The Orgy Of 9/11 Exploitation

 

In the US on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with "A Day of Remembrance," a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma.

- Paul Craig Roberts

Ten years gone. The big lies of 9/11, that oh so glorious day in America when the reset button was flipped on over two hundred years and the country flipped full blown fascist were cemented into place forever over the weekend. One of the only institutions more respected by the star-spangled sheep than the blessed military, the National Football League played an enormous part in promulgating the new normal and glorifying the society changing event that has come to be justification for plunder, wars without end, a colossal police state and the undercurrent of anti-Muslim hatred that will soon lead to blood in the streets. It was a day when corporate advertising took full advantage of the exploitation of the 9/11 dead (no mention ever goes to the the tens to hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians murdered by the U.S. military and our allies in the endless and phony war on terror) and used the occasion to pimp their products. Not that this is entirely precedent setting, the Republican party was cashing in on the 'terrorist' attacks while the smell of rotting flesh still wafted in on the morning breezes in lower Manhattan. The appropriation of 9/11 by corporations is only the obvious evolution of the moral decay that has a once mighty nation up against the ropes, staggering like a punch drunk palooka and just struggling to avoid the knockout blow. 


Being a football fan for years the NFL season opener had long been a festive event. There was beer, parties and barbecues followed by a day spent immersed in football. Not this year, the repulsive promotion of the new American religion of 9/11 was too much for me to take, I spent the majority of the afternoon monitoring the games on the internet. I skipped all of the pregame ceremonies, the usual pregame shows where buffoons like Terry Bradshaw (once accused of being so dumb that he couldn't spell cat if he was spotted the first two letters) and grinning shit salesman Howie Long would ensure that sports and war metaphors would become interchangeable. FOX's NFL for example had long been in the war propaganda business, Murdoch the old dog knew fully well that pushing right-wing political agendas would be his bread and butter as his cancerous media empire metastasized across the globe and he knew that faux patriotism and sports sold to the masses. It was on Veteran's Day weekend back in 2009 that FOX set up it's NFL show studios in Afghanistan, with all of the assclowns who never wore the uniform in actual service were dressed up in their cammies like fake soldiers. Bradshaw looked the most ridiculous of all, like a bizarre form of movie parody of an out of touch general. Not that FOX is unique, the porcine Peter King was traveling around to NFL camps this year in his militarized motorcoach to cover the warmups to the big 9/11 kickoff party. Peter King being the prolific and long-tenured football writer for Sports Illustrated not the porcine I.R.A. terrorist sponsoring neo-McCarthyist Republican congressman from Long Island. The big 9/11 whoop de doo was the one reason why I absolutely knew that the NFL's labor strife would be over in time for the big games of Sunday past. 

What little football I did watch (I popped in for about ten minutes of the Steelers vs. Ravens game) made me glad that I just skipped the rest. When fuckwad CBS announcer Jim Nance took a cheap shot at Pittsburgh running back Rashard 'the Fumble Machine' Mendenhall for his TWITter comments expressing distaste at the unseemly celebrations over bin Laden's alleged assassination. Nance even seemed to invite violence and harassment to be heaped on Mendenhall throughout the year in making the inference that he could expect to receive hostile receptions on the road. This is what happens when the official state religion of 9/11 needs to deal with heresy, it's just too primitive to go around and cut people's tongues out anymore. The games were even more overly militarized than normal, take this account from Glenn Greenwald's piece The Meaning of Political Rituals Like 9/11 Day:

Not just 9/11 Day but everything connected to it was constructed to deliver and implant a very politicized message, over and over.  Consider this email I received from a friend in South Florida after he attended an NFL football game last night in Miami:

 Let me describe the patriotic display at last night's NFL opener. Men with machine guns at all entrances, to scare off the terrorists. Pat down on the way in, to make sure [my wife] and I weren't carrying plastic explosives. A moving national anthem with troops out on the field spelling out U.S.A. A moving tribute to the thousands who perished in 9/11 and to our nation's brave response to that atrocity (which was, of course, the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world). A U.S.A., U.S.A. chant. Then a Stealth B2 Bomber flew over the stadium, followed by fireworks. At half time, a US Army paratrooper squad jumped out of a plane and landed on the field. Maybe next week they'll shoot some missiles from unmanned drones.

Does anyone want to claim with a straight face that these ceremonies are apolitical, devoid of political messaging?  Everything about 9/11 -- how it's talked about, how it's described, how it's commemorated -- is all designed to impart very specific political messages, and that's been true since the day it happened.

The Fumble Machine wasn't the only one getting publicly pilloried, New York Times columnist and noted economist Paul Krugman drew the wrath of the establishment for his dead on blog posting on that holiest of days that the post 9/11 era is one of shame not valor, glory and remembrance:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

I would disagree with Krugman on the commemorations being subdued, there was plenty of still warm bloody red chunks of meat shoveled into community troughs by the pocket media and the usual pigs lined up to eat the slop. Of course the knives were out and buried in Krugman’s back and not only from the fascist right-wingers but from the same sissified liberal suckup bloggers that I have denounced for years, the ass-kissing, yuppie social climbing types typically found at Daily Kos which is about as leftist as Stalin. Rather than get off on a tangent here about the dismal state of the so-called progressive blogosphere and it's miserable failings I just will say that I have been doing this for over six years now and I have had more than my share of run ins with the foul types of cretins who sell out to achieve the coveted posting positions at the "A" list prog blogs, especially that foul orange nest of pit vipers. While I have worked with many dignified and talented people I just had to split from it all and just do my own thing. I can attest that elements of the dreck that passes for "the left" online are every bit as foul as their mouth-breathing fascist counterparts only in their own sordid little ways.

Krugman's piece drew a blistering response, how DARE he blaspheme by actually telling the truth? I mean just how fucking un-American is that anymore? The piece even made war criminal Donald Rumsfeld barf up his Metamucil and cancel his subscription to the NYT. The question goes unasked why a hardened neocon like Rummy would even have a subscription to the damned librul [sic] rag in the first place. Perhaps it has more than a little bit to do with the New York Times having played an integral part in allowing the Bushreich to lie American into attacking and invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Remember Judith Miller? She was Scooter Libby's fuck-bunny who abused her prominent position with the NYT to promote the bullshit story about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Not that Saddam didn't at one time actually have WMD, shit he gassed his own people. The dirty little back story is that he got the WMD including the toxic gas from American corporations, the same corporations that good ole Rummy was shilling for when he was sent over to Iraq by Reagan back in the 1980s. Saddam and Rumsfeld were thick as thieves, ever wonder why Hussein was tried and strung up on a murder beef that didn't include the gassing at Halabja? Sure couldn't have any of that shit about Rummy coming out in court now could we?

As of today Krugman is a dead man walking, he is so fat a high-value target to the filthy neo-Nazis in the Republican establishment (as well as the rats of the Democratic Obama led corporatists and Wall Street looters) that he will be the new Dan Rather. His bloody scalp will soon be brandished as a trophy, if I were Krugman I would put a lock on my hamper to prevent the underwear sniffing punk Andrew Breitbart or any of his latent pork sword swallowing acolytes from being the ones bearing the tomahawk.

