Bloodsuckers McCain and Graham Hit Sunday Circuit to Peddle More Lies

“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. Now in mid-2014 we are a nation at permanent war, whether it be Afghanistan, a new Cold War with Russia or the third bite at the apple in Iraq it is as Orwell once put it "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia". The wars are of course not the desire of the people, and truly there are very few of them who sacrifice a damned thing (since we no longer have conscription) other than lost investment in their own country due to the diversion of tax payer dollars to fund permanent militarism. President Dwight D. Eisenhower lamented the social cost of a state of permanent war in his 1961 farewell address as well as the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex but those dangers can also be very lucrative opportunities to the death pimp politicians who are always willing to send others to kill, die and be maimed for their ongoing ability to remain in office thanks to those who fund them as well as their vainglorious self-importance. 

With the new wave of violence in Iraq courtesy of that brilliant re-branding of the scary Muslim menace ISIS and the long promised by the neocon fear-mongers caliphate US troops are returning to Iraq again. While the troops, who when the violence really gets kicked up will return home to the USA!, USA!, USA! to further tax an already stretched to breaking VA system  (and no, Obama's corporate stooge, a former Procter & Gamble CEO who was just named ad VA Secretary is not going to fix it) the usual suspects are out shilling for escalation. Never mind that they have always been wrong about the warfare state that became the "new normal" after September 11, 2001 they still manage to be afforded attention, undeserved credibility and a national television platform to bray for their wars.

There are no two more diseased parasites who have lead the hordes of blood-suckers feasting on the host of what used to be a great country than Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The dynamic duo appeared on Sunday morning's bloviation circuit to engage in their standard asinine lying and demagoguery as the election cycle nears and there are cheap political points to provide added value to their pimping for the Pentagon and the arms industry which both rely upon the other for continued existence.

It was on CBS's Face the Nation that old blood and guts and the Palmetto state princess showed up to sell their wares and I excerpt from the transcript:

SCHIEFFER: Let's get back to Iraq.

 What is your take, Senators, on this new video? Is ISIS now trying to scare us? Is the threat to the United States from ISIS growing? I guess those are the two questions I would have to ask.

 GRAHAM: Well, according to direction of national intelligence, the FBI director and most of our intelligence community, ISIS presents a direct threat to the homeland in Syria, now Iraq.

Americans and Western Europeans are going to help their cause. And they can flow back here. So, yes, they are a direct threat to the homeland and they're getting much stronger as we speak.

[These sick bastards will do anything to catch that post 9/11 flag-sucking lightning in a bottle again to keep their NSA surveillance state in place and get the sheep on board for another war - shameless] 

MCCAIN: I think it's important to recognize that we did have this situation stabilized, thanks to the surge, that we could have left a residual force behind which would have stabilized the situation.

[God bless The Surge and God bless General Petraeus, the "ass-kissing little chickenshit"] 

This is not like a hurricane or an earthquake. This didn't have to happen. This is a failure of United States policy. And, by the way, there still is none that I can discern, either a policy or a strategy, to handle this situation.

[No, it did not have to happen but it largely happened because of these two charlatans and the corrupt media that they rode in on]

This guy Baghdadi when he left Camp Bucca, a prison camp that we ran, he said, see you in New York. We now have the largest and richest enclave of radical terrorism in history that not only encompasses Iraq, as we know, but Iraq and Syria. So, we have to look at this as a Syria-Iraq problem. And one of the things that we need to do, of course we want Maliki to be replaced, but we got to stop ISIS first. And that means that we're going to have to do airstrikes. And we need to step up our support for the Free Syrian Army that is really right now getting very badly beaten.

[BULLSHIT! The Bergdahl as a radical of some sort is based on propaganda provided by former Iran-Contra figure and perjurer Duane "Dewey" Clarridge who runs a discredited private intelligence firm "The Eclipse Group" that primarily appeals to Fox News viewers. Bergdahl was also just cleared by the Army of any misconduct while in captivity. McCain knows better than this and so does CBS] 

SCHIEFFER: Just one thing, Senator. You say we left. The Iraqis would not sign the status of forces agreement, which would have put troops under our control, legal control. Are you just saying we didn't try hard enough to get that agreement?

 MCCAIN: I'm saying that they were ready to sign. I'm saying that this administration, this president didn't want to stay, and we were there in Baghdad and in Irbil when they agreed to do it.

Now, we were actually there. And the president of the United States would never give them a number of troops and their mission that they wanted to leave behind. In the words of General Dempsey in testimony before the Armed Services Committee, it cascaded down to 3,000 people. The president campaigned he was going to get us out. And the president is going to make the same mistake in Afghanistan, unless he reverses that decision, that he made.

