New York Times Fires Falsehoods at Russia

All the Crap That's Fit to Print does it again. Today's dispenser? One Tom Skanker who, reporting on Russian military exercises, sputters out the following

"In a grim finale, commanders launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles, the type that can carry multiple nuclear warheads. It was a clear signal of the drastic endgame the Kremlin might consider should its conventional forces not hold. One of the missiles flew more than 7,100 miles, allowing Russian officials to claim they had set a distance record.

"If these images of Russian power projection appeared drawn from the dark decades of Dr. Strangelove, the response from Washington was anything but."

Ah yes... Washington the Supremely Patient and Forgiving being tried once again by those dark Strangelovian Russkies. Once again, the Times pierces through its own thin veneer of liberality to reveal that it is just a pompous shill for economic and military imperialism.

If anyone has been Strangelovian it has been the Neocon Thug Staat, previously known as the U.S.A. Has Skanker read his co-worker, Billy Kristol's magnun opus, Rebuilding Americas' Defenses (P.N.A.C., Sept, 2000)? Surely he has and therefore surely he is engaging in grotesque misinformation on behalf of a fellow worshipper of The Devouring Saturn.

For Skanker's benefit and anyone else who hasn't got a whiff of Kristol's wet dream, the Bush Administration's neocon "project" is nothing other than ongoing, relentless, global American power projection -- in Iraq (to the tune of trillions) and against Russia, for starters. After outlining the New American Security Mission of sustaining "multiple full theatre wars" and ongoing "lesser included" so-called "constabulary operations" in "zones of democratic peace" (such as Iraq and Afghanistan) the Neocon blue print reaches its ultimate thug-climax with a call to

“CONTROL THE 'NEW INTERNATIONAL COMMONS" or SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE,”

Not only does the Neocon Manifesto call for” the creation of a new military service – U.S. Space Forces – with the mission of space control” The PNAC’s goal of “space control” is to prevent anyone else from having access to outer space and to use outer space for the placement military weapons that can strike anywhere on earth from the push of a button in some bunker in Wyoming. [Barf some more here on the PNAC Wet Dream of US Dominance]

Who the fuck is Strangelove around here? Hardly the Russians. But stay misinformed. Read all the crap that's fit to print.

©WCG, 2008

No Tears for Bully

Just when you thought the U.S. couldn’t cover itself in more odium along comes defense secretary Gates to announce that the United States would not be adverse to sitting down and chatting it up with the Taliban. “At the end of the day, that's how most wars end," Gates said. DUH

At the beginning of the day that’s how most wars are avoided .

But no....the besmirching occupant of the Offal Office, had to go “Smoke ‘em out” and “Bring ‘em On” and rally up the Yeeehaw Boys who were getting so little regular sex that they had to stomp round the flag, hardness in hand vowing to kick ass and never nego-she-ate with turrurists ... especially them rag head types.

So where is the First FlyBoy now? He sure as hell ain’t strutting his codpiece on the flight deck. No... he’s hunched over a podium telling a revolted and contemptuous world that the “fundamentals” of an economy he and his cronies bankrupted are “sound”. No... he blathers platitudes to a General Assembly so openly laughing at him that the ever servient US press had to shield the public from the disgrace

The New American Century did not even last a miserable eight years. Bush’s Kick Ass strutting, Cheney’s scowling unilateralism, Scumsfeld’s smirking preemption have been replaced with Shylock Tears for “please can you lend us a bail out?”and beggaring whines “..for some troops, please, to help out in Afghanistan...” Hectoring Condi’s World Lecture Tour has been replaced by articles entitled “A New Multi-Polar World” and “The End of Liberal Imperialism” and most cuttingly by Putin’s remark that the U.S. was in no position to lecture anyone.

Where is smirking Billy Kristol now to tell us why the world despises and hates the U.S. Come out of the New York Times editorial rest room Billy and tell us what happened to your Kick Ass Bully Boy wet dream.

Now, it is possible that in the incestuous intrigue that constitutes Beltway politics, Gates was "signalling" that he supports Obama (who favors talking) over McCain (who favors crash-bombing). But that doesn't remove the vicious irony. The United States which eight years ago ran up the red pennant of no quarter now wants to chit-a-chat, tin cup in hand.

It would be laughable had not so many innocent people been killed, maimed and made to suffer by the repulsive slime that have indelibly stained the corridors of government with their infected and putrid "ideology". It would be laughable had not Iraq and Afghanistan been shock and awed back to the stone age; had not an entire city been “shaked and baked” (yeehaw yuk yuk) with phosphorous bombs; had not old men, boys of 15 been and innocent shepherds and farmers been kidnapped, beaten, (“pulpified”), drugged and thrown into isolation cells for years where they slowly went crazy and tried to kill themselves while morally degenerate “Injustices” spewed judicial vomit over the finer technicalities of The Great Writ.... for seven goddam years. It would be laughable had the United States not been turned into a frank and open police state, that respects NO law, international or domestic, that spies on its citizens as “potential” enemies, breaks into houses without warrants, that arrests people without cause and whose ThugKops stomp about with the same body armor and kill-toys as their fellow KombatKops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be funny had not this cancerous administration done everything within its metastasizing power to eat up the environment, kill species and drive whales insane.

It would be funny, if any of these things could be undone. But they cannot be. That is not the way history works. That is not the way Nature works.

These diseased aliens from a lower dimension together with the cowardly, venal, whoring degenerates in Congress and the Judiciary have destroyed everything: the environment, civilization, language, law, comity and cooperation and now the economy. They have done so just as we said they would, and they have done so while the U.S. demos as a whole sat around, guzzled chips and gas, scratched their anuses, and pondered the next re-fi. It’s known -- as Palin reminds us -- as Murkan Exceptionalism. Hey Da Rulez don Apply to Us! We’re the Shining Bacon on the Hill.

I wish I could feel sorry for my country; but I don’t.

©WCG, 2008
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It's Time for Punitive Voting

It’s time to start punitive voting.

The concept of punitive voting is very simple: If we loose, YOU loose.

As things are now run, Democrats (like Pelosi, Franks, Feinstein, Biden, and even Boxer) think they’ve got Progressives in a corner. After all, who else are we going to vote for? So they toss us the occasional chicken feed while they

vote billions for war and destruction

vote billions for insurance companies that deny health coverage

vote billions for the banksters that rob and plunder America, all

while they deny bankruptcy protection for people who loose their homes because they committed the crime of falling ill,

while they deny environmental protection for a poor earth that is whitering and dying under the unslaught of naked greed

while they do nothing of any serious importance to assure people a life of wellbeing and freedom.

The senawhores and pimprasentatives who do this figure we’ll vote for them anywyays because what are we going to do, vote Republican?

Hey, the way I see it, if you act like a Republican you should be treated like a Republican. We loose anyway, so we might as well kick your sorry ass out.

It may take a cycle or two, but that is the only way to work for change. You can’t plant until your clear.

VOTE PUNITIVE.

P.S. Call up your local congressoid’s office and tell them about the concept. and listen to the stunned silence at the other end. Oh shit......

©WCG, 2008

United States Atones for Monroe Doctrine.

Attending a meeting of Euro-leaders at Lake Como in Italy, Vice President Cheney offered official mea culpas for the United States' unilateral embargo of Cuba. "That is no way for a responsible power to conduct itself,” Mr. Cheney said. “And it reflects the discredited notion that any country can claim an exclusion zone of authority, to be held together by muscle and threats.”

©WCG, 2008

Gordon Brown is a Jackass

The English have always been superb at intoning pious hypocricies; but Gordon Brown has taken the skill into the heights of ludicrous comedy

"When Russia has a grievance over an issue such as South Ossetia, it should act multilaterally by consent rather than unilaterally by force," he said. "My message to Russia is simple: If you want to be welcome at the top table of organisations such as the G8, OECD and WTO, you must accept that with rights come responsibilities."