The NFL while wallowing in nationalism and rolling out the military worship barely even paid homage to a true hero, formerly one of their own: Pat Tillman. Tillman left a promising career with the Arizona Cardinals to go and enlist in the Army Rangers after the American Reichstag Fire, it was the patriotic thing to do right? As so much of our current history is a perversely Bizarro reinvention of World War II strained through the electronic crackpipe that is the television Tillman was to place loyalty to country over personal fame and fortune. But 9/11 was not your grandfather's Pearl Harbor but rather the "New Pearl Harbor" of the cunning, amoral pack of jackal neocons of the Project For The New American Century. Tillman quickly realized that it was all just bullshit and had turned against the wars, who knows what he thought about 9/11 but he was communicating with Noam Chomsky and had a story to tell when he would return home - except he didn't.

From Dave Zirin on Tillman:

In 2004, President George W. Bush appeared on the Jumbotron at Arizona’s Sun Devil stadium to address the combat death of former NFL player turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman.  Bush said: “Pat Tillman loved the game of football. Yet, as much as Pat Tillman loved competing on the football field, he loved America even more… Courageous and humble, a loving husband and son, a devoted brother and a fierce defender of liberty. Pat Tillman will always be remembered.”

But Sunday--- while NFL teams around the country commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks---Pat’s name was only mentioned before the game in Arizona.  In stadium after stadium, in pregame show after pregame show, as the NFL’s 9/11 commemoration strategy was rolled out with lockstep discipline, Tillman’s name was conspicuously absent.

George W. Bush certainly got his moment in the spotlight, receiving a standing ovation by 70,000 fans at the Meadowlands. On other football fields, massive flags were unfurled, “official NFL/9/11 logos” were unveiled, soldiers were cheered, Reebok’s “We Will Never Forget” 9/11 gear was worn, and yet it was as if Pat Tillman had never existed.

Tillman was an atheist so the holy war bullshit didn’t resonate with him and one of Dick Cheney’s JSOC hit teams likely were the ones who blew his insubordinate fucking head off.  The official story of being killed by "friendly fire" are bad enough, it puts a damper on the original 'poster boy' for American militarism in the new American century, not a thing to throw to the masses of asses on the holiest day of all. That Tillman was shot in the head at close range by his own side, his clothes and diary destroyed and a massive coverup effort undertaken speaks of even darker things. The NFL is far more interested in selling merchandise, advertising and currying the favor of powerful interests than in doing anything so gauchely unpatriotic as telling the truth, an unforgivable sin in The Homeland.

The New Normal For the 9/11 Generation

Adolf Hitler was more interested in the children who would be the future of his thousand year Reich for all that they would know would be his worldview. It is very similar her in Der Heimat. Our youngest citizens have known nothing other than the fear, fascism, hatred and perpetual warfare that were set into motion ten years ago. They will grow to adulthood in a society where airport checkpoints manned by drooling government goons and the ever present all-seeing eyes of Big Brother are a part of daily life. On Sunday they even trotted out the war criminal George W. Bush as though he were some sort of fucking dignitary despite the truth that after spending the morning of 9/11 with his nose buried in My Pet Goat and then flying around the country on Air Force One like some sort of chickenshit while the treasonous Cheney and Rummy were running the show. And when it comes to chickenshits who has anything on that diseased little turd Eric Cantor, the bespectacled Virginia Republican Majority Leader whose face looks like the logo on the New England Patriots helmet. In an act as brazenly shameless as corporations using 9/11 tributes to sell hamburgers and other crap Cantor took a break from screening anti-Muslim propaganda films on behalf of his Israeli buddies to introduce HR 391 - the resolution to "Never Forget" 9/11, or rather the official big lie of 9/11. In true GOP fashion it was another ghoulish use of the dead to push their decidedly fascist, anti-American political agenda. Then again, pissing on the 9/11 dead is nothing new to the Republicans who had the most kick ass club in the bag once the war criminal Bush grabbed a megaphone and climbed atop that pile of debris at "Ground Zero" while the rubble was still smoldering. As H.L. Mencken once remarked, "imagine a gentleman and you will have imagined everything that he is not".

I could go on and on about the dishonor of America's behavior in the aftermath of 9/11 but what's the point? It was a lamentable display of all that his country has come to stand for that was force fed to us all last weekend, the corporate NFL's corpse humping being the cherry on top of the shit cake. Guys like Krugman and Chris Hedges had the best takes but there were many, many others who saw this travesty as the charade that it truly was. Hedges, always with a unique perspective flayed the myth by reintroducing the "jumpers" or those who perished in the World Trade Center towers but have been erased from collective memory by a treacherous media. Hedges' 9/11 10th Anniversary piece is entitled A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe and I excerpt the following: 

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.

I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.

Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.

The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.

Hedges’ piece evokes an account of the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, another bit of history that has been revised to the benefit of the rapacious looter capitalist state.  Even in their gruesome war justifying lies, lies responsible now for ten years of death and torture, human misery and looting the treasury Americans love their subterfuge sunny side up. People jumping out of a burning building and going SPLAT doesn't fit that mindset, the mindset of a lemming, a lemming now in freefall down the rabbit hole, and it still doesn't understand that the rabbit hole is a grave.

Just my two cents


EE

Print the Legend: The Official Death of Osama bin Laden

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell

 H. L. Mencken

I would have to say that in my opinion the greatest thing about the officially announced death of our very own Emanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden is the sheer joy of watching the Republicans having to eat their own shit. There is something wonderful about the super-sized helping of humble pie served up with one of those nice little toothpick American flaggie things planted in the middle of their slab now that the rotten fascist fifth columnists and neocons have been robbed of the most kick ass club in the bag, their shameless exploitation of the ‘terrorist’ attacks of 9/11/01 for political gain. The GOP has utterly terrorized the rubes, suckers and suburban Sally soccer moms for nearly a decade now, fundamentally altering the country in the process. You can bet the house on it that the fear and terror cards along with the inevitable Obama is a secret Muslim who along with buddies Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan attended wild drug fueled orgies where satanic ritual sacrifices were held were key components of their 2012 strategy. Remember the wild rumors about Hillary's secret lesbian trysts in the White House and the Christmas tree adorned with crackpipes and dildos? That one was a children's bedtime story compared to the volcanic eruption of lies, filth and toxic spew that the Koch Brothers money was funding this time around. The narratives were already well under way and likely were very costly, direct mailings, whisper campaigns, retainers for think tank scum like Dinesh D'Souza and his ilk for their libelous bulk purchased books all are going to have to be scrapped because in  less than a week it is all gone, it went up like a bag of flaming dogshit. To all those who have been justifiably revolted by this all too predictable heinous tactic of assassination though black propaganda and a corrupt media that amplifies and disseminates it just enjoy the sweet schadenfreude along with a side of delicious irony. 

Bin Laden is dead! The release of this week's latest edition of Time Magazine, the official 'news' magazine for the establishment with the evil one's stock picture with the traditional red X though it ensures that despite the caterwauling of the squealing little swine birthers, degenerate America hating pigs like Orly Taitz, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the neocon propagandists the official account is now locked down by the impenetrable firewall of conventional wisdom. Sure they can warble about having to see the pictures like the hilariously desperate Sarah Palin (perhaps she can finagle some sort of trade bartering beaver shots of Bristol for the pics of the now dead bin Laden) who still doesn't understand that her political career is over and that she is well into her next phase of being a gross parody of herself, not that she wasn't always a parody from the git go. Yes, they are going totally batshit over in the big carnival tent of the Republican party, barker in chief Donald T.Rump can now focus on selling tickets to the feces eating contest in the geek section. It is astonishing to behold, the party of shoot first ask questions later is bemoaning the capping of the unarmed uber terrorist and in what is the most hilarious thing of all the corporate media is now suddenly concerned about international law and did the execution of Osama violate it. Hell, that one is hilarious, nearly spit coffee on the keyboard when I read that. Just where in the fuck was the corporate media and the concern for international law when George W. Bush launched his illegal wars, bombed the shit out of civilians, presided over a vile and sadistic regime that made torture an official U.S. policy or for that matter when Obama continued to endorse predator drone strikes on civilian weddings? Double standards and it shows just how rotten to the core that the consolidated and interlocking media in this country has become. Oh, and now here's a real knee-slapper, the Republican whiners, continuing with their well-established culture of victimhood are pissy that none of the credit for taking out bin Laden is being given to Dubya or to his immoral and illegal torture programs. But at least it's consistent since they never saw fit that there should have been any of the blame  assigned to him despite the damned inconvenient fact that the 9/11 events occurred during his watch. Perhaps there can be a commemorative edition of My Pet Goat issued in order to honor Bush for his heroism on that morning. 

