American Warlord: Obama's Empire of Blood

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

Bob Dylan – Man of Peace

Barack H. Obama was sworn as the forty-fourth president of the United States on a bite ass cold day in Washington in January of 2009 riding high upon a wave of hope and change. The nation had become war-weary after the eight year gauntlet of brutality and horrors that was the Bush-Cheney regime and their neocon foreign policy and Obama was to wash away the sins, end the wars and restore the rule of law. Instead Mr. Obama not only did not hold his war criminal predecessor and his minions accountable but refined their programs including the launching of a robotic fleet of airborne murder machines that are the squadrons of civilian killing drones. He somewhat drew down the US occupation in Iraq although the country has become a roiling cauldron of violence now thanks to the destabilization from the invasion and is engaged in the smoke and mirrors that will end the US presence in Afghanistan but the man has now tasted blood and seems to like it.

It really didn't take long for the latest war criminal to occupy the imperial throne at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to pick up the baton of his predecessors. After Obama 'won' his exalted Nobel Peace Prize for essentially NOT being George W. Bush and coming off of a drubbing inflicted by race-baiting Republicans in the 2010 mid-terms that cost Dear Leader's feckless Democratic party the House in that famous "shellacking" he decided to take the advice of arch neocon Michael Ledeen:

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

That crappy little country was Libya.

The moment the first explosions rocked Libya I knew that Barack Obama had just locked down another four years in the White House. This was his initiation, his right of passage, just like laying in a mock coffin and sucking off upperclassmen in the Skull and Bones tomb (Secretary of State John Kerry is an alumni) he joined the big club. By the very definition of the term, every US President is a war criminal and our very own proud owner of the Nobel Peace Prize staked his claim, pissed his name into the snow and has been inclined to pursue the wars of the American Empire with vigor ever since. This is a guy who has a fucking kill list delivered to him with breakfast every day and seems to relish it.

Prior to hitting Libya and ultimately inciting local thugs to viciously and cruelly murder former US friendly despot Muammar Gaddafi there was the killing of Osama bin Laden that elicited grotesque displays of flag-waving triumphalism in America. Obama was the man because  it took the most powerful military machine in the history of the galaxy over ten years to find the alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks who was more than once reported to be cave-hopping with a dialysis machine but Obama to much celebration ordered the hit team to storm that safe house in Pakistan. The jubilation at the alleged kill far outweighed the perception from many that taking out Osama was more like a mafia hit, he was after all a servant of the Empire in the proxy war against the hated Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Incidentally and take this for what it's worth because I offer up no suggestions, allegations or theories but the body was never seen outside of a small circle and the photos of the killing of the bad ass bogeyman are a bigger state secret than who killed John F. Kennedy.

But I digress...

Obama having been reelected rather easily (who wouldn't be if they faced the thoroughly inept Mitt Romney) has in his second term become hellbent at proving that he is the baddest fucking gangster on Earth and this is apparent in the shameful, US sponsored bloodletting in Ukraine.  The events leading up to the coup in Kiev that toppled the then democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovych - a corrupt bastard although he has nothing on western leaders when it comes to that - and installed a ready to go puppet leader in waiting in Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk which were backed by notorious thugs from Ukranian fascists Svoboda and Right Sektor were steeped in Obama's need to win a dick measuring contest with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. There was first the stinging indignity of Russia's granting of asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden - it's one thing for Republicans to tell Obama to eat shit and quite another for a goddamned Rooskie to to likewise and particularly if the refugee protected has the goods on Obama's Stasi. Then came Putin's saving Obama from himself over going to war with Syria on trumped up evidence over a to this day mysterious Sarin gas attack in the Damascus suburbs, this inflamed the neocons embedded within the administration as well as Kerry and they have been likely pushing all of Obama's buttons since.

The grand disaster of all is what continues to unfold in Ukraine and more so that what appear to be paramilitary death squads and packs of fascist and neo-Nazi thugs along with the coup government's military rolling into the east for a reign of terror of which the BEST result would be a bloody civil war. The violence has continued to escalate too since that Odessa trade union hall was set ablaze by US sanctioned goons and yet the US state-corporate media still refuses to acknowledge the composition of the forces deployed by the puppet regime in Kiev - had such a thing been done then the Obama administration may have barred the offending organization and individuals from that garish festival of pigs that was the White House Correspondent's Association Dinner over the weekend. While the majority of Americans continue to be lied to on a daily basis by the establishment media the bulk of honest reportage is either provided by the alternative or foreign media. Consortium News and Robert Parry have been of particular help with the ongoing coverage of the deteriorating situation. I excerpt from the latest "Ukraine's 'Dr. Strangelove' Reality":

As much as the coup regime in Ukraine and its supporters want to project an image of Western moderation, there is a “Dr. Strangelove” element that can’t stop the Nazism from popping up from time to time, like when the Peter Sellers character in the classic movie can’t keep his right arm from making a “Heil Hitler” salute.

This brutal Nazism surfaced again on Friday when right-wing toughs in Odessa attacked an encampment of ethnic Russian protesters driving them into a trade union building which was then set on fire with Molotov cocktails. As the building was engulfed in flames, some people who tried to flee were chased and beaten, while those trapped inside heard the Ukrainian nationalists liken them to black-and-red-striped potato beetles called Colorados, because those colors are used in pro-Russian ribbons.

“Burn, Colorado, burn” went the chant.

As the fire worsened, those dying inside were serenaded with the taunting singing of the Ukrainian national anthem. The building also was spray-painted with Swastika-like symbols and graffiti reading “Galician SS,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalist army that fought alongside the German Nazi SS in World War II, killing Russians on the eastern front.

