U.S. Scores Gold Medal in Sochi Olympic Propaganda

American exceptionalism oozes from the pores of recycled political hacks turned paid pundits, elected war freaks and the state-corporate media parrots as the anti-Russian propaganda spews from every orifice of our corrupt establishment. With the months constant smearing, disinformation campaigns and fear-mongering over imminent terror attacks in Sochi reaching a crescendo by the opening ceremonies the onslaught is vile and ongoing. The Cold War never ended in the minds of a good amount of our sordid political class and their interlocking networks of warmongering think tanks and media outlets whose festering hatred for all that is Russian burst forth anew last year when the reviled Vladimir Putin punked Barry and the boys with his granting of asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, swept in to pounce on a John Kerry gaffe to prevent another Middle Eastern war in Syria and topped it off with a New York Times editorial published on that holy day of September 11^th calling out our very exceptionalism. The Sochi Olympics were naturally going to be payback time for an establishment scorned.

In his Monday column “Diagnosing Sochi Media Coverage: Virulent Russophobia” libertarian Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com excoriates the corrupt careerists, lackeys, presstitutes and stenographers of the putrid U.S. media for their complicity in trashing the Olympics. I excerpt some pieces below:

Any illusions some naïve soul may have had about the objectivity of the US media has been dispelled by their embarrassing performance at the Sochi Olympics: the chorus of whining complaints might as well have been written for them by the US State Department – which, come to think of it, is entirely within the realm of the possible given the imperious tone. The water, the toilets, the hotels – nothing pleases our pampered media divas, whose hatred of all things Russian oozes from between the lines of their "reporting" like pus from an old wound.

All the antipathy we saw aimed at Russia during the cold war years is now being revomited up by the political class, albeit in a new flavor: instead of genuine martyrs like Andrei Sakharov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn being lionized, we see the professional provocateurs of "Pussy Riot" elevated by Western media to the status of "dissident" stars. Why do these heavily made-up show biz types merit our attention? Well, didn’t they desecrate a Russian Orthodox cathedral by stripping off their clothes, screaming obscenities, and insulting parishioners? Clearly this is the type of "dissident" the American media can get behind. (Try that in New York City, ladies, and see what happens.)

Our shameless media is always eager to place itself at the disposal of the State. If it isn’t David Gregory calling for the arrest of Glenn Greenwald, it’s the ubiquitous Richard Engel of NBC "News" – tireless cheerleader of US-sponsored "revolutions" abroad – deliberately downloading a virus onto his computer and then pontificating about how the minute you enter Russia you are bound to be "hacked."

And

Confirming George Orwell’s theory that sport, international games, and militant nationalism are all inextricably intertwined, Sochi is the stage on which the new cold war is being fought. The battlefield is in the column inches given over in the Western media to the alleged shortcomings of Putin’s "Potemkin Village," as the critics are calling it. However, the nature of their complaints – the lack of luxuries to which they feel entitled, and which much of the rest of the world goes largely without – just underscores the utter cluelessness of Western propagandists posing as "reporters." They fail to understand why this makes them look bad to everyone outside of Brooklyn’s hipster precincts and Washington’s tonier neighborhoods.

Raimondo as usual is spot on and his personal bullshit detector always set on high and his willingness to call out American establishment hypocrisy whenever it occurs:  a tireless job in these grim days of the mew American century. That the Olympics are supposed to be a sporting event and entertainment for millions who turn to such distractions to escape the daily drudgery that they are subjected to in a post capitalist corporate state that in many areas has all of the indignities and cruelty of the old Soviet system that our elite punditry so denounce. It is sad that the agents of The Homeland have to once again exploit the games for cheap political gain to bolster their mania for more wars, an uncontrollable urge that borders on that of a pack of pederasts.

While Putin is certainly no saint his counterparts in The Homeland are every bit his equal in terms of repression albeit in a less ostentatious form. Our very own American Stasi, the NSA conducts illegal (at least when it comes to that antiquated and pesky U.S. Constitution) surveillance and data-mining of the domestic population and stores the data for some vague future purpose which will undoubtedly include persecution, interrogations, show trials and according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia even the future rounding up and internment of American citizens. This sort of stuff isn’t on the level of Putin but rather of Stalin and who needs the NKVD when you have the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. The greatest achievement of the rotten domestic lickspittle media during their run towards the Olympic gold for their propaganda is that they are able to foist off Putin as the devil himself while never bothering to mention that we are the ones living in Hell and have been ever since September 11, 2001 the ‘day that changed everything’.