He talks that way to King George, too?


©WCG, 2008

Bullying the Bear: Payback and Pipelines

If anyone ever wanted to punch George Bush in his stupid face, kick Cheney in his underbelly or stuff a stinking sock into any palavaring neocon's mouth, he can relax his hostile intentions. The very center of this Administration’s foreign policy has received a massive blow to the gut.

The Administration’s neocon policy of encircling Russia and gutting it from within baited the bear once too often. The bear has struck back and the US can do little but stand aside like a hapless, shown-up punk.

If proof were needed that things were bad, one need only have listened to Condolezza Rice’s hectoring whines chastising Russia’s failure to “integrate” into world institutions and condemning its resort to unilateral and “disproportionate” force against a neighboring country. From an Administration that bully-bellowed it’s “right” to act unilaterally while it incinerated Falluja, Rice’s shamelessness could only provoke acidic ridicule.

If proof were needed that things were edging toward critical, one need only have noticed that virtually no Western media horn published a detailed map of the region

To its credit (mirabilis dictu) the New York Times published a guest editorial by Michael Gorbachev outlining Russia’s complaint against U.S. policies and a decent synopsis by Jad Mouawad of the petro-political issues in the region. I suppose the Times has to do something every once in a while to keep its nose a hair above toney tabloid. Nevertheless, the fact that the western media en masse omitted any mention of the critical gas pipelines that criss-cross the region while they blathered stupidly if tirelessly about who started it and about the ethnic differences between East and West Ossetians was proof certain that Uncle Sam just got his hand mauled as it was clawing the cookie jar.

To appreciate the set back, one has to go back to the sordid foundations of this punk-administration’s foreign policy, so ably set forth in Billy Kristol’s neo- and zio-con PNAC Report of 2000. (Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Project for a New American Cenutry, Sept. 2000)

As enunciated in the Report, the core policy goal for the 21st century was simply and nakedly to “preserve American preeminence through the coming [technological] transformation of war.” America’s policy should be to “preserve and extend” its military “preeminence” by simultaneously fighting “multiple theatre wars” in order to “shape the security environment in critical regions.”

In plain English, the U.S. policy was to go about kicking ass simply to show everyone that it was the meanest punk on the block. This is nothing else that a policy of geo-political terrorism that sought to intimidate anyone and everyone else

The Report identified two critical regions in which this “power projection” needed to take place, viz: (1) “in the Middle East and surrounding energy producing regions” and (2) in a new “American security perimeter in Europe removed eastward.” Although much has been written about the “zionist” prong of PNAC policy which obsesses on Iraq and Iran and the fiction of “islamic terrorism” the more “traditional” prong of this policy was the nibbling away, emasculation and encirclement of Russia.

The Report made unquestionably clear that these twin goals were to be accomplished by unilateral “diplomatic” and military decisions and a corresponding rejection of international structures, treaties and norms. In the neocon mind, institutional structures are useful only as they may temporarily serve to cover and advance an American “projection” of its putative “democratic values.”

Bearing these fundamental in mind, Condi Rice’s sanctimonious condemnation of Russia’s action was nothing other than theatre of the absurd. Just listen to her cant.

Early on in the crisis, Rice intoned that Russia had a “choice to act in a 21st-century way, [and] fully integrate into the international institutions.” (8/15/08) Instead it chose to “to engage in kind of Soviet-style behavior of intimidating and invading allies” like Czechoslovakia. (08/19) “Russia” she said, had backed away from “the principles of cooperation among nations of the communities of states” by “invading small neighbors, bombing civilian infrastructure, going into villages and wreak[ing] havoc and wanton destruction of [the] infrastructure.” (08/19) That same week it was reported that the U.S. had twice killed scores of Afghani children in some village blitzkrieg. Rice’s hypocrisy was so shameless that it is hard to say whether she deserved a medal or a wack upside her prissy face.

There are those who argue that Rice utters this nonsense solely for Americow consumption. After all who else can’t remember back past two weeks and who else wouldn’t choke on the absurd analogy of “Georgia” as a Russian “ally”. Certainly almost no one in Europe -- even if they are intensely anti-Russian -- could swallow such crap.

More interesting than whether Rice swallows her own poop is what her effluences disclose about the inner workings of the neo-con mind. Neo-con pronouncements always inversely reflect the truth. One has to translate.

When Rice speaks of a Russian choice to “fully integrate into ...international institutions” what she really meant was that Russia had a choice to vasselize itself as a quiescent and powerless satrap in America’s neo liberal “institutional empire.” That is the only reason she could go on to say that she felt it was “ very much worthwhile to have given Russia that chance.” Alas! For some perverse reason Russia didn’t particularly jump at the opportunity to be the projectee of American values.

When Rice condemned “the Russian strategic intent of destroying Georgian infrastructure and economic progress,” what she really was moaning about was Russia's spoiling Prince Cheney and Halliburton’s progress at constructing a gas pipeline circumventing both Iran and Russia. In fact, Russia was simply intent on not having its own infrastructure rendered worthless and its own economic progress sent to the back of the Chevron / Unocal / Halliburton bus.

When Rice goes on to assure us that “The culprit here is that Russia overreached, used disproportionate force against a small neighbor, and is now paying the price for that, because Russia’s reputation as a potential partner in international institutions, diplomatic, political, security, economic is frankly in tatters” what she was in fact doing was describing the nature and confessing the failure of America’s own policy.

Over and over again in the past eight years we have seen that with neo-con speak, the condemnation and characterization of “the other” is almost invariably a confession and characterization of self. “They’re seeking to ..." undermine, provoke, destabilize, destroy... always ends up being a completely accurate description of what this Administration itself has done and is up to. The neocon mind is in fact a mental illness, as those who work with paranoids, psychotics and delusional anti-social crazies will readily recognize.

In all events, what Rice has indirectly admitted is that a key prong of US power projection into the “surrounding energy producing regions” is “frankly in tatters”.

Indeed it is. The Bush-Cheney Administration has but a few months to go and it is scrambling to create “realities on the ground.” In so far as the anti-Russian prong of neocon policy is concerned, the Administration certainly has made headway. The Baltic states and Poland been have admitted into NATO, a missile shield against Somalia’s emerging nuclear threat has been forward based in Poland and the Czech Republic. Quite against Russia’s historic interests and alliances, Kosovo was “freed” from Serbia. There can be no doubt that the Administration was egging Georgia on to de-autonomize South Ossetia. As Presdident Medvedev put it

“ The Georgian leadership chose another way. Disrupting the negotiating process, ignoring the agreements achieved, committing political and military provocations, attacking the [Russian] peacekeepers — all these actions grossly violated the regime established in conflict zones with the support of the United Nations and O.S.C.E [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe]. ...It stands quite clear now: a peaceful resolution of the conflict was not part of Tbilisi’s plan.”

Well, Tbilisi had about as much to do with it as the “political and material support provided by its foreign guardians” If Medvedev is to be believed (and there is no reason why he shouldn’t be), Cheney & His Neo Cons were seeking to extend America’s eastward “security perimeter” another nibble or two.

It was too much for the Bear which has now emitted a ROAR that has chilled half of Europe. It has pushed its own security perimeter south and has hung the Sword of Damocles over the CBT pipeline. It has brusquely informed Poland and the Czech Republic that, happy days are again and their cities will once again be targetted by Russian missiles . It is only regrettable that Russia missed a chance for irony by not claiming that the missiles were only directed at the nuclear threat from Brazil. But angry bears aren’t given to irony.

