Banana Republic USA: More Reporters Arrested in Ferguson

Granted it is not like getting your head chopped off in a promotional video for the extremist Islamist group ISIS as journalist James Foley has suffered, but the press is under attack in America as well. In the continuation of Obama's war on journalism,  more reporters were arrested or otherwise detained in Ferguson, Missouri during coverage of the civil unrest. Not that Obama, his vicious hatchet man Eric Holder or any of the heavily armed thugs that are imposing borderline martial law in Ferguson give a rat's ass but we do have this thing called the First Amendment. That one most precious of gift from the founding fathers provides a guarantee of a free press in America and therefore has been targeted for elimination.

According to an article published by CNN entitled "6 more journalists arrested in Ferguson protests":

Six journalists were taken into custody while covering the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday and early Tuesday, aggravating what one press freedom group has called a "concerted, top-down effort to restrict the fundamental First Amendment rights of the public and the press."

The incidents bring the total number of journalists arrested during the mid-August protests to 11.

Other journalists reported being threatened with arrest and affected by tear-gas on Monday night. Authorities tried to restrict members of the news media to a designated area away from the protests, sometimes nicknamed a "press pen."

The latest arrests came on the same day that President Barack Obama reaffirmed his support for journalists on the ground in Ferguson. "Let me also be clear that our constitutional rights to speak freely, to assemble, and to report in the press must be vigilantly safeguarded, especially in moments like these," the President said at a Monday afternoon news conference.

The journalists arrested ranged from photographer Scott Olson of Getty Images, Breitbart.com reporter Kerry Picket, Ryan Devereaux from The Intercept and three Germans reporting on our sham democracy in The Homeland. These arrests followed last week’s display of militarized police assaulting and arresting two reporters. The public relations debacle included Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery whose account was published the next day.  The thug police temporarily stood down and now are trolling for any who might catch their bullying on camera. It is like we live in some sort of third world dictatorship run by a petty and petulant tin-pot despot. Whoops, we do - it is just another day in Obamastan.

Obama is a colossal hypocrite. While he recites the drivel spoon-fed to him off his handy teleprompter about letting reporters do their jobs, he continues to be the greatest enemy to press freedom  in recent history. His rotten to the core administration has been the most hostile to the press since Richard M. Nixon stalked the halls of the White House braying at demons and compiling an enemies list.  I have no doubt that Obama does these things as well. The man is a complete fascist and yet there are moronic liberals and Democrats (but I repeat myself) who still defend the slimy bastard for the same things that they wanted to see Bush swinging from the end of a rope for. Hell, Bush was like Thomas Jefferson when compared to Obama who is a one-man Constitutional wrecking crew.

And Obama can go on television, throw out his chest and vow revenge against ISIS for the beheading of Foley all the he wants. However,  when his administration is hellbent at throwing Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist James Risen into prison for doing his job it is just more of Barry’s bullshit. The next time that Obama wants to squeal for “justice” against Islamist fanatics in ISIS he should at least own up to some accountability in acknowledging that his regime is complicit in it’s creation. Obama’s failed foreign policy is what facilitated the endless flow of American funded weapons into Syria. He signed off on arming some of the most violent elements of global jihad to use as a proxy army against Bashar al Assad including al Qaeda affiliates and even admitted fucking cannibals.

In Obamastan the only time that the rights of a journalist matter is whenever dear leader can use an act of barbarism to score cheap political points in an election year. Were this still a decent country where the rule of law were honored, Mr. Obama would have been frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs by now.

I mean just how fucked up does this shit have to get before Americans EVERYWHERE rise up against it?