The death by fire of dozens of people in Odessa recalled a World War II incident in 1944 when elements of a Galician SS police regiment took part in the massacre of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, which had been a refuge for Jews and was protected by Russian and Polish partisans. Attacked by a mixed force of Ukrainian police and German soldiers on Feb. 28, hundreds of townspeople were massacred, including many locked in barns that were set ablaze.

The legacy of World War II – especially the bitter fight between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and ethnic Russians from the east seven decades ago – is never far from the surface in Ukrainian politics. One of the heroes celebrated during the Maidan protests in Kiev was Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose name was honored in many banners including one on a podium where Sen. John McCain voiced support for the uprising to oust elected President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was in eastern Ukraine.

During World War II, Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, a radical paramilitary movement that sought to transform Ukraine into a racially pure state. OUN-B took part in the expulsion and extermination of thousands of Jews and Poles.

Though most of the Maidan protesters in 2013-14 appeared motivated by anger over political corruption and by a desire to join the European Union, neo-Nazis made up a significant number. These storm troopers from the Right Sektor and Svoboda party decked out some of the occupied government buildings with Nazi insignias and even a Confederate battle flag, the universal symbol of white supremacy.

Then, as the protests turned violent from Feb. 20-22, the neo-Nazis surged to the forefront. Their well-trained militias, organized in 100-man brigades called “the hundreds,” led the final assaults against police and forced Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives.

In the days after the coup, as the neo-Nazi militias effectively controlled the government, European and U.S. diplomats scrambled to help the shaken parliament put together the semblance of a respectable regime, although four ministries, including national security, were awarded to the right-wing extremists in recognition of their crucial role in ousting Yanukovych.

Seeing No Nazis

Since February, virtually the entire U.S. news media has cooperated in the effort to play down the neo-Nazi role, dismissing any mention of this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Stories in the U.S. media delicately step around the neo-Nazi reality by keeping out relevant context, such as the background of national security chief Andriy Parubiy, who founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, blending radical Ukrainian nationalism with neo-Nazi symbols. Parubiy was commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense forces.”

When the neo-Nazi factor is mentioned in the mainstream U.S. press, it is usually to dismiss it as nonsense, such as an April 20 column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who visited his ancestral home, the western Ukrainian town of Karapchiv, and portrayed its residents as the true voice of the Ukrainian people.

“To understand why Ukrainians are risking war with Russia to try to pluck themselves from Moscow’s grip, I came to this village where my father grew up,” he wrote. “Even here in the village, Ukrainians watch Russian television and loathe the propaganda portraying them as neo-Nazi thugs rampaging against Russian speakers.

“‘If you listen to them, we all carry assault rifles; we’re all beating people,’ Ilya Moskal, a history teacher, said contemptuously.”

In an April 17 column from Kiev, Kristof wrote that what the Ukrainians want is weapons from the West so they can to go “bear-hunting,” i.e. killing Russians. “People seem to feel a bit disappointed that the United States and Europe haven’t been more supportive, and they are humiliated that their own acting government hasn’t done more to confront Russian-backed militants. So, especially after a few drinks, people are ready to take down the Russian Army themselves.”

The rest of the Parry piece is here and his site Consortium News not only continually produces great stories but there is also a huge archive, please visit and support his work because it is of great value in this rapidly closing society. You can bet that Parry will never be invited to the White House Press Correspondent's Association Dinner.

The Obama administration is wallowing in lies up to their asses over what is going on in Ukraine, constantly issuing threats against Putin, leveling economic sanctions, bullying the EU satellites into economic reprisals that in the long run will damage their own people more than Russia. Then despite the constant accusations of Putin's meddling it is now out that there are CIA and FBI agents assisting with the counterinsurgency campaign to protect the unelected puppet government. As of this morning the situation on the ground becomes more violent and now even the German foreign minister is warning of war. Having failed to bait Putin into sending Russian forces into Ukraine - and it is suspiciously looking like that may have been the intent - the neocons, having failed in the original putsch to take the Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea may just be content to destabilize Ukraine entirely. It is all just a sick fucking game to these people who should have been discredited long ago instead of attaching themselves to their latest host in the White House.

Not surprisingly, as of this morning Obama has yet to denounce the thugs that burned down that building in Odessa, don't hold your breath waiting for it either.

The Fat Man Grovels for Shelly Adelson's Dirty Money

The signs of our now fully decayed system of democracy are evident just about everywhere that one looks the days. From the ongoing travesty of the Obama administration and the neocon forced march into the jaws of what could be World War III with their ongoing pursuit of the head of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the garish displays of greed and political fixing that has now overtaken anything that occurs in the voting booth. The latter of these would be the disgusting orgy of political fecklessness that was the Republican Jewish Coalition parade of political whores that is taking place in sin city. The parade of aspiring Republicans jostling for the money of the grand chiseler that is casino magnate Sheldon Adelson in which they prostrate themselves in front of a man whose true loyalties lie outside of our domestic borders is a shameful exhibit of garishness of which there are few equals.

Adelson, the ultra-right wing Zionist billionaire who counts among his personal friends the lunatic Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right up there with the phony libertarian Koch Brothers and Wall Street bloodsucker Paul Singer when it comes to Republican party sugar daddies. I by no means undertake this diatribe without blame for the equally disgusting Democrats who have their own money machine to which they similarly prostitute themselves out to but the for sheer spectacle it just doesn’t get any worse than the GOP. Desperate to repel the likes of Rand Paul and Justin Amash as well as the growing libertarian influence within the ‘big tent’ the gaggle of aspirants to engage in the coming political scrum with the queen in waiting Hillary Rodham-Clinton to claim the office that will be vacated by the hated Barack Obama come January of 2017 is a carnival of perversion without equal in America.