Medvedev made quite clear, that in addition to protecting its southern flank, Russia’s action on behalf of the Ossetians could also be considered pay for Kosovo,

“ [Faced with Tbilisi’s actions] Russia continually displayed calm and patience. We repeatedly called for returning to the negotiating table and did not deviate from this position of ours even after the unilateral proclamation of Kosovo’s independence.”

Contrary to Rice’s disingenuous blather, upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia did earnestly seek to “integrate” itself with the West. What it got was rebuffs, encirclement by US and NATO bases and an insulting 300 million dollar loan collateralized with demands to “open” its economy to savaging and scavenging. Russia has apparently had enough. It is signalling in concrete terms that the days of bullying the bear are over.

And what has the United States shown it can faced with this ROAR? About all it can do is send Condi Rice (and now Cindy McCain!) to hector and whine and accuse the Russians of harboring her own sordid intents. It is truly pathetic, even if Homo Americow can’t figure it out to save his mortgage.

The United States cannot come to the military aid of Georgia. It simply doesn’t have the manpower. Nor does it have the money to double the size of Blackwater, its new Free Market Army. The United States pushed and poked and now it can’t do much more than back off. The United States is close to bankrupt and its fraud riven banking system is dragging the world into recession. The NeoCon Century of Power Projection has turned into little more than a limp dick, high oil and most of our allies in Europe -- still dependent on Russian gas --with very deep second thoughts. All that is needed to make the farce complete is for Israel to discover its long standing “special relationship” with China.

©WCG, 2008
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War Mongering On Easter

Except for the Progressive magazine, the USUK press has downplayed Cheney’s war mongering foray in the Holy Land. Instead the headlines announce “Cheney says Independent Palestinian State Overdue.” Yawn.....

What is really going on is that Israel is pressuring a known war hawk to lean on Bush to go to war against Iran.

As reported by the International Herald Tribune: "Welcoming Cheney on Saturday night, Prime Minister Olmert pointedly placed Iran ahead of the peace process as one of "the many items on the common agenda" to be discussed. ' We are both very concerned about Iran; we are anxious to carry on the peace negotiations with the Palestinians.' "

Of course, “We are anxious for peace talks with the Palestinians” is the single most outstanding bull moo of the last 50 years. It is what Israel says every time it takes some action to torpedo whatever umphteenth Peace Plan is on the table. The refrain is intoned so regularly it would not be in the least surprising to learn that it had been incorporated into morning prayers at the Wailing Wall. It is meaningless. It is taken at face value only by morons, and the US mudia.

What Olmert really said was “We are both very concerned about Iran. 00 000 0000000 00 00000 00 000 00000 000000000000 0000 000 000000000000.”

In case one isn't quick enough to understand the meaning of zero, an Israeli official added that Cheney was seen by Jerusalem as "a significant player" who could influence "serious issues that cannot wait." (IHT 03/23/08)

What “serious issues” can’t wait? Certainly not the Peace with Palestine in Our Time issue. While that might be a serious issue, it has been waiting for 60 years. Surely it can wait another nine months until Cheney leaves office.

Well.... what other “serious issues” can’t wait? Peace in Iraq? We all know that Israel has nothing to do with our incursion into Iraq. Global Warming? As if Olmert were pressing Cheney to do something about the Arctic polar bear?

In case anyone still hasn’t figured it out, maybe Cheney’s reply will help. “America's commitment to Israel's security is enduring and unshakable, as is our commitment to Israel's right to defend itself always against terrorism, rocket attacks and other threats from forces dedicated to Israel's destruction,"

Once again, we get fillers packed with zeros. No one denies anyone the right to “defend against” terrorism, whatever that is. The right of self-defense is the bedrock of international relations. Cheney might just as well said he was committed to everyman's right to piss. The question is: against whose wall? Well... for one, against the rocket attacks or more accurately the jumbo firecrackers Hamas is lobbing at Sderot which has forced Israel into aerial bombing of Gaza. That hardly needed clarification. So, discounting the sum of zeros, we are lef with “other threats” allegedly “dedicated to Israel’s destruction.”

I will spare the slow reader any further agony. The issue that “can’t wait” is Iran. What the Israeli official was saying was that Israel regarded Cheney as a key player who could influence President Who himself on an issue that Israel says can’t wait.

The International Herald Tribune, which reported on the Unknown Issue, went on to fill up column inches with the usual blather about Abbas, Hamas, rockets, and the usual nonsense that masquerades as news. But supposing the Times, the Post and the Tribune really can't fathom what is going on, even a moron understands that the vice president doesn’t need to go to Israel to “revitalize” the peace process two weeks after the president himself went to Israel and actually did (or so were told) revitalize it.

In the absence of serious reporting from the Times, the Post, and other outlets of the US mudia, it was left to Mathew Rothschild in the Progressive to note that the sudden departure of Admiral Fallon the other week signaled, if not an imminent attack on Iran, the removal of the safety-lock against doing so.

The missle hatches are open. And on this Sunday, when Christians celebrate the the Suffering and Resurrection of the Prince of Peace, the prince of darkness (while he may attend spurious services in some bunkered conventicle of the US Embassy) is in the Holy Land tete a teting with Israel who wants him to lean on Caesar to attack Iran.

God help us.

© WCG, 2008
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In Torture We Trust

The veto of legislation that would have outlawed CIA waterboarding is the shriek from Hell that reflects what this diseased regime has always been about : the poisoining and consumption of everything healthy and decent in the United States.

Spewing over the radio waves, the presidential malignance in the Offal Office asserted that “the fact that we have not been attacked over the past six and a half years is not a matter of chance. ... were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes [sic] that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. ... this is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven [sic] track record of keeping America safe.”

Our faith is our proof! His Malignancy never actually asserted that a specific attack had been deterred through the use of torture. This minion from Hell said only that something called our intelligence community “believed” that this “program” had prevented another attack. Once again, injecting poison into the body politic, Bush sought to induce people into thinking that torture had made us safe. This is a lie, and it is a lie that kills.

The truth is that torture does not produce reliable information. The truth is that this diseased regime has been unable to point -- in private or in public -- to a single instance where torture has protected the United States from a specific attack.

So why does bowel movement from Hell insist that torture will make us safe? Does it really believe that? No. It did so because in the festering intestines that pass for its soul, it knows that the minute the American People buy that lie, they will have been tricked into damning themselves forever. The body politic will have lost all immunity against being consumed entirely.

The instant torture is accepted as capable of protecting us from bad things, it itself becomes a good thing. It will become an accepted routine for bringing about the greater good and we will turned away, dulled and accepting, from the screams and pleadings of the tortured. We will have inverted good and evil. We will have accepted sin.

The moment torture is accepted as protecting us from our “enemies” it becomes acceptable to be used against us, ourselves, in order to ferret out the enemies in our midsts. And not just the known enemies, because the avowed purpose of torture is not to prove what is known but to find out what is unknown. And if not just against known enemies among us, then against any of us to find out who of us is the enemy, and to root out the blendables.

In this way, our acceptance of sin will consume us and the malignancy from hell will have triumphed.

Anyone who may have perchanced into this blog, may have wondered why it uses such foul language describing the slime and putrefaction that inhabit our public places. We does so, because this regime and everyone associated with it and everyone who collaborates with it is truly foul and disgusting in every possible way. Foul language is the only way to speak the truth.

©WCG, 2008

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On Time & On the Dime

The Guardian newspaper reports a former British SAS soldier has been served with a gag order preventing him from discussing the role of British forces in the US extraordinary rendition program. Last week, Ben Griffin told a news conference that individuals detained by British forces have ended up at Guantanamo, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other secretive US-run prisons.

Ben Griffin: “The use of British territory and airspace pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been often British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place. Since the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, United Kingdom Special Forces have operated within a joint US-UK task force. This task force has been responsible for the detention of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Griffin said he had no doubt that noncombatants he had personally detained in Iraq had been handed over to the United States to be tortured.