So the state media smear campaign rolls on as lunatics, degenerates and reprobates are trotted out on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit where the trifecta of the deranged anti-Muslim fanatic Peter King continues to insinuate that there will be a terrorist attack, Representative Michael McCaul vows that something will “detonate” and the ubiquitous Mike Rogers blasts the Russians for not sharing intelligence (translation: where is Edward Snowden hiding?) with the U.S. of A. The parallel track is of course the ongoing blasting of Putin for his dismal record on gay rights but what is left out is that there are a number of U.S. states that have laws against homosexuality that are every bit the equal of the Russian boss.  There is however the lack of context, use of false equivalence and just plain lying that is the hallmark of all great propagandists be it Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels or Roger Ailes and his competitors the ability to successfully rise to the pinnacle of historical bullshit artists is both an art and a science.  One needs to look no further than the ongoing coverage of the Winter Olympics which will endure long after the closing ceremonies as a case study in how it’s done.

Here We Go Again: Explosive Toothpaste Alert

With the crown jewel of American cultural decadence that is the Super Bowl now receding into the recesses of the national memory the next great offering up of bread and circuses for the masses will be the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. While the Super Bowl was a national celebration of all that has gone awry in this once great country, in particular the worship of the militaristic security state this edition of the world games presents the establishment with a particularly fine opportunity to traffic in the fear and loathing that have become the coin of the realm. In the sad husk of what used to be (at least in theory) a democracy that was the envy of the world but s now just a desiccated and perverted dystiopa referred to as  the Homeland we shalt now be inundated with a plague of raw propaganda of biblical proportions. The state-corporate media are piling onto the host country as well as its hated leader Vladimir Putin who has been constantly mocked and vilified by the lackeys of the elite ever since that audacious New York Times column that ran on the twelfth anniversary of that most sanctified day questioning the asinine concept that is our blessed American exceptionalism.

The Russians have many problems given the recent spate of terrorist attacks as well as the much sensationalized infiltration of “Black Widow” suicide bombers and according to some accounts the refusal of House of Saud political fixer Prince Bandar bin Sultan (aka Bandar Bush) to guarantee protection for a price. Prince Bandar and the swinish monarchy in The Kingdom are still furious over the abandonment of the latest Middle Eastern war in Syria, jilted by both Putin and Barack Obama and have been caterwauling about it ever since. I tend to put some credence in the accounts of Bandar’s guarantee of Olympic safety as it is no secret that the House of Saud or elements thereof have provided funding to Islamist militant groups, pitting them against the Great Satan to spare them from launching a mass invasion of the opulent palaces of their oppressors. It is also of note that fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers hailed from Prince Bandar’s own homeland.

But I digress. The domestic propaganda machine is set on high with the latest Olympic scare being about toothpaste bombs. This of course is meant for internal consumption in the United States of Kardashian where the populace needs to be kept in a constant state of fear to ensure their continued submission to the NSA Stasi and the police state forces that serve as enforcers of our own increasingly Draconian laws. Having a football free month of full spectrum media dominance with which to hype not only the dangers of Olympic terrorism but also to launch diatribes against all things Russian look for the fear card to be played often and dealt from the bottom of the deck. The tale of the explosive toothpaste is the latest in a line of the type of bullshit that Americans have been bludgeoned with to meekly accept the never ending war on terror. Christ, this is all straight out of the Bush-Cheney textbook, recall the days back when the child fondling, old woman harassing government goons at the TSA staked out their territory by confiscating an ever growing list of personal hygiene items from terrified travelers? Remember that there was once a time when our national airports actually did not old Soviet bloc checkpoints where state sanctioned theft, bullying and other forms of intimidation were enforced. We never had to take our shoes off nor be felt up by thugs nor marched through naked body scanners – the deadly explosive toothpaste bombs of a reminder that we all must sacrifice to remain free.

