Jeb Bush to Give Big Foreign Policy Speech

With Americans’ political choices in the 2016 presidential race having pretty much already been made for them – Bush III or Clinton II – it is now up to the candidates to craft their sales pitches. While neither one will differ drastically from the other in terms of endless foreign entanglements, banker bailouts, mass surveillance, the war on civil liberties and amnesty for illegals it is all a matter of packaging. While Hillary lays low in the weeds - a luxury in that she has no competition from other Democrats – Jeb is going to have to actually go out and hit the cornbread and rubber chicken circuit to sell his policies.

Reuters is reporting that Jeb is doing just that in what is billed as an “exclusive” on his first major foreign policy speech in the story “Republican Jeb Bush to lay out case for stronger U.S. role in world”:

The United States needs to regain its leadership role in the world, Republican Jeb Bush will say in a speech on Wednesday, while asserting that President Barack Obama has been inconsistent and indecisive in carrying out American foreign policy.

Bush's speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs will be his first major foray into foreign policy since he announced in December that he is considering a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

“The great irony of the Obama presidency is this: Someone who came to office promising greater engagement with the world has left America less influential in the world,” Bush will say, according to speech excerpts that were provided to Reuters.

The former Florida governor is casting a wide net for advice on national security. An aide provided to Reuters a diverse list of 20 diplomatic and national security veterans who will be providing informal advice to Bush in the coming months.

Many of them are from past Republican administrations, including those of his father and brother, former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, as well as that of Ronald Reagan.

Jeb’s gaggle of foreign policy and national security advisors include the likes of James Baker III, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Chertoff, Tom Ridge, Stephen Hadley, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden. Paula Dobriansky and Robert Zoellick. It is fair to say that a Jeb Bush regime would represent a return to the era of the neoconservatives and the first George W. Bush term. Jeb is essentially putting the band back together again.

This doesn’t bode well for the financial prospects of Americans in that counter to the post-World War II conventional wisdom that war is good for the economy it only applies to the connected insiders. The gravy train will be running at full speed under Bush III and the key will be selling a “stronger America” to an electorate that if it understands nothing else it understands that Obama’s foreign policy has been an aimless and ineffective mess. But what can you expect when you bring in John “Skull and Bones” Kerry, Susan Rice and Samantha Power as your heavy hitters. The Bush collection of neocons can be called many things but incompetent is not among them.

This is not a good thing for average Americans and with Jeb already staking out a very muscular foreign policy vision it will be incumbent upon Hillary – no shrinking violet – to present an even more bellicose vision of a “stronger America”. None of this hogwash about American having a “stronger role” in the world does one damned thing to address the very serious problems in The Homeland. The reality is that America is now a land of a rigged financial system that is unable to function without government backstopping, ever increasing mass surveillance, diminishing civil liberties, crumbling infrastructure, lousy jobs (thanks to offshoring and importing illegal aliens) and dismal hopes for future generations.

Neither Jeb Bush nor Hillary Clinton represent anything short of a strengthening of a status quo grown fat and powerful off of cashing in on the never ending Global War on Terror (GWOT).  In a true and functional democracy – we no longer live in one – voters would have a choice that offers more difference than a taste test between Coke and Pepsi.

Torture is Just the Way We Roll in the USA! USA! USA!

“Goddamn, motherfucker got blood all over my best clown suit.”

-Captain Spaulding

With all due respect to Maine Senator Angus King on the CIA torture report he is dead wrong: that is exactly who we are. "Did we torture people? Yes. Did it work? No" King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said on CNN after the release of the heavily redacted, watered down sample that was the executive summary. Flying in the face of King’s pronouncement is the grim and sordid evidence provided by a Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed that 59 percent of Americans are down with torture of the same type that had Nazi war criminals hanged at Nuremberg. "This is not America. This is not who we are," King said. "What was done diminished our stature and enflamed [Islamist extremists], terrorists around the world." But it is not the Islamists that we should be worried about – it is the red, white and blue clad flag-suckers who are the cheerleaders of the fascist state of the new American century.

Somehow the neocons have managed to return to prominence within the hallowed halls of a besmirched U.S. government and a propaganda machine of which Joseph Goebbels himself would be in awe of. Fox News bimbo hostess Andrea Tantaros had a unique but predictable take on the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture programs, which included among other sick and degenerate acts - pureeing food and anally"feeding" it to a detainee and threatening rape of family members.