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

Obama Doubles Down on Iraq War Catastrophe

When you find yourself in a hole the smart idea is to stop digging, that is unless it is a grave. With the situation in Iraq deteriorating by the minute, thanks to the neocon ideologues who goaded George W. Bush into attacking and invading the country in 2003 the now fully blossomed leader of the imperial war machine is prepared to once again sink more American blood and treasure into the Mesopotamian meat-grinder rather than stand up on his hind legs to the keening squealing of the war pigs. The grand "Shock and Awe" adventure of using the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as an excuse to settle a family score with Saddam Hussein is now as critics once warned becoming the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history and Obama is ready to begin the air strikes against the militant Islamic uprising that is raging through the war-ravaged country and heading directly towards the Green Zone.  I hope that the profiteers who fleeced the American taxpayer to construct that grand palace of a US embassy included helicopter decks because the way that this is going conjures up images of the fall of Saigon.

The American elite are so drunk on their own propaganda, their crusading arrogance and a pathological hubris driven by the obscene concept of American exceptionalism that has within it sown the seeds or our own destruction that any acknowledgement to the lessons of history are not only ignored but spat upon by the best and the brightest whose only real talent is the spectacular fuck-up.  The worst thing that has ever happened to the American people and this country's image as well as whatever moral high ground was once occupied was the fall of the Soviet Union - a triumphal moment that was proclaimed to be "the end of history" by the think tank dwelling masters of the universe who were the brat pack of the post World War II era. But Barack Obama firmly within that camp for the huge self-inflicted wound that he is about to deliver to America in committing the beleaguered  US military to more violence in Iraq - in addition to his NATO gamesmanship that is getting ever closer to igniting a war with Russia that cold being an end to the empire if not the planet itself.

This is a man who is a fool and one who has shanked the country in the back in paying far too much attention to his legacy, the grand taxpayer funded presidential library that will be erected in his honor one day in the Windy City like the idols and Sphinxes of the Egyptian Pharoahs to consider the ramifications of the renewed involvement in Iraq. The decision has already been made according to some ominous accounts, I excerpt the following from The Guardian "Obama pledges US support to Iraq as Isis militants approach Baghdad":

President Barack Obama pledged the US would help the Iraqi government push back an Islamic insurgency threatening to overwhelm Baghdad on Thursday, saying he had “not ruled anything out”.

Amid mounting pressure in Washington for a robust response to the rapid advances made by forces of the Islamic State and the Levant (Isis), the White House is understood to be examining a number of options including air support for Baghdad.

But he also said the advance of the Islamists should act as a "wake-up call" to the Shia-dominated government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been accused of running a partisan government that has alienated the Sunni minority.

In brief comments to reporters after a meeting with Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, Obama said he was watching the situation in Iraq with concern and wants to ensure that jihadists do not get a foothold.The crisis escalated rapidly on Thursday as Iraqi Kurdish forces took control of key military installations in the major oil city of Kirkuk and the Sunni jihadi group Isis revealed its intention to move on Baghdad and cities in the southern Shia heartland.

Obama admitted that the scale of the insurgency in recent days demonstrated the need for more help. “I don’t rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foot hold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter.” The president said his national security advisers were “looking at all the options”.

Obama is too self-absorbed, too much of a power crazed, insulated narcissist to bother to consider that actions have consequences - bombing the shit out of the ISIS militants - who Obama himself bears a good deal of the blame for in arming vicious jihadists to topple the Assad regime in Syria - just may be the triggering event of the collapse of the entire rotten fucking house of cards. Particularly the economy because the oil speculators are already masturbating themselves raw over the payoff that will allow them to stick it to Americans at the pump with impunity. A gas price spike that drives pump costs to around 6 bucks a gallon would be catastrophic and could finally be the spark that ignites the smoldering but yet to ignite protests against the Empire at home. The defeat of the corrupt Republican House Majority leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday by an unknown who railed against Wall Street should be taken as what it is - a sign that judgement day is coming for the corrupt oligarchy that has subverted American democracy to lavish riches upon politically connected crooks, big banking houses and military arms hucksters.

The anger is building in what remains of this once great country and the pitchforks and torches outnumber the militarized police forces of the state - and many of them may join the party instead of defend the indefensible on the day when the shit finally hits the fan.

Obama is sitting on a powder keg and playing with matches and is flying so high off of his own perceived historical greatness that the he will be the one who is most surprised when it detonates.

