Little Ricky" Rubio and that loudmouthed fat piece of crap up in New Jersey Chris Christie with his continued  insincere sucking up to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson the Daddy Warbucks of the neocon world domination project.

That most bitter of truths to the neocons is that an increasing amount of Americans are sick to death of their globe-trotting escapades of murder, torture and stealing of resources after the murders of women and children. The Democrats offer no viable alternative either as evident by the meddlesome adventures of the drone ranger Obama, the full-blown fanatical State Department and Cass Sunstein's wife over at the UN Samantha Power and their piling up of dead bodies based on the horseshit of humanitarian interventionism.

The 2016 election is a critical time in our nation's history for it offers what may be the last chance to banish the neocons - particularly since Hillary Clinton, a bloodthirsty bitch who puts Margaret Thatcher to shame would be a hero to the neocons and why not hedge their bets with a zany and pliable doofus like Rick Perry? Anything to keep Rand Paul and libertarian ideas out of the national conversation next year. The neocons understand this and that is why they are going right for Paul's throat, the Washington Post continues to churn out agitprop like today's offering from the high priestess of neocon bullshit Jennifer Rubin with the very creative title of "Rand Paul Isolated on Foreign Policy" from which I excerpt:

The extent of Rand Paul’s extremism is slowly coming to light. American Enterprise Institute’s David Adesnik has analyzed Paul’s recommended summer reading list. “The foreign policy section of the list consists entirely of works that blame the United States for the rise of Islamic extremism while offering solutions that verge on isolationism. Most of the books also express a sharp hostility toward Israel and toward those who believe that U.S. foreign policy should serve the cause of human freedom.”

Specifically, he includes Pat Buchanan’s anti-Semitic tract: “If Ron Paul’s message isn’t clear enough, the curious student may turn to another book on the list, Pat Buchanan’s critique of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, Where the Right Went Wrong. ‘America’s huge footprint on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia led straight to 9/11. The terrorists were over here because we were over there. Terrorism is the price of empire.’ . . . Buchanan explains that ‘the Beltway Likud was plotting and propagandizing for war on Iraq long before 9/11.’ The distinctive trait of this clique is that it sees ‘U.S. and Israeli interests as identical.’ ” Unfortunately it’s becoming clear that Paul’s views are virtually identical to his father’s (who has three books on his son’s list). Suffice it to say, there is no elected Republican in Congress who would embrace these ideas.

If that is the best that Rubin and the neocons are able to come up with, selectively picking through Rand Paul's reading list and crying "ANTI-SEMITE" then they are more desperate than ever. That particular pejorative was at one time the ultimate trump card when it came to squashing criticism of the Middle East conflicts in which Israel always benefited from at the cost of American blood and treasure but it has lost it's potency through overuse. Pity poor Rubin and her handlers whose primary accomplishment has been to diminish "anti-Semitism" to the point that it has lost any sort of effectiveness when it comes to real anti-Semites. But that is what happens when such a filthy abuse of the historically heinous persecution of Jews - a very real problem - is turned into no more than a cheap political tactic. We all know the fairy tale of the boy who cried wolf and by continually playing that very card scum like Rubin only harm those who are the real victims.

It is time for the neocons to give up the ghost and just go quietly into the dustbin of history before their deranged, remarkably Naziesque ideology destroys the planet. It is far past time to confiscate the keys to the war machine from these highly influential lunatics. 

(Image: Getty Images)

Prolific WaPo Neocon Blogger Jennifer Rubin is Foaming at the Mouth

The neocon central propaganda transmission station at the Washington Post is as usual engaged in pushing agitation and lies to send more American money and bodies into a sucking black hole of death where we have absolutely no business in being. While it is hard to pick out the most wretched of the WaPo propagandists - they have an amazingly deep bench - I would have to say that Jennifer Rubin more than merits a share of the prize. Her ongoing screeds, often in the number of several a day call into question as to whether she actually writes this bullshit herself for just works from material provided by the William Kristol-Robert Kagan machine and simply repackages it. As could be expected with the carnival of perversion of the architects of the Iraq debacle engaged in a ghoulish media tour to revise history and jump start the PNAC Middle East domination plans Rubin provides plenty of supporting fire, sniping from the gutter as usual.