Adelson pissed away a fortune gambling on Republican losers in 2012 including plowing tens of millions into the always futile presidential run of one Newton Leroy Gingrich, the philandering fascist dwarf whose big ideas including going to the moon turned him into a mockery. Adelson then continued to gamble heavily on the doomed horse Mitt Romney, he of the White Horse Prophecy who in a winnable election against a loser like Obama still managed to crap the magic Mormon underwear.  Adelson is nothing if not tenacious but as there is no such thing as immortality that fat Hebrew toad might as well spend as much of his loot as possible before taking the dirt nap.  Other than dodging accountability for his casino gambling empire there is one thing that old Shelly wants most of all and that is to have the US do Israel’s dirty work by attacking Tehran and turning it into the largest glass surface on Earth. The line of those who crawled up on their bellies to the kingmaker was filled with the undignified types who would gladly do exactly that if they could land the support of the rotten old bastard. 

Shelly and the Shellbacks

I recall a certain vomit-inducing exercise from back in my days when I served in the United States Navy – during a thing that was called military service that none of those fucking vile pricks on display can claim to have participated in – becoming a Shellback. This refers to the rite of passage of sailors who have been on a ship that has crossed the equator and despite the thoroughly disgusting and repulsive nature of the festivities is a thing which puts one in an exalted status.  I excerpt the following from Wikipedia:

The two-day event (evening and day) is a ritual in which previously inducted crew members (Trusty Shellbacks) are organized into a "Court of Neptune" to induct the Slimy Pollywogs into "the mysteries of the Deep".[citation needed] Physical hardship, in keeping with the spirit of the initiation, are tolerated, and each Pollywog is expected to endure a standard initiation rite in order to become a Shellback.[citation needed] Depending on the Ocean or Fleet AOR, there can be variations in the rite. Some rites have discussed a role reversal as follows, but this is not always a normal feature, and may be dependent on whether a small number of Shellbacks exist to conduct the initiation.

The transition flows from established order to the controlled "chaos" of the Pollywog Revolt, the beginnings of re-order in the initiation rite as the fewer but experienced enlisted crew converts the Wogs through physical tests, then back to, and thereby affirming, the pre-established order of officers and enlisted.

The eve of the equatorial crossing is called Wog Day and, as with many other night-before rituals, is a mild type of reversal of the day to come. Wogs—all of the uninitiated—are allowed to capture and interrogate any shellbacks they can find (e.g., tying them up, cracking eggs or pouring aftershave lotion on their heads).  The wogs are made very aware of the fact that it will be much harder on them if they do anything like this.

After crossing the line, Pollywogs receive subpoenas [4] to appear before King Neptune and his court (usually including his first assistant Davy Jones and her Highness Amphitrite and often various dignitaries, who are all represented by the highest ranking seamen), who officiate at the ceremony, which is often preceded by a beauty contest of men dressing up as women, each department of the ship being required to introduce one contestant in swimsuit drag. Afterwards, some wogs may be "interrogated" by King Neptune and his entourage, and the use of "truth serum" (hot sauce + after shave) and whole uncooked eggs put in the mouth. During the ceremony, the Pollywogs undergo a number of increasingly embarrassing ordeals (wearing clothing inside out and backwards; crawling on hands and knees on nonskid-coated decks; being swatted with short lengths of firehose; being locked in stocks and pillories and pelted with mushy fruit; being locked in a water coffin of salt-water and bright green sea dye (fluorescent sodium salt); crawling through chutes or large tubs of rotting garbage; kissing the Royal Baby's belly coated with axle grease, hair chopping, etc.), largely for the entertainment of the Shellbacks.

Once the ceremony is complete, a Pollywog receives a certificate [5] declaring his new status. Another rare status is the Golden Shellback, a person who has crossed the Equator at the 180th meridian (International Date Line). The rarest Shellback status is that of the Emerald Shellback (USA), or Royal Diamond Shellback (Commonwealth), which is received after crossing the Equator at the prime meridian. When a ship must cross the Equator reasonably close to one of these meridians, the ship's captain will typically plot a course across the Golden X so that the ship's crew can be initiated as Golden or Emerald/Royal Diamond Shellbacks.

When my US Navy ship, a Hull Class destroyer went through this traumatic yet ultimately cathartic ceremony I recall that our version of the "Royal Baby" was the nastiest, dirtiest senior petty officer on the ship and that the pollywogs were forced to suck a nut out of the fat slob's belly button I was able to skip that part only because when I got there I vomited all over the obese bastard and it was such a mess that there was a good deal of confusion until they got it all cleaned up. I do still have my Shellback card though which along with an x-rated business card from the legendary Subic City brothel "Marilyn's" is a prized possession to this day.

Leading the parade of those who would suck the peanut out of Shelly’s obese hairy navel was one New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who was fresh off of being “cleared” of any involvement in the Bridgegate controversy by his own internal investigation. It was the equivalent of Paulie Walnuts and Silvio Dante doing an internal audit of the Bada Bing Club but the lickspittle media will swallow it whole. Porky Soprano had to apologize profusely for having once dared to refer to the land which Israel has stolen from the Palestinians as “occupied territories”, such is the aversion to the truth in this country circa 2014. After his renouncing his most horrid transgression of telling the truth Christie waddled back into the good graces of Adelson and assumed his place with the rest of the con artists crawling through the swill to the foot of his throne. Another prominent governor joining Christie is the union-busting Koch whore Wisconsin kingpin Scott Walker, not sure how well that his dallying with Adelson will go over with the brothers Charles and David but an opportunistic piece of shit like Walker covers all of his bases and like a snake is possessed of zero loyalty.

