U.S. Senator Uses Bogus Photos to Make the Case For Arming Ukraine

Despite the fragile ceasefire that emerged from the peace talks between leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine there is still an ongoing push by defense industry pimps to supply weapons to Kiev backed forces.  The top two proponents – as well as the most noisy – are of course the dynamic duo of John McCain and Lindsey Graham which comes as no surprise. Since it is Sunday at least one them will be appearing on the morning propaganda shows today to howl for pissing away American tax dollars in a civil war that we have no business meddling in. Neither one of the two - who have never met a foreign conflict that they would not send Americans off to die for - has ever done anything remotely as shameless as what Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe just did.

Inhofe, who sits elbow to elbow with McCain and Graham on the Senate Armed Services Committee has been doing his damned level best to poke the nuclear armed bear. This gaggle, and a multitude of supporting propagandists, State Department figures and Obama administration hacks seem to believe that it is in the best interests of America to get into a proxy war halfway across the planet over events in Ukraine. We can’t even secure our own freaking borders and it is largely thanks to the likes of Inhofe and his ilk who only seem to be interested in waging Cold War era ideological battles and shilling for the defense industrial complex.

The senator is taking heavy flak now for making his case to arm the Ukrainian regime against Russian backed insurgents and using phony photos to back his claims about a Russian invasion.  As reported by Michael Krieger of the website Liberty Blitzkrieg in the piece “In His Thirst for War, Senator Jim Inhofe Releases Fake Photos of Russian Troops in the Ukraine”:

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee first viewed the graphic pictures in December. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.) then obtained the photos and worked to independently verify and confirm the authenticity of the photos, before providing them exclusively to the Free Beacon.

Inhofe said he hopes the images act as a wake up call to the Obama administration and American people, who largely have been spared from seeing the graphic violence inflicted upon Ukraine by the Russian-backed separatists…

Following publication of this story, serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of some of the photographs provided by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.). Several images of the Russian convoys appear to have been taken in 2008, during Russia’s conflict with Georgia. Given the similarities between the earlier images and those provided by the senator’s office, the Washington Free Beacon is investigating further and will update as necessary.

The providing of the pics to the Washington Free Beacon is a tried and true tactic for the establishment propaganda machine. First a fake story is put out by a lesser known website and then breathlessly hyped until one of the mainstream McNews outlets picks it up and then it becomes a talking point. Call me a cynic but it would be very advantageous to have "proof" of a massive Russian invasion that could be cited by McCain on Meet the Press. Inhofe is frantically backing away from the photos now and blaming the whole mess on the members of parliament in Kiev who provided him with the material.

Even conservative websites can see through this transparent bullshit, the Daily Caller provides an update on the pictures in a story entitled "Sen. Inhofe Blames Ukrainian Parliament For Falsified Photo":

Washington Free Beacon published a story Thursday that included several photographs offered to the publication exclusively by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). Well, “exclusive” was a bit of a stretch. Both the publication and the senator soon learned that at least one of the gruesome pictures came from the AP in 2008. Two others were easily spotted elsewhere online.

Washington Free Beacon walked back its story with a severe update as well as a second update up top.

Inhofe issued a statement late Thursday saying he was furious. But he claimed one falsified photo doesn’t change the gist of the story, which is that pro-Russia separatists have been murdering Ukranians and the U.S. government, in his view, needs to step in and militarily aid the Ukraine.

“The Ukrainian parliament members who gave us these photos in print form as if it came directly from a camera really did themselves a disservice,” Inhofe said in a statement sent to The Mirror by his office. “We felt confident to release these photos because the images match the reporting of what is going on in the region. I was furious to learn one of the photos provided now appears to be falsified from an AP photo taken in 2008. This doesn’t change the fact that there is plenty of evidence Russia has made advances into the country with T-72 tanks and that pro-Russian separatists have been killing Ukrainians in cold blood.”

But lying comes as naturally to a member of congress as breathing water does to a fish and the corrupt media never calls any of these swine out for their bullshit. Inhofe can huff and puff and blame it all on being suckered but it rings hollow because he is not walking back his statements on a Russian invasion of Ukraine one bit. This line of hogwash has been invoked so often over the past year that one wonders why Putin himself isn't already sitting behind Petro "the Chocolate King" Poroshenko's desk and sipping his aged cognac from a snifter.

I don't buy it that Inhofe didn't know that the pictures were a hoax but even if he was duped would that make you feel any better as to the level of competence of our government? And this is Russia that these morons are provoking not some dipshit Middle East hellhole that doesn't possess a huge nuclear arsenal which makes Inhofe's actions recklessly stupid.

Looks like Brian Williams may just have a career in politics after all.

Brian Williams Scrutinized Over SEAL Team Six Embedded Reporter Claim

Suspended NBC News celebrity anchorman Brian Williams continues to come under scrutiny. Now that the man whose big fib about being in a military helicopter that came under enemy fire in Iraq has been exposed as a pathological liar, his entire career is being picked apart. I recently wrote that “One almost expects to see statements pop up that Williams was riding shotgun with SEAL Team Six during the raid that was alleged to have resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden” but I was only being sarcastic. Now lo and behold, an actual story has surfaced of ‘lyin Brian actually claiming that he was embedded with SEAL Team Six. You just can’t make shit like this up.

As reported by CNN’s Peter Bergen in the online piece “Did Brian Williams embed with SEAL Team 6?”:

Embattled NBC News anchor Brian Williams may have some more explaining to do.

On May 3, 2011, just two days after the daring U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, Williams said on his NBC News show, "Now, people might be hearing about SEAL Team 6. I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them at the start of the war."

