SMEAR ARCHIVE 2

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APRIL 22, 2008
CLINTON'S DAISY SPOT Following up on the last week's psychotic eerily Thatcher-esque nuke-rattling, Clinton went even further Daisy Spot-ward this morning to put a punctuation mark on her "look-at-my-testicles" tactical assault. You've probably already seen it, but if not:

Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on "Good Morning America" Tuesday. ABC News' Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

This prompts a particularly salient question worth weighing, at very least as a lesson of the last eight years. Who in their right fucking mind thinks that the way to disarm a potentially hostile nation is to threaten in every breath it destroy it?

This, of course, notwithstanding the NIE and all other actual, y'know, evidence that Iran does not, in fact, pose a goddamn nuclear threat, as Paul Craig Roberts addressed soberly over at Counterpunch last month.

Maybe Clinton should consult Colin Powell and Larry Wilkerson on how this kind of bullshit worked out before, then explain how it involves a breath of anything resembling fresh air in these toxic times.

LUGO, PARAGUAY AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF RED/BLUE MAP I've had worse reasons to get joyously drunk than the potentially epoch-making electoral victory of Fernando Lugo in the Paraguay's presidential election.

For anybody with any rudimentary knowledge of the last 100 years of Latin American history, the norteamericano hand in economic manipulation, dirty wars, coups, undisguised fascism and a seemingly endless war upon the poor is not something for which the United States can soon atone, even were its leadership willing. Institutionally confabulated rationalizations of Cold War exigency aside — which some will surely still argue — American guns, chicanery and capital have served as an ominous, razor-wire-dressed bulwark against the merest, most modest steps towards inclusionary democracy and social and economic justice for half the hemisphere.

But capping as it has an onslaught of too long-delayed electoral redress for the machinations of gringos and their "Market"-sanctifying, pale-skinned oligarch proxies, Lugo and his coaliton's end of 60 years of reactionary one-party rule in Paraguay seems an exclamation point of sorts. What it punctuates is perhaps the best legacy the cretinous Bush administration can hope to leave us, the symbolic end to the Monroe Doctrine, and a nearly hemispheric rejection of the insidious and conspicuously a-consensual Washington Consensus (the "consensus" was arrived upon in Harvard and Yale clubs with precious few others included in the discussion)

At any rate, given the recent fascination with red and blue-hued geography in our current electoral enterprise, I wondered what this shift in Latin America might look like if similarly mapped out from the beginning of the Bush administration to yesterday. Not surprisingly, it gives me even more reason to get drunk, which I will soon.

I share this not out of any intellectual authority, I just played around with a couple maps and Photoshop and the pretty colors, and I understand there are some nuances to Lula and Kirchner versus, say, Chavez and Morales versus, say, Lugo and Colom. Obviously there are still huge problems, too many owing to corrupt institutions and indigenous economies wracked by blight long ago seeded by U.S. foreign and economic policies. But amid all these voices and these spirited victories, and in the face of ostensible Democrats like Mark Penn, Bill Clinton and Harold Ickes neolib clinging to the reactionary outlier (and coke industry legacy) Uribe, we do find some common denominators, namely trending toward social inclusion and economic populism, the kind that, if nurtured, improves economies, empowers people and makes better trading partners, no matter what the bullshit Chicago School orthodoxy says.

One other note: call any of these guys whatever names you want, one truth remains, that none of them are our enemy, or ever needed to be. Some of these might be miscolored in your opinion and, to re-emphasize, this is anything but scientific or ironclad, and if you've got suggestions, float em out there. Or just meet me at the bar.

2001



April 21, 2008:



APR. 17, 2008
DONE Two-faced Rovian fucking dick. See, when you dip into the realm of candor, you asshole, you are a Republican after all. All we ever asked, Hillary, was honesty. Would've made all this shit a lot easier.

That said, your denials of your giddiness for war with Iran aside, your Iran war plan is totally awesome. You are so tough. And here we thought your primary charm was not having a penis.

Game

fucking

over.

MAR. 17, 2008
WINTER SOLDIER - WATCH AND CRINGE I've discussed dehumanization previously, as it pertains to race versus a sense of ascendancy and entitlement among some of our fellow citizens, how the latter allows one to do things one wouldn't otherwise if he considered someone different to be human versus Other. Dehumanization requires indoctrination, in the subtle code of Otherification. Indoctrination, also called brainwashing, prompts one to blindly follow orders, even if illegal, even if it impedes the job versus smooths it. Sure, people in war will obviously come to hate their enemy, but to cavalierly dismiss whole populations, their anguish, the horrors wrought against them, their very humanity, is worse, because it enables unimaginable acts such as My Lai and Haditha. In our Philippine conquest, American soldiers dehumanized Filipinos en toto with the imported epithet "nigger," in Vietnam they used "gook," in Iraq "haji," all with the guttural vindictiveness of hatespeech. Such subjugative mindsets, of us against All Around Us, yielded the most ugly, unconscionable crimes against humanity — not just, as some will inevitably, mincingly argue, the inevitable collateral damages, the bugfuck insanity, of war — but the acts of an oppressor, routine torture, summary mass executions, concentrations camps by other names that smell as fetid. This becomes especially problematic when you're dehumanizing, and making enemies of, the people you are ostensibly liberating. This always and ever can not, by any whit of logic, work. It hearkens to the old, dark joke that infamously circulated among soldiers in Vietnam: "The way you win the war is, you load up all the friendlies onto ships and send em out into the Gulf of Tonkin. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships." Wrong wars stem from wrong policy, which, falsely justified and endlessly rationalized, results in wrong actions. Wrong actions, blessed by both chain-of-command and cover-up after the fact, beget more wrong actions. Do not fucking even take my word for it, because it is also what brings well-meant, conscience-rent soldiers home to do the theretofore unthinkable, question that for which they fought and suffered. Iraq Veterans Against the War this past weekend held a series of unofficial hearings in DC under the aegis of "Winter Soldier," so called because of a similar program staged by Vietnam vets in 1971. If you haven't heard of it — as it has yet to get a remote spark of interest from the mainstream media even as they continue forwarding the fiction that John "100 years in Iraq" McCain is not just fucking batshit nuts — go here and watch these soldiers' testimony. Watch all of it, click the links, read more, however uncomfortable it makes you. It fuckwell should. Appreciate it. McCain, I think, would call these men traitors.

FEB. 26, 2008
THE STDS WE CONTRACT WHEN LADY JUSTICE IS MADE A WHORE No doubt a lot of Americans gave only passing attention to Alberto Gonzales' repeated, contemptuous and contemptible testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last spring, unsure why the wonkier firebrands amongst us were worked up into a lather by it all. What was at issue, in sum, was the notion that Americans, all Americans, are governed by the same rule of law, or whether some can simply make up new rules to suit them and their friends, to maintain power and to make inordinate profits by gaming the system. It is the equivalent of most people in your office working their asses off every week to do their jobs well, maybe get a raise and a promotion, then the boss's smirking fratboy son graduates college and get appointed your middle-manager, and there isn't shit you can do about it.

Except in this case, when the law meant to make us equal get tossed out the window, it portends much more insidious ramifications. It ends up with a guy, former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, getting set up for crime, imprisoned for seven years for doing pretty much nothing but thinking in ways Karl Rove didn't like. And it drives a pattern of corruption and criminal behavior designed specifically to stack the political deck, to forcibly eliminate all opposition in Machiavellian fashion, to destroy their means of competing in our life's-blood marketplace of ideas, and to, in the end, yield a one-party nation, a Republican nation, under God, with liberty and justice for the wealthy and pious.

And maybe even more egregiously, when news of their agenda threatened to reach the people it most affects via a 60 Minutes broadcast this past Sunday night, someone reached out and cut off the signal. Nearly a third of the state of Alabama saw their screen go blank during the highly rated CBS show's long-delayed and Bush-filibustered story on Siegelman, and only during that segment of the program. When it hits home, see, you, dear citizen, will not even be allowed to weigh the evidence for yourself. Somebody will do that for you.

When you put people above the law, able to manipulate it as they see fit and bear no consequences for doing so, you get injustice without redress, or, in a word, authoritarianism. You render the binding common denominator of the Constitution inert. In doing so, you in effect destroy that which makes a society of a nation-state. There is no greater crime, not murder, not genocide, than subverting the social compact made by the consent of the governed, for doing so effects widespread dehumanization of those whom constitutions are written to empower and protect; doing so, in fact, is the thing that allows and abides murder and genocide and lets those responsible go unpunished.

The first such social compact in recorded history, Hammurabi's Code, circa the 18th century BCE, stated its purpose as "to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; [to] enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind . . ." The evolution of democratic processes has been specifically to give the governed a hand in governing, effectively giving them a say in their own fates, which most of us have deemed a good thing. This is why the first vow the president speaks in his oath of office is "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Society has broken down in Alabama, which might not surprise anyone at face value. It's where they "hope ol' Neill will remember, a Southern man don't need him around anyhow," as Lynyrd Skynyrd famously defended "the governor" and his stalwart championing of institutional racism. Not only did the Bush administration and Justice Department and the Alabama Republican leadership railroad Siegelman, they did so as part of a relentless ongoing imperative to populate the Justice Department's regional offices with U.S. attorneys more amenable to doing the party's bidding than enforce the Constitution, which is to say, to not do their jobs.

This, recall, was the crux of the Congressional investigation last May into the Bush/Gonzalez's firing of eight U.S. attorneys across the country, Republicans all but not Republican enough, thus requiring replacement by "loyal Bushies," as administration officials put it. Monica Goodling, a dipshit little Rove flunky, came to the fore at that time, testifying in essence that she had broken the law in pretty much doing exactly what Rove had tasked her with, vetting U.S. attorneys for their True Believer bona fides and making up the hit-list. I wrote at the time:

This pinched little deb graduated from Messiah College and got her Law Degree from Regent University, an "educational" institution run by Pat Robertson, the billionaire diamond magnate and a lifelong friend of the most racist neo-Klan white supremacy groups that continue to dull and cow the minds of that stolid, unmovable, unthinking 24 percent [now 19 percent], oh, and also an influential Christian "leader." Getting a law degree from fundamentalist Christians is like getting a degree in quantum physics from Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

That these assholes decided to fire Republicans they didn't deem neocon enough is an egregious enough example of zealotry, but look at who they've got doing the dirty work:

All the tightwound uppercrust prigs we all fucking hated in high school! We have yielded our guidance as a society to everyone who never fucking invited us to the party, because we weren't white enough or weren't Christian enough or weren't Country Club enough or weren't jock enough . . . Nerds-in-crime Rove and Gonzalez and their pale, sexless True Believer henchkids Sampson, McNulty, Monica Fucking Goodling -- [t]hese were the people whose intrepid mission in the service of God and wealth and privilege allowed them to bypass anything resembling the actual life as experienced by the grand masses they hoped to lord over, to usher us unto their grand Christian design, removed of the plague of reason and science that might otherwise guide us on, um, any other course but fucking national and global disaster!

. . . . These are the stolid tie-wearing/sweatervest fucks in your political philosophy classes who raised their hands all the time and rationalized Machiavelli, who bitched at you to turn down your stereo and who had jobs waiting for them when they got out of school -- people who never once had a second-thought of openmindedness, who never once re-examined their worldviews, who never struggled with meaning and purpose, you know, like fucking people do.

These were people who went on to be the footsoldiers of campaign chicanery and dirty tricks, accusing McCain of having a black bastard child, fucking with voter rolls in Ohio, justifying any scurrilous means to subvert actual democratic processes in the name of their Godly agenda. Hell, one of the pricks Rove/Gonzalez/McNulty/Goodling put into a US Attorney's job was Tim Griffin, a Machiavellian little Bush True Believer who helped the administration winnow minority soldier's absentee ballots out of voting pools, via a patently illegal process called voter "caging." Goodling testified to her and her bosses' knowledge of Griffin's involvement in the process on the Hill, dimwittedly blowing the whistle on a criminal felony, which, ahem, Griffin, in his new ill-gotten job, would now be charged with investigating. So, yeah, all their bullshit about "supporting the troops" only goes as far as those troops' constitutional right to vote, a fetid little administration secret laid bare by Greg Palast, who actually obtained hundreds of the subpoenaed emails the White House has still somehow "misplaced."

In addition to being wonkish ranting, this skimmed the basic seeding of Bush/Rove/Kristol's crusade to create their vaunted "permanent Republican majority," as has been documented by Larisa Alexandrovna at RawStory.com. The Griffin piece, however, gave us a peek into how those seeds would bear fruit in the most odious perversions and manipulations of justice.

Smash cut to Arizona, where Congressman Rick Renzi, McCain's Arizona campaign co-chair, just found himself indicted on 35 counts of corruption. Those stem from typical Republican wheeler-dealing with wealthy pricks for campaign donations in exchange for favorable legislation. But the imminent trial will reveal that Renzi's office, while campaigning for re-election in 2006, called the the U.S. attorney for Phoenix, Republican Paul Charlton, to attempt to influence the ongoing investigation favorably for Renzi, an outcome also being urged at the time by the Gonzales DoJ. When Charlton refused to play ball, Gonzales fired him, making him one of the eight and delaying case being made against Renzi.

The failure to stave off, finally, the prosecution for such glaring crimes can't obviate the malign intent of Gonzales and company. If they had their way, they would've killed the case outright, leaving scumbags like Renzi to continue to rubberstamp any little war or rendition any innocent Muslim Bush's black little heart desired, all his corrupt coffers intact.

Gonzales' eventual resignation in disgrace only deflected the Senate Judiciary's Committee, because its vast mission of rooting out the Bush crony cancer from the DoJ could not be made more evident than with Siegelman's case. However wonky the U.S. attorney "massacre" hearings may've seemed to non-wonks, the undercurrent plague they exposed was the overt politicization of the Justice Department, something the laws of the nation guard rigorously against to prevent the DoJ from becoming a thug arm of any sitting political party. Lady Justice, after all, has long worn a blindfold for a profound symbolic reason.

But as Siegelman's frame-up attests, Bush et al. have shanghaied us far down the road in the opposite direction. Two Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys in Alabama, one with direct ties to the Governor's mansion, made two separate tries at nailing Siegelman, one of the few successful and popular Democrats' in that Third World country of a state's recent history, and the first was thrown out by a judge after opening arguments. The second stuck, but, as 60 Minutes' story pointed out, not without some flashing red-neon question marks over:

a) coerced testimony;

b) Karl Rove's roll in a Get-Don-Siegelman crusade, directed from the White House;

c) unabashedly cronyist conflicts of interest on the part of GOP True Believers in the U.S. attorney's office and the trial judge on the case;

and d) a crime that may not actually be considered a crime in normal American chit politics, this according to 52 former Attorneys General from 40 states, including Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona, whom 60 Minutes interviewed at length, all of whom have signed a letter to the Judiciary Committee.

As to the latter, Siegelman is doing his seven years ostensibly on the questionable testimony that he made a political appointment based on a contribution of a donor not to him personally, but to a state campaign to legalize a lottery. Even throwing out a growing body of doubts being cast on whether that happened as the prosecutors say it did, even just assuming it did, by the estimates of Woods and his fellow ex-AGs, it isn't a fucking crime.

No, according to Grant Woods, again a Republican, Siegelman's real crime: "They could not beat him fair and square. This is a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of."

Harper's reporter Scott Horton, who has lead on coverage of the Siegelman case put it this way: "So how many Bush-Cheney donors in amounts of one hundred thousand and more were appointed to government offices or to positions in the Bush-Cheney transition team? The answer is one hundred and forty-six (146). And in how many of those cases did the Justice Department initiate investigations of corruption? The answer is zero (0). The Justice Department's rationale is that this crime is one that can be committed by Democrats alone. When a Republican does it, it's normal campaign fundraising."

That, of course, is the logic of the ubermenschen, those who deem themselves super-citizens by dint of whom they know and what strings they can pull — say, people like the Bass family of Texas, owners of Oak Hill Capital Partners, which owns one WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate out of Huntsville, AL. The Basses are infamously linked to George W. Bush's resumé of failures in the private sector, most notably riding in on a white horse to bail out Bush's abortive Enron-esque Ponzi scheme Harken Energy, which also had close ties to the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Rove bestowed the Basses with the title of Bush "Pioneers" for raising, according to RawStory, "more than $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in both 2000 and 2004." Any CBS affiliate can choose to air any CBS show, or not, at any time, but when the 60 Minutes broadcast began on Sunday night, just as the Siegelman story rolled, the signal of WHNT, the Basses' TV station in Alabama, went black.

WHNT claimed technical difficulties, initially on the end of the CBS signal, then with its own receiver, before the picture resumed at the tail end of the Siegelman story. CBS told Horton: "There is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters." Horton added, "I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama 'could only have been an editorial call.'"

Called on its bullshit, WHNT aired the Siegelman segment the next day on its local news broadcast, though no-doubt hardly garnering the kind of audiences 60 Minutes draws. And as with Renzi, the Basses' failure at corruption in no way obviates the intent. If you want more visceral evidence of their purer intent, it's worth noting what was not mentioned in the 60 Minutes story, that whistleblower Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican attorney who attested to Karl Rove's role in the Get-Siegelman crusade, had her house burned down just before she gave similar testimony to the Congress last year.

The inevitable irony is, if the law still, really applies in this country, or if it is made to ever again, these men and women, from Bush to Rove to Gonzales to Goodling, to the Canarys and Griffins at the U.S. attorney level, these people need to be the first up in the dock, praying to their White God they look good in prison orange. When Obama becomes our next president, I'm all for his creating coalitions, bridging this polar divide largely contrived by bullshit non-issues like patriotism, family values and gay marriage, but only up to this point: justice has to again assume its actual meaning in this country before we can even start to heal from these last seven years.

We need a Nuremberg on the Potomac. We need it not for vengeance or spite, but because justice requires justice for our Constitution to be made whole again. Those who so maliciously infected this country with their syphilitic master race primacy, their machinations of perpetual, unquestioned predominance, who sought to subvert the very Constitution they swore to uphold to get it, must be made to atone, to be shuffled off in whole phalanxes of perp-walks, and branded forever as pariahs who have no place, role or legitimacy as arbiters of what is right and good in a nation of laws.

FEB. 5, 2008
THE SECRET WAR FOR THE SOUL OF THE PARTY It would be a egregious mistake to read recent weeks' acrimony between Barack Obama and the Clintons, for the latter can only truly be perceived as a two-headed beast, as merely the political tit-for-tat expected in any down-and-dirty political campaign. This has merely been the scent of gunpowder escaping through cracks in the decorum and into public consciousness, wafting up from a roiling semi-secret civil war now being waged for the future of the Democratic Party, and the country.

The end of John Edwards' campaign serves a blow to my side of it. His viability aside, he, like Kucinich before him, kept the conversation on point, or what should be the point, about how a society must be judged by the least of its citizens, and how that's more and more of us. And while progressives can well harbor reservations as to some of Obama's advisors, tepid Wall Street-friendly and neo-liberal planks, and an at least competitive share of corporate donors greasing the wheels of his bandwagon, we can still read some more optimal tea-leaves in whom his enemies have revealed themselves to be. Would that their recent, sniping, chicane, cynical power plays against Obama at long last put the lie to the notion that the Clintons, including the venerated Bill, ever represented anything but their own version of Old Boy, money-entrenched, right-wing power politics.

After the Clintons' attempts to shanghai hospitality workers' caucuses in Vegas, after their union endorsed Obama, a headline at the influential blog DownWithTyranny summed up pithily:

REPUBLICANS ALWAYS TRY TO CUT DOWN VOTER PARTICIPATION, DEMOCRATS ENCOURAGE VOTERS — SO DOES THAT MEAN BILL AND HILL ARE...

Let their own bullying words be the epitaph on their utterly mundane stamp on the Republic, and let Obama, or preferably Obama/Edwards, and an overhauled, progressive-stormed Democratic Party shovel the dirt over it. It is time and it is vital — it is indeed what the party's progressive insurgency has been fighting for and what the Clintons are desperately fighting against — to move the party back to where it responds to the wants and needs of the vast majority of the people, the put-upon, the downsized, the oil-raped, the toxified and post-trauma-stressed, instead of just taking them for granted and glad-handing through Big Business-as-usual.

Not to count the Clintons out — that would be wishful thinking at best — as upper-tier party hacks, the ones who have all but ignored the progressive mandate of Nov. 7, 2006, continue to adhere white-knuckled to the hollow establishment catchphrase of Hilary's "experience." But even lateral-thinking-challenged MSM like Time have registered "a general revulsion to the Clinton's[sic] campaign tactics now settling in."

I've heard the counterpoint from too many friends, whom I respect but question their critical analysis/nostalgia ratio, that, geez, maybe Bill was kind of a cock, but he was so good at what he did, and he got you 12 weeks paid leave and . . . and, well, come up with something positive here, because I'm drawing a blank. He greenlit the most neo-colonial-friendly trade pacts since our actual colonial epoch, I remember that, and helped deliver precious publicly owned airwaves into the manicured hands of cloistered, soulless robber barons, I remember that too, and he hobnobbed with venture capitalists and sat idly while real value-challenged bubble economies inflated and popped. The economic boom of Roaring Twenties, after all, had everything to do with the Depression, and not for nothing did David Greenspan, the Grand Arbiter of the Fake Economy, consider Clinton the best Republican president since Bush41, as I and many bonafide progressives have long posited. Greenspan said it glowingly. We didn't.

I won't go too deeply into the Case Against Bill Clinton — documented exhaustively elsewhere, including Mena, and, by the way, lying about a blowjob is the utter, abject least of them — but suffice to say I do not mourn the shattering of the myth of his/their earnest, heartfelt populism, and must appreciate the cosmic justice of his/their own hand in the act. The man, and the couple, did much destroy the Democratic Party and its one-time distinct point of difference as being the party that spoke for everyone who wasn't a plutocrat or a plutocrat's fundamentalist foot-soldier, that spoke to solving those people's problems versus blind adherence to arcane orthodoxies.

Was it ever purely that? No. Did it go off the rails at times? Sure. Did it work, since FDR, effectively toward giving vastly more people a greater hand in guiding their own destiny, as "democracy" promises, than at any time in this Republic's bloody history? There is no fucking question it did.

But they sold us out, the ascendent pseudocon "New" Democrats of the 1990s, codified in the guise of the Democratic Leadership Council, but more colloquially referred to as the party's Clintonista wing. They went where the money was, they "compromised" on the "free trade" that has continued apace and now threatens to bankrupt the country, they coopted the Republican pro-business raison d'etre, they reshaped the party as a distinctly more corrupt, swaggering and mean thing than at anytime since it buoyed Jim Crow.

Here's how current DLC chairman Harold Ford once put it: "Remember what Bill Clinton did: He figured out what Republicans were doing well, and instead of complaining about it, he figured out a way to do it better."

Please understand, I celebrated in November 1992, I got righteously drunk, for we had ended the Reagan Era once and for all, thank fucking karma — except we didn't. The Reagan Era, for all its glowing feel-good chauvinism masking a single-minded commitment to the primacy of a vainglorious wealthy Elect, has yet to end. The New Democrats soon adopted the deluded Republican talking points, that The Market would guide us better than our own unenforced laws, that the State no longer need fulfill its natural role as arbiter of good business and mediator against the predations of bad business. The New Democrats, though speaking with more purported empathy, would resume the elites' faith in economic down-trickling, would empower a purer kind of democracy, that of the Unseen Hand. "Do-as-thou-wilt" would come back to us cheaper Chinese and Indonesian goods, and if our proxies and sanctions murdered thousands people along the way, so fucking be it.

Machiavellian horseshit, this flies in the face of anything resembling common sense. It is in and of itself an indictment of the path the party took, because the Democratic Party was ostensibly the party of measured pragmatism, of science as non-heresy, of progress, of reason over dogma. It was the Wagner Act and the WPA, the Voting Rights Act and OSHA and CAFE standards. It was the alternative energy imperative that Carter mandated but that Reagan scuttled — at the behest of industries who would go on to become huge Hillary bankrollers — that would have saved us endless fiscal austerity, a criminal war, and a tenuous future as a species that the last 27 years have ushered unto our midst, '92-'00 included.