God Dammit, they cut into Celebrity Apprentice!

It is pretty obvious that the story of bin Laden's assassination by Seal Team 6 is the official story of the state and it is already being reinforced with the same type of groupthink promulgated by the corporate media that followed the original attacks. While the release of any actual photos of the body have been nixed by Obama on the grounds of national security the government has released bin Laden home videos that are making their way about the internet and media megaphones today. The post death storyline goes to great lengths to play down the mythic capacity of the man once built up to be the baddest motherfucker in the valley of the shadow of death. There have been stories describing bin Laden as "unkempt", "bored", "shabby", "frail" and "weary". There have been stories on the contents of his medicine cabinet, did he have eczema or some other skin condition? Was he using a form of Viagra? Xanax? Interestingly enough nothing seems to have been found that would indicate treatments for kidney failure. The official propaganda gains new layers by the day, this from an article in Time's Special Report issue:

Living the Good Live

So he wasn't in a cave after all. Osama bin Laden, master marketer of mass murder, loved to traffic in the image of the ascetic warrior-prophet. In one of his most famous videotapes, he chose gray rocks for a background, a rough camo jacket for a costume and a rifle for a prop. He portrayed a hard, pure alternative to the decadent weakness of the modern world. Soft Westerners and their corrupt puppet princes reclined in luxury and sin while he wanted nothing but a gun and a prayer rug. The zealot travels light, his bloodred thoughts so pure that even stones are as cushions for his troubled sleep.

Now we know otherwise. Bin Laden was not the stoic soldier that he played onscreen. The exiled son of a Saudi construction mogul was living in a million-dollar home in a wealthy town nestled among green hills. He apparently slept in a king-size bed with a much younger wife. He had satellite TV. This, most of all, was fitting, because no matter how many hours he spent talking nostalgically of the 12th century and the glory of the islamic caliphate, bin laden was a master of the 21st century image machine.

The deconstruction of the uber-fiend, peddled for years, most relentlessly by the insidious Bush regime to hold political power and justify their wars and associated criminality was well under way. The Republican party owned 9/11, wielded it as a trusty bludgeon and used it without mercy as they eviscerated the United States Constitution, turned torture into the guiding principle of national policy, looted the treasury and doled out ever more lucrative contracts to mercenaries and private war profiteers on the taxpayer dime. Whenever it was questioned one of those timely bin Laden videos or tapes just happened to pop up, up went the color-coded terror alert and the nuisance of having to come up with answers went away. For example when Osama bin Laden just happened to pop up on a video four days or so before the 2004 elections it provided a ringing endorsement for the terrorism of Bush and Cheney and with a bit of help in Ohio courtesy of Karl Rove's election stealing machine the king was coronated anew for four more years of hell. The Republicans seized bin Laden and along with him the mythic menace of the destroyer of worlds, it was as though George W. Bush had pulled the magical sword Excalibur from the stone of the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center and the use of the tragedy for political expedience was already official policy while the rotting flesh of the victims still hung heavy in the lower Manhattan air.

Later in the Time piece there is this:

No Hollywood filmmaker ever staged a more terrifying spectacle than 9/11, which bin Laden conjured from a few box cutters and 19 misguided martyrs. When the Twin Towers collapsed, he became the real-life answer to the ruthless, stateless and seemingly unstoppable villains of James Bond fantasy. It was necessary then, to find him and render him mortal again, reduce him to mere humanity - not just as a matter of justice but as a matter of self-defense. 

And it has been done, Barack Hussein Obama has stolen away the mighty sword while at the same time the Mighty Wurlitzer of the pocket media not only ensures that the truth of the death of the evil one will be that of the official story of the state but that the original dogma of the attacks themselves would be reinforced for all time. With the establishment of the official historical account (which as the maxim goes, written by the victors and sanitized to omit the dirt) not only does the questioning of any part of the 9/11 story become intolerable by bin Laden himself is being body scrubbed with his past CIA association being denied by think tank hacks like Peter Bergen in his prominent WaPo piece entitled Five Myths about Osama bin Laden. The usual gaggle of reliable neocon stooges like Charles Kraüthammer patting themselves on the back while trumpeting the great success of the phony war on terror, the sadists and authoritarian freaks on the right-wing decrying any criticism of torture, in Time's case making apologies for the ugly Americans celebrating the demise of the bogeyman with their idiot "USA,USA,USA" chants and viciously cracking down on those who happen to wander off the star spangled lemming farm. Take for example Pittsburgh Steelers running back whose most recent claim to fame was a key fumble during the Super Bowl that pretty much sealed his team's doom. Both barrels were turned on Mendenhall this week for his daring to use TWITter to weigh in on the orgy of glee during the national barbecuing of bin Laden's ass - "those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn in hell and piss on his ashes, I ask how would God feel about your heart?... What kind of person celebrates death?". For this the man was descended upon as if by a biblical plague of flesh-eating bats by the pocket media kingmakers, flag-sucking drones and assorted other imbecilic dwellers of the most befouled gutters of the mind. Were this a more primitive (or in our case futuristic) society, Mendenhall would have been quickly an ruthlessly hunted down, his tongue ripped out with fire heated iron tongs and his wayward fingers chopped off so as to never again engage in such heresy as well as to sent an example for others. 


We have been here before, any dissent from the Bush administration's blatant usage of the 9/11 event for reasons of politics and settling an old score with Saddam Hussein were affixed with the scarlet letters of traitor and anti-American. This is just the reverse form of the same primitive defense of the official religions. When it comes to doubts about the ceremonies, false idols and totems any who dare to utter the blasphemies must be dealt with summarily and with extreme prejudice. Any really serious examination of the scaly underbelly of the angry beast with millions of electronic eyes that is the Homeland in the new American century must be taken with a familiarity of the allegory of Plato's cave. Once you have been outside don't even bother to venture back to try to enlighten the other slaves for ye shalt be damned for your efforts if not drawn and quartered by a team of Clydesdales. 

Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.

- Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

Maybe the real truth of the bin Laden story is that his former sponsors and associates within the American establishment finally just wanted to write the end to his story, tie up that last loose end because to do anything else would ensure a demise, sucked under in the quicksand bog of the wars without end. Obviously spooked by the recent Standard and Poor downgrade of the U.S. debt perhaps it was just an acknowledgement of that which is obvious in that the wars, especially the bottomless money pit in Afghanistan are destroying the country in ways that bin Laden or any other foreign enemy ever could. The bin Laden execution brings to mind the scene from the classic film Apocalypse Now when finally reaching the river's end Captain Willard is delivered to the compound of Colonel Kurtz who had gone rogue and was as a result marked for death by his own country's military leadership in order to terminate his command:

Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.