One of the more troubling aspect of American politics in the neocon dominated era of post September 11, 2001 is the fixation on what benefits the state of Israel – or more appropriately that extremist element that has manifested itself in their government – to the detriment of what is good for America. It is not arguable that the Middle East wars of aggression undertaken in consistence with the PNAC/Clean Break neocon doctrines as well as the ongoing US defense of Israeli human rights abuses only serves to create more enemies for America. Former George H.W. Bush administration Secretary of State and Chief of Staff  James Baker once infamously remarked "fuck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway" and while this was probably just a bit too inclusive it was back in the day when the Republican party didn't turn the recognition of the state of Israel into a cheap and perilous partisan issue. This may be good business for the surveillance security military industrial complex that is just drooling over the prospects of ‘another 9/11’ for wealth beyond their wildest dreams but it is bad policy and dangerous as well. It serves neither America or Israel wall and there will come a day when those who like Adelson and the neocons who have sowed the seeds of discontent will reap the whirlwind.

As the late H.L. Mencken once pegged it: "Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods" and it was ALL for sale at the Venetian Resort over the weekend.

(Image: Reuters)

Provocateur McCain Returns to Kiev

Senator John McCain, the man whose adoration by the US state-corporate media is second only to his proclivity to turn up as an agitator in whichever country happens to be the next stop on the neocon PNAC world domination tour has showed up in Kiev again this weekend. With the massively over-hyped imminent Russian invasion only hours away according to US and western propaganda organs - because Putin is just like Hitler you know - the pathological media whore is hellbent on working the crowds after the western backed coup d'etat that ousted democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovych. It wasn't that long ago that the Arizona Senator who was recently censured by his own state's Republican party for being too "liberal" (although his warmongering doesn't seem to bother them) was in the Ukrainian capital city where he was pictured schmoozing with the vile facsists and neo-Nazis who provided the muscle for the toppling of the legitimate government. While his public relations staff, including a woman named Elizabeth O'Bagy whose claim to fame was being outed as a paid liar over her credentials as an 'expert' during the selling of the preempted war on Syria will likely not make the same mistake as having the rotten old bastard photographed next to Oleh Tyahnybok of the Svodoba party again.

While setting the stage for what will end up being the greatest US foreign policy debacle since Iraq (another joint venture of the neocons and McCain) the corrupt media in this country has done a masterful job in brainwashing the sheeple into the acceptance of Cold War: The Sequel. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll a whopping 72 percent of Americans see Russia as an "adversary", a "record" number according to what more of an authoritative source than NBC News. What the low-information types who always swallow the lies of the state and the propagandists that serve it is that when considering that the Wall Street Journal was acquired by unprincipled mogul Rupert Murdoch what the poll essentially is as a joint venture between MSNBC and FOX and we all know what sort of unbiased viewers are attracted to that type of swill.  Still despite the fraudulent narrative that is pumped out Americans are being suckered into another quagmire - it almost worked last summer with the bogus Assad gassed his own people tale coupled with the war porn video of dying children in Syria until Russian leader Vladimir Putin saved Obama and the US from another self-inflicted wound. The neocons were furious over that one being blown up and turned their focus to the destabilization of Ukraine and a proxy war with Putin instead.

McCain seems to revel in particular in showing up wherever he can to cause more problems for the Obama administration and pushing for the renewed animosity between the US and Russia over the Ukraine coup is just the venue of the moment. The dyspeptic one just had a scathing op ed piece published in the New York Times entitled “Obama Has Made America Look Weak” from which I excerpt:

For five years, Americans have been told that “the tide of war is receding,” that we can pull back from the world at little cost to our interests and values. This has fed a perception that the United States is weak, and to people like Mr. Putin, weakness is provocative.

That is how Mr. Putin viewed the “reset” policy. United States missile defense plans were scaled back. Allies in Eastern Europe and Georgia were undercut. NATO enlargement was tabled. A new strategic arms reduction treaty required significant cuts by America, but not Russia. Mr. Putin gave little. Mr. Obama promised “more flexibility.”

Mr. Putin also saw a lack of resolve in President Obama’s actions beyond Europe. In Afghanistan and Iraq, military decisions have appeared driven more by a desire to withdraw than to succeed. Defense budgets have been slashed based on hope, not strategy. Iran and China have bullied America’s allies at no discernible cost. Perhaps worst of all, Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons in Syria, and nothing happened to him.

AND

More broadly, we must rearm ourselves morally and intellectually to prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin’s world from befalling more of humanity. We may wish to believe, as President Obama has said, that we are not “in competition with Russia.” But Mr. Putin believes Russia is in competition with us, and pretending otherwise is an unrealistic basis for a great nation’s foreign policy.

Three American presidents have sought to cooperate with Mr. Putin where our interests converge. What should be clear now, and should have been clear the last time he tore apart a country, is that our interests do not converge much. He will always insist on being our rival.

 The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime. And eventually, Russians will come for Mr. Putin in the same way and for the same reasons that Ukrainians came for Viktor F. Yanukovych.

How does this guy continue to get away with this bullshit? He is out there publicly advocating an overthrow of Putin in what is presented as the nation’s flagship newspaper and he doesn’t get called on it. Why is a Senator with a long history of derangement allowed to hijack the system and become the defacto voice for American foreign policy? Jesus Christ, enough of this American whup-ass militarist garbage already.  While I personally am of the opinion that Senator McCain has truly never gotten over being beaten in the 2008 presidential race by a black man (and an unqualified one at that) he would still be selling more war to a country whose true reason for decline and ultimately collapse is precisely because that we are indoctrinated to believe in a world filled with those who “hate us for our freedoms” (we really are not that free if you take a serious look around) and that military spending must be constantly increased to record levels to finance the fight against the enemy. That enemy is now shape-shifting from the mad mullahs and ayatollahs and the menace of al-Qaeda (thanks to guys like McCain we now arm them again) to the Russians.

