Shameless Biden Allegedly Cried During American Sniper

Vice President Joe “Foghorn Leghorn” Biden remains a very dark horse candidate for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nod and being a canny career politician with no shame he is prone to histrionics. Whether it be emotional outbursts or the proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth old Joe can always be counted on to grab attention. In the unlikely event that Hillary Clinton’s inevitable coronation is derailed – perhaps by another Bubba sex scandal – Biden will be the only viable replacement. Liberal hero Elizabeth Warren? Forget it, she is just the newer version of the phony “hope and change” peddled by Advertising Age’s "2008 Marketer of the Year" Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders? The man is an admitted socialist and a borderline cadaver. Biden will be the only option if Queen Hillary for some reason decides not to run.

So it is incumbent upon blabbering Joe to grab some positive media attention while branding himself as an all-American guy. As a part of this imaging strategy the story has come out that he wept at the end of Clint Eastwood’s new movie American Sniper. According to The Daily Beast in a piece entitled “Oscar-Nominated ‘American Sniper’ Made Joe Biden Cry”:

While attending the Washington, DC, premiere of American Sniper held at the Burke Theatre at the U.S. Navy Memorial on Tuesday night, the Vice President of the United States offered his three-word review of the film. “It’s intense, man,” Joe Biden said, before adding that veterans still need our help and deserve our deepest respect.

In fact, the vice president enjoyed the film enough that, according to three separate people seated near him, Biden was moved to tears during the film's final sequence. Biden's is one of many positive reviews that American Sniper has earned.

Biden is just the type of cheesy bastard who would intentionally turn on the waterworks if he knew it would grab him some positive media coverage. Launching into phony crying jags is pretty simple if you stand to gain politically from it – look at how often that Speaker of the House John Boehner engages in displays of choking and sobbing. With the 2016 election meme well on the way towards becoming an orgy of flag-draped, apple pie authoritarianism and American exceptionalism (there is nothing exceptional about mass surveillance and a domestic police state) American Sniper is an early litmus test. The focus groups will be carefully watching the reaction to the movie which is already steeped in controversy over being too pro-war and drawing scorn from liberals.

Clint Eastwood has redeemed himself with many conservatives after his infamous appearance at the 2012 Republican National Convention by making this movie. Eastwood horrified Mitt Romney staffers with his bizarre, rambling conversation with an empty chair that stole the nominee’s thunder and sucked up media attention. The film is a dramatization of the life of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper who racked up over 150 kills while serving in Iraq. Kyle was decorated for his service and became a national hero but met an unexpected and tragic end when he was shot and killed by a PTSD afflicted Marine Corps veteran at a Texas shooting range.

I have always been a fan of Eastwood, ever since the early days when the epic western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly headed up a four-movie spaghetti western marathon at the local drive-in theatre. The first two Dirty Harry movies are classics and my other favorites during my formative years were Kelly’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare. Later in his career Eastwood – who has identified his politics as being libertarian – became more settled in as an acclaimed director and less of an actor. American Sniper is not the first movie to be politicized nor will it be the last and Eastwood has seen his work glommed onto by politicians in the past. Don’t forget that Super Bowl Chrysler commercial “Halftime in America” that was immediately turned into a political football.

Such is the case with American Sniper with the reaction being typically divisive in a rapidly fracturing America (the establishment likes it that way) with the exchanges already pretty heated. With his films as a director often being more steeped in ambiguity and shades of gray – Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby to name a few – it is probably a lot more difficult to pigeon-hole American Sniper as an ideological statement. Eastwood has made statements that he opposed going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq so the film may be far more nuanced than the professional yappers in the media are portraying it.

That will not stop the political travelers from trying though, especially a guy like Joe Biden who brings to mind the H.L. Mencken quote "Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not".

While I have not seen the movie myself - and don't plan to given my loathing for anything that even remotely promotes the endless neocon wars of aggression - the politics of it all make me want to vomit. There will never be an end to war in The Homeland as long as there are people who insist on worshipping the professional killers of Empire like Chris Kyle. When he came back from the war and then became a celebrity he pretty much abandoned the pretense of a professional soldier for that of just another mercenary. 

