Oscar Puked: American Mesmerized by Celebrity as Collapse Looms

On Monday the putrid excuse for the media in this country temporarily cut away from the incessant smearing and bashing of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to report on the gravely important news that the latest celebrity on trial Oscar Pistorius vomited. The paraplegic sprinter, creatively nicknamed “Blade Runner” became just another piece of carrion to be feasted upon by the media vultures after he blew away his South African model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year.  Too bad that he didn’t live in Florida, the diseased penis of America where he could have invoked his “stand your ground” defense as did the self-anoited neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, loud music murderer Michael Dunn or Curtis Reeves who gunned down a man in cold blood in a movie theater as though a box of popcorn thrown at him was a threat to his life. That is the way that we roll down here in the Sunshine State and to a larger degree in all of America, a brainwashed, dumbed-down, electronically lobotomized lemming colony that has been indoctrinated to revere violence for it is that which is crucial to the ongoing series of what John Kerry refers to as incredible acts of aggression  to make the world safe for corporate exploitation.

Not that the amazing barfing Oscar really did very much to break up the logjam of anti-Russian propaganda, the presstitutes were still in full onslaught mode and the proxy war between Obama and Putin over the global finance mafia orchestrated putsch in Ukraine was only one prong of the trident wielded by the war machine on Monday. There is the matter of that Malaysian jetliner that went missing over the weekend and a desperate attempt by the American national security establishment to conjure up a link to some sort of terrorist action – particularly one with an Iranian angle to it. You can rest assured that the neocons and their Likudnik accomplices are scrambling to piece together this narrative which meshes very nicely with the public relations blitz unleashed by loose cannon Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister, fresh off of his embarrassing performance at the AIPAC conference in Washington returned home to show off what was said to be a shipment of intercepted munitions sent to Gaza by Iran. Bibi ranted that Iran was “fooling the world” in his latest tirade directed at undermining the P5+1 nuclear talks so that America can get about the business of feeding their youth into a multi-trillion dollar meat grinder to fight the war that he doesn’t have the balls to wage himself.

The always imminent attack on Iran, especially given the now spinning out of control escalation in hostilities over Ukraine will for all intents and purposes ignite the global conflagration that the neocons and most of all the brainless Christian Zionist shock troops in The Homeland so desire. For the neocons it is the continuation of the PNAC doctrine, for Bibi it is lebensraum and for the Rapturheads it is the longed for moment when they all fly up into the sky dirty nasty naked to sit at the foot of God’s throne while the rest of us are left to suffer excruciating fates for their entertainment and amusement. The whole fucking world is certifiably insane or at least it is when viewed through the jaundiced eye of what now passes for America post September 11, 2001.

Few in the US establishment are more desperate to find any sort of nugget of information on Flight MH370 that could be trumpeted as a ‘evidence’ of a terrorist plot and then parlayed into the false pretense for even more of that apple pie authoritarianism than the pride of Michigan who is Congressman Mike Rogers gets a chubby over. The porcine boss of the House Intelligence Committee has been squealing like a stuck pig on whatever corrupt ‘news’ program that will have him as a guest over any efforts to reign in the surveillance-warfare state. The fanatic Rogers has a proclivity for just pulling flat-out nonsense out of his ass such as Edward Snowden being a Russian spy, working all the angles to have journalist Glenn Greenwald targeted by the US rogue regime, of course bashing Putin and Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” speculating that the disappearance of that doomed Malaysian flight was the result of terrorism.

Mr. Rogers is notorious for hurling around baseless bullshit without any semblance of proof which is exactly why he is a such a Sunday morning frontman for the police state. Sure there could have been a terrorist angle but it also could have been a mechanical failure (something that is very likely given the need to squeeze every last fractional cent of profit out of everything on the face of the earth these days), a lightning strike or even an abduction by space aliens which all have just as much actual evidence backing them as the Iranian terror insinuation. Today despite the frantic work to pin the devil horns on the ayatollahs the stolen passport red herring was being debunked by no less an authority than Interpol. Do not however expect that to in any way stop the ass clown Rogers, whose uncontrollable mania borders on that of a pederast and who will continue to lie with impunity as long as he is never called on it.

