Weapon of Mass Distraction: More Ridiculous Redskins Team Name Hogwash

With the NFL season less than two weeks from the official opening games, the political circus over the  Washington Redskins team nickname is back in the news. After all, it isn’t as though there are more pressing issues like wars and rumors of wars, a dismal economy teetering on the brink of collapse, the militarizing of the American police, spiking food prices, rampant political corruption and any number of other problems. The political class - especially the worthless swine in the U.S. Congress who are on their latest taxpayer funded vacation -  see opportunity in pimping racism and identity politics because after all, it is an election year.

The newest front in the attack against the Redskins comes from the editorial page of the neocon flagship Washington Post. The paper has taken a break from shilling for the wars that keep the money flowing into the local economy to support the armies of worthless bureaucrats and other tax teat sucklers employed to proclaim that the paper’s editorial section would no longer use the term “Redskins” in team coverage.

I excerpt the following from “Washington Post editorials will no longer use ‘Redskins’ for the local NFL team”:

This page has for many years urged the local football team to change its name. The term “Redskins,” we wrote in 1992, “is really pretty offensive.” The team owner then, Jack Kent Cooke, disagreed, and the owner now, Daniel M. Snyder, disagrees, too. But the matter seems clearer to us now than ever, and while we wait for the National Football League to catch up with thoughtful opinion and common decency, we have decided that, except when it is essential for clarity or effect, we will no longer use the slur ourselves. That’s the standard we apply to all offensive vocabulary, and the team name unquestionably offends not only many Native Americans but many other Americans, too.

How convenient the Washington Post is capitalizing on the raw sore of the national racial dogfight over events in Ferguson, Missouri to stir the pot. Hell, the WAPO is a for profit corporation and as such needs to be able to draw attention via page views and selling papers. It is also, after all, an election year. There will be no end to this stupidity and the war will be on between those who traffic in racial outrage, whether it be the co-called conservative talking heads on Fox etc. or the political correctness Nazis on the left. Neither of which ever let an opportunity to whip out the race-bait like shovels of bloody red meat to their particular consumers and acolytes in order to remain relevant and keep the money flowing in. Racial issues in America are a tragic and complex societal problem that only continue to worsen, only a part of it is due to systemic inequality and institutionalized racism and the trivializing of race issues by the agents of outrage is not only insulting but does nothing to address the real problems. 

Obama’s Democrats are about to get crushed at the polls come November 4th, and by sundown on the day after they will have been washed off of the streets and into the gutters like leftover vomit. They know it too. Obama is one of the worst presidents in U.S. history and his ratings are mirroring Newton’s Law of Gravity as they careen into the abyss. El Presidente,  in addition to being a thin-skinned narcissist, a fascist and an incompetent fool only continues to do damage to this feckless party. This being the case there is a good deal of politics in the ginned-up outrage over the Redskins team name. It energizes what remains of their base - anyone with any common sense who neither stupid nor willfully blind has become an independent and bolted the party. This leaves only the myriad of squabbling identity groups seeking government redress for long-running grievances. They will all of course be promptly shit on after their votes have been nailed down but that’s just the name of the game and they are gluttons for punishment.

The weeping and gnashing of teeth directed at the Washington Redskins previously included the U.S. Patent office stripping the trademark of the team name. Then a gaggle of Democrats lead by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to force the team to change names - no Republicans were asked to sign it.  More recently the sainted moral icon of the football world Tony Dungy (himself an anti-gay bigot) along with fellow analyst Phil Simms have announced that they will refuse to refer to the Redskins as the Redskins while on air. The pitchforks however are out for former NFL coach Mike Ditka who is always entertaining in a way that only Hockey Night in Canada's Don Cherry can be and has blamed the phony controversy on "politically correct idiots". Now as fantasy football drafts are taking place and participants in betting pools rushing to get their entries in the Washington Post editorial board chimes in add fuel to the fire. 

As for the actual team name, is it politically incorrect?  Sure, I guess it may be. But why only in an election cycle when cheap political points can be scored by charlatans like Harry Reid who is also inclined to make racial jabs on occasion? Do the descendants of Native Americans have every right to be offended? Well, I can't speak for them but I would think that having your ancestors slaughtered and their land stolen by John Wayne hammerhead prototypes under the pretense of Manifest Destiny would be a far more serious grievance than what the hell some football team calls itself. Especially when the team has used the name ever since relocating from Boston back in 1937 where it used to be called the Boston Redskins.