Kurtz: It's no longer classified, is it? What did they tell you?

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.

Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?

Willard: I'm a soldier.

Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

Osama bin Laden was never going to stand trial, not in this Empire, not with what he knew. Despite the best efforts of the professional propagandists and spin doctors to downplay his longtime involvement as a valuable instrument of U.S. policy, most notably with the Mujahadeen in the proxy war against the Soviets back in the Reagan years in Afghanistan. What is now existent in popular culture as a noble effort, Charlie Wilson's War for example with the all-American Tom Hanks playing the flamboyant Texan Republican who used his seat in the U.S. Congress to promote arming Islamic radicals, a Reagan pet project right up there with letting good ole Ollie North run guns and drugs to fund arming the Latin American death squads. Were bin Laden to have a forum the potential revealing of such a duplicitous history could prove to be immensely embarrassing and in our sugar-coated, sanitized and flag-draped narrative we couldn't possibly admit to colluding with criminals, dictators, Nazi war criminals or Muslim fanatics in order to further an agenda largely dictated by corporations and plutocrats. Best to just send in the hit squad and be done with it, if that's what actually happened. 

Media analyst Danny Schecter puts it well in his piece Nailing Osama Bin Laden: Was it a military or amedia operation? Why now?

They could have captured him, but that would lead to the hassle of putting him on trial. Besides, what if he revealed his long connection with the CIA and US officials? Can't have that. So the kill order was given, along with a quick disposal of the body, mafia-style (as in “sleeping with the fishes)."

But we will never really know will we?

I have always personally believed that he was dead, at least since shortly after the towers fell and I have never been convinced that he played anything more than an ancillary role in the 9/11 attacks. The attacks as they occurred couldn’t have been carried out by anything less than a multi-national alliance of serious and I mean stone cold professional military personnel, intelligence pros, mole networks largely compartmentalized to provide plausible denial and government officials with the clout to influence both the behind the scenes preparatory work as well as the following cover-up. The weakest part of the entire story to me has always been Osama bin Laden and his flight-simulator trained Islamic fundamentalist fanatics like Mohammad Atta, Ninjas with box-cutters who could overwhelm a multi-trillion dollar intelligence colossus, circumvent the entire national air defense command, dupe U.S. allies and their intelligence services and then pull off with crackerjack precision three daredevil direct hits on U.S. buildings with such damage being done to the structures as to defy the basic laws of physics. Americans are stupid though and swallowed it all, rolled over and gave up their rights and begged for more tyrannical enslavement as their tax dollars were funneled to private military contractors (mercenaries) and private   intelligence firms operating with impunity, zero oversight and no loyalty except to the bottom line. Maybe in the movies Bruce Willis can assemble a crew of losers, party freaks, misunderstood geniuses and hard-assed oil patch roughnecks who could be trained by NASA in less than two weeks to go into space and destroy a killer asteroid but this is reality and when something smells like bullshit there is a 99.9 % chance that it IS bullshit.

The entire official story of 9/11 is one big lie but it is now a lie that like the assassination of President Kennedy will live on while any naysayers will be stigmatized and ghettoized in the predictable manner that "conspiracy theorists" are always treated by a corrupt state seeking to keep its skeletons in the closet with the doors nailed shut. What is now occurring is the death of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as the national wound that was ripped open on that Tuesday morning in 2001 begins to scab over there will be no tolerance for those who continue to pick at it. Already in the days after the big announcement there is a real chill in the air and the establishment is in all likelihood implement the Cass Sunstein plan to "cognitively infiltrate" groups that question the official government fairy tale of 9/11. Personalities who had previously done much good work in investigating 9/11, for example alternative media firebrand Alex Jones has essentially discredited himself through his willingness to feast upon the fruit of the poisoned tree that was the finally and hopefully permanently discredited Birther movement (which smelled like an Israeli black propaganda campaign from the get go) and as a result of this been immersed in a vat of horseshit. While playing fast and loose with themes friendly to the Council For National Policy like global warming denial and pandering to bigots for ratings by demonizing Meskins any of Jones' skepticism at the serendipitous death of bin Laden is easily mocked despite the legitimacy of such questions. There are others as well calling bullshit on the bin Laden murder and they will surely face immense difficulty and much scorn in pursuing this line of skepticism. My personal advice is that it just isn't worth it, there are too many other areas that are in more need of serious attention than wailing away at the tar baby that is Osama bin Laden. Again, where is the body? Why the changes of story? Why now? I defer to recent work by Paul Craig Roberts The Agendas Behind the bin Laden News Event and Russ Baker More Questions on bin Laden for provocative reading and unlike Alex Jones they have not self-immolated. 

This may sound like a cop out but as far as I am concerned an official admission that the man is dead works fine for me, whether it happened last weekend or nine years ago is at this point moot to me. In the end what is most important is that we are able to exit the bizarre, down the rabbit hole because it just may end up being a grave, parallel universe that we were catapulted into when the planes hit the building on September 11, 2001. That will have to suffice right now for nothing will ever have even the remotest chance of returning to a state of semi-normality or what is going to pass for that unless we are able to get some closure and an escape from the neocon Republican fear mongering that has mired us in unwinnable, bankrupting and immoral wars of occupation based on lies. Barring a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks, which by the way is NEVER going to happen, I personally think that it is best to just accept the official story of Osama bin Laden’s death as it has been put forth by the state and it’s organs. Face it, the story may have that now familiar rottenness about it but it’s just time to move on beyond the horrors of the last decade. 

I recall that one great line from the famous western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance :

“when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”

So it goes....

Happy 8th Anniversary - Now Investigate 9/11!

Last night when I was watching the NFL grand kickoff festivities it just amazed me on how much more extravagant that the bread and circuses become as the American empire enters the stage of terminal rot. Eaten from within by looters using the full power of the state to confiscate the tax dollars of the American citizens for their financial gambling schemes and to throw anyone into a for profit prison gulag system who dares to complain about it as well as the termites and maggots like Rep. Joe Wilson who proudly serve as the guardians of the fascist oligarchy. Of course there is the menace of rising demagogue Glenn Beck and the full might of the shadow government that is all too happy to have a money loser as an ace propagandist, liberals extol the virtues of the boycotts by Beck advertisers but it doesn't mean jack fucking shit - the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times has been a huge money loser practically since its inception but it's true value is as a forum to distort and mold public opiniong, a launching pad for the slime, swill, sleaze and lies that reverberate throughout the right wing echo chamber media. Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace said it best:

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

And today it is the 8th Anniversary of that sanctified day when the reset button was hit on 200+ years of American 'democracy' and the justification for the authoritarian surveillance state was set into stone with the obvious false flag attacks that occurred on that Tuesday morning when a special effects/psy ops extravaganza destroyed the World Trade Center, something hit the exact right side of the Pentagon to cause the least death and destruction and the national myth of the heroic Todd Beamer and the fighting passengers of United 93 became legend.

And the media pimped the American Reichstag Fire as though it were holy gospel. Now I can't even watch a fucking football game without being bludgeoned by the lies.

There will be many, especially the knuckle-dragging, NeoNazi RepublKKKan shitheads out in force today exploiting the deaths of 3,000 American citizens on home soil like the necorphiliac corpse fuckers that they always have been - fucking jackbooted ghouls. The racist pigs will of couse never acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of dead brown people who were later slaughtered with the phony terrorist attacks used as the justification. Same phony attacks were used as justification for every rotten trangression of humanity, every revocation of civil liberties and every imposition by goons at the nation's airports, football stadiums as well as the invasive Big Brother surveillance machine that has been unleashed upon us all.