The Cold War after all made one hell of a lot of coin for the blood barters and combined with the now oh so close to being back in power neocons there will be plenty of money to be made while the poor dupes on our star-spangled lemming farm will continue to face a declining standard of living to fund the war machine.  In a sardonically humorous sort of way it is actually rather amusing to see how the neocons are now goading Obama into a confrontation with Russia the same way that Cheney and Rummy pushed George W. Bush’s buttons to manipulate into the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires. With Dubya it was always that Oedipal thing and with the narcissist Obama being punked by Putin over the amnesty provided to former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden after he shined a light into the massive nest of cockroaches at American Stasi HQ in Fort Meade is Barry’s weak spot. McCain and the neocons will now keep rubbing salt into the open wound of Obama's violated pride in order to foment that which they lust for which is permanent war.

Despite “Shutdown” Pentagon Recalls Workers

As the phony government shutdown enters week two it becomes increasingly obvious that it is just another of the big lies of our corrupt big government.  The announcement that between 300,000 to 400,000 civilian employees of the war machine would be coming back to work on Monday after a nice week of vacation is confirmation of the systemic rot. This thing has always been a farce, another ginned up fake crisis that gives the professional shills in the state-corporate media fodder while the empire teeters on the brink of collapse. The absurd pissing match over passing a budget attached to the revocation of Obamacare - the law that corporations are salivating over as they now have the ability to screw employees and their dependents with impunity as they jettison health insurance costs is just for show. The real business of the United States in 2013 is more than ever war, this was evident when Barry signed the Pay Our Military Act into law last week ensuring that the imperial stormtroopers will be at the ready for whatever war (Syria, Iran) is next on the agenda and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was never going to give up the hundreds of thousands of parasites that provide support at the Pentagon. As Randolph Bourne once famously remarked, "war is the health of the state" and there has never in history been one as dependent on the global killing machine as the American Empire.  The reverence for our blessed troops in this country is quite possibly the most telling example of just how fascist that this place has become. In a nice touch and just because it plays well the the rubes and easily manipulated base the House has passed a bill to bring back military chaplains because, god just loves war. Hallelujah.

The partial government closures will also not save money either despite how the wailing about spending cuts, in the true bipartisanship that always is possible when it comes to cover your own ass time congress is currently working on making sure that all of those on their vacations will be able to retroactively collect their back pay.  It was just way too obvious of a scam considering congress wasn't being made to cough up one thin dime of their taxpayer supported lives of living large and having all of their benefits paid for while the general population is thrown to the wolves.  Speaker John Boehner, one of the most disingenuous and shameless of politicians that I have ever seen, one whose ability to break into well-timed crying jags whenever on camera during his pre-speaker days  delivered the sound bite that "this isn't  some damn game" on Friday as the spinning continued.  Boehner of course is lying, his fake outrage is just a part of the scrum between the jackasses and elephants and the trophy is winning the media advantage going into the 2014 mid-term elections where all of the victorious assclowns will be able to hold onto their positions of privilege, power and a life of stealing money from hard working Americans.  It is all a game and one that honest, decent people trying to make a living are losing because of the entitled servants of the elite within the beltway and the insatiably bloodthirsty war machine that President Eisenhower warned of over a half-century ago:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

We all can see today how that turned out - "alert and knowledgeable citizenry"? That's just not the way we roll here in the Homeland.

WHOOPS

Perhaps I was a bit overly dismissive about John McCain’s little bitch Lindsey Graham’s hysterics about the possible nuking of Charleston harbor while they were pushing the case for attacking Syria. Graham’s rhetoric  has at least some basis in history although it was the idiotic government of the United States that nearly nuked his state’s northern neighbor back in 1961. In an amazing exclusive story that just came out in The Guardian it was reported that two four-megaton bombs were accidentally dropped near Goldsboro, NC back on January 23, 1961. three days after the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. The Guardian story is based upon a once secret document obtained by writer Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act while researching his new book Command and Control.  The book is about the history of the U.S. nuclear program and documents a number of close calls that could have were they to have going the other way resulted in the real version of those smoking guns as mushroom clouds that were used to sell the Iraq disaster. The North Carolina incident would have been devastating for the Eastern seaboard had the last of four safety switches did what it was supposed to do after the other three failed.

The bombs were onboard a B-52 that underwent some sort of structural failure in mid-air therefore dumping the bombs – each of which was 260 times more powerful than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima - onto North Carolina. It is a very fortunate thing  for all of us today that the disaster was averted because the war-mongering freaks in the defense establishment would certainly have blamed it on the Russians setting off a global nuclear holocaust. These were the days when the legendary General Curtis ‘Bombs  Away’  LeMay, a man who had an absolute hard-on for a first strike on the Soviet Union and had the self-inflicted nuclear wound actually manifested itself he and his fellow hawks would have surely used the opportunity to send in the bombers. LeMay was the basis for the George C. Scott character, General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove and the prototype for the militarist maniacs of the future including of course a certain crazed Senator from Arizona who currently has his panties in a twist over starting a bombing campaign in Syria. Russian and China would eventually be dragged in and we would have WW III and the Rapture clock would strike midnight with McCain riding the bomb down into the center of Damascus Square.

Schlosser, an outstanding investigative journalist whose gut-churning book Fast Food Nation convinced me years ago to change my eating habits seems to have found a winning topic for his long awaited follow-up.  Command and Control reportedly details a number of serious close calls where a nuclear weapon could have ended up going off in America out of happenstance, bad luck, poor planning and just some of that good old fashioned big government idiocy that never fails to fail in planning for contingencies. One of the incidents in the book is the so called “Damascus Incident” where a dropped tool happened to breach the skin of a Titan II missile armed with a thermonuclear warhead.  This happened in Arkansas back in 1980 when none other than Slick Willie was the sitting governor. I don’t know whether Schlosser gives any space in his book to the bizarre 2007 incident when six nuclear missiles were somehow without any authorization loaded onto a Stratofortress bomber and flown out of Minot, North Dakota. This which came at the time when the Cheney faction of the George W. Bush administration was pushing for a war on Iran has never been adequately explained and there are tales of a number of strange deaths involving personnel of both Minot and Barksdale A.F.B. Just another of those ugly little situations where there never is a satisfactory explanation and all doubters of the official government story are rapidly sent off to sit in the corner wearing tin foil dunce hats. Somehow I doubt that that gets much if any play in Command and Control but after reading the Guardian story as well as a few other reviews my interest has been piqued to the extent that I just ordered a copy of the book.

