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

Establishment Begins Building the Case Against Putin

You have to give it to the extremists that run the US government war machine these days, they are predictable to a fault. The morning after the apparent shootdown of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet over Ukraine (once again, why was a commercial airliner routed over a war zone?) the warmongers are out with a vengeance in building their ongoing case against Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin's grave offenses have been (1) presiding over a government that dared to save NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden from a US torture chamber (2) intervening to stop what would have been a devastating air attack on the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad who was blamed for a to this day unsolved use of sarin gas on civilians (3) working to facilitate an end to economic sanctions against Iran for their alleged nuclear program (4) not accepting the illegally installed US backed, neo-Nazi infested coup in Ukraine (5) refusing to bow to the demands of crazy old Uncle Scam therefore risking becoming an example of one who successfully stands up to a bully.

The lurid tales that have been churned out of the propaganda machine like so many sausage links made of tainted rat meat have duped already stupid and fear-addled Americans into accepting that Putin is some malevolent evil force out of a Marvel comics series and now with the downed airliner - the earthly manifestation of Mephistopheles himself. Sadly it will be gobbled up by the American common folk who will ultimately be the ones who foot the bill for the coming disaster of our warped foreign policy - just like they always do.

Leading point for the wrapping of the blame of the downing of MH-17 around the Russian leader's neck like the noose applied before the lynching are the usual vermin and scum that have risen to the apex of the rotten to the core and now bordering on biblical evil US government that lives high in the kingdom of Washington. Vice President Joe Biden rapidly identified the air disaster as a missile attack as though he already knew the answer - the veep is hardly one who is unbiased in the Ukrainian matter given his son landed a plum job with the country's largest gas company - which he likely did. Old blood and guts, Senator John McCain was bellowing his usual bullshit and crying for war - has there ever been a stronger argument for euthanasia? But the deal was sealed when none other than Queen Hillary the Inevitable, our historic first woman president in waiting let it rip on the Charlie Rose show last night. As in the Bush era, the "facts" were being fixed around the policy and the policy as it was even before this primo excuse for a war of some type against Russia have always been preordained.

The war propaganda and campaign of relentless demonization will pick up today and escalate to a thundering and rousing, flag-wrapped crescendo by the time that the usual assortment of freaks, stooges and war criminals are rolled out for the Sunday morning "news" shows. The warmonger's gazette, The Washington Post is pounding the war drums loudly already as the sun rises on Friday from the neocon bunker of their editorial page with a call to arms "The world must know whose weapon destroyed a passenger plane" - which anyone who has seen what the monsters running the USA!, USA!, USA! since September 11, 2001 already knows. The reports from the illegitimate occupying government in Kiev are taken as gospel by the state-corporate media and the "proof" will assuredly be provided and be as damning as the aerial photos of Saddam's mobile chemical weapons labs. I excerpt from WAPO:

In recent days there has been abundant evidence of Russia stepping up supplies of heavy weapons to rebels in eastern Ukraine, including advanced anti-aircraft systems. The Kiev government reported that two of its military aircraft were shot down in the past week, either by separatists, Russian planes or batteries operating from across the border. On Thursday came a greater tragedy: the destruction of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet with 295 people aboard. Ukrainian authorities charged that it had been struck by a missile fired by a Russian-made surface-to-air battery supplied to Moscow’s Ukrainian proxies.

If the reports are confirmed, the Ukrainian separatists and their sponsors in Moscow will be responsible for a heinous crime. The United States and its allies must insist that those responsible be held accountable — including those in the Kremlin. [TRANSLATION: PUTIN]

First the word of "Ukranian authorities" and the "Kiev government" are not to be believed or trusted, this is a US installed puppet regime packed with thugs, crooks, fascists, neo-Nazis and led by a corrupt oligarch whose fondness for Hitlerian statements of total retaliation to avenge the deaths of military forces killed by anti-austerity, anti-fascist federalists defending against ethnic cleansing indicated a depth of moral depravity that makes it easy to see why the US State Department and Obama regime back him. The WAPO screed goes on:

The White House continues to avoid measures that could inflict crushing damage on the Russian financial system and force Mr. Putin and the elites around him to choose between aggression in Ukraine and Russia’s economic future. Wednesday’s measures stop two banks from obtaining long-term debt financing in U.S. markets, but the treasury has not excluded those banks from the financial system nor taken measures against the largest banks. Though its bank was sanctioned, the energy operations of Gazprom, Russia’s giant, remain untouched.