They paid us, so we can at least take their viewpoints into account in policymaking, even if their viewpoints are bullshit and based thoroughly on path-of-least-resistance profit-at-all-costs, and even if we won't be taking into account the viewpoints of those who can't afford to tithe them into the appropriate ears.

This literal and odious power-brokering ushered unto the party the Clintonian modus of triangulation, a cynical practice of political chit cost/benefit analysis, by which one gauges how much or little one can do per a given policy pending what one can get away with by pissing off the least mount of people. Talk of class, of haves and have-nots, the great undeniable chasm between the two parties, became impolitic and unseemly. Its defenders call this "compromise," toward the end of, as Hillary defenders often mewl, "getting things done"; what it renders down to, however, is a policy mish-mash bereft of vision, passion or anything resembling a sense of right and wrong, bereft of, in sum, principled leadership.

Sure, we can maintain strangling economic sanctions on Iraq for eight years, at the cost of 500,000 Iraqi innocents, because, for the liberals, it's not overt war and for the war-mongers, it's seems "tough."

Sure, we can open the "trade" floodgates to turn Mexico and China into cheap labor plantations, enabling authoritarian assholes as our overseers, with international treaties written wholly by orthodox neoclassical economists and corporate lawyers. Sure, we can hollow out the manufacturing infrastructure because what're they gonna do, go Green?

A lot of us did, of course. Some of you, I know, got pissed off at us, as if you were owed our votes. But if you expected us to stick around the trailer home waiting to get beat on again and call it "love," you're a bad fucking feminist. Our return to the party has not been one of loyalty, obviously, but of bitter, grinding exigency, desperate circumstances made, sadly, by that self-same triangulation. Triangulation led directly to capitulation on one of the greatest disasters in the nation's history, the Bush War on Islam. The Clintons' "success" and their sponsorship of the DLC, or New Democrats, or, in my parlance "pseudocons," led to a raft of Clintonista congresspeople, more interested in power for power's sake, not ideals, not of an unapologetically activist government helping to make things better for more people. It gave us triangulated hem-and-hawing presidential candidates like pre-progressive Al Gore and John Kerry, guys so incapable of articulating vision that they couldn't discursively eviscerate a linear-thinking dullard.

Triangulation led to these people to give sweeping war powers to that self-same linear-thinking dullard, the equivalent of handing a safety-off AK-47 to a rabid chimp in an elementary school. Many of them knew better — millions of their constituents warned them, loudly, futilely — and if they didn't, they had no place speaking for thinking human beings. But they did it anyway, because triangulation suggested they must cover their asses so as not to look unpatriotic, so as not to have seemed plagued by reason amid mobilization for Crusade, for that would look weak. Supposed leaders, supposed agenda-makers, they let the agenda be set for them and they swam right along with a bloody tide.

Triangulation gave us a pseudocon mafia, led by Rahm Emanuels, Chuck Schumers and Dianne Feinsteins, the party's wheedling, conniving Uncle Toms, Vichy Dems, who not only giddily cheerlead Hillary, who not only mainline the same corporate dollars and dogma, who not only dissemble about their own role in ushering the nation to calamity. No, insult to injury, they work actively against those who posit real remedies to the nation's ills, who understand the cause-and-effect wrought by their leadership's capitulation.

Edwards and Gore, once swimming with that tide, have undergone their own catharses and at least taken steps towards atonement. That Edwards was so ignominiously shunted into also-ran role by the major media, given the resonance of his message to any who heard it, bespeaks an institutional party scrambling to winnow class out of the American dialogue. Edwards tried, according to Progressive Review editor Sam Smith, "to change things back to the way Democrats used to do it. And what happens? Yes, those with power move to keep him in the background. Yes, from the start the establishment media gave him as little coverage as possible. But more significant was the reaction of average members of the liberal — really post-liberal — establishment. Ridicule and disgust combined with a stunning disinterest in Edwards' issues that told much about the Democratic Party today."

To both their credit, Edwards' message pressed Obama left, the latter adopting necessary, galvanizing class-conscious language in the final weeks here in Iowa. That in no small part helped the crystallize the passion of Obama's rhetoric, given such fervent voice at the Jefferson-Jackson gathering here in December, which, combined with his disarming personal magnetism, has kept him buoyant against the fusillades of the Clinton war machine.

Down in the trenches, however, those working to reclaim these districts where votes have too long been squandered and taken for granted by the Clintonistas, meet similar, buffeting opposition from the party's "leadership." Illinois' Emmanuel, the DLC's internecine wartime consigliere and the controller of the DLCC's campaign purse, has been conspicuous in his efforts to gun down real progressives, read "democratic" Democrats, in favor of more Vichy-flavored ones. As DownWithTyranny's Howie Klein has aptly pointed out, in the face of the gargantuan progressive, economic populist mandate of Nov. 7 — which years from now, one hopes, will be marked down as a signature date in American history — Emanuel is this year again marshaling a rogue's gallery of pseudocon "Democrats" against real progressives like Donna Edwards (MD-4), Victoria Wulsin (OH-2) and John Laesch, whose primary eve rally my band played last night at the UAW Hall in Montgomery, IL.

This is not to completely demonize Bill and Hillary, they may well be decent people at heart — I know decent people who know them and who say they are — and they might wield slightly more sense as pertains to treating their fellow citizens than those who do demonize them from the right. But this admonishment from the unrepentant left is to say, to wish fervently, to urge into reality, that their time has come and gone, that their brand of Democrat has proven itself co-opted and inert, if not completely facile. If Obama's appeal is now generational, then fine, good, let the fucking torch be passed, now, goddammit, before it's too late. My friend Mike, who is as critical an analyst as you'll meet, argues that this is no infinitesimal matter, that Obama is the closest thing to a Generation X candidate we have entertained as a viable presidential candidate, and that the portents of this are profound.

Even at the surface of Obama's personality and platform, nothwithstanding his inspired rhetoric, Mike posits, lies a distinctly, palpably different way of looking at the world, and our neighbors. And I can see this. The Clintons were the definitive baby boomer presidency, and, if you'll forgive the admittedly sweeping generalizations here and to come, their co-optation mirrors generational trendlines: that we can be selfish, consumer crap-hording, bourgeois control freaks, but still want a green world; we can tolerate poor people, but be surly bitches when they come into our pristine condofied neighborhoods; we can sell our souls to go-go careerism, but still flip a coin to poor people after work and feel it mitigates our spiritual apostasy; we can be— bazooka barf — "Reagan Democrats."

The trade-offs have been so myriad, the messages so mixed, no wonder the simple, essential moral center gets misplaced. And no wonder the kind of youth vote Obama is pulling, by speaking to something better for all of us, across lines, across race, across economic strata, across oceans.

Not to imply he is Arthur leading us into a Golden Age, nor is he simply that now hollow MSM buzzword, "change." But, as Mike points out, what a GenX ethos might well inform is an implicit mistrust of the ancien regime, of sold-out "grown-ups," of the status quo that have proven themselves utter failures at the task at hand, namely solving the problems they have created. This is not just the "anti-Beltway Insider" thing that so often informs "populist" campaign strategems, Mike argues, but a genuine tabula rasa of worldview, that is, how to go about re-envisioning the world and our role in it, as a part of it, not as a virus feeding upon it. Post-Nam, post-Watergate, post-New Day In America, post-lies, post-outsourced industry, post-the-utter-moral-system-crash-that-has-been-the-Bush-administration, indeed post-American Dream for all but the Elect, he may be the best candidate (left, anyway) to disengage the system from the addictions that make it do stupid shit.

I brought up the term "post-American Dream" to Laesch in Montgomery and he did a barely perceptible double-take. Something flickered in his eye, a recognition of the unhappiness of the term, and he said, "That's a good way of putting it."

It is worth restating, over and over again: "Experience" in a corrupt system doesn't do anybody any good. Except, duh, the corrupt.

The Clintons, of course, nor the Emanuels or Schumers, will never admit they did anything wrong. Ask a 12-stepper how quickly that mindset makes shit better. Take a look at Laesch and the Dems endorsed over at Howie's Blue America PAC ActBlue fundraising site, which vets and endorses candidates for true blue platforms and credentials. Now stack those up with the record of Emanuel's lapdogs, as run down in an email from Howie to colleague blogger Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.com:

As for Rahm's recruits strengthening what some call "centrist" positions-- and what I call reactionary positions — just look at how they vote.

The freshmen voting most frequently abandoning the Democrats in order to vote with the Republicans are Heath Shuler (personally recruited by Rahm), Jason Altmire (not a Rahm candidate), Joe Donnelly (a Rahm candidate), Brad Ellsworth (a Rahm candidate), Baron Hill (relentlessly pursued by Rahm to run), and Nick Lampson (I hope some Texans will make public how Rahm made this happen; I'm bound to silence).

Emanuel and the pseudocons' dream of the reactionary, corporate-felating DLC subsuming the DNC, with Vichy Dem poster boy Harold Ford supplanting the architect of Nov. 7, Howard Dean. Then everything old is New Democrat again. A bridge to the 20th century indeed.

We're just too wiggy out here on the fringe left. Rahm will hear none of this anti-NAFTA, corporate-bashing, anti-neoliberal (read "anti-neocolonial"), soft-on-terrorism (not bombing our problems away-and-by-the-way-creating-more). Nothwithstanding all this might cut to quick of the nation's problems, it all, by Emanuel's beshitted thinking, is just too off-putting to, um, the Republican Democrats out there . . . or something. Which is unqualified bullshit, because, since his own pseudocon dogma seemingly precludes his reading any research, it is worth stating here: "progressive" has become the mainstream.

In fact, Media Matters for America (MMA) and the Campaign for America's Future in June issued a report that positively guts the pseudocon "centrist" artifice, with aggregated data from non-partisan sources such as American National Election Studies (NES), maintained by the University of Michigan, General Social Survey (GSS), maintained by the University of Chicago, plus data from the Pew Research Center, Gallup, Zogby, CBS/New York Times and NBC/Newsweek polls.

At its broadest, versus the underlying conservative presumption that government must be winnowed down to nothing, the MMA report found that 58% think the government should be "doing more" — such as, say, assuring Americans of healthcare. It cites a February CBS/New York Times poll that found 76% of Americans willing to roll back Bush's vast tax cuts in order to assure all Americans get access to healthcare, and that 82% would be willing to pay $500 more in annual taxes to insure all Americans. It tracked only 20% of Americans who think government services should be cut, and, citing Pew, and 69% who think "the government should care for those who can't care for themselves, steadily trending upward every year since 1994. And 58% disagree with the statement that "corporations generally strike a fair balance between making profits and serving the public interest.

A rolling NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll tracked Americans thinking corporate-counseled "free trade" agreements harmful to the US economy growing 16 points to 46% between 1999 to 2007, while those who thought they "helped" fell to just 28%. As to organized labor, its lot winnowing for years, '92-'00 included, amid and onslaught of government and corporate attrition, downsizing and job exportation, Pew found 56% of Americans held a favorable opinion of unions, just 33% unfavorable, corroborated by Gallup's 59-29% ratio. As to the past four administrations' institutional coddling of our wealthiest citizens and corporations, Gallup in April found 66% considered taxes on upper income people "too low," 71% percent thinking the same of corporations.

A full 86% of Americans want the government to invest in the research and development of alternative fuels for cars, 84% want it to impose higher pollution standards for businesses, 82% favor stronger enforcement of existing environmental law, 81% want it to invest in developing solar and wind power resources and 79% want stricter federally-mandated auto emissions standards.

In short, the triangulators seem intent upon triangulating on a demographic that doesn't exist. Laesch addressed it pointedly at his rally in Montgomery, where he noted that, somehow, in the face of the above metric reality, a local newspaper endorsed his pseudocon opponent Bill Foster, suggesting Laesch would need to "move to the middle" to win the district. At the end of the night, shed of his suit-jacket and just finished personally wiping down the bar at the UAW Local 145, he told me pointedly, "The progressive agenda is the middle . . . What we're doing here is representing what the majority of Americans are all about. [Mainstream institutions] have defined us, and we've let em do it. But we're going redefine the middle. The middle's fair trade, the middle's single payer, the middle's getting the hell out of iraq."

Given the stark empirical evidence for this sentiment, one must necessarily ask, what could possibly be the counter-argument? If grand majorities of people agree with wiggy, out-there, passionate, plainspoken, utterly common-sensible guys like Laesch, then what could the voices of "moderation" be suggesting counter-balances the will of the people? This seems to presume 40-to-15 percent of the people who disagree with great progressive majority, the rank-and-file that delivered Nov. 7 to the party, wield some kind of super-vote that trumps those of what they might call "common folk."

And herein lies the difference between the two sides of the party, the progressives and those desperately trying to quash their campaigns and voices. The Vichy Dems weight non-progressive minorities unequally, not necessarily their opinions but their money. The Clintonista/pseudocon/Vichy "wing" are not a wing, they are machine-minded high functionaries who recognize a primacy of some citizens over others — a notion one might well call "Republican." They see nothing intrinsically bad about the system other than they don't have the reins.

Ask them to put ideal ahead of their own real politick, say, the dough they might get for their next campaign, ask them to quash the odious plague of rich people's money in politics. Then watch as they babble out some obfuscation, as Hillary already did at AFSCME's candidate forum last year, suggesting all that money buys nothing, and that lobbyists were good Americans too and deserve to be heard, even if, refer to above, you and I don't get to be. Public campaign financing is the vital epoch-making next step to fixing this country, and it doesn't take a genius to see Obama as more amenable, as uncorrupted enough, to send that kind of shockwave into the status quo. It is a sensibility, or promise of it, that could be summed up in his simple statement at the last debate, that he doesn't just want to end the war, he wants to end "the mindset" that led to it.

That mindset is no small matter. Where money goes, where dogma goes, principle does not follow; folly does. As Prorev's Sam Smith, no great fan of either candidate, put it, "a great difference between the two remaining major Democratic candidates: Obama has integrity, the Clintons do not; only one alleged crook has showed up on the Obama big backer list; with the Clintons they litter the place like packing peanuts on the floor after opening a package."

Maybe we need to dream a fairy tale right now, because at least the dream gives us a new star to set our sights on, even if we only make it to the moon, um, so to speak. We goddamn well need somebody unafraid to at least pose a vision for saving the fucking world. I don't want to beat the Kennedy thing too much, because I've read too fucking much to think of him as anything close to a "good" president, but it may be worth a bit of sentiment from his brother Bobby, when he famously quoted George Bernard Shaw: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not."

Why the fuck not. My measure of any candidate, every two years, is how much I have to keep their feet to the fire, to stay on their ass, for all my emails and phonecalls and blog rants are worth — and the more they dissemble, the more they whore themselves, the more corporate money they mainline, I can see my workload increasing. I'm fine with that, such that the work is necessary, even if I am working for a day in America when it isn't. But with people like Laesch, Wulsin, Edwards, with our own Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack here in Iowa, and a growing vanguard of congresspeople that recognize what the Nov. 7 mandate meant, not just that it gave them power, I know we will have people representing people, not money, and not just ones who would vote like I want them to, but who will raise holy hell if the party leadership continues along its collaborationist path. Because that, goddammit, Nancy, Harry, Steny, Hillary, is what actual leaders do.

And with Obama, at very least, they would have an amenable ear in the Oval Office. "We'll have to keep on him," Laesch said. "I get that assured sense that I will have allies in the Congress doing the same. And with Obama, at very least, I have a sense he's listening."

That, in and of itself, would pose a stunning blow to the status quo, because it might, maybe, possibly, I wish from the depths of my black little soul, begin again to resemble what democracy was supposed to look like.

DEC. 26, 2007
SNOWBALLS IN HELL In a world furiously bombarded by man-made horror and the skulking avarice that informs it, Palast actually found an uplifting story for the holiday season. It is something that bespeaks a real lesson that might be heeded by the blind, doctrinaire jackals running for president fueled by blood-sopped corporate dollars. It is about Ecuadorian presidente Rafael Correa Delgado, and how, not just spouting "change" as a hollow catchphrase, he actually looked into the heart of a corrupt, Wall Street-written international money game that had victimized his people, dared declare the game fixed, said fuck the game, and then fucked it.

That, motherfucker, is change. For his honesty, and real sense of justice, and fortitude, and courage, Correa is considered a dangerous terrorist-supporting Commie by the establishment cabal in Washington and New York, as are a whole wave of real, idea-driven leaders whose people have swept them to power across Latin America, largely in response to American hegemony and its ruinous effects on their countries over the course of the last century.

I'm excerpting some of it below. You can read the whole story here, and, if you want more background, Pilger's exhaustive documentary The War on Democracy remains viewable here.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said 'We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. " Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I'd met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?" Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela's president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn't done.

I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan's chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it's not just any company he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there's a verdict in favor of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

Christians still go all tingly when they speak of how their early saints defied the empire, often going to martyrdom, but Correa's defiance of empire, most of their American fundamentalist adherents will tell you, is positively heretical. This is a mitigation, of course, because, in spite of their protestations of the "secular progressive war" on their fucking holiday, they have come, like Popes of yore, to claim both secular and spiritual primacy over the world. My friend Spike, a local progressive activist, drew a a deft and inspirational analysis of this phenomenon in his holiday greeting this year, which is worth relaying:

A couple thousand years ago, back when Mother Nature was god, the winter solstice was the big celebration this time of year. Days getting longer are cause for a party, I believe.

Before about 300a.d., Jesus was the anti-Roman Empire guy. "Heaven is within us," Jesus said. Good to look within, since the Romans had conquered their lands, and were occupying, taxing, killing, and doing all the things imperial warlords usually do.

Then the Roman Empire started to crumble, so Emperor Constantine became a Christian. And the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Christianity became the vehicle of Empire. And the internal struggle of what Christianity is really about continues to this day.

Well, heaven is within us. So says Jesus, Buddha, the Dali Lama, and many others. Somedays I touch heaven. Most days I forget it's so close.

Constantine didn't really become a Christian -- he just legalized the religion, but it's a common Church-ratified myth, and it did lead to the Church and eventually Christianity itself becoming anathema to the actual teachings of Christ, seeing as how Popes soon strutted about in their garish vestments declaring themselves both secular and spiritual Last Word on All Things Everywhere. They did so to keep people in line, at the behest of themselves and their kingly benefactors/benefactees. Power begets assholery, though it doesn't always have to.

As Spike says, and as the evolution of society has proven, realizing the capacities within us, as individuals, as communities, can disperse power and make it work for everyone, not just latter day kings, or at least moreso, step by step. This coming year affords us at least a small say in effecting not just "change," but in realizing and exposing this stupid, corrupt, venal game for what it is, in rewriting the fucking rules, in making certain people's words and intentions match up to their actions, impossible though it seems as they play free and loose all around us, with the same money that fucked up Ecuador for way too many years. But it requires due diligence, of our own hearts and minds, measured against those of people who claim to speak from theirs and so rarely do.

Fuck New Year's resolutions about diets and smokes. Supervillains run the world. There are no James Bonds. Maybe a few people can resolve to be inspired, like Correa, to defy machinations of those who have stacked the deck against the rest of us -- because, really, until we do, there's no point playing.

NOV. 16, 2007
DENNIS K'S BIG FUCK-YOU . . . conveniently glossed over by the Clinton-fawning-all-over CNN or anybody else MSM. Kucinich is dead-nuts right, on everything, down the line, as he nailed the Whack-a-Moles last night on CNN's D-bate.

BLITZER: "Congressman Kucinich, I believe you're the only person on this stage who had a chance to vote on the Patriot Act right after 9/11 who voted against it right away."

KUCINICH: "That's because I read it."

[BIGASS CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]

EAT SOME FUCK, CLINTON. Not even the Clinton-machine-stacked heckler-batallion in the audience could shout down that one. (She didn't read it before she voted FOR it, it was reported in her recent bio, and never fucking denied.)

KUCINICH CONTINUES: "You've seen here tonight people who voted for the war, voted to fund the war, now they have a different position. People voted for the Patriot Act. Now they have a different position. People voted for China trade. Now they have a different position . . . Just imagine what it will be like to have a president of the United States who's right the first time. Just imagine."

IF IT WEARS A SUIT AND DISSEMBLES LIKE A SUIT . . . Awesome story here on why Clinton is a cynical sold-out power-whore and Obama is at best seriously deluded by his more (sadly-chosen) Clintonista advisors on this endless string of corporate welfare programs under the guise of "free trade."

Too bad because the latter finally kicked up some shit here in Iowa over the weekend. Cautionary tale here, if you agree with Clinton on pretty much of anything, you're probably fucking wrong.

WHERE WOULD JESUS DROP A DEUCE? Oh, no, get ready for more sanctimonious allusions to Roman persecution of Christians and the odious pall of progressive secularism steering this righteous nation straight into the bowels of Hell.

Iowa's asshole senator, Chuck Grassley, has actually initiated this investigation into televangelist and megachurches' finances, including the icky and apostate Pastor Joyce Meyer's purchase of a $23,000 marble toilet for her ministry's headquarters in Fenton, MO.

Oh, "values voters," you never cease to be fucktarded braying marks for sanctimonious pricks whose only "values" are unabashed avarice and charlatanry.

Why Grassley, whose party has benefited exclusively from these ministries exploiting and abusing their tax exempt status to bray a toxic mutant strain of Christianity and Libertarian orthodoxy, would choose to bite the hand that bankrolls the Republicans' grass-roots mobilization apparatus is curious.

"We want to make sure the tax exemption is not abused," Grassley told CNN. Which, the deeper he goes into this, he'll find in spades, since megachurches are just basically recruiting/cash-sucking factory outlets for the GOP. "Non-profit" status doesn't much gibe with fleets of Rolls-Royces and private jets, much less crappers-fit-for-a-God -- and if the Republican Great God of The Market applies here, whup, there goes your tax exemption, fucko!

All this shit, notwithstanding Matthew 19:24, which, for all their "actual living word of God" bullshit, Christian Nationalists conveniently, cynically and pathologically read right past.

In Meyer's case, she basically guarantees that Jesus will bestow economic fortune upon you the more money you shovel into her $8,500 handbag (one for each pantsuit!). Wonder how that's sitting with all those fear-based McMansion dwelling Stepford People who mainline her bullshit and have nevertheless seen their property value hollowed out by the predatory laissez-faire buzz-saw of the last 25 years.

Grassley's usually a fuck, but big fat kudos, and good luck getting RNC money for his next campaign.

And hey, Pat Robertson just endorsed Giuliani. Awesome, it's like a super-villain team-up! "Just think of how many people we can marginalize and kill . . . together!"

NOV. 13, 2007
GOODBYE, AL My friend Al is dead. I got the call from a buddy of mine at The Mill, at around 12:30 in the morning, could barely understand him, but the news had messed him. Al, only 54 when the mailman found him in his house on the southeast side, turned out to be the second guy he knew who kicked it that week. And here I should qualify, I should only really call Al a friend-in-passing. I didn't know him all that well.

We didn't. I shelved my work and lit out that night for The Mill, to talk my drunk-ass buddy down, to help him make sense of death, pointless as that notion will always be. But we had to be that honest.

Al Achtner, in his time in Iowa City, served as vice president of the local AFL-CIO chapter and president of the Iowa City Labor Party. He traveled all over the Midwest, helping locals organize. He still believed that the movement could be rescued from almost three decades of Republican, Clinton Democrat and corporate austerity. And still, most of us knew him as the owl-looking guy who came to shows at The Mill. In fact, if Al showed up, you could feel pretty good, since he only went to the best shows in town, usually Americana, rootsy stuff, sometimes even my band.

