Kiev Burns as U.S. Propaganda Mills Churn

The tense situation in Ukraine has just erupted into a mass orgy of violence, the pictures of which are set against the dark winter nights are surreal and astounding. This certainly is a distraction for Russian leader Vladimir Putin who has to this point managed to preside over a damned good show in Sochi - aside from the cheating of U.S. men's hockey team goalie Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings that is. In a fulfillment of the prediction of Texas yahoo Mike McCaul of the House Homeland Security Committee's prediction that "...that something will detonate, something will go off" the proverbial shit has hit the fan in the streets of Kiev.

Months of street protests that started in November after Ukranian President Viktor Yanukovych chose to take a deal from Russia, which Ukraine was a part of until the fall of the USSR shunning an alliance with the European Union "detonated" in a melee of bloody violence this week. The latest figures after all Hell broke loose has the death toll at 26 and who knows how many injured as the state police and protesters (according to some accounts many are being paid by the west)  clashed in the latest escalation of what may very well end up being yet another one of those civil wars that have been breaking out - offering U.S. and foreign arms and 'security' corporations a golden opportunity to profit from arming both sides.

This has to make President Barack Obama happy as well as Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry and the rest of the stooges of the American war machine who had to endure the humiliation of Putin making them eat a nice big borscht and shit sandwich with his flagrant refusal to back the war in Syria which is now being eased back onto the front burner. Having the current carnage in the streets of Kiev as a bludgeon with to have the U.S. state-corporate media beat Putin over the head during his country's Olympic showcase is a textbook example of psychological warfare and black propaganda. The underlying benefit to Barry and the boys is that they not only get to piss on Putin's Olympic parade but also to roll out the Cold War v.2 demagoguery to further demonize Putin. 

Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda on MSNBC is pushing hard for a ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Ukraine and dishing up the anti-Putin propaganda with a near religious fervor. Last night even the increasingly vile Rachel Maddow, the Baghdad Bob of American cable television took a break from her nonstop bashing of the bullying New Jersey gasbag Chris Christie to fixate on the violence in the streets of Kiev. You know that it is getting bad when HBO's Bill Maher, a serious defender of the warfare/surveillance state calls out MSNBC and particularly Ms. Maddow on their bullshit as being as bad as FOX News with their fixation on "Bridgegate" as being the Democratic party's Benghazi". I can't argue with Maher and I except from the transcript of Maddown's show last night where her 'expert' guest was NBC's Andrea Mitchell, the wife of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan "The Maestro" Greenspan. A man who is complicit in the the economic collapse and subsequent Obama sanctioned rescue of the criminal gamblers on Wall Street.

I excerpt the following from the transcript (read at your own risk as it could induce vomiting):

MADDOW: Andrea, thanks very much for being with us.

ANDREA MITCHELL, MSNBC ANCHOR: You bet.

MADDOW: So, we got this readout tonight of Vice President Biden calling the Ukrainian president in the midst of the street battles going on right there in the capital city in Kiev.

Why, why is it that it`s Vice President Biden calling and not President Obama? Is this something you would expect to happen at a higher level or a lower level? Why him?

MITCHELL: It`s a high level but not the highest level, and in fact,the very fact that Putin has said, stay out of my backyard, would mean it would be almost to much of an out front for President Obama himself to get involved.

One of the issues here has been this tug-of-war between Putin saying this is my territory and the United States saying that we and the E.U. have a vested interest in this. Just look at what`s happening in the streets.

Look at what the pictures you have shown. I mean, these paintings -- they look like paints. They look like  (INAUDIBLE) [I listened and she said "Delacroix"]or something. These look like battles, classic battles.

It doesn`t look real what we`re seeing in the streets of Kiev. Yet, it is all too real. And the deaths are real. And the stakes are very,very high.

And think back to what happened just 24 hours ago. That`s when Putin upped the ante. He said he would guarantee these $2 billion in loans evenas the rebel leaders were in Berlin visiting with Angela Merkel and the

Germans and the E.U., and you know the frustration that America has expressed through Victoria Nuland ["FUCK THE E.U."], the top official for Europe, at the slowness of the European Union to respond with money, to try to balance itand not have Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, be completely under the thrall of Putin.

But clearly, the students, the others, the protesters and rebel leaders saw Russia offering this loan guarantee as the final blow to them that Yanukovych was indeed going to be in line with Russia and they wouldbe completely frustrated in their efforts to align themselves with the West.