Even before the tragic loss of the Malaysian plane, it ought to have been clear to the West that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine could not be overlooked or wished away. It is both criminal and intolerable and should be treated accordingly.

That is about as obvious a call to arms- even if it results in a civilization destroying nuclear war - as it gets but this is the depth of the systemic rot in our now fully amok and globally despised empire. The very least that the WAPO is calling for seems to be the dropping of what has been referred to as the "financial neutron bomb" which would in essence be an act of war. But war is what the establishment needs and has refashioned US society around as a the cornerstone for our continued existence - it is lucrative, keeps the bewildered herd in line with the ongoing worship of the flag and the state and most of all it is damned good politics in the permanent election cycle.

The feeding frenzy begins but the obvious blame lies with Obama himself because had he not presided over the original sin of the coup d'etat in Kiev then there would have been no war zone and the passengers of MH-17 would be alive today. The emperor not only has blood on his hands but it would not be a surprise if he bathes in it on a daily basis.

Is the Foolhardy Obama About to Start World War III?

2014 is the one-hundred year anniversary of the beginning of World War I, a conflict of such savagery, really the first time in history that mass slaughter was industrialized and the resulting carnage was unprecedented. The war itself was the result of a series of events that rapidly careened out of control. The spark that ignited the whole conflagration being the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria that was followed by a cascading series of events that led to a conflict of empires that forever changed the world. WW I in particular leading to the rise of the Nazis and the resultant post-World War II global structure that is still playing out although now in it's latter stages. There have been many who have written of similarities between 1914 and 2014 and the increasingly unstable regime in Washington, with ongoing hostilities with Syria, Iran, Russia-Ukraine and now Iraq again is dragging the world, and billions of people closer to the brink of what could be history's next great disaster.

President Barack Obama, his fanatic packed State Department and the neocons in the state-corporate media who keep up the pressure in instigating him to launch another war in Ukraine, Syria or the opportune location of the week - right now it is Iraq are recklessly lurching towards an Archduke Ferdinand moment. It is only a matter of what exactly it will be. While the hew and cry of the chattering classes with their preying upon the fears of timid Americans of the new "caliphate" being established by the mysterious ISIS it would seem that a reentry into Iraq could be the catalyst. This will be the topic of of choice during the Sunday morning circle jerk where neocon war criminal after war criminal will inevitably be trotted out to make their case for war. My money however is on Obama doing something historically stupid over the ongoing resistance to the US installed junta in Kiev and his colossal inferiority complex over being punked repeatedly by Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

While nearly completely overwhelmed in the US media by the necessity to push the ISIS story Ukraine is on the brink of something extremely ugly. The recently crowned US puppet Petro Poroshenko aka "the Chocolate King" has indicated that the violence in the east is about to be be unleashed after his phony cease fire, basically a call for complete surrender of anti-austerity, anti-fascist rebels was rejected. In an article at Russia Today Porshenko is quoted as being ready to go to "plan B" which inevitably will lead to an increased use of the Kiev junta's military forces against civilians. Russia has responded to the Poroshenko's  cease-fire offer and implied threat with both an acknowledgement as well as a huge one of those military exercises that are so often utilized by the USA!, USA! USA! and NATO who are predictably crying foul. According to a story in The Guardian entitled  "Vladimir Putin backs Ukraine ceasefire but orders huge military exercise":

Putin’s qualified backing for Poroshenko's effort to halt the conflict was another in a series of shifting moves and statements by the Kremlin that still leave unclear Moscow's level of commitment to de-escalating the conflict.

Putin's conciliatory words on Saturday were made on the same day as he ordered large-scale military exercises that NATO criticised as likely to raise tensions. United States officials also accused Russian troops of moving back into positions near the border with Ukraine's troubled east.

AND

On Saturday, a NATO spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, lamented Moscow’s military exercises, saying that “it can be seen as a further escalation of the crisis with Ukraine”.