He sat at the far booth, nearest the soundboard, all mop of salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache and big bespectacled eyes and that hyperarticulate way of talking that made him sound like an English Lit professor. He drank wine. He smoked foul-smelling foreign cigarettes that he specialty-ordered, usually at a particular tobacco shop he went to when he visited his mom back in Long Island, but he only smoked a few of them, usually in bars, not enough, really, to even be called a smoker. He died, according to his two-line obit, after a short illness, which none of us knew about. We took him for granted.

We take people for granted. Everybody does. My drunk friend beat himself up over it that night. But you can't.

He said, "I'd see that guy and I'd think, that guy'll be here forever."

But that's a lie he told himself. Nobody sees anybody and thinks that. We do take people for granted, not because we're bad, but because you can't go around every fucking day telling every goddamn person you like how much you like them. You can't. It would exhaust you like the air going out of a balloon. And if it didn't, if you did, you would probably be fucking annoying, all hugging everybody arbitrarily all the time.

The mailman, is all we knew that night, looked into his house after his mail had stacked up for a few days. Saw something. Al turned out to be dead. We didn't know any more. I Googled. We had a guy call a guy. The world doesn't start and stop on Al, but, y'know, fucking respect. I played "Honea Path," on the jukebox at the bar, for him, a story about a South Carolina textile strike, where townspeople working for the company gunned down townspeople demanding a decent living for their labor.

"The old men just holdin' their own 'gainst the union,
the one Mr. Roosevelt says is our right."

FDR saved us. Al tried to keep his ghost haunting us, the way some of these people traipsing around Iowa should. We need them to, in these days when the Old Men see fit to keep taking from us. My hand shook with the smoke in it, just for a verse and a chorus, while I watched the stray car go by on Burlington. It shook because I felt it for the first time, because that, the stuff in the song, is what Al spent his life in service of, the unions and what they were supposed to mean for all of us.

That doesn't just mean working people, fuck you if you think that. However they went astray, the unions, at their best, worked for everyone, and still can, and he knew that, and never stopped trying. Priorities, motherfucker. Don't you fucking forget it. Don't you goddamn dare.

The best people understand that shit isn't all about them.

I tell Al, knowing he can't hear and that it's a stupid symbolic act, that I try to, and that I know there is still work to be done.

NOV. 3, 2007
PSEUDOCON WHORES FEINSTEIN AND SCHUMER SELL US, AND RULE OF LAW, OUT If you live in California or New York, your lip-trembling, Jello-spined, triangulating, steaming heaps of "Democratic" senators are about to roll over, arch their asses and present, once again, to the most odious, venal, bloodthirsty and a-moral presidential administration in the history of the republic.

Pseudocon douchebags Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer have said they will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as the top law enforcement officer of the land, a man who has unabashedly equivocated on whether water-boarding, a form of torture, is torture and whether it can be employed by agents of the United States in spite of the law of the land prohibiting its use; and, worse, a man who intimated, upon committee questioning, that the president of the United States is not subject to the law of the United States.

Olbermann offers the best breakdown of it here.

Lest there be any doubt as to what constitutes torture -- as if it is not a fucking indictment of this nation's leadership that a supposedly civilized society is even having this conversation -- in that report, John Dean, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and former Nixon administration counsel, refers to precedent law in the wake of World War II. In one particular case in 1947, the US tried and convicted Japanese officer Yukio Asano with war crimes for waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. In that case, according to the Washington Post, "the subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk." For this crime, Asano received a sentence of 15 years of hard labor.

Here's the deal: if it has been found to be illegal and a crime against humanity by our own legal system, applying international law, it doesn't become un-illegal just because some drawling Yalie fuck in a suit says so.

And to simply infer that someone, much less some drawling Yalie fuck in a suit, somehow is immune from said law, can in fact supersede law that this fucking nation has signed off on and been protected by, this is to posit some kind of superhumanity. In essence, this whole round of bullshit, then, is to establish, engrain and enforce a stratum of master-race, unanswerable to any authority, unaccountable to any law, freed by some kind of divine right to rape, pillage, imprison, bomb, invade, occupy the Sudetenland, at whim.

Go visit a foreign country, find a child, rape it bloody, eviscerate it with a hunting knife, murder its family, then burn its village to cinders, leaving nothing but carbonized corpses. It's okay. You're American. You can get away with it, long as you wear the right tie and know the right handshake and wear a flag pin on your lapel. Laws don't apply to you. The president will get the attorney general he wants, one who will use the Constitution to wipe proper Yalie shit from proper Yalie asses. The Geneva Protocols remain "quaint."

We are roundly fucked, moreso than ever before, and have been ushered knowingly to the Wrong Side of History, thanks in no small part to the craven kowtowing of sniveling sell-out bitches like Schumer and Feinstein -- whose crimes are worse, because they know better and nevertheless do its opposite.

If anyone finds this as unacceptable as all common sense dictates they might, and if you live in California or New York, or even if not, contact Feinstein here and Schumer here. Make it clear that you will encourage your state party to field an actual Democrat to replace them at the next opportunity, and that they fucking suck.

OCT. 30, 2007
BUSH, RUMMY, CHENEY, WELCOME TO YOUR WELL-DESERVED FUTURE Rumsfeld runs from detainment on war-crimes charges like the chickenhawk chickenshit he is. What's the old fascist law-and-order catchphrase? "If you didn't do anything wrong, you've got nothing to fear."

BWAH-hahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Ah, neocons, retirement will not be kind to you. You are about to enter the rarified realm of Kissinger, Pinochet and Barbie. Live in fear, you fucks!

RUMSFELD FLEES FRANCE, FEARING ARREST

IPS News. Posted October 29, 2007
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

U.S. embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld, shouting "murderer" and "war criminal" at the breakfast meeting venue, U.S. embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary's whereabouts citing "security reasons".

Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activists point out that under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive . . .

Maybe he'll be able to catch one of those extraordinary rendition flights to the relative safety of Syria or Romania, where the helpful CIA asset staff greets you by hooking a field-phone hooked up to your balls.

OCT. 22, 2007
THE MORE SHIT DOESN’T CHANGE: WATCH PILGER’S NEW DOCUMENTARY NOW I started calling this shit the "new Cold War" back in 2002 -- an institutionally fear-galvanized permanent war economy, spectral villains hiding in every shadow, carte blanche for cynical, rapacious, war-profiteering capitalist shitheels -- just all fucking kinds of nostalgia.

Pilger draws the parallels deftly in his new doc The War on Democracy, which you can watch for free here. Note ex-spook Phil Agee's testimony in particular.

This should be required viewing by the time your punkass children are in high school. If we ever actually addressed the issue of this country's institutional Alzheimer's, we wouldn't have to wake up and smell the bullshit 3,800 uniformed corpses and half a million civilian ones into the enterprise.

OCT. 19, 2007
ONE DEM FINALLY DARES CALL A TURD "SHIT" There is not one goddamn whit of difference between the Republicans' craven veto of the SCHIP bill and their trillion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq. One informs the other.

Pete Stark (D-CA) finally nailed it from the floor of the House, and naturally, *gasp* the fascist fucks are bellowing "treason" because somebody with a public microphone finally drew the dotted line that a freshman social studies student with rudimentary grasp of cause-and-effect, not to mention of motive, could draw in a two-page handwritten report.

It is the explicit intent of the dogmatic right in this country, stated over and over again, to erode even categorically successful government social programs down to nothing, and if they have to do that by braying the "exigency" of funding a perfidious war, all the better.

Giuliani's longtime shadow cabinet, the Manhattan Institute, is such a fanatical engine of regressive Chicago School orthodoxy that it would privatize the fucking fire department and city parks if it could get away with it. While aping selfsame calls for winnowed government, the architects of the Bush administration, the Project for a New American Century, advocated curiously expensive agenda. As the Project for an Old American Century blog summed up recently, PNAC as early as 1997 advocated: "'pre-emptively' attacking countries that were of no imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating treaties when they conflicted with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations) could ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons . . . All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America . . ."

Cut taxes on the wealthy, invade, bolster military budget above Cold War levels, cut more taxes on the wealthy, cry poverty on social needs, harvest impoverished children to do more invading. If you've read that book before, it's called The Prince and it is shit.

No fucking wonder the world hates us, we let James Bond villains run the fucking country. Note to candidates roaming my state: If you're not as pissed off as Pete Stark and willing to state as much, you don't fucking deserve the Democratic nomination.

SEPT. 26, 2007
BUSH CHALLENGES NATIONS OF WORLD TO KICK HIS ASS Yesterday at the UN, titular US president George W. Bush issued a challenge to the nations of the world:

"This great institution must work for great purposes," Bush said, "to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and disease, illiteracy and ignorance, and poverty and despair. Every member of the United Nations must join in this mission of liberation.

"First, the mission of the United Nations requires liberating people from tyranny and violence. The first article of the Universal Declaration begins, 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.' The truth is denied by terrorists and extremists who kill the innocent with the aim of imposing their hateful vision on humanity. The followers of this violent ideology are a threat to civilized people everywhere. All civilized nations must work together to stop them."

Inspired by his speech, UN delegates applauded roundly, then formed a circle around Bush and beat the shit out of him.

In my brain.

I fucking love shit like this. It's like Emperor Palpatine calling for a ban on Death Stars.

GIULIANI 9/11s the 9/11 for 9/11, SHOULD KILL SELF Just when you thought you could never see a more cretinous, cynical, exploitive, corrupt self-dicklicking errant-sperm of a Republican . . .

Olbermann reports that a Giuliani fundraiser in Palo Alto, NM, was charging $9.11 a plate. Get it? Heh. Jon Stewart just made fun of him for his shameless, hackneyed exploitation of the fucking cosmic accident of his mayoralty during the plane bombing of New York. But that this little blackshirt fuckfist can one-up satire at his expense only shows he isn't fit to be elected lunch-helper at a group-home.

Awesome, Rudy. Trumpet yourself as the champion of the firefighters who died, only to have the union take a giant shit on you in public for your textbook "conservative" austere underfunding of them, before and after. And why stop there -- now you put an actual price on each body turned to ashes in the flames of Lower Manhattan, because, dammit, yay for you, you talk tough and happened to be there.

This, according to the my friend Megan, "is equivalent to a rape victim using coverage of her rapist's trial to pick up men."

Just an FYI, I lived three miles away back then, under the plume, all of the three-to-four months it wafted over Brooklyn. My lungs most likely still host the toxic particulate matter that will probably kill me, eventually, the stuff that is even now killing selfless workers at the pile, the ones who have been short-changed by "conservative" austere government, who decided that all the money earmarked for New York after the attacks would be better spent killing the Muslims who had fuckall to do with them, like Rudy wants to keep doing. And you know about the toxic particulate matter, the stuff killing all those people, right, Rudy? It's the stuff that you and the EPA told everybody, in the months after the attacks, wasn't there.

Yeah, here's some more insider info: up to September 11, 2001, most everybody thought Giuliani was a draconian, officious, self-righteous, corporate-asshole-spelunking prick. Even if "9/11 changed everything," guess it couldn't change that.

Would that he were a few blocks southwest that morning.

SEPT. 23, 2007
HEY, I WOKE UP TODAY SO I'M 400 BUCKS POORER Dear Democratic Candidates Now Touring My State:

A quick note to point out that insurance companies suck. Mine, for example, just upped my premium $400 a year out of the blue, citing as the reason that I just got older from my current age to my current age, which actually occurs every fucking day I wake up. I understand this is an inconvenience to them, so I've decided to make it it an inconvenience for you, you mealy-mouthed dissembling prostrate wussbuckets.

All your proposals to help the 47 million Americans now uninsured, whose ranks I am about to join, and those, like me at the moment, getting cornholed by the occasional form-letter, seem to run through insurance companies and make them more money. This seems curious given the fact that you're taking money from them like any other Republican whose tonsils have been battered like punching bags by corporate cocks. This seems even funnier, as your frontrunner, the Blessed Lady of Our Sell-out Pseudocons, the one ostensibly to offer us a "change" from kleptocrat business-fellating coozebanes who have run the fucking country into the ground, seems to mainline insurance company money like a heroin addict with a poppy-field inheritance and access to an IV-drip setup.

As of the first quarter of 2007 [Clinton] was the recipient of more health-care-industry donations than any presidential candidate—Democrat or Republican—according to a recent study by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy.--Newsweek, Sept. 17, 2007

My suggestion is you actually let Kucinich debate you so you imaginationless dicktoasts might understand that "change" would actually involve proposals to fucking end current, destructive patterns of behavior instead of just, say, doing a little less heroin.

Put another way, I'm not sure how you solve a fucking murder by recruiting the fucking murderer to help investigate it.

I know, I know, you're busy and all, but, um, I don't know if anybody's pointed this out, but, y'know, there's a world to be saved from the forces of fucking darkness! Get checked out on the basic tenets of reason and step up to the plate or fuck off.

Thanks

Matthew

SEPT. 20, 2007
GOP BROWNSHIRTS KEEPING AN EYE ON OUR "KIND" The following is a letter I sent to the website of the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the Stepford Candidate.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR, CONCORD MONITOR - On Sept. 3, I attended a house party for Mitt Romney in Ashland. While standing quietly waiting for Romney to appear, a gentleman approached me and said if I started any trouble I would be thrown out of the event.

He stated that although the event was open to the public, it was still private property and I could be asked to leave at any point. He reiterated I would be tossed out because my "kind" weren't welcome at such an event.

I am an independent voter who was wearing a pair of jeans and a gray Bedford, Mass., sweatshirt to show my hometown pride. I was offended this gentleman would make such a blanket assumption about me. When I asked where he got the idea I would cause trouble, he stated it was his "intuition." He said he would keep his eye on me. All the while, he used his 6-foot frame to intimidate my 5-foot-4-inch body.

MICHELLE CUNHA
Hill, NH

Just wondering what her "kind" might be. Any explanation welcome. Thanks.

Let you know if I hear anything back.

SEPT. 13, 2007
CAUSE & EFFECT, 3 YEARS AFTER
[SOMETHING I WROTE IN MY OLD BAND THE HANGDOGS' BLOG, BACK IN 2004. I'M REPOSTING IT BECAUSE I-TOLD-YOU-SO-YOU-DOUCHE CANNOT BE REITERATED ENOUGH IN DAYS LIKE THESE.]

Well, a somewhat enlightened civilization was fun while it lasted. But if we read the writing on the wall, we can only really speak of it in fond remembrance at this point. The Christians might as well pool their celebrated numbers and rename the place New Jerusalem and the Department of Fatherland Security the Ministry of Inquisition.

We, as loyal opposition, now have a duty to fall in line with whatever Malthusian evisceration of society our leaders command so they can afford sending more of your kids and neighbors off for more bloody subjugation of more countries full of people who don't think like our leaders. Good fucking luck. Good luck reversing the Scopes-Monkey Trial and your delusions that children and Ready Reserve insurance salesmen are being harvested to fight for "democracy" instead of rich guys' stock portfolios, cross your fingers and rub splinters of the True Cross -- doesn't matter. Actions have consequences, and millions of chanting, braying, mindwiped minions doing whatever stiffs in suits tell them most likely won't work out any better for us than it has any of the other God-blessed empires of history. And there's MILLIONS of us to make your life a living hell in the meantime.

Do your worst. Racist Christian fanatic Bob Jones bids you! "Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ . . . Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years -- a brief time only -- to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God. . . If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them. Conservative Americans would love to see one president who doesn't care whether he is liked, but cares infinitely that he does right."

Jones, president of racist Christian fanatic college Bob Jones University, wrote this to the president not long before the latter indeed shed himself of weaklings like Colin Powell, y'know, the national hero. Coincidence? He's right that I despise him, though I'm not sure how Christ became Bush's in particular, since he doesn't seem to follow Jesus teachings any more than any other Christian. And in spite of the (still tentative) 49 percent of American voters who maybe have some small issue with Jones' sentiments, post-election posturing has made it clear: we're second-class citizens. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, the thinly veiled lobby for rapacious capitalist assholes, suggested that, by dint of Bush's blockbuster 51 percent mandate, the opposition's natural course is to know their place. Once Democrats are "comfortable in their minority status," Norquist said, "they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such."

And by peeing on the furniture, he of course means allowing reason to weigh into human discourse. No threat of that as dusk of the new American Dark Ages descends. Federally-bankrolled youth abstinence advocacy programs now teach that touching someone's genitals can result in pregnancy and perspiration and tears can transmit HIV. Homosexuals are to be bashed liberally, as it were, and further legislated against. Bush buddy Gerald Allen, a state representative in Alabama, is now waging a campaign to have all literary works with even intimations of same-sex ardor stricken from public school and university libraries -- no more Tennessee Williams, T.H. White, Oscar Wilde for you, literature students, who knows if you'll read it and ass-fuck a boy the same way you play your video games and then go kill people with plasma rifles. Shit, while we're at it, might as well burn anything even written by queers, because who knows what fag code Truman Copote and Gore Vidal and a third of anybody who ever wrote anything might've inserted in the subtext. Best not take any chances with the "homosexual agenda," as Allen calls it, since they've apparently gotten more organized since getting the shit beat out of them in high school by troglodyte thugs like, well, Gerald Allen.

Not only that, according to a Newsweek poll, the "moral values" that (still tentatively) won the election for Bush seem to show a bipartisan consensus on turning the clock back to the days of a geocentric universe. Sixty-two percent Americans, the poll found, favor teaching "creation science" along with evolution in public schools, and 43 percent favor teaching creation science INSTEAD OF evolution in public schools, and presumably this is a national poll, not just of hillbillies and stoic Krauts from Georgia and Kansas. But just for good measure, Georgia politicians hope to stamp new science text-books with a sticker admonishing them that evolution is "only a theory" -- which it isn't, its apparent suspension in America not withstanding.

The fun bit of sophistry here is "Creation Science." Creation SCIENCE. Bless you your wide-eyed adherence to your fairy tales, but here's an idea for 62 percent of Americans and I mean this sincerely: fuck YOU. Really, fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking child. You wanna smear shit on the walls and call it your God, fine, just don't smear shit on MY walls because I pay the rent here and my nose still works, dumb fucking shaved monkeys. You can call creationism "science" all you want, it's the same thing as calling voodoo "practicing medicine." You want to argue some kind of Christian mandate as your justification, fuck you TWICE, because the sheer number of people drowning women in the river to prove they aren't witches doesn't validate the act.

Unless Bush, Rove, et al. say it does, right? One senior White House aide admonished Times magazine reporter Ron Suskind for living "in what we call the reality-based community, [where people] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality . . . That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

John Steinberg deftly deconstructed this beshitted purview at Rawstory.com. "A core tenet of post-Enlightenment Western society is that a rational person will drop a hypothesis that is contradicted by good empirical evidence," Steinberg wrote. "It is the scientific method enshrined by Descartes and Bacon, and, for good or ill, it has given us every scrap of technology and science. But . . . fundamentalist religion rejects reason. Reason embraces the possibility of error; absolutist religion must deny it. By definition, Fundamentalists maintain belief by rejecting the data . . . [F]undamentalists create belief systems that banish critical thinking. As the Catholic Church learned hundreds of years ago, reason cannot be tethered to dogma, and inevitably contradicts it. Fundamentalist leaders know this, and tie reason to the devil instead . . . The decision to invade Iraq is now the most obvious assault on reality-based decision-making, but there are many others. Global warming is denied in the face of virtual consensus among scientists; billions of dollars have been transferred to defense contractors building missile defense systems that most experts agree will be useless; energy policy assumes infinite resources; environmental policy suspends belief in cause and effect. The old separation between church and state has become a separation between church and reality, and government increasingly stands opposite reality."

But, hey, go nuts. Not that you already haven't. I prowl around conservative message boards now and then, so I know the shrillest of these still consider all who oppose them some kind of remnant fifth column from the Cold War. Without resources of a monolithic communist apparatus or even hot Russian chicks to seduce us, we're still somehow doing Joe Stalin's bidding, and not just because we don't want some capitalist asshole privatizing our waterworks, and not just because we think you need to have reasons, not just flags, to go to war -- according to the international laws we drafted and signed off on -- but because they can't parse a world without someone to hate. And they, the message-boarders, have made it clear that those who don't fall down the line of order, decency and piety have no place in their America, and only because of our "freedom" are people like me free to be a godless, reasonable asshole who doesn't believe every hunk of bullshit his pale white uberklass tells him. Or, that is, I'll be free until the next terrorist act, when martial law will be declared. Then I'll get mine, won't I? That's what they say. They can taste it. So what's the difference to me between "the terrorists" and white American Christians? They both think what they're told, have God on their side, hate me and want me dead.

So I say it loud, fuck you. Loyal opposition? In your dreams, cooze. Until the First Amendment disappears from history -- most likely wiped away in the night like something on the Animal Farm barn -- fuck you, in song, in verse, on the radio, from the mountaintops. Mindfuck your children, keep them away from the horrible radio, rational thought in books and images of death on TV, let them listen only to Radio Disney, they will still hear these words, "fuck you," and when they dare repeat them, they'll be astounded and awakened to find God didn't strike them dead. It's called cognitive dissonance. Look it up. As Stanhope says, when you spot some bullshit, you start spotting it all. They will curse you, eventually, for your lies and your repression, for telling them state violence is noble and clean and then watching their buddy come home from Iraq in gobbets, and they'll listen to non-government-approved music and they'll vote for anybody you don't. Loving Gods and noble causes won't match up with "nigger" jokes and concentration camps at Guantanamo and arbitrary military adventures to fill your fucking SUV tank and beating up queers, and we'll be whispering these unqualifiable dichotomies into their ears at night, suggesting that perhaps reason and common sense would better ground a society than hatred, fear and superstition.

We don't need to take up arms, or secede to Canada, to fuck you -- corrupt systems rot themselves. People figure it out when they get hungry and their sons die for no good fucking reason. Actions have consequences. Viva la Resistance, bitches.

SEPT. 6, 2007
CAN BUSH BE INDICTED UNDER RICO STATUTES AS WELL AS WAR CRIMES?
This man's name is Stan Goff. He will discursively kick your ass, eloquently positing measured, studied and prescient warning to all young people considering military service in the current national milieu. He is a left activist, author, blogger and a retired Special Forces master sergeant, serving from 1970 through 1996 in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti.

Just for edification, when we wacky lefties refer to our reigning corporate-whore leadership as "fascists," it is not unconsidered, nor screedish hyperbole. Policymaking in the blind interest of a lordly golf-happy uberclass, ceding them rapacious economic privilege at the expense of the balance of the population, not to mention to the nation's very infrastructure (saayyy, mines, bridges, Louisianan cities), activist government reduced to nil -- these formed the very specific mission statement of the coup d'etat plotted in the early 1930s by the creme de la U.S. business community.

The net yield of the coup, as recorded in Congressional investigation, was to be FDR's murder and the establishment of a fascist government in the United States. Its alleged sponsors were the House of Morgan, DuPont, General Motors, Remington Arms and sundry Wall Street brokerages.

That's just history, which you can read more about here, among other places, or hear the recent BBC radio recollection of it here, which both accesses the Congressional Record of the investigation and raises the specter of the involvement of one Prescott Bush, grandfather to the current president.

This is worth unearthing in this context because of the man who the business community chose to lead the coup, and also the man who blew the whistle on it, Smedley Butler. The retired Marine general and two-time Congressional Medal of Honor-winner would seem a curious candidate for the barons of industry to pose dictatorial straw man, given his own catharses as to his storied multi-decade career.

Butler, after his retirement, in the throes of the Depression, began giving speeches to veterans groups, which he later put down in the short book War Is a Racket. He dared make this remarkable, curiously non-commie analysis of what, and whom, he fought for all those years, curiously before the latter came to woo him to destroy that which he was supposedly fighting:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints."

Juxtapose this with Goff's own remarkable words, see how little fucking juxtaposition one actually needs to do. Then go back in and fill all the above mentioned company names with Halliburton, KBR, Enron, Exxon, Rand, Diebold, Occidental, Carlyle, Blackwater, ad nauseum.