Good God - get a life people.  I don’t see Harry Reid and the other professional race-baiters whooping up the liberal lynch mobs to go after the Notre Dame Fighting Irish for that negative stereotype so this is all just more of the same politics of divisiveness that are used as a distraction while everything collapses.

If the Red Sox Had Lost Would the Terrorists Have Won?

Kiss the Street, Kiss the Whip

A bit of food for thought with this segue into the world of sports where it intersects with politics in the aftermath of the Boston Red Sox World Series win last Wednesday night. The Beantown boppers had made no secret of their adoption of the “Boston Strong” motto after the heinously cruel pressure cooker bombing of the Boston Marathon finish line back in April by those evil little bastards the  Tsarnaev brothers. While the use by the baseball team of the tragedy as a motivating factor in their championship run was at the very least poor judgment and at worst poor taste and any criticism of such is a taboo so serious that it would merit a serious bludgeoning if invoked in the company of many Bostonians. The Red Sox played it off as though their season was a tribute rather than the co-opting of the victims of that gutless attack that left the street soaked with blood and dismembered limbs and altered the lives of hundreds but am I the only one who finds it all to be cynical?

By taking the city on their shoulders so to speak and providing an example of perseverance in their relentless crusade towards the October hardware did it not ever occur that such a mission could have gone badly awry? What would have happened had the St. Louis Cardinals managed to actually show up and what if the vanquished had instead been the victors? If the Cardinals had won the World Series and they were certainly a team that has had the luck of the devil himself in the postseason in recent years, would that have meant that the terrorists had won too?

Sports teams love gimmicks and the 2013 Red Sox are just the latest example despite outside of the serious political implications. In addition to the motivational ploy of using the bombing as fuel for fire a good number the members of the team for some bizarre reason also decided to collectively abandon shaving, growing beards that in a rather strange bit of irony made them appear much like the Islamist radicals that were the perpetrators. You could barely distinguish the difference between Johnny Gomes and Osama bin Laden, Mike Napoli and a Taliban commander by the time that the playoffs began. The hometown team also trotted out bombing survivors (given that there were only 3 deaths there was no short supply of them) for an onfield ceremony during game two, a contest that the Sox actually lost and were headed to the pitcher friendly Busch Stadium for the next three games. Seriously, if the Cards didn’t manage to completely implode, especially their pitching staff there would have been no victory parade in Boston and no propagandistic milking of the bombing tragedy with the pilgrimage to the site of the crime on the route. The Red Sox organization certainly would not have discouraged any of it, after all it was a member of the ownership group who allowed the CIA to use a private plane for extraordinary renditions aka torture during the Bush years.

In the immediate aftermath of the 6-1 finale revelers filled the streets of the city that became the testing ground only six months ago for a rollout of martial law in America. There were no paramilitary police goon squads patrolling the streets in armored vehicles and engaging in warrantless searches of the homes of cowardly citizens to chase down one teenage punk and the air was filled with triumph. There were many reports of fans (likely drunk if I know Boston at all) making pilgrimages to the marathon finish line and actually kissing the freaking street. It was a pure mob atmosphere and I would hope that any Muslim with a lick of common sense and an interest in self-preservation would have stayed inside, God only knows what the packs of celebrants roaming the streets were capable of. This satirical bit from The Onion entitled "Red Sox Fan Dedicates Garbage Can He’s Lighting On Fire To Marathon Victims" would be a hoot were it not so absurd as to resemble an actual feat by an overly stimulated fan. This all really should be a part of a larger conversation of the misplaced value system of this rotting empire where so many choose to live vicariously through the exploits of their sports teams. Let us not kid ourselves either, while the Red Sox adoption of the cause in taking it upon themselves of cleansing the city of shame and horror is hardly the worst exploitation of political memes to promote an imperialist warfare agenda. Just watch any NFL game with the militaristic jingoism, even worse around Veterans Day weekend games and the honor guard and military flyovers. As a departed associate of mine once mused - the reason that the NHL has never been able to reach the level of popularity in this country is because the games are all indoors and the fans unable to see the millions of taxpayer dollars squandered by directing six or so fighter jets to fly overhead for something as silly as a sporting event. But that again is part of a much larger topic that is for another time.