Blame Obama for the Shooting Down of MH17

As one of the heroes of the neocons, President Harry Truman famously put it: "the buck stops here" and in the frenzy to blame the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over a freaking war zone on Thursday (what the hell was it doing there?) on the reviled and demonized Vladimir Putin our pathetic excuse for a media is blaming the wrong president. The responsibility for the loss of the lives of the passengers of that ill-fated jetliner can be parked directly at the foot of US President Barack H. Obama for it was he who signed off on the series of events that culminated in the disaster in the first place. Were the prince of petulance not so intent at avenging his wounded pride over Russia's saving Edward Snowden from being waterboarded more times than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Putin's pissing on the parade of bombing Damascus last September there would be no civil war in Ukraine in the first place.

Libertarian icon Ron Paul sums it up very nicely in his piece "What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17" that is available at Antiwar.com and I excerpt from the good doctor:

While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report.

They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Without US-sponsored “regime change,” it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.

The media has reported that the plane must have been shot down by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists, because the missile that reportedly brought down the plane was Russian made. But they will not report that the Ukrainian government also uses the exact same Russian-made weapons.

They will not report that the post-coup government in Kiev has, according to OSCE monitors, killed 250 people in the breakaway Lugansk region since June, including 20 killed as government forces bombed the city center the day after the plane crash! Most of these are civilians and together they roughly equal the number killed in the plane crash. By contrast, Russia has killed no one in Ukraine, and the separatists have struck largely military, not civilian, targets.

They will not report that the US has strongly backed the Ukrainian government in these attacks on civilians, which a State Department spokeswoman called “measured and moderate.”

They will not report that neither Russia nor the separatists in eastern Ukraine have anything to gain but everything to lose by shooting down a passenger liner full of civilians.

They will not report that the Ukrainian government has much to gain by pinning the attack on Russia, and that the Ukrainian prime minister has already expressed his pleasure that Russia is being blamed for the attack.

I have admired the former Congressman for his principled stance against the evils of the warfare state and his set of stones for daring to speak out against Bush and Cheney's wars of aggression back when critics were branded as "traitors", "terrorist sympathizers" and worse and would face the equivalent of being "necklaced" for daring to stand up and be counted when it mattered the most. I will never forget Ron Paul's brutal smackdown of Mr. 9/11 himself, Rudy Giuliani in that Republican debate and then assigning the fascist former Big Apple mayor, a neocon favorite a reading list. Congressman Paul was vilified by the same scum-infested, corrupt, warmongering media types that are busily selling the latest load of Obama's horse manure about Ukraine - all the while covering up the war crimes of the US backed Israeli despot Bibi Netanyahu and his wanton slaughter of civilians in Gaza.

The propaganda is shameless, from the loud-mouthed lout of a Vice President Joe Biden - a fucking embarrassment to decent Americans - and his juvenile attacks on Putin as "not having a soul" to the endless proclamations of the pope of hope and change and his evidence-deficient charges that Russia's president was personally responsible for the attack despite the unspeakable fact that Obama is the one backing ruthless neo-Nazi death squad filth engaged in ethnic cleansing while the Kiev junta uses the military against civilians. 

This is what it is to be an American during a time of rampant corruption, imperial hubris, national blindness (as well as stupidity) and an addiction to the drug of American exceptionalism that is as potent as black tar heroin. It is sick and shameful to watch these scumbags in the Obama regime and the neocon rats nest at Foggy Bottom continue to lie with zero regard to the long-term consequences even if those consequences end up leading willfully ignorant and brainwashed Americans into the flaming abyss of World War III and imminent nuclear catastrophe.

Obama is a punk but the office of the presidency seems to attract that type like flies to a pile of rotting corpses these days and unlike when Harry Truman took responsibility the serpentine, conniving, Teflon coated bullshit salesman Obama does anything but adhere to the "buck stops here" principle.

Two and a half years left until we can be rid of this most loathsome of leaders, that is if he doesn't succeed in getting us all incinerated in a nuclear apocalypse first.