Rubin has long had a particular ax to grind with Senator Rand Paul or more particularly the non-intervention that he is selling which is incompatible with neocon fever dreams, keeping the millions employed by the government in the military and surveillance colossus on the Potomac and most importantly of all allowing for the right-wing regime of Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to flout international law and basic human decency in carving out lebensraum for Israel. Rubin and the neocons are representative of an Israeli fifth-column or as as described by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their groundbreaking book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". The amount of clout that Israeli right-wingers exercise in the United States is well known and understood with the corrupt US Congress effectively being in the words of Patrick J. Buchanan - "Israeli occupied territory" where a swine like Netanyahu is afforded nearly three dozen standing ovations and the William Kristol propaganda network as well as numerous think tanks providing the content to editorial pages and churning out policy "experts" to sell schemes that while beneficial to Israel are detrimental to long-term US interests. Israel also conducts (and has long conducted) some of the most aggressive spying operations within in the United States - some of which may explain the fealty of the Congress (blackmail perhaps) to recklessly commit the country to regional wars to the benefit of Israel.

But I digress..

Rubin's latest column drags out Israeli loyalist and Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams as though he is an elder statesman instead of the vile warmonger and longtime cloak and dagger operative who keeps turning up through the decades when he belongs rotting in prison. Abrams in his book "Faith or Fear" once advocated for what was essentially eugenics in making the case for American Jews to adhere to only marrying within their own religion and group - sounds eerily Aryan as well as incompatible with American values but Abrams is a monster and a go to guy for Rubin who picks up the baton from Dick Cheney in her latest offering "Who is the non-proliferation president?":

 Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security adviser, reminds us: “The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.” Add to that a new Rand Corporation study showing terrorist groups’ activity has increased 50 percent in the last three years and the near-collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation architecture and you have a truly troubling conflagration: more terrorists, fewer functioning central governments and the potential widespread possession of weapons of mass destruction (already used multiple times with no consequences by Bashar al-Assad).

That Abrams and Rubin are still selling the lie that Syrian President Assad gassed those people last summer at the Damascus suburb of Ghouta is telling as to who is really going to benefit from the coming back door attack on the Assad regime that is currently being ginned up by the convenient appearance of ISIS in Iraq. That report by the RAND Corporation - a notorious hive of scum and villainy that only exists to sell war - that Cheney has been invoking also gets mention which makes the entire ISIS narrative even more smelly than it already is. Things are probably going to get even worse very soon as the top diplomatic moron in America John "Skull and Bones" Kerry is sliming around in Iraq right now and wherever he goes disaster follows, the man is a virtual hurricane of bullshit.

Ironic in that the Washington Post is also running one of those stupid animal tales that Americans so adore with the heart-warming story of Peanuts, the world's ugliest dog which is cuter than Rubin and would have the good sense to stay away from a devil like Abrams.

Could ISIS in Iraq Be a Hoax?

I have to admit that as the week has gone on, with the increasingly breathless media blather over the baddest bogeymen of all - ISIS - that I have been struck with the idea that this just doesn't smell right. The emergence of a jihadist force, so nasty that even al Qaeda doesn't want them seems to be a wet dream to a war machine that has spent the past year just itching for another military intervention. That the uprising occurred shortly after the recent electoral triumphs of both Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki and Syria's Bashar al-Assad makes it suspect of being a creation of the "regime changers" who can claim plausible deniability that it ISIS arose out of festering regional fanaticism hellbent at the establishment of that new caliphate long preached about by the neocon warmongers.