It is truly pathetic how passive and worthless the press is. Why wasn't this "discovered" seven years ago? I know more in my bones than these clowns have in their brains.


©WCG, 2008

Psychosis, Policy and Purim

The image of Israel is that of a big body-built bouncer holding a five year old by the scruff of its neck, smashing its teeth out, bloodying its nose, and kneeing it in the stomach as “deterrence” for being kicked in the shin.

In researching the previous post on Israel's threatened holocaust, I logged onto Ha’artez in order to find the exact quote from an israeli source. After doing so, I perused the discussion blog, which -- no surprise at this point -- was nothing more that a long roll of murderous, hate-filled self pity.

“ The trouble with Israel is that they keep pussy-footing around and bombing empty buildings. For every rocket attack on Israel their should be a 2-3 day rocket barrage in return, right over the Gazan`s heads.”

“ Ring Gaza with artillery and bombard from a stand-off distance as a direct answer to rockets. Time this for maximum embarrassment of Condi"

“ The past two years have been devoted to this still born process, called the peace process. ... . We were told that we had to be patient, that Sderot had to be valiant, and her children had to suffer in silence ... People have the impudence to tell Israelis that they have to suffer in silence because otherwise the Palestinians will stop cooperating in this non-existent peace process. The world always liked its Jews quiet and pliant. The world, the "civilized" one, would like nothing better than to see the end to this troublesome country of the Jews. They just dare not say it in public. That would be bad form."

There was a smaller percentage of posts that decried the “holocaust” remarks as a tactical public relations error. I counted only one or two Jewish/Israeli comments that pointed out the moral contradiction and hypocrisy of Israeli policy.

These few examples are illustrative of the mass psychosis that has taken hold of Israel. This is a phenomenon that has been noted and decried by high-ranking Israelis themselves. As far back as 2001, Ami Alayon, the head of the Israeli secret service (Shin Bet) until 2000, told Le Monde that “In Israel, nobody is dealing with reality anymore.” He debunked the self-deluding propaganda that Arafat had maliciously turned down a magnanimous offer. “This is ridiculous”. (Le Monde 12/22/01) At the other end of the political spectrum Uri Avneri, Class of ‘48 and leftist journalist, has repeatedly decried Israel’s “self-brainwashing, paranoia and suspicion. In between, there are anonymous people like “Esther” who lamented on the discussion board that Ha’aretz had deleted her posts mentioning the three Hamas truce offers that the Israeli government rejected before launching its mini (not so bad) holocaust.

The manner of speaking that has been emitting from Israel and zionist quarters around the world has been cribbed from the book of ThugSpeak -- a language of cultivated hardness and brutality. Victor Kemperer, a German Jewish professor who survived Nazi genocide wrote a book about how deeds conform to the mental attitudes carved out by habits of speech Anyone who has truly informed himself about the nazi period can only be shocked by the kind of language coming from jewish lips.

But the truly troubling psychosis is revealed in the comment that the whole rest of the civilized world “would like nothing better than to see the end to this troublesome country of the Jews.” They all hate us!!! Therefore we have to destroy the Palestinians.

This is simply insane; it bears no relation to objective reality. Israel has the United States, the world’s strongest military, firmly in its corner. Pro-Israeli Jews work at the highest levels in all branches of the U.S. government. Laws in France and Germany make it a criminal offence to denigrate or even to question the jewish version of “The Holocaust”. Most western powers have embargoed Iran demanding that it give up nuclear power, while Israel is allowed to maintain a nuclear arsenal. What kind of derangement translates this into “people have the impudence to tell Israelis that they have to suffer in silence” ?

The Israeli author and musician Gilad Atzmon, answered it this way:

“ I tend to believe that the recorded sudden change in the Israeli collective mental mood is nothing but the outcome of the Israeli natural tendency to resolve the schizophrenic mode inherently entangled within Zionism. It is the outcome of the outburst of the conflict between the tribal and the universal that matures into a state of a colossal and complete phobia. The more Israelis want to secure themselves by clinging to isolation, the more death they happen to spread around themselves” [link]

Zionism certainly, but perhaps more. One of the commentators on the Ha’aretz blog wrote:

“ Our Purim Lesson is that Israel needs to do to Hamas what Hamas has promised to do to Israel. Haman hung on the gallows he had built for Mordechai.”

Well, what did Haman do? Haman faithfully carried out the orders of his king Ahasuerus, who ruled, it is said, from Ethiopia to India. On instructions from Mordechai, the Jewish inhabitants refused to bow to the king or to obey his laws . Haman asked the king what he should and the king gave him power to prosecute the offenders.

On orders from Mordechai, Esther concealed her jewishness, worked her way into the king’s affection and by the usual arts turned the king against his own loyal servant. Mordechai moved into the drivers seat had Haman and his sons hanged and then went about merrily slaughtering 75,000 of the kings own non-Jewish subjects..

"Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.” (Esther 9:5 )

Perhaps it could be said that Haman got it in the neck during a palace coup. But what of these 75,000? Nothing in the story gives grounds for believing that they were other than just non-Jewish subjects obeying their king’s laws. The account provides no explanation or evidence that these slaughtered innocents “hated” anyone, at least no more than the assertion that “the whole civilized world” just hates us because we are Jews.

To this day Purim is a Jewish holiday. And the actions in Gaza will provide the Israelis with another occasion for holiday that they can call Purim II.

©WCG, 2008


Post Script. The Guidelines for the Ha’artez discussion board prohibit

“2. Statements terming Israelis or Palestinians and their leaders Nazis, or accusing them of genocide or ethnic cleansing."

Uh.... that makes it kinda difficult to discuss the topic, doesn't it?

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It's not a Holocaust even when We say It is.

It was the shock that reverberated around the world. An Israeli defense minister threatened Gaza with a holocaust.

It defied belief that a people who have expended so much talent and effort in educating the world as to the horrors of genocide should turn around and threaten others with what they themselves suffered.

This wretched denouement will come as no surprise to those who recognize in Zionism the same fatal ethnic idolatry that agitated Nazism. The difference between legitimate ethnic pride and pathological ethnic narcissism is always a question of degree. But when self-worthiness passes into self-worship it inevitably ends up worshiping at the expense of others

The reaction among most Israelis and their supporters around the globe fell into two categories: (1) denial that anything so outrageous had been said and (2) an attempt to shift the blame onto the victims.

The back-pedaling of the first would be comic were it not so hypocritical. It was said that the word “shoah” (or holocaust) didn’t always mean holocaust, but was used colloquially to refer to the mess in the kitchen, messed up accounts, and any kind of routine fiasco. Ergo, the Gazans weren’t really be threatened with anything like genocide. Not to worry.

This hasbara (“forensic defense of Israel”) is just an outright lie. Just last year, AIPAC and Jewish Groups in the United State fought tooth and nail to prevent an official commemoration of the “Armenian Holocaust.” Over and over again Jewish spokesmen declaimed that the word “holocaust” had a specific meaning limited to Jewish suffering and the “extent of the horror” would be cheapened by being applied to any else.... except of course as we now learn, the mess in the kitchen, the fiasco at the picnic and other such disasters which afflict ordinary people in daily life.

Just this January, the Jewish Council of Germany was aghast and offended that some Munich carnival goers had been granted a permit to parade on what the they unilaterally decreed was “Holocaust Day.” In short, the efforts of Jews around the world to turn their experience in the second world war into a sacred and taboo event is obvious to anyone who hasn’t had his head buried in the sand. To come now and claim that “holocaust” really didn’t mean that when it was uttered is just bald faced hypocrisy that counts on the world being stupidly suckered.