The insanity isn't just limited to Washington and the Obama gang and that only increases the danger of some massive fuckup by some lunatic - for example NATO boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen delusional assertion that the Russians have infiltrated the anti-fracking movement. Per a story in The Guardian entitled "Russia 'secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking'" from which I excerpt:

The head of one of the world’s leading groups of democratic nations has accused Russia of undermining projects using hydraulic fracturing technology in Europe.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), and former premier of Denmark, told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday that Vladimir Putin’s government was behind attempts to discredit fracking, according to reports.

Rasmussen said: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

He declined to give details of those operations, saying: “That is my interpretation.”

This is the man in charge of fucking NATO for Christ's sake - and with the ongoing provocation of Russia over the fiasco in Ukraine this is a man who could start World War III - why isn't this insane accusation of not only Russia but the accusation of US environmental groups as being essentially "terrorists" an illustration of his manifest unfitness for his job? It is like Dr. Strangelove is now our reality in 2014 and Rasmussen could be General Jack D. Ripper.

This is serious foray into John Birch Society tin-foil hatter territory for Rasmussen although with the masturbatory glee with which big US energy companies have seized upon the potential disruption in Russian gas supplies to Europe to continue to frack away in America in the orgasmic quest for energy export profits while pushing similar horseshit propaganda designed to transform anti-fracking activists into the increasingly catch-all category of "terrorists" it is just another indicator of how rotten that the entire system is. Rasmussen, the former Danish Prime Minister was an outspoken supporter of Bush's Iraq adventure and the descent into frenzied Cold War conspiracy theories (remember back when the Russians were accused of infiltrating the Civil Rights Movement to sow discontent?) shows why he got the gig with NATO in the first place.

But while the NATO militarists with their 20th century European worldviews and their itchy trigger fingers ready to shoot at anything Russian represent a grave threat to order the real danger is Obama himself. There has been more talk of economic sanctions against Russia due to the Empire's fury that the Russian leader will neither back down and lick Uncle Scam's red, white and blue jackboots nor take the bait by invading eastern Ukraine to stop the atrocities. This could very well be the week that Obama green-lights the dropping of that "financial neutron bomb" that the Wall Street swine who are embedded within the US Treasury have been working on. I excerpt the following from The Telegraph article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard entitled  "US financial showdown with Russia is more dangerous than it looks, for both sides":

The United States has constructed a financial neutron bomb. For the past 12 years an elite cell at the US Treasury has been sharpening the tools of economic warfare, designing ways to bring almost any country to its knees without firing a shot.

The strategy relies on hegemonic control over the global banking system, buttressed by a network of allies and the reluctant acquiescence of neutral states. Let us call this the Manhattan Project of the early 21st century.

"It is a new kind of war, like a creeping financial insurgency, intended to constrict our enemies' financial lifeblood, unprecedented in its reach and effectiveness," says Juan Zarate, the Treasury and White House official who helped spearhead policy after 9/11.

“The new geo-economic game may be more efficient and subtle than past geopolitical competitions, but it is no less ruthless and destructive,” he writes in his book Treasury's War: the Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.

Bear this in mind as Washington tightens the noose on Vladimir Putin's Russia, slowly shutting off market access for Russian banks, companies and state bodies with $714bn of dollar debt (Sberbank data).

The stealth weapon is a "scarlet letter", devised under Section 311 of the US Patriot Act. Once a bank is tainted in this way - accused of money-laundering or underwriting terrorist activities, a suitably loose offence - it becomes radioactive, caught in the "boa constrictor's lethal embrace", as Mr Zarate puts it.

This can be a death sentence even if the lender has no operations in the US. European banks do not dare to defy US regulators. They sever all dealings with the victim.

AND

The US Treasury faces a more formidable prey with Russia, the world's biggest producer of energy with a $2 trillion economy, superb scientists and a first-strike nuclear arsenal. It is also tightly linked to the German and east European economies. The US risks endangering its own alliance system if it runs roughshod over friends. It is in much the same situation as Britain in the mid-19th century when it enforced naval supremacy, boarding alleged slave ships anywhere in the world, under any flag, ruffling everybody's feathers.

