Lord of the Pigs: Obama Dines at Exclusive Honolulu Eatery

Emperor Barack Obama is going to be sure to milk the taxpayers for the remaining two years of his dismal tenure and the ongoing Hawaiian Christmas vacation is a preview of his retirement. Obama has drawn criticism during his extended holiday for playing too much golf, wrecking the wedding plans of a military couple and now breaking bread at a swanky Honolulu eatery. Never mind that millions of Americans are wallowing in the existential hell of broken dreams and financial ruination thanks to Obama's economic policies, he is going to swill booze with the elitist limousine liberals as he embarks upon his victory tour.

The Obama family rang in the New Year at the "Vintage Cave", an exclusive gathering place for local and vacationing high-rollers called a "blank check restaurant" by Honolulu Magazine. The Hill reports that a "charter membership" costs a half million dollars so Barry won't have to be troubled by having to rub elbows with the rabble. The "Vintage Cave" is described on it's website as being  "A Space for Returning to Our Origins":

Our oldest ancestors who dwelled in caves experienced great pleasures there, creating spectacular wall paintings that survive to this very day. Modern civilization and its sophisticated worldwide digital network—and the ever more complex global system that is part of it—is transforming human beings in unprecedented ways. Yet, however advanced we become, there always lurks in the deep recesses of our hearts a yearning to return to the basics of our ancestral origins. Vintage Cave Honolulu brings that secret longing to life. Its walls and ceilings are masoned with 150,000 antique style bricks. Its flooring is of granite quarried in the mountains of India. Furniture and fixtures were all custom crafted to create unique and comfortable cavern echoing the underground architecture of ancient Rome.

The decor features expensive artwork by such cultural legends as Picasso as well as one hell of a collection of stuff that you don't find at your local yard sale or flea market - the images are here. A story from the website of Pacific Business News provides more details:

In the two years since it opened below the Shirokiya deparment store at Ala Moana Center, Vintage Cave has become a destination restaurant for a high-end clientele.

Art valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, by artists such Pablo Picasso and Mordecai Ardon, line walls made of bricks that were specially made for the restaurant and laid by 10 bricklayers flown in from Yugoslavia.

The wine cellar holds bottles that are worth thousands of dollars — the most expensive one is a 2009 Grand Cru Moaopole that costs $16,000 A shot of 50-year-old Macallan single-malt Scotch from the members-only bar costs $6,000.

The restaurant has a “private society” member roster of around 550 clientele who have paid either $50,000 or $500,000 to dine at the restaurant, Sekiguchi said. The clients use the credit toward food and drink.

Considering that Mr. Obama managed to win election in 2008 by running on a platform of economic fairness and then immediately proceeded to protect the Wall Street gamblers that destroyed the economy it is just more hypocrisy from the man of hope and change. In 2012 the Obama campaign was extremely successful in bludgeoning the hapless Mitt Romney as an out of touch elitist of the type that hangs around with the .01 percent at exclusive clubs where membership begins at $500,000. It was one hell of a con job for a gravy train riding swine like Obama and he was able to con enough people into winning reelection.

Liberals and progressives who were hoodwinked are still waiting for him to put on those boots and walk the picket line and are now casting their lot with the Socialist cadaver Bernie Sanders (let's get real here) and Elizabeth Warren who is the newest iteration of what passes for hope and change. People need to get a clue, the system is so rotten in the star-spangled republic of Obamastan or Bushland or Clintongrad that you don't even get a seat at the table unless you are a moral reprobate or otherwise able to be bought. 

Obama continues to wallow in the spoils of victory as his South Pacific soiree makes evident and the tab for it all will be paid by the American taxpayer. Nice work if you can get it.

Obama Justice Department Scooping Up American Cellphone Data

One nation under surveillance could fittingly be the new motto of the United States circa 2014. Not only have numerous revelations over the past year and a half revealed the stunning degree to which the NSA has been spying on law-abiding Americans – all ostensibly to “keep us safe” but there has been much bleeding over into other big government agencies as well. Americans who surrendered their civil liberties with nary a whimper after the 9/11 attacks should be shocked at how the government has gone on to use those acts of terrorism as an excuse to expand its own powers exponentially.