The unstoppable force of ISIS has provided the worst culprits of the Bush-Cheney regime, including the dark master himself with a new opportunity to revise history in favor of their ideology of global and regional conquest as put forth by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and they have been hitting the media circuit with a vigor. The emergence of ISIS has also allowed President Barack Obama to begin to reinsert the US military back into Iraq after the lying bastard had vowed not to do so. Thursday's announcement that 300 military "advisers" were headed to Iraq is the beginning of an escalation that will further deplete American resources and squander the lives of more US troops in an ultimately doomed crusade that in effect never really ended.

Writer Mike Whitney just put out an interesting piece that I strongly recommend that questions the frenzy, especially in the corrupt state-corporate media to sell the ISIS menace - a task that shouldn't be too difficult considering that most Americans live in a constant state of fear of their own shadows let alone head-chopping jihadists hellbent on imposing Sharia law upon besieged Christians. The Whitney piece is published at Counterpunch and is entitled "The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really an Attack on Iran" from which I excerpt:

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where he says that Maliki’s military forces in Mosul “melted away”. Interestingly, the Haass op-ed was followed by a piece by David Gardener who used almost the very same language. He said the “army melts away.” So, I decided to thumb through the news a bit and see how many other journalists were stung by the “melted away” bug. And, as it happens, there were quite a few, including Politico, NBC News, News Sentinel, Global Post, the National Interest, ABC News etc. Now, the only way an unusual expression like that would pop up with such frequency would be if the authors were getting their talking points from a central authority. (which they probably do.) But the effect, of course, is the exact opposite than what the authors intend, that is, these cookie cutter stories leave readers scratching their heads and feeling like something fishy is going on.

And something fishy IS going on. The whole fable about 1,500 jihadis scaring the pants off 30,000 Iraqi security guards to the point where they threw away their rifles, changed their clothes and headed for the hills, is just not believable. I don’t know what happened in Mosul, but, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t that. That story just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Whitney goes on to question the official media narrative - I went out and did a quick search and the term "melted away" in describing the Iraqi army indeed pops up in a number of different variations which is a giveaway what the story is centrally created. If any thinking American still has any faith whatsoever in the credibility of our corrupt and contemptible media then they are a sucker. After being lied to over the Bush regime's original hogwash fairy tales to attack and invade Iraq in the first place, the pack of whoppers and propaganda that inflated a massive stock market bubble to the benefit of a small amount of crony capitalists at the expense of millions after the 2008 economic collapse (remember Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's "Green Shoots"?), the attempts to use a bogus Sarin gas attack to justify the bombing of Syria and most recently the vilification of Vladimir Putin and coverup of a US backed coup in Ukraine that installed neo-Nazi backed fascists who can anyone believe anything that comes out of the media?

While Whitney makes a compelling case there is one just unveiled masterpiece of bullshit and spin that sealed the deal for me that the entire ISIS narrative is a serious and intricate psyops hoax and that was yesterday's amazing discovery of Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction by the miraculous ISIS. The tale followed the usual echo chamber routine, first appearing in The Telegraph and then being amplified by a network of right-wing neocon blogs and websites as well as operatives who appeared in chat rooms and message boards and ended up in the central neocon propaganda beacon The Washington Post this morning "Islamist militants bear down on Iraqi forces; seize former chemical weapons facility". Just wait until the Sunday morning "news" shows, if Senator Lindsey Graham was already shrieking about ISIS plotting another 9/11 from Iraq and Syria last week the man will need to be restrained or seriously medicated about 48 hours from now as I publish this on Friday morning. 

Whitney nailed it that the ISIS tale "doesn't pass the smell test" but I would disagree in that it smells like bullshit.