President Putin knows exactly what the US can do with its financial weapons. Russia was brought into the loop when the two countries were for a while "allies" in the fight against Jihadi terrorism. Mr Putin appointed loyalist Viktor Zubkov - later prime minister - to handle dealings with the US Treasury.

Mr Zarate said the Obama White House has waited too long to strike in earnest, clinging to the hope that Putin would stop short of tearing up the global rule book. "They should take the gloves off. The longer the wait, the more maximalist they may have to be," he said.

This would be a calibrated escalation, issuing the scarlet letter to Russian banks that help Syria's regime

This would seem to be a perfect time for Obama to issue a devastating strike against Russia's economy by the use of what Zarate is referring to - it would likely be justified by finding some bogus tie between Putin and ISIS in Syria and the corrupt media will eagerly provide cover for it. Such a move however will like everything that Barry and the boys have touched blow up in their faces when Russia inevitably retaliates. Such a strike against the Russian financial system, largely based on Obama's petty narcissistic tantrums and a festering grudge against Putin (who is not a stupid man and understands exactly what this is all about) would be an act of war and as history has shown, the act of a desperate man like Gavrilo Princip busting a cap into the Archduke's ass things can spiral out of control very, very quickly.

Unless Obama gets a grip we are all about to fine out exactly how bad that things can really get when fools, lunatics and charlatans have a monopoly on power. 

Here We Go Again: Another Syria Chemical Weapons Tale

MORE WAR PORN TO PUSH FOR US ATTACK ON SYRIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Super Size This Putin: McDonalds Pulls Out of Crimea

Only in Obama's America could something like this bit of 'news' be sold to the masses of asses by a corrupt cadre of state-corporate media that long ago chucked their first amendment responsibilities into the crapper to become careerist pressititutes riding on the rogue government gravy train. Those economic sanctions that have hurled at Russia with as much real effect as Zell Miller's legendary "spitballs" now are getting some real clout as the punishment towards the reincarnated red menace grows a set of teeth.  McDonalds, the tip of the spear of the corporate American imperial conquest of the world is closing locations in Crimea. This comes much to the delight of moronic consumers of the cable ‘news’ tabloid infotainment that poisons their minds as surely as the artery clogging food at Micky D’s does to their bodies. It is a sardonically funny real life example of the thoroughly dishonest rhetoric of that pathological political cynic and closet Bircher Paul Ryan's "full stomachs and empty souls" speech to the low-hanging fruit at the recent CPAC soiree.  Nothing could be more ironically truthful of the state of the American "consumer" today, whether it be focus group tested bullshit or cheap fast food that is being devoured.

Boy that is going to show Putin. I can practically see William Kristol, the Kagan Brothers, John McCain and the rest of the neocons popping the champagne corks over this latest fusillade of indignity. Considering the insane levels of hubris, delusion and arrogance among the “end of history” crowd I can really imagine that they think that depriving Russians of greasy, unhealthy American fast food is going to ignite their desired color revolution that will bring about regime change in Russia. What a bunch of  reckless and dangerous dummies and Obama and his Skull and Bones stooge John Kerry are no better. With the latest edition of the impossible dream of Israel accepting a peace deal with the Palestinians now going up like a flaming bag of dogshit John Kerry has officially become the grand marshal of the US fool’s parade. My God, what a mind boggling fiasco of a first year on the job in thoroughly screwing up everything that the stammering ass from Mass got involved in, wasn’t John Bolton available? Good God Obama, did it ever dawn on you that there was a reason why the Republicans supported Kerry for the Secretary of State gig? How is that “Team of Rivals” thing workin’ out for you now?

The news of McDonalds pulling out of Crimea is already being picked up and fed through the echo chamber with the launching pad being th neocon transmission station at the Washington Post. While it hasn't reached the columns of the A team of propagandists over at Pravda on the Potomac, namely neocon war wench Jennifer Rubin and Charles "Dr.Strangelove" Kraüthammer some so-called Russian expert named Kathy Lally is practically peeing in her pants with glee while blogging:

Talk about a Big Mac attack. Here’s a sanction with some real bite to it.