The latest outrage comes courtesy of a story reported by The Wall Street Journal entitled “Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy Program” . The piece details how the Department of Justice is gathering up data from the mobile phones of Americans using small airplanes equipped with special equipment. This is the same D.O.J. that has been presided over for the past six years by Barack Obama’s ruthless henchman Eric Holder and has set new standards in the abuse of state power. I except the following from the WSJ piece:

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.

The technology in the two-foot-square device enables investigators to scoop data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location, these people said.

People with knowledge of the program wouldn’t discuss the frequency or duration of such flights, but said they take place on a regular basis.

A Justice Department official would neither confirm nor deny the existence of such a program. The official said discussion of such matters would allow criminal suspects or foreign powers to determine U.S. surveillance capabilities. Justice Department agencies comply with federal law, including by seeking court approval, the official said.

The program is yet another gross violation of the U.S. Constitution in that it like those utilized by the NSA Stasi is effectively conducting warrantless searches. The Fourth Amendment very clearly states that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

An army of legal weasels within the government has been furiously working for years to decouple the government from the Constitution and the American bedrock principles espoused within it and have had a stunning degree of success.  The Founding Fathers certainly could never have envisioned the dystopian nightmare of the high-tech surveillance state is it exists today but they understood the nature of kings and despots and based their document on solid defenses of individuals from their abuses of power. Whether it be King George’s redcoats ransacking homes in door to door searches or Eric Holder’s Justice Department flying surveillance planes over their homes in the 21^st century it is one and the same.

The greatest problem that we face today – an existential crisis – is how much is enough power to vest in an increasingly out of control and unaccountable government. While it is the responsibility of that government to keep Americans safe it will matter nothing if the Constitution has been gutted for we will then live in a totalitarian society.

We are well on the way there now unless a very serious intervention is undertaken and done soon.

Eat This Obama: Will Russia Ban McDonalds?

Despite months of  sanctions applied by the Obama regime and it's EU lapdogs against Russia over the alleged arming of rebels fighting the US puppet government in Kiev, the bear is biting back. In a symbolic shot after last week's latest round of idiotic economic warfare waged by Barry and the boys, the Putin regime is retaliating by going after the iconic American 800 pound gorilla of fast food that is McDonalds. In a Bloomberg piece from last week entitled "Russia Eyes Banning U.S. Chicken And Some European Fruit" it was stated that in addition to American poultry imports that the Russians were scrutinizing McDonalds cheese over food safety concerns. If the Russians really wanted to to stick it to Mickey D's and other U.S. chains they should look at the meat, especially given the recent resurgence of the noxious "Pink Slime" additive by many of the nation's beef suppliers. For that matter so should Americans because this garbage is being foisted off on us too in a sleazy way to hide rising food prices.

A Washington Post piece that was published online yesterday "As the West steps up sanctions, Russia starts banning food" states that:

In the past few days, the scope of the limitations has expanded rapidly: As of Friday, Russian officials have banned most grain imports from Ukraine, stopped bringing in produce from Poland and are murmuring about potentially expanding the food blacklist to include European fruits and vegetables, U.S. chickens, and flagship items from U.S. fast-food restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC, according to reports. Separately this week, Wendy’s announced it would be closing its locations in Russia.

The ongoing ridiculousness of the narcissistic Obama's 'my dick is bigger than your dick'  feud with Putin is only going to hurt American businesses and investors in the long run. Why do you think that both the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers so vehemently opposed the escalating tit-for-tat sanctions? Like it or not, we now live in a connected global economy and the snits of thin-skinned political leaders have the capability of inflicting enormous damage on both corporate profits and American jobs.

Not that Mr. Obama gives a rat's ass.  Especially when considering how his NSA Stasi has dealt a long-term blow to U.S. high tech businesses, particularly in cloud computing which has been touted as the future with their ongoing undermining of privacy, tampering with product that is intercepted while en route to the buyer and undermining of encryption. This is a serious personal vendetta against the leader of a nuclear armed power and the interests of everyone but Obama and his gaggle of morons are of little importance.