The ugly truth is that there has NEVER been a legitimate investigation of what happened on 9/11/2001. There was the Kean Commission which was as laughable as the Warren Commission in it's conclusions, just more whitewash delivered by a group of cover up artists, political cronies and military industrial complex lackeys. There was at one time a vibrant 9/11 Truth Movement but it has along with the Ron Paul Revolution has been hijacked by the drooling fear pimp and reactionary thug for hire Glenn Beck and there are condemnations and tin foil hats to be handed to all with legitimate questions of that day of national 'rejuvenation'. The PNAC has never been investigated, the Anthrax attacks were blamed on a conveniently dead patsy, Richard B. Cheney has never been made to testify under oath about what happened on that morning from the PEOC underground command center, there has been so serious attempt to investigate or even acknowledge why the intercept procedures had been changed and why there were multiple war games going on which prevented any military response to hijacked airliners heading towards Washington and New York. And there is the fact about the hijackers themselves, in my opinion the biggest farce of them all:


It should be obvious to anybody with half a brain that the daredevil type of piloting finesse that would be required in order to execute the precision high-speed maneuvers that resulted in devastating direct hits on both towers of the WTC as well as the Pentagon are not exactly what could be reasonably expected from training in small time flight schools for puddle hoppers, especially considering the caliber of the losers who were enrolled to hone their 'skills' for the devastating kamikaze strikes. It is inconceivable that the supposed suicide pilots would be able to undertake this mission on the strength of the official story of their amateur flight school training alone. This to me is the critically contradictory piece of called evidence in the official story that should be subjected to the most intense scrutiny possible because let’s face it, this is the real world and Bruce Willis may be able to learn how to become an astronaut in order to save the planet Earth by valiantly flying off to destroy a killer asteroid in about a week’s time but movies are movies and fantasy is not reality.

The alleged hijackers were either complete phonies with well constructed histories that were immediately available for mass distribution through the media much like another patsy named Lee Harvey Oswald after another great national tragedy or their identities had been created as a cover for who they really were. The level of professional military caliber training needed to fly the hijacked airliners with the sophistication, skill and precision that they had to have been flown with in order to accomplish their mission almost certainly had to have been underwritten by a state with a highly advanced air force (of course the neo cons have done their best to inundate the public with the propaganda that it was Saddam Hussein's Iraq) , the question is which state? Considering that over three quarters of the alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia would it be too much of a leap in logic to consider that just perhaps they may have received training and practice either there or elsewhere? This is the one part of the official story that is the most malodorous and yet is easily accepted by Americans accustomed to living in a world of television and movie adventure fantasies.

Oh, and there is the strange contradictions that lead 'hijacker' Mo Atta was operating out of a flight school with a history of CIA black ops and had a fetish for cocaine, pork chops and pussy - hardly the behavior of a fanatic Islamist religious fanatic hellbent on self immolation.

The contradictions are endless and lies pile up like cordwood...just like the bodies in the illegal wars that used 9/11 as their justification. They can pile the bodies all the way up to fucking Jesus too for what it's worth, nothing is going to change (except for the worse) unless there is a real and legitimate investigation by an independent commission of what the hell happened.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o' joe

EE

The Bushreich Battle Of The Bulge

All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.

-Adolf Hitler

 In late 1944, battered and on the brink of defeat due to the failed delusions of global domination by an extremist right-wing megalomaniac and his one party state, the German regime in a desperate attempt to regain their mojo and turn the tables on the advancing American armies threw everything but the Berchtesgaden kitchen sink into a massive counteroffensive famously known as the Battle Of The Bulge. It is no slight coincidence that the similarities between the playbooks of both Rove era Republicans and that certain twentieth century European regime of the mention of which is verboten in many areas of the liberal and progressive blogosphere but they continue to manifest themselves in the tactics of this rogue regime that has hijacked America and is once again reverting to their bread and butter strategy of going back to the future. The stench of fetid sauerkraut and charred flesh will be wafting in on the early September breezes emanating from the think tank kitchens where the bitches brew of anti-American warmongering propaganda is concocted. The Pentagon has even set up yet another of their psyops chop shops to pimp the war and keep the killing machine in overdrive.

A relentless propaganda campaign of extreme right-wing nationalism swaddled in the stars and stripes, yet another ripping of the scab from the festering wound of Vietnam for political advantage, exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 and going to the ‘we cold have won but the liberals and media stabbed us in the back’ card will soon be jacking up the pro-war fervor of an ignorant and pathologically angry base of dead enders as the Bush-Cheney junta seeks to prolong the escalation of his war of civilizations and bludgeon all opposition into submission no matter what the consequences are. From all indications there is going to be a huge Republican neofascist counter attack against the thoroughly lame Democrats, war critics and civil libertarians that will be so savage and vicious that it will be a wonder if there aren't mass pogroms with blood running in the streets by the time that it is all over and the motherfucker brigades have been mobilized. Soon the screaming heads on FOX and CNN will be braying accusations of treason at the top of their diseased fucking lungs and the pocket media will provide cover for the warmongers. Longtime establishment shill George Will has already started with his recent Washington Post column that goes so far as to actually invoke Weimar entitled What September Won’t Settle:

Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable.

After the First World War, politics in Germany's new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power.

And

When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.

One faction -- essentially, congressional Democrats -- is heavily invested in the belief, fervently held by the party's base of donors and activists, that prolonging U.S. involvement can have no benefit commensurate with the costs. The war, this faction says, is lost because even its repeatedly and radically revised objective -- a stable society under a tolerable regime -- is beyond America's military capacity and nation-building competence, and it is politically impossible given the limits of American patience.

In comparing the America that awaits the bogus Patraeus Report written by White House flacks with Weimar Germany Will also sees the all too obvious analogy – only this time with history as a guideline as to what happens when an angry, rogue element is allowed to wave the bloody flag to marginalize, dehumanize and ultimately destroy those who have betrayed the glory of the state and the “November Criminals” while building a totalitarian death machine that was doomed to self destruct but not before claiming millions of victims it is essential that the brownshirts be put down like the rabid dogs that they are.

Something is in the air right now, that much is for sure and this is not the same country that it was six years ago that is evident from the crazed screed of neocon operative Michael Savage wanna be cocksucker named Stu Bykofsky that proclaimed that America NEEDED another 9/11 to among other things “quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail”. What sort of a rancid and filthy goddamned place has this become when it is acceptable to openly advocate for the murders of thousands of innocents for the sake of rank political expedience for entrenched criminal sacks of shit and their miserably failed war that never should have been started in the fucking first place?

Extremist red state fascist sleeper cells are now being placed on full alert, treasonous fifth columnist apostate scum the likes of Pastor John Hagee along with that duplicitously rotten little dual loyalist bastard Joe Lieberman are out rousing the rabble of the Christian Zionist warmongers for yet more war against the enemies of God’s chosen land of Israel. Baring his fleshy butt cheeks as if to say "kiss my ass" at the contemptuous Vichy Democrats on his way out of Washington Karl Rove is now free to run amok. Now even veteran rat fucker Ari Fleischer is back with yet another of those swift boat style Orwellian named front groups called this one unbelievably named Freedom’s Watch that is going to launch a $15 million dollar blitzkrieg of slander, sewage and hate mongering just in time for that holiest of all holies -September 11th our great day of national fucking glory when the reset button was hit on the great experiment called democracy. I don't make this shit up although it seems like such daredevil freefall leaps of faith down the rabbit hole just can't fucking be real.