As for blame shifting; this has become the Standard Performance of Israeli policy. Thus, after protesting that, “in context,” shoah really only meant a doozy paloozy, Israelis followed up with “and they deserved it anyways”. Inevitably the coda to this refrain was that “Israel” was being terrorized by a “rain” of rockets and had to defend itself against, unprovoked attacks and a looming Holocaust™ at the hands of jew-hating Arabs.

mini-shoah in Gaza

The only way Israel can disequilibriate the sheer disporportionality of its conduct is to shuffle and switch the things compared. “Israel” is not under attack in any real sense. Sderot, a small township, near the Gaza border is being harrased by jumbo firecrackers that in a period of four years have killed two, perhaps now three or four people. By way of a true comparison all of Gaza is under siege and daily attack by the Israeli military and In the same period, hundreds verging on a thousand Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli collateral actions. The false equation foisted is revolting.

When all is said and done, no one “deserves” a “holocaust” -- mini or otherwise. The whole point of international law in this area is to put limits on how wars are fought. Those limits mean that whatever else “the enemy” may deserve it deserves not to have its children blasted to bits or to be starved and diseased into submission.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is evil, and has been condemned by the UN, the Secretary General, the World Court and numerous human rights organizations. For years the Israel government has subjected Gaza (and the West Bank) to restrictions that clearly qualified as “genocide” under the definitions studiously worked out by Rafael Lemkin who coined the word.

During the past year, what the sycophant western press labeled as energy cut offs was in fact a program of starvation, as reported here and elsewhere. Earlier this year (2008), it was reported that as a result of Israeli bombings the sewage mains had broken in Gaza. What this means is that the Gazans are being placed in imminent danger of typhus outbreaks.

So? So what the vast heap of “The Holocaust®” documentaries invariably omit to tell, is that the piles of bodies so horrorificly being bulldozed into mass graves were not “gassed” but were people who had died of typhus. Epidemics of typhus had broken out in most camps. For this reason one of the key elements of the judgement at Nuremberg was that the Nazis had done “little or nothing” to prevent the outbreak of typhus. -- and this calculated “negligence” qualified as an intentional war crime.

And now that the sewage mains have broken in Gaza, what does the Israeli government says? It threatens a “fiasco”.

©WCG, 2008
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Olmert Tries to Wake up Sleeping Morons at the Times

Other than morons and the U.S. mudia.... was there anybody in the world who fell for the Annapolis Farce last November, when the Administration made a Big Push and lots of noise promising peace in Palestine before Bush left his throne? No. In fact the farce was so obvious, so boring and so irrelevant to reality, that it hardly got covered.

But in case anyone was too terminally stupid not to have figured out the sham, now comes Ehud Olmert who announced today to an audience of fanatically faithfull Jewish-American leaders that the goal of peace talks with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, was to reach an understanding on "basic principles" for a Palestinian state by the end of 2008, rather than a fully-fledged agreement.

In other words ...no deal in Bush's term. Got that Condi? No agreements on "specifics". In fact no agreement at all, except endless Israeli evasion under cover of crap for the stupid. Crap no doubt dished out in gob-fulls by the editors and word hacks at the Spew York Times.

Olmert also said on Sunday that the Israeli army had a "free hand" to target anyone in the Gaza Strip, particularly ruling Hamas members, to stop cross-border rocket fire.

Got that? "Anyone" To target "anyone" includes women and children, particularly if they are engaged in a "shopping spree" for food.

©WCG, 2008

Look at Yourself - America

Photo by Tim Heatherington (published in Vanity Fair)

Look at yourself America. This is you and this is your son. This is what Cheney-Bush-Rove, what Jingoid Republicans, Smirking Billy Kristol and his ZioCons, what Morally Bankrupt Demorats, Avaricious Corporations, a Whore Press and a Feckless False-Issue Left have done to you. Look.

Needless to say, Tim Heatherington's photograph got little play in the Murkan Mudia. It is posted here with acknowledgement to help, in a small way, give it the dissemination it deserves.
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The Sweinstein Stench and the Schumer Shuffle

In November 2007, senawhores Feinstein and Schumer bolted ranks and voted to confirm fellow think-alike Mukasey as Attorney General. Nothing partisan here.

Explaining yet another one of her DemoPublican switcheroos Feinstein wrote in the LA Times (32 Nov 07) “Judge Mukasey is not Alberto R. Gonzales.” The Justice Department was demoralized and needed “a new dynamic of independence from the White House”

Feinstein acknowledged that “serious questions”had been raised about Mukasey’s “views on torture” but that he had assured her in a personal letter that he knew that water-boarding was “illegal” under US Military Law and the Geneva Conventions.

“Congress,” Feinstein wrote, “should go further and explicitly ban waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques for all parts of the government” presumably including the Post Office, the Department of Education and perhaps even the CIA.

Until then, however, “the bottom line” was that she “hope[d]” Judge Mukasey would “direct the Justice Department where the facts and the law lead, not where the White House dictates.”

Of course the real bottom line is that both Mukasey and Feinstein were hiding under The Rock of Technicalities -- waterboarding whether it was fun or folly was not yet “illegal” for the CIA.

Schumer was no less two-faced. In an article penned for the Spew York Times (06 Nov 07) he explained that he was voting for Mukasey because the Justice Deparment was in “desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.” “Most important,” Schumer wrote, “Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law”

Ah... but then came the fine print on the encyclopedia installment purchase plan.... While Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding was “illegal” was deeply unsatisfactory to Schumer --- deeply --- “ Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.”

Ah... the Schumer Shuffle... praise Mukasey for fidelity to legality, excoriate him not stating that waterboarding was “illegal” when it wasn’t and then express a pious hope that Congress might one day pass and Mukasey might one day enforce a law illegalizing waterboarding.

Actually, most people didn’t give a rats ass about Chuck's legalities. What most people found offensive was Mukasey’s helpless moral quandary as to whether dunking was torture or not, as a matter of painful fact.

The Schumer Shuffle concluded by stating that “if we block Judge Mukasey’s nomination and then learn in six months that waterboarding has continued unabated, that victory [for Law] will seem much less valuable. No one questions that Judge Mukasey would do much to remove the stench of politics from the Justice Department. I believe we should give him that chance.”

Ah... but the Stench from the Hill...

Today, Dan Eggen of the Washington Post reported

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said this morning that waterboarding was deemed legal by the Justice Department at the time it was used by the CIA on three al-Qaeda captives, and as a result the Justice Department "cannot possibly" investigate whether a crime occurred. . . .

Mukasey's remarks were a direct rebuff to demands from many leading Democrats this week that the Justice Department open a criminal probe into the CIA's use of waterboarding, . . .

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Wednesday that President Bush could approve the use of the tactic again and that such a decision would "depend on the circumstances," ...

Mukasey, is scheduled to appear before the Judiciary Committee again, where no doubt he will be grilled with mock mercilessness by Schumer and Feinstein, who will demand that he follow a law Congress has not passed.

And the stench rolls on.

©WCG, 2008
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Blendables

The News: CIA Chief, Mike McConnell, told Congress yesterday that Al Qaeda had improved its ability to recruit, train and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States, producing militants, including new Western recruits, capable of blending into American society and attacking domestic targets.

The Quiz: What is the key word in this news? (a) ability (b) attacks (c) blending (d) domestic?

Most people, including most congressoids, will doubtless choose a, b and c: ability, attack, us. "Omygod... we need more security and fast!!

The true key word, of course, is “blending”. For six years now the US Government has been nabbing and deep-storing a whole bunch of them terrorist rag-heads -- brownish people that worship that heathen allah-fellow -- not good Jews and Gentiles, like us.

It really made no difference that that Mohammad fellow may have been an English citizen, or that what’s-his-name Ali Ah-whatever was a Canadian or that Padilla was a US subject . We all saw through that. All that was just a matter of probably falsely obtained passports. The guts of the matter is that they are “them” or at least “those”.