I don't eat at McDonalds anymore. My personal opinion is that the food is about as healthy as low-grade industrial sewage and puts one at a serious risk of longtime colon problems, diabetes and heart disease. That being said, the corporation is one of the most successful long-term money makers as well as an iconic American brand right up there with Coca Cola. My personal choice not to eat there aside, there are a lot of Americans who are investors in what was up until the time of Obama's latest tantrum a sound long-term proposition .  The Chamber of Commerce and other business interests know fully well the negative effects on long term profits that can be inflicted by an incompetent idiot and this doesn't take into account the potential for World War III which under the three-headed monster of Obama, Kerry and Biden becomes more likely with each passing day.

I have often had difficulty buying into the entire "run government as a business" argument but I must admit that given the recklessness of the Obama regime that I am coming around very quickly.

We Tortured Some Folks: Obama Defends Brennan and Admits War Crimes

Four words uttered during President Barack Obama's Friday White House press conference sum everything up: "we tortured some folks". It was an admission of how far that America has fallen since the dawn of the twenty first century, the phony war on terror, the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the coming ones in Europe and the Middle East. The days of America always being the "good guys"  is over. Gone forever is the tremendous amount of global goodwill that came after our fathers and grandfathers saved the world from totalitarianism and suffering under the yoke of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. This is what it can be distilled down to: "we tortured some folks".  The sitting leader of the 'free world' just admitted that this country committed war crimes of the type that had the leaders of the Axis powers hanged for at the post-war tribunals held at Nuremberg and Tokyo. These are dark and terrible days to be an American as lawless charlatans like Obama drag us into what will be a full-blown fascist state in the coming years if something isn't done now to slow the juggernaut.

Obama's presser was largely used to defend his hand-picked CIA Director John Brennan, a vicious thug who was forced to confess to his lies after an investigation found that the agency was indeed spying on a key Senate committee that was investigating torture. Brennan had flat out fibbed about this when called out by the Senate Intelligence Committee overlord Dianne Feinstein and has now been exposed as a liar. Obama is standing by his man. Brennan is however in good company, Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper perjured himself by lying to Congress over the nature of NSA surveillance programs. Obama stood by him too. Both men are still serving in their posts despite being exposed as liars and having covered up unconstitutional activities in the capacity of their jobs. Both men are also defended by the biggest liar of them all: Barack Obama. How far out of control does this all have to go before Americans finally wake up and demand that the rule of law be restored and the criminals in high places held accountable?

The entire system is breaking down with the protection by the government of those who either have the money to purchase influence or who serve as lackeys for the regime. The haughty Obama and the US elite, particularly those in the political class are drunk on hubris and openly flout both domestic and international law. This is the era of the potent intoxicant of American exceptionalism and those in power who have sipped it believe that they are untouchable and able to act with impunity. The American empire though is built upon a foundation of shifting sand and economic fraud. Thanks to Obama's hand-picked finance industry fixer and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the same Wall Street casinos that crashed the economy in 2008 were allowed to not only avoid accountability but have been given and endless supply of low interest money with which to gamble. The too big to fails are now bigger than ever and the next implosion of this house of cards - which is coming - will take the economy down for good. Even almighty Rome fell, it took time but the fall was abetted by the decadence and impunity of a rotten ruling class. The late writer I.F. Stone put it perfectly: "all governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out". The hookah seems to be getting quite a workout at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.

You know that things are spinning out of control when even the beltway propaganda organ and defender of the entrenched power of the surveillance state Gomorrah is even calling for Obama to fire Brennan for his lies. An editorial in The Washington Post, "Obama Should Fire John Brennan" states the obvious:

An apology and an internal review board might suffice if this were Brennan or intelligence leaders’ first offense, but the track record is far from spotless. In 2011, Brennan claimed that dozens of U.S. drone strikes on overseas targets had not killed a single civilian. This remarkable success rate was not only disputed at the time by news reports — even supporters of the drone program called it “absurd” — but as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New York Times both reported later, President Obama received reports from the very beginning of his presidency about drone strikes killing numerous civilians.

As Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, Brennan would have received these reports as well, so either Brennan knew that his claim was a lie, or he is secretly deaf. Similarly, Brennan denied snooping on Senate computers six weeks after Feinstein first made the accusation to the CIA in private, which means either that he was lying, or he had ignored a serious charge against his agency for six weeks, then spouted off about it without any real knowledge — hardly the behavior expected of an agency director.

And last year, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress when he told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the National Security Agency did not collect any kind of data on millions of Americans, a claim later disproved by documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. Despite Clapper receiving criticism from both sides of the aisle, the damage to Clapper’s and the White House’s credibility on intelligence and civil liberties issues and, well, the fact that lying to Congress is a crime (though one that’s difficult to prosecute), Obama has not disciplined Clapper in any way.

Sadly, it’s unlikely that this latest incident will encourage Obama to finally induce some accountability in the intelligence community: White House press secretary Josh Earnest called the CIA’s illegal activities mere “misunderstandings.” But as Brennan said when he denied the allegations, “if I did something wrong…he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.” It’s time for Obama to take that responsibility head-on and start to restore in U.S. intelligence agencies some semblance of responsibility to the Constitution and the public.

No amount of public outcry or newspaper editorial writing will compel Obama to do the right thing and give Brennan his walking papers. Nor will it be quietly done through Brenner 'voluntarily' submitting his resignation for the sake of preserving the credibility of the US government. There is no credibility left to preserve and with each passing day, outrageous scandal, revelation of unconstitutional conduct and lies to justify more wars the institutionalized cancer of corruption further eats away at what was once a strong and vibrant system of democracy.

The man of hope and change has turned out to be the man of dashed hope and chump change.

State Department Runs Amok as Obama Plays Golf

The presidential reality television show, as the Obama administration was once dubbed by trends forecaster Gerald Celente continues to descend into theater of the absurd territory as American foreign policy - or the lack of one that is sane - sets the world ablaze and the narcissist in chief goes golfing and raises money for the Democrats. Like George W. Bush retreating to Chickenhawk Ranch, that phony cowboy movie set in Crawford, Texas to chop brush and ride his dirt bike and letting Cheney run things, dear leader is content to do likewise with the crazed State Department engages in continuing to provoke Russia into what could be World War III. If this is what now passes for liberalism it is the "improve or we'll kill you" brand.

It is obvious by now that Obama has checked out and now shorn of all international credibility due to the planetary surveillance grid under the purview of the NSA Stasi, the ongoing wars and failure to stop ethnic cleansing (if not tacitly encouraging it) and stretching the global economy to the breaking point with idiotic sanctions and the saving of the Wall Street fraudsters -he is getting a head start on the taxpayer funded life of luxury that he will enjoy for his remaining days. Not only has Obama no credibility internationally - the puppet states only continue their lemming march over the cliff due to US coercion - but outside of the low-information nincompoops and the O-Bots he has little left in Der Homeland either. Republicans have obstructed him from day one and exposed him as an amateur and a chump unprepared for the Washington steel cage death match and his reactions to his enemies and to events in general shows that he was never anything more than an amateur and a shitty politician. Certainly not a leader.

His big domestic signature achievement - Obamacare - as as big a flaming disaster as the Middle East (it was nothing more than one big corporate ripoff from day one), to this day not one big Wall Street banker has been thrown into prison for wrecking the economy and the surveillance and police state have been strengthened for when the real dictator takes power in the USA!, USA!, USA!. The Republicans will regain control of the Senate in November and El Presidente will spend the rest of his term dodging subpoenas on whatever golf course he is slithering around on, his legacy now secure as the man who not only put a star-spangled seal of approval on the war crimes of the Bush - Cheney regime but has run up an impressive number of his own. Those who voted for Obama - although the other options were much worse - were duped by the product as president. Leftist writer Chris Hedges summed it up just about perfectly back in 2009 in his column "Buying Brand Obama":