The Freedom's Watch website not surprisingly features lots of American iconography straight out of Frank Luntz’s playbook with flying flags, a glowering eagle and enough ‘patriotic’ fascist style horseshit to ensure wavering red staters and raptureheads that the Republicans are REAL Americans not those limp wristed, terrorist symp, faggot worshipping, defeatist enemies of America whose logo is a freaking donkey for God’s sake! The Fleischer spots are among some of the most shameless and dishonest moments in the history of American marketing. They are so thoroughly vile in nature that the only comparison that I can come up with was the ploy from the movie Used Cars where one of the lot lizards had Toby the dog play dead under a vehicle that was being test driven to lay a colossal guilt trip on the sucker inside to buy the lemon. The trick worked, the rube signed the dotted line and when the tailgate fell off on the way off of the lot Toby was wagging his little tail as the commission was booked. These damned Republicans remind me of the same sort of disreputable cheapjack swindlers who manned the Fuchs Brothers’ dealerships with the sole intention to prey on any moron who was credulous enough to be easily gypped and fleeced. They prey on weakness and have a sixth sense that gives them an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to smell the blood of the vulnerable upon which they feed just like the worst that nature has to offer like feral garbage rats, ravenous wolves and degenerate pederasts. The Democrats are on their heels now and the scent of desperation is in the air.

None of this of course would be happening were it not for the doublecross of voters by the new Democratic Congress who given power last November with a crystal clear mandate to ring down the curtain once and for all on the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil’s bloody damned wars – both on Iraq and on civil liberties in ‘the Homeland’ a fucking stinking term of totalitarian language that is the antithesis to everything that America is supposed to stand for. Not once did the disgusting excuse for leadership exemplified by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Steny Hoyer and the too smart consultants already triangulating while running for 2008 draw a serious line on ending the madness and the death.

No, scratch that – not once did the gutless, contemptible charlatans in the Democratic Congress take a stand on ANYTHING! Impeachment was immediately taken off of the table, a smirky criminal Attorney General still is the nation’s top law enforcement official, illegal spying on American citizens has now been codified AGAIN, habeas corpus is still gone, this is still a torture state, the Fairness Doctrine has not been restored, corporate greedheads still have carte blanche to screw the middle class whenever they damned will please which is every day while the Wall Street looters are allowed to suckle at the government teat whenever their schemes unravel, millions are still uninsured, subpoenas are openly mocked and ignored, the same neofascist Supreme Court justices that were green-lighted by a Senate too timid to use the filibuster (which I might add is now loved by Republicans) to essentially overturn Brown v. Board of Education and I just don’t have enough time to keep listing the failures of this most disappointing and cowardly of Congresses. The spin can go on until Hell itself freezes over and the fingers can be pointed at the "Blue Dogs" but the fault lies with a party leadership itself that continues to piss on America and then claim that it's raining.

It is no wonder that their popularity rating is only slightly higher than colorectal cancer and they are about to be torn to shreds by a vile hydra that has regenerated itself because the timorous jackasses couldn’t close the deal and drive a stake through it’s heart when it was on the ropes.

The Sweltering Summer Of Fear

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

-Stu Bykofsky


Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and jackbooted government thugs kicking down your door after your name turns up on the hit list after the illegal spying and data mining just given a seal of approval by the Vichy Dems, this is the vision of the grand experiment of the dismantling of democracy in the post-9/11 through the looking glass world of The Homeland. It is now mid-August, the sweltering heat and dread of the summer of fear combine to choke off reason and logic as the grand house of cards that is the stock market teeters precariously and those strange words of Rick Santorum that “a lot of things are going to happen” resonate with each and every terror warning like the latest threatening a reported plot that there is chatter about a pending dirty bomb attack in New York City.

Dick Cheney and the neocon junta are also ratcheting up the rhetoric and pushing their plans for the looming attack on Iran that will take the bastard conflagration that is the wet dream of madmen global and turn the United States into pariah of Nazi like proportions. Hitting Iran would be like Hitler invading Poland and you can bet that any justification such as a false flag attack will be just as steeped in utter bullshit as the Gleiwitz incident was back in 1939. The PNAC boys and Clean Breakers have obviously studied Operation Himmler and how in your face would it be if the next ‘terrorist’ attack to take place within the borders of Der Heimat were to occur on August 31st? Then again, who would care because in a nation of mindless drones and hateful lemmings it is incomprehensible that anything resembling recall of history extends past the latest bust involving Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan or the most recent winner of the American Idol.

Many Republicans are already on record longing for another terrorist attack with the same sort of uncontrollable lust that drives degenerate pederasts, the same sort of bad wiring in the head that drugs just can’t cure and nothing short of removal from civilized society (or this mortal coil itself for that matter) can remedy. The latest example of this sort of mass dementia is exemplified in the recent column of one Stu Bykofsky entitled and I shit you not -"To save America, we need another 9/11”. Sweet Fucking Jesus, what has happened to us as a country when these sick, demented ghouls can wrap themselves in old glory and openly cheer for the deaths of thousands of innocent people for the sake of political expediency and some twisted version of nationalism that more fittingly belongs in the Weimar Republic than in the sad mockery of the remnants of what was once the land of the free and the home of the brave.

One of the most often misquoted and abused statements in the brutal word wars that pass for political discourse these days is that of Carl Schurz who in 1872 said:

“My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"

Of course in the attention deficit disorder afflicted land of suckers that is the post 9/11 wasteland that is mid-2007 America it is much more familiar in its shortened form-“My Country, Right or Wrong” and is regularly bandied about for political purposes. This has become a standard denunciation for the extremist right in its diluted form and serves the same purpose as the standard “Love it Or Leave It”. Either one is absolutely guaranteed to get the backs of ‘patriots’ up and the red, white and blue blood flowing for another round of rousing demagoguery. If the nationalist ranting of our beleaguered national fascist party in this latest round of bunting draped vitriol is any indication the Republicans won’t be satisfied until there are brutally violent pogroms being conducted and the blood of liberals and gays is flowing in the streets.

There is something very dark locked away in the American psyche that makes for fertile territory for sick fascist fucks like Bykofsky seeking to catch that good ole 9/11 style lightning in a bottle for a renewal of the foaming at the mouth, dissent quashing, authoritarian tyranny that ruled the land in the direct aftermath of that day of infamy now nearly six years past. Those were the good old days when rallies were held to destroy Dixie Chicks CD’s and every home was festooned with American flags (many made in China) that were the requisite talisman to prevent the owners from having visited upon them a terrible pox of ‘unpatriotic’, it was as necessary as the blood of the lamb on doorposts in biblical times to keep the angel of death at bay. There has always been a considerable segment of the population susceptible to the siren song of authoritarianism, a good study on this is John Dean’s outstanding book Conservatives Without Conscience” which examines the mutant strain of virulent ‘conservatism’ that exists today. From the days when Father Charles Coughlin railed against the New Deal to the heir to his throne of hatred Rush Limbaugh who has the benefit of high technology and a king hell infrastructure to back him the need for scapegoats and a return to days of yore have hooked those that I refer to very easily.

A childhood friend who I will call 'Rocky' fell under the spell of the grand poobah of white populist propaganda years ago. The last times that I talked to him was immediately after the news of his hero's taste for Vicodin and Oxycontin had broken and Rocky this with a line of crap along the lines that at “any given time that at least half of the population was high on something or the other”. He of course became quite angry when I told him that thrice divorced, racist, drugged out hypocrites who hold others to higher standards by proclaiming that they are morally superior deserve exactly what they get. Then again Rocky never really did get it. He always was dumber than a bucket of shit and to borrow a line from Matt Taibbi was "a total zero, a loser and 200-odd pounds of the world's purest pussy repellent" although in Rocky’s case it was far closer to 300.