As all of us who are able to see already are fully aware – the collapse is coming. While it is even money that it will be triggered either by an implosion of the financial house of cards economy  that has been meticulously constructed by Wall Street gangsters, their Don at the Federal Reserve and the ever changing lineup of insiders in government or by another ruinously botched war it is coming.  What may end up setting it off though would be one of those “black swan” events or in layman’s terms a “wild card”.  Perhaps some sort of nuclear negligence such as Schlosser writes of or an even larger threat would be that one of our own shoddily constructed and maintained nuclear facilities would do the full Fukushima.  Either would immediately be pounced on by the neocon war freaks and their army of propagandists and armchair bombardiers, such as Senator Graham to use as a bogus ‘terrorist’ plot justifying their final escalation.

It is a very American phenomenon, putting the most dangerous weapons in the history of mankind into the hands of the least responsible and completely stupid individuals running the most powerful institutions on the planet.  They are freaks who dig playing Russian roulette with millions of other people’s lives in the balance, so far the chamber has always been empty when the trigger was pulled but our luck will eventually run out.  Sooner rather than later too.

Syrian Debacle Postponed For Now

Barack H. Obama’s much heralded prime time television speech the other night has only served to temporarily delay the launching of WW III. With widespread public rejection of this latest foreign policy fiasco Obama’s latest love affair with the teleprompter truly only served to kick the can down the road a ways and at the same time save face for his foolhardy “red line” statement.  There is however far too much money to be made by the warfare industry to simply allow this wonderful opportunity to increase the bottom line to go to waste.  It is already being reported that the worlds preeminent terrorist organization, the CIA is now ramping up their arming of the rebels, many of them Islamic lunatics with Al Qaeda connections.  Just imagine the sick irony of our current regime using taxpayer money in arming the same radical Islamist group behind the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001 that then allowed a rogue government to flip the off switch on over two centuries of American democracy and transform the U.S.A. into a full blown fascist police state.  One that is fueled by the never ending wars which in turn serve the elite in justifying the endless shakedown of honest and decent Americans to fund the surveillance industrial complex hydra that is devouring our freedoms like a ravenous cancer.

To his credit Barry didn’t directly take a dump on the graves of the 9/11 victims by invoking that day as justification for his Syrian attack which I found to be surprising.  The only time that he really did veer into that territory was his cunning insinuation that attacking would protect the children in America in the future from some vague threat. Kind of like the propaganda that Saddam would supply WMD to terrorists who would then bring them to America to use because they hate us for our way of life. He is far slicker than his predecessor in that manner but his speech was as loathesome and dishonest as any ever given by George W. Bush or for that matter ANY president.  Obama broke out the XL manure shovel for his absurd invocations of American exceptionalism, trumped up moral outrage and historical references to cover his own ass while providing more time for a smoking gun to be discovered in Syria . I hope that you had your hip waders on if you even bothered to watch that gross perversion of what used to mean to be an American before the swine hijacked the entire system. Barry then served up a generous slice of yellowcake with his invocation of the gassed kids:

The situation profoundly changed, though, on August 21st, when Assad’s government gassed to death over 1,000 people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.

On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits, a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.

This was not always the case. In World War I, American G.I.s were among the many thousands killed by deadly gas in the trenches of Europe. In World War II, the Nazis used gas to inflict the horror of the Holocaust. Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them. And in 1997, the United States Senate overwhelmingly approved an international agreement prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, now joined by 189 governments that represent 98 percent of humanity.

On August 21st, these basic rules were violated, along with our sense of common humanity. No one disputes that chemical weapons were used in Syria. The world saw thousands of videos, cell phone pictures, and social media accounts from the attack, and humanitarian organizations told stories of hospitals packed with people who had symptoms of poison gas.

Moreover, we know the Assad regime was responsible. In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces. Shortly after those rockets landed, the gas spread, and hospitals filled with the dying and the wounded.

We know senior figures in Assad’s military machine reviewed the results of the attack and the regime increased their shelling of the same neighborhoods in the days that followed. We’ve also studied samples of blood and hair from people at the site that tested positive for sarin.

When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory, but these things happened. The facts cannot be denied.

Despite his heart-wrenching appeals to emotion what Mr. Obama left out is the very critical fact that it is total bullshit that Assad actually ordered the gassing.  The whole scaffolding of the case for war collapses without that Hitlerian whopper and other than King Barack’s secret evidence there is still no proof that the Assad regime was responsible for anything other than fighting a civil war insurgency. Sadly, the only effective piece of his entire sales job is the poor children and it works to perfection to those prone to knee jerk reactions and a taste for bellicose rhetoric. Yesterday two of armchair bombardiers that I know, both of whom HATE Obama as if he were Satan himself were backing Barry and his administration’s carpet bombing of Damascus based solely on the “he gassed his own people” sham. The entire speech had sensible people scrambling for their barf bags, it is really hard to take a man who presides over a country with huge stocks of chemical weapons including the white phosphorous and depleted uranium that were used to kill untold thousands of civilians in Iraq seriously.  This man has no shame and it is a travesty that he was ever elected to the highest office in the land,  Barry would not know morality and “common humanity” if they sneaked up behind him and bit him in the ass.  That speech was an insult to every American who understands our how great our country once was and how rotten that things have become today thanks to hustlers and pimps like Obama, Kerry and their ilk.