With this statement Williams asserted that he was embedded with one of the most covert units in the U.S. military and flew with the SEALs into Iraq in March 2003 as the war there began.

When asked about this claim, a Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw told CNN: "We do not embed journalists with that unit or any other unit that conducts counterterrorism missions. Bottom line -- no."

Could Williams have simply hitched a ride into Iraq with SEAL Team 6 outside of the formal embedding process? This seems quite unlikely. A SEAL officer told CNN, "That early in the conflict, there were only missions taking place, not bouncing between outstations."

With another whopper now on his resume Williams may have no choice other than to seek a job in national party politics. There are also inquires being made into whether ‘lyin Brian personally witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall as he has claimed and whether he actually met Pope John Paul II when he was in college.

In the story “NBC investigating Brian Williams' claims that he witnessed fall of Berlin Wall and met Pope John Paul II” the New York Daily News reports that:

NBC is expanding its inquiry into the alleged tall tales of suspended “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, CNN reported Thursday.
The network’s internal fact-checking is “nowhere near done,” a senior NBC source told the cable news channel.
The look into Williams’ exaggerated exploits has expanded beyond the anchor’s claims about being in a helicopter that was struck by an RPG during the 2003 Iraq War.
The new focus will examine Williams’ claims that he, not his predecessor Tom Brokaw, was in Germany the day the Berlin Wall fell and a story about meeting Pope John Paul II while a college student at Catholic University in 1979.

Despite efforts by the NBC News damage control team to contain the category five storm surge of bullshit it now appears that their defenses will be completely overwhelmed.

Pathetic Democrats Steamrolled by Resurgent Republicans

It was a very cold morning indeed on the day of reckoning for the Democratic party and suicide hotlines across the fruited plain likely saw high volume into the wee hours of the night on Tuesday. In an electoral bloodbath as savage as a Rob Zombie slasher flick, the blue jackass party was thoroughly routed in the mid-term elections. It's not as though this was unexpected given the ominous signs of the last several months. The Dems were the recipients of voter wrath towards the miserably failed presidency of Barack Obama that now crawls on it’s mangy belly into the final two years of an eight year sentence to Hell in America. The whipping was thorough, so much so that even the most optimistic of Republicans had to be shocked as the sun came up on Wednesday.

Not only did the GOP regain control of the Senate but gained House seats and won a number of what were to be close Governor’s races. Florida’s reptillan Rick Scott beat back a challenge by flip-flopping party hopper Charlie Crist and union buster Scott Walker – who survived a recall attempt – won reelection in Wisconsin. As expected the turtle-faced wonder Mitch McConnell easily won in Kentucky and now will become Senate Majority Leader replacing the wretched Harry Reid. The ousting of Reid is truly a victory for all of America whether they know it or not as he along with Obama and the weasel queen Nancy Pelosi have become the public face of all things wrong with Democrats. A disastrous end of times for the recent party control of congress was pretty much preordained with her proclamation that "impeachment is off the table" back in 2006. Now the chickens have come home to roost but it would be more apropos if they were vultures in that the party is now a corpse.  

The early Wednesday columns are interesting to say the least.  Pundit Dan Balz weighs in at the 

Washington Post with “An unhappy electorate is toughest on Obama and the Democrats”:

Campaign 2014 surpassed its advance billing, as an electorate that was deeply unhappy with all its leaders handed the biggest rebuke to President Obama and the Democrats by giving Republicans control of the Senate. For Democrats, election night turned out far worse than any of them had feared.

At every turn in almost every state, the Republicans proved superior. They won nearly every competitive contest in states held by Democrats and held on to the states that had looked like they might go to the Democrats. Instead of slipping into the majority, the GOP stormed to power in the Senate.

That wasn’t all. In a year when incumbent governors in both parties were endangered, the Republicans prevailed and the Democrats did not, including in some of the bluest states in the nation.

Exit polls Tuesday portrayed an electorate that, while disgruntled, was not quite as Republican in its leaning as it was four years ago, when a tidal wave of dissatisfaction gave the GOP a historic victory. But if Democrats thought that might save them, their expectations proved groundless.

There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth on the so-called left but little to no real acknowledgement of exactly why voters have come to hate the Democrats. I have a number of progressive friends who either stayed home out of disgust with the Dems to punish Obama or went to the polls and voted for libertarians, Greens and no party affiliate candidates. I really don't expect Democratic party bosses to get it before 2016 election and they will only double-down on pushing a failed product that has fewer buyers now than ever. The preeminent Democratic party shill website Daily Kos ran live blogs on the election that became more grim as the pummeling continued. I found the image on the second to last one amusing:

Conservative website Breitbart's live-blogging of the Dem debacle is good although not quite up there in terms of pure entertainment value with the doomed liberal ones as the night wore on.

Democrats went to bed crying into their pillows last night but that is what happens when they stand for nothing and play with the fire of identity group politics - it is very easy to get burned come election day if those who you pander to don't show up. Could be that blacks, gays, Latinos and union types fully understand that the party only needs them until after the polls close and are tired of being shit on afterwards. An ominous sign for Democrats is that not even Bill Clinton could salvage their hopes when he was trotted out a few weeks ago to stump for candidates. This bodes ill for Hillary.

The Republicans, if they want to retain power and rescue America from doom will have to find some way of reaching out to these demographics for a winning coalition. Despite all that was wrong with him (and it was a lot) Ronald Reagan did and was successful. We will see whether the GOP is content to rest on their laurels after Tuesday's massacre or think beyond the next election cycle. Americans are pissed off and Obama will no longer be around to be a target for their frustrations. McConnell needs to move quickly before primary season starts and gridlock sets in anew although he may find the ambitious, fascist fanatic Ted Cruz to be a more serious thorn in the side than Obama ever was. 