War Now and War Forever as Neocons Bask in Renewed Glory

You have to give one thing to Dick Cheney, the motherfucker has balls. The ongoing bedlam in Iraq courtesy of militant Islamic group ISIS - a sudden arrival so convenient that it is practically too good to be true for the war machine and just maybe it is - the architects of the disastrous "Shock and Awe" attack and invasion are taking to the airwaves to take their bows and trash Barack the magnificent over their own bloody mess in a Neocon Surge. People are buying it too, just like they got suckered by the original sales pitch by the Bushreich and bullshit conjecture about smoking guns as mushroom clouds and Saddam Hussein's yellow cake uranium - not surprising in that we live in the land of the great star-spangled shit sandwich that never lacks for hordes of suckers lining up to take a bite. The neocons are everywhere this week, a veritable ghouls parade for a pack of deranged jackals long ago left for dead. None however have come roaring back quite like former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, a man who were he to live in a land where justice reigned would long ago have been swinging from the end of a rope just like Saddam did.

Bursting forth like the proverbial alien through the chest cavity, Cheney was afforded prime space in the Rupert Murdoch war herald the Wall Street Journal, a paper whose editorial page is slightly to the right of Benito Mussolini. The man who quite possibly may be the greatest war criminal since Adolf Hitler and definitely in US history delivered a sulfuric reeking jeremiad that could have come from the bowels of Hades itself, a place where Cheney most assuredly would be roasting on a spit were it not for his ability to jump to the front of the line on the donor list to score a new heart. The piece, entitled "The Collapsing Obama Doctrine" co-written by his lunatic daughter and failed Wyoming US candidate Liz amazingly begins "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many" as if he wasn't the co-pilot (and arguably top gun) during the catastrophic eight year wrecking spree of the George W. Bush administration. I excerpt the following from Cheney and his hell-spawn's screed:

As the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threaten Baghdad, thousands of slaughtered Iraqis in their wake, it is worth recalling a few of President Obama's past statements about ISIS and al Qaeda. "If a J.V. team puts on Lakers' uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant" (January 2014). "[C]ore al Qaeda is on its heels, has been decimated" (August 2013). "So, let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding" (September 2011).

[Kobe Bryant should sue the Cheneys who have now tainted him in a manner that that ugly rape case nor his inability to win more NBA titles than Michael Jordan ever could - his very mention though shows that Dick and Liz had some professional help from a high dollar advertising/public relations house]

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.

[Once again Cheney, doing his best Ronald Reagan with Alzheimer's disease imitation conveniently forgets George W. Bush in his selective recall of history. Also there is that increasingly smelly "ISIS" thing that looks more and more like a psyops campaign]

AND

On a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, "Can you please explain what your president is doing?" "Why is he walking away?" "Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?" "Why is he abandoning your friends?" "Why is he doing deals with your enemies?"

[The last time that I looked the Persian Gulf and Israel weren't a part of America, a land who our bought politicians are at least theoretically supposed to represent instead of foreigners] 

In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, "They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don't the Americans care?"

[I can't speak for ALL Americans but my personal opinion is NO - I don't fucking care, it is time to clean up our own house and get the fuck out of all of these foreign entanglements that George Washington once warned of]

AND

American freedom will not be secured by empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies, or apologizing for our great nation—all hallmarks to date of the Obama doctrine. Our security, and the security of our friends around the world, can only be guaranteed with a fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.

[Translation: ROMNEY 2016 - Sheldon Adelson has more money that God and he's on our side]

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, "If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.

[Jesus do I long for that great day when Dick Cheney joins Ronald Reagan for eternity]

After reading that monstrous tirade I feel like I need a shower to wash off the toxic sleaze and slime.

It's total bullshit and his criticism of Obama is hypocrisy at the utmost, our current above the law figurehead has his own disasters now - the Wall Street bailout, the corporate friendly Obamacare scam, a dismal economy and with his ongoing dangerous provocation of Vladimir Putin and Russia (the neocons and Cheney hate them too) perhaps a global nuclear catastrophe. Obama, like Kobe Bryant in the late stages of what appears to be a losing effort still has some time on the clock and could yet surpass Bush, Cheney and the neocons in their damage inflicted upon America and to a larger extent the planet. Christ knows that the man isn't trying his damned level best.