MADDOW: Andrea, these images that we`re showing right now are live. It`s just -- it`s incredible. It`s about 4:00 a.m., as you can see with the time stamp there, local time. But this is happening right now. In terms of looking at the dynamics under way, does the opposition in Ukraine, either the organized opposition in terms of people who are in parliament and so forth, or the opposition leaders in the street, do theywant and expect international help? Do they see the United States as having a range of potential influence here? What are they asking for?

MITCHELL: Well, the rebel leaders have been very much in touch with American and European Union leaders, but the people in streets are not necessarily all connected.You mentioned the fact that there has been some violence. The rebel leaders have lost control of some of the people in the streets. This is not a completely unified situation, as these things never are. But theyhave been remarkably consistent given that this has been happening since December, as you pointed out.

So, the rebel leaders want help from us. They want some force to pull them back from Putin`s grasp. But Putin is not going to negotiate on this.

Lavrov, his foreign minister, made it very clear in the last couple days with the West that they consider this their territory, and it would be as though they were mucking around in Latin America, and you know how we feelabout our territory. They feel that this is not a part of Western Europe. They think that this is part of the former Soviet Union.

Regarding Andrea Mitchell as some sort of hallowed official figure what better example can be made as to the rot and incestuous permutation of power and the media that has taken place in the last few decades. Alan Greenspan's wife indeed, were Maddow a journalist and not a cheerleader and propagandist she might have asked how much that Alan and Andrea's portfolios would benefit from Cold War II.

There are people dying in Ukraine but given the long and storied history of the  dark funding opposition to the democratically elected leaders in countries that don't march to the beat of Uncle Sam's drummer that too often result in revolutions, torture, assassinations, mass murder of civilian dissidents and legitimate political opposition to western backed despots how can anyone possibly buy any of the horseshit that is being spewed by what most of us already know is a thoroughly corrupt media?

But the skulls will keep getting cracked in Kiev as Obama and the U.S. establishment continue to wage their ever expanding proxy war against the hated devil Putin for his original sin of offering amnesty to former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden; his intervention in the at one time inevitable war on Syria and most of all that column in the New York Times published on the anniversary of that oh so sanctified day September 11th where he called into question the very concept of American exceptionalism.

So the media feeding frenzy continues over  the fortuitous outbreak of violence in the streets of Kiev and the sheer ecstasy of the Russian Olympic hockey team getting knocked out of the medal chase today.

USA! USA! USA!

(Image: Reuters/David Mdzinarishvili)

The Hypocrisy of Obama's MSNBC Water Carriers

Seldom discussed as a propaganda organ that is in its own right every bit the equal of Fox News MSNBC plumbs the depths of political discourse in providing a constant forum of dishonesty and hypocrisy.  The network, which is owned by GE, one of the largest defense contractors of the U.S. military industrial complex regularly shills for more war albeit wrapped up in the bright shining lie of a package of humanitarian interventions. The resulting dead from the collateral damage of wars of aggression or missions of ‘mercy’ are no different and the profits reaped by GE remain constant. The network is so shameless of a water-carrier for the Barack Obama administration that it is astounding that it receives any legitimacy at all. Fox is after all very transparent as the media arm of the Republican party establishment which in a perverse and twisted sort of way is somewhat honorable. I suppose that some credit can go to former Richard M. Nixon media guru Roger Ailes who is as unabashedly incapable of shame as fellow former Nixon administration figures such as Pat Buchanan who wears his bigotry on his sleeve and G. Gordon Liddy who in his book “Will” admitted his admiration for Hitler.

Buchanan is among the last of a dying breed and a dinosaur who used to drink Wild Turkey with Hunter S. Thompson is not going to be sucked into the tar pit without a struggle but he has now become a cartoon. His contemporary G. Gordon Liddy, also getting ready to pass into history was always a no bullshit guy when it came to his true sentiments as well. I especially liked the following expression of his burgeoning man love for a newly discovered idol from "Will" where he speaks wistfully of how the Liddy family maid, Teresa inculcated in the young whelp an adoration of Der Führer:

One day Teresa was excited. He was going to be on the radio. Just wait till I hear him speak! Eagerly, I joined her at the Emerson [radio]. First the music, the now familiar strains of a song that started, “Die Fahne hoch…” – Raise the banner…” It was a rousing, powerful anthem the Horst Wessel song.