You're going to see the same result in Afghanistan. We just came back from there. They feel abandoned.

[Again, it is largely due to McCain and his ilk that we were in Afghanistan in the first place] 

SCHIEFFER: Senator, do you agree with that?

GRAHAM: I think the big fear I have about what we're doing in Afghanistan is that we have great capability now.

We can watch a part of the world that is a safe haven for terrorists. Thirteen years after 9/11, there are more safe havens. There are more terrorist groups with more weapons and more capabilities than before 9/11, and we're having less capability, less presence.

 [Once again the 9/11 card is played]

If we get down to 1,000 troops by 2017, and dismantle our eyes and ears in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it will haunt us far worse than Iraq. The counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan is a front-line defense against -- for the homeland and it is being destroyed by this idea of leaving completely in 2017.

[Any government official who pronounces the United States of America as "the Homeland", always a very German term does not belong in office]

Mr. President, reverse your course. Keep our counterterrorism capabilities in effect to protect us here at home.

Just another day in the Empire isn't it? The lies keep coming as well as the wars that they are used to sell.

Here We Go Again: Domestic Terrorist Attacks Hyped for Political Gain

The great Iraq war heroics of Bush and Cheney aren't the only blasts from the past being pushed by the state-corporate media this week - now we are revisiting the good old days of the multi-colored terror alert charts with fear-mongering over possible ISIS attacks on The Homeland. According to a story in The Guardian New York City's terrorism top dog has followed up on Senator Lindsey Graham's dire warnings of a new 9/11 by warning that ISIS militants - those who are US citizens - could return from the land of jihad to exact a terrible revenge upon the land of the free and the home of the brave that truthfully is neither. In the era post September 11, 2001 - the day that everything changed - there is nothing quite like the potent political magic talisman of playing the fear card - as Bush and Cheney well understood, it is the most ass-kicking club in the bag.

The story, entitled "NYPD terror chief: New Yorkers among American Islamists in Middle East" quotes NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence John Miller as the pall of dread begins to spread, especially after that big find of Saddam's lost chemical weapons by the baddest new bogeymen of them all. I excerpt from the Guardian piece:

New York City’s counter-terrorism chief has claimed that Muslim Americans from the city have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join jihadist groups such as Isis, and could return to attack the US.

John Miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence for the New York Police Department, said New Yorkers were among more than 100 American Muslims fighting with Islamists in the Middle East.

“I would be hyper-concerned about the people over there from New York City on the presumption they’re going to return to New York City,” Miller told the New York Daily News.

But he added that he was equally concerned about jihadists from cities such as “Chicago, Minnesota, Portland, you name it”, and said: “If their mindset is to return to America and to engage in terrorist activities, they’re likely going to end up in New York anyway.”

Of course Miller provides no actual evidence that the jihadists are "likely going to end up in New York anyway", he just plucked that out of his ass in what is probably just an involuntary spasm of Big Apple arrogance but it will be screamed by every Republican up for election this November and repeated on TV by the talking heads until poor, fear-stricken American's have been battered into jelly. This sort of crap will bolster the NSA Stasi case to just go on conducting their unconstitutional surveillance and data-mining operations, convenient timing  in that it was just yesterday that the US House of Representatives just passed an amendment putting minor restrictions on the NSA's spying on Americans. So much for that now that those scary Muslims - American citizen Muslims at that - are at it again because they hate us for our freedoms. It must be noted that this is the same John Miller who did that sorry infomercial defending the NSA on 60 Minutes last year - sounds like a whopping conflict of interest to me. 

Now that Obama has sent US military troops back into Iraq and gutless, politically motivated Democrats are joining the warmongering Republicans in squealing like stuck pigs for airstrikes it is obvious that we are doomed to remain trapped in a parallel universe as long as a corrupt media allows for the most cynical political class in US history to continue to wage war abroad and repress civil liberties at home. I recall a bit from the satirical website The Onion early in 2001 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. Today in retrospect it is shocking as to how closely that the Onion bit mimicked the real Bush:

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

Ten months later he was standing on a smoldering pile of rubble in lower Manhattan with a bullhorn and or national destiny was clinched. The reset button was effectively hit on over 220 years of American democracy as we were force marched down the road to fascism. Bush may have left office in 2008 but nothing that Obama has done shows any indication of reversing that doomed course, in fact if anything he is hastening it.