"The United States of America is awesome. We are awesome, but we've had this discussion" about torture, Tantaros said. She lamented, "the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are;" rather, "this administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we're not awesome." This is because "they apologized for this country, they don't like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again."

But of course that is what Fox News would say for like their prototypes Goebbels and Julius Streicher it is a powerful megaphone for the most evil and vile impulses of a particular authoritarian element. While America will never go full blown Nazi - it is just too ostentatious and crude - the techniques of the masters have been refined for the information age. Fox routinely trots out vermin the likes of Dick Cheney, the Grand Poobah of the torture state (did he actually masturbate over those missing videos?) and other neocon filth to make the case for morons obsessed with the ludicrous "ticking time bomb" scenario. It is also Fox that served as the delivery system for one of the most sinister of the post 9/11 efforts to effectively brainwash the star-spangled sheep into the acceptance of torture. The television series "24" with Kiefer Sutherland starring as America's favorite Nazi, Jack Bauer was an instant sensation in a terrified, revenge crazed country determined to exact a terrible vengeance for the taking down of those precious towers.

The New Hammerhead was a perfect cowboy. He was vicious & stupid & ignorant of everything except his own fears and appetites. He beat the mortal shit out of anything that made him uneasy, for any reason at all. The Hammerhead was a perfect warrior. He defended the flag. Any flag. He learned to understand words like “orders” and “patriotism”, but the secret of his success was an animal taste for blood. He thrived on motion. But he was brainless; he had to be aimed.

-Hunter S. Thompson

A Brief Interlude: In Jack’s Country

The pain was immense for the crumbled heap on the concrete floor, the sweaty blond man just didn’t stop…”ok you fucker…you goddamned filthy sand nigger, you fucking piece of shit…I am going to peel you before Allah”

"Not enough jagoff?? I’m gonna bring your son in here, fuck him in the ass, whack him into bloody pieces, make him into soup and make you eat him goddammit…now one more time…WHERE the fuck is it???"

"Where sand nigger? Where is the fucking bomb, the ticking fucking time bomb motherfucker…."

“Fuck you heathen” hissed jack as he grabbed a steel chair, twisting like a ballet dancer as he pirouetted seamlessly and smashed the chair into the man’s back….sending him crashing into the reinforced concrete wall, a Rorschach spot of dark arterial blood was upon the wall as the man bounced back to land at the feet of the avenging angel in black.

“For God”…screamed Jack as he brought the chair down again. The man was now only whimpering….

“For Country”…..Jack executed a powerhouse karate kick that snapped the man’s neck and separated the jaw, teeth skittered across the piss and blood slicked floor, the jaw sort of flip flopped in place, held on by a piece of flesh….

“And for John Wayne You filthy Muslim Cocksucker!” shrieked Jack with spittle flying from his lips, hyperventilating he brought the chair down again….again….again….the sick sound like wet smacking meat, like Rocky using the beef carcasses for workout bags….he brought it down fifteen more times then dropped it….fell to his knees in a pool of blood and viscera."

"Then, panting and drooling he undid his belt, opened his pants and jacked off into the mess before him. God bless America, our safety is once again assured by our courageous guardians."

The torture infomercial was a smash hit for years on Fox and conditioned Americans to accept torture and the ridiculous James Bond style doomsday scenarios that were constantly invoked by the Cheney gang. Later replaced by the Obama era refinement of indoctrination of Showtime’s “Homeland” along with it's Iranian sleeper agents embedded within the government. The enemies change along with the times and so does the official propaganda. The next ratings titan will be about the Russians - bet on it.

Outside of “24” and “Homeland” and their runs on the electronic crackpipe the meme that torture was acceptable found a place in big time Hollywood movies with the acclaimed “Zero Dark Thirty”. The movie, which garnered a fistful of Academy Award nominations was the story of “Maya”, an intrepid and relentless female anti-terrorist crusader and her role in tracking down the bad-assed bogeyman Osama bin Laden. As stories have emerged following the release of the torture report it has become clear that not only was the lie about torture working total bullshit but the story of "Maya" herself is too.

“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.”