And you have to just love this picture of the glimmer twins from Democratic propaganda organ MSNBC courtesy of the Huffington Post's Twitter feed.  No further comment is necessary on this one. I detest Rachel Maddow who along with Al Franken managed to escape from the wreckage of liberal radio venture Air America to prominent positions in the establishment while those critical of Democrats as well were exiled to obscurity. 

In the past it was at times fashionable to refer to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” for their lack of enthusiasm in supporting America. Now that the magnitude of the colossal ass-beating given to Democrats by the electorate in Tuesday’s mid-terms is sinking in it is time to drag out the term anew.  This afternoon, speaking from the smoking ruins of the Democrat command center, the cheese-eater in chief delivered his surrender address. While it wasn’t exactly General Robert E. Lee giving it up at Appomattox it did have historical significance as a pathological narcissist had to formally acknowledge a crippling political defeat.

According to a story from Reuters entitled “After Republican rout, Obama tells voters: 'I hear you'”:

U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged on Wednesday that "Republicans had a good night" with sweeping election victories in Congress and said he got a message from voters that it was his responsibility to break a Washington gridlock.

Republicans seized control of the U.S. Senate in Tuesday's election and captured their biggest majority in the House of Representatives in more than 60 years. The party also won more than half of the 36 governors' races.

"As president, I have a unique responsibility to try and make this town work," the president, a Democrat, said at a White House news conference. "So, to everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you."

The president, whose unpopularity made him unwelcome to many fellow Democrats running for office, plans to meet congressional leaders from both parties at the White House on Friday to take stock of the new political landscape.

On Wednesday, he spoke with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who is poised to become the Senate's new majority leader, and with House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner.

"I told them both that I look forward to finishing up this Congress' business and then working together for the next two years to advance America's business," Obama said.

What this surely means is that we are all about to get the mother of all ass-fuckings. There will be serious escalations of the war on ISIS, a huge infusion of cash to the military and with the deranged Senator John McCain now wielding a big stick a very dangerous flirtation with nuclear disaster. McCain has to one of the happiest men in America now with Congress firmly under GOP control and we may even see a return to the constitution in that they will be able to declare war. Bibi will be coming soon to address his legions of perverted fanatics and meat-puppets in a joint session railing for the bombers to be sent to Tehran. Bet the mortgage money on that one. 

Now the Democrats are turning on each other like starved rats trapped in a septic tank after getting walloped and trying to shed their own culpability. According to the Washington Post, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s staff is caterwauling about a lack of support from dear leader while David Axelrod went on MSNBC and called for a house cleaning. The circular firing squad is already forming but there is no honest discussion over what it is about the Democrats and Obama that Americans really hate so much. It is a deep state of denial bordering on fugue and there is no easy fixing of this hot mess in time for the next round in 2016 which the talking heads are already masturbating over.

Short of the Republicans getting drunk off of their own success and imploding – see the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks – the Democrats have very serious problems and Hillary Rodham-Clinton is not the cure. The Clintons used to be fresh back in 1992 when they were the sign of a new generation assuming it's position atop the nation’s political establishment and were adored by millions. That however was one hell of a long time -and more scandals than Bubba can shake Mr. Wiggly at - ago.

 Today Bill and Hillary Clinton are symbols of a terminally corrupt, atrophied, insider packed political class who have zero chance at connecting with younger generations. Obama pulled it off  back in 2008 but like everything else that the prince of petulance touched it all turned to shit leaving millions of new voters up for grabs. It was a stunning reversal of fortune and inexplicable why Obama abandoned the young but who needs them when you can field a "team of rivals" that was the darling of the political elite. 

So the Republicans have a chance to own the future if they are able to actually do something positive for Americans and make an attempt to appeal to millennials and non-white demographics. Rand Paul and Jeb Bush are among those already reaching out and the party is going to have to come up with an answer to harvest those disgusted with the Democrats to win in 2016 and beyond. Given the lack of depth on the Democrat's bench as well as a their total moral bankruptcy the party may be on the way to the scrap heap of history but the GOP also has to adapt to survive in a new era. The grumpy and gullible FOX News blue-haired fatty ingrates are dying off and in a couple of more election cycles there will be millions fewer racists to rely on. The old Republicans are as much a dinosaur as the Democrats and a good night of the long knives style purge to clean them out of the party would behoove those who run it. So here we sit in a one-party America - but that is always what it has been over the past several decades, only now it's out in the open,

But today is about whining and finger-pointing and people who were right about the Democrats laughing their jolly assess off and saying “I told you so”. I sure as hell am. I remember the days when I despised the Republicans as though they were Satan incarnate but in the Obama era, after the betrayals, bank bailouts and bellicosity towards Syria and Russia they have now closed ground and are running neck and neck. Fuck the goddamned Democrats, when they are nothing but less strident neocons and Republican lite why not just abandon the whole charade entirely and stop trying to differentiate between the two. No matter how loathsome that the party is at least the Republicans stand for something. The Democrats are just a pack of Judas goats and after Tuesday's baby-seal clubbing should just surrender and fold up their tents. 

And how fitting  is it that a former hog-castrator in Joni Ernst won a Senate seat in Iowa? It is a classic metaphor for how Mr. Obama’s balls have been chopped off once and for all. If it quacks like a lame duck, it is a lame duck.