Then there is the man who is a national hero and should be welcomed home with a ticker tape parade and one of those Medal of Freedom thingies that Obama is always giving to Oprah. Former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who appeared via video feed at the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival in Austin, Texas before one of those giant constitutions similar to the one that adorned attorney Saul Goodman’s office in the hit television series Breaking Bad. Snowden, a man who Mike from Michigan would like to see slowly skinned alive with a dull knife and then boiled in oil continued to spread awareness on the flagrantly illegal activities of the secret government as it exists buried within the "Deep State". No matter what the rogue US government and its criminal operatives do to discredit and demonize Snowden the more that his message continues to resonate and if one Glenn Greenwald can be bothered to get off of his ass and stop resting on his laurels then we can finally get to the real stuff that the NSA has been engaged in. Spying on American phone calls, perusing online porno habits and playing peekaboo with their buddies across the pond at GCHQ through Yahoo webcam videos  is only the tip of the iceberg.

The more that the establishment does to smear and marginalize Snowden the longer that he is allowed to endure as a symbol and that is what truly scares the living shit out of the thugs who are running the system. So as the televisions play on, mesmerizing the masses of asses with spectacle, celebrity, sexual deviance and most of all pimping fear it is all the more imperative for those who have managed to escape - as in the allegory of Plato's Cave - continue to work as hard as possible to expose the lies, hypocrisy and murderous intent of the American war machine and the global finance mafia that have their boot on our throats.

Hard to fault Oscar for vomiting, any sane American likely feels the same way these days.

The Madness of King Bibi

To use one of those wonderful Hitler analogies that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so cherishes the increasingly unstable leader of our most influential ally is now like Der Führer hunkered down in his Berlin bunker wailing at phantoms as the Russian army closed in. While the rumblings that plague Bibi aren’t so much the sound of tank treads pulverizing Berlin into rubble they are much more ominous, they are the sounds of shifting world opinion. With the state of Israel methodically being reduced to a racist, war addicted doppelganger of the very land whose heinous crimes allowed for its creation primarily due to the Netanyahu regime’s increasing reliability on the most fanatical religious right-wing elements of his society to hold onto power what he really fears is economic isolation. With the momentum building for the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) which unlike the U.N. and the leaders of official governments (ours in particular) is pushing to hold Israel accountable for gross human rights abuses including the ongoing land theft from Palestinians to build settlements for religious zealots in a region that is incapable of discarding ancient hatred and superstition in favor of modern, progressive thinking.

With the economic pressure slowly being raised on Netanyahu's rogue regime and the cunning and manipulative strongman backed into a corner he has come out swinging. Netanyahu has now formally denounced the BDS movement and by extension ANY who question the repressive policies of his regime as "anti-Semites". This is the desperate act of a bully who is on the brink of getting his long-deserved comeuppance and only serves as one more example of how he is always willing to exploit the historical persecution of Jews, particularly those who were murdered by Hitler for political gain. Netanyahu's shtick is getting old and the playing of the at one time most kick ass club in the bag that is the "anti-Semitism" card has lost its power due to overuse as a standard smear term for any criticism of Israeli policy, particularly in the United States.  It jumped the shark about the time when the very inflammatory accusation was used to kick around poor old decrepit Jimmy Carter over his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" and has been increasingly ineffective as anything but a badge of honor to legitimate critics of right-wing Israeli policies ever since.

The paranoid and ill-considered outbursts of King Bibi have contributed  and now rapidly declining star of King Bibi who is finding his iron-fisted rule now threatened by young turk Danny Danon who just made a power play to loosen his elder's control over the Likud party. While the crazed Netanyahu was busily denouncing BDS and supporters as though they personally were in charge of running the showers at Auschwitz and meeting with the Mossad  in order to formulate a strategy for retaliation Danon was sizing up the Prime Minister's chair just as top domestic lickspittle Eric Cantor has been doing as he has plotted his overthrow of Republican Speaker John Boehner. Cantor is leading the charge to push anew for a war with Iran - something not in the best interests of the country that he is supposedly elected to represent - as was evident in his red-meat filled speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Monday.

Bibi is now once again scrambling his winged monkeys in the U.S Congress (an institution that Pat Buchanan once referred to as "Israeli occupied territory") to save him from his own self-destructive tendencies. While the push for Iran sanctions has temporarily been derailed largely due to AIPAC getting squeamish over the overly partisan support of the Menendez-Kirk bill that would set the country on the course for yet another disastrous war there is a concerted effort within the Congress being made to deliver the bacon for Bibi. Israeli interests have spent millions to pander and manipulate the Christian Zionists in this country and our elected officials routinely are flown to the holy land on vacation/brainwashing junkets to secure their support for the Likudnik right-wing policies that have been so ruinous to the people of that land.

