Quote of the day: Tom Ricks on Fox News

I think Fox may be the most destructive force in American society nowadays, basically pouring poison into the stream of our political discourse.

- Tom Ricks, "Fox News Scoop!"

As this blog has been discussing for years, the function of the media is not to inform, but to deform reality for the benefit of the ruling class.  In this context, the nature of the news is by definition propaganda and its value, just as Pravda was during the years of the Soviet Union, is to leave the audience with a specific perspective that benefits the powerful.  In the USSR it was the communist party; in the USA it is the broad swath of business interests, including the military-industrial-surveillance complex, big-pharma, big-agri, the financial industry, the energy/chemicals sector, and Health care/insurance industry.  Fox News serves the interests of these people and is, as Ricks points out, a source of outright fraud that contaminates civil discourse with purposefully designed falsehoods and innuendo that plays into the biases and bigotry of their audience.

I found it interesting when Dick Cheney was vice-president, that he wanted the television in his hotel suites preset to Fox news.  Did that mean that he wanted to know what the minions were watching and thus assess the adequacy of his disinformation machine personally?  Or did it mean that Cheney was uninterested in hearing other perspectives of news, other than the one he and his cohorts had created?  Fox News represents the convoluted intersection of corporatism and government sponsored deceit.  This disinformation channel, because it wasn't interested in news but in pushing perspective, became a juggernaut in the decade of the zeroes. The conventional framework of left and right politics has broken down.  As a result, no longer is the prevalent conflict between liberals and conservatives.  Instead, the struggle for America has become a battle between an inverted form of totalitarianism, defined by corporatism, and the free flow of information espoused by those interested in democracy.

There are those who feel that if a person is given sufficient and credible information, they will invariably choose the most rational argument.  The fact that religion, debunked political ideologies, and failed economic models persist amongst the majority of Americans, suggests that this line of thinking is false.  Many people don't want to know the truth.  They want to be lied to and given ridiculous and fictitious narratives that make their lives tolerable.  The majority of the world want to exist under what Nietzsche described as a slave ethic.  A world where they are the constant victims, where forces external to themselves are always punishing them and depriving them of their just deserves.  In the minds of American conservatives, Fox News is their secular conduit to the outside world.  They can justify their ignorance and prejudices through presented falsehoods and manufactured realities, while all the time marching to the beat of their corporate masters.

Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. 

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%).  At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America.  The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

• advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
• repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
• pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
• massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
• using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
• the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
• failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
• pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
• the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
• allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
• promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
• promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
• advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
• denying climate change was occurring
• doubling the national public debt
• cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
• cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
• limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
• preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration.  Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term.  His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved.  He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level.  Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!"  He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels.  And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator.  With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations.  At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions.  The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations.  In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Sarah Palin, accomplice in mass murder!

Is this a reasonable graphic?  Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in an induced coma, didn't think so when asked about the above graphic issued by Palin, which implores Republican supporters to "reload" and keep pursuing their Democratic Party opponents.  In fact, the local Arizonan Republican candidate to oust Ms. Giffords did far more than Caribou Barbie.  He actually had a gun rally, where they said "Remove Gabrielle Giffords from office, shoot a fully automatic M-16." (ref. below)

Again, this type of inflammatory rhetoric isn't coming from fringe elements and outliers, this is coming from Party leaders, and no less than a former Vice-Presidential candidate of the USA herself.

If the above isn't sufficient to validate the depravity of these so-called Christians, consider what another Republican candidate and Tea party-backed congresswoman Michele Bachmann had to say on the subject:

Controversial Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said this weekend that she wants residents of her state "armed and dangerous" over President Barack Obama's plan to reduce global warming "because we need to fight back."

Whether these politicians believe what they are saying or are merely ginning up the facile minded dunces of the gun-totting "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" crowd is irrelevant to me.  They are inciting political violence to achieve political aims.  That and that alone is what the last decade has been all about: the war and struggle against violent extremism and terrorism!

Neither their words nor actions have been misconstrued by anyone to be merely metaphorical.   They themselves clearly defend their stance as a violent defense against Washingtonian corruption and capitulation to liberalism.  The only question left, is when is the Department of Justice going to start applying the laws uniformly and start sending Republicans to enjoy the warm sunshine and if Dick Cheney can be believed, excellent health care, in Guantanamo, Cuba?

Dubya is Threatened with Arrest if He Visits London, UK!