- O’Brien

The tale of "Maya" is a curious one indeed given that the actual person that the "Zero Dark Thirty" character was based on, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky aka the "Queen of Torture" is a mysterious figure whose identity has been protected throughout the phony war on terror. Thanks to Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept who outs her in a damning piece entitled “Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, The Senior Officer At The Center Of The CIA’S Torture Scandals” the real identity of the "Maya" is now known. I excerpt the following from Greenwald's piece:

NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous.

The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency.

The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.

The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.”

NBC, while withholding her identity, noted that the same unnamed officer “also participated in ‘enhanced interrogations’ of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.”

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, writing yesterday about the NBC article, added that the officer “is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.” This officer, Mayer noted, is the same one who “dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.” Mayer also wrote that the officer is “the same woman” identified in the Senate report who oversaw “the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity.”

That Ms. Bikowsky was present during the torture sessions begs the question of what exactly were the objectives? Were the victims being tortured in such a manner to make them provide false information that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? While Bikowsky's conduct and presence are more than a bit mysterious there is one critical question where nobody is prepared to go? Was her "screw up" that blocked critical intelligence that could have stopped the attacks and prevented the day when everything changed the bumbling of an arrogant egomaniac or something far more sinister?

Dick Cheney spent a hell of a lot of time at CIA before and after 9/11 and it is a legitimate question to ask as to whether he knew Bikowsky. Sources have referred to her as a "bitch on wheels" who seems to have been in place at a crucial failure point at a key time to have prevented the attacks. The Homeland is now over thirteen years past the demarcation point of a free society and well into the post-democratic era and any questioning of the events of 9/11 are treated as blasphemy against a national religion. 

There was a time when it wasn't tantamount to treason to ponder the role of Cheney, the neocons and certain foreign elements in executing that transformative event. Now, using the always reliable public mockery and scorning of heretics of the temple of fascism erected out of the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center with the overused but tired lable of "conspiracy theorist" and the updated version which is "truther" such questioners have been silenced. There has however never been a legitimate investigation of what happened on September 11, 2001 and the government officials who were on watch at the time - such as Cheney -are treated like elder statesmen instead of traitors and war criminals. We may never have the answers but given the ease in which the transition to a full-blown national surveillance/police state and the launching of the war on civilizations it sure smells like a coup d'etat to me. But that is a story far too complex to get into now.

"The reason why Dick Cheney is able to go on 'Meet The Press' instead of being where he should be -- which is in the dock at The Hague or in a federal prison -- is because President Obama and his administration made the decision not to prosecute any of the people who implemented this torture regime despite the fact that it was illegal and criminal,"

-Glenn Greenwald

Emperor Barack Obama continues to protect the torturers and Bush administration figures whose massive "failure" resulted in the worst "terrorist" attack in U.S. history as well as the murder of over 3,000 people. To this day - January 10, 2015 - Obama has done not one goddamned thing to roll back the crimes of his predecessors in the Bush- Cheney administration. Therefore he is complicit in their crimes yet there will be no justice in this country as long as the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 goes unchallenged. And don't look for anything but more war, torture, surveillance and stripping of civil liberties once Obama has departed. He was a practicioner of the Fozzie Bear version of fascism but his successor won't be. The neocons are already hedging their bets with major candidates of both parties and the future is grim once they have returned to power with an ax to grind.

The preservation of the self-proclaimed divine right of the state of Israel to carve out lebensraum was the organizing principle of the PNAC neocons and the Netanyahu regime. Bibi has waited it out and will soon be rid of the hated Obama and have a pliant idiot - perhaps Mitt Romney - who will dial up those long overdue airstrikes on Tehran. This week's brutal assassination of a number of cartoonists and writers at the French "satirical" newspaper Charlie Hebdo even has liberals enlisting in the great war on civilizations and the Republicans have just assumed control of Congress. 

South Carolina's strident (and likely sexually blackmailed) Senator Lindsey Graham has just issued a vow of allegiance to Netanyahu. According to Sheldon Adelson's Israel Hayom, the Palmetto State princess dismissed the lame duck Obama by proclaiming that "Congress has Israel's Back" and "I think the U.S.-Israel relationship's anchor tenant is the Congress." In that statement Graham let it slip that there is indeed a Deep State and with such obvious treason on the lips of an influential Senator it certainly would not be beyond that shadow government to pull off a bold operation like 9/11. Torture is nothing compared to the audacity of such a grand scale false flag event.