The three McDonald’s restaurants in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that has been abruptly annexed by Russia, are now closed. The Ukrainian branch of McDonald’s, based in Kiev, said in a statement Thursday that they had been closed for technical reasons, perhaps referring to the difficulty of supplying your restaurants when they turn up in a foreign country overnight.

Although the United States has imposed financial and other sanctions on Moscow because of its Crimean takeover, American businesses have been left free to operate in Russia. McDonald’s said the closing was temporary, but its offer to move employees to other jobs in mainland Ukraine - and give them a three-month rent payment - made that assertion sound less than persuasive.

Crimean officials tried to minimize the enormity of being forever deprived of the seductive phrase, “Would you like fries with that?”

My fellow Americans, this is how low that we have sunk in that the closing of McDonalds restaurants in Crimea has become to this point the most kick ass club in the bag in terms of all of those threatened economic sanctions that have been endlessly threatened by Team Obama. Oh, and Mighty Taco has banned Putin from eating in any of their restaurants, I am sure that he is already on the phone with his military commanders to get the fuck out of Crimea asap. This coordinated onslaught of Russia bashing is all so ridiculous that it has descended into parody, I cannot even watch my local news anymore without being blasted with propaganda and last night there was a plea for bay area residents to adopt those stray dogs that were being hunted down to be killed prior to the Sochi Winter Olympics. It never ends as we continue to slouch towards Idiocracy, on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last week much to the delight of a woeful nation of TV addled zombies the reigning queen of American ignoramuses that is Sarah Palin was trotted out to partake in a Putin skewering skit , the woman is a national embarrassment yet in a rotting empire where celebrity is the coin of the realm has become mainstream. It is as if the entire nation is slowly being sucked into the vortex inhabited by such morons and is becoming nothing more than a cartoon version of itself.

Likely to further inflame tensions and up the insanity level is the outstanding denunciation of one Russian political figure  who administered a classic smackdown, according to a story in The Guardian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov mocked the current state of lunacy:

"Clearly, the US leadership is really annoyed, and cannot come to terms with the new situation, which has arisen in large part due to the deliberate line taken by the US and its allies in Europe to prepare anti-Russian forces to take power in Ukraine," said deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, in an interview with Interfax.

"Trying to demonstrate how unhappy it is with the exercise of free will by the population of Crimea and the decisions we took related to it, Washington is ruining contacts even in places where continuing dialogue is in their own interests."

In addition to sanctions against a number of businessmen and politicians considered to be close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the US has responded with other measures, including cancelling all co-operation between Nasa and the Russian space agency, except for joint work on the International Space Station.

"The situation is turning into a joke when, for example, meetings between meteorologists are cancelled," said Ryabkov.

"What can we advise our American colleagues? They should get more fresh air, do yoga, eat healthily, maybe watch some sitcoms on television.

"This is better than getting themselves and others all worked up when they know very well that the train has already departed and that childish tantrums, tears and hysterics will not help things."

HEAR! HEAR! Enough is enough of this silly horseshit. It's long past time for the adults to intervene, stick a pacifier into Obama's pie hole and send Kerry, Powers, Nuland, Rice and the neocons to go and sit in the corner until they can behave in the mature manner that should be expected of statesmen and stateswomen. Oh, and take bad ass Billy Kristol out to the wood shed and give him the type of serious spanking that would give David Vitter a hard on. America is the petulant spoiled child of the world and it is embarrassing to be an American these days due to our tantrum throwing political class. For Christ’s sake, listen to rational war criminals for a change like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and just ignore the diaper-dumping piss babies like Kristol and the rest of his wretched gang of misfits when it comes to Russia.

Maybe the neocons can take solace that McDonalds has suspended operations in Crimea, thereby depriving the citizens of the Russian territory of the crappy food that is a major contributor to a plague of health problems here in The Homeland where we are number one - in obesity. Like the rest of our sick national obsession with being that oh so exceptional people the brainwashing that is used by McDonalds in targeting advertising to children is essential in the indoctrination process. Just like the pledge of allegiance which is something that has no place in a "free" country and more appropriately belongs in the same types of authoritarian states that are defined by the criteria that is steeped in the same hypocrisy that is being peddled to justify the new Cold War.