Then you tell me what's changed, particularly as to the agenda of the uberclass.

JULY 22, 2007
OMFG, CAPITALISM IS SOOOO FUCKING AWESOME!Read this shit and god bless motherfuckin America.

Guess all that stuff that was supposed to "trickle-down" from our beknighted lairds, per the long-beshitted orthodoxy, is trickling down to the Caymans. To whore my own shit: "Didn't say capitalism doesn't work. Just gets fucked up by capitalists."

PRE-EMPTIVE COMMENT RESPONSE TO OBJECTIVISTS: Shut the fuck up.

--------------

MUSIC UPDATE: Speaking of which, if anybody gives a shit, I've posted a rough demo of a new song called "One Big Union" here on the myspace profile page.

IRAQ-MINUS-64, TONKIN-MINUS-25 You decide the relevance of this:

On August 31 1939, Gestapo operatives raided a German radio tower in the German state of Upper Silesia. They had commandeered a German citizen, Franciszek Honiok, arrested previously for suspected Polish sympathies, dressed him in a Polish army uniform, and brought him with them to the town of Gleiwitz, near the Polish border. There, at a German radio station, they gave Honlok a lethal injection, then discharged several rounds into his corpse.

The murder was one component of Operation Himmler, a deliberative and "patriotic" execution of 21 separate, concurrent but similar missions, undertaken by the Hitler administration and very soon to become the "spark" that ignited World War II, according to the sworn affidavit of the Gleiwitz operation's commander, Gestapo officer Alfred Naujocks, at the post-war war-crimes trials in Nuremberg.

Hitler's men had primed the milieu with months of false stories, planted with Germany's major media and reported dutifully, about the Polish government's oppression of ethnic Germans within its borders and incitement of ethnic Poles in German territories like Silesia.

The Nazis in Gleiwitz, Naujocks stated, seized the radio station and broadcast a Polish-language message calling for Poles in Silesia to rise up against German rule. The prisoner Honlok's staged lifeless husk was presented to the press as proof-positive of a Polish military raiding party carrying out "Polish aggression."

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. According to Wikipedia, "Against all the evidence, pro-Nazi Germans believed they were fighting a justified defensive war until the last days of the Second World War."

Weigh.
Measure.
Discern.

OLD ROADSIGNS TO BETTER DAYS

Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of Tao,
Counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe.
For this would only cause resistance.
Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed.
Lean years follow in the wake of a great war.
Just do what needs to be done.
Never take advantage of power.

Achieve results,
But never glory in them.
Achieve results,
But never boast.
Achieve results,
But never be proud.
Achieve results,
Because this is the natural way.
Achieve results,
But not through violence.

Force is followed by loss of strength.
This is not the way of Tao.
That which goes against the Tao
comes to an early end.

-Tao Te Ching, Chapter 30, as translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English

With props to Simply Appalling.

JULY 11, 2007
THE MAJORITY BY THEIR SILENCE WILL PAY FOR DAYS LIKE THESE And these kids will get caught in the crossfire, or end up in Guantanamo. This gave me a tingle and made my cheeks burn a little. I want to hug every one of these little monkeys. This by way of the ever-awesome Amy Goodman over at Truthdig:

President Bush got a lesson from a group of recent high school graduates. They were Presidential Scholars, a program designed "to recognize and provide leadership development experiences for some of America's most outstanding graduating high-school seniors."

The 141 Presidential Scholars were being honored at the White House. One of them, Mari Oye, from Wellesley, Mass., describes what happened: "The president walked in and gave us a short speech saying that as we went on into our careers, it was important to treat others as we would like to be treated. And he told us that we would have to make choices we would be able to live with for the rest of our lives. And so, I said to the president, 'Several of us made a choice, and we would like you to have this,' and handed him the letter." It was a letter Mari had handwritten. It read:

"As members of the Presidential Scholars class of 2007, we have been told that we represent the best and brightest of our nation. Therefore, we believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions. We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants."

The letter was signed by close to 50 of the students, more than a third of the Presidential Scholars.

Mari described Bush's reaction to the letter: "He read down the letter. He got to the part about torture. He looked up, and he said, 'America doesn't torture people.' And I said, 'If you look specifically at what we said, we said, we ask you to cease illegal renditions. Please remove your signing statement to the McCain anti-torture bill.'

"At that point, he just said, 'America doesn't torture people' again."

In fact, after Bush signed the bill that outlawed the torture of detainees last year, he quietly issued a "signing statement" reserving the right to bypass the law, as he has more than 1,100 times, issuing more signing statements than all other U.S. presidents combined.

Mari knows a little bit about detention . . . "I [told the president] that for me personally, the issue of detainee rights also had a lot of importance, because my grandparents had been interned during World War II for being Japanese-American."

Her mother, Willa Michener . . . was a Presidential Scholar—40 years ago, in 1968—and had wanted to confront President Lyndon Johnson with her opposition to the Vietnam War. She deferred to a teacher, who Mari said "stressed it was important to stay quiet when you're in the presence of the president." Willa Michener has regretted it since, Mari said.

Mari called her mother as soon as she left the White House to tell her what she had done. "She was actually in the Holocaust Museum in the last room when I called her to say that we had given the letter. She didn't know there was a letter beforehand. ... And she said that she walked out into the bright sunlight with tears streaming down her face, but since a lot of people walk out of the Holocaust Museum that way, you know, no one noticed anything out of the ordinary."

Another Presidential Scholar, Leah Anthony Libresco, from Long Island, N.Y., [who] helped write the letter, [said] "If I'm going to be in the room with the president, I've got to say something, because silence betokens consent, and there's a lot going on I don't want to consent to" . . .

Afraid that Mari's letter would be confiscated before she was able to deliver it to the president, Leah had a handwritten copy of it—yes, up her sleeve. She handed it to a reporter, as she said later in a blog, "at The No Child Left Behind photo op for which the Scholars were apparently supposed to be a backdrop."

The kids are no doubt on a watchlist now, but if that shit doesn't make you feel your own heart for at least a couple beats, you're either dead, a Nazi or a fucking accessory.

JUNE 23, 2007
MEIN TOTAL KAMPF, OMG! I'm going to try to do the math as I go along here, because it still confounds me: some of the wealthiest douchebags in the world, seeking to capitalize on the criminal behavior of their douchebag daughter, who was born into inordinate wealth and is now world-renowned for nothing other than squandering her inordinate, unearned wealth on shitty clubs, getting tagged by the cops and fucking on camera in probably the least erotic porno ever made, were seeking to ransom up to a million bucks more out of venerable US "news" organizations to tell of her "experience" in stir -- in complete contravention of said news organizations' reputed journalistic ethics -- because her 45-day multiple DUI/parole violation sentence (with email privileges!) is, what, our post-modern remake of Chekhov's The Cell?

The networks discovered some integrity only after their unctuous bullshit got leaked, and yet they still wonder how we increasingly think they're a fucking joke and Jon Stewart is fast becoming the most respected newsman in the country. Let's go to the blockquote, courtesy of my buddies at Prorev:

STEVE GORMAN, REUTERS - Paris Hilton appeared to be a celebrity without a spotlight on Friday after two major U.S. television networks snubbed the hotel heiress they initially fought over for a first post-jail interview. An ABC executive said his network declined interview offers from the multimillionaire socialite after Hilton and her mother, Kathy, personally sought to secure a deal in a flurry of telephone calls to ABC News veteran Barbara Walters.

Meanwhile, rival network NBC issued a statement saying it, too, had informed Hilton's representatives that it was "no longer interested in pursing an interview with her." Contrary to reports of a $1 million deal in the works, NBC said it was "never going to pay them any money." CBS News, which had not been deeply involved in the initial tug-of-war for a Hilton interview, likewise said it was not interested. . .

Paid interviews, while routine in some countries, are taboo in U.S. journalism because they might be an incentive for news sources to embellish or fabricate information. But "licensing" deals providing compensation for the rights to personal material such as video footage or photos have grown more common. Both ABC and NBC News have insisted [lying in the fucking process-MG] they do not pay for interviews and that neither had a deal in place with Hilton.

But an ABC executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Hiltons informed the network earlier this week that they had opted for NBC because of a more lucrative offer to license accompanying family photos and video for up to $1 million, compared with $100,000 offered by ABC.

Wonder how much she'll get for the book rights? And how many fucking people will starve to death in the time it takes her to write it entirely in Txtmsg. Wait, who am I kidding, she has people to write shit for her entirely in Txtmsg. Either way, it'll totally be like MLK's Letter from the Birmingham Jail, except, y'know, with the whole anti-masterrace, progress-through-struggle message utterly reversed.

Yeah, the Bolsheviks did some stupid shit, but you gotta hand it to em, least they lined up their Romanovs against a wall and slaughtered them.

MAY 30, 2007
ONCE MORE UNTO THE REICHSTAG On the last stretch of drive home, through a Nebraska and Western Iowa downpour, I finally got to hear some radio clips of Monica Goodling's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, and I have to say, are you people on fucking drugs?

I'm gone five fucking weeks, and you haven't yet stormed the steps of the fucking Capitol and demanded impeachment not only of Bush but the banishment from public service and subsequent indictment of every kowtowing Christian psychotic crony who ever shook his fucking hand?

Who the fuck is Monica Goodling, and how does this sorority-giggle-voiced bimbo ever get into a position to weigh, much less judge and vet, the highest practitioners of LAW in this fucking country? Even given the growing evidence that Bush has yet to actually win one fucking election in his epic Gibbon-esque Decline-of-the-Roman-Empire evisceration of this Republic, how could we have devolved to where even 24 percent of the populace, much less 49, said, "Yeah, these gibbering cultist, armband-adorned, flag-draped fascist baboons are really good people to give license to guide the lives of 300 million people and access to unquantifiable ordnance to wield against their neighbors?"

Who the FUCK is this Neocon Barbie? Who the fuck has been given control of "justice" in this country that this babbling dissembling Overland Parkish cheerleader princess is a lawyer, much less one given immeasurable influence over the future of federal prosecution in this country, instead of some fucking Desperate Housewife real estate agent bumbling and jerking her Village-of-the-Damnedesque master-race children through the mall parking lot in an H2? [Settle down, feminists, we're talking about their women, not women in general; think Ann Coulter and seethe with me] This pinched little deb graduated from Messiah College and got her Law Degree from Regent University, an "educational" institution run by Pat Robertson, the billionaire diamond magnate and a lifelong friend of the most racist neo-Klan white supremacy groups that continue to dull and cow the minds of that stolid, unmovable, unthinking 24 percent, oh, and also an influential Christian "leader." Getting a law degree from fundamentalist Christians is like getting a degree in quantum physics from Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

That these assholes decided to fire Republicans they didn't deem neocon enough is an egregious enough example of zealotry, but look at who they've got doing the dirty work:

All the tightwound uppercrust prigs we all fucking hated in high school! We have yielded our guidance as a society to everyone who never fucking invited us to the party, because we weren't white enough or weren't Christian enough or weren't Country Club enough or weren't jock enough!

Republicans, I dearly love some of you fuckers out there -- you know who you are -- but is that what you were shooting for? All those wealthy pricks who, back in the day, knew exactly what they wanted to do and grade-grubbed and applied to all their dream colleges early their junior year and had their whole fucking course curriculum and grad school planned before they got or gave their first handjob, the ones who shat on your lo-brau beer parties while they scored their Yalie older brother's coke, but it was okay because God loved them and they believed Jesus died for their sins -- if not those of others, of lessers -- -- these cunts are the ones you thought it would be a swell idea to give unchecked fucking power to?

Nerds-in-crime Rove and Gonzalez and their pale, sexless True Believer henchkids Sampson, McNulty, Monica Fucking Goodling -- these were snooty pricks you wanted to beat up in school, and I know because I was kind of one of them (without the money!) These were the people whose intrepid mission in the service of God and wealth and privelege allowed them to bypass anything resembling the actual life as experienced by the grand masses they hoped to lord over, to usher us unto their grand Christian design, removed of the plague of reason and science that might otherwise guide us on, um, any other course but fucking national and global disaster!

They had pictures of Ronald Reagan on their dorm-room walls! Next to the ones of Jesus! And Ivan Fucking Boesky! I don't even care if you like Reagan and Jesus -- I kind of like Jesus, I think, just the one I read about is different from the one they worship -- the point is they didn't have rock stars and naked chicks on their walls, and these are people you trust to understand the plight of the hoi polloi? These are the stolid tie-wearing/sweatervest fucks in your political philosophy classes who raised their hands all the time and rationalized Machiavelli, who bitched at you to turn down your stereo and who had jobs waiting for them when they got out of school -- people who never once had a second-thought of openmindedness, who never once re-examined their worldviews, who never struggled with meaning and purpose, you know, like fucking people do.

These were people who went on to be the footsoldiers of campaign chicanery and dirty tricks, accusing McCain of having a black bastard child, fucking with voter rolls in Ohio, justifying any scurrilous means to subvert actual democratic processes in the name of their Godly agenda. Hell, one of the pricks Rove/Gonzalez/McNulty/Goodling put into a US Attorney's job was Tim Griffin, a Machiavellian little Bush True Believer who helped the administration winnow minority soldier's absentee ballots out of voting pools, via a patently illegal process called voter "caging." Goodling testified to her and her bosses' knowledge of Griffin's involvement in the process on the Hill, dimwittedly blowing the whistle on a criminal felony, which, ahem, Griffin, in his new ill-gotten job, would now be charged with investigating. So, yeah, all their bullshit about "supporting the troops" only goes as far as those troops' constitutional right to vote, a fetid little administration secret laid bare by Greg Palast, who actually obtained hundreds of the subpoenaed emails the White House has still somehow "misplaced."

Yup, your little blackshirts have done you proud, you fucktards (even the ones I love). If this mincing pack of pseudocon Royal Democrats had any balls, the actual Democrats in the party would be set loose tearing these fratwonks' throats out in Committee and measuring them for prison greys, notwithstanding making their Eva Braun-wannabe patsies like Goodling break just like a little pep squad betty.

MAY 27, 2007
TEEING OFF ON NAZI PIGFUCKERS We've got new HATEMAIL! And from some "white pride" schmuck. Click here for the blistering deconstruction of his tired and hackneyed hatespeech.

MAY 10, 2007
FUCKED AGAIN, AND HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHY: SUITS SUCK Drove out to Hy-Vee at about 1:30 this morning, to stock up some shit for the tour, saw the gas prices jacked up to $3.09. That's what it was in LA a month back, and figuring that California gas prices are always about 40 to 50 cents higher than here, and that I'm on my way to the West Coast, I am utterly fucked. Clubs don't pay guarantees anymore, or even percentages off the drawer (THANK you, Mardi Gras in Dallas, Texas, you are champions of Old School rock & rolldom), and nobody buys records. I'm still in debt up to my eyeballs and going deeper cause I gotta tour the record that put me in debt, and I gotta pay guys to do it and the assholes insist on eating.



The oil companies say it's because they're refitting refineries for summer blends or some shit, which is bullshit, because they've been doing it for two months. It's not Iran, because Iran's not a threat to anyone—according to Pentagon fucking intel—and it's not increased overhead from petro-terrorists like Chavez because he's not a terrorist and he's not a threat to anyone once you get past the rhetoric spewed forth as truth by the capitalist mouthpieces in the mainstream media, not to mention inveterate douchebag Rudy Giuliani.

There is fucking nothing that mitigates this kind of pump-gouging except collusion, which is illegal, and pure fucking profit, which benefits options markets and Bush cronies and almost no one else. Once again, they're jacking us because they can. And like an asshole I gotta drive the band-van and I gotta pay the besuited pricks.

Anybody with kids who want to play rock & roll, give them my email. I'll have a talk with them.

MAY 8, 2007
SPRING TOUR PHOTOS AND MUSINGS AND STUFF ABOUT BASSES SHIT Check out Mick's tour blog here.

AND NOW, AN OPEN LETTER TO FRANCE

Dear France:

You guys suck. I avoided the whole French-bashing thing in these last few miserable years because generally my countrymen fomenting it were fucking assholes, but that's shot. Bad enough your new raging rightwing douchebag president Sarkozy is reaching out to assuage those same assholes, but you elected him president instead the hottest babe ever to run for anything, Segolene Royal.



Insult to injury, she's a hot socialist babe. Let me re-emphasize this.



Not only, you schmucks, would she have been an elegant and smoking thorn in the side of the tattered Bush imperial agenda, she would've been the first head of state whose images I could pleasure myself to since, well, ever. And the first politico since Liz Holzman, or maybe that Republican dame from Staten Island. But that woulda been a grudgefuck.

Either way, Sarkozy's already "reaching out" to his elitist prick kindred in DC, so good luck harvesting your youth to "pacify" Iraq. I'm sure it'll go much better for you guys.

All that's left is to gaze longingly at what you have foresaken.



Sigh. You dicks.

APR 13, 2007
HMMMM, SEE IF YOU CAN GUESS WHAT WIGGY RAVING FRINGE-LEFT RADICAL LUNATIC SAID THIS (AND DON'T PEEK, YOU BITCHES):

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.

— Lee Iacocca, from his new book Where Have All the Leaders Gone?MAR 21, 2007
MOUNTING, SMOKING-GUN EVIDENCE THAT GEORGE W. BUSH IS THE LONGEST SITTING PRESIDENT NEVER TO HAVE WON ANY ELECTION All eyes on the burrow of snakes being dug up in Ohio. Click the link.

MAR 19, 2007
WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME, ALBERTO! CSPAN in the MUTHAFUCKIN HOUSE! Y'know, a boy hopes and dreams for a bona fide Constitutional crisis in his lifetime, but now that it's here, I'm giddy as a fratboy transported back in time to the Nuremberg Rallies. I am fucking stoked for CSPAN's upcoming schedule as if it were the Bulls back in the NBA Finals.

The man . . . in the middle . . . 5 foot 10 out of verMONT . . . chairman of the Senate Judiciary Commiteeeeeeee . . . Pa-trick Lea-hy!!!

Leahy and Feingold are as pissed as pissed gets and about to bring the pain up on Alberto Gonzales' monkey noggin. What Olbermann calls "perfect storm" of the Bush Justice Department's coalescing scandals -- the US Attorney massacre, the illicit use of the Patriot Act to replace them, the extralegal use of Patriot Act by the FBI to wiretap US citizens -- is coming to a head at the Judiciary Committee, with subpoenas of Rove and that dogmatic slag Harriet Miers in the offing, and my leg is fucking shaking!

Yeah, I'm a big goddamn nerd — eat me — the neocon fucks are about to reap the whirlwind of six long fucking years unrestrained blank-check fascist cretinism and I'm stocking up on popcorn.

Yes, Alberto, you can torture people and justify it by calling the Geneva Protocols "quaint." Yes, Alberto, you can suspend Habeas Corpus by claiming it never existed in the canon law of five fucking centuries of civil society. You can wiretap whomever you want with impunity because it's "wartime," against the enemies of freedom, which somehow obviates our own. You can abuse the already abusive Patriot Act to spy on people in cases not even pertaining to national security. You can fire anybody want because even some Republican US Attorneys won't kowtow to your petty little political payback schemes. And you can smirk your way through a dullard, rubberstamp Republican Congress, you can fucking LIE to Congress, and its softball, servile notion of oversight.

And, no, because all science and reason is suspended in the Grand Theocracy of the Second American Republican, there will be no cause-and-effect, will there, Alberto?

Except, whups, November 7! I smell subpoenas! Mmmmmm, smells like chocolate and and Angelina Jolie's afterglow.

Welcome to hell, motherfuckers, nobody deserves it more than you. I'm putting the pizza guy on speed dial; this shit is better than March Madness.

UPDATE: Bush told Congressional Democrats to go piss up a rope. He'll "got to the mat" to defend his, Rove and Miers' rights to operate above the law of the land, unaccountable to people's representatives. Gentlemen, start your subpoenas. Viewers at home, go get beer and maybe some paper towels. I know I've got major wood.

MAR 9, 2007
MORE TIMELESS WISDOM FROM TOM THE SURLY BARTENDER
"I can see how you might cop a dickish attitude when trying to tell someone not to pee on you." — Tom the Surly Bartender, Iowa City, March 07

MAR 5, 2007
DOES AYN RAND SUCK? Ayn Rand sucks. No news here, it just needed to be put in print. Fuck her and the beshitted religion that has been built around her. Email hatemail to tetdog @ mchsi.com.

GHOSTWRITER responds:

Ayn Rand sucks? Wow, would never expect you to say that!

Coincidentally enough I just finished the Fountainhead yesterday, and so overwhelmed was I by her wisdom I wondered whether objectivism might be the way to go...but then, much like that time with the mescaline when I thought lying in the middle of the highway was a good idea, I quickly saw the error of my ways. I was wondering why YOU could possibly not like Ayn Rand. (Really I know, but I'd love to read a good rant.)

Thanks
Daniel

Dude, that's not hatemail, that's just baiting for baiting's sake. We're looking for those foaming-at-the-mouth Objectivists of the Grover Norquist or pseudo-intellectual bohemian ilk who have so proudly pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, who when you say Ayn Rand sucks look at you like you just ate a baby in front of them.

If you want a rant, stay tuned to this space for how institutionalized Randian doctrine, now infesting every policy decision by the current administration, yielded the current Walter Reed scandal and the betrayal of all those troops it supposedly "supports."

MAR 2, 2007
ANTI-DUMBSHIT PROTOCOL ADVISORY Could everybody just please stop LOLing at stuff that's not funny. Look, I've gotta cruise the Myspace thing outta sheer dearth of promotional resources, but for every person I see that I like there's like two profiles by someone saying some shit like "I love my friends! And Thai food! LOL!" What the hell IS that? Does that mean you're laughing sarcastically at the idea that you love your friends and Thai food? Or that you're just retardedly giddy about it? Did you REALLY laugh as you typed that, y'know, OUT LOUD??

If not, CUT IT THE FUCK OUT!

I mean, I'm fine with it if you're sticking to its original intention, that is, indicating something in your email communication exchange made you laugh. Out loud. I understand that intonation is always a problem in textual communication, that shorthand indicators help mitigate some of that sterility. I get it. But some people are abusing the privilege for everyone else.

You know who you are, people. Get true to your LingOL, or I'll take it away from everybody.

Oh, yeah, and since I brought it up -- ahem -- to a full 50% of the girls on Myspace: we KNOW you LOVE your friends. Nobody has friends they HATE, k? Just kinda doesn't work that way.

FEB 23, 2007
MUTINY! After the veritable batallion of retired military brass that emerged last year as active opponents to it, Bush's crusader-minded imperial agenda has become a disaster of such epic proportions that even standing Pentagon leadership would rather figuratively fall on their swords than be party to it. Once again we have to rely on the foreign press for any real salient news about our own country, as the Times of London reports, "Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources."

According to the report, "up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack . . . [wary that] an attack on Iran would backfire on American troops in Iraq and lead to more terrorist attacks, a rise in oil prices and the threat of a regional war."

You know, the kind of big picture that sagely strategic thinkers are supposed to bring to the offices of, say, presidents and cabinet secretaries. It's one thing for retired generals and colonels to speak their mind, but when guys with full careers of decorum and duty under their belt start bridling at orders, you're talking about some seriously fucked orders.

It all comes in the wake of Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Peter Pace dumping on the Bush administration's fevered attempts build up a war footing against Iran. The general last week shot holes in the administration's claims that Iran is secretly supplying insurgents in Iraq — a stunning display of candor, according to a former administration official. “It is extraordinary for him to have made these comments publicly, and it suggests there are serious problems between the White House, the National Security Council and the Pentagon,” Hillary Mann, the top Iran expert on the National Security Council until 2004, told the Times.

Hey, cons, call these guys "cut-and-runners," I fucking dare you, you inestimable bitches.