‘Rocky’ always had a low sense of self esteem as well as a wide yellow streak bordering on neocon chickenshit and had an irrational fear of dogs. When we were going around door to door soliciting donations for whatever charitable cause we were tasked with doing by our school (which we did quite often as kids) he could be confronted by a toy poodle and would practically shit in his pants out of pure primal fear, he acted as though it were the crazed, rabid monster canine 'Cujo' himself bearing down on him with a blood scent. It was a good thing that he had the fear though because it made for good exercise both for myself and the little pudgeball who would often make us walk blocks out of our way so as to avoid any yards where there were barking dogs.

After about thirty years of cowardice and shame ‘Rocky’ found Rush in much the same manner that some diehard losers turn their lives around by finding Jesus. It was as though he became possessed by an evil spirit because practically overnight he was transformed into a blowhard, ditto-head bully, parroting Limbaugh in going off on anti-liberal, Clinton bashing diatribes and visiting the gathering places that were then known as 'Rush Rooms' that were areas set aside in local dining and drinking establishments where fans of the great one with borrowed talent from the heavens could gather and network while his radio show was played every day to the cheers of the aspiring beer hall putschers. As it is with other conscripts in ditto head angry army, my buddy was a mass of contradictions, a bigot of immense proportions both in girth and flawed ideology, you see he became one of those angry white man without a clue as to the true reason for their anger but the big fat bastard who was of Hispanic descent really wasn’t white at all.

In retrospect my old buddy was a latent dittohead from his earliest days. He once tried to coax me into participating in a mutual jack-off session back when we were in our early teens one night when I was sleeping over at his house which was something that I did often due to the fact that my parents were going through a very ugly divorce and it was a refuge from their fighting. So there you have the latent homosexual tendencies that drive many of those angry Alpha males into outwardly projected self-loathing and ripe for the picking for the high and mighty Limbaughs and lesser stooges like Bykofskys of the world. I know that his parents who are devout Catholics would be absolutely horrified at this revelation so hopefully they will never read this blog. They are really very nice people who still send me a Christmas card every year and I certainly wouldn’t ever want to give them any idea that their son may in fact be a repressed closet queen who may have been far more qualified for the priesthood than they ever would have otherwise imagined. Given the mass appeal of Limbaugh it is an absolute certainty that there are millions out there just like ‘Rocky’ who are all too easily ensnared by their tentacles.

Author Kevin Phillips is a longtime conservative whose most recent book American Theocracy is a must read as it offers an excellent analysis of the triple threat that radical religion, foreign oil and massive debt pose to our nation’s future. This is his follow-up to the equally excellent American Dynasty that stripped away the veneer of respectability and shined a light into the foul den of iniquity that is the House of Bush and the family ability to discard that pesky morality which far too often serves as an impediment to the accumulation of wealth and power. Phillips wrote another book back in 1982 that accurately and prophetically forecast many of the contributing factors to today’s poisonous political environment.

Post Conservative America was bold and daring in the examination of the caustic effects of the triumphal ascendancy of Ronald Reagan as the heir to Barry Goldwater style conservatism and made the comparison between the U.S. in the 1980’s and the Weimar Republic of Germany that preceded the rise to power of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. Phillips noted that there were certain similarities in the legacy of a nation reeling from the effects of a “lost war, diminished faith in institutions, the gap between an elite ‘cabaret culture’ and the beliefs of the more traditional masses”. The combination of these as well as the Reagan political machine’s reliance on the seductive siren song of nostalgia that fed off of a longing for a better time that although itself a myth was widely accepted due to the fantasy world of television. For years there were shows and movies that presented a distorted version of white picket fenced, small town Americana that was overly simplistic and totally lacking in the portrayal of the complexities and contradictions of life itself in regards to human history in general and our own revisionist American history in particular. Phillips theorized that such mass misconceptions as well as their cynical exploitation by amoral political operatives could potentially result in an “apple-pie authoritarianism” in our society.

Phillips stated that such fantasy and a growing influence of the south in the political arena could result in a country in which:

“Corporatist policies would manage the economy more than is being done today, mobilizing a U.S.A. Inc. to cope with France Inc. or Japan Inc. The morality of the majority would be upheld and enforced, though with politically convenient lapses; “The Star-Spangled Banner” would wave with greater frequency and over many more parades; increased surveillance would crack down on urban outbreaks and extreme political dissidents”.

Sound familiar? I find it strange that some of the biggest defenders of American liberties are disenchanted principled conservatives like John Dean, Kevin Phillips, Vic Gold and the spot on Paul Craig Roberts among others. In Post Conservative America the author also addresses the foul aftertaste of Vietnam that has lingered in the mouths of so many whose bitterness at the first lost war in American history would remain so firmly lodged in their exceptionalist craws and be embodied as huge chips on their shoulders that the propagandists could exploit to the maximum value when it came to promoting the ultra-right movement's agenda. Phillips very accurately predicted not only the increasing radicalism of the religious right (which is covered in depth in American Theocracy) and the backlash against the perceived excesses of the 1960s but he also warned of the open wounds left by the lost war in Vietnam. These wounds have lingered, never being able to completely heal due to their value to certain elements of the political realm who relish not only tearing away the scabs but in rubbing salt into them for good measure as well as added impact. He warned of revisionism in re-fighting this war, a devastating blow to the national psyche and never a political party to continue to exploit divisive tactics like the infamous Southern Strategy the Reagan administration wasted no time in capitalizing on simmering resentment when the 'Gipper' himself stated in a speech shortly after taking office:

“Several years [ago], we brought home a group of American fighting men who obeyed their country’s call and fought as bravely and well as any Americans in our history. They came home without a victory not because they had been defeated but because they had been denied permission to win”

The war was then re-fought at cinemas with vengeful fantasies like Rambo II, Chuck Norris’ Missing In Action series, Uncommon Valor and a number of lesser films all featuring the same theme...winning it this time! Vietnam era resentment is still alive and well, ready to be sprung like a bouncing betty from the subconscious whenever the Republican party needs to tap into it. And when our loss in Iraq is firmly established in history then Karl Rove and his minions will use the exact same tactics to blame the loss on the clueless and cowardly Democrats who can only be counted on to roll over repeatedly while Americans are stripped of their civil liberties and a dictatorial police state becomes more deeply entrenched.

It has already started, don’t take my word for it though. Just look around.

The summer of fear is entering the dog days now and the scent of blood is dangerously close to wafting in on the breeze much to the delight of the apple pie authoritarians and dangerous demagogues who are coiled and ready to strike whenever the next ‘terrorist’ attack provides them with the opportunity that they have been slavering for.

2004 Reprobate Party Convention: Nuremburg Revisited

"The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked..”.

- George Orwell's 1984

“They all came to look for America”

- Simon and Garfunkel

NEW YORK CITY

August 2004: They came from throughout this great and mighty land, the patriotic and the God fearing, the disenfranchised, the bigots, the healers, the hopeful, the hopeless, the wealthy and the poor alike: they were legion.