Swinish Boehner Calls for Boots on the Ground in Syria

The American political class enjoys many perks as our so-called elected representatives. There is of course the regular paycheck, enough paid vacation time to make even European socialists envious, great health insurance and a generous retirement package after a minimal qualifying period. All on the taxpayer dole too and that doesn't count the paid junkets, free meals and high paid lobbying gigs that await thanks to the revolving door between Washington and private industry. If a politician is prominent enough, they also are able to land face time in the media with the top honor being a regular on the Sunday morning bullshit circuit. Such an honor has made John McCain and Lindsey Graham into the "men" that they are.

John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House appeared Sunday on ABC's "This Week" with the cheesy former Bill Clinton flack turned celebrity pundit George Stephanopoulos where he called for American "Boots on the Ground" to combat the fanatical Islamist army ISIS or ISIL or IS. I excerpt from the transcript:

BOEHNER: If the goal is to destroy ISIS, as the president says it is, I don't believe the strategy that he outlined will accomplish that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why not?

BOEHNER: At the end of the day, I think it's gonna take more than air strikes to drive them outta there.

At some point somebody's boots have to be on the ground… That's the whole point-

STEPHANOPOULOS: American?

BOEHNER: Listen, the president doesn't want to do that.

If I were the president, I probably wouldn't have talked about what I wouldn't do. And maybe we can get enough of these forces trained to get ‘em on the battlefield. But somebody's boots have to be there.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And if no one else will step up, would you recommend putting American boots on the ground?

BOEHNER: We have no choice. These are barbarians. They intend to kill us. And if we don't destroy them first, we're gonna pay the price.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I know you've said that - assuming you're speaker next year - you'd want to have a vote on a resolution - why not now?

BOEHNER: I'd be happy to.

The president typically in a situation like this would call for an authorization vote and go sell that to the American people and send a resolution to the Hill. The president has not done that. He believes he has authority under existing resolutions to do what he's done.

Boehner is a world class weasel - he will call for a vote but only after the elections so he can save his own worthless ass.  Any 'leader' with a set of stones as well as a respect for American principles would have ensured that congress would have authorized renewed military action. Obama is acting like a king by invoking the 2001 authorization for the use of military force in Iraq in his war on ISIS.  This is a flimsy justification from a pathological liar and the fact that his regime had to actually invent Khorasan, the badder than ISIS group in order to gin up an al Qaeda link shows how this is all about cheap election year politics. Why doesn't Boehner demand some accountability from our Caesar? That is after all his f*cking job because the Constitution vests within congress the power to declare war - and only congress can do so. Boehner and his ilk are only enabling Obama and provided that Republicans are able to win the Senate - which is likely - it will be a charlatan like him who allows Barry to wriggle off of the hook of impeachment for his mounting list of high crimes.

Also it's mighty white of Boehner to volunteer the sons and daughters, husbands and wives and fathers and mothers of Americans up to be fed into the Middle East meat grinder again. He knows damned well that none of his children or grandchildren will end up coming back in a body bag or after being maimed by an IED or even worse, captured and beheaded on You Tube. The political scumbags are always the first to send others into their idiotic wars and they suffer none of the fallout. It should be enough to just continue bombing and to give the Iraqis a swift kick in the ass to fight their own damned battles without sacrificing American blood in another futile cause. The only way that ISIS is going to be eradicated is if the locals are the ones doing the heavy lifting and we see how that has worked out.

As far as "boots on the ground" haven't we heard enough of that overused, focus group tested bumper sticker slogan? Not one of these babbling idiots, from Boehner to Obama and all of the jackasses in between along with their media presstitutes can go longer than ten minutes without invoking the cliche of the year. Why not just cut through the bullshit and call it what it is which is the involvement of U.S. combat troops? My God these people have no shame.

Politicians and government lackeys are also given special status when it comes to skirting those TSA goons at the nation's airports. They never have to endure the humiliation of being forced to remove their shoes, walk over an area teeming with the foot fungus of others nor have their children felt up or grandma being forced to remove her medical diaper. They stand as much chance of being forced to submit to intimidating state thugs as their own kids do of being sent off to fight in one of their wars.

The political class in this country has become the equivalent to royalty and didn't America once fight a revolution to no longer be subjected to the whims of a king and his operatives.

Definition of Irony:John Kerry Visits Saudi Arabia on Anniversary of 9/11

You have to hand it to Secretary of State John "Skull and Bones" Kerry, as the nation's top diplomat the man scores right around zero on the political sensitivity scale. Kerry, who is a source of ongoing embarrassment to the image of the U.S. stopped off in Saudi Arabia on Thursday - the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that murdered over 3,000 Americans. Considering the dismal quality of the nincompoops at the State Department like Marie Harf, Jen Psaki and Victoria Nuland it is unsurprising that nobody bothered to take into account the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from The Kingdom.

Kerry was on his latest whirlwind tour to sell the disastrous policies of the Obama regime. This time it is the looming disaster of the war on ISIS that Barry rolled out in a tour de force of teleprompter recited bullshit in his speech on Wednesday night. Hell, when you have to fight the "terrorists" there are no greater authorities on "terrorism" than the decadent pigs in the House of Saud. They have a history of funding and supporting Islamist extremists. None other than Prince Bandar himself was dabbling in arming the rebels in Syria that included al Qaeda sympathizers and admitted cannibals last year before Kerry's diarrhea of the mouth gaffe allowed the hated Russian leader Vladimir Putin to sweep in and prevent a war. Now with the emergence of ISIS (or IS or ISIL as dear leader refers to them) there is the chance of another bite at the apple of a backdoor regime change against Bashar al Assad in Syria.