American Gangster

He got a sweet gift of gab, he got a harmonious tongue...He knows every song of love that ever has been sung..Good intentions can be evil..Both hands can be full of grease...You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace

Bob Dylan -- Man of Peace

Barack Obama was sworn as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America on a bite ass cold day in Washington on January 20, 2009 and was riding high upon a cresting wave of hope and change. The nation was humiliated and weary of war after the eight year gauntlet of greed, brutality, torture and flouting of the law that it was dragged through under the Bush-Cheney regime and their neocon ideology. Obama's election was many things to many people but it was foremost the desire to wash away the sins of the Bushreich. He was to provide a restoration of economic fairness, a return to the humble America of days of yore, the end of the wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and most importantly the restoration of the rule of law and these all drove voters to deliver to him a huge victory over the John McCain-Sarah Palin Republican ticket. He was the guy, I mean he won the Nobel Peace Prize for no other reason besides that he wasn't George W. Bush and the future was his for the making and his mandate was to rescue America from those who had hijacked and subverted that once noble and heroic destiny.

Now nearly five and a half years later it is evident that many (and perhaps most) of those who cast their hope with the former community organizer and Harvard law professor were sold out for pennies on the dollar by the smiling wolf in sheep's clothing that is Barack Obama. Despite his ability to deliver soaring, inspirational speeches that in retrospect were about as sincere and honest as a traveling tent preacher or flim-flam man he was able dupe the rubes, many of whom learned to stop worrying and love the bomb as long as it was their man in the White House dialing up the strikes but the truth was seen rather quickly by those who paid attention. Barack Obama is a ruthless, corrupt, ice-cold killer of a son of a b*tch and history will damn him for his complicity in the carnage that has been unleashed in Ukraine by fascist and neo-Nazi death squads that he is personally responsible for. That often invoked quote of President Harry Truman "the buck stops here" fully applies to Mr. Obama and he belongs standing in the dock at The Hague along with dozens of other members of his administration.

But I am getting ahead of myself here so allow me to digress...

While sweeping into office as a sort of messianic figure, Obama was always a fraud of the most cynical in nature. His rhetoric of economic fairness never passed the smell test when his chosen Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner who was Wall Street's inside man to ensure that the big casinos with their economically ruinous losses from bad bets would be free to continue to loot with impunity while the average American schmuck got crushed. Obama also failed to demand accountability under the law for the criminal acts of his predecessor and his administration -many who are now raking in money on book tours and are treated with few exceptions like honored elder statesmen and stateswomen despite their complicity in actions that had men hanged at Nuremberg in another period in history. It was the all too familiar"looking forward" excuse that has been sold to Americans by a corrupt political system and an even more crooked establishment media that provides cover for criminals in high places - just move along, there is nothing to see here is the "new normal" in America today.

Not only did Mr. Obama not hold his criminal predecessor and his minions accountable but he actually refined their programs, including the launching of a robotic fleet of airborne murder machines that are the squadrons of civilian killing drones. Were the unleashing of the drone fleet not enough Obama also became the first US President to sign off on the extrajudicial murder of American citizens. He did draw down the US occupation in Iraq although that sorrowful land has again become a roiling cauldron of violence as a result of the initial destabilization. Obama is also now engaged in the smoke and mirrors theatrics that will soon end the US military presence in Afghanistan which is hogwash. Whether or not Obama ever actually ever had any seriously held belief in being able to work with the criminal syndicate Republicans, a gang who were determined to use every dirty trick in the bag to wrest control over the spoils system from his own criminal party is debatable. Obama was beaten to a pulp by a ruthless opposition that played the race card early and often to de-legitimize him, primarily using the corporate scam that is Obamacare to fire up the rabble.