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

Obama's incompetence and disengagement created a vacuum in the power structure and this was rapidly filled by a neocon infested State Department first led by Obama's chief political rival in 2008 Hillary Clinton (hell hath no fury like this particular woman scorned) and later the globe-trotting buffoon John "Skull and Bones" Kerry. The morons at Foggy Bottom have been instrumental in leading the USA! USA! USA! to the brink of WW III thanks to former Dick Cheney aide Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland who was instrumental in setting into motion the current debacle of historic proportions in Ukraine. Nuland, the spouse of PNAC honcho Robert Kagan fed the fire that led to the fascist and neo-Nazi assisted coup d'etat against the democratically elected leader in Kiev - whether it was in passing out cookies to the useful idiots whose Euromaiden protests were hijacked by the hard-core US backed thugs or boasting of the billions of us tax dollars spent on destabilizing the country for corporate invasion Nuland bears a full share of the responsibility for the deaths of all of those hapless victims who died on Malaysian Airlines MH17 last week. Without hers and the State Department's meddling there would have been no war zone in the east.

I have yet to see any comments from the puffy Nuland now that her chosen man to run the feeding of Ukraine into the jaws of brutal austerity, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk or “Yats” as she affectionately referred to him has abruptly resigned. The former central banker is the first rat running for the lifeboat from Nuland’s rapidly sinking ship of fools or perhaps he knows something about who really downed flight MH17 and plans to be safely out of the country and living in luxury when the shit hits the fan for good. He was smart enough to be chosen by the western gangsters to manage their looting spree and he sure as hell is too smart to end up swinging from the end of a rope for crimes against humanity when the Kiev junta is inevitably toppled by the people of Ukraine get the picture that they were played for chumps just like Americans were by Obama.

The State Department continues to agitate and put out waves of anti-Putin propaganda despite official intelligence reports that Russia had zilch to do with the downing of the doomed jetliner. State representatives just keep pushing the lies, recycling the propaganda and throwing as much shit against the wall as possible in the hope that some of it sticks in their trumped up case against Putin. The latest abomination being some dimwitted bitch named Marie Harf who is trotted out to make the case for the "secret information" that the US will not divulge about the missile attack. Harf is  a real piece of work who obviously spends a lot of time trying to be Hillary Clinton in an eerie sort of way that reminds one of the movie about the obsessive psychopath in the movie Single White Female. Harf and Foggy Bottom is now pushing the horseshit about satellite photographs of a Russian training base on Ukraine's border (remember the satellite imagery of Saddam's mobile chemical weapons labs?) and artillery fire from Russia. With people like Nuland and Harf and their boss, the Sunday morning whirling dervish of bullshit Kerry running the show while Barry hits the putting green it is getting pretty obvious that this is not destined for a happy ending.

Obama Like a Sphinx as Egypt Burns

The hue and cry from the professional hand wringers over Barry’s inaction in Egypt after the ouster of Mohamad Morsi is now becoming as constant as it is laughable. The U.S. is losingprestige over Obama’s lame response to the growing wave of violence and the bloodbath in Egypt ridiculous even at face value. Prestige? Hell, to anyone who has been paying attention prestigeleft the building a long time ago when we began meddling in the region to begin with. It has been a cavalcade of ongoing disasters ever since and is only going to worsen as the current situation deteriorates. All hell has broken loose since Morsi was kicked out of power by the Egyptian military last month and every day beings fresh reports of escalating violence as pro-Morsi supporters and that devilish bogeyman the Muslim Brotherhood are targeted with extreme prejudice by the junta.  That the violence is being perpetrated largely through the use of American provided munitions and military financial aid packages is no small matter.  Unlike the majority of the inhabitants of this massive star-spangled lemming farm the rest of the world sees this and understands it perfectly as what it is.  For decades our foreign policy has been in the business of creating conflicts from which the defense industry and investors reap huge profits off of the misery of others, that is the way that it always is with Empire. The slaughter continues, the bodies pile up, rotting in makeshift morgues and the cash register bells are jingling as the blood barters of the military industrial complex reap their obscene profits.