FEB 23, 2007
WHY WE FIGHT, EVIDENCE ITEM #70785342 More sick fucking evidence of the true neoliberal agenda behind pointless, boondoggle wars, courtesy of the intrepid Juan Gonzalez, here. Here's the nut of it:

A proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week among that country's top government leaders and was quickly leaked to various Internet sites -- before it has even been presented to the Iraqi parliament. [Emphasis added; what was that "spreading democracy" argument, again, neocons? - MG]
Under the proposed law, Iraq's immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq's reserves.
In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq's own national oil company would become just another competitor.
The new law would grant the council virtually all power to develop policies and plans for undeveloped oil fields and to review and change all exploration and production contracts.

Mmmmmmm, smells familiar, um, like maybe the Platt Amendment. If it doesn't ring a bell, click the link, and tell me how that tasty little imperial nugget worked out for everybody.

FEB 16, 2007
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, MOTHAFUCKAAAAZZZZ!!! Patrick Leahy (D-VT) shows Bush minister of obfuscation Alberto Gonzalez just what Congressional oversight can be. The little Reichsfuhrer ain't smirking anymore, is he? Watch it here, and fuck you if you don't get that warm tingly feeling.

JAN 10, 2007
WARGASM! Some insights on tonight's presidential pitch of his new "Iraq strategy":

A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces . . . The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of the continuing success of that withdrawal program. A majority of the American people want to end this war rather than to have it drag on interminably. The action I have taken tonight will serve that purpose.

A majority of the American people want to keep the casualties of our brave men . . . at an absolute minimum. The action I take tonight is essential if we are to accomplish that goal. We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war . . . but for the purpose of ending the war . . . and winning the just peace we all desire.

. . . We live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years . . . If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world. It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight. The question all Americans must ask and answer tonight is this: Does the richest and strongest nation in the history of the world have the character to meet a direct challenge by a group which rejects every effort to win a just peace . . . If we fail to meet this challenge, all other nations will be on notice that despite its overwhelming power, the United States, when a real crisis comes, will be found wanting.

. . . The action that I have announced tonight puts the leaders [of our enemies] on notice that we will be patient in working for peace, we will be conciliatory at the conference table, but we will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated.

--Nixon, address to the nation upon his escalation of the Vietnam War/invasion of Cambodia, May 1970
[last paragraph shifted for emphasis]

NOV. 10, 2006. POST-IT TO BE LEFT ON RUMSFELD'S FRIDGE.

Don,
It's been a helluva six years. Kick back, take a vacation. Go see a foreign jurisdiction, er, I mean, country. Like Holland. The Hague is just lovely this time of year.

Love,
MG

Gentlemen, start your engines. And gun them bitches.

AND LEST WE LOSE SIGHT OF THE STAKES:
MILFy former Brooklyn DA and NY Congresswoman Liz Holzman, from her The Impeachment of George W. Bush, published in The Nation in January:

A President can commit no more serious crime against our democracy than lying to Congress and the American people to get them to support a military action or war. It is not just that it is cowardly and abhorrent to trick others into giving their lives for a nonexistent threat, or even that making false statements might in some circumstances be a crime. It is that the decision to go to war is the gravest decision a nation can make, and in a democracy the people and their elected representatives, when there is no imminent attack on the United States to repel, have the right to make it. Given that the consequences can be death for hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people--as well as the diversion of vast sums of money to the war effort--the fraud cannot be tolerated.

NOV. 9, 2006. DRINKING. OR HUNGOVER. MORE SOON.

NOV. 1, 2006
WHAT WE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT: PAT TILLMAN AND THE DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC Football season here in Iowa City comes in hot and noisy and state-fair-ish, but seems to hit its proper stride, whether the Hawkeyes gruesomely underperform or not, as the days chill and start smelling of dead leaves. It's become a minor obsession since I've moved back here, Hawks, Bears, really anything that comes up on TV here or at the bar, and I'm hungover or just need to shed whatever's eating my gut at the moment. Yet with all the games, the seemingly bottomless well of resources devoted to it, I keep wondering when one of the many media will even dare try to ask a salient question regarding the game's most venerated player of recent years:

Why did Pat Tillman die?

Tillman has become the Audie Murphy of the current, nebulous, misguided and legally untenable war. His untimely death in Afghanistan, in spite of coming at the hands of his brother US Army Rangers, made him a the Golden Boy of Golden Boys, celebrated, canonized with fanfare that befits a god, even amid the fireworks and spectacle and shitty pop music that have come to frame the National Football League. His demise went so commemorated not because he was a soldier who died in a war, but because he sacrificed a lucrative job as a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals to join the War on Terror. He put country ahead of personal prosperity, and he paid the ultimate price -- a Disney story for the ages, sans curse words and the unseemly prospect of meaning. All the PR and fanfare says he died, as the worn-thin propaganda line goes, "defending our liberties and way of life."

What most of the millions of football fans don't hear, the story that won't be reported, is that Tillman himself considered the latter sentiments utter bullshit. He had come to see the war as nebulous, misguided and illicit as even this illegitimate, scandal-mongering blog. The Golden Boy had become one of the growing number of veterans against the war.

His family had arranged a meeting between Tillman and godfather of American dissidents Noam Chomsky upon the former's next rotation home. Tillman's brother, Kevin, a now-former Ranger, has gone dissident, though thus far unworthy of the ink and fanfare his brother's death rated. He recently called for any Americans who presume to honor Pat's's memory to overturn the congress, to return it to Democratic hands, on the day after his Pat's birthday, Nov. 6.

"Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground," Kevin Tillman wrote in an essay on Truthdig.com. "Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started . . . Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is."

Pending the fifth and finally "criminal" investigation into Pat Tillman's death, you can surmise for yourself who benefited most from ostensible "death by friendly fire," but one medium, and at least one NFL star in its apolitical skies, have shown the stones to air the voluminous questions.

"We know how he died," Tillman's friend, former teammate and current Denver QB Jake Plummer recently told HBO's Inside the NFL. "But y'know who was calling the shots and why. Why would you lie?"

Does anyone want to know? Really want to know? Or is it sufficient to have a hollow icon, one of our countless celebrity saints made into a graven image printed by the Franklin Mint and devoid of purpose other than a star-spangled tschatschke to rest on the shelves of old people and thought-free fratboys (stupid Republican metawhore Ann Coulter, with remarkably Reifenstahlesque candor, described him as "An American original -- virtuous, pure and masculine, like only an American can be")? Such queries, into real cause-and-effect, seeking real accountability, of course will start with the new Congress, one diametrically opposed to the course this nation has taken, and the measures its government has enacted to inure us from meaning with superfluous slogans and car magnets and other Chinese-made shit people buy in lieu of thinking for themselves. "God Bless America" does not tell us how convicted criminals like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling crafted the administration's already disastrous (soon enough to be cataclysmic) energy policy, or what happened to the $21 billion in taxpayer money flown off missing into the void of Iraq, nor does it answer how that conflict was contrived, plotted, marketed, miscalculated, mismanaged and rationalized endlessly for three years in contravention of international law, or, as Tillman called it, "so fucking illegal."

Words ill-befitting Coulter's ubermensch, to be sure, but worthy of the best of this, and any other, nation, someone courageous enough to act selflessly, yet who does not consider "duty" blind fealty to those who exploit such courage. Tillman, having literally been through both wars, came to ask the same questions the rest of us did, the ones we asked even before the Congress let itself be so exploited and returned carte blanche war powers to an office ill-deserving of them, to missionaries of a broader dogmatic agenda who could only misuse them. Pat Tillman didn't die for freedom or democracy, he died for that agenda, which has little to do with either.

Time to wake up and smell the glove that's been smacking you around. Time to get a good whiff of what this coming election is really all about: our limping, sputtering, bruised but well-meant egalitarian political system, one that gives people a voice in their society's course and their own well-being, versus a matrix of lies insinuating that is the the exact same thing as a rich guy free-for-all. In a nutshell, they have succeeded in confusing the basic American experiment of an activist, progressive State with the historically discredited doctrine that freedom is only freedom of unfettered, unrestrained wealth.

Ask your Rick Santorums and Chuck Grassles, Jim Tallents or Mike Whalens or our current gubernatorial candidate Jim Nussle or other sundry god-fearing yes-men, if not millionaires, running to be yet another rubber-stamp in the Bush machine. Ask why they would refuse hold war profiteers like Halliburton responsible for the billions missing in Iraq, why they refuse to enforce simple laws on the books insisting on basic accountability, both for companies and for elected officials. Ask them why they love rich people almost fetishistically, to the point of looking past the gross record of corporate crime on their watch, and still keep a straight face as they paint themselves aw-shucks populist middle-American everymen.

Ask why rich white men get a pass, but not those who look for laws and common sense to apply to all people.

The shouts of "freedom" and "democracy" our stalwart and stolid flag-waving neighbors still ape like a tired ad catchphrase -- wazzaaaaap! -- has little to do with what the word actually means, not in the hands of these men. If you don't believe me, ask their cage dancer Coulter or their fluffer Hannity, if these mere sentiments, typed on my little compter, constitute TREASON. But for more visceral evidence, keep your eyes on Iraq, and see how democratic it becomes in coming months, versus, y'know, not, per the Bush administration's machinations.

Because the democracy you love and trumpet and that Pat Tillman died for -- in spite of the actual reasons we were all given -- is about to be taken off the menu for the actual Iraqis you proclaim to have liberated.

'DEMOCRACY' AT GUNPOINT Bush & Co., according to series of buried reports including vague asides in a New York Times story and less vague in the Washington Post, may soon decide that its handpicked Iraqi "democracy" isn't working -- conspicuously without Iraqis' consent -- and to sponsor a coup to re-assert more dictatorial control. Virginia Republican senator John Warner hinted as much upon his return from a recent trip to Iraq, telling reporters, "[I]n two or three months, if this thing hasn't come to fruition and if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function, I think it's a responsibility of our government internally to determine: Is there a change of course that we should take?"

A "strongman," the thinking is, would be the only way to crack down on both the counter-U.S. insurgency and internecine violence currently standing in the way of people throwing flowers. What would be hiLARious about that is, all the blind apologists for the neocon crusade are gonna be shit outta luck on their standardized and grossly rationalized talking points. This means we'll soon arrive, by deduction, to the true reason Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Adelman, Perle, et al. took us to war in the first place, the same reason their reactionary forbears, from Truman on, have fucked with foreign lives -- not for "democracy," but for the crass misconception of it foist upon us by their corporate sponsors.

To wit, a quick rundown of our conspicuously grasped-at straws. We've gone from hard unqualified of assurances of our imminent, clear, present danger from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which there wasn't and weren't, to the president's absolute insistence of Iraq links with al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attack, which there weren't, to the Hallmark-esque vaguery "spreading democracy," a curious rationale as we've sat idly as a distinctly anti-democratic FUCKING GENOCIDE engulfs the Sudan. At most cursory examination, the "democratic" protestations have proven bullshit, according to a recent survey by pollsters Mark Tessler and Mansoor Moaddel. Their research found 91.7 percent of Iraqis want foreign troops out of the country, versus 74.4% in 2004. Overwhelming consensus, however, doesn't seem to carry much weight in their ostensibly democratic republic. Just those kinds of sentiments, as well as Bush & Co.'s handpicked prime minister condemning Israel's Lebanon misadventure, are what have the administration so consternated and ready to throw out their contaminated experiment in favor of a new "friendly dictator" -- y'know, like Saddam Hussein.

And so once "democracy" sifts through clammy, manicured, lordly hands, after some clumsy Diem-esque coup in Baghdad, what's really going to be fun is what the neocons and their dittoheads fitfully stutter out next: Like, maybe Orcs were rampaging through Mesopotamia looking for the One Ring. Or, wait, I got it, Cheney and Rummy were on a scavenger hunt and the last thing on their list was a sanctions-starved, defanged Muslim nation.

Long-American-forwarded traditions of social justice, of fair play, of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, for which a united America fought assuredly in WWII -- freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom from fear, freedom from want -- have been replaced by freedom of greed. Gordon Gecko and Ivan Boesky are the new saints, (Donald Trump their mascot), Duke Cunninghams, Bob Neys, Jeff Skillings and Ken Lays their apostles, merely ensnared, according to the dogma, in an archaic web of socialist regulation called a "safety net." Their freedoms, according to current U.S. policy, trump the actual freedoms that an activist government seeks to assure and defend.

Pounce on this as wacko screed, if it helps you sleep at night, but I've got some conspicuously right-wing confirmation. "President Eisenhower's concern about the military industrial complex -- his words have unfortunately come true," deceptively conservative senator John McCain (R-AZ) told Eugene Jarecki in the latter's film Why We Fight. "He was worried that priorities are set by what benefits corporations rather than what benefits the country."

LAISSEZ FUCKED If this doesn't sound familiar, start paying attention and you'll find it informs the entirety of Bush policies, in fact the great global mission of the Chicago School economic proselytes who now rule. Cabinet posts have been filled and judges promoted, ad nauseum, from the ranks of ex-executives and idealogues with paper trails of standing stolidly against any kind of state oversight of our corporate citizens, including the actual jobs their departments were created to do -- which makes sense in the same way as giving a tweaker a job guarding the pharmacy. The vice president has actually gone to court to prevent reporters from seeing what he, on our dollar and ostensibly at our behest, discussed with the Brooks Brothers-draped oil and energy fatcats, including Ken Lay, in the formulating of an energy policy that has ravaged household budgets and made a conspicuous handful of Brooks Brothers-draped oil and energy fatcats ludicrously fatter.

Santorums, Whalens and Nussles, dogmatic stooges as they are, of course trot out the beshitted myth that these re-capitalized barons then turn around create jobs, benefiting us all, which, by the way, SHUT THE FUCK UP and SHOW ME THE JOBS. Let's ask that of our favorite conservative Paul Craig Roberts, who once again belies these MINCING FUCKING FAIRY TALES in Counterpunch:

Last Friday's payroll jobs report was a continuation of Bush's dismal record. Only 59,000 net new private sector jobs were created during September. That is about 90,000 less than would be needed to stay even with population growth. Like all jobs that the US economy has created in the 21st century, the September jobs are in domestic services.

Waitresses and bar tenders accounted for a quarter of the new jobs. The remainder were in health care and social assistance, wholesale trade and transportation, financial activities, and accounting and bookkeeping services.

US manufacturing lost another 19,000 jobs. Since Bush took office, the US has lost 3 million manufacturing jobs . . .

It has been years since the US economy has created high-productivity, high-paying jobs in export and import-competitive sectors. The US manufacturing trade deficit is now twice the size of the oil import bill . . . In the 21st century, real income growth has been limited to a few at the top, while median family income stagnates or declines. As a result of the moronic American system of tying CEO pay to quarterly results, fat cats get richer by arbitraging labor and replacing American workers with foreigners.

It should be no great surprise that rich guys (Santorum, Whalen, Nussle, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld -- the latter of whom, by the way, made a fortune while with a company that sold North Korea nuclear components back in the 90s) would set an agenda of basically enabling rich guys, to the detriment of non-members of the country club. What's particularly galling is how they do it in undisguised contravention of the established law of the land. Establishment whore The Washington Post even reported two weeks ago that, in conspicuous pattern, a number of federal judges have handed down decisions lambasting Bush administration departments for giving energy and logging industries a complete pass when it comes to adhering even to the lax environmental regulations on the books. "When judges express that frustration on paper, which is not all that often," Dan Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, in Portland, OR, told the paper, "they are often reflecting what they see as a systematic effort to get around the law."

More egregious is the length to which Bush functionaries have gone to repress its own information that doesn't toe the party line. To wit, it was revealed last month that administration toadies at the FCC, whose job it is to ensure the equitable use of mass media in the public interest, quashed its own commissioned hard-data studies when they revealed that, counter to that interest, the massive conglomerations of media, such as Disney, wind up winnowing down local news vital to the public to make local decisions. In other words, the more companies own in their never-ending quest for national advertising revenues, the more a single agenda (like, say, Rupert Murdoch's) can filter the information that gets to you. The flipside, as us wacky reality-removed radicals have long warned is, the more your community's programming and information comes prepackaged from CEOs far far away, like LA (Disney), Arlington (Gannett) or San Antonio (Clear Channel), the less it is likely to inform you and measure the dynamics of what is actually happening in your town -- a template example of what the FCC was set up to protect against.

Turns out, however, the wacky reality-removed assessment is, um, hard, metric reality, ACCORDING TO THE FCC. One of the agency's commissioned studies, according to the AP, found that "local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of 'on-location' news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market." Even if this seems a minor factoid at face value, it's not. It provides empirical proof that media conglomeration is detrimental to the communities the megaconglomerate's "assets" are specifically licensed to serve. If you don't see how damning that is to the laissez-faire orthodoxy of the present regime, you might want to ask why the Bush flunkies at the agency ordered the study destroyed before it ever saw the light of day.

In accord with their servile relationship with the aforementioned CEOs, FCC higher-ups ordered the reports shredded, along with all corroborating information, according to an FCC whistleblower. Adam Candeub, who worked on the project and is now a law professor at Michigan State, told MSNBC that "senior managers at the agency ordered that 'every last piece' of the report be destroyed. 'The whole project was just stopped -- end of discussion,' [Candeub] said."

Add it to the growing list of scandals of deception and obfuscation for which the administration is now being investigated.

But as companies granted above-the-law status go, Halliburton, the Houston oil services firm Cheney used to run, of course remains King Shit. In spite of having been caught defrauding the government on numerous counts, the company has shrugged off multiple reports of its chicanery and that of its military services unit, Kellogg Brown & Root, and gone merrily along sucking up taxpayer dollars for its Iraq "account," overcharging for gas and buying shitty supplies to serve substandard fare to American servicemen. It has done so with such carte blanche from the Bush administration, that it has taken an ordinary citizen, a former KBR employee, to call it to task with a lawsuit seeking redress for the squandered taxpayer dollars. The whistleblower's suit, filed under the anti-war profiteering statute called the False Claims Act, alleges that Halliburton "defrauded the government by double - and triple - billing for Internet, food and gym services for soldiers," the LA Times reports, and even that its executives sent home for a "big-screen television and 10 large tubs of tacos, chicken wings and cheese sticks" for their own Super Bowl party, all wracked up on the taxpayer dime.

The kicker: the U.S. Justice Dept., nominally in charge of enforcing the nation's laws, has refused to join the suit and, thus, once again as pertains to Bush administration toadies, do their fucking job.

"One former Halliburton employee after another tells the same story of outrageous and intentional overcharging," CA congressman Henry Waxman said in a statement. "Yet no one in the Bush administration seems to care."

This is not merely cronyism. It's worse. It is evidence of a symbiosis between the gang in charge and the gang in the corner offices, those being the same, of government working for corporations and vice versa, and, thus, unquestioned and unaccountable -- if you question any of this, you're a fucking traitor, right, Ann? That, should you check your glossary, defines fascism.

SEEMS LIKE COLD TIMES Little wonder that their definitions of "democracy" differ from ours. Nobody clued us in to this anti-democratic shift in what we were fighting for, they're too busy calling it what it isn't. And we're not just mincing terminology here. Whenever you hear about the latest excesses of this historically and malfeasant government, the claim is always "exigent circumstances." "Yes, you're free to say what you want, normally, but it's WARtime." We must spy on you, outside of the law. We reserve the right to decide who and who isn't a lawful combattant, here and overseas, and to deprive you of legal redress if you are so determined. We don't torture people, in adherence to the exhaustively and meticulously constructed tenets of international law, except when the president determines it necessary, and how he, no fan of international law, nor possessing much capacity to understand it, chooses to interpret it. We must free our military contractors from public oversight, per the Patriot Act, even though that puts them above the law . . . because it's an EMERGENCY.

And the punchline: this nebulous "war," they tell us, will last long into the foreseeable future.

This is a conundrum, understand, because one doesn't live in a state of "emergency" forever. It's either emergency or its just-the-way-things-are, and if you have to suspend certain guarantees because of "exigent circumstances" qualified by our leaders as having no plausible resolution, then, understand, this is not a temporary sanction, it is permanent. If gross restrictions on your rights and the very fabric of our freedom become commonplace -- if our fellow citizens can be jailed indeterminately, without trial or even access to lawyers or the charges against them, if one is determined by the state to be guilty not by proof presented in court of law but by suspicion based on, for example, writing words like these -- then we live in a new reality, "freedom" with an asterisk, in some kind of Second American Republic, and barely that.

We once called this the permanent war economy. That is, a state-run economic system constantly turning on the nexus of commissioning, researching, developing and using a vast matrix of weaponry, which, naturally, requires periodic exercise, and which includes ideological tools required to convince a public of their need for such. This is the military/industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned, and which, nevertheless, has surpassed his direst forecast of its "unwarranted power." It runs efficiently on institutional fear and martial machinations freed of the pesky notion of democratic oversight. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the nation's powerbrokers, public and publicly traded, found themselves scrambling to get the "peace dividend," as Bush Sr. called it, reinvested in corporate accounts, instead of the public welfare whose proper funding had long lost out to rampant military expenditures. Once, for a magical forty years, corporations could cry "commie" and the Feds would come running, to overthrow third-world republics, or to bust union heads. Now they cry "terrorist" to the same effect.

The war is the same. Why we fight is for freedom of greed. We fight for the freedom of our royals to marshal the labor of little brown people and get fat on the resources under their feet, the same way royals the British and Spanish and Dutch and French empires did so, also citing it as God's work, for five centuries. Ours don't wear crowns, of course, but they live the same sense of garish coutoured entitlement. It's just that they paint themselves as common, decent, ordinary, good, abiding, Christian folk -- recall Mrs. Ken Lay weeping on national TV about how, after the Feds' raids, they only had a few million dollars and one mansion left -- so good, decent Americans and our conglomerated media don't broach the essence of this argument, the essence of American Fucking Politics, for what it is: class war. They export it to far shores, befriending and golfing with the wealthy families in the cloistered villas, importing their scions to Yale and Harvard where they learn that all public spending and government activism is ungodly theft and socialism. In turn, these, the land-hording elites who'd long sold out (and beaten and tortured and disappeared) their own people to assuage the Yankees and keep their loans coming in, come to be ascribed by our leaders and business lords as "democratic" bastions (like the Sauds, the Shah, Pinochet and Diem, solonic heroes all, in spite of the bodycounts).

And lest you think this, again, a radical interpretation, let's go to the sentiments of those who crafted the Cold War in the first place:

George Kennan, the grand theoretician and veritable father of U.S. Cold War policy, before it was even so named, framed the global conflict thusly in the now declassified Policy Planning Staff Memorandum 23 (PPS23) in 1947: We will forward "democracy" throughout the world by enabling and arming authoritarian pricks, local and colonial, as long as they keep humping their shit into our corporate coffers.

[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

. . . In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking . . . We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and--for the Far East--unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

From just such cynical power politics emerged the matrix of petty despots and coups d'etat that characterized the USA's Cold War legacy for most of this put-upon orb, the Four Freedoms conspicuously missing like Old Major's revolutionary tenets on the side of the barn in Animal Farm. Little wonder that our intentions remain suspect. Halliburton's oil-pumping contracts in Iraq might as well be ARAMCO's in Iran in 1953 or United Fruit's banana plantations in Guatemala in 1954. Consider U.S. News & World Report's salient April 4, 1954 assessment of U.S. deciding to extend its involvement in Vietnam, in spite of the utter defeat facing its then-client, France, in Indochina. "One of the world's richest areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That's behind the growing U.S. concern . . . tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really all about."

Any -- any -- prick tinpot dictator, under such rationalization, becomes a potential "ally" as long as they pay tribute to Caesar. This would explain how later US Cold Warriors, notably Kissinger and Reagan, struck unconscionable covert sponsorships with genocidal regimes in Argentina, El Salvador, Indonesia, Zaire and Haiti, how they secretly armed and bankrolled the vestigial Nazi regime in South Africa for decades after the civilized world had ostracized that nation, and how Rumsfeld ended up shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, bringing the Iraqi bogeyman into Reagan's good graces, even after Hussein had begun using chemical weapons on Iranians and his own people.