Americans yesterday honored the victims although whenever the anniversary comes, despite the ceremonies and solemn speeches on what has been labeled Patriot Day there are always the obvious omissions. First and foremost being that the overreaction to the 9/11 attacks have allowed for the slow but steady dismantling of the Constitution, the implementation of the Patriot Act, the expansion of a domestic surveillance state and of course the endless and costly Middle East wars. Wars that calculating swine like Obama never level with Americans about what it would truly take to forever rid the world of the influence of radical Islam. We are talking a total commitment here, one which would last for generations and require real sacrifice from the nation. We are talking about the restoration of the draft and the type of transformation of our entire society to devote generations to wiping out an ideology and that would take political courage of a nature that does not exist. It would also entail the cutting off of the head of the snake itself in Saudi Arabia.

Then there is the matter of those missing twenty eight pages of the 2002 "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" that are said to show some level of Saudi complicity in the attacks. The government has been fighting tooth, fang and claw to keep the information within this report hidden from the American public over the course of the administrations of two presidencies. I don't see that this report merited any mention in the coverage of the 9/11 anniversary yesterday. There is currently an ongoing effort being made by members of congress to have the contents of these 28 pages released which would do much to shed some light on the 9/11 attacks and who provided aid to the terrorists.

Yet there was John Forbes Kerry, the flip-flopping, finger-wagging windbag schmoozing and bribing the leadership of the very country that bore a share of the responsibility in bringing down the twin towers. You just can't make crap like this up.

Obama Finally Gets His Excuse for Middle East War With Beheading

Bad ass Barry is about to become a real, live war president in Iraq. Continuing with the finest of American traditions of the previous four war criminals who held the office Obama is taking the USA! USA! USA! back to war. The beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley, who had been captured in Syria is the excuse of the week and it will sell to the masses of asses. Not that the bastard and his warmonger infested administration and State Department have not been itching to do so for at least the past year. There was the horseshit about the babies being thrown out of incubators children gassed in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta the spectacularly blew up when it was derailed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin last year. That was ugly, Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry, was a whirling dervish of bullshit as he pimped for what would according to journalist Seymour Hersh been a huge bombing campaign in Syria only to have one of his collection of gaffes pounced on to put the choke chain back on the dogs of war. Then Putin had the unmitigated audacity to run that running drop kick in the balls of Uncle Scam calling out American exceptionalism on the anniversary of 9/11, the holiest of holy days here in The Homeland in a New York Times editorial.

We see what happened to Putin. He faced a category five hurricane of propaganda culminating in the U.S. backed coup d'etat by neo-Nazis and fascists in Ukraine right in the middle of his cherished showcase of the Sochi Winter Olympics. That editorial really rubbed rock salt into the open wounds of the neocons and dear leader's wounded egos, it was an awesome dressing down and I excerpt the following in the event anyone missed it:

“it is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

Go and read that editorial and you will see what Putin's real crime was.

The neocon/R2P backed proxy war in Ukraine seems to have stalled temporarily, having hit the high water mark with the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines MH17 which was immediately blamed on "Putin's Missile" but has now disappeared down the memory hole in the corrupt western media. The truth is probably well known in the bowls of the Washington establishment that a rogue faction of the Kiev junta regime was at fault and this doesn't fit the narrative. According to sources today though, the Russian aid convoy has tired of the criminal delays and has proceeded into Ukraine - this could be a golden opportunity for the US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression to attack it and launch their war but why bother when they can settle for Iraq, Syria and ISIS or the IS as it is now called, none of which have nuclear weapons.

The entire ISIS thing has me baffled. On one hand it could be one of those western backed armies along the lines of the thinking behind Operation Gladio, or an enormous hoax (you can't spell bullshit without the letters IS) or a legitimate force that benefited greatly from the U.S. government's arming of extremist jihadist rebels to topple Syria's Bashar al Assad that backfired. The only certainty is that it is being used very effectively by the panicked empire to justify going back into Iraq. Lurid tales like the "beheading" of captured journalist James Foley are extremely useful propaganda tools, especially now that the imperiled Yazidi's facing that genocide on Mount Sinjar have disappeared from the media along with MH17.

As the great journalist Pepe Escobar refers to America, the "Empire of Chaos" is desperate to recapture some of that great 9/11 lightning in a bottle again so we now have the usual dismal array of psychotic war criminals and blood-drinkers coming out about about an imminent terror attack. The Palmetto State princess Senator Lindsey Graham (I wonder how many pictures that the NSA or Mossad has of him with a young boy's pee pee in his mouth) has been squealing like a pig about it for months. Dick Cheney, the head of the shadow government has vowed an attack "more deadly" than that of 9/11, a day that Cheney has yet to explain what and where he was in a credible manner. The fanatical Republican Senator James Ihofe of Oklahoma is fear-mongering that ISIS will soon be blowing up an American city.

What is ominous is that more than just the normal array of treacherous right-wing cranks and neocon traitors are running around with their hair on fire shrieking about an imminent attack on Der Heimat - which would forever cement into place the NSA surveillance machine as well as the militarized police stormtroopers. The chorus of impending doom is being joined by normally rational actors like Secretary of War Defense Chuck Hagel. According to a story in libertarian financial blog Zero Hedge entitled "Chuck Hagel Goes Full Fearmonger: "ISIS Poses GreaterThreat Than 9/11, Prepare For Everything"":

US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel talks about the "imminent threat" ISIS poses to the US and the World.. .and pulls no punches in his total fearmongery..."ISIL poses a threat greater than 9/11. ISIL is as sophisticated and well funded as any group we have seen. They're beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology with a sophisticated strategic and tactical military prowess and they're tremendously well-funded. This is way beyond anything we have seen. We must prepare for everything. Get Ready!" Time for some QE-funded deficit-busting war spending...