Israel is viewed with much positively by a majority of Americans according to a recent Jerusalem Post poll but what the poll omits is the extremely one-sided view of Middle East events that the domestic media offers up, choosing to self-censor in order to avoid boycotts and protests by it's embedded fifth-column. It is impossible to understand anything that comes out of the state-corporate media largely due to omission, the Palestinian side of the story is rarely if ever offered and if it were to be the offending entity would be set upon fiercely by the same sort of lunatics who were inspirations to Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik. The normal anti-Muslim bigots such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, David Horowitz and their ilk as well as the more 'respectable' enforcers of Israeli propaganda and institutional harassment such as Alan Dershowitz, Abe Foxman, Joe Lieberman, Jennifer Rubin etc. I find it ironically hilarious that Bibi is caterwauling over being force fed a nice big taste of his own medicine with the BDS movement but bullies never seem to have much of a taste for conflict then someone fights back.

The coming wave of official condemnation of the Israeli regime's repressive policies has already sparked Illinois congressmen Peter Roskam and Dan Lipinski to push a bill that will strip academic institutions of federal funding if they support in any way whatsoever the BDS Mmovement. The bill, with the obligatory Orwellian title of "The Protect Academic Freedom Act" shows just how much contempt that a good many members of the U.S. Congress have for the concept of freedom of speech and is in clear violation of the First Amendment. But it is after all an election year and nobody wants to find themselves targeted for removal from the publicly funded gravy train. I would personally like to see someone with a set of stones come up with legislation stripping for life federal funding and benefits from any member of Congress who puts the interests of a foreign country over those of his/her own constituents. The list can be compiled during Netanyahu's next visit to speak to Congress likely in March, according to the Times of Israel there is already a letter being circulated by nearly a hundred of the rats who should be rapidly divested from the taxpayer dole come November. 

While it would be too much to ask for our elected representatives who continue to prove daily that their loyalty lies elsewhere be it it the military industrial complex, Wall Street scammers, energy cartels and in this case foreign despots they would be wise to start looking past Netanyahu. With ambitious sorts like Danon already plotting against his old and tired ways he is a goner, it is only a matter of time and whose fingerprints will be on the hatchet that he will one day find embedded in his back. Our sanctimonious frauds in Congress would be well advised to save the standing ovations this time and keep an eye on the future as they break out their kneepads.

If Mr. Netanyahu wants to see who is truly responsible for "deligitimizing" Israel and turning it into a pariah as well as diminishing real anti-Semitism by his constant invocation of it as a political tool he needs only to look into his own mirror.

(Image: Israel Hayom)

Warmongers Caterwauling Over Iran Deal

In the aftermath of Saturday’s landmark deal over restricting Iran’s nuclear program in return for an easing of crushing economic sanctions there has predictably much weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst the crusading Neocon war-mongers. Senators and other congressional swine of dubious loyalty were already calling for even more sanctions before Saturday and the accord reached in Geneva will only reinforce their recalcitrance in acting against the national interest and working desperately to sabotage the deal. Right-wing Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu naturally was bitching the loudest, the deal according to Bibi, a man who is rapidly becoming a cartoon figure  is a “historic mistake” although in the humble opinion of this writer nowhere near the historic mistakes that old Harry Truman made in 1947-48 that started this Middle East madness with the creation of the National Security State or the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh that effectively set off the chain of events leading up to the 1979 Islamic revolution to overthrow the U.S. friendly torturing Shah of Iran. Not to mention the "historic mistake" of the electorate in his own country that despite a progressive and rational citizenry continues to vote against their own self interests by not replacing his regime at the ballot box before he completely destroys the relationship with the U.S. due to his paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies. The state-corporate media is bereft of any outside perspective or historical reference other than the flogged to death WW II metaphors were the head of state of any target on the list is dubbed the "new Hitler", any efforts at diplomacy are "Munich" again and those who seek to settle problems through negotiation rather than bombs are "Neville Chamberlain". It is all hogwash and were television lobotomized Americans better informed as a populace it would called out as such.