Maybe one solution to people hating the country, presumably something that compromises our vaunted security, is to stop employing distinctly undemocratic thugs to kill them. Maybe we could start by altering the Machiavellian mindset that has made the US, according to Kevin Tillman, "one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world."

THE TRAIL OF CAVIAR LEADS TO CARACAS But as the scientific method is anathema to this administration, far be it from anyone in it to learn anything, much less acknowledge the actual history of this or any other country. They need bogeymen. Little wonder that when the Bush administration bleats and postures against Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez, and when, then, a coup d'etat occurs, spearheaded by a lordly Ivy League chair of the country's chamber of commerce, everyone in Latin America knows who sponsored, bankrolled and greenlit it, because it is more of the same.

The Bush smear campaign continues apace against Chavez, and mainstream media, Republicans and Democrats alike ape its ascription of the presidente as a volatile tinpot wannabe Castro, who dares come to our shores and calls our president "the devil" in front of the world assembled -- but who among them bothered to check out his story? Even if one allows that his recent behavior was gadflyish and impolitic, who has tried to simply comprehend why it is utterly credible and why Chavez is far more popular than Bush in the world abroad?

Eva Golinger, for one, but her research doesn't much buoy the official smear. Golinger's book The Chavez Code exhaustively follows the money funneled to the coup plotters, the meetings of the business leaders and generals who ferried between Caracas and Washington to meet with the Bush administration in the months before the coup. Who did the necessary follow-up investigations, in the Senate or House or The New York Times or Washington Post or CNN? Who bothered to follow obvious trail of caviar-crumbs, to measure Bush's tired insistences on "our" dedication to democracy against the hard facts that it bankrolled and blessed the attempted subversion and destruction of another sovereign nation's constitution? Who bothered to broach the most basic discourse of the event, that Bush and his wealthy Venezuelan allies chose, in their oaken cloisters, to take it upon themselves to simply veto, by force, the popular vote of the Venezuelan people, who elected Chavez twice by profoundly greater majorities than Bush could ever see in his wettest dream?

How exactly does this equate to "democracy," by any definition? How does a handful of true believer aristocrats obviating a popular vote, foisting in its place a pinstriped heel who immediately disbands the legislature and the high court, advance the cause of freedom? Seriously, somebody tell me in any way that uses reason. Here's my address, tetdog@mchsi.com. Tell me how Chavez's administration is any less legitimate in the wake of the groundswell of its citizens who took to the streets and the constitutionalist military units who faced down their mutinous compadres to restore the republic. Everybody bitching about Chavez's unseemly performance at the UN -- how fucking dare he call our esteemed president names -- maybe try this: have your popularly elected government overthrown in a coup, watch the very foundations of your sovereign nation torn asunder, get your ass kidnapped off to a military base off the coast and sit in front of your treasonous officers as they discuss how they're going to murder you, all at the smirking approval of the President of the United States, if not by his hand-drawn blueprint, and then tell me what disrespect is.

Chavez's biggest crime is having removed the douchebag Yalie elites from the administration of, and reaping disproportionate profits from, the country's oil wealth and reinvested it in public education, health and food programs for the EIGHTY PERCENT of his people who live in poverty. Yes, he's expanded the state's role in public life, nationalized some rich families' idle plots of land to grow aforementioned food, and he's increased the pay-in of Venezuela's wealthiest citizens, whether they like it or not, as did FDR. Some might consider that socialistic abomination, fine, maybe I think they're doing their kids untold damage pounding 2,000-year-old superstitions and boogeyman fears into their heads. The difference is, I don't see that as an justification to go over to my neighbor's house, drive my car through his kitchen, slap the shit out of him, blow his salary on a lot of ebay crap and parties for my friends, eat the stuff out of his fridge and garden, bang his wife and daughter and start homeschooling his kids as existential humanists. And, guess what, if you did that in somebody else's country, you ought not feel too put out when somebody calls you an asshole.

Or a fascist.

THE PROOF They say we bandy this term about a bit much, and fascists rarely even know they are -- they quibble Kennan's realpolitick hork or something similar -- so let's offer a quick proof [FAIR WARNING: follow along at risk of your own self-realization]:

1) Given: Democracy is predicated on the notion of the citizens of a state taking participatory role in its guidance; instead of older notions of people serving a limited number of individuals who compose the state, the state is composed consensually to serve the people.

2) If Chavez acted to "attack the right of private property," as the U.S. Caracas embassy has alleged, then Franklin Roosevelt did as well in similar fashion.

3) If, as alleged, Chavez's Bolivarian revolution equates a shift towards totalitarianism, as Rumsfeld has alleged, then so did FDR's New Deal, whose "free market"-championing critics warned that its public works and expanded economic management were immutable portents of a coming communist US.

4) If the coup d'etat was a proper and moral reaction to Chavez, it was also a plausible response to FDR.

5) Assuming the propriety of the anti-Chavez coup as a proper course of action, one must also validate the notion of an anti-FDR coup.

6) Supporters of the anti-Chavez coup validate the extra-legal anti-constitutional action intended to render null and void the electoral processes of the Venezuelan republic, which is an anti-democratic action.

7) Supporters of the anti-Chavez coup applauded that temporarily coup-installed government, led by a businessman who, as head of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, also represented the nation's corporate class. The government proceeded to suspend the other constitutional apparati of government, the Venezuelan legislature and its supreme court.

8) As such, supporters of the anti-Chavez coup applaud the suspension of representative and lawful government, in favor of a coercive, unaccountable centralized state whose interests and actions are merged with those of the corporate community and, intrinsically, the elite class that dominates it.

9) The latter defines fascism.

10) If one considers a coup d'etat toward a fascist state in Venezuela a valid and welcome action, one must afford the same moral ascription to a coup d'etat against FDR, whose crimes of activist statecraft were palpably similar to those of Chavez.

THEREFORE:

11) Supporters of the anti-Chavez coup would, under similar circumstances, advocate a fascist state in the US at the very time similarly minded plutocracies were plotting world domination in Germany, Italy and Japan.

The realpolitick response to this, of course, goes something this: Venezuela lies in the Third World, where the workings of "democracy" remain new and malleable. Such a course of events would be untenable here in the U.S., a mature republic, whose well-developed electoral processes and inclusive electorate would preclude such actions. However logical the above conclusions drawn in theory, it is argued, the real world reality simply would disallow the merest consideration of an American coup, on the part of our corporate elites or their support base. Even if one allows that this establishes a double standard (US versus Other), that is the privilege of the powerful in a system of power politics.

This would assuage most draconian Republicans, except that it runs headlong into the even peskier realities of history: In 1933, representatives of a Wall Street brokerage met with two-time Congressional Medal of Honor-winner General Smedley Butler (ret.) and asked him to lead a coup of veteran U.S. soldiers to prematurely oust the FDR administration. Their funding and support base, the plotters said, came from a new organization that would soon be established as a vocal mouthpiece against the New Deal and, they alleged, its subverting of the US into a socialist state. The organization's founding would be announced within weeks of the first contact with Butler.

A few weeks later, the Liberty League, an association of stolid Republicans, conservative Democrats and, moreover, major corporate chieftains from Wall Street brokerages, DuPont and General Motors, announced its formation and its intentions to leverage its millions in corporate funding to lobby against the New Deal as a dangerous, socialist tack for the country. The coup, the plotters told Butler, would involve mobilizing half a million members of the American Legion, who were to be armed with Remington guns, that company then owned by the major bankroller of the Liberty League, Irene DuPont, also chief of the company that bore his name. Butler, he was told, was to assume the dictatorial role of Secretary of General Welfare in the wake of Roosevelt's murder or arrest, the office of president thereafter relegated to a figurehead.

Butler blew the whistle on the plot, to the Congress and the press. The House committee investigating Nazi activities investigated Butler's charges, grilled the Liberty League middle-men, and deemed the allegations well-founded. The committee recommended further investigation after it's charge expired with the congressional term. Roosevelt, reputedly magnanimous in the interest of national unity, did not press for further inquiries, preferring the initial investigation to be fair warning to the plotters. But it is there, on paper, the whole plot to violently eradicate the most basic democratic processes, to deliver the constitution unto the barons of Wall Street to be used as toilet paper and flushed, it is there in the Congressional record and well documented in Jules Archer's fine book The Plot to Seize the White House.

I need to re-emphasize something here: the expansion of the state's role in society, an increased tax burden levied by that state on those best able to afford it, those who derive their wealth from license given by the state, to pay for that expansion, the rudimentary re-thinking of government as something that uses taxpayers dollars to serve taxpayers in roles the private sector is too shortsighted, insensitive or corrupt to fill, even the nationalization of resources untapped by the private sector to better the general welfare -- none of this qualified either Chavez or Roosevelt as the misguided despots the wealthy painted them as. Rather, it just put them at odds with a certain lofty, doctrinaire economic theory that had thus far failed their people and doomed too many of them to squalor and misery. The people who held that theory, of course, possessed enough money and influence to paint both leaders as dangerous would-be dictators, and, in Roosevelt's case, we can see how their alarmist forecasts bore out.

That theory, indeed, lies at the heart of the great national debate taking place this fall (even if most Democrats are too fucking coached, shallow or shortsighted to articulate as much). The debate is not one of "lower taxes" -- dumbfucks, soundbyte retard hacks! -- it is of who pays those taxes and in whose interest they are spent. Qui bono?

AMERICAN SUPERMEN ARE YOUR SUPERIORS! Who would have benefited most from Chavez's ouster? The Venezuelan people who have four times reaffirmed their approval of his policies? "Democracy"? So where is the coup against the fetid, fundamentalist, royal dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, somehow a beacon of enlightenment among oil powers, even as Chavez's "tyranny" comes replete unabated freedom of the press (all controlled by the wealthy oligarchy, all of whom gleefully cheer-led the coup that almost killed him, all continuing to broadcast and publish unhindered), regular payments of all the country's previous foreign debt-load, and leniency against the coup plotters, all of whom remain alive, well and rich.

Once we remove that and the distinctly anti-democratic notion of the coup from the equation, it leaves us little to fully understand the Bush administration's interest in his ouster, unless you count the wrath of the plutocratic elites and their partners in the American oil companies, who have been bridling at Chavez's intended renegotiations of their pumping contracts. Seems he wanted them to pay some taxes instead of the none they'd paid under previous plutocrat regimes. So, for whom did we stage the coup, and for whom did we lose face throughout an ever-enlightening Latin America?

Ask yourself this: are American companies entitled, by dint of being wealthy and American to whatever they want, whenever they want it, and the US government's role to act as their thug mafiosi? We overthrew a secular parliament in Iran in 1953 to secure oil, a constitutional government in Guatemala in 1954 for bananas and in Chile in 1973 for ITT and Pepsi, and these are just the best documented and odious of that track record. Government contracted companies like Halliburton were to help the Bush administration, according to the Bush administration, pay for the Iraq invasion with Iraqi oil -- how has that worked out? Halliburton gets your tax money to pump it, and still half a trillion dollars have flown over to the country to both pacify it and pay other profiteering American companies to rebuild the infrastructure as only can-do American enterprise can. How are both of those going? Maybe something you should ask your congressman, along with who continues to reap your taxdollars as profit?

Maybe I misunderstand the concept of "value," but when you fuck shit up that badly, shouldn't your stock go down instead of up?

And "democracy," as it should by now wax overly evident, has little to do with any of it, other than that which is brayed in slogans and talk radio and Fox News. What is at issue on Nov. 7 is making the promise behind the word real, for us, for them, not just for gilded portfolios of the 5 percent uppercrust. Yes, it is class warfare, a struggle of equality and accountability and inclusion, things that, behind the slogans and especially behind closed doors, the Republican leadership cannot truck. Theirs are the voices of the CEO, as played by Ned Beatty, in Sidney Lumet's masterpiece Network. The CEO abides insane anchorman Howard Beale's populist rabble-rousing as long as it brings in the ratings, but when Beale reveals an imminent, secret deal to sell airwaves to the Saudis, he is called into the oaken boardroom for thunderous reality check:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today . . .

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Read this to a friend, somebody currently spouting the economic orthodoxy of the "democracy of the market," and ask them how this expression of proto-sci-fi-esque villainy differs from their views. You'll most likely find it doesn't. Kennan's scholarly global a-morality has become the dread reality behind the flag you wave, the principles it is supposed to stand for hijacked to semaphore your orders to fall into line, an ill-gotten, manipulated consensus based on a horrible Other lurking in the shadows, justifying any expense and execrable action so long as keeps the machine humming -- a reality even Kennan could not escape.

"My thoughts about containment," he wrote many years later, "were of course distorted by the people who understood it and pursued it exclusively as a military concept; and I think that that, as much as any other cause, led to 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War."

Before he died in 2005, the Cold War architect even called the Bush administration's case for war on Iraq "pathetically unsupportive and unreliable," that Iraq "bears no relation to the first war against terrorism," and issued this prophetic warning: "Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before'. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

DENOUMENT So for whom do we fight? For what? Why did Pat Tillman die, not to mention the other 2,700 American servicemen lost forever in that oil-rich quagmire?

"If you join the U.S. military now, you are not defending the United States of America -- you are helping certain policymakers pursue an imperial agenda," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force colonel interviewed for Jarecki's Why We Fight. A lifelong military woman who worked with Rumsfeld in the Defense Department, work that hastened her retirement, Kwiatowski is a woman who ate, slept, shat U.S. military, to the point where she got good enough at her job as to be promoted to the Pentagon's rarified civilian circles, and bears nothing on her resume remotely resembling radical. "The reason we're in Iraq . . . certainly had nothing to do with the liberation of the Iraqi people. That was never part of the agenda and it's not part of the agenda now."

And now, it turns out, that "liberation" may only be to "our" dictator versus the previous one, another Pinochet, Diem, Pahlavi, Papa Doc, Rios Montt and, yes, Saddam. That's why, every time you hear some thick-necked sports jagoff saluting "our brave women and women overseas" for "defending our freedom," it's a slap in those kids' face. They signed up to be an honest cop, protecting and serving, and now find themselves capos in a protection racket, strong-arming conspicuously different cultures into being colonies for Western companies, the pristine, unimpeded "markets" that the Lords foresee in their Utopia.

"In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people," former US Army Ranger Kevin Tillman wrote. "So don't be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity."

Kwiatowski's protestations, like Beale's, reveal a truth that dare not be uttered, the big Deux Ex Machina behind the curtain assuring the marginalization of such voices. Tillman's brother Pat, like Beale, had come to understand things he wasn't supposed to. But unlike Kwiatkowski, he represented not just a cog, but a lynchpin in that machine, a Helenized statue with the sun going down behind it as the wind sings a warm and comforting paean to "duty." Given the lengths the administration's Orwellian pricks have gone to to forward their agenda, to manage information, to rationalize disastrous acts on outright lies, and to, in their own words, "create a new reality," it is not a difficult leap to imagine a Rovian West Wing meeting in which it was understood that the negative impact of a dissident antiwar Tillman could be just as a powerful as his positive impact on their war propaganda. Curiously, all the Rangers from Tillman's unit are now subject to a gag order with regard to the events surrounding his death. After his family found successive military investigations to have been cover-ups, then varying degrees of dissembling and outright obfuscation, that critical evidence was destroyed on orders, little wonder that they have pushed for a criminal probe into his death.

"It just makes you feel kind of sick, that they'd cover up that for whatever reason," the Broncos' Jake Plummer told HBO. "We were all led to believe that he died leading his troops up the hill. But what can you do. You're at their mercy . . . Everytime [Tillman's mom] tries to do something she's thinking about her son being killed [and that being] used as propaganda, and it's tough."

If it seems at face value unseemly to address Tillman's death in a political context, understand this: the a-politicization of the tragedy, its constant framing in stars and stripes, is of itself politicization. It does the young man an unconscionable disservice, by whitewashing and sanitizing the choices he made to find meaning in his own life, and it dismisses what he found along the way. To leave him simply an iconofied superhero no more serves his memory than the notion that Lincoln waged a war simply against "states' rights" or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an "eloquent speaker." There is a greater, deeper, far more conflicted and complex story to the man who acted from noblest intentions, only to have his nobility exploited and misappropriated, even in death.

Ask your congressmen why Pat Tillman died and how. Ask why the Pentagon lied about it and buried it and routinely insulted his family. Ask why they think Tillman might have called the Iraq war "so fucking illegal." Ask what it means when our heroes, so drilled and regimented to do what they're told, start asking questions. Ask those who themselves presume to be the solonic heroes of us simple commonfolk -- our great protectors in their conformist charcoal suits and striped ties instead of actual battle fatigues -- why they don't have the balls or the basic integrity to ask questions themselves, of their own bankrollers, of their leadership, of their colleagues. Ask them why they say nothing while those people gad about above the law, and if their immunity and privilege evinces the egalitarian spirit of the constitution they are sworn to uphold. Ask them if democracy means something else to them than that which was taught the rest of us. Ask them if we are voting to suspend the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law until further notice.

Measure their answers carefully, vote accordingly, because nothing less than the death of the First American Republic hangs in the balance.

SEPT 30, 2006
"THE RIGHT TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT" -- HOW REPUBLICAN "DEMOCRACY" WORKS From the NYTimes story on the Congressional report detailing the intimate association between the Bush Administration and vile Machiavellian corruption-broker Jack Abramoff, about which the White House has persistently lied.

Mr. Rove has described Mr. Abramoff as a "casual acquaintance," but the records obtained by the House committee show that Mr. Rove and his aides sought Mr. Abramoff's help in obtaining seats at sporting events, and that Mr. Rove sat with Mr. Abramoff in the lobbyist's box seats for an N.C.A.A. basketball playoff game in 2002.

After that game, Mr. Abramoff described Mr. Rove in an e-mail message to a colleague: "He's a great guy. Told me anytime we need something just let him know through Susan." The message was referring to Susan Ralson, Mr. Abramoff's former secretary, who joined the White House in February 2001 as Mr. Rove's executive assistant. . .

SEPT 28, 2006
TRUER OVER THE YEARS "I'm sorry, I can't hear you! Don't fire the gun while you're talking!" -- Frank Drebin, The Naked Gun

SEPT 26, 2006
MORE, AND EVEN MORE PROFOUND, FROM OLBERMANN HERE Just to fire your ass up.

Please note, especially any of the linear-thought challenged who cannot perceive dimensions beyond two poles, that we at The Smear are not Clinton fans. But compared to the current clan in power, he's fucking Gandhi. Mainstream media (MSM, or Ministry of Propaganda) wags can bitch all they want about his snipey attitude towards Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace, who asked questions presumably based on a fictional discredited Disney movie that aired on ABC, but y'know what? Clinton or not, it's about time anybody called sell-out cunts like Wallace on their bullshit.

As Olbermann -- again, far from a bonafied leftie radical -- so noted in reacting to the (mostly) Fox bitches who referred to Clinton as "crazed" or worse:

"Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as Al-Qaeda; the nation’s 'marketplace of ideas' is being poisoned, by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit.

"Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I -- in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist -- and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds -- by mail."

Understand this, now and for all time:

Saying shit the government, right or left or cagey pseudocon "moderate," wants you to say does not make you a journalist.

Journalists measure the official story against reality. IF YOU ARE NOT DOING THIS, IF YOU ARE APING OR ECHOING THE TALKING POINTS OF THOSE IN POWER, YOU ARE A PROPAGANDA WHORE AND MIGHT AS WELL BE A ZOMBIE WITH A LOUDSPEAKER RAMMED THROUGH ITS HEAD.

Whether you agree with a government or disagree, to insist that those in power are right in spite of all evidence, are unerring in spite of all, myriad, even criminal errors, has nothing WHATSOFUCKINGEVER TO DO WITH DEMOCRATIC VALUES. It is an abrogation of those, in fact, to authority. It is, literally, unquestioning fealty to the notion of authoritarianism.

A lot of us already know that Republicanism, as it exists now, is fascism. It's just most Republicans who haven't figured it out, timestrapped as they are waving flags and dodging stiff gay penises.

(I WILL, BY THE WAY, PROVE THIS, SYLLOGISTICALLY, IN A FUTURE ITEM.)

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A CONFEDERATE FLAG-WAVING RACIST SENATOR Lest anybody not understand yet what is at stake in the upcoming elections, yes, racism has everything to do with the divide in America. Ask inveterate asshole George Allen, trying to escape the obvious bigoted bullshit he uttered into the camera held by an opponent's campaign worker, whom he called "Macaca," an old-timey Euro-epithet for a dark-skinned person. Yet, the problem is, Old Boys are . . . well, Old Boys, and they have histories. In spite of two different, creative excuses his campaign has come up with to wave reporters away from the obvious, corroboration is popping up like Whack-a-Moles that Allen routinely used the word "nigger" in mean-spirited context towards black people -- mostly, of course, around Old Boys.

Follow the ever-unwinding trail at Salon and the Daily Kos.

And before anyone deludes themselves this is just a lone, ultra-rich, neoconfed douche from Virginia, challenge yourself to a little history quiz: When did the solid-red of American South turn that color? When did the once Solid South, all but assured to the Democratic Party every election, veer Republican? Why?

Answer: in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Don't trust us on this, look it up for yourself. Explain it and the ensuing course of American electoral politics to me any other way. I'm all fucking ears.

The South went to Nixon because Lyndon Johnson, douchebag though he was, ended Jim Crow, federally and categorically. It, the South, never looked back. The act enraged White Citizens Councils across the south who backed and bankrolled local party machines and who, if they bore a WCC emblem, were front groups for the Klan. For a bit more political correctness, these White Citizens Councils morphed over the years into the St. Louis-headquartered Council of Conservative Citizens, unabashedly segregationist, white supremicist defenders of "traditional American values," whose associations with, ahem, Sen. George Allen have been well documented. As they have with, hmmm, longtime GOP influential Trent Lott.

The south went Republican because they didn't much appreciate the "dangerous underclasses" having voice in their pristine democratic republic, preferring it be something, by definition, less. They share that sentiment with the Republican "small government" policies that abandoned the same "underclasses" to an undermaintained, then devasted, New Orleans, the same "underclasses" whose education assistance it has routinely and sanguinely eviscerated, whose basic worker protections it has left unenforced, whose neighborhoods have been forsaken an gerrymandered to dilute their votes (notably in the president's home state), whose polling places in Ohio and Florida conspicuously ended up with way too few voting booths, whose businesses have been crushed by the Forbes Richest People In America list, whose smallest assurances of an equitable life, the long-fought, meager attempts at recompense for 100 years of martially enforced servitude post-Emancipation Proclamation. (What is the statute of limitations on deprevation of opportunity, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, on a population of millions, for nearly the entire history of the nation?) Yes, they have also done so to the detriment of working poor white and Latino and Asians people, yes, the racism is now effectively "classism," but don't for a microsecond convince yourself it is not the same thing: golfing, cognac-sniffing elites fighting tooth and nail any progressive measure or policy that might benefit anyone other than them.

And let's be clear about one other thing: the more melanin-deficient among us know George Allens. We've all been in rooms where Old Boys, or their NASCAR-distracted footsoldiers, see our palor and simply assume we're "in the club." They still say "nigger" routinely and with gutteral meanness and superior venom, and, if not, refer to "certain types" or "those people." They've said it to me, winking, as if we're all in this together, ostensibly thoughtful and well-respected men, pillars of their communities. And when they found their scurrilous, presumptuous, cartoon-villainous sentiments objected to, they even try to qualify that they consider black people and "niggers" two separate things, y'know, it's all about attitude, see, that uppity "urban" thing, not a racist notion on their part, god forbid. Dance, bitch, dance like George Allen.

Bullshit. I called it on them then, I call it now.