This week the “two minutes hate” is to be directed at Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak who inflamed the sensitivities of our leadership class daring to opine during news conference last week that the security in Sochi as far as the Russian state being able to guarantee total safety is “the same in Sochi as in Boston” and “For Example, in the United States, at the marathon, people died not so long ago”. OUCH! That has to really smart to have that vodka marinated, star spangled shit sandwich jammed down the throat particulary in the aftermath of the Super Bowl when of all people a (GASP)  “truther” was able to penetrate millions of dollars in paramilitary forces and high tech security to hijack the microphone during game MVP Malcolm Smith’s press conference to deliver his message that 9/11 needs to be investigated. That humiliating breach of the fraud of the security state illustrates what a scam that it all is, the man could have been wearing a suicide bomb and detonated in the middle of the crowd during the freaking game.

Kozak’s comments may have assoles aplenty in full pucker mode but he is spot on and the failure of the trillion dollar NSA all-seeing spy machine to stop two losers from setting off a pressure cooker bomb at the Boston Marathon finish line shows just how much of a lie that it is that the government police state can prevent anything - it is all about money, power and getting over. That Kozak chose to take a poke at Boston has to be especially galling to the chowder heads who after the bombing allowed a huge portion of their city to be put under a de facto state of martial law where black clad paramilitary police squads roamed the streets and conducted unconstitutional, warrantless, house to house searches. That the ever belligerent bad asses of Beantown, heralded as one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution would so easily throw up their hands, cower and kiss the whip had to really fuck with the local psyche. It was all washed away in the exploitation of the bombings though, hijacked by the Red Sox baseball team as a chintzy motiational tactic to power them to a World Series win which was then prompted as the cleansing of a most vile act that was perpetrated upon a city. The whole thing was sickening and as revealing of an American character now bereft of dignity and content to cower in fear at bogeymen invoked by the profiteers who run their government. To think that after the humiliation of the bombing, the further indignity of the rape of their rights by being placed under martial law and then the spectacle of watching the post World Series win pilgrimage of freaks to kiss the street at the finish line was as surreal as it was sickening. Samuel Adams had to be rolling over in his grave over that. 

There is also the ongoing exploitation of another American demographic through the use of disgusting ‘gay baiting’ and the continuing drenched in hypocrisy hectoring of Putin over his less than stellar record towards homosexuals. This is laughable horseshit coming from the Obama administration which has turned the exploitation of the gay community for votes into an art form. It is even more ridiculous when considering that a good numer of American states, largely comprised of  those down behind the cornbread curtain in Dixie have their own onerous laws against homosexuality in one form or the other (all denying personal rights) and the legitimately recognized portions of the American Christian establishment treat gays with the same sort of intolerance and hatred that the Ku Klux Klan espoused towards blacks or for that matter the establishment expresses towards all who do not heel to them.  You know, Jesus Christ never once denounced gays but he sure as hell preached many a mean sermon against hypocrisy of the type that The Homeland is drenched in.

The Olympic closing ceremony is to be on February 23rd making the next few weeks the perfect opportunity to those who want to get off the grid for awhile and just tune out all of the noise.

Obama's Dilemma: How to Best Kill Snowden

Barack Obama has a problem, with his heralded Friday announcement of NSA "reforms" being just the latest bill of goods foisted off on a doomed public by a professional con artist it should now be crystal clear that there will be no attempts to reign in the American Stasi. What Obama now has to do is to find an acceptable way to eliminate the source of the surveillance state's problems which is of course former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden from the equation. Barry's dilemma is that with Snowden continuing to receive public support - including what is likely a higher approval level than the pope of hope himself - he can't risk assassinating the man and turning him into a martyr.

While an apprehension of Snowden followed by torture and a huge spectacle of a public show trial that would send a message to any who may have similar ideas would have just a short while back been ideal that is just not going to happen. This is especially so now that even the naive idea of serious oversight let alone meaningful reform of the rogue spying behemoth has been dismissed by El Presidente as though he were flicking a fly off of his collar. With the worst stuff yet to come out and it is going to make what has thus far been revealed look like amateur hour the need to eliminate him as well as others is imperative for the cancer that is eating this country from within to avoid any chance at being cut out. What has yet to break is of course still the subject of much speculation but a recent piece by writer and historian Alfred McCoy (The Politics of Heroin) posted at the website Tom Dispatch under the headline that  "It's About Blackmail, Not National Security" has finally interjected a topic that has been obvious about all of this surveillance from the get go.  McCoy's piece, itself tiled "Surveillance and Scandal" reveals at least one of those functions of the NSA and it's tentacles that is hidden under the star spangled facade of what has always been the phony war on terror.