So the torturers will continue to live in comfort, never having to worry about the prison terms that they so richly are deserving of for their unspeakable acts of depravity.  Rectal feeding? What sort of a fucking twisted, perverted mind would come up with something like that? Was it too impractical to just subject the prisoners to something like maybe scaphism which is described as:

The naked person was firmly fastened within a back-to-back pair of narrow rowing boats (or a hollowed-out tree trunk), with the head, hands, and feet protruding. The condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of developing severe diarrhea, and more honey would be rubbed on his body so as to attract insects to the exposed appendages. They would then be left to float on a stagnant pond or be exposed to the sun. 

The defenseless individual's feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed and increasingly gangrenous flesh. The feeding would be repeated each day in some cases to prolong the torture, so that dehydration or starvation did not provide them with the release of death. Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock. Delirium would typically set in after a few days.

In other recorded versions, the insects did not eat the person; biting and stinging insects such as wasps, which were attracted by honey on the body, acted as the torture.

Death by scaphism was painful, humiliating, and protracted. Plutarch writes in his biography of Artaxerxes that Mithridates, sentenced to die in this manner for killing Cyrus the Younger, survived 17 days before dying.

Now that would be a wonderful punishment for a sick, twisted pig-fucker like Dick Cheney since he would probably actually enjoy the rectal feeding and sado-sexual aspects of official United States government sanctioned “Advanced Interrogation Techniques”.

The Neocon vs. Rand Paul Pissing Contest Rages On

Senator Rand Paul has taken withering fire from the cheerleaders for American interventionism and global conquest at gunpoint for he is a very serious threat to the warfare and surveillance state as it currently exists and if he is not halted before the 2016 presidential campaign the idea that we do not have to be a nation crushed by the yoke of perpetual war may take hold. Paul represents the increasingly influential emerging libertarian wing of the Republican party and with growing popularity with the younger demographic - the youth that Obama shit on after mobilizing them in 2008 with his siren song of false hope and chump change - he has the potential to for the first time in decades provide a serious alternative to the corrupt sucklers of Empire.

Fresh off of being smacked down with a blistering and ridiculous editorial in the Washington Post by the ever more bizarre Texas Governor Rick Perry who in the hilarious words of Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo is "dumber than a steer who’s been zapped by a cattle-prod and still won’t move" and in the opinion of some (myself included), is a man of such enormous idiocy and grotesque buffoonery that he actually makes George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein - Paul punched back. The Senator from Kentucky's rebuttal was featured in the gospel of the beltway Politico in a piece entitled "Rick Perry is Dead Wrong":

There are many things I like about Texas Gov. Rick Perry, including his stance on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. But apparently his new glasses haven’t altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly.

There are obviously many important events going on in the world right now, but with 60,000 foreign children streaming across the Texas border, I am surprised Governor Perry has apparently still found time to mischaracterize and attack my foreign policy.

Governor Perry writes a fictionalized account of my foreign policy so mischaracterizing my views that I wonder if he’s even really read any of my policy papers.

In fact, some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed, something he fails to mention. His solutions also aren’t much different from President Barack Obama’s, something he also fails to mention. Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.

Perry says there are no good options. I’ve said the same thing. President Obama has said the same thing. So what are Perry’s solutions and why does he think they are so bold and different from anyone else’s?

AND

I ask Governor Perry: How many Americans should send their sons or daughters to die for a foreign country — a nation the Iraqis won’t defend for themselves? How many Texan mothers and fathers will Governor Perry ask to send their children to fight in Iraq?

I will not hold my breath for an answer. If refusing to send Americans to die for a country that refuses to defend itself makes one an “isolationist,” then perhaps its time we finally retire that pejorative.

Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to send U.S. soldiers back into Iraq. Is Perry calling the entire country “isolationist” too?

And he is absolutely right, Slick Rick Perry has absolutely nothing to offer besides the same bitching that always erupts like a bursting, fully ripened pustule from a party that has nothing new to offer rather than a keening cacophony of bleating every time that Obama - who they hate - so much as scratches his ass. While it will not likely please the movers and shakers within the GOP the knee-jerk opposition of everything Obama is not a substitute for a winning formula which they should understand by now after getting thumped by the black dude in two presidential elections despite his gross incompetence. This is a party that is in need of new ideas rather than the same alarmist and race-baiting bullshit that plays well to the borderline cadavers whose daily sustenance of outrage is provided by FOX News which plays them like a pack of stupid fucking donkeys. Perry's new glasses are a nice touch too but Barry Goldwater voters are dropping like flies with each passing election cycle and Rand Paul and libertarian ideas will be like sipping from the fountain of youth for a party that clings to a corpse like Reagan rather than just walk through that door into the future and a brave new world.