 We could tell he was about to speak. The crowd could hardly contain itself. They hailed him in the huge swelling ovations that carried me along. Sieg!”someone would shout, and what seemed like all the people in the world would answer with a roar, “Heil!”. For he was their leader, Der Führer, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s voice started out calmly, in low, dispassionate tones, but as he spoke of what his people would accomplish, his voice rose in pitch and tempo. Once united, the German people could do anything, surmount any obstacle, rout any enemy, achieve fulfillment. He would lead them; there would be one people, one nation, one leader. Here was the very antithesis of fear – sheer animal confidence and the power of will. He sent an electric current through my body and, as the massive audience thundered its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I realized suddenly that I had stopped breathing.

Liddy’s love affair with full-blown Nazism would go on and he allegedly once arranged for a showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will to fellow fascist worshipers in the White House. At least the old school guys from Nixon’s administration had a strange sort of integrity in that they are unabashed about their bigotry unlike the young turks currently operating in the political realm with their weasel words and focus group distilled blather. Only in the 2014 Homeland could one find any virtue in this but such is the world in which we now live, a dystopian nightmare where ignorance is exalted and with each passing day we see that Orwell was an optimist.

But as the Dylan song goes, “you know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace” and there is much brimstone scented smoke that emanates from the MSNBC sets. Some of the worst swill that is upchucked from the Democratic party electronic propaganda sewer spews forth five nights a week on the Rachel Maddow Show.  Maddow, who is a lesbian regularly uses her broadcast to hide her task as a Democratic party saleswoman under layers of identity group saturated diatribes that primarily serve as polemics against some of the more blatantly asinine statements by Republican party politicians, primarily those of the so-called tea party. Maddow, who parlayed her fame as a member of the Air America liberal radio network into her present career, much like Minnesota Senator Al Franken a fellow traveler is now an essential protector of the establishment while other former hosts who did not conform (Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy) have been exiled to the fringes. I will admittedly on occasion tune in to Maddow although I often regret it fairly quickly given the lack of substantive coverage of real issues, a failure to hold the Obama administration accountable and the selling of the war machine, a good deal of it by resident Pentagon flack Richard Engel who tried his damned best to push for war in Syria.

Last night prior to the BCS Championship game really getting revved up I happened to catch Maddow’s interview with  Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall St.).  The bagman for financial criminals, following the lunatic Peter King (R-IRA) chose to pile onto Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a favorite punching bag for the two-party syndicate that protects the corrupt system. Schumer, reciting straight from the Obama-DNC talking points went for Pauls throat over the expiration of extended benefits for the long-term unemployed painting him as the leader of the “hard right Republicans” who are “stopping everything”, using a comment attributed to the son of Ron that “unemployment insurance is a disservice to the American worker”, more than likely taken out of context and packaged as a chunk of bloody red meat.

While it wasn’t exactly King accusing him of letting New Yorkers be murdered by Muslim terrorists it was every bit as disingenuous. When Schumer gets up on his soapbox on the Maddow Show and proclaims that “The turning away from the middle class is dominated by one party” and brays in ginned up outrage about Rand Paul’s comments fly in the very face of (gag) the “American ethos” being attacked:

“What he’s saying is, that people would rather not work and collect these meager unemployment benefits. That is not true. There is a work ethos in America, it’s part of our American being and it doesn’t just apply to CEOs or nuclear physicists. The guy who cleans the floor late at night has a pride in making sure that floor is really clean. The woman who will organize an office has a real pride in making sure it is extremely well organized and everything is in it’s place. So this idea that the hard right has that people will stop looking for work and is just bunk and insulting to the American worker and to the American ethos”

What a condescending phony prick. Just think of how MSNBC would portray that sort of a rotten elitist comment were it to have come from Mitt Romney. It brings to mind Judge Smails from Caddyshack who proclaimed that “The world needs ditch-diggers too”.

Maddow of course would never dare to question the Wall Street's own senator and senator from the party and the administration that has continually screwed the American worker, ethos be damned while pumping 85 billion dollars of month into the banking casinos. Nor as to why any American worker who has a shit job such as cleaning the floors late at night (probably for minimum wage) or the woman who organizes offices would have any reason to be “proud” of such lousy employment opportunities while Schumer and his ilk continue to loot the coffers to subsidize the banksters who destroyed the economy once and are rapidly inflating the mother of all bubbles that will ultimately bring about the final collapse. That an unprincipled charlatan such as Schumer can go out and make this argument is as obscene as it is insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the joint bipartisan effort to dismantle the middle class through the Ponzi schemes of high finance, crony capitalism, cheating and offshoring American jobs by the millions to low-cost third world shitholes where people will work in abhorrent sweatshop conditions for pennies an hour. As the late H.L. Mencken would have put it “imagine a gentleman and you will imagined everything that he was not”.