Much to the chagrin of the de-facto Pentagon lobbyists the job of selling the Syria war hasn’t been the cakewalk that it was anticipated and it just became a bit worse when Elizabeth O’Bagy, a War Street Journal’s op ed writer was dumped for misrepresenting her credentials. O’Bagy was an invaluable resource to the warmongers John McCain and John Kerry as they built their case for military intervention in Syria. The truth is that she was a paid shill for yet another of those noxious neoconservative think tanks, this one called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) that have been so influential in ensnaring America in the Middle Eastern morass.  But Obama and his neocon buddies won’t stop just because a member of their marketing team  has been outed as a pathological liar, they are ever more determined now than ever. It must have been especially galling for the criminals who run this place to have had to endure the humiliation of Vladimir Putin coming out of this all smelling like a rose and looking like a rational player with an interest in the preservation of peace. The New York Times editorial by the Russian leader in today’s edition was the equivalent of rubbing kosher salt into a still festering wound. Putin’s hilariously balls out take on all of the amateurish Obama administration’s propaganda and talking points as well as the Russian leader’s preaching from the moral high ground he now occupies must have elitist assholes puckering from sea to shining sea. I recall my liberal friends in the early days of the administration’s first four years as fantasizing of Obama being the chess master and the Michael Jordan of national and global politics, just laying back and studying the opposition like the basketball great and when the time was right he would explode, destroying the Detroit Pistons Bad Boys defense and winning the title. It is pretty obvious now that he has just been slam dunked by Putin, a professional who seems to delight in exposing our dear leader as the rank and easily manipulated incompetent buffoon that he is.

So for now while the attack has been temporarily postponed pending further revelations of intelligence community lies that will be peddled by El Presidente to the public because hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned. Get ready because today Barry once again renewed the unspoken but ongoing state of emergency that was declared by the Bushreich three days after  9/11.  This rotten administration is going to have its Syrian war and God help anyone who opposes him as he now wields the full power and fury of the police state and will unleash it with impunity upon those who dare to stand behind him and his precious legacy of a war president. What they did to the Occupy movement by sanctioning and supporting police brutality is nothing .It is just a matter of waiting for notoriously short attention spanned Americans to become distracted and forget about Syria altogether. Hey, it’s now NFL football season and Dancing With the Stars will have the latest season debut next week + both of which will make it easier for Barry to break bad.

The sheeple will soon be conditioned to just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

Obama Goes into C.Y.A. Mode after Kerry's Rhetorical Blunder

During his six interview public relations blitz on Monday Barack Hussein Obama took advantage of a “breakthrough” in the ongoing media promoted Syria crisis to cover his own ass.  With public opinion polls showing a majority of Americans opposed to this latest idiotic and most ill-advised war of all the pope of hope capitalized on a John Kerry blunder. The Secretary of Skull and Bones provided the surprise out when he stated that the Assad regime could simply turn over all of the chemical weapons to an internationally neutral party to avoid war. The hated Russia rapidly moved to get their man in Damascus, Bashar Al-Assad to agree with their using Kerry’s opening to ride to the rescue, for the time not only preventing WW III but managing to look more rational and democratic than the fascist ruled U.S.  The entire scenario was made possible when the loutish buffoon Kerry developed one of his trademark cases of diarrhea of the mouth. During his wall to wall sales pitch for bogus secret intelligence on that affixed the Assad regime with complete responsibility for the Ghouta gas attack, he let slip that such a move would by Assad would be a game changer. His exact and widely mocked dialogue that turned him and his boss into Putin’s bitches for the second time in less than two months was – “Sure, he could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week, without delay,” “But he isn’t about to.” The savvy Russians and Syria jumped on it like starved pitbulls advancing on a cornered rat and Barry had to put his missiles away – for the time being that is. The behind the scenes work by the war machine continues.

It is nice to see the liar Kerry hoisted on his own petard. His hypocrisy on this new war  turns his famous and phony Vietnam statement on its head by pushing to be the one who would ensure that some poor bastard will be the first one to die for a mistake. Even as Barry dances a dervish of spin in front of a national audience  Kerry is backing off his words, stating that it was only a “rhetorical” statement and not an actual condition of hitting the brakes on WW III. Obama must be delighted in that now he has a chance to save face by appearing to be a man of reason and just postpone the attack for awhile until either Syria is unable to comply within the given time frame to disarm or another chemical attack of dubious origin magically occurs to bolster the case. It is Saddam 101 taken right out of the playbook of Bush and Cheney’s neocon regime. Just use the extra time to move the goalposts so far out of Syrian range that there will be no way on God’s green earth that they can be met and hope for another mysterious gas attack on women and children. Am I Cynical?  Yes but the bastards who run this place are the most cynical creatures on two legs led by the hyena in chief himself. I am but an amateur.

So tonight will the much-awaited national address by El Presidente and there will most certainly be talk of weapons of mass destruction and inevitable references to September 11, 2001 as today is after all the eve of the twelfth anniversary of the granddaddy of all ‘terrorist’ attacks that became the lynchpin for our star-spangled police state. 9/11 is the event that forever changed America and changed it for the absolute worst. Every insane transgression against civil liberties has been undertaken because of the elite’s exploitation of that tragedy to reinforce their own positions of privilege as well as to create an impenetrable bulwark between us and them. It has been twelve years of dumbness, fear, rancor, racism, religious intolerance, government spying, corporate cronyism, war, gun-grabbing, political corruption and the government extraction of tax payer money to pay for their own enslavement by an out of control national security state that has made trillions since that day. Mr. Obama will be the latest to wantonly abuse it for political gain as he delivers his stemwinder tonight, patting himself on the back for avoiding an immediate war on Syria while facilitating those who are now putting into place the impossible conditions upon which Assad will soon be crucified upon.