As for the Boston Red Sox, if you are going to claim credit as exorcists for a city’s emotional traumas then it is a legitimate question of what lasting damage would have resulted in the psyches of many of the locals had they not won. David Ortiz was a monster in the series, the idiocy of the Cardinals coaching staff to pitch to this guy rather than walk him was arrogance at its worst. Ortiz did the equivalent of brutally smashing in the skull of the living bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, lamented Rolling Stone cover boy with his bat. But what if he didn’t? What if the clueless Cardinals didn’t lob hittable pitch after hittable pitch to the eventual MVP?  This is where the social problem lies with multimillionaire professional athletes exploiting political causes. In this case of the Red Sox using the unconscionable maiming and killing of civilians as a rallying cry I will assume that it was an honest rather than just slimily glomming onto an event to provide that extra motivation that cashing seven figure pay checks just does not provide to a celebrity ballplayer.

This is not to trash the Red Sox, piss on their victory parade or drag their trophy through shit. They have tainted it themselves through their use of the bombings for maximum motivational effect.  They were a resilient, scrappy, clutch bunch that in no way resembled the smoking crater left at the heart of Red Sox nation after the Bobby Valentine disaster. They earned the title and beat the crap out of all who stood in their way, they were one hell of a baseball team but sports is a non-partisan, non-political exercise in escapism and entertainment. Professional athletes should just shut the hell up and play.

Syrian Debacle Postponed For Now

Barack H. Obama’s much heralded prime time television speech the other night has only served to temporarily delay the launching of WW III. With widespread public rejection of this latest foreign policy fiasco Obama’s latest love affair with the teleprompter truly only served to kick the can down the road a ways and at the same time save face for his foolhardy “red line” statement.  There is however far too much money to be made by the warfare industry to simply allow this wonderful opportunity to increase the bottom line to go to waste.  It is already being reported that the worlds preeminent terrorist organization, the CIA is now ramping up their arming of the rebels, many of them Islamic lunatics with Al Qaeda connections.  Just imagine the sick irony of our current regime using taxpayer money in arming the same radical Islamist group behind the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001 that then allowed a rogue government to flip the off switch on over two centuries of American democracy and transform the U.S.A. into a full blown fascist police state.  One that is fueled by the never ending wars which in turn serve the elite in justifying the endless shakedown of honest and decent Americans to fund the surveillance industrial complex hydra that is devouring our freedoms like a ravenous cancer.

To his credit Barry didn’t directly take a dump on the graves of the 9/11 victims by invoking that day as justification for his Syrian attack which I found to be surprising.  The only time that he really did veer into that territory was his cunning insinuation that attacking would protect the children in America in the future from some vague threat. Kind of like the propaganda that Saddam would supply WMD to terrorists who would then bring them to America to use because they hate us for our way of life. He is far slicker than his predecessor in that manner but his speech was as loathesome and dishonest as any ever given by George W. Bush or for that matter ANY president.  Obama broke out the XL manure shovel for his absurd invocations of American exceptionalism, trumped up moral outrage and historical references to cover his own ass while providing more time for a smoking gun to be discovered in Syria . I hope that you had your hip waders on if you even bothered to watch that gross perversion of what used to mean to be an American before the swine hijacked the entire system. Barry then served up a generous slice of yellowcake with his invocation of the gassed kids:

The situation profoundly changed, though, on August 21st, when Assad’s government gassed to death over 1,000 people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.

On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits, a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.

This was not always the case. In World War I, American G.I.s were among the many thousands killed by deadly gas in the trenches of Europe. In World War II, the Nazis used gas to inflict the horror of the Holocaust. Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them. And in 1997, the United States Senate overwhelmingly approved an international agreement prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, now joined by 189 governments that represent 98 percent of humanity.