Once that famous 2010 mid-term "shellacking" was administered by a neo-Confederate gaggle of freaks flying the piss yellow Gadsden flag of the so-called tea party, Obama like a chronic loser who is beaten down at work and goes home looking to take it out on the family dog. The dog in this case was Libya when he picked up the baton of his pathologically prone to violence predecessors and initiated an attack on the regime of Muammar Qaddafi - the "New Hitler" of the moment. He may have had the hell kicked out of him on the domestic political front but nothing gets Americans riled up and ready to salute Old Glory than a military ass-whupping administered on a foreign country. Obama had embraced the doctrine of arch neocon Michael Ledeen:

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business"

From the moment the first explosions rocked Libya in 2011 I knew that Barack Obama had just locked down another four years in the White House no matter what his political foes would hit him with. It was his sacred initiation, his right of passage into the big boys club. In a way it was like laying in a mock coffin and sucking off upperclassmen in the Skull and Bones tomb - a secret society of rich pricks dedicating their lives to helping each other get over on everybody else. Obama was a made man and a proud member of the war criminals club of which all US presidents (with the obvious exception of poor old Jimmy Carter) belong to.

Obama then authorized that celebrated revenge killing of Osama bin Laden, the accused mastermind behind those September 11, 2001 attacks that forever transformed America into The Homeland. The alleged assassination of the baddest ass bogeyman of all was celebrated nationwide in a tasteless and shameful display of flag waving and cheering like it was a sporting event. There were hit movies made about the special ops murder of an old man in hiding including the acclaimed "Zero Dark Thirty" that glorified the practice of torture as surely as the Fox television series "24" and the deranged American cartoon hero Jack Bauer did. At that time Obama was the f*cking man and therefore untouchable politically, a true American hero for the modern era. It was actually really very funny to see the Republicans have to eat their own sh*t for a period of time over the bin Laden killing and Obama's role in the taking out of the Emanuel Goldstein figure that drove the phony war on terror. This was a man who had managed to survive for over ten years after the most devastating terrorist strike in US history, cave-hopping and dragging along a dialysis machine despite being hunted by the most powerful military and surveillance machine in the history of the galaxy but Obama pulled it off. Forget that were never any actual pictures of the dead man's body - which was conveniently disposed of at sea - released to the public for reasons of national security. The main benefit of the official story of the calling in of the chit on a former CIA asset who was used in the proxy war against the hated Russians in the 1980's but then turned on America the beautiful is that it burnished Obama's image - and the Democrats - as tough on terror, stealing away the magical talisman from the Republicans.

But I digress...

Obama having been easily reelected in 2012 despite his myriad of betrayals and failures has now in his second term become hellbent at proving that he is the baddest f*cking gangster on Earth and this is apparent in the shameful, US sponsored bloodletting in Ukraine. The events leading up to the coup d'et in Kiev that toppled the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych (who may have been a corrupt bastard although probably not even in the league of western backed leaders) and installed the turnkey puppet Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk are Obama's responsibility. The muscle that backed the overthrow, a scurvy pack of seig-heiling goons who infiltrated and hijacked what was an at one time somewhat legitimate mass protest against Yanukovych (although likely orchestrated by US NGOs) and who have now been unleashed on a rampage has Obama's full support. It is a disgrace to me as an American to see the horrendous violence and state sanctioned pogroms like what occurred in Odessa knowing full well that the elected leader of my country can so callously hover above such savagery. This is all very obviously a petty vendetta and personal grudge against Vladimir Putin over being slighted on the world stage through the latter's rescue of Edward Snowden and the preemption of a war on Syria in which Obama lost face.

Obama's conduct towards Ukraine and support of the illegal occupying government along with ignoring the very real potential of this all to spin out of control as Russia is a nuclear power was bad enough but on May 2nd 2014 Obama crossed the line. It is one thing to engage in a sick exercise of saber rattling and dick measuring with the leader of a world power like Russia but quite another when the forces that one is backing engage in atrocities right out of Nazi Germany. Despite the impenetrable wall of bullshit in the American state-corporate media the truth is leaking out and that truth is a damnation of President Barack Obama. It is the height of arrogance and hubris to believe that a bought and sold pack of clowns who pass for the "media" in The Homeland and whose excessive worship of power and themselves is on full display at the White House Correspondent's Association dinner where the presstitutes jack each other off and suckle the criminal elite will be able to hold back the real truth forever.