The escalation of the anti-Snowden smears, especially in the last month by such enemies of the state as the preening little Nazis like Michael Hayden and the fanatical House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers who just this week has pretty much accused Snowden of being a Russian spy without a shred of proof which was dutifully promoted by the corrupt state media as fact. Rogers, who is hell bent on destroying every last shred of American privacy is a fascist thug who on a good day does a hell of a good Reinhard Heydrich impersonation has been given to us all by the fine voters in Michigan’s Eight Congressional district.  One would hope that these people will suddenly rise up come November and oust this menace to society and common decency from office but as is so often with these swine they are ensconced for perpetuity in gerrymandered districts and their ability to exert enormous influence of the country at large despite only being a true representative of a very small amount of actual voters. Like Heydrich, Rogers seems like he would do "Night and Fog" very well and as a former FBI agent his jones for unconstitutional voyeurism is only slightly behind that of the maniacal J.Edgar Hoover.

Snowden understandably is scared, you don't spit in Leviathan's face and get away with it. This is especially so when he is one who spiked the ball, proclaimed victory and called out both Rogers and the morally bereft sow Dianne Feinstein aka DiFi for not doing their jobs when it comes to oversight of the surveillance industrial complex. The hydra of malevolence will always rapidly reconfigure itself, especially when it has the greatest propaganda machine in human history, blackmail cards to play on all who have been spied upon and black ops specialists whose primary reason for existence is to follow orders without question, search and destroy and terminate with extreme prejudice. Obama already has become the first U.S. President to openly authorize extrajudicial killings of American citizens and Snowden has now obviously made this very, very personal.

It is of much interest that as the Winter Olympics in Sochi are increasingly becoming the target of what will be some incredibly savage terrorist attacks, the hype today is over the "Black Widow" suicide bombers but notable also that the U.S. government has now ordered planes and warships sent to the Black Sea to "assist" the hated Putin regime in managing the "terrorist" problem. Perhaps if some accounts are true that the Russian leader is even now regretting not taking Bandar Bush up on his alleged offer for in exchange for Putin's cooperation in the preempted war on Syria. It is however a very ominous sign, especially for the cornered whistleblower that Rogers is not only engaging in the promulgating of talking points that he pulled out of his ass about Snowden being Putin's spy but also engaged in the following exchange with CNN's Candy Crowley on the Sunday morning propaganda circuit:

ROGERS:  Yeah.  I am very concerned about the security status of the Olympics.  I do believe that the Russian government needs to be more cooperative with the United States when it comes to the security of the games.  We have found a departure of cooperation that's very concerning to me.

CROWLEY:  Can you tell me what a departure of cooperation is?  What does that mean?  What are they doing?

ROGERS:  Well, think about the problems they've had.  So they've had several bombings.  They disrupted plots.  They've now moved some 30,000 armed troops down to the region.  That tells you that their level of concern is great, but we don't seem to be getting all of the information we need to protect our athletes in the games.  I think this needs to change, and it should change soon.  This is not going to be a political problem for the Russians to share, although they apparently don't think so.  It will be a problem–

CROWLEY:  They don't want to share their intelligence with U.S. intelligence.

ROGERS:  That's correct.  So what we're finding is they aren't giving us the full story about what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups, the terrorist groups who have had some success, are they still plotting?  There's a missing gap, and you never want that when you go into something I think as important as the Olympic Games and the security of the athletes, and the participants and those who come to watch the games.

CROWLEY:  Just quickly if I can, if that does not change, would you worry about U.S. participation in the Olympics?

ROGERS:  If I don't see a higher level of cooperation, I'm concerned today.  I don't think anything would abate that concern short of full cooperation from the Russian security services.

Cooperation likely including the whereabouts of one Edward Snowden whose remaining lifespan at this point may very well be measured in weeks.