We all know how these fucks vote, don't we, at least since '65. Thing is, though, we're all niggers now, those of us who don't toe their line of "traditional American values," those venerable democratic principles of shutting up, consuming, worshipping their god and knowing our place.

AUG 30, 2006
OLBERMANN TO RUMSFELD: UM, WHO'S A FASCIST? He holds a primetime slot, albeit on the third-ranked, also-ran cable news network. But Keith Olbermann at MSNBC just became a goddamn hero of the Republic. Best as I can tell, I this, clickable at over at CrooksandLiars.com, qualifies as a GREAT moment in the history of television. For all the insipid, superfluous, rank fecal matter that major TV giants routinely shit into our faces, Olbermann, no radical, executed a passionate, emaculately worded and common-sensical dressing down of the Secretary of Defense -- for the latter's castigation of the majority of Americans opposed to administration policies as "morally or intellectually confused" and apologists for "a new kind of fascism" -- and, in doing so, Olbermann dragged the medium kicking and screaming back, briefly, to the great promise of mass communication in the public interest.

Click the above link to watch an astonishing moment, doubly astonishing insofar as it comes from mainstream media community that has almost universally abrogated its responsibilities to this country and its people, in favor of lapsing into a toadying, kowtowing, unctuous ministry of propaganda (Katie Couric becomes CBS' lead news person next week!). Olbermann's delivery was impeccable and needs to be seen, for he invokes Edward R. Murrow, the heroic CBS newsman in whose chair Couric will now figuratively sit, in more than just citation. But we will reprint some of the transcript here, because they are words worth spreading in every medium available. Tell your friends, gather round the PC, drink a fucking beer and pay heed someone (other than Stewart and Colbert) with the courage and balls, finally, to speak sense and the true ideals of the nation to the face of the chickenshit, bullying idealogues who have brought us all to the brink.

That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused… is simply this:

This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count -- not just his. Had he or his President perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago -- about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago -- about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one* year ago -- we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation -- he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have -- inadvertently or intentionally -- profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes.

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised?

As a child, of whose heroism did he read?

On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight?

With what country has he confused… the United States of America?

The confusion we -- as its citizens -- must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note - with hope in your heart - that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light… and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this Administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism." As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that -- though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism -- indeed.

Tell Keith thanks, email him at KOlbermann@msnbc.com.

ADDENDUM, COURTESY OF OUR GUATEMALAN CORRESPONDENT, MIKE TALLON: Today President Bush recast the global war against terrorism as a multi-front war against "a new form of fascism" and quickly added that he planned to "fight fire with fire."

AUG 9, 2006
GHOSTS OF WAR-CRIMES PAST

"You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives -- the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture . . . Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate."
--Senator George Hoar, 1902, addressing three Army officers court-martialed for their prosecution of the Philippine-American War.

If you haven't brushed up on your Philippine War history recently, it probably couldn't hurt, given how that egregiously imperial conflict served as a prototype for Vietnam, and how Vietnam appears increasingly an ominous prototype for Iraq. Even stalwart GOP senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Nam vet, has said as much, mincing no words. Wonks can quibble about the analogy all they want, but the stark and apt parallel between the three conflicts remains, as it did in March 2003, undeniable: war declared on trumped up rationale by lordly, avaricious, self-righteous white men spouting grand strategic vision, but sparing nary a thought to comprehend the actual, cultural complexities of the little brown people they hope to subjugate in order to liberate. Well, that and the constant of the American youth they harvest domestically to do the dirty work, and to get lost in the moral morass implicit in subjugation.

As atrocities continue to mount in the Iraq morass, a startling bit of language cropped up, echoing from century past. American soldiers in the Iraq theater have in at least one circumstance been ordered to "kill all military age males," according to sworn statements in a military war-crime investigation obtained by the AP. The incident under investigation, the alleged murder of three Iraqi men in a raid on a suspected insurgent training camp in Salahudin province, is but one in a series of war-crimes emerging from the occupation (see July 2 entry below). While the some of these incidents, such as the Mahmoudiyah rape/murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family by a platoon of the 1st Batallion of the 502nd Infantry, bespeak a stark sociopathy that breeds amid a morally compromised mission, the Salahudin incident indicates that the pattern of behavior may be fanned by draconian Rules of Engagement being issued to our young men in uniform.

Not that this should surprise anyone in circumstances of repressive war. Any occupiers tasked with "pacifying" nations who don't particularly want them there inevitably find their combat training sorely tested in circumstances where it is impossible to distinguish who is and who isn't a combatant. The Philippine War, recall, began ostensibly to liberate the archipelago from the Empire of Spain as a theater of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Problematic to that mission, the Filipinos' own revolutionary movement had all but liberated themselves. This did not sit well with McKinley administration, who eyed the islands as a spoil of war and a farflung colony with a major Pacific port for the U.S. Navy, and U.S. forces landed in Manila were soon given orders to pick fights with their supposed beneficiaries. The decade-long war that ensued would result in the deaths of an officially estimated 272,000 Filipinos, only a fraction of those actual combatants.

The U.S. expeditionary force accomplished this via means that would become too familiar 60 years later just a few hundred miles away in Indochina: scorched earth, strategic hamlets (i.e. concentration camps, "reconcentrados, as they were called in the Philippines), free-fire zones, and the (now criminal) destruction of agrarian resources needed to sustain the population. As with any massive forced relocation of populations, as many died from privation, starvation and disease as from American guns, torches and nooses. Such tactics wiped out an estimated 100,000 of the total 298,000 population of the Batangas province, more than a third of the total deaths of the entire war. McKinley's stated intentions to "uplift" and "Christianize" the Filipino savages manifested, as such self-righteous crusades seem ever to do, in subspeciation of an entire people, whom U.S. soldiers commonly referred to, without irony, as "niggers."

The Philadelphia Ledger summed up the scenario -- in defense of American policy, mind you -- thusly:

Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet riddled corpses. It is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality, and we give it to them.

General Smith, upbraided by the senator above, infamously gave this order to Major Tony Waller regarding the pacification of one tract: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”

"I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir," Waller said.

"Ten years," Smith replied.

In ominous parallel, soldiers being investigated in the Salahuddin province incident in Iraq claim their "ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males" in the target zone, the AP cites suspect Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard as telling investigators. Girouard, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, in addition to being charged with murder, also allegedly threatened to kill a fellow U.S. soldier if he told authorities what actually happened in the field. The latter is symptomatic of the broader dynamic developing, that hard and callow orders, in enabling the dehumanization of an amorphous, ambiguous enemy, has diluted processes of moral discernment.

US Army tank driver, Clifton Hicks, who participated in a coordinated strike against an Iraqi wedding party, told Truthout.org, "What struck me most was just how callous we had become. I didn't even care myself. Sure some Iraqi kid had been killed; big deal. It's like seeing a dead dog on the side of the road."

"We didn't care about Iraqis," Hicks said, "because we were conditioned to hate them . . . We hated them and were happy to have killed one. For as long as I can remember I've been taught to fear and mistrust Arabs. That's how those kids on the news were able to rape the 14-year-old girl, shoot her in the face, and kill her whole family. They just didn't care, they still don't care, they couldn't make themselves care if they tried. Every soldier on the frontlines is capable of that or worse."

One American soldier from Utah wrote home: ". . . the old boys will say that no cruelty is too severe for these brainless monkeys, who can appreciate no sense of honor, kindness, or justice . . . With an enemy like this to fight, it is not surprising that the boys should soon adopt 'no quarter' as a motto, and fill [the locals] full of lead before finding out whether or not they are friends or enemies."

A sad game to play before you click the above hyperlink: did he write it in 1906 or 2006?

Not to sugggest all "our boys (and girls)" took to such a dark mindset, or do even now in their own Mesopotamian quagmire. From the Philippines, Frank Fay of the Twentieth Infantry wrote the following. I send it out to my friend Mat, who saw through the Bush propaganda from the get-go, who was nevertheless Stop/Lossed, and who was last week detailed to Baghdad:

"Our soldiers are performing the task set them by the government with admirable skill and valor. They are sacrificing their own lives without hesitation, and, so far as any sign appears, without reluctance or regret. But it is a sombre thought that a little tact with the Filipinos might have prevented the rain of 'fire and bullets,' and saved tens of thousands of the natives, and hundreds and thousands of our own brave men."

JULY 25, 2006
REPUBLICANS FULL-OUT SUCK, ACCORDING TO . . . A REPUBLICAN Howie Klein over at DownWithTyranny pointed out this stunning item from the Washington Post. Speaking to no less than nine reporters on background, a Republican senatorial candidate said the Bush administration's "monumental failure" in the wake of Katrina was indicative of a class chasm and disconnection from reality that now informs the Republican party:

"We became so powerful in our ivory towers, in our gated communities. We forgot that there are poor people . . . I could see that they weren't getting it, they weren't necessarily clued in . . ."

Though confessing to lining up with the administration's procedurally and morally bankrupt agenda, the candidate's party affiliation, he also admitted, has in fact become "an impediment. It's a hurdle I have to overcome. I've got an 'R' here, a scarlet letter . . ."

'DEMOCRACY' IN ACTION In case anybody needs a reminder of what we're really fighting for in our never-ending War on Terror, here's a quick illustration of U.S. priorities amid the pigfuck in Lebanon, as relayed by Counterpunch. As resources were divvied up to evacuate American, a certain segment of the citizenry got first dibs getting past the velvet rope:

. . . it turns out, if you were an Ivy League student in Beirut, your turn came first. Among those enrolled in the summer Arabic program at the American University of Beirut, students told ABC News, those from Harvard, Yale and Princeton were in the first group evacuated -- by high-end private security firms. Students from other American schools were left behind, waiting it out for days while the U.S. embassy formulated its plan [and] as bombs falling nearby shook their dorm rooms.

JULY 22, 2006
WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB? In case you haven't heard, the number of the Beast, as ascribed by the mostly worthless Book of Revelation, is not "666." Biblical scholars a few months ago found that the final book of the New Testament, used liberally over centuries to cow and frighten peasants, Kansans and Southerners into abject servitude, had been mistranslated, and that the first known copy of the book actually has the Antichrist's mark as "616." Notwithstanding that the number refers to a Roman emperor, as most of Revelation is a feverish, metaphorical and wildly wrong forecast of the decline of the Roman empire, notwithstanding even the countless dollars wasted on meaningless tattoos on the flesh of metal and goth geeks, it indicates how completely stupid, random and house-of-cards-sturdy any immediate, tactile worldview based on 2000-year-old misinterpreted superstition, in fact, is. Seventeen centuries worth of unquestioned, fear-mongered truth has been based on a type-o. Keep this in mind over the next few paragraphs.

The scary thing about the latest round of Middle-east tribalism is not its portents for "World War III," the latest code-orange with which the rogues gallery of reactionary pricks have been trotted out to scare you shitless. The same "experts" helped sell a war in which flowers were to pave streets, a crusader presence would pacify a region exploited for 100 years by Godly and wealthy Caucasian men, such stabilization yielding, as a fully erect Rupert Murdoch forecast at the time, $20 barrels of oil. A salient question might be why, in a supposedly results-based economic system, anybody, even Fox News, still pays them to speak instead of not, but their past and imminent wrongness goes toward a specific end. This being the really scary thing, that, instead of offering "expert" analysis, these jagoffs are basically pitching self-fulfilling prophecy. See, the administration they routinely rationalize can afford to be sanguine about the escalating violence in the so-called Holy Land, thus fanning its flames, because the president, his True Believer cabal and their spiritual Kansan foot-soldiers get hard-ons when things to start to boil over in the Levant.

Why? For anyone who's wisely avoided the ravings of our Born Again brethren, here's a creepy little bit of intel: they see all violence in the Holy Land as the precursor to the Apocalypse. Oh, and they look forward to the Apocalypse with the same mixture of giddy fear and anxious glee I get when the adorable moppet is about to be eviscerated in a horror movie. The difference being, I know what is fictional and what is random carpet bombing killing civilians in droves. By standard fundamentalist interpretation of Revelation, war in the vicinity of Israel always portends a chance for Jesus to return and amass the faithful in the Palestinian valley of Megido for the final battle against the Antichrist and the kings of the world, which has come to be translated as Armageddon.

This is worth re-emphasis: the minority of evangelical dipshits who run the country, deep in their "heart of hearts," see an Apocalypse as imminent and welcome.

This notion is so woven into the tapestry of American hyperChristians' superstitious delusion that it informs the plot of a soon-to-be-released video game marketed by the fear-mongering Left Behind media empire. Left Behind: Eternal Forces, set amid the Apocalyptic "End of Days," which herald Jesus' return, pits a righteous Turner Diaries-esque army of the faithful against the Global Community Peacekeepers (um, like the UN maybe?) led by the Antichrist, in the flaming ruins of . . . New York. [This, as Waylon points out, a reflection of the Left Behind books' running plotpoint that has the Secretary General of UN revealed to be . . . bum, bum, BUMMMMM . . . the Antichrist.] With each kill scored by a soldier of righteousness, he shouts "Praise the Lord!" just like a good Mujahadein, as the streets of the city pile with corpses. Jesus would just be so proud.

This, keep in mind, is just an indoctrinating tool. The True Believers who proselytize such tribalistic poison have been the foot-soldiers in forwarding arguably the most a-moral agenda in the history of the Republic. As the first American-made Israeli ordnance started cratering Lebanon, some old reactionary bitch called into a talk radio show I was flipping by and said she hoped, this time, the U.S. would not try to be "politically correct" in dealing with the current crisis. Pressed for what she meant by that, she jabbered and skirted around what she really meant, that the U.S. either abide or actively participate in the unrestrained slaughter of the infidel Muslim. Big business mouthpiece and persisent apologist for institutional corruption Larry Kudlow cheered on the Israeli onslaught as "doing the Lord’s work."

The biggest cheerleader of the WWIII concept, former House speaker, "family values" proponent and admitted adulterer Newt Gingrich, has been braying this spin to everything that looks like a microphone. He advocates we look at the collection of our "enemies," Hezbollah included -- though the U.S. currently is only "at war" with them by proxy -- and their grouping in the near and central Asia, and intimates with less balls than the talk radio bitch that we recognize this as the sweeping clash of cultures that Bush and his cronies long denied it was. Of course, a reversal of this posture would be convenient given that the administration and its beshitted party desperately need to deflect attention from billowing consensus among Americans that they have failed disastrously in every conceivable undertaking. Lo and behold, Gingrich doesn't even try to disguise the fact that his marketing campaign is cynical political verbiage to rally the faithful to keep the cancerous, rubberstamp-happy Republican Congress in power past Nov. 7.

Little wonder that Bush sees fit to sit, smirk and watch as tanks amass and the little brown people die arbitrarily on Fox News. It's all foretold, who is he or America's pickaninny doll Condie Rice to try to stay God's hand? Who are Hillary or Rahm or the other complicit pseudocon Democrats to demand actual, meaningful global leadership, to maybe, hmmm, STOP WORLD WAR FUCKING III, while they're waiting for their AIPAC checks to clear?

(And by the way, knee-jerk brigade, calling the current Israeli government on its shit doesn't make me any more antisemitic than calling Tony Blair a preening, servile lapdog makes me anticaucasian, so spare me the tangential doublespeak.)

If this all ends up reifying the wishful thinking of the True Believers -- and glitzy graphics and marketingspeak of Fox News -- it will be because these people, Democrats and Republicans alike, rubberstamped and dissembled when the true, arbitrary, carpet-bombing war on the whole of Islam began, in Iraq. Curious that the last world war began when Hitler made shit up about the vile, demonic Poles oppressing ethnic Germans in the Gdansk corridor -- if you have to lie to go to war, your mission is already compromised. If you continue to perpetuate the lie, you're only enabling psychosis, and you might as well fess up to it, like the talk show bitch wants you to, you've got a boner to exterminate whole peoples for their beliefs, for the actions of a handful of assholes. That's like a redneck in a bar picking a fight with you, so you BLOW UP THE ENTIRE CITY the bar is in.

Keep that in mind, you remotely rational Republicans; this is your beast, the shit you loosed on the world when you made your deals with the demonic hyperChristian hordes, you validated the boilerplate, cartoony rhetoric that inflames their bloodlust and inflates their apostate notions of racial and spiritual superiority. THAT, motherfuckers, is what lets any culture bomb the shit out of another culture randomly, the innocents in the line of fire be damned, basic subspeciation, to the point where "collateral damage" means little more than stomping on an anthill. Who are you to stay God's hand, if He has deemed them the weaker species (nothwithstanding they are the same species)? Loose the pitbulls of Israeli reactionaries to do exactly as we do, as we've loosed them for a half century, and guess what? Instead of SOLVING PROBLEMS, you're making more, exponentially, a new family or neighborhood full of enemies with every shard of "collateral damage" that severs a kid's corotid artery, that blows up the bridge that keeps the ambulances from getting there, that sends a million people fleeing to communities with the resources barely able to care for a few thousand, waves of refugees cast into homelessness, squalor and starvation, more Sabras and Shatillas to be left in the wake.

This is the price of your righteousness, a world of shit that decent, rational human beings are going to have to clean up when we storm the polls in November and rescue this country, and the world, from Apocalyptic machinations. So let it be written, so let it be done.

JULY 2, 2006
SCENES FROM THE OCCUPATION We want to get this god-awful Ryan Lenz AP story in print and linked before it gets buried by the Ministry of Propaganda, also known as the American news media. This on top of the Haditha massacre and an unconscionable pattern of similar war crimes, mounting, incontrovertable evidence of the souls bartered for a handful of rich fucks' imperial machinations:

Sat Jul 1, 3:00 PM ET
BEIJI, Iraq - Investigators believe American soldiers spent nearly a week plotting an attack in which they raped an Iraqi woman, then killed her and her family in an insurgent-ridden area south of Baghdad, a U.S. military official said Saturday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the attack appeared "totally premeditated" and that the soldiers apparently "studied" the family for about a week before carrying out the attack.

According to the official, the Sunni Arab family had just moved into a new home in the religiously mixed area about 20 miles south of Baghdad. The Americans entered the home, separated three family members from the woman, then raped her and set fire to her body, the official said. The three others were also slain. A senior Army official who also requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing said one of the victims was a child . . .

One of the officials familiar with details of the investigation told The Associated Press that a flammable liquid was used to burn the woman's body in a cover-up attempt. It was unclear if it was gasoline or lighter fluid . . .

Those troops under investigation are from the same platoon as two soldiers kidnapped and killed south of Baghdad this month, another official said Friday. Their mutilated bodies were found June 19, three days after they were abducted by insurgents near Youssifiyah, southwest of Baghdad.

The military has said one and possibly both of the slain soldiers were tortured and beheaded. The official said the mutilation of the slain soldiers stirred feelings of guilt and led at least one member of the platoon to reveal the rape-slaying on June 22.

This raises a salient question, whether the American corpses, exploited on every available microphone by Republican crusaders as proof of the "evil" of the "enemy," were the result of a vendetta sparked by that same platoon's own transgressions. This is the ugly, stupid illogic of "eye-for-an-eye," as neither dumbfucktruebelieverprick crime can mitigate the other, but only forward a cycle of horror even now stacking up, atrocity after atrocity, Iraqi and American alike. Bitch all you want about the media only focusing on "bad news" in Iraq, but take a second to use your imagination and suck on this:

If the dumbfucks who raped and burned that girl and gunned down her family were America's-Most-Wanted skells who went on their joyride in California or Kansas or someplace, it'd be on every news network and banner headline as the top story every hour until they were caught and brought to justice. Recognize that and you just might understand that the master-race filter on your, and your media's, sense of justice, the exact same America-uber-alles bullshit that got those dumbfucks over there in the first place, and gave them -- not to mention their bosses -- the sense that they could get away with the most heinous crimes imaginable.

DEFENDING AMERICA AGAINST ITS VETERANS Mike Ferner, a Vietnam vet and former US Navy corpsman, found out the kind of "freedom" his current military brethren are fighting for late last month. Sitting in the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, drinking a cup of coffee, Ferner discovered that, while the Supreme Court recently ruled that campaign graft qualified as "free speech" (see June 29 post), one's choice of attire doesn't. A VA cop rousted Ferner for a t-shirt that said only "Veterans for Peace," insisting it connoted "protest."

Ferner responded, "I'm not protesting, I'm having a cup of coffee," but that parlance, and the fact that he wasn't protesting, didn't gibe with Orwellian reality of Bush America. As Ferner relayed to Counterpunch:

Flipping his badge open, he said, "No, not with that shirt. You're protesting and you have to go."

Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, "Not before I finish my coffee."

He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason. "Hey, listen. I'm a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I'm sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I'm not protesting and you can't kick me out."

"You'll either go or we'll arrest you," [the officer] threatened.

"Well, you'll just have to arrest me," I said, wondering what strange land I was now living in.

JUNE 29, 2006
THE MARKET AND THE MARKS Vegas leaves a weird taste in your mouth, like serving up congealed Velveeta and calling it brie. Both suck and there's little point in trying to pass off either as the other. Vegas is like mainlining America in a hot dose, all its exhaustively constructed and marketed promise, all its delusional hopefulness, concentrated into dense rock of dream-crack, all its half-baked pseudo-culture — Rita Rudner was the town's "comedian of the year"; even when Rita Rudner was funny, she wasn't fucking funny — and unrelenting self-congratulation over it, like the boisterous salesman at a party who mirthfully gads on about how all the world revolves around sales.

Past every facade, of course, dwells actual life, and we met the best of it, as we always do, the losers, ne'erdowells and psychos at the Double Down, the magnanimous Tommy Rocker, Dave's hot cousin. Them aside, as I drove the drunk fucks out of there in the middle of the night, trying to put a dent in our 10 hours to San Jose, a notion struck me: the only way to properly see Vegas is in your rearview mirror, burning like Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, lighting up the horizon like dawn. Then, on an achingly dry, womb-dark tract of I-15 between Baker and Primm that we drove too many times on the trip, I kept thinking about a story a friend had told me about driving that stretch:

A guy on his way to Vegas, toting all his shit in a U-Haul trailer, had hit one of those gusts that bottle up in the canyons and explode off the salt flats. It twisted the trailer around like a box kite, pulling his car over in the churn. The U-Haul's gate popped open. The guy, probably moving to the great advertised Promise that is Vegas, maybe planning in that city of dreams the proverbial "new start" insipid movies tell us is our birthright, climbed out to see everything he owned strewn out over the highway and adjacent ditches and median. People began stopping. As they did, they picked up the guy's stuff, the stuff they wanted, then got back into their cars and drove off with it. They hit Vegas early, the guy's U-Haul paying off instead of the nickel slots, tiny stupid little dreams of a PlayStation, or maybe a Kit-Kat Klock or some dumbass antique lamp, of shit they didn't earn, abruptly fulfilled. As traffic de-coagulated and began moving and my friend actually got up to the accident scene, he saw the guy sitting there on the side of the road, by his wrecked car, his U-Haul emptied.

The story still horrifies me. I don't know anybody who would do that, and I can't imagine that many, all in that single time and space, who could. But the thing that really bugs me about it, I think, is that it aggregates the worst we bring to this fragile notion of society, and delegitimizes it. It is a grand metaphor of the "democracy of The Market," that magic ethereal tenet of bullshit that those who now run our country consider some kind of sacrosanct, God-bestowed elixir. Those people on the highway, the stuff of the elixir, "voted with their feet," after all, and their gas-pedals. They ravaged the weak because Act of God had rendered him so, and if God let such things be, who were they to stop and think and argue otherwise, or even to defend that man. What is "society" to somehow refute their right to that shit?