Despite the US media coverup of the vicious retaliation by neo-Nazi militias now patrolling eastern Ukraine on their terminate with extreme prejudice killing sprees there are more reports, videos and pictures are slipping out and being exposed by the alternative media and bloggers. The pictures are not pretty either in that they show American complicity in a coordinated campaign of butchery that is escalating into ethnic cleansing. With the failure to bother to condemn or to otherwise pick up the phone and call for an end to the violence Mr. Obama has proved once and for all that he is one stone cold motherf*cker. His ignoring of the horror that occurred at that trade union building in Odessa that was burned down he now has made the leap from a thin-skinned and prissy narcissist displaying flagrant indifference into outright psychopathy. Obama is now a balls out gangster who operates on a global scale and has enough time left on the clock before January 2017 to take a run at a top ten position in the murderers hall of fame.

One of the more gruesome chronicles of what occurred in Odessa is an article at progressive website OpEd News by George Eliason entitled "Odessa-- the First Pogrom-- The Obama Genocide" and I very strongly recommend it although be forewarned that the imagery presented is not for those with a weak stomach for it contains pictures of atrocities within the building that one should never have to be exposed to in a moral world. While any accounts of the abominable conduct of the coup government thugs and their rampage has to this point not been substantiated by 'official' media sources the very fact that they have done nothing but lie about damned near everything in Ukraine (with the exception that it is next to Russia) does not discount Mr. Eliason's work from which I excerpt:

Before people were herded into the Trade Union House, Pravy Sektor was already setting up in the building for what can only be described as a crime against humanity.

People were tortured. Women were raped. People were hacked with axes all the while Pravy Sektor under the group Stop Horowitz blocked the exits. At least one small child perished. Some of the survivors were people on their way home from work that were just passing by.

In the aftermath the Kiev government immediately blamed Russia, claiming agents from Russia and Transnisstria were there. They also claimed in the media that their was fighting going on between pro and ant maidan groups. The survivors of the attack are being charged with separatism, which can carry a life sentence.

AND

In the aftermath so far 126 bodies were found in the basement of the Customs House that did not suffer from the fire. Outside the building another 200 Odessa residents remain missing.

Last night the Police Chief of Odessa deputized over 1800 Pravy Sektor members to find and root out "Separatists." Pravy Sektor is rampaging through Odessa and it is mass slaughter ahead for the large Jewish population here because they speak Russian.

Maxim Sokalov summed it up well in his article today "When the Ghetto Burned"- Odessa pogrom of May 2, 2014 will be one of the blackest pages in Europe (so far rushes new Ukraine) because when supporters set fire to the building of national unity with the people within it and finish off trying to escape from the fire - 1945 Europe did not know this.

As I write this Ukrainian National Guard forces are massacring the population of the village of Semenvika which is on the outskirts of Slovyansk. The junta forces set up concentric rings leading out from the village and at the same time went through the village with heavy machine guns, tanks, and grenade launchers indiscriminately killing residents that are unarmed. Slovyansk forces are taking heavy losses trying to get to the village and protect it.

AND

In Mauriopal Pravy Sektor retook City Hall temporarily by using gas. Fortunately it had an odor. People are in the hospital but all escaped. Residents of Mauriopal retook the building.

I went into town today. I had to go through a few citizens road blocks manned by people that could be from your own neighborhood.

People were on edge but it was quiet. Ten minutes after we left someone on the bus got a call, Pravy Sektor arrived by carloads. Fifteen minutes later in a bus filled mainly with retirees, an attack helicopter ran parallel to us low to the ground until we turned off the road. As the bus entered our town a call came from the mayor, Pravy Sektor was in town demanding peoples passports and tearing them up. Its an easy way to make a Moskal; no identification, no problem.