While extremists in the Israeli government as well as their buddies in the House of Saud were as outraged as their domestic operatives at the deal, especially after the serpent that is Prince Bander (aka Bandar Bush) had coaxed the socialist French into torpedoing the negotiations two weeks ago one aspect had to really rub salt into the wound. It has been reported that the U.S. had been engaged in secret talks since March which would come to nicely serve to circumvent attempts by the usual suspects to scuttle it all and just dial up the airstrikes on Tehran. It was almost as though the old war criminal Henry Kissinger was back in the saddle with his Realpolitick. The revelation of the secret meetings is setting off shockwaves and the charlatans and opportunists are working themselves into a feeding frenzy. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has slithered out from under his rock again and Israeli lickspittle Mark Kirk will be the likely point men for the coming congressional frontal assault that will be used to rouse the rabble and renew the at least temporary derailing of the American war machine. As it is with all of the gutless chickenhawks, they are always eager to send the sons and daughters of others off to die in the asinine wars of their own creation.

There is going to be hell to pay though because Bibi just got punked. In his best interests I would hope that he has been put under suicide watch for the next several days.  The hydra will very quickly reconfigure and no expense will be spared as the warmongers begin to mobilize their media plants, embedded fifth columnists and religious zealot shock troops to besiege fence sitters in D.C. and go all in so that Jesus can come back when the Middle East erupts in flames. There will be much of the same fear-mongering to pander to the "low information voters" (God I love that term) as 2014 is an election year and there is no better sucker bait to harvest the low-hanging fruit than nationalist demagoguery.  To use a WW II analogy of my own it is as  Hermann Göring once said - "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country". Getting this very basic concept down is a certain recipe for electoral success here in The Homeland.

Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry is basking in the limelight after his successful weekend that is when he wasn't out buying expensive gourmet chocolates for his ketchup heiress wife which resulted in a security staff lock down of the candy shop. An employee of the famous Auer Chocolatier spoke of Kerry that he was “very nice” and spoke “perfect French.”.  The entire thing did not go over well with Senator Lindsey "thank God for France"  Graham who despite the preempting of this week's Meet the Press for a NASCAR race wasted no time in getting together a gaggle of corporate-state media for his inevitable denouncing of the deal and calling for more sanctions. Joining the Palmetto State princess in parroting Neocon talking points was of course Senator John McCain and NRA terrorist supporter Peter King, a trifecta of seasoned media whores always on call to the lazy, career suckups that have so polluted the national press. I expect that by the time that the grease is congealing on the turkey gravy later this week that the aforementioned blood sucking war freaks will be joined by hundreds of others seeking to wave the bloody flag engage in their self-serving blather to get a leg up on next year's mid-terms. The ghoulish thug John Bolton has even emerged from the skeleton's closet of the Bush-Cheney administration to bitch and moan about the "abject surrender" to Iran and to once again psychotically rattle the saber as he is so accustomed to do as  a veteran shill for the war machine.

I do have to give one thing to Graham and McCain in that they both actually served in the military in comparison to the cowardly douchebags who are their colleagues and associates who will never cease to send Americans marching into a foreign meat grinder to score cheap political points or remain relevant on the talk show circuit. The propaganda mills are revving up right now and the lies will soon be as thick as a proverbial biblical plague of locusts as the warmongers desperately work to salvage their feverish wet dream of reducing Iran to ashes while leaving it's citizens with nothing but their eyes to cry with.

The Push to Attack Iran Continues

“Real men go to Tehran"

-Anonymous Bush Administration Official

With the Syrian attack relegated to the back burner for the immediate future thanks to Putin’s brilliant humiliation of Barry and Kerry it has become incumbent for the warmongers to once again try to sell an attack on Iran. This has been ongoing for at least a decade now, it ebbs and flows but is always the apple of the eye of neocons, the weapons industry, oil and natural gas cartels and the entourage of millions on their payroll to push for this most lucrative and ultimately disastrous of wars.  While the strikes on Syria despite weeks of political class hysteria over the gassing of civilians at Ghouta was a deal that Barry and the boys just could not close and one that could have potentially lead to WW III at least Assad had no real ability to militarily threaten the Empire. With Iran that is not the case, it would be an unbelievably stupid, ugly and rapidly escalating series of reactions and counter-reactions that only a lunatic would risk. The bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities would lead to attacks on U.S. ships in the Straits of Hormuz that could effectively close down that key transit point and quadruple oil prices virtually overnight - futures traders would love this. There would be the radioactive fallout from the strikes as well, poisoning thousands of Iranian civilians in ways that would make the still mysterious sarin gassings at Ghouta seem humanitarian by comparison. There is nothing like the damage wrought by radiation poisoning and it lasts, does not dissipate and causes deformations upon the as yet unborn. The Muslim world would immediately be galvanized against the west and Russia and China would not likely be bystanders. Only a lunatic would risk something like this.