Some of us may have worried that these them types were being tortured or denied the basic protections of minimal due process; but, when all was said and done, our concern was basically a sort of legal-charity. Certainly, nothing we had to worry about that cut too close to our own bones.

Now comes Intelligence Chief McConnel to tell us that the big Al “Q” has produced blendable western attack agents. In other words, people that look just like you and me. And not just look, but have names like Smith, Scalia and Schmidt. Why, maybe even names like Sachs, Sulzberger and Schumer. Blendables.

What this means is that the proverbial “potential terrorist” includes people just like you and me. Which mean that in the eyes of our All Seeing All Beneficent State Guardian, people just like you and me are indistinguishable from “potential terrorists”.

Got it?

Welcome to Baghdad folks.

©WCG, 2008

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Ridet et Moritur

It was said of Rome, that she “laughed and died”. It will be said of us as well. But at least, from a certain point of view, it will be amusant. US politics has become a total farce.

Wikipedia (yes, I rely on Wiki!) defines “farce” as “a comedy ... which aims to entertain the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast paced plot whose speed usually increases, culminating in an ending which often involves an elaborate chase scene. Farce is also characterized by physical humour, the use of deliberate absurdity or nonsense,....”

Uh....

Lessee here.... the aspirants for Emperor have included a senator turned impersonator who runs on his record as tv prosecutor; a real-time prosecutor who runs away from his record as an adulterer, mafia pimp and real-time cross dresser; a kiddie bomber turned torture victim whose damaged psyche promises to keep the country embroiled in a 100 year war aimed at ferreting out a quasi mythological figure of evil; and lastly, a bible thumper and a Mormon Savant... Where, oh where is Moliere when we need him?

On the Demorat side we’ve had a crowd of mediocrities, the chief ones of which is a lacquered matrioshka doll whose revealed and uncovered political positions remain the same: progressively bigger versions of herself. While matrioshka jets around the country telling Arkansas, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, and Nevada how “thrilled” she is to “be here” (Hi there!!!) she is trailed by her bully boy hubbie who has given off intoning lachrymose renditions of Amazing Grace in favor of negro-bating and snarling “you, get out of here” to questioners at public meetings.

This duo is followed by another -- for Tintin buffs, the American version of Thompson and Thomson (Dupond et Dupont) -- a black man peddling “change” trailed by a white suthner’ peddlin’ “hope”. Were they to run on a ticket, the platform would undoubtedly be: It’s Time for a Change Hope is on the Way. By all accounts, prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary has a better record of effective relief.

To be effective, every farce needs just a hint of reality missed, which in this case is provided by a reactionary who wants to return to the statu quo ante 1812 and a jug eared dwarf married to a towering stunner, who wants to move the country forward (while, perhaps, communicating with alternative life forms from outer space).

If tragedy can be enveloped within farce it lies in the fact that contradictions like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich represent what paradoxically enough needs to be done. The United States, needs to return to its constitutional foundations, reviving its spirit of laissez-aller, while at the same renouncing laissez faire and moving forward toward social-democracy.

For those not blessed with French, the two laissez’s are not the same. The first refers to a spirit of live-and-let live and to a concept of the State that does not look too hard at individuals, does not probe into their lives and respects their privacy even if it leads to some minor social deviances and sloppiness around the edges. In every day American life, this spirit once led to an easiness not found anywhere else in the world. You could get a drivers license simply by passing a test and telling the clerk who you were. You could get into the country simply by knowing where the Orioles came from and you were a shoe-in, if you said that you had gone to Grover Cleveland High... because God knows only Americans could come up with something like that. Juridically, this concept of laissez aller was enshrined in the first four articles of the Bill of Rights and, most practically, in the Fourth Amendment. As Burke put it, howsoever drafty and humble the abode, “all the Kings horse and all the King’s men dare not cross the threshold!”

But there is a difference betting “letting him be” and “letting them do”. The line may be imprecise and shiftable, since all being involves some doing and all doing involves some being. But basically, we all know what it looks like when some asshole is going on a rampage that doesn’t do the public much good. Incredibly enough laissez faire became the prevailing political philosophy --at least the "resounding cymbal -- of the 19th century. This doctrine of irresponsibility (for that is what is at issue) took hold precisely on account of a confusion and equivocation between individual aller and corporate faire. This confusion lives on today, in such absurd notions as “our family budget is just a smaller version of GM’s”. Well... it’s true, both use math... but that really isn’t the point.

From this equivocation, a further petard sprung up; namely, the propaganda that pursuit of private interests promotes social good: “What’s good for me, is good for you, Jack; have faith.” This notion was no more than a perversion of altruism. It is one thing to say, as the ancient Romans did by way of greeting, si vales valeo (if you are well, I am well); it is a moral distortion to invert the greeting into si valeo, vales.

Nevertheless, this perversion became the foundation stone of capitalist ideology. It had a false and seeming corroboration so long as the irresponsible party was wasteful enough to leave juicy scraps all about making it appear that the proposition was true. But it was “true” only so long as there could be an abundance of waste... waste that inevitably some poor, oppressed peon in one of them inferior undeveloped countries paid for with sweat and a ruined life devoid of anything but underpaid labour.

Most of the world gave up on this nonsense by 1880. By then, even Bismarck caught on which is why he coopted huge chunks of the socialist platform from Ferdinand Lasalle. Historically viewed fascism is the progression past capitalism. From the Communist perspective, it was “capitalism in its last stages” From the fascist perspective it was “the first stage of the post-capitalist “third way”). To put it very simply (in what is after all an essay on farce), the argument between the two sides was over intent and purpose but neither side disputed the structural character of a "regulated economy". Only the imbeciles and morons in post-war/pee-cee political science departments could elaborate the manichean fairy tale that has become the accepted view of “fascism”.

The difference between what the French called the "radical right" and social democracy was simply the degree of laissez aller that each was willing to allow. Both philosophies accepted private enterprise as an engine of production. Both put limits on laissez-faire. Both fascism and social democracy regulated capitalism to insure that it behaved more or less responsibly. The difference basically boiled down to tolerance. Historically, speaking the European fascist movements encompassed racial, religious, cultural and geo-political aims in addition to the central socio-economic one; and this endeavor to “regulate” these other issues is what gave fascism its totalitarian taint.

To give a simple and minimally controversial example, fascist programs to get rid of “degenerate art” and to “restore decency” to culture were in fact an unnecessary side issue to the underlying restructuring of political-economy. Communism also embarked on these side dish crusades, and this coincidence on irrelevancies has led bimbos in America to argue that communism and fascism were “the same”. They were not.

Under FDR, the United States too became a fascist country. Anyone who does not understand that should start up his or her own campaign for president. The underlying proposition of the so-called New Deal was that the “the economy needed to be regulated”. Duh. And so fifty years after Bismarck, the ever avant garde United States came up with a rudimentary social security program.

In some ways, US fascism was the worst of the lot. There is no question that its main target was to protect and promote capitalism. Roosevelt made this very clear in a speech to preppies in which he avowed his love of bacon, eggs and the “capitalistic system.” Whereas, in European countries fascism was avowedly undertaken for the good of “the State” the “Das Volk” the La Nación Una y Grande... in the US it was undertaken to salvage “the system” i.e. capitalism. It was a subtle but important distinction.

Leftist orthodoxy would have it that fascism was just a razzle-dazzle capitalist "trick" on labor. In my view, that is an incorrect oversimplification which overlooks the contradictions inherent in any attempted synthesis of opposites. Bismarck's trenchant remark about assuming responsibility for the "welfare" of the "labour soldier" bespoke the dualism involved.