Perry's anti-Paul diatribe was a gut-wrenching mish-mash of warmed over neocon talking points, bogus historical references and more references to the hallowed Ronald Reagan than you can shake that cattle-prod at - it was one of the most over the top, thoroughly asinine pieces of tripe that the WAPO has published recently and that says one hell of a lot considering the lower than whaleshit level of the competition. While Senator Paul is not the man that his father is and has a tendency to go along to get along he still towers above the recycled garbage like Rick Perry, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and blows away the sleazy political opportunists like Florida's Marco "Little Ricky" Rubio and that loudmouthed fat piece of crap up in New Jersey Chris Christie with his continued  insincere sucking up to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson the Daddy Warbucks of the neocon world domination project.

That most bitter of truths to the neocons is that an increasing amount of Americans are sick to death of their globe-trotting escapades of murder, torture and stealing of resources after the murders of women and children. The Democrats offer no viable alternative either as evident by the meddlesome adventures of the drone ranger Obama, the full-blown fanatical State Department and Cass Sunstein's wife over at the UN Samantha Power and their piling up of dead bodies based on the horseshit of humanitarian interventionism.

The 2016 election is a critical time in our nation's history for it offers what may be the last chance to banish the neocons - particularly since Hillary Clinton, a bloodthirsty bitch who puts Margaret Thatcher to shame would be a hero to the neocons and why not hedge their bets with a zany and pliable doofus like Rick Perry? Anything to keep Rand Paul and libertarian ideas out of the national conversation next year. The neocons understand this and that is why they are going right for Paul's throat, the Washington Post continues to churn out agitprop like today's offering from the high priestess of neocon bullshit Jennifer Rubin with the very creative title of "Rand Paul Isolated on Foreign Policy" from which I excerpt:

The extent of Rand Paul’s extremism is slowly coming to light. American Enterprise Institute’s David Adesnik has analyzed Paul’s recommended summer reading list. “The foreign policy section of the list consists entirely of works that blame the United States for the rise of Islamic extremism while offering solutions that verge on isolationism. Most of the books also express a sharp hostility toward Israel and toward those who believe that U.S. foreign policy should serve the cause of human freedom.”

Specifically, he includes Pat Buchanan’s anti-Semitic tract: “If Ron Paul’s message isn’t clear enough, the curious student may turn to another book on the list, Pat Buchanan’s critique of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, Where the Right Went Wrong. ‘America’s huge footprint on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia led straight to 9/11. The terrorists were over here because we were over there. Terrorism is the price of empire.’ . . . Buchanan explains that ‘the Beltway Likud was plotting and propagandizing for war on Iraq long before 9/11.’ The distinctive trait of this clique is that it sees ‘U.S. and Israeli interests as identical.’ ” Unfortunately it’s becoming clear that Paul’s views are virtually identical to his father’s (who has three books on his son’s list). Suffice it to say, there is no elected Republican in Congress who would embrace these ideas.

If that is the best that Rubin and the neocons are able to come up with, selectively picking through Rand Paul's reading list and crying "ANTI-SEMITE" then they are more desperate than ever. That particular pejorative was at one time the ultimate trump card when it came to squashing criticism of the Middle East conflicts in which Israel always benefited from at the cost of American blood and treasure but it has lost it's potency through overuse. Pity poor Rubin and her handlers whose primary accomplishment has been to diminish "anti-Semitism" to the point that it has lost any sort of effectiveness when it comes to real anti-Semites. But that is what happens when such a filthy abuse of the historically heinous persecution of Jews - a very real problem - is turned into no more than a cheap political tactic. We all know the fairy tale of the boy who cried wolf and by continually playing that very card scum like Rubin only harm those who are the real victims.

It is time for the neocons to give up the ghost and just go quietly into the dustbin of history before their deranged, remarkably Naziesque ideology destroys the planet. It is far past time to confiscate the keys to the war machine from these highly influential lunatics. 