It was the highly decorated former U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler who summed it up most appropriately when he famously stated that “war is a racket” and that:

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.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

That is absolutely correct and never more so than in 2013, the brutal second decade of the New American Century. The idea of the United States as it currently exists being any sort of an avatar of human dignity and defender of human rights is a sick joke, a mockery and another of the great lies that is constantly sold to the sheeple. They are indoctrinated in the religion of American exceptionalism from their youngest cognitive days and then the state, it’s schools and it’s media drum home the idea for the duration of their lives. Few manage to escape from the flag-draped bubble of honor and glory, the simplistic we are the good guys myth but once you understand that it is a lie, always has been a lie then there is really no way to ever go back again. It is as Plato’s famous allegory of the cave for those mesmerized by the false shadows on the walls (or in the modern era, their televisions) will always prefer the comforts of their illusions and those who have seen reality will forever be cast out and shunned. Egypt is only the butchery du jour, it wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about Syria and that our sitting government was considering arming and supporting fanatics including flesh-eating cannibals against the Assad government. El Presidente himself was twisting arms to find the backing to send weaponry to these militants, including some groups possibly linked to Al Qaeda. The proud winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has zero credibility, neither abroad nor here in Der Homeland thanks to his NSA Stasi and the lies that he has used to protect it.

Now Barry finds himself in a bit of a political pickle. When he finally gets back to work after his schmooze-a- palooza with the elites at the playground of the idle rich that is Martha’s Vineyard he will find himself under attack by opportunistic political jackals seeking to have it both ways. Since it is after all Sunday, the king and queen of the Pentagon pimps, John McCain and Lindsay Graham were making their normal glad-handing, gut-wrenching appearances on the gauche masturbatory fests that are the weekly gabfests. Hey, they are authorities, the state media absolutely loves them and besides, Obama himself sent the two snakes on a special mission to Egypt just weeks ago. Sunday morning, they were plunging in the daggers between his shoulder blades as was wrapping up his taxpayer funded soiree after playing golf with comedian Larry David on Saturday and with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts earlier in the week. It should be of note that this is no small coincidence considering that Comcast owns MSNBC which is  the propaganda arm of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.  McCain wailed about Obama causing the U.S. to have“lost all credibility in the Middle East” by not cutting off aid to Egypt. What the ever crankier and unstable old bastard never mentions is that his own support for Bush’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on a lie that he not only shilled for but enabled didn’t exactly add to our ‘prestigious’ image. The invasion of Iraq, while admittedly displacing a vicious thug in Saddam Hussein (who we once backed) and the subsequent slaughter of civilians, the unleashing of sectarian violence and the exposure of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison will forever be a pox upon us. The Iraq debacle was unnecessary and has created more ‘terrorists’ and enemies than ever could have been imagined. Guys like McCain are the best recruiters for bin Laden types, so good that they could actually be on the official payroll of Al Qaeda. Charlatans like McCain, Graham, Peter King and their ilk are always first and foremost about themselves over what benefits their country.

Obama’s failure to stop arming the murderers in Egypt will likely do wonders for our existing dismal image in the region, already a sucking, stinking black hole of death, misery and primitive religious fanaticism. McCain and his little buddy will be up and down, for and against Barry depending on what day it happens to be but neither of those blood-drinking politically influential carrion birds have ever met a war that they could not support nor their munitions industry cronies couldn’t profit off of. The administration’s hands are however tied by the need to support big business interests in the region therefore other than some gesture of no substance, for example small cuts in the approximately 1.5 billion dollars extorted out of the American tax payers nothing will be done to stop the violence. There is too much money to be made and his hands are tied, don’t forget that when the uprising of 2011 forced U.S. backed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak from power that Obama’s emissary wasn’t a former political or State Department dignitary but one Frank Wisner Jr., who is virtually the bagman of empire. Wisner’s father, Frank Wisner Sr. was one of the Wall Street eastern elite who was instrumental in the establishment of the CIA, the enforcement arm of the empire. When it all comes down to it, it is really all about money, it is all just one big racket exactly as General Butler said it was. When munitions manufacturers and mammoth global corporations such as Exxon Mobil are able to effectively set their own business friendly foreign policy (see Steve Coll’s Private Empire) using the CIA, the U.S. military and the NSA as tools for their profiteering it is easy to see that our political actors are just that, tools of the real power elite.