Senator Schumer by the way is also one of the key drivers of the efforts to undermine the P5+1 talks to restrict the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. It has been pretty much acknowledged that the sabotage of the current diplomatic negotiations by swine like Schumer who don’t give a rat’s ass about American interests will lead to war. But that war will make GE and Shumer’s buddies on Wall Street very happy with the tide of blood money that will come rolling in.

Mass Distraction: Obama and Cameron Prepare for War

So desperate are Barack Obama and his British counterpart David Cameron to distract any and all attention from their NSA/GCHQ global surveillance that both are ready to start a war in Syria. A war that will likely ignite the tinderbox that is the Middle East, allow both counties to crush dissent at home and ensure that we will spend the rest of our lives living in an oppressive world of total war and brutal big government crackdowns. The pretense for the coming conflagration will be the much hyped chemical weapons attack by Russian ally and Syrian dictator Bashar-al-Assad. An attack that still has not been proven to have been anything other than a false flag event staged by U.S. backed, Al Qaeda connected flesh eating militants. The usual war propagandists, from Maddow to McCain have been hyperventilating in a rush to judgement that will again suck the U.S. into yet another never-ending Middle Eastern disaster like a possum lured into a briar patch. The Pentagon and the National Surveillance State have already sent naval vessels into the region and it is only a matter of time until Barry and the boys are raining down bombs and lobbing cruise missiles into the country. All hell is going to then break loose as Syrian officials have rightfully pointed out that any U.S. intervention in the country’s civil war would be like “a ball of fire that will inflame the Middle East”.

I know that there are some who really want an escalation. Wall Street speculators are already drooling and chortling like rutting pigs over the prospect of massive spikes in oil prices and the resultant ripple effect that will have the degenerate gamblers driving up the costs of everything on the planet. Rising oil prices subsequently will result in higher food prices and even more global unrest, people just have a tendency to get pissed off and rebel when they are forced to watch their children starving.  The Pentagon and it’s related network of crony contractors will also win big as will the security industrial complex that arose like a poisonous mushroom out of the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. The neocon fifth column also benefits in that their plans of regional destabilization, hatched years ago will still be on track despite Obama’s succession of Bush. With the U.S. government on the brink of default as GOP dead-enders in Congress threaten to default on the national debt (of course they along with their equally crooked colleagues across the aisle will ensure that there are no cuts in military and police state programs) the crushing jackboot of austerity will stifle an already phony economic recovery. Not that Obama and his minions care, he has already been exposed as a liar extraordinaire over his defense of the NSA Stasi, and the abuses that grow by the day. Most recently most recently that government goons are using these false ‘anti-terrorism tools’ to spy on former spouses. Obama continues to fib about these programs and as has been reported has already brought in his Chicago and Harvard crony Cass Sunstein to facilitate the coming whitewash.

While even a good amount of liberals long steeped in Utopian dreams are slowly being roused from their slumber to see that their Emperor is butt-naked. The scales may be falling from the eyes of millions of Obama supporters but it won’t stop the coming attack on Syria. Despite the ongoing exposure of Barry’s new term in office as an outwardly kinder and gentler fourth Bush term and the realization that the man has always been a liar and Teflon coated bullshit salesman far too many are dependent on the corrupt media for any sort of mass awakening. While the bulk of the American sheeple continue to be blissfully ignorant and busy consumers who get their McNews in bite-sized chunks from state media organs while they revel in celebrity, scandal and the upcoming NFL season those more inclined to be activists continue to be bamboozled. Those most able to present a challenge to the existing corrupt regime continue to be hoodwinked by lying liberals on phony liberal cable outlets that are really Democratic propaganda organs owned by defense industry corporations. I am of course referring to MSNBC, that increasingly wretched font of disinformation that should have hypocritical liberals ashamed of themselves (as if they capable of such a thing) for their hectoring of Fox News. While I try to stay away except when doing research as too much exposure at a time easily triggers my gag reflex I endured a portion of the Rachel Maddow Show earlier in the week as the DNC’s preeminent shill pushed for a war in Syria.