The kicker about Cheney's much-publicized vomiting up of chunks of lunacy is that in addition to his blasting of Barry and polishing the turd of his own legacy he is promoting a new political money-laundering house with one of those stupid patriotic sounding names - Alliance for a Stronger America - that seems more like a place for Liz to hang her cowboy hat and spurs for a job long after Dick has gone on to his great reward.

While the neocons are doing their victory lap and revising history thanks to the same corrupt media that allowed them to lie America into a war that cost thousands of American servicemen and women their lives and hundreds of thousands more diminished lifestyles thanks to being maimed for their delusions those who get it can just watch in a sort of mixture of horror and really fucking cynical humor as the war criminals are afforded the chance to rewrite history in their favor.

As George Orwell himself, a man who had a Nostradamus like ability to foresee the coming of the neocons once so aptly put it: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past". The same lying media figures and ideologues who lied this once great country into the insane  cauldron of corruption and ancient religious hatred that is the blood-drenched clusterfuck of the Middle East at the cost of thousands of dead Americans and well over a million non-Christian brown folks (aka collateral damage) have not only gotten away with it but are doing it again now.

Always remember 2+2=5

Senator Lindsey Graham Plays the 9/11 Card on Sunday Morning TV

The neocons wasted no time in exploiting the escalating violence in Iraq (no mention that they are responsible for the whole fiasco in the first place) in rolling out the big guns on the Sunday morning propaganda shows. Senator Lindsey Graham, fresh off of his primary win in the Palmetto State slithered out on CBS's Face the Nation to engage in the very fearmongering and lies that keep the war machine permanently set on kill and the machinery of the national surveillance state humming along. Graham is a disgrace to America and a loose cannon with the type of ideas that get people killed and yet he along with his fellow bloodthristy degenerates are always given the legitimacy that they are undeserving of and afforded national television airtime on shows that the vast majority do not realize are staged for the benefit of the establishment and solely for that reason.

From the Face the Nation website on Senator Graham's appearance this morning:

"We need air power immediately to stop the advance toward Baghdad," Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, warning that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) - the jihadists who are an offshoot of al Qaeda - could control the entire northern half of the country and use it to march on Jordan and Lebanon while Iran moves in to control the south.

The South Carolina senator added that the director of national intelligence and the head of the FBI have both warned that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, has promised to carry out the next 9/11 attacks.

"I think it's inevitable. The seeds of 9/11 are being planted all over Iraq and Syria. You don't have to believe me, this is what they're telling you they're gonna do. They're not hiding their agenda. They want an Islamic caliphate," Graham said. "They plan to drive us out of the Mideast by attacking us here at home."

It is the same - "we have to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here" horseshit that served as the basis of the Bush regime and the compliant Congress to attack Iraq in the first place. It was a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks and yet they were used as the pretense to execute the plans of the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to invade the Middle East. And the Palmetto State princess Senator Graham, the pivot man in the warmonger circle jerk along with John McCain and Joseph Lieberman was a key instigator in pushing for the attack on Iraq and has not stopped wailing in his bitchy Gomer Pyle style cadence to send others to die for his lunacy for one damned minute.

While the carnage in Iraq certainly looks like the blowback of years of failed US regional policies as well as arming the most violent elements of the jihadist movement - including admitted cannibals - has more than just a hint of bullshit to it in that ISIS seems to perfectly fit into the neocon narrative about the new Islamic Caliphate - and I mean perfectly - the new bogeyman has arrived. This will be hammered home repeatedly over the coming week as the neocon talking points will be spread like so much manure and Obama will most certainly dial up the airstrikes on Iraq while the warmongers at the State Department led by the horse-faced serial lair John Kerry concoct their plans on how to ensure that Syria is bombed as well. It will be the back door to the overthrow of the Bashir Al Assad regime that was ready to go last September until Russian leader Vladimir Putin swept in to thwart the plans.