(Image: Getty Images)

Bloodsuckers McCain and Graham Hit Sunday Circuit to Peddle More Lies

“Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”

- Bob Dylan (Visions of Johanna)

A 2001 piece at satirical website The Onion entitled “Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'” published shortly after his inauguration was astonishing in the uncanny ability to so accurately predict the future. Now in mid-2014 we are a nation at permanent war, whether it be Afghanistan, a new Cold War with Russia or the third bite at the apple in Iraq it is as Orwell once put it "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia". The wars are of course not the desire of the people, and truly there are very few of them who sacrifice a damned thing (since we no longer have conscription) other than lost investment in their own country due to the diversion of tax payer dollars to fund permanent militarism. President Dwight D. Eisenhower lamented the social cost of a state of permanent war in his 1961 farewell address as well as the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex but those dangers can also be very lucrative opportunities to the death pimp politicians who are always willing to send others to kill, die and be maimed for their ongoing ability to remain in office thanks to those who fund them as well as their vainglorious self-importance. 

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

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

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

SCHIEFFER: Let's get back to Iraq.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCHIEFFER: Senator, do you agree with that?

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

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

 [Once again the 9/11 card is played]

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

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

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

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

Prolific WaPo Neocon Blogger Jennifer Rubin is Foaming at the Mouth

The neocon central propaganda transmission station at the Washington Post is as usual engaged in pushing agitation and lies to send more American money and bodies into a sucking black hole of death where we have absolutely no business in being. While it is hard to pick out the most wretched of the WaPo propagandists - they have an amazingly deep bench - I would have to say that Jennifer Rubin more than merits a share of the prize. Her ongoing screeds, often in the number of several a day call into question as to whether she actually writes this bullshit herself for just works from material provided by the William Kristol-Robert Kagan machine and simply repackages it. As could be expected with the carnival of perversion of the architects of the Iraq debacle engaged in a ghoulish media tour to revise history and jump start the PNAC Middle East domination plans Rubin provides plenty of supporting fire, sniping from the gutter as usual.

Rubin has long had a particular ax to grind with Senator Rand Paul or more particularly the non-intervention that he is selling which is incompatible with neocon fever dreams, keeping the millions employed by the government in the military and surveillance colossus on the Potomac and most importantly of all allowing for the right-wing regime of Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to flout international law and basic human decency in carving out lebensraum for Israel. Rubin and the neocons are representative of an Israeli fifth-column or as as described by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their groundbreaking book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". The amount of clout that Israeli right-wingers exercise in the United States is well known and understood with the corrupt US Congress effectively being in the words of Patrick J. Buchanan - "Israeli occupied territory" where a swine like Netanyahu is afforded nearly three dozen standing ovations and the William Kristol propaganda network as well as numerous think tanks providing the content to editorial pages and churning out policy "experts" to sell schemes that while beneficial to Israel are detrimental to long-term US interests. Israel also conducts (and has long conducted) some of the most aggressive spying operations within in the United States - some of which may explain the fealty of the Congress (blackmail perhaps) to recklessly commit the country to regional wars to the benefit of Israel.

But I digress..

Rubin's latest column drags out Israeli loyalist and Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams as though he is an elder statesman instead of the vile warmonger and longtime cloak and dagger operative who keeps turning up through the decades when he belongs rotting in prison. Abrams in his book "Faith or Fear" once advocated for what was essentially eugenics in making the case for American Jews to adhere to only marrying within their own religion and group - sounds eerily Aryan as well as incompatible with American values but Abrams is a monster and a go to guy for Rubin who picks up the baton from Dick Cheney in her latest offering "Who is the non-proliferation president?":

 Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security adviser, reminds us: “The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.” Add to that a new Rand Corporation study showing terrorist groups’ activity has increased 50 percent in the last three years and the near-collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation architecture and you have a truly troubling conflagration: more terrorists, fewer functioning central governments and the potential widespread possession of weapons of mass destruction (already used multiple times with no consequences by Bashar al-Assad).

That Abrams and Rubin are still selling the lie that Syrian President Assad gassed those people last summer at the Damascus suburb of Ghouta is telling as to who is really going to benefit from the coming back door attack on the Assad regime that is currently being ginned up by the convenient appearance of ISIS in Iraq. That report by the RAND Corporation - a notorious hive of scum and villainy that only exists to sell war - that Cheney has been invoking also gets mention which makes the entire ISIS narrative even more smelly than it already is. Things are probably going to get even worse very soon as the top diplomatic moron in America John "Skull and Bones" Kerry is sliming around in Iraq right now and wherever he goes disaster follows, the man is a virtual hurricane of bullshit.