As Warren Zevon put it: "lawyers, guns and money.. the shit has hit the fan".

So as trends forecaster Gerald Celente always puts it: when everything else fails, they take you to war. The Obama mob is going to milk the beheading of Foley to the hilt - just like the Bushreich did when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was relieved of the burden of his own head - in order to rile the American sheeple up into supporting the coming war. But there is too much skepticism for that to work this time and unlike in the period prior to the attacks and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan we now have social media.

The real trick is exactly what has worked before for scum like Cheney - a false flag attack, and a damned big one too. Maybe an American city as Senator Inhofe predicts (we could never be lucky enough for it to be Washington) to mobilize the masses into a final burst of imperial carnage leading eventually to a global nuclear conflagration.

The Empire of Chaos are about to roll God's dice and they are going to come up craps this time.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Permanent War for Permanent Profits

“Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

- Bob Dylan (Visions of Johanna)

A 2001 piece at satirical website The Onion entitled “Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'” published shortly after his inauguration was astonishing in the uncanny ability to so accurately predict the future. Not only did Bush and Cheney use the September 11, 2001 attacks to justify the invasion of the bane of empires that is Afghanistan but also to launch a “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq, a country that had no connection to 9/11. When it comes to Jr. Bush it was a chance to one up the old man who stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein in 1991 much to the dismay of the neocons and Cheney and Rummy were pushing all the buttons. What the 2003 attack on Iraq did was to throw open the gates of hell itself, result in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of American service members and forever taint what remained of the U.S. national image with the descent into the barbaric pits of the torture state as evident at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison.

Bush and Cheney ushered in the societal transformation, exploiting the 9/11 attacks which to this day have never been honestly investigated – in particular the level of U.S. Deep State complicity in covering up Saudi involvement – to hit the reset button on over two and a quarter centuries of history. The Bush regime will forever be responsible for the transformation of the United States of America into that dark and ominous entity known as “The Homeland” as well as the Orwellian concept of perpetual war abroad and totalitarianism at home.

The new era of the Surveillance State Gomorrah was birthed out of the ruins of the World Trade Center and thanks largely to Bush’s successor, Barack Obama it has become a permanent fixture of a rapidly closing society where privacy has been rendered obsolete and black clad militarized police forces enforce the diktats of the chief executive. The courageous actions of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have peeled away the star-spangled curtain from this virulent fascist machine and yet the hydra has only reconfigured itself since and now is pushing for the world war that will lock it into place forever.  Orwell’s O’Brien foretold the future of the United States when he sneeringly and coldly explained to Winston Smith that:

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that.

We know that no one ever seeks power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Barack Obama was the logical next step to Bush-Cheney who were in effect the change agents who administered to the new American Homeland birthed from the ashes of 9/11 and united under fascism. The rise of Obama would put a smiling new face upon the new American century, friendly and inclusive to the new generations. As I write this Americans who were toddlers when the towers came down have known no other world than that of the warfare-surveillance-police state. Hitler himself had always made it clear that the children were essential to future of the Reich and had it not imploded under the accumulated weight of his insanity it may have eventually refined itself to resemble a land not much different from The Homeland circa 2014.

Obama has always been a product, the real power is vested in the state itself and his selection of such seasoned servants as Robert Gates (Secretary of Defense), Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State), Rahm Emanuel (Chief of Staff) and Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury) along with Vice President Joseph Biden made it evident that there would be no real “change” despite the hype and campaign promises. The second term of the Obama administration saw the exit of all four – like rats off a sinking ship – and the arrival of more virulent warmongers the likes of John “Skull and Bones” Kerry (Secretary of State), Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland (former Cheney aide and Assistant Secretary of State) and the wife of PNAC founder Robert Kagan, Samantha Power (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) and wife of the sinister insider Cass Sunstein and Jack Lew (Secretary of the Treasury) and former Citigroup exec. The rhetoric of Obama has always belied the truth that he is himself a lackey of entrenched power and with the expansion of executive power to include the extrajudicial murder of U.S. citizens, the expanding NSA surveillance colossus and the imminent wars it is apparent that he always was a fraud.

The real boon for the powers that be (TBTB) behind Obama is that as the nation’s first black president it was a slam dunk that he would have as a foil and a cover for the continuation of ruinous national foreign and domestic policy a Republican Congress packed with racists and religious zealots. It is the ultimate form of good cop-bad cop and plays perfectly for the corrupt state-corporate media and the abject morons who are American voters that still believe that there is a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties. The business of America as the center of the global finance capital empire is war and that business continues to thrive. As former longtime Congressional aide Mike Lofgren put it so well in his essay for an appearance with PBS’s Bill Moyers “Anatomy of the Deep State”:

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Lofgren sums up the concept of the Deep State very well and I would strongly recommend that you go and read his essay as well as the work of longtime Deep State researcher Peter Dale Scott but that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that business of America is war and there will be no end to the wars until they are the end to us.

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

-General Smedley D. Butler

Obama and his administration have over the past year been relentlessly pushing  for that next great war, whether it be based on lies about the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad gassing civilian children in a Damascus suburb, underwriting a coup d’etat in Ukraine backed by savage fascists and neo-Nazis or by dancing on the edge of the abyss by pushing for a full blown war with nuclear power Russia it goes on. While none of those have erupted into the massive wealth generating conflict so desired – the lunatic obsession with Russia still has potential – TPTB and the Obama regime may have found a temporary out with yet another U.S. military intervention in Iraq. The rise of the mysterious Islamist bogeyman of ISIS (Islamic Stat of Iran in Syria) is hard to figure as it could be legitimate blowback or yet another of those secret armies that is created through covert funding and support of the U.S. Deep State interests along with foreign assistance. It sure as hell is convenient though.