This crystallizes the culture's peculiar sense of entitlement, our impending hitting of the lottery, the stuff we overpay for, the "lifestyle" we go into debt to afford, because we just have to have it, even at the expense of the staples and dignity of even one downtrodden life. This is also the guiding dogma of our ruling class, its massive daily audiovisual barrage to encourage just such stupid, utterly nihilistic behavior, and bleating Limbaughesque mantra that it is somehow moral, all to a specific end: that is, if we accept our ravenous accumulation of crap, and obsessing over more, as a natural, moral state of be, we will accept the systematized and much more damaging aberrant behavior of our business class. Buy into our right and obligation to "get ours," we can't begrudge someone for getting theirs millions of times over, freeing us all from the onerous responsibility of who we leave in the wake. It's like a smoker not only trying to get someone else to smoke, but insinuating that, if I do it, it not only won't kill you, it'll cure cancer.

For those of us who've shaken off the programming — and yeah, most of us degenerate apostates were once so programmed — we understood this as the singular mindset and, more importantly, motive of our beknighted Christian leadership. When they made their perfidious case for war, we warned that you can't trust such people, because their motives de facto nullified their shoddily constructed marketing campaign of moral indignation. Freed of oversight, freed of scrutiny, "society" rendered inert by righteous, persistent cries of "9/11" — which continue today unabated — the party in power and their bankrollers set one another loose like Vikings on an undefended village, or like northbound travelers on I-15 on that guy's U-Haul.

Even if you just write this off as a liberal interpretation, the evidence stacking up amid even docile, cursory news reporting continues an ominous wave. Witness the still-missing $21 billion that flew over to Iraq ostensibly to rebuild it and simply disappeared, either into Republican slush-funds or the pockets of contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater, already found to have been defrauding the government, but continuing their work unimpeded, without even a slap on the wrist (which would be a Market impediment). Turns out the procedural pigfuck of Bush's cynical policy of "signing statements" — in which he scribbles caveats on whether or how a law will be enforced or not — so conveniently glossed over by mainstream media, had the conspicuous effect of defraying any accountability. According to reporter Dave Lindorff, in fact, when the issue of the missing dough first cropped up in 2004, Congress's effort to address the problem went directly contradicted by a presidential signing statement "saying that the new inspector general would have no authority to investigate any contracts or corruption issues involving the Pentagon." Lindorff elaborates:

You might think that the inspector general himself would have complained about such a restriction on his authority to do the job that Congress had intended, but Bush took care of that. In his role as Chief Executive, he appointed [Stuart] Bowen to the post, a man who has a long history of working as a loyal manservant to the president. Bowen was a deputy general counsel for Governor Bush (meaning he was an assistant to the ever solicitous solicitor Alberto Gonzales). He did yeoman service to Bush as a member of the term that handled the famous vote count atrocity in Florida in the November 2000 election, making sure every vote wasn't counted, and then worked under Gonzales again in the White House during Bush's first term [when Gonzales concocted his famous mitigation of torture as policy, calling Geneva Protocols that deemed such practice a war-crime "quaint"—MG] . . .

Bowen simply never mentioned to anyone that, courtesy of a secretive and unconstitutional order from the president, he was not doing the job that Congress had intended.

. . . When Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon, was asked in 2005 during a congressional hearing by Christopher Shays (R-CT), chair of the House government reform subcommittee, why the Pentagon had no audit team in Iraq to look for fraud, the facile Gimble replied that such a team was "not needed" because Congress had set up the special inspector general unit to do that. He conveniently didn't mention that the president had barred the special inspector general from investigating Pentagon scandals.

That's TWENTY-ONE BILLION DOLLARS never to be accounted for — what's YOUR state's budget shortfall, where does your city need money it'll never get, in its schools, in downtown infrastructure, in its evaporating small business community? How are your levees holding up?

When the open-ended boondoggle of the war sapped the vital resources and manpower that might've at least muted the disastrous aftermath of Katrina, the administration used the opportunity to abrogate all applicable labor law in the region, to pay reconstruction workers sub-minimum wage and house them in squalid shantytowns (let The Market fix it). Little wonder, if that is the "official" behavior, that the GAO has found grift running rampant around the Gulf Coast. Enterprising Americans have put in play, as the Times reports, "one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion." Among these, a hotel owner in Sugar Land, TX, who invoiced the government for reimbursement for $232,000 worth of lodging for hurricane victims who never stayed there, and the $1 billion sweetheart contract to a well-connected mobile home manufacturer, whose wares the government has purchased but have yet to house a single victim or worker. Hardly Christian behavior, but indicative, to be sure, of The Market operating freely and unregulated.

Obsessive defenders of The Market, and the dutiful agent of the pharmaceutical industry, the Bush administration has secretly conspired to abrogate even the relief measures it allowed to the swelling millions of AIDS victims the world over. The US in 2001 joined 142 countries in signing onto a WTO agreement that allowed poor countries wracked by the pandemic to produce or buy generic versions of AIDS-stemming drugs. But now, according to Doug Ireland, "the Bush administration is morbidly blackmailing poor countries into giving up their rights to make cheap AIDS meds . . . they want the benefits of so-called Free Trade Agreements with the U.S. Either the poor countries refuse to knuckle under and scuttle these bi-lateral and regional trade deals with Washington -- which are worth billions of dollars -- or they accept these deals and raise the price of AIDS meds beyond the reach of the poor. "

The administration's institutional extortion, Ireland reports,

has already resulted in many countries giving up their rights to break the Big Pharma AIDS drug monopoly in these secretly-negotiated deals, including six countries in Latin America. And tough negotiations are now under way with a raft of poor countries hard hit by AIDS, from Thailand to five southern African countries, including South Africa and Botswana. If Thailand signs the trade agreement the U.S. has proposed, “Those who require the essential drugs but cannot afford them, they will have to die,” says Dr. Suwit Wibulpolpraset, [a] Thai Public Health Ministry official . . .

The question, anymore, is not how the Hobbesian, Bond-villainish lords of the administration live with themselves — fuck them, if the Hell they cow us with actually existed, they're on the VIP list for the Hitler Memorial Champagne Room — it is how ostensibly moral people, people who wear their morality like armbands, continue to support them and say, "Yeah, that represents us, that's what we're all about." The Market, sacrosanct as their dogma might tell them it is, has nothing to do with consigning people to death and homelessness to make some rich asshole richer, or siphoning public funds to pimp business out to your golf buddies, contract money that might simply disappear and if it does, fuck you, traitor, for asking about it.

No, people do that, because people make, guide, arbitrate and trade on the (small-M) market. Trading stuff in a market economy isn't necessarily bad, but the anthropomorphicization of it as The Market, like some benign god, not only seems to obviate common sense — it kills. And because it has been deified, the actual people responsible get away with murder.

Sorry, Chicago School, turns out you're wrong, proven incontrovertably by the yawning scape of corruption, malfeasance, lies and chicanery that now engulfs our public sphere. You got what you wanted, got the dogs loosed, and they came out and went right after the balls of your neighbors. The Market, let be, cannot function purely, independently, unimpeded, because its greatest champions inevitably abuse it, because they are avaricious pricks, which is why they chose that path, and the convenient, rationalized neo-classical dogma that goes along with it, in the first place. These are the people who waltz interchangeably from government to business, business to government, and they haven't bought their own groceries or gassed up their own car for decades, if ever. They're the ones telling you not to worry about your big stupid fucking SUV, that it makes you a real American Cowboy, and not to fret over the ongoing energy shock and its inextricable links to the looming climate change. In spite of the overwhelming 67-85% of Americans who believe in and genuinely fear the ramifications global warming (depending on what poll you use), they're the ones who can afford to air national advertising telling the rest of us we're wrong, that the overwhelming consensus of science is just a big fundraising scheme — because they can't perceive of a world without a dollar sign on everything — and can afford to convince your representatives to ignore your concerns.

Such is the price, one must assume, of enabling the "pure democracy" of The Market. Weren't Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Jeff Skilling, Duke Cunningham, jackals buying and selling the public "good," just deft practitioners of the truest essence of human parlance, after all? The public welfare is for sale as everything is, even if it does not remotely bolster the welfare of the public. The Supreme Court last week told Vermont it was unconstitutional to place limits on political contributions — such being, in the court's Dickenso-Fieldian interpretation, a limit on free speech — meaning those with more money, human or incorporated, can buy a greater voice, like the voice the drug industry bought in the administration's AIDS medicine blackmail scheme. Money = speech, slapping price-tags on the most sacred right of our constitution, so if you have less, well, your needs will be weighed by your representatives against, say, that of Procter & Gamble or McDonald's or ExxonMobil or Pepsi or Cargill. So, de facto, unless you hit that goddamn scratch ticket tomorrow, you have become a second-class citizen.

The Market, if not the market, has dictated your value. God help you if your U-Haul turns over.

"This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us." —Rorschach, Alan Moore's Watchmen

HITLER OR COULTER? Can you tell them apart? Take the quiz here.

JUNE 6, 2006
Hey, we go away for a month and there's an "attack on marriage," this so quickly on the heels of the "war on Christmas." It is an unrelenting blitzkreig, we are now told, against the most fundamental atomic structure of our society, the family. Which is funny, cause I've been driving all the fuck around this great land trying, if vainly, to pursue my happiness, and it seemed to me that the root of the country's problems lies in three-fucking-dollar-per-gallon gas-rape sending ripple effects throughout an already beshitted, de-unionized, table-service-at-Applebee's economy, those effects just extended ripples of a foreign policy roughly based on Al Pacino-as-Scarface that's killed hundreds of thousands, pissed off billions, and skillfully fluffed and guided a handful of engorged, institutionally diseased (and convicted of as much many times over) corporate phalli into the already bleeding recta of the American citizenry.

Yeah, guys, the queers are the real problem. Or, failing that, elves.

That's like walking up to people on the street in broad daylight, kicking them in the crotch, standing there as they shake it off and get ready to make you kiss your own ass from the inside, then you point at an orphan and say, "She did it." The saddest shit is, half of us see your flag lapel-pin, believe you and kick the fuck out of the orphan. Fucking orphans.

Nice try, anyway, Rove. I've seen Republican family values, mostly in pictures of the hollow-skulled family slaughtered by tweaked out Marines in Haditha. Guess it'd be too much to ask for your talking points that those were all those few, proud young men were all raised by two daddies, right?

MAR 22, 2006
ACHTUNG, HOMELAND SECURITY! LIBRARIANS NOW 'TERRORISTS' Bill Stafford from Dallas sent this over, a call for impeachment of the president of the United States by the Progressive Librarians Guild. As Bill said, "You gotta be a major fuckup to piss off librarians."

Resolution Condemning the Actions of President George W. Bush and Calling for Impeachment Proceedings

WHEREAS, democracy is a core value that defines, informs, and guides our professional practice;

WHEREAS, the American Library Association affirms the responsibility of the political leaders of the United States to protect and preserve the freedoms that are the foundation of our democracy (ALA Resolution on the USA Patriot Act and Related Measures that Infringe on the Rights of Public Library Users); and

WHEREAS, the actions of the current President, George W. Bush, have violated that responsibility in unprecedented ways and threaten the very foundations of a democratic government; those actions, arguably involving the commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” are as follows:

Entering into an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, based upon fabricated and erroneous information;

Crafting of policies adopted since September 11, 2001, including provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56) and PATRIOT ACT II and related executive orders, regulations and actions, which threaten fundamental rights and liberties by:
a) expanding the authority of federal agents to conduct so-called “sneak and peek” or “black bag” searches, in which the subject of the search warrant is unaware that his property has been searched, thereby increasing the likelihood that the activities of library users, including their use of computers to browse the Web or access e-mail, may be under government surveillance without their knowledge or consent;
b) granting law enforcement and intelligence agencies broad access to personal medical, financial, library and education records with little if any judicial oversight;
c) permitting the FBI to conduct surveillance of religious services, internet chat rooms, political demonstrations, and other public meetings of any kind without having any evidence that a crime has been or may be committed;
d) diminishing personal privacy by removing important checks on government surveillance authority; e) reducing the accountability of government to the public by increasing government secrecy;
f) granting expansive new immigration powers to the Attorney General which are subject to abuse, particularly with regard to immigrants from Arab, Muslim and South Asian countries; and
g) expanding the definition of “terrorism” in a manner that threatens the constitutionally protected rights of Americans.

Approval of the use of torture (including practices such as hooding, shackling, drugging, sleep deprivation, etc.) in the interrogation of suspected terrorists or their suspected accomplices in his “war on terror.”

Illegal detainment of so called “enemy combatants” and others who are jailed on the merest suspicion, refusing them legal counsel and either holding them indefinitely or secretly deporting them.

Authorization of warrantless electronic surveillance of people within the United States, including U.S. citizens, by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Promoting policies that erode the division of Church and State.

Openly asserting executive power in attempts to override the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Congress, and the U.S. Judicial system, thus ignoring the system of checks and balances fundamental to democratic government.

WHEREAS, librarians are among the preeminent defenders of intellectual freedom and government openness in the US; and

WHEREAS, intellectual freedom, our primary value as librarians, is seriously violated by the current political climate which allows for suppression, attack and even criminalization of dissent; and

WHEREAS, the Library Bill of Rights states that libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas; and

WHEREAS, the broad social responsibilities of the American Library Association are, in part, defined in terms of the contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society, and the willingness of the ALA to take a position on current critical issues with the relationship to libraries and library service set forth in the position statement (ALA Policy Manual, 1.1); therefore it is

RESOLVED, that the Progressive Librarians Guild join with others demanding that President George W. Bush, as the head of the administration that is leading the U.S. in its current political direction, be presented with articles of impeachment as stipulated by the Constitution with a view to removing him from office; and, be it further

RESOLVED, that PLG calls on its members and all others in the library community to urge their elected representatives to support HR635 of the 109th Congress calling for an investigation into possible impeachment proceedings; and be it finally

RESOLVED, that this resolution be forwarded to the President of the United States, to the Attorney General of the United States, to Members of both Houses of Congress, to the library community, and to others as appropriate.

Approved by the Coordinating Committee of the Progressive Librarians Guild
March 15, 2006

Progressive Librarians Guild
c/o Rider University Library
2083 Lawrenceville Road
Lawrenceville NJ 08648

Other notables calling for Bush's impeachment:
City of San Francsico, CA
City of Santa Cruz, CA
City of Arcata, CA
City of Newfane, VT
City of Marlboro,VT
City of Putney, VT
City of Dummerston, VT
City of Brookfield, VT
Paul Craig Roberts, Hoover Institute economist, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Reagan
Democratic Party of Ann Arbor, MI, proposal that resolution be adopted by the city
Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader
Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark
Rhode Island senatorial candidate Carl Sheeler
Bruce Springsteen
Veterans for Peace
Congressman John Lewis, GA

NOW YOUR TURN Congressman John Conyers of Michigan has introduced House Resolution 635 to "investigate the president for impeachable offenses." Sponsoring the bill are Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). You can lend your voice to the movement with but a couple clicks, starting with Conyers' petition drive, here.

MAR 15, 2006
OPENING SHOUT "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." — Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, to Maryland state senator Nancy Jacobs, Mar. 1, Annapolis, MD

WHY FEINGOLD IS THE CANDIDATE: DEM LEADERSHIP PUSSIES OUT: In 1971, the Church Committee, unearthing the U.S. intelligence apparatus' bloody legacy of murder, misappropriated funds, drug experimentation on civilians and the military, assassination plots, coups d'etat and countless incidences of subverting democratic institutions at home and abroad, received this testimony from CIA director Richard Helms: "The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we too are honorable men, devoted to her service." Hearing transcripts don't indicate if anyone in the chamber broke down in seizures of gut-laughs.

Helms' timeless comedy kept running through my head this week, as Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold continued to emerge from the pack of his rudderless party. Its "leaders" declared a collective AHEM/COUGH/UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE in response to Feingold's proposal to censure the most censurable president in modern times. Feingold is understandably pissed after offering legislation to rebuke Bush for his patently unconstitutional and precipitous domestic spying imperative and seeing it greeted by resounding hems and haws from his own, ostensibly "opposition" party. Clinton, Kerry, Lieberman, Dodd, Biden, et al., would apparently require "due dilligence" before signing on to a joint declaration that the sky is fucking blue.

Exactly one senator, hearteningly (for us) Iowa's own Tom Harkin, was able to muster the balls apparently required to state the obvious: "The president broke the law and he needs to be held accountable."

This begs the question as to what, exactly, Bush needs to do stir opposition consensus. Eat a live baby? Nuke some random Christian country for no good reason? The president has been quoted as saying the U.S. constitution is just "a goddamn piece of paper"; perhaps he could pull out the orginal document on the South Lawn and publicly jerk off into it like a stray Kleenex. Oh, right, he's been doing that figuratively for a while now, which is the goddamn point.

Quick reminder: A free republic, in theory, enacts protections against domestic surveillance, seizure and unwarranted invasion of privacy so that sundry police apparati cannot be over-empowered and used to persecute people for things that usually go along with concept of freedom, like what they say, who they hang out with and stuff they read and think. If, for example (and God willing), we could somehow forward a popular perception of American fundamentalists as a pitiable, fear-based tribalized cult, aforementioned protections would shield even them from being unduly hounded, audited and prosecuted simply for their stupid beliefs.

Unfortunately, however, the administration is currently circumventing the law to target people for more lateral and enlightened beliefs — NOT, as the administration posits, an amorphous Other it calls "the terrorists." In fact, by proscribing the law and all those pesky warrants it said it doesn't need, Bush & Co. can very simply avoid qualifying who it deems to be terrorists, since, as the alarmists among us fear, that includes people who aren't terrorists.

And as with EVERYTHING pertaining to this administration, our fears are abject reality. To wit, at a guest lecture on the University of Texas School of Law on Wednesday, FBI agent G. Charles Rasner ran down a list of Austin groups on the bureau's "terrorist watch" list. They included citizen-journalist network Indymedia, Food Not Bombs (volunteer organization that recovers vegetarian food that would otherwise be thrown out and serves free meals to the poor), and the no-doubt voluminous, ahem, Communist Party of Texas. Rasner qualified that peaceful-sounding group names could cover more violent extremist tactics, and suggested that the FBI routinely monitored the groups by infiltrating agents.

Meanwhile the ACLU has released documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, showing how your Homeland Security tax money's being spent in Pennsylvania while your gramma goes hungry. One FBI memo (which you can see by clicking here) detailing the bureau's monitoring of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice in Pittsburgh, documented devious sociopathic behavior on the group's part, such as leafleting: "One female leaflet distributor, who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, inquired if [the photographer] was an FBI agent. No other TMC participants appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent." Another memo, curiously headlined "International Terrorism Matters," offered the gravitas-laden intel that the Merton Center advertised local and national anti-war demonstrations on its website. Again, worth re-emphasizing here, you paid some jagoff to look at a website that stated the obvious.

No, Democratic "leaders," you're right, all is swell and dandy, and NSA cocks are reading this shit at the same time you are, just making sure that the extra fifty bucks a month I make after rent, gas, cable, food and beer doesn't wing off to buy some Shiite an AK. Feingold and Harkin, they're just wiggy alarmists like me and Indymedia, the "alarmists" who've been DEAD NUTS RIGHT for five fucking years while you sat and spun.

Feingold 08. Bitches.

FEB 15, 2006
PSEUDO-CONS, STAND DOWN Molly Ivins last month filed this righteous column, in re the abject failure of the "Royal" Democrats of the Clinton/Biden/Kerry/Lieberman nexus to pose an actual, vital counterpoint to the baboons currently running the country. This should be considered mandatory reading for anyone who considers themselves in the billowing "oposition" in this country, and remembered when it comes time to choose among the aforementioned sell-outs and the few, last, best vestiges of Roosevelt Democracy. You want to be part of the solution these days, bitches, time to recognize you colluded in the fucking problem.

Feingold 08.

ONE MORE LIE FOR GOOD MEASURE - 'THE ECONOMY IS STRONG' Our favorite conservative Paul Craig Roberts again pops a cap in the ass of socio-economic conventional wisdom over at Counterpunch. Read it and weep, if you've got the energy once you get home from that second job.

FEB 12, 2006
WE'RE OPENING FOR STANHOPE CHICAGOLAND folks, reserve THURSDAY, APRIL 13 at the EMPTY BOTTLE, where MG and Red Smear will warm up the room for Doug Stanhope, the darkest, funniest fuck in comedy. Then we're hauling his zombified husk back to THE MILL in IOWA CITY for a special pre-Easter degenerate fest on SATURDAY, APRIL 15. WE'RE NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP. CALL BABYSITTERS NOW (BOBBY G). We're still trying to work a co-bill for Apr. 14, so stay tuned.

FREE MUSIC: For previews of our (finally) upcoming record, Dawn's Early Apocalypse, check out the Smear's new Myspace site by clicking here.

SPARKS IN THE DARKNESS In ominous times like these, when you can expect little but meanness and stupidity from the private and public institutions that influence our lives, moments of pure joy occur infrequently. This is why I drink, a lot. It's also why a couple media bytes have me actually giving a shit about living for another year, the cinematization of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's epic comic book series V for Vendetta, due next month from Warners and the Wachowski Brothers, and word that Matt Groening and his crew this summer start work on a series of no less than FOUR direct-to-DVD Futurama movies.

Futurama, the greatest TV show in the history of the Planet Earth -- that or Farscape, depending on what mood I'm in -- will begin initial voice recording this summer, which, best as I recall from their production cycle, means the first movie by around summer 2007. If you're not down with Bender yet, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block airs the show's first four season Sunday through Thursday nights.

V, a noir "alternate future" tale of fascist Britain, is a stunning undertaking in these times, sure to be castigated for its "glorification of terrorism" by "family media" watchdogs who fear all ideas other than that Jesus Loves Us Except for the Majority of Us. The story is set in society that has traded its most basic freedoms for "security," patriotic fervor and utter homogeneity of religion and thought, and, as with Clooney's brilliant Good Night and Good Luck, the subtle parallels to our nation's current national security state, and its adherents' cavalier eschewal of constitutional law and pressing for ever more unchecked power, should not be lost.

Might seem hyperbolic, unless you're paying attention. In spite of adminstraton toady Alberto Gonzalez' smirking defiance of congressional investigation, voluminous evidence already exists of a growing administration "enemies list," of spying and subertfuge beyond any relevance to "terrorism," of watchlists full of members of environmental groups, anti-corporate activists and even church-based antiwar groups, and infiltration of agents provocateur into their midst. Gonzalez' flaunting of "executive privilege" on these issues, and the GOP majority's absolute cession of their own oversight responsibilities, further provides portents of unchecked power. And Gonzelez's unceasing citation of "wartime" as giving the executive license to do anything the fuck it wants becomes particularly odious when one understands that the administration and shadowy think-tank theoriticians posit this "war" on terror as an open-ended, thus unWINable, process.

It's worth reiterating, you can no more wage an actual, material "war" on terror than you can wage a war on the weather. The blind acceptance of this gossamer film of verbal shit, by neo-con Republicans and pseudo-con Democrats alike, essentially allows "emergency" powers in perpetuity, leaving the door ajar to legalize anything erstwhile-illegal as long as officious crackpots with national microphones cry "national security." Upon the recent death of Coretta Scott King, it's worth the reminder that the exact same rationale was used to bug unimpeachable American heroes like her husband, foist infiltrators into his civil rights and later peace movement and prompted the FBI-penned blackmail letter suggesting to King that he kill himself. It's worth reiterating that THAT was some oversightless patriotic schmuck's idea of national security, too.

Don't spend a second thought on whether or not the Kings would be under surveillance today. Don't kid yourself he wouldn't be flagged on "random search" lists at the airport -- as is my girlfriend's brother, who runs a FIRESTONE -- and slandered routinely as "un-American" on Fox News and labeled a traitor by Ann Coulter.

Remember what Nixon said, "If the president does it, it's not illegal." Sounding awfully familiar these days, but they're anything but the watchwords of a democratic republic.

Little wonder, in these environs, that the most widely heard dissent amid our vast spectrum of ostensible "news" media comes from Green Day and Eminem records, nor that the brightest lights on the horizon are movies and cartoons. Anything, like booze, to help lighten the godawful load of days like these.

For more Smearage, check out our next Weekly Smear archive.