On August 21st, these basic rules were violated, along with our sense of common humanity. No one disputes that chemical weapons were used in Syria. The world saw thousands of videos, cell phone pictures, and social media accounts from the attack, and humanitarian organizations told stories of hospitals packed with people who had symptoms of poison gas.

Moreover, we know the Assad regime was responsible. In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces. Shortly after those rockets landed, the gas spread, and hospitals filled with the dying and the wounded.

We know senior figures in Assad’s military machine reviewed the results of the attack and the regime increased their shelling of the same neighborhoods in the days that followed. We’ve also studied samples of blood and hair from people at the site that tested positive for sarin.

When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory, but these things happened. The facts cannot be denied.

Despite his heart-wrenching appeals to emotion what Mr. Obama left out is the very critical fact that it is total bullshit that Assad actually ordered the gassing.  The whole scaffolding of the case for war collapses without that Hitlerian whopper and other than King Barack’s secret evidence there is still no proof that the Assad regime was responsible for anything other than fighting a civil war insurgency. Sadly, the only effective piece of his entire sales job is the poor children and it works to perfection to those prone to knee jerk reactions and a taste for bellicose rhetoric. Yesterday two of armchair bombardiers that I know, both of whom HATE Obama as if he were Satan himself were backing Barry and his administration’s carpet bombing of Damascus based solely on the “he gassed his own people” sham. The entire speech had sensible people scrambling for their barf bags, it is really hard to take a man who presides over a country with huge stocks of chemical weapons including the white phosphorous and depleted uranium that were used to kill untold thousands of civilians in Iraq seriously.  This man has no shame and it is a travesty that he was ever elected to the highest office in the land,  Barry would not know morality and “common humanity” if they sneaked up behind him and bit him in the ass.  That speech was an insult to every American who understands our how great our country once was and how rotten that things have become today thanks to hustlers and pimps like Obama, Kerry and their ilk.

Much to the chagrin of the de-facto Pentagon lobbyists the job of selling the Syria war hasn’t been the cakewalk that it was anticipated and it just became a bit worse when Elizabeth O’Bagy, a War Street Journal’s op ed writer was dumped for misrepresenting her credentials. O’Bagy was an invaluable resource to the warmongers John McCain and John Kerry as they built their case for military intervention in Syria. The truth is that she was a paid shill for yet another of those noxious neoconservative think tanks, this one called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) that have been so influential in ensnaring America in the Middle Eastern morass.  But Obama and his neocon buddies won’t stop just because a member of their marketing team  has been outed as a pathological liar, they are ever more determined now than ever. It must have been especially galling for the criminals who run this place to have had to endure the humiliation of Vladimir Putin coming out of this all smelling like a rose and looking like a rational player with an interest in the preservation of peace. The New York Times editorial by the Russian leader in today’s edition was the equivalent of rubbing kosher salt into a still festering wound. Putin’s hilariously balls out take on all of the amateurish Obama administration’s propaganda and talking points as well as the Russian leader’s preaching from the moral high ground he now occupies must have elitist assholes puckering from sea to shining sea. I recall my liberal friends in the early days of the administration’s first four years as fantasizing of Obama being the chess master and the Michael Jordan of national and global politics, just laying back and studying the opposition like the basketball great and when the time was right he would explode, destroying the Detroit Pistons Bad Boys defense and winning the title. It is pretty obvious now that he has just been slam dunked by Putin, a professional who seems to delight in exposing our dear leader as the rank and easily manipulated incompetent buffoon that he is.

So for now while the attack has been temporarily postponed pending further revelations of intelligence community lies that will be peddled by El Presidente to the public because hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned. Get ready because today Barry once again renewed the unspoken but ongoing state of emergency that was declared by the Bushreich three days after  9/11.  This rotten administration is going to have its Syrian war and God help anyone who opposes him as he now wields the full power and fury of the police state and will unleash it with impunity upon those who dare to stand behind him and his precious legacy of a war president. What they did to the Occupy movement by sanctioning and supporting police brutality is nothing .It is just a matter of waiting for notoriously short attention spanned Americans to become distracted and forget about Syria altogether. Hey, it’s now NFL football season and Dancing With the Stars will have the latest season debut next week + both of which will make it easier for Barry to break bad.

The sheeple will soon be conditioned to just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.