Warmongering Republicans and the neocon propaganda machine has been worked into a lather over the explosion of violence in Iraq, ostensibly the work if ISIS the great and terrible but largely to wash the blood from their own hands in pimping revisionist history as well as invoking the old German "stabbed in the back" charge against Obama. For months now the calls for a re-engagement of U.S. military forces in Iraq have ratcheted up the pressure on Mr. Transparency with the usual gaggle of deranged right-wing fiends and chickenhawks caterwauling the loudest to send Americans back into harm's way. The neocons will always be the first ones to commit the sons and daughters of American mothers to be fed into the latest Middle East meat grinder to slake their never-ending thirst for the blood of others and of course, the money that funds their damnable political campaigns.

The propaganda has been deafening, never more so than today with the added accelerant of the ongoing indignity of continuing to be punked by the fully-demonized Russian leader Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. Another bite at the Iraq apple, particularly now that Obama has liberal cover in an election year under the bogus pretense of humanitarian intervention or R2P (Responsibility to Protect) to reengage.  He just dialed up the first airstrikes in order to "prevent genocide", just ignore the hypocrisy that Obama has not taken similar action to prevent the Israeli genocide operation ongoing in Gaza but it is after all an election year and Jewish donors may close their wallets to the Democrats were the war criminal Netanyahu to be challenged.

Not that the limited airstrikes to "prevent genocide" in Iraq will ever satisfy the neocons, no amount of death, blood and violence ever will. A recent piece in the Inside Baseball publication of the beltway circle-jerk - Politico -  brings back all of the Bushreich neocon ghouls who are responsible for setting Iraq ablaze to begin with. I excerpt the following from the litany of bullshit that is entitled "Neocons to Obama: No Half Measures":

“We’re not out of Iraq. The pledge [Obama] made [to leave Iraq] was premature — we’re back,” said Elliott Abrams, who served on former President George W. Bush’s National Security Council. “Let’s now do the job, and not do two airstrikes when we really need to do five.”

AND

“I think it’s late in the sense that, if the threat is ISIS, ISIS is a hell of a lot more powerful today than it was six or 12 months ago,” said Abrams, who was also deeply involved in the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America. “So it’s going to be a lot harder to protect the Kurds, the Christians, the Yazidis and Baghdad than it would have been.”

John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer known for his hardline approach to terrorism suspects, added that “President Obama is obsessed with a legacy as the president who got us out of Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter), even at the expense of the U.S. interest in stability in the Middle East.”

AND

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former spokesman, noted that Obama has received bipartisan support for his actions in Iraq.

“What he did today shows, in a quote-unquote ‘war-weary nation,’ when presidents lead, the public follows,” he said.

ISIL has been publicly on the White House radar for several months, and in June the Obama administration decided to send up to 300 military advisers to Iraq. In a tweet on Friday, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona — a hawk in his own right, though not part of the Bush crowd — pointed out that in a New Yorker interview earlier this year, Obama dismissed ISIL as “jayvee.”

AND

Frederick Kagan, an architect of the military “surge” in Iraq, said the U.S. should have been “attacking” ISIL “all along.” Now that military action is underway, Obama should use the opportunity to deal a major blow to the group, he said.

“We should do as much damage to the organization as we can, as quickly as possible,” he said. “That is a core interest to the United States of America.”

Max Boot, a former adviser to the GOP presidential campaigns of McCain and Mitt Romney, wrote in Commentary that Obama “deserves credit for acting now,” but he argued that the actions this week undermine previous White House claims about Iraqi stability.

Still, Obama’s move to authorize the strikes “indicates that no matter how much he doesn’t want to be involved in Iraq, he understands the cost of doing nothing is too great to stomach,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and political adviser to what was the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Several of the observers interviewed noted that ISIL is also a problem in Syria, where thousands have died in that country’s civil war, and where the U.S. has declined to engage militarily. The difference in approach comes across as “cognitive dissonance,” as Rubin put it.

Another problem, some argued, is that the airstrikes seem like a mere tactic, when what’s needed is a broader strategy.

“He doesn’t even get close to Whac-a-Mole,” Rubin gibed. “Instead, it’s more like finger-waving at the mole.”

This week’s slate of psychopaths set to appear on the Sunday morning war propaganda “news” shows include the two men who were instrumental in the nurturing of ISIS/ISIL, Senator Lindsey Graham and old blood and guts himself Senator John “nuke them all” McCain. It will be like NFL Gameday where the roundtable of shills for the warfare state critique and discuss the upcoming game – this one in particular being the commitment of Mr. Hope and Change to an extended military campaign in Iraq. Obama is the fourth U.S. President to bomb Iraq now in an Oval Office tradition that is becoming as institutionalized as the Easter Egg roll and the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald accurately now refers to it as a "redundant presidential ritual" in a new piece that he wrote at The Intercept. Obama has now officially joined the club.

 "In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason."

 - Ernest Hemingway

Essential in rolling out the propaganda campaign to sell the star-spangled sheep for yet another war in Iraq are the testimonials and comments of former Iraq war veterans who find a media platform supportive of the warfare state. We saw examples of this during the week when the Iraqi city of Fallujah was overrun by "Islamist militants" therefore defiling the site of a great symbolic American military triumph. Veterans were trotted out to decry the loss of Fallujah and to bitch and moan that their sacrifices were for naught.  What remained unsaid is that the Iraqi city was descended upon by American forces in spring of 2004 after the brutal ambush, murder and hanging of the mutilated bodies off four Blackwater mercenaries in the early days of Bush-Cheney’s "Shock and Awe" attack and invasion of Iraq.