(Image: Reuters TV image of ISIS recruitment video via the Guardian)

The Benghazi "Ringleader" Capture Diversion

In a very conveniently timed announcement the story was launched that US Special Forces troops have captured a man named Ahmed Abu Khattala, described as the “ringleader” of the September 11, 2012 attacks on the Benghazi embassy compound that resulted in the death of four Americans including US Ambassador Christopher Stephens and millions of dollars burned in political partisan witch hunts. The news of the capture of Khattala brings back memories of how all of those al Qaeda number three men were either caught or killed whenever the Bush administration needed media cover or to score cheap political points and this comes at a rather nice time for President Barack Obama who has just sent troops back into Iraq despite his having said only days prior that it was not an option. Score another one for Team America World Police, after that World Cup beat down of international powerhouse Ghana by the USA!, USA!, USA! the exceptionalism oozes from patriotic pores this morning.

The political elite are desperate to reboot the days of the aftermath of 9/11 to get Americans back onboard with the latest involvement in Iraq and the fearmongering is ratcheting up. US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, the wife of the slimy authoritarian Cass Sunstein has claimed that Khatalla aka "the ringleader" had been planning attacks on Americans in presenting her case for the incursion into Libya to rendition him. In more strident rhetoric than what Power was engaged in the neocons in The Homeland have spent the last several days since the mysterious emergency of the perfect new bogeyman ISIS making the case for a return to the Mesopotamian meat grinder and widespread US military involvement across the Middle East by claiming that the "new caliphate" in Iraq and Syria would be the birthplace of the next 9/11. Leading the charge of course is the Palmetto state princess Senator Lindsey Graham who appeared on the Sunday morning propaganda circuit to claim that:

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

Just more of the same garbage from one of the nation's preeminent demagogues and liars, the ongoing trotting out of Senator Graham as some sort of great authority on the geopolitics of the era of the phony war on terror shows the  deep  and endemic rot of the domestic state-corporate media in that he is never once called on any of his bullshit. The media is nothing more than a fully functional propaganda arm of the Deep State and nothing that they say should be believed - for information go to selected foreign press outlets and only use the US stuff for context on the daily government spin.

Libertarian Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com is his usual ass-kicking self in today's column entitled  "Iraq: Will the Neocons Get Away With It Again?", subtitled "They lied us into war, and now they're back on television" from which I excerpt:

The "BS" in CBS is well-earned by this CBS News story speculating on the alleged near certainty of a terrorist attack launched by ISIS – the Islamist group now rampaging across Iraq – against the continental US. Headlined "Will ISIS Plan a 9/11-style Terror Plot Against the US?", it is filled with the opinions of various "experts" and habitual warmongers whose exhalation of hot air is no doubt contributing to global warming.

The usual suspects are cited: Sen. Lindsey Graham, the War Party’s answer to Richard Simmons, shrieks "the seeds of 9/11s are being planted all over Iraq and Syria," while Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Oceania), who is giving up his seat in Congress for the right-wing radio talk show circuit, is honing his demagogy by declaring "I guarantee you: this is a problem that we will have to face, and we’re either going to have to face it in New York City or we’re going to face it here."

The same neocons who succeeded in lying the nation into the war in Iraq to begin with are still being allowed to do exactly what with total impunity armed with updated versions of the same stale talking points. That CBS is leading point in pushing the next 9/11 narrative should not be surprising given the network's role in the Benghazi hoax that was pushed later last year on the embassy attack by their ace 'journalist' Lara Logan (who is the wife of a former military psyops expert involved in Iraq) and then using 60 Minutes, their flagship program to air a story that provided cover for unconstitutional NSA mass surveillance and data-mining programs that was an insider delivered infomercial. As Raimondo puts it there is no doubt as exactly what the "BS" stands for in CBS.

While Obama enjoys some political cover for the rendition of "ringleader" Khatalla and a temporary feel good hit of the potent narcotic of  exceptionalism it will only be hours until torture loving Republicans are swarming the usual state-corporate media outlets to decry the plans to try him in the US Court system. While our now fully decimated judicial system is nothing more than a franchise of kangaroo courts where the state and the police who serve it are the winners of a rigged game even that is too good for the more overtly fascist of our two party crime syndicate. It is already being demanded that Khatalla be sent to our offshore torture/concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, so desperate are they to keep that heinous blight on our squandered moral standing long enough to take advantage of the day when the constantly morphing definition of "terrorist" is expanded to include their political foes and critics of the warfare state.

You would think that rank and file Americans would have wised up by now but they are still the biggest suckers on the planet, mesmerized by snake oil salesmen like Obama and Graham, terrified of their own shadows and incapable of critical thinking having long ago been electronically lobotomized by the bullshit that comes from their televisions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gates of hell are about to swing open..