Ironic in that the Washington Post is also running one of those stupid animal tales that Americans so adore with the heart-warming story of Peanuts, the world's ugliest dog which is cuter than Rubin and would have the good sense to stay away from a devil like Abrams.

Bombs Away! Neocons Set for Sequel in Iraq

"Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran"

-unnamed Bush administration official

Mistakenly left for dead after the wet dream of the conquest of the Middle East commencing with the US attack and invasion on Iraq unraveled far short of the glorious thousand year American Reich that the ideologues envisioned, leaving them discredited and for the most part ousted during the latter years of the lamentable George W. Bush regime the neocons are now resurgent and this time they are not leaving power again. The post September 11, 2001 era after the tragic and horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that saw over 3,000 Americans murdered was quietly greeted by the PNAC gang whose desire for "a new Pearl Harbor" that would radically transform the United States into a conquering power that would not rest until the entire globe was locked down.

It would be a golden era, the real "end of history" where our "heroes" the American military troops (along with armies of independent contractors funded by the taxpayers at quadruple the cost of actual servicemen/women) would enforce hegemony upon the rest of the planet - one world, under God with McDonalds and Wal-Mart for all. They squealed with the delight children on Christmas morning over the initial "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad, made excuses for the heinous sado-sexual torture at Abu Ghraib prison and eventually became too much of a political burden for Bush who dumped Rumsfeld, froze out Cheney and seemingly exiled the neocons as his father once did to the "crazies" during his own presidency.

It took years but the neocons are back with a vengeance, every bit as extreme as before and having already wet their whistles with the bloodshed in Ukraine are ready to rock in Iraq, ready to use the excuse of the invasion of Islamist extremists (armed by the US's foolish Syrian games) to jump start the old PNAC plans. Obama is going to cooperate too despite his early waffling and has already reneged on his promise to not send in the troops when he signed off on sending in special forces. I excerpt the following from The Guardian story entitled  "Barack Obama sends troops back to Iraq as Isis insurgency worsen":

The US is urgently deploying several hundred armed troops in and around Iraq and considering sending an additional contingent of special forces soldiers as Baghdad struggles to repel a rampant insurgency.

Barack Obama discussed the crisis with his top national security advisers on Monday night after earlier telling Congress that up to 275 troops could be sent to Iraq to provide support and security for personnel and the US Embassy in Baghdad.

While Obama has vowed to keep US forces out of combat in Iraq, he said in his notification to Congress that the personnel moving into the region are equipped for direct fighting.

Around 170 of those forces have already arrived and another 100 soldiers will be on standby in a nearby country such as Kuwait until they are needed. In addition, officials told Reuters that the White House was considering sending a contingent of special forces to train and advise beleaguered Iraqi troops, many of whom have fled their posts in the face of the insurgency.

While the public is largely portrayed as war weary and apathetic over the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures the neocon cheerleaders in the media are doing their damned level best to change things. From the whirlwind tour of the usual war pimps, first and foremost Senators John McCain “We are now facing an existential threat to the security of the United States of America” to Lindsey Graham "I think it's inevitable. The seeds of 9/11 are being planted all over Iraq and Syria. You don't have to believe me, this is what they're telling you they're gonna do. They're not hiding their agenda. They want an Islamic caliphate….They plan to drive us out of the Mideast by attacking us here at home" the real seeds are being planted. There is a new bogeyman now in ISIS, the resurrected bread and butter line about the "new caliphate" and all of that American exceptionalism that was evident on Monday when the USA!, USA!, USA! triumphed in over Ghana - according to Wikipedia the 82nd largest country in the world - in the World Cup opening round. Be proud Americans, the cutaways during yesterday's television broadcasts to the obligatory shots of US military personnel in Afghanistan whooping it up during the game provide the world once again with the perfect illustration of the ugly American. There was also something symbolic in the victory of the beating of Ghana as has been embodied in the words of arch neocon Michael Ledeen that "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".

So as it sits today the troops are already going back to Iraq, the bombing strike plans and drone kill lists are already in the works and the neocons jubilant with anticipation of the coming cleansing crusade of flag-swaddled mayhem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gates of hell are about to swing open..