The grotesque abuse of the bodies of the armed intruders, hung from a bridge where they were mocked and had shoes and other debris thrown at them by insurgents was an image that did not jibe with the choreographed war propaganda like saving Private Lynch and the staged pulling down of Saddam’s statue. Americans who were already whipped up into a lynch mob braying for retaliation against Muslims by the neocons after the September 11, 2001 attacks, were outraged and there was hell to pay. The military went into Fallujah heavily armed, often staging house to house raids in a Lidice style orgy of vengeance and were cheered in the land of black SUV’s adorned with those little magnetic yellow ribbon magnets. It was brutal American forces used white phosphorus munitions on the those trapped in besieged city. But that no more gibes with the official glorious narrative than that the atomic bombs dropped on primarily civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to save the millions of American lives that would be lost in an invasion of the Japanese homeland did. Both are total horseshit.

With the latest U.S. military action in Iraq The Guardian dredged up one of the "Iraq war veterans" of the whining, we were stabbed in the back variety. The piece, by a guy named Cody Buzzell is a call for the new round of Iraq bombing. I excerpt the following from "How I learned to stop worrying and love bombing the hell out of Isis":

Even Iraq war veterans find out what’s happening in Iraq on Facebook. A couple months ago, when the terrorists formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) re-invaded Iraq, the group’s greatest-hits videos started flooding my feed again.

Recreational beheadings, cold-blooded mass executions, Sopranos-esque executions, 2Pac-style drive-by’s: the “Isis Gone Wild” YouTube videos are impossibly horrifying, yet somehow impossible not to watch. You can’t believe what you’re seeing because you saw it coming – because you saw it before – and so you click play anyway.

Many of the videos are posted by my disgruntled former platoon mates. They’re the same veterans who wondered, a couple months ago, whether it was all worth it 10 years earlier, what with it all going to hell again. We’re the same vets wondering today, what the hell took so long to do bomb the hell out of these guys?

So on Friday morning, I logged on to the usual nothingness of Facebook, and between the emoticons and selfies, the check-ins and the inspirational memes, there it was – and I actually couldn’t believe what happened next: US begins air strikes against Isis targets in Iraq.

About fucking time, I almost posted in a comment underneath.

Typically missing from the beating of the war drums is any sort of counter by an Iraq war veteran who opposes the new round of intervention and denounces the warmongering politicians and pundits as exactly the scum and vermin that they were in 2003 and continue to be in 2014 shouting for attacking Iraq. Providing exactly that sort of commentary in a scathing essay that literally must have burned the paint off of the walls between which it was written is a brilliant piece by the sort of veteran who understands patriotism in a way that our political class and it's lackeys are incapable of doing.

The essay, entitled “Absolutely Nothing” was written by Jim Wright, a retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer and Iraq war veteran who has a website named Stone Kettle Station. Mr. Wright’s work, in particular this piece – which a copy authorized by the author is posted at following site - is of monumental importance in that he is one of those who was sent into battle by the scum who view our military people as in the words of Henry Kissinger - "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy. 

Jim Wright hits the bastards with both-barrels:

Sure, let’s go back to Iraq.

Oh, yes, let us do that.

I’ll dig out my uniform and strap on my pistol and gird up my sword and ride into battle yet again.

Just so long as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and every single one of those powdered, Botoxed talking heads at Fox News are in the vanguard. That’s right, you cowards, you put on a uniform and you lead the charge this time around. The Koch brothers and Mitt Romney can pay for it, every goddamned penny, we’ll bleed them until they’re dry and then we’ll pull the gold fillings from their teeth to pay for it right along with the rest of their Wall Street cronies. You fuckers got rich off the last one, you can damned well pay for this one. And when you run out of money, we’ll take your blood, fair’s fair.

Strap John McCain into the cockpit of an A-4 Skyhawk and let him fly air cover.

If he gets himself shot down and taken prisoner again, well, you know what? Fuck him, leave him to the enemy because frankly his hate and bile and raging insanity have done more damage to this country than Bowe Bergdahl ever did.

The terrorists can keep him.

People like Jim Wright, veterans who actually had skin in the game – their skin need to be heard from and heard from loudly so as to denounce the chickenhawks of the political class and their chicken shit games in sending others off to die for the sake of their fucking political ambitions.They are armchair patriots, cowards and losers, has-beens and never-will bes, psychopaths and petty criminals, zealots and charlatans, loud-mouths and lap top bombardiers, bottom feeders and parasites and to a one of them they only want one thing – to cower behind their precious flag, using as it as a shield for their own repugnant indignities as they howl for the sons and daughters of American mothers to go and sacrifice their lives, their hopes and dreams for nothing more than ratings points ins some stupid and inconsequential fucking political poll.And most of all they are swine who serve a criminal war machine that is the American Empire of the New American Century.

Fuck them all! Jim Wright deserves a seat at the table on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, CNN's State of the Union, ABC's This Week and every one of those sick electronic vomitories where wars are sold like toothpaste, soft drinks or erectile dysfunction pills to a captive audience of flag-waving schmucks and suckers.

As a military veteran myself, I served in the US Navy during one of those extremely rare periods between wars there is nothing that I view that is as shameless and despicable than any of these political swine and vermin standing upon their nationalist soapboxes blathering like some crazed, piss-reeking miscreant outside of a German beer hall about opening that great big can of American whup ass and pouring it out on some hapless over-matched country.

Like Iraq - AGAIN!

(Note: "Absolutely Nothing" excerpted with author's permission)

Donn Marten in Tampa, FL