These won't be surgical strikes either, as Seymour Hersh wrote in his piece about the false flag Sarin gas attacks in Ghouta "The Red Line and the Rat Line":

 In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

The potential for disaster is enormous and on a scale of what Nixon and Kissinger released when their bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge because Christ only knows what hell will be unleashed by the evil twins of American idiocy and incompetence. While Obama has ruled out sending the ground troops back into Iraq the Democrats are facing a major pasting come November and the Senate will be in the hands of the serious murderers in the Republican party. Fighting the caliphate will make for one hell of a campaign season in the run up to 2016 and there will be even worse options than the fanatical Hillary Clinton that will be funded by millions of dollars in Sheldon Adelson's blood money to fund a candidate that will finally come through and nuke Tehran. There is a certain stench beginning to become noticeable as one Willard "Mitt" Romney hovers in the background, just barely noticeable but he is there and if Jeb Bush's liberal immigration stance is too much for the berserkers in the party base then he will be back with a vengeance after cutting his deal with devil that is Adelson.

I would be increasingly worried about some sort of attack in The Homeland right about now simply because so many have so much to gain from one. It would seal the deal for the Republicans in taking over all three branches of the government and the NSA Stasi would be off the hook to commence search and destroy operations against antiwar dissidents which will be conducted with a vengeance and privacy and pro-constitution advocates, especially those who have a history of pro-Snowden comments will be blamed for any such attack for not letting the NSA Stasi do it's job.

The gates of hell are about to swing open..

Here We Go Again: Another Syria Chemical Weapons Tale

MORE WAR PORN TO PUSH FOR US ATTACK ON SYRIA

It is hard not to be completely distracted by the endless torrent of war propaganda over Ukraine and getting Americans whipped up into a bloody frenzy of hatred towards Russia and Vladimir Putin but there is another lurid tale of Syrian gas attacks on civilians making the rounds this week. While it is nowhere near as intense an effort to promote lies upon which to base the long-desired apple of the neocon's eye that is regime change in Damascus as we saw back last summer when Obama and his incredible shrinking Secretary of State John Kerry were trying to close the deal for yet another regime change in the Middle East.

There aren't those war porn videos of the poor children who were allegedly the victims of the use of chemical weapons by the "New Hitler" of the week Bashar al-Assad on civilians that the missing airplane network CNN looped over and over again in excruciating detail. The sheer cynicism of the Obama regime, one that has always been built upon a foundation of horseshit was laid bare for all to see before Putin saved the day, an act that was a terminal blow to the embedded neoconservatives and according to journalist Robert Parry over at the great Consortium News may have been - along with the desire to sink the P5+1 Iran talks - the impetus for the unfolding debacle in Kiev. This certainly resonates with the sort of tactics that the Leo Strauss inspired Machiavellian masturbators resort to in selling their illegal wars of aggression.

Despite the US war machine having never been able to definitively prove that the Sarin used in Ghouta indeed came from Assad's government and despite the account that was too volcanic to mention in the poisoned state-corporate media in The Homeland by Seymour Hersh that writes of a potential false flag Turkish involvement the neocons are flogging the fairy tales about gas attacks anew. The latest offering from the mighty megaphones of living high on the hog US war propagandists and their NATO allies is the claim that chlorine gas has been used nine times since February. According to a story in The Guardian (also with an image of suffering children as a sales tactic):

The global body supervising the surrender of Syria's chemical weapons is to investigate fresh claims that a less dangerous – but still lethal – chlorine gas has been used in recent attacks on opposition areas.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has announced it will investigate allegations that chlorine has been used at least nine times since February, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.

The move follows intensive lobbying from the US and France who have both indicated in the past fortnight that they believe the Syrian government has been responsible for the attacks.