Under the European fascist model, state intervention in the economy was avowedly undertaken for the direct benefit of ordinary people and in some not insignificant respects this was in fact the case. The underlying notion was that business owed and the worker had a social right to a certain standard of living. Under the Rooseveltian model, intervention was undertaken for the direct benefit of the “business community,” and "the flow of interstate commerce" in the belief that that would indirectly benefit the public in general. In other words, the Rooseveltian model did not depart one iota from the trickle down theory. For that reason, and with good reason, some commentators have called it National Capitalism.

The virtue of American Fascism Lite was that whatever it did to regulate the faire of the matter, it left largely unregulated, the aller of life. The cruel irony is that since the 1960’s , America’s pursuit of multi-cultural, multi gender, political correctness has ended up making it more fascistic by attempting a totalist management of culture and social mores while leaving an essentially 19th century political economy intact.

A comparison between the United States and Germany is once again illustrative. No one can doubt that the current regime in Germany is anti-Nazi. But to be “anti-Nazi” can also simply be to be Nazi in reverse. The facts bear this out. The German government today criminalizes and sends people to jail for invoking illicit symbols, illegal ideas, impermissible beliefs. Just as Goebbels tried to purge the German language of “non-Germanic” words (mandating haarschneider versus friseur) so today German wort-leiters are purging the language of words that have “unsavory” connotations such as “degenerate” and “lager”. Why? Well, because Nazis used them.

Of course, this “culture management” is totalitarian in the truest and worst way. But, in Germany, it takes place on top of a system that actually does protect and deliver social benefits to ordinary people. The fascio/social democratic economic foundation remains in place. In the United States there is no foundation to speak of. What little there was has been pulverized by the Reagan - Bush - Clinton - Bush regimes. What we are left with is political and cultural fascism without even the economic benefits -- in other words Police State Capitalism.

This then, in summary form, is the situation in its historical context. Once the context is grasped correctly and shorn of the digressive nonsense and ignorance that passes for American political criticism, it can be seen how and why the Ron and Dennis Show embodied the pathetic contradictions of our current in extremis.

Ron Paul is completely correct in advocating a political return to constitutional laissez aller. But he is completely wrong in thinking that this can be accomplished without regulating the corporate beast. In fact, the corporate beast did not exist in 1789, and cannot under any stretch of sophistry be brought within any libertarian framework of an “original intent”.

Similarly, Dennis Kucinich is completely correct in his advocacy of social welfare and environmental protection programs. But he is equally wrong to the extent that he promotes the jumbalaya of political correctness. Nothing has brought the putative “left” into more contempt in the public’s mind than its essentially fascistic drum beating on cultural and personal issues.

At this juncture in history, the only way out of the morass is to pull these contradictory poles into synthesis. The corporate mechanism will not be abolished in our lifetimes, but it can and should be brought under strict regulation directly for the public good. Society must emphatically reject the idea that humans, wildlife and God’s creation exist for the plunder and profit of corporations and an excrescent plutocratic elite. In tandem it must be recognized that the private sector has no role in certain public endeavors, such as health care. This synthesis, forms the structure of the so-called the “mixed economies” -- which entailed laissez faire at primitive economic levels, fascistic regulation in the middle, and outright socialistic control of certain national resources and enterprises. Broadly speaking this was the “state-socialism / social-democratic” system adopted in Europe in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It needs to be adopted in the United States.

A move to such a system is not a simple flip of the coin. Individualist libertarianism and state-socialism are, after all, opposites. The "move" becomes a question of adulterations. For example, in pure Madisonian liberalism, the state has no business knowing if you have hemmorhoids whereas in a system where the state provides health care the question shifts to limits on what can be done with that information. There would be plenty of practical issues to argue over were US social policies to undertake a move into the late 19th century.

Rather than debating such pragmatic and structural questions, the farce that passes for “democracy” in the United States makes Carnival in Rio look like a sober academic discussion. Of course, this farce could not more delight the putrescent scum that control the US media, which fills the airwaves and, thus the empty space in millions of crania, with total nonsense and absurdities. In fact, they have done such a good job in hollowing out what passes for the American brain, that The People themselves DEMAND NONSENSE.

For decades, true political questions and discourse have been dragged through muck and mud of racio-gender-faith issues to the detriment of any serious political or economic thought. It is not that any one of these “issues” is not important to the interested persons or groups, it is rather that, in the scheme things, they are not issues that relate to the whole. Although they have filled the national airwaves they are not truly national issues.... unless, of course, one suffers from Bentham’s Dementia.

Thus considered, the faux left is equally as idiotic as the neo Christian right and between the two of them they have shredded politics to fragmented tatters. And when that gets old there is always the tested standby of racism wrapped in righteousness, which in today's incarnation is blaming Mexican "illegals" for our self-inflicted woes. All of this suits our true rulers who would have us all chase after bugaboos forever rather than come anywhere close to the word “class”.

As a result, the farce will continue. Energy and vapour will be expended in copious amounts on such stupidities as Hillary the Woman versus Obama the Black, when any damn fool can see that neither is either. Pundits will punditize on whether “Hope” is more of an appealing political (sic) issue than “Bringing America Home” or “Fighting Terrorism Wherever it Takes Us” or “Putting the God back into the Budget.”

In the end, no one will shed tears for us, anymore than they shed tears for the enervated and degenerate Romans. Hilarity will reign until the concluding mad “chase scene” when the US economy falls on all concerned, and the Rulers of the World are left bereft, standing next to their rusting SUVs and squabbling over turnips.

Ridet et moritur.

©WCG, 2008
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Whoops

I did not watch the State of the Union Address because I don't need a Talking Turd to tell me what the state of the Union is. Anyone who hasn't figured that out should put an ad in the Pet Rock Personals section of his local paper.

State of the Union speeches aren't very important anyway. Originally conceived as a kind of accountability-accounting of national accounts, it became in the last hundred years or so a form of political tone setting -- somewhat like the Queen's Speech, only delivered by boors.

There is nothing particularly wrong with political toning. In fact, it does serve to identify the particular obsession, lunacy or idiocy that animates a Chief Magistrate. The Caesars engaged in political toning, only they were much more succinct and graphic about it. Upon acceding to the imperial curule, they would "indicate" a tutelary deity. When the Empire was beset by economic difficulties and lots of illegal immigration by Uncouth Blonds, Diocletian, not surprisingly, chose Hercules as his Guiding Light or Club as the case might be. Nero, chose pretty boy Apollo and, if I am not mistaken, Julius Gaius chose Venus. Everyone one knows the story about how Constantine changed tutelary deities in mid-battle, as a result of which we all now eat the Bread of Christ in lieu of Mithra's Pomegranate or whatever his holy food was. Problems only arose when emperors "indicated" that they were their own tutelary deity ... as when Caligula became convinced that he was the very incarnation of Zeus. Otherwise, it was an efficient "political toning" system that saved a lot shouting from the Rostra. Alas, this system would hardly work in the United States. Given that all our Chief Magistrates have chosen to accept Jesus as their titular god.

For all that, getting a general indication of a president's "agenda" for the year wasn't particularly obnoxious either. However, beginning with Reagan, the State of the Union became the occasion for a lot of cheap and meaningless rabble-rousing. It was then, that I first noticed how the flotsam in Congress passed over from applauding to whooping and whistling. And not only when Reagan fed them some ear-candy, but even as He walked into The Well. "This is undignified," I thought.

Ever since then the State of the Union Address has gotten progressively more vulgar, loud, crude, and just plain hysterical. It has become, in fact, an Orwellian Hour of Adulation -- a mindless orgy of Whoops, Yelps, Shrieking and Foot Stompings and Furious Clapping. Apes and Chimps on a rampage.