Enter one Benjamin Netanyahu, current ruler of Israel and a megalomaniac paranoid with an eye on history and visions of Sir Winston Churchill dancing in his head.  Bibi spent last week engaged in a public relations campaign on American soil to pander to the political foot soldiers who could make that attack on Iran a reality. While difficult to follow up last year's United Nations speech with that ridiculous cartoon bomb the Israeli leader denounced newly minted Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" before the world body. Never mind that Rouhani has toned down the incendiary Holocaust denial rhetoric that his predecessor, the freakish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  used to bait Bibi and which the big man never failed to bite on while in the process legitimizing Ahmadinejad with large percentage of Islamics.  The greatest fear of Netanyahu, a man who relies on the threat of war for his own political survival is that there would be a more moderate approach towards Iran under the new leadership. Obama and Rouhani's much hyped phone call scared the hell of Netanyahu and the tantrum toward's Barry's failure to adequately condemn Iran royally pissed off Israeli officials who have along with their boss spent years trying to get the U.S. to do the heavy lifting as well as bear the burden of any of the blowback of the attack.  Obama's waffling has resulted in the Netanyahu regime's attempt to line up support for an attack by creating an alliance of other Gulf countries, a first strike that would inevitably suck the U.S. into the conflict and trigger the global conflagration that was avoided thanks to Putin's intervention last month.

I would imagine that any such alliance would of course include the aforementioned Bandar Bush and the House of Saud who were reportedly apoplectic that they were unable to goad Obama into attacking the Assad regime in Damascus and are also chafing at a moderated stance towards Iran. The propagandizing will continue in the U.S. corporate-state media which never calls Netanyahu on his horseshit, such as this whopper that Iran is building ICBM's to launch nukes at the American Homeland - this is about as credible as Saddam's trans-Atlantic fleet of chemical weapon spewing drones. There was the rare column this time that Bibi had finally overreached, notably columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times in the piece entitled Bibi's Tired Iranian Lines from which I excerpt:

Never has it been more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to convince the world that, as he put it in 2006: “It’s 1938. Iran is Germany.” He tried again at the United Nations this week. In a speech that strained for effect, he likened Iran to a 20th-century “radical regime” of “awesome power.” That would be the Third Reich.

Among those who question this approach is David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. Referring to the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, he wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz that, “Simply implying, for instance, that anyone who sits down with Rouhani is a modern-day Neville Chamberlain or Édouard Daladier won’t do the trick. To the contrary, it will only give offense and alienate.”

When Netanyahu’s staunchest supporters — the leaders of the American Jewish community — question his approach to Iran, the Israeli prime minister needs to stop calling Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” his favored epithet, and start worrying about crying wolf.

I suppose that it's at least something but the disproportionate amount of coverage to non-Israeli regime friendly reportage in this country is astounding - I read Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post quite regularly and there is no shortage of reporting and viewpoints that aren't in lockstep with the extreme right-wing Netanyahu government. I am also pretty sure that the New York Times ombudsman will be getting a call from Alan Dershowitz or some other deranged war pimp threatening boycotts and smearing for Cohen's intransigence. This is yet one more example of the shameful enabling of the dumbing down of America that the mass media has been culpable in and it really isn't getting any better considering that as of this afternoon some of the top 'stories' being promoted are Tiger at Zoo Bites Woman's Arm, 9 Year Old Boy Sneaks onto Flight to Vegas and 2,000 Lashes For Nude Dancing. The last one is of interest only because it took place in Saudi Arabia, our 'partners in peace' and the paragon for a tolerant society as well as the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. weapons deals. With friends like these who needs enemies?

And of course the genesis of the entire U.S.-Iran problem as it actually exists is that 1953 coup d'etat that the CIA and the Brits engineered to overthrow democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh giving way to decades of tyranny by the U.S. backed despot the Shah of Iran and his SAVAK goon squads. Despite the CIA itself's recent copping to this and the subsequent documentation released it is always through the lens of the 1978-1980 Iranian hostage crisis that is used to portray Iran as an enemy of American freedom (not that we actually have any), mom and apple pie. The Ayatollah Khomeini is a scary looking guy, just like Ahmadinejad and it is always easier to boil down historical and geopolitical issues of enormous complexity into easily digested gruel to feed to the sheeple when you have that ready made devil that can be trotted out.  

The business of America after all is war, we are addicted to it but like all doomed junkies the only endgame is sorrow and self-destruction.