A grotesquely obese black bearded man rolled along in a motorized cart, his legs unable to support his colossal bulk. He was decked out in red white and blue, his tunic like a patriotic circus tent, he wore a Dr. Seuss style star spangled hat. His patriotism was on obvious display, his patriotism made possible by his lifetime of overindulgence on junk food, television and a sedentary lifestyle, a consumer of great magnitude, another denizen of the land of the obese and stupid: God bless the salt of the earth. A large sign adorned the back of his scooter, Abortion is Murder in red blood dripping letters, a miniature American flag flying from each handlebar, a Trust Jesus, Support President Bush super-sized button on the front of his clothing. He motored his way through the crowds, attracting little or no attention from security police more concerned with old ladies dressed in democratic blue, the scooter could have been packed with C-4 but the biggest patriot of them all kept on rolling, then he was consumed by the crowd.

In a flashback to The Exorcist, or a sleazy promo tie in for Exorcist 4: The Beginning, Dorthea, a prostitute from the Bronx screamed “LET JESUS FUCK ME” as she fornicated with a delegate from South Carolina who ironically happened to be a lay minister for the Charleston chapter of the Southern Baptist Convention, a family man with a wife and three children (all girls) and a Border Collie, he adamantly supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage given its heinous potential for destroying the nuclear family. Dorthea’s come slicked ass bounced against the plexiglass partition in Ahmed Hakim’s taxi, leaving greasy streaks and jolting his head forward from the impact, amplifying his already throbbing headache. A naturalized citizen and devout Muslim, Ahmed was sickened by the hate and perversity of these invaders of his adopted city. Ahmed had a bad day yesterday, swept up in a racial profiling operation by the NYPD he had missed out on an entire day’s fares during the Republican extravaganza, he had a family to feed, his three children were American citizens, his head ached from being slammed into a brick wall by a young white policeman who called him a dirty goat fucking dune coon. Dorthea had already fucked three other GOP delegates today, two who wanted anal sex.

The streets in front of Madison Square Garden resembled a war zone, cordoned off with razor wire. Hundreds of black clothed police in riot gear ringed the facility, ready to unleash a barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets at any faggot ACLU types who may show up to defile the impending coronation of the greatest president in the history of the United States. Hail to Augustus Bush, Praise God!. Vendors were hawking t-shirts of John Kerry in a turban, buttons of a red hued Kerry with horns and a pitchfork, rubber fetuses on sticks, posters of Bush in front of the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center emblazoned with “You’re with us or against us in large red letters”, cds of archived shows by Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Regnery Publishing had a kiosk as did American Opinion Books, both would do have brisk sales. A small mob had earlier hung Michael Moore in effigy to the cheers of a youth church group from Wichita Falls. Even the private arena security contractors got in on the fun, violently smacking the stuffed figure in the private area with their billy clubs. The Moore figure was then set ablaze to the cheers and catcalls of hundreds.

Despite terror warnings and heightened security the MSG parking area was home to numerous recreational vehicles that were rented by local entrepreneurs to serve as mobile brothels, some had barbecues set up in front, like tail gate parties. Some were even subsidized by party loyalists and power brokers, of course this was kept out of the range of the television cameras lest people get the wrong idea. Some rocked up and down as the smell of roasting meat and the sound of Toby Keith’s Shock and y’all boomed from loudspeakers and GOP delegates mingled as they waited their turns. There was a wet bar set up, cold beer flowed from kegs.

The pogrom was under way in the free speech zones.

Firehoses were being used to spray the screaming protestors in the razor wire topped free speech pen, they were caught by the high-pressure streams and thrown back violently. Police and security contractors marched abreast behind shields, closing the distance rapidly.

A young black man lay supine on the sidewalk, he was motionless, blood pooling around his head, chaos around. The private security contractor who had delivered the killing blow sneered to his partner “He was unpatriotic, and he was a nigger” as he sheathed his club.

A middle aged woman from Minneapolis who had lost her only son in Fallujah and who was protesting for the first time in her fifty four years had her head split open, she will never again recover normal brain functionality as a result.

A pregnant teenager from Dayton was shot in the belly by a rubber bullet fired by a riot cop, she would eventually miscarry, Randall Terry and Operation Rescue will not bother showing up to protest the NYPD for performing the abortion.

A group of young gay men from Rochester were set upon with rarely seen savagery by beer drinking young thugs in flannel shirts, jeans and cowboy boots, three were hospitalized, one lost both eyes, all would require months of therapy after the broken bones were set and the wounds stitched closed. A veteran triage attendant would be so disturbed over the mangled bodies that she would later need counseling. No arrests were made.

“Gas them all ” said Ashcroft, the sneer on his face was like a horizontal vaginal opening as obscenely lascivious as any shown in a multitude of pornographic publications that the A.G. sought to outlaw. “They are enemies of God, they are anarchists”.

Those rounded up were forced to endure humiliations, forced to strip naked and stand in cold rooms in front of leering cops and security contractors, body cavity searches, women were made to spread the lips of their vaginas and spread their ass cheeks so as to accommodate views into their most private of all areas while flashlights were shined into the orifices, the former National Socialist Party in Berlin used similar tactics in order to dehumanize. The cops and security goons hadn’t had it this good since Times Square was cleaned up by the invasion of corporate greed several years ago.

Several homeless men were set afire in Central Park , the breezes bore the stench of their charred flesh and reminded some city residents of the horrors of 9-11, some would say that this played into the hands of the party leaders who sought to exploit the tragedy through the very timing and location of this gathering.

Ground Zero was hallowed ground, secured in a joint effort by Promise Keepers, Birchers and Young America’s Foundation activists. A perimeter was set up; murals of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jesus Christ were plastered on area structures. A platform was festooned with bunting, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth led a rally, rescued from their pathetic, indignant, middle aged lives of simmering resentment and drunken obscurity for a highly compensated moment of glory, a chance to repudiate the drug addled sixties and to bask in the patriotic pride and nationalism that they never enjoyed after the Nam thanks to fucking commies like Kerry and the goddamned dope smoking peaceniks from faggot infested Berkeley. Their benefactors had been generous, prime accommodations at the plaza, catered prime rib feasts, champagne, Viagra and hookers delivered like room service, FOX interviews, speaking engagements, celebrity…hallelujah, a heroes welcome thirty-five years belated.

Fundamentalist Christian leaders were not extended formal invitations to speak during the tightly choreographed, sanitized televised convention but instead appeared at rallies throughout the city.

General Jerry Boykin, sans Army uniform addressed tens of thousands at a rally in Giants Stadium.

“This is a war for God, for American providence against evil, against Islam, against secularism, for family, we will be victorious”.

The fire was lit and rapidly exceeded 451 degrees Fahrenheit, books by Michael Moore and Al Franken were thrown in, bales of the New York Times fed the pyre, Bruce Springsteen and Linda Ronstadt compact discs melted and blackened, the smoke rose through the air, the true believers eyes burned with an inner fire that was all consuming, a righteous fire…a fire to cleanse the sodomites, the liberal secularists, they would all burn for eternity when thy kingdom come.

The throng cheered, the throng exalted.

God’s vengeance on queers, read a banner.

Praise Jesus, Re Elect President Bush!!

The rapture was coming soon, the end justified the means.

The streets were under control….God bless America.

Karachi, Pakistan:

Word was brought to Osama on the proceedings in New York, all was going exactly as planned, let Americans know the meaning of fear, of repression, of an elitist heathen ruling class family that exploited the masses, who crushed insurrection and dissent, who hid behind a deity to justify their hatred and oppression. Soon the time would be right for the war against Islam and in turn the Islamic jihad against the infidels, he would be ready to meet his destiny as the leader of the Islamic world against the Christian crusader who would do more to unite the Muslim world from without than would ever have been possible from within.

Allah Bless America!!