Obama is just the bloodsucker of the moment, since the end of World War II and the advent of the National Security State this country has required it’s presidents to be bathed in blood. Bush may have ignited the funeral pyre of the Middle East but never forget that WW II, Korea and Vietnam were all presided over by Democrats. With Obama now having a bit less than three and a half years to go he will want to have pissed his own name into the snow as a ‘war president’, our currently configured society of permanent warfare demands it. Nothing after all creates an eternal foreign enemy which is used by the rogue state to justify it’s increasingly virulent domestically oppressive policies than our ongoing wars and interventions. You have to understand this to know why someone like Senator Rand Paul has become such a hated figure, and his own Sunday morning appearance today will only put a bigger target on his back. On Fox News Sunday Paul dared to utter the heresy that foreign aid “essentially goes to dictators and despots” which “doesn’t win the hearts and minds of people”. But when that is the unstated intent, to keep the war machine running and generating profits while wrapping the entire immoral package up in a shiny package with a red, white and blue bow to be delivered to Boobus Americanus as patriotism a man like Rand Paul is dangerous. If I were him I would keep in mind what happened to Michael Hastings and what is going to happen to Ed Snowden very soon. Whatever Senator Paul does, in light of history it would be advised to stay away from flying on small planes.

It is no coincidence that the good amount of the problems that the U.S. faces with the world in general and the Middle East in specific are self-created. There are currently the abattoirs of Egypt and Syria and of course the aforementioned Iraq but this has always been the case. The 1953 CIA backed overthrow of Iran’s then democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossaddegh after a nationalizing of oil companies.  Operation Ajax ensured that Mossaddegh was replaced by the western backed puppet despot the Shah of Iran who ruled with an iron fist. His ruthless secret police, the SAVAK kept order through the use of torture and repression. It was in 1979 that the Iranian Revolution brought the Mullahs into power along with the Ayatollah Khomeini. The U.S. embassy was stormed and hostages were taken, this led to the subsequent ouster of U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The revolution was a backlash against the Shah and his foreign backers and to this day Iran continues to be a problem although much of the nuclear threats are hype and propaganda to wrest power from the theocrats and get another U.S. friendly strongman into power.

Then there was the 1965 CIA backed coup in Indonesia that resulted in the rule of U.S. friendly dictator Suharto and which had the critical assistance of the country’s Muslims who were whipped up by propaganda against the godless commies. Muslims assisted the military junta, militias, criminal gangs and other opposition backed groups in committing one of the greatest slaughters of the 20th century. Today Indonesia is demographically the largest Muslim country on the planet, is the home to an estimated 12.7 percent of the world’s Islamic adherents. I use these examples (there are dozens more) primarily because that ever since communism collapsed the need for the Manichean Devil, the always hateful enemy is being filled by Muslims. They occupy resource rich territories, Islam is their coherent religious dogma which stands in the way of western imperialist exploitation and their lives of misery, abetted by U.S. friendly tyrants ensures that they will always be filled with resentment, bitterness and even righteous fury at the west. There is nothing that quite radicalizes like having your loved ones killed by wayward bombs, errant drone strikes or tortured to death in the dungeons of their despotic rulers. Forget that Islamic caliphate crap, that’s for the rubes, the rabble and those who can be easily manipulated and mustered as political shock troops by corrupt and cynical party bosses. The real power in this country is cold, calculating and pragmatic, it’s representatives are guys like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brezinski and it’s bagmen are guys like Frank Wisner. All the rest is political theater and those who are demanding that Obama cut off military aid to Egypt now are just trying to avoid responsibility for the coming slaughter, hypocrites all. In a footnote to the Indonesian atrocities where the enemies of the regime were labeled “Gestapu” (after Gestapo) the Egyptian junta is in the process of banning the Muslim Brotherhood, an official sanctioning of the coming wave of murders, torture and assassinations that will seek to eradicate the group.  A statement is being made here , as this seems to somewhat mimic the blueprint for a past coup look for rivers of blood to flow through the streets of Cairo.

Where he able to, Obama should get the United States the hell out of the Middle East entirely and the sooner the better. But he won’t, and neither will his successors because there is far too much blood money to be made yet and anyone who believes otherwise is both foolish and naive and only serve as enablers of the downtrend.