Ever haling proudly, we broadcast this disgrace throughtout the world, convinced that this proves to all the alien unfortunates what a "vibrant democracy" we have. What it in fact shows, is that our Congress has surpassed the Roman Senate in degenerate, stupid, mindless, adulation of tyrants. As Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush walk down the aisle these moronic sychophants stumble over one another to reach out for a handshake or even a look or a smile in their direction. And so I was not surprised when a friend called to say that during the Talking Turd's latest address the congressoids were all but standing chairs.

Ah! This is terrible! Our representatives reduced to standing on chairs to express the legislative ecstasy. We need to pass a bill to authorize the installation of rings, swings and trampolines. Democracy demands no less.

©WCG, 2008
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The Times Makes Light of Desperation

The [N]ew York Times continued it’s truly vile reporting on Gaza with an article by Steven Erlanger which began by stating that Egypt had moved to “restore” its border with Gaza after “Palestinians used a bulldozer to knock down another portion of the wall, originally built by Israel just inside Gaza, to continue their shopping spree.”

Shopping spree??? SHOPPING SPREE??? Is that what Erlanger thinks you do when you are starving? Are we to suppose that Erlanger would characterize 12 year old “ghetto rats” who “breached” the “security barrier” around the “Jew-Enclave” of Warsaw as going on a “shopping spree” for potatoes? Oh... I forgot...those shoppers were Innocent Jews, these untermenschen are filthy Arabs.

Actually there is no difference. Cutting off heat in the winter, cutting off electricity and water, restricting medical supplies and reducing food rations to just above starvation is a crime against humanity -- any humanity -- and that includes anyone. Period. Erlanger’s quip about “shopping spree” was just the sort of cynical, contemptuous, humour one might have expected from the moral cadavers that ran the concentration camps.

Let’s get certain facts straight. Facts that even the Spew York Times can’t quite bury. As commented on this blog in October, the initial “sealing off” of Gaza did not just involve electricity blackouts but extended to food. Even innocent Israel didn’t deny it, proving its magnanimity by saying it would “allow in the minimum amount of food and medicines necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis”

Avoid a crisis? How many calories does that require? 2,000? 1600 Non-German Rations? A “Jew Ration” of 800? It’s all so deja jew -- aint that right Stevie?

The US press, which gives comfortable berth to scrivner punks like Erlanger, has consistently sought to sanitize Israel’s crimes under international law and has become a mere fart horn for the Israeli Thug State. It glosses over Israel’s illegal acts, it consistently harps (in misleadingly vague terms) about so-called “missle attacks on Israel” and routinely refers to the blockade of Gaza as involving mere “power cuts”. Typically enough Erlanger’s spew talked about “the economic squeeze on Hamas, which intensified last week when Israel decided to cut off shipments into Gaza, including fuel for the local power plant, in response to rocket attacks from Gaza.” Ah.... well then... it’s not so bad... It’s just an “economic squeeze” on "Hamas" in an ever so restrained response against TERRORIST ROCKET attacks on Israel.

The whole world except the spew fed chicken-public in the US understands that Israel is seeking to “degrade” the quality of life of Gazans to sub-basic levels.

As reported by the Guardian “Gaza goes hungry as Israeli sanctions bite”

“http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2189543,00.html

“According to a World Bank report issued last month: "Gaza's economic backbone and private sector vitality risks collapse if the current situation ... continues." The report states that 90% of Gaza's industrial production has ceased and agricultural output has fallen by 50% in 2007

“The Israeli sanctions are affecting every level of Gazan society. Farmers have been particularly hard hit as they have been barred from exporting their products and denied pesticides and fertiliser by Israel, which makes it impossible to plant for next year

“Spare parts for water pumps and other equipment are also barred

“It is reducing the amount of food going into Gaza every week as it tries to exert more pressure on the population to bring about political change.”

Let me repeat that for thug pimps like Erlanger... Thug Staat Israel is:

REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF FOOD .... in order to EXERT MORE PRESSURE ON THE POPULATION. ....

In order for “pressure” to work it has to hurt. After all, no one was pressured into making concessions by baskets of brioche. And when reduced amounts of food “hurt” we call it hunger and starvation. In other words, Israel is engaged in precisely what international forbids: the collective starving of civilians in order to get them to surrender, or otherwise do what you want. It’s kinda like “area bombing”.

Back last Fall, the International Herald Tribune reported:

"The international aid group Oxfam International has warned that 225,000 Gazans could soon suffer from inadequate water supplies because of the fuel shortage, raising concerns for public health.

"With exports and most imports halted, factories have closed, construction has halted and store shelves are empty. Government officials believe the poverty rate has jumped to 75 percent, up from 65 percent from last summer."

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8618265

Let me repeat that for Spew York Times douchebags like Erlanger

SUFFER FROM INADEQUATE WATER SUPPLIES / STORE SHELVES ARE EMPTY

No doubt Erlanger, stuffed and slothed by post-war fats thinks that this refers to a run on truffles at Bloomies. Not.

Just this past week, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, condemned the crisis Israel had instigated in Gaza, stating that “If this situation endures, the closure will also cause further shortages of food, medical and relief items in the Gaza Strip,” He called on Israel to “refrain from actions that will harm the well-being of the general civilian population in Gaza.”

FURTHER SHORTAGES OF FOOD.... got that Steve?

As Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, insisted that Gazans were starving, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, John Holmes, sounded the alarm about the impact of the closure of crossing points on the already “extremely worrying and fragile” humanitarian situation in Gaza. The crossings are “the lifeline for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and other goods into Gaza,” Holmes said, and the closure will result in even greater shortages of food items, medical goods, among other relief supplies and basic daily necessities.

But in what surely qualifies for a cameo scene in one of the genocide soaps Hollywood churns out, the Guardian reported that

“The Israeli army is micro-managing the sanctions to ensure that it cannot be accused of starving Gaza. In a daily communique to international organisations, the army proclaims: "No Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip - No Hunger in the Palestinian Territories", before it lists the number of days of food it estimates that Gaza has."

Ah yes:

Welcome to Theresienstadt, where you will be well cared for. There is no starvation in Theresienstadt. You will be well cared for... And everyone will receive FULL RATIONS , as decreed by the Reich Government!!

As the Guardian noted,

"But dry statistics hide thousands of stories of misery."

While the humanitarian Israeli Army is “managing” the situation to insure -- most critically -- that it can’t be accused of what it is doing to bring stomach pressure to bear, David Welch, one of the pieces of shit that have gotten stuck into the US Government, blamed the “border crossings” on Hamas’s `illegal actions in Gaza, their unwillingness to behave in a responsible manner.”

Wringing its hands and joining in the woe-fest, Israel's government said it was concerned that militants would use the breach in the border fence to bring arms and terrorists into Gaza. “We have real concerns that they can now freely smuggle explosives, missiles and people into Gaza, which makes an already bad situation even worse,'' Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Aryeh Mekel “Egypt should take care of the problem.''

The hypocrisy is beyond belief but not beyond outrage. Jesus forgave almost every sin... but hypocrisy infuriated even him.

Conflict and enmity are lamentable facts of human existence. That Jews and Arabs are at war in Palestine is one thing. But, if we have learned anything, in 2000 years of Christian Civilization it is that we can at least seek to mitigate the harm we inflict on civilians and avoid cruel and unusual punishments on even our enemies. Too often the restraint that distinguishes civilization from barbarism has been cast aside, as by Allied terror bombing of German cities and German ethnic cleansing of the so-called eastern territories. If there is a paradigm of what ought not to be done, it is the “rations reduction” of civilians trapped behind walled enclosures. If Israel doesn’t understand that then, it “has remembered everything and learned nothing.”

©WCG, 2008

http://cghs.dadeschools.net/ib_holocaust2001/Ghettoes/diet/diet.htm
http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-2.htm#Feeding
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