The Maddow program routinely trots out the “experts” such as Richard Engel, the same warfare state mouthpiece who only weeks ago was pushing the ludicrous tale of Al Qaeda militants withsurgically implanted bombs ala The Joker’s henchman in The Dark Knight.  This was the justification for Obama’s diversionary tactics of closing embassies to deflect attention from the NSA thugs. While it was a near vomit-inducing experience I subjected myself to watching the segment from the day that the poor gassed children were appearing on every state media propaganda outlet. During the show’s broadcast on Wednesday Engel was in rare form. This excerpt from the transcript was spewed out with a straight face while Maddow tut-tutted and even invoked the termWMD so as to put an exclamation point onto every shameless morsel of emotional pornography:

It seems to be a very important story, and we’ve spoken to doctors and members of the Syrian opposition who are in these affected areas and they have expressed no doubt whatsoever that something awful happened. They believe a chemical weapon attack, those death toll estimates they believe that they are in the higher end 1,000 plus.

But as you’ve been saying time and time again, we’re here in Cairo doing the best we can. The Syrian government does not allow independent access to these areas. They’re not allowing the U.N. weapons inspectors into these areas.

So, based on phone calls, witness accounts, videos we’re piecing together what seems to be an atrocity that took place.

Some of the video you showed, all those toddlers and infants lining up still, apparently dead, you can’t fake that. You can’t convince children to play dead for long periods of time.

There’s just some of the videos you are showing, these are the most sanitized because other videos are so disturbing that they’re not fit for broadcast. But we saw dozens and dozens of children limp, being carried in people’s arms.

In terms of sheer audacity it was right up there with Richard Nixon’s historically dishonest Checkers speech and on a par with the scene in the movie Used Cars where Tobey the dog is trained to play dead by a slimy salesmen in order to generate sympathy and guilt that would cause the prospective buyer to shell out money for an overpriced lemon that would fall apart the minute it was driven off the lot. But Engel, Maddow and the rest of the payrolled liars and charlatans wouldn’t have their gigs in the first place had they any semblance of morality. Just as in the past, as in the build up to the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad all of the state’s presstitutes are reading from the same centrally concocted script. It was announced recently the NBC has rewarded Engel with his own production unit, it will certainly be the current counterpart of The Lie Factory , a shadowy Pentagon office that churned out propaganda to support the Iraq war a decade ago.  When you have tales of dead children it is always simple to gin up support for war, look at what the story that Saddam’s soldiers were tearing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in the run up to Gulf War I did? It was of course later revealed to be false but the bodies were already burning by then so it served the purpose of the establishment at the time.

And all the while the images of the dead cascaded across the telescreens to horrify Americans into lining up to salute Dear Leader and rally around the flag it was a textbook example of the systemic rot of our days of darkness and the downward spiral. As you can probably tell by now I generally have fairly libertarian leanings but I must admit that conservatives are right about the hypocrisy of the liberals. I generally try to tune this sort of stuff off but have a morbid fascination with just how easily that the bleeding heart types are played as schmucks and chumps by the self-serving charlatans who are their idols. There are still far too many who have been buffaloed into actually believing that Barry is some benevolent agent of change. An agent of the devil is more apropos as he is now presiding over the most radical presidency in history. Only not the most radical because he is some sort of communist, socialist, closet Kenyan or Muslim Manchurian candidate as Maddow and Engel’s equally dishonest counterparts would have some believe. No, he is a stone fascist and a war criminal who is stripping away more of American’s civil liberties by the minute, sanctioning the extraction of wealth from the U.S. by rapacious corporations to which offshoring of American jobs to low wage hellholes is like crack cocaine and redistributing wealth upwards to his bankster buddies. His savage henchman Eric Holder and his ruthless Justice Department and the NSA Stasi do the heavy lifting while he is able to float above it all and maintain the illusion that is necessary for the ongoing presidential reality television show.

But war is coming and it is coming soon, it won’t stop at Syria either as reports that Russia is considering a reinforcement of naval forces in the Mediterranean to counter the U.S. escalation. Obama is still royally pissed off over Putin’s granting of asylum to former government contractor Booz Allen turned whistleblower Edward Snowden and let’s hope that his poor governance isn’t accompanied by an itchy trigger finger. With a coming war based on a pack of lies that is about to go live already a recipe for disaster the presence of Russian naval ships turns an already bad situation into something far bigger.

WW III anyone?