Note the hypocrisy in that now the neocons are throwing in with those previously mocked and detested "cheese eating surrender monkeys" in Paris whose failure to support Bush-Cheney's military misadventures resulted in much outrage back in 2003. Such stupid behavior as the US House of Representatives (as big a collection of childish assholes that exists today) to rename french fries as freedom fries and a scary proposal by Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite who represents the textbook example for gerrymandered districts in Florida's 5th to exhume the bodies of the American war dead who were killed during the "good war" at Normandy and returning them home for burial as a retaliatory gesture to the "ungrateful French" are now forgotten but in attention deficit America a decade may as well be eternity.

Just as forgotten as the lessons of the ruinous - although massively profitable - war in Iraq and to a lesser degree the one in Afghanistan that Obama adopted like a Portuguese water dog puppy. With everything now focused on the support of the coup regime in Ukraine and the ongoing Russia bashing don't discount the ability of the neocons to work to slide a military attack on Syria under the radar. This piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department per her byline at a website Project Syndicate is indicative of the sorty of deranged thinking that has helped to punch the ticket of this once great country towards damnation. I excerpt from the following "Stopping Russia Starts in Syria":

The solution to the crisis in Ukraine lies in part in Syria. It is time for US President Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order the offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone attacks or covert operations. The result will change the strategic calculus not only in Damascus, but also in Moscow, not to mention Beijing and Tokyo.

Many argue that Obama’s climb-down from his threatened missile strikes against Syria last August emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex Crimea. But it is more likely that Putin acted for domestic reasons – to distract Russians’ attention from their country’s failing economy and to salve the humiliation of watching pro-European demonstrators oust the Ukrainian government he backed.

Regardless of Putin’s initial motivations, he is now operating in an environment in which he is quite certain of the parameters of play. He is weighing the value of further dismemberment of Ukraine, with some pieces either joining Russia or becoming Russian vassal states, against the pain of much stronger and more comprehensive economic sanctions. Western use of force, other than to send arms to a fairly hapless Ukrainian army, is not part of the equation.

That is a problem. In the case of Syria, the US, the world’s largest and most flexible military power, has chosen to negotiate with its hands tied behind its back for more than three years. This is no less of a mistake in the case of Russia, with a leader like Putin who measures himself and his fellow leaders in terms of crude machismo.

It is time to change Putin’s calculations, and Syria is the place to do it. Through a combination of mortars that shatter entire city quarters, starvation, hypothermia, and now barrel bombs that spray nails and shrapnel indiscriminately, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have seized the advantage. Slowly but surely, the government is reclaiming rebel-held territory.

Realist” foreign policy analysts openly describe Assad as the lesser evil compared to the Al Qaeda-affiliated members of the opposition; others see an advantage in letting all sides fight it out, tying one another down for years. Moreover, the Syrian government does appear to be slowly giving up its chemical weapons, as it agreed last September to do.

 The problem is that if Assad continues to believe that he can do anything to his people except kill them with chemicals, he will exterminate his opponents, slaughtering everyone he captures and punishing entire communities, just as his father, Hafez al-Assad, massacred the residents of Hama in 1982. He has demonstrated repeatedly that he is cut from the same ruthless cloth.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, Assad has fanned fears of what Sunni opposition forces might do to the Alawites, Druze, Christians and other minorities if they won. But we need not speculate about Assad’s behavior. We have seen enough.

 A US strike against the Syrian government now would change the entire dynamic. It would either force the regime back to the negotiating table with a genuine intention of reaching a settlement, or at least make it clear that Assad will not have a free hand in re-establishing his rule.

Jesus Christ.. Colonel Kurtz has reached the end of the river here. Ms. Slaughter (how apropos a name) is indicative of the thinking that has set this country on the road to historical damnation if not the compilation of a body count that in the end would exceed that of all of the 'great" mass murderers of history driven by an insane ideology and that it is now pretty much the conventional wisdom bodes very ill for all of the subjects of the Empire as well as humanity itself.