As I finish this we are waiting for them to show up.

I am mindful of the fact that there is now bounties on the heads of journalists that write about the junta. Phone data is being mined and people are complaining conversations are cut off as soon as politics are mentioned. Two days ago I was scheduled to do an interview by Skype. Five minutes beforehand the internet connection was lost. We hobbled through over the phone. The subject was kept to the days events. After the interview was complete the internet connection returned. It does make you wonder.

There is still time to stop this. Petitions like this one to the European Court on Human Rights is a way people across the world are trying to accomplish this.

The pictures and videos are gut-wrenching and one would imagine that they are easily available to those who make the decisions -- that Obama has not denounced the killing spree in East Ukraine is a condemnation of not only him but of the American people who allow such atrocities to be carried out in their names. Being wilfully ignorant is not an excuse because the information is out there if one bothers to look for it.

The only official media outlet that accounts for any of this is in The Independent from the UK which states:

The dead are still being counted from Odessa's terrible fire: it was 31 at first, then went up to 48, while the number of injured has risen to 200. Some were burnt alive, some were asphyxiated, some jumped to their deaths.

The inability of the authorities to say just how many perished, four days on, has prompted dark tales of bodies in the basement spirited away and buried by the authorities. They show, it is claimed, signs of torture; women victims have been raped. There is no evidence to support these claims, but they fester in this atmosphere of malignant hatred and suspicion which is so bitterly dividing Ukraine.

The lack of evidence to support the "claims" are on display in those heinous pictures and videos that are in Eliason's essay.

Obama is committed to this bloodletting and having made no secret of his admiration of Ronald Reagan now seems to have adopted one of Reagan's practices in using death squads to carry out search and destroy missions against political dissidents. Mr. Reagan once lovingly compared the right-wing death squads that were sponsored by his administration as "freedom fighters"who were "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers" despite their proclivity for torture, rape and murder to make the world safe for 'democracy'. Post World War II history is also replete with other US backed slaughters such as the infamous Phoenix Program during the Vietnam and the ongoing midnight raids in Afghanistan. That shining city on the hill loses much of its luster when one realizes that the real business of those who run this country is murder in the name of land grabs, resource control and suppression of real democracy.

The history is long and sordid and the events in Odessa on May 2, 2014 will forever live in infamy when it comes to the criminality of those in high places. US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression as well because the illegitimate government in Kiev with US backing and CIA and FBI advisory assistance is continuing their murderous activities and there will only be escalations now that Obama has washed his hands to seal their fates. The man's character or more accurately lack of one was apparent when he threw Reverend Wright under the bus for political gain and the poisoned tree that sprouted forth on that day continues to bear the bitter fruit that the US President is force feeding to the world as a whole.

Obama’s Contra Death Squads Coming to Ukraine

Barack Obama has made no secret of his admiration of Ronald Reagan and now he can have his very own death squads. The day after Vice President Joe Biden, he of the shining white donkey teeth that conceal a forked tongue flew to Kiev to meet with the coup government. This coming on the heels of CIA Director John Brennan’s trip after which strange things began to bubble up like that debunked forced Jew registration leaflet and the promulgation of the anti-austerity rebels in East Ukraine were the most virulent form of anti-Semites, this despite the inclusion of actual neo-Nazis within the US backed regime of Prime Minister Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk.  On Tuesday it was announced with much outrage that the body of a pro-junta politician, Vladimir Rybak (no word as of yet whether he was affiliated with either Svoboda or Right-Sector) was discovered having been tortured.  The ground has been prepped for the coming slaughter and Americans, the vast majority having no other source of information outside of the thoroughly controlled state-corporate media can park themselves upon their couches and fire up the electronic crackpipe by tuning in to CNN, MNSBC or FOX and grab some popcorn for it is time for some good ole fashion Rooskie bashing.