Calling Prince Bandar: Russia’s Pre-Olympic Terrorism Problem

With the recent spate of terrorist bombings threatening to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin's international showcase Sochi Winter Olympics it would be advisable for the Russian leader to arrange an urgent sit down with Prince Bandar bin Sultan aka Bandar Bush. It has been reported that during the summer when the Saudi intelligence chief and former ambassador to the United States in order to obtain Putin's backing for the preempted attack on Syria issued a guarantee of safety from terrorism for the international sports festival. The leaked diplomatic reports of the then secret meeting stated that Bandar allegedly told Putin that “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us”. He also reportedly offered up a huge oil deal that was extremely favorable to the Russians. Putin became furious over the House of Saud's extortion and rejected the offer/implied threat.

According to a piece in Consortium News entitled The Russian-Saudi Showdown at Sochi:

I was told by a source close to the Russian government that this mix of overt inducements and implied threats infuriated Putin who barely kept his anger in check through the end of the meeting with Bandar. Putin viewed Bandar’s offer to protect the Sochi Olympics as something akin to a Mafia don shaking down a shopkeeper for protection money by saying, “nice little business you got here, I’d hate to see anything happen to it.”

Putin then redoubled his support for the Syrian government in response to Bandar’s blend of bribes and warnings. The source said Russia also issued its own thinly veiled threats against the Saudis. The Saudis may have substantial “soft power” – with their oil and money – but Russia has its own formidable “hard power,” including a huge military, the source said.

Months later the bombs started going off in the city of Volgograd triggering a wave of fear, dread and the inevitable crackdown by Putin as he has unleashed the full power of the authoritarian state for a huge crackdown and has vowed to "annihilate" those responsible for the attacks. While it has yet to be determined who actually is responsible for blowing up a railway station and a bus as well as killing at least 34 people and maiming more - it is as mysterious as who really gassed those civilians in Ghouta - it would be hard to blame Putin for not ordering his military to enter the target coordinates for the Saudi royal palace in Riyadh into hundreds of missiles.

In addition to threatening the winter games and spoiling Putin's recent public relations offensive the bombs resonate as a political message in that Volgograd was formerly known as Stalingrad, the site of one of the bloodiest battles in human history as well as Russia's greatest triumph. It was in this very city that the Nazi war machine was delivered a devastating blow from which it never recovered as after bombings reduced the place to rubble and civilians engaged the German army in savage hand to hand guerrilla warfare. Then the full fury of the Russian winter set in and Stalin's armies were able to encircle and subsequently destroy the invaders delivering a humiliating defeat to Hitler that he never recovered from. This is going to become very, very personal to Putin, especially if the bombings continue.

The corrupt American state media is doing its part in fear-mongering and spreading disinformation in a not at all subtle attempt to embarrass Putin and undermine the Olympics. In the trademark Orwellian establishment of villains someone named Doku Umarov, the ‘Emir of Caucasus' is being blamed. This conjures up memories of the first days after those attacks on September 11, 2001 'the day that changed everything' when the media trotted out Emanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden and the one eyed Mullah Omar to whip up the sheep into a nationalistic frenzy and justify launching a war of choice on Iran, a country that posed no threat to the U.S. and had zero to do with the attacks despite the incessant brainwashing. Fox News of course leads the pack with "Russian terror attacks could be chilling prelude to Olympic violence, say experts" - very likely the same paid think tank spinners and military flacks. Considering that Fox doesn't have the broadcast rights the network will continue to exploit the bombings to undermine Putin and of course find some way to blame everything on Obama, probably due to his backing out of his end of the deal to bomb Damascus over the ginned up gas attacks.

The Obama administration, while offering "security" help to Russia to help protect the Sochi games has to be more than a bit delighted behind the scenes at the prospect of embarrassing Putin. Obama already threw an ugly tantrum over the Russian leader's offer of temporary amnesty to former government contractor turned NSA leaker Edward Snowden and he would likely relish the prospect of offering up his crackerjack fascists at the NSA to assist with mass surveillance. If this is the case it would probably be a cover for going after Snowden and either rendering him for torture and life in a CIA black site prison or a drone strike.

As for the Saudis, one of the largest supporters of terrorism in the world there assuredly will be some serious payback in their future if Putin ever is able to find a link to the attacks after his meeting with Bandar Bush. You can say one thing about Russia is that it is NOT America where the country where fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers hailed from yet somehow remained a trusted ally.