In a side note Obama’s likely successor Hillary Clinton is revved up for war and ready for the U.S. war machine to kick ass and take names. For now Barry has once again emerged as the Teflon coated snake oil salesman that he always has been and dodges accountability for his enormously stupid “red line” ultimatum. But like a predatory animal laying low in the weeds he will bide his time and go for the kill as soon as the coast is clear for him to burnish his elite credentials and bask in the glory of being a war president.

Will Obama Embark on the Road to Damascus?

The biggest news event of the day is that according to “activist” Syrian rebels that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on hundreds of people including women and children. This will have the war freaks caterwauling at several octaves above their normal ear-splitting pitch as the U.S. now must escalate the already disastrous decade plus misadventure in the Middle East against the barbarous Assad. The one thing about our star-spangled fascist state’s easily swallowed national lie of American exceptionalism is that it continues the emergency state of surveillance, war on civil liberties and looting of the treasury that has perpetuated our now careening into overdrive downtrend. This will be sold to the masses as a gross human rights violation and the justification to send more American troops into battle to be maimed and to kill civilians in a foreign land where we have zero business of being in the first place. Both Bushes were able to rouse the rabble and get them saluting the flag in full-throated patriotic fervor over the demonic Saddam who gassed his own people, look for Barack Obama to do follow their examples. His conclave of corrupt apparatchik in the White House are already seeking the sameU.N. stamp of approval that it took for Bush to attack Iraq.

This crossing of his much ballyhooed “red line” will now allow for him to become a “war president” and to enjoy the bully pulpit from which he will send forth his NSA Stasi and Gestapo Justice Department to smash opponents of our state’s now eternal war. Just as Democratic president Woodrow Wilson did in the early days of Empire with his ruthless crackdown on anti-war dissidents during the waning days of World War I. It is no coincidence that Obama has been the most aggressive president since Wilson with his abuse of Wilson’s own Espionage Act of 1917 which has been used to devastate the free press in current times. As Orwell so aptly put it – Oceania has always been at war and it suited the government of his dystopian world of “1984” well. Now that Barry has become Big Brother his rogue cabal of cornered rats, thugs and scoundrels will heavy-handedly enforce their will and just as O’Brien sneered to Winston Smith the rule now is that “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever”.  There is no depth to which the swine will not descend to as they seek to protect the golden goose of their war machine, Military Keynesianism directed upwards to the top while the fiends at NSA HQ will make damned sure that there will never be a challenge to the existing order.

This alleged chemical weapons attack is highly  suspicious for a number of reasons, firstly the fortuitous timing in that a team of U.N. experts had just begun work onlooking for evidence of chemical weapon use in Syria after months of propaganda. Why the hell would the Assad government, which by most accounts is more than holding it’s own suddenly risk international condemnation and an inevitable escalation on the part of the U.S. and it’s western allies? In light of the rottenness that has enveloped this once great country it just seems staged, a claim that the Russian supporters of the Assad regime are already mumbling and rightfully so. It would not beyond the “rebels” with their Al Qaeda support and their cannibalistic tendencies to do such a thing were it to benefit their cause would it? Obama and his loathsome enforcer Eric Holder are still seething over being punked by Putin over the Snowden affair and their lackeys over at MSNBC, especially Tokyo Rachel Maddow have been sowing the seeds of a new Cold War of discontent. Liberals love the big state butchery associated with war as long as it can be justified by some bullshit humanitarian interventionist cause. The rumblings of a global crusade to make the world safe for gay marriage has already been floated as a trial balloon by the MSNBC shills, and liberals have the nerve to accuse Fox News of propagandizing?  I grew sick of the hypocrisy of the liberals who I knew who became apologists for Obama for things that they wanted Bush and Cheney strung up by their balls for and stopped associating with them. They will surely be cheering on their hero Obama as he looses the dogs of war on the Assad government.

The entire region is about to go up in flames soon which suits many, including the once disgraced but still influential neocons who concocted the Iraq war just fine. With the Egyptian junta continuing to slaughter all opposition in a U.S. sanctioned operation that the Obama administration still refuses to call a “coup” and now being issued a guarantee of financial backing by our ‘partners in peace’ over in Saudi Arabia there is a conflagration now coming. Incidentally, that would be the same Saudi Arabia from which fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers came from and that tragic and horrifying event was effectively used by American fascists as their own Reichstag Fire which provided the justification for what the Gore Vidal sardonically called  ”perpetual war for perpetual peace” .

The U.S. deep state perfectly used those attacks from which to terrify Americans into submission and to  birth their fascist state, now it’s Saudi connections will ensure that the money into Cairo will provide plausible deniability to the U.S. Empire for the Suharto style purge of opposition forces. This once moral nation has one hell of a lot to answer for as far as it’s myriad of gross alliances with terrorist supporting regimes who regularly slaughter far more than the 1,300 who were allegedly gassed by Assad. Unfortunately it won’t have to  (at least in the short term) because the victors and their hired scribes and experts so often write the history. That is unless it comes to collapsed empires and this one is surely headed for a far worse date with historical infamy than Rome. Perhaps once the corruption, arrogance and hubris of those psychopaths who managed to become our leaders after the Second World War have finally gone a bridge too far and imploded the United States of America from within will historians who are yet unborn haul the rotten carcass of this empire of fear, loathing, greed, oppression, war and dumbness upon an autopsy table and carve out the truth. We then forever serve as an example of all that could have been done for the betterment of humanity and yet was lost thanks to sociopathic power-mad punks like Obama, his predecessors and the rest of their filthy ilk.

The Obama regime will wash away their sins in the rivers of bloodshed from their coming wars, like lepers frolicking in the waters at Lourdes.

That’s just the way we roll in this place.