The US political class, poisoned by years of exposure to a toxic neocon ideology and presided over by easily offended nincompoops like Obama, Biden and their man over at Foggy Bottom, Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry is lusting for a new Cold War. Kerry, being the prone to chronic bouts of diarrhea of the mouth said as much when he waxed nostalgic about the good old days in a moment when the veil slipped during a speech at the State Department (from RT because something this idiotic will likely be scrubbed from US accounts):

“during the Cold War, it actually – it may not have seemed so at the time, obviously, to great leaders, but it was easier than it is today – simpler is maybe a way to put it.”

“We could make really bad decisions and still win because we were pretty much the sole dominant economic and military power around,” Kerry said. “That’s not true anymore.”

Kerry said that during the era of mutually assured destruction “choices were less varied, less complicated, more stark, more clear.” He said everything was clear cut and split into camps “communism, democracy; West, East; the Iron Curtain, the great line of divide. And many things were subsumed and quashed by that force of that bipolar world.”

In today's world, US foreign policy is more complicated as “the vast array of challenges that we face today as the world is witnessing this explosion of sectarianism, religious extremism, radical ideologies, and frankly too many failed states and failing states – a vast challenge to governance, sometimes even witnessed here in our nation’s capital”

Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo is as usual on the attack and he skewers the Massachusetts moron in his Wednesday column entitled “John Kerry: Clueless Buffoon” from which I excerpt:

Yes, those were the Good Old Days – when children in the schoolroom cowered beneath their desks – and we almost went to war with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba which posed no more threat than missiles outside Moscow. Does "quaint" even begin to describe that vintage scene? It’s all so Currier & Ives.

We were the Good Guys and the Russkies were the Bad Guys – and never the morally equivalent twain shall meet! If only we could get back to those halcyon days, everything would be "simpler," says Kerry.

Having an implacable enemy of unrivaled evil supposedly bent on our destruction has its advantages – yes, a US Secretary of State actually does seem to believe this. Having nuclear-armed enemies is a Good Thing – because it makes the job of US officials so much easier. Should we support a South American dictator who murders his own people for looking at him cross-eyed – but of course we should, because he hates the Russkies! Do we really need to build more nuclear weapons than it would take to incinerate the world one-hundred times over? The answer – back then – was an obvious yes, at least to our wise rulers (who never considered how dangerous our arsenal would become once it started to age….). And how about getting involved in a war in Southeast Asia that would take tens of thousands of American lives – and easily a million non-Americans – a war this same John Kerry would refer to with unmitigated contempt as he threw his war medals right back at the Pentagon?

To think that this fool nearly became President of the United States until he was derailed in Ohio back in 2004 – Kerry is another wonderful example of the rottenness of the American political elite that rewards dishonor and incompetence and where the scum always rises to the top.

In Ukraine, acting coup regime President Oleksandr Turchynov is using the discovery of Ryback's corpse as the Gleiwitz incident that will now allow for the paramilitary forces to be unleashed - among them neo-Nazis and likely mercenaries and the slaughter is going to begin. Biden's guarantee to commit the US taxpayers as accomplices to the coming wave of murder, rape and torture has further emboldened the illegally installed puppet government. There is lots and lots of bloodshed coming soon. According to a Reuters story entitled "Ukraine's leaders say have U.S. backing to take on 'aggressors'" from which I excerpt:

Ukraine's government said on Wednesday the United States had promised to stand by it in the face of aggression, and announced that it would press ahead with a security operation to crack down on pro-Russian armed groups.

After a lull for the Easter religious holiday, officials in Kiev decided to renew what they call an "anti-terrorist operation" against separatist militias who have seized control of about a dozen public buildings in eastern Ukraine.

There it is again, the use of "terrorist" to describe political dissenters as if those whose violence in Maidan, who hurled firebombs at police and conducted a violent (US sanctioned) rampage were not "terrorists". Once again, it is the same old hypocrisy wrapped in a flag being used to sell yet more carnage abroad.

Pity the anti-austerity protesters in the East for the pogroms are coming while the stars and stripes fly over a nation steeped in the blissful  peace that is ignorance.