From Scott Horton's blog over at Harper's comes this exquisite piece of news, from the city of London's conservative Mayor.  I usually do not repost entire posts of others, but this succinct and insightful post is too valuable to not be shared in its totality. Bold print has been added by me.

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be prepared for a long stay. In fact, you may “never see Texas again.” As he sees it, Bush’s book and statements he has made in efforts to market it constitute admissions of serious crimes.

Initial reports about Bush’s autobiography did not go over well in Europe, and Britain’s new Conservative government was particularly eager to push back against suggestions that their conservatism had any resemblance to the Bush variety. Bush insisted this his decision to use waterboarding and other torture techniques kept Britain safe. But British Conservatives are having none of it:

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”.

As Johnson sees it, the torture debate is ultimately about America’s claim to leadership in the world and the Bush team’s sullying of the nation’s reputation:

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

***

I have been saying this for years.  In yesterday's blog on Republican corruption, I stated that it is only a matter of time before someone in the Bush junta is ensnared and eventually prosecuted for international legal problems arising from their years of legal misconduct.  Whilst America's media glosses over the fact that both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have admitted to ordering torture, people around the world are looking carefully at the decider's words and movement and evaluating the possibility of bringing him or his henchmen in front of a magistrate to explain themselves in court.

What we have also seen is that Mr. Obama has made substantial efforts to collude with the former administration in shielding and protecting them from domestic and international prosecutions.  Andrew Sulivan states in his blog that the most recent WikiLeaks information dump, "reveal an extraordinary effort by the US embassy and the Bush and Obama administrations to cajole, pressure, redirect and try to rig legal cases that could reveal the war crimes of the previous administration."  Both administrations are bound by the pirate's ethic of evading responsibility and accountability for any action they or their Jolly-Roger-like counterparts may engage in.  The Obama administration is now culpable in the crimes of his predecessors, and needs to explain their actions, at the very least, to the voters who demanded change that they could believe in.

Republican Corruption Tales...

In the past two weeks, two particular incidents have occurred that crystallizes the level of corruption and nepotism within the ranks of America's conservative party and big business interests.

The first involves the man who came to represent Republican corruption across America during the 2006 election; former Texas congressman and majority house leader Tom Delay. In 2005, Delay known on the Hill as "the hammer" for his harsh lobbying and legislative practices, was indicated for money-laundering and evading Texas anti-corruption laws. Two weeks ago, a jury in Austin, Texas, after 19-hours of deliberations found him guilty.

The NY Times reports on the case:

The verdict ends the latest chapter in a long legal battle that forced Mr. DeLay to step down. The trial also opened a window on the world of campaign financing, as jurors heard testimony about large contributions flowing to Mr. DeLay from corporations seeking to influence him, and about junkets to luxury resorts where the congressman would rub shoulders with lobbyists in return for donations.

Delay was initially charged for violating Texas campaign finance laws, but prosecutors realizing it would be impossible to convict him under these terms decided to prosecute him under a 1903 law, in which Texas prohibited corporations from giving money to candidates directly or indirectly. The details surrounding Mr. Delay participating in a transfer of money from private donors to his PAC to Texas candidates have never been in question.  What the jury determined though is that Delay actively engaged in flouting state laws to subvert democracy and manipulate state elections in favor of Republican candidates.

***

The second case involves another No.2 man amongst the conservative machine.  Charges of international corruption have been made against the man most responsible for the invasion of Iraq, the institution of torture as American foreign policy, and extending a regulatory framework that led to the greatest economic collapse in American history since the Great Depression; former Vice President Richard "go fuck yourself" Cheney!

Prior to becoming Dubya's VP, Cheney was Chairman of the Texas based energy services company Haliburton.  According to reports in the press, Cheney will be "indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal."  The charges stem from the systemic bribery amongst Nigerian custom officials on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell Plc., one of the world's largest oil and gas company's.  The charges have furthermore, lead Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for him.

The likelihood of Dick Cheney being extradited to Nigeria or a foreign court is zero.  However, the fact remains that the world of tomorrow will be a very different place than it currently is and all the imperial might will not protect all of the members of the Bush junta into perpetuity for the domestic and international crimes they have committed.  Just as Henry Kissinger is unable to visit numerous countries for his involvement in multiple cases of state terrorism and criminality, so will these people be forced to limit their visits to states who have an independent judiciary that does not take matters such as, crimes against humanity lightly.

Quote of the Day: Tom Ricks on 9-11

Tom Ricks is an author and a Pulitzer award winning journalist who has covered the Pentagon and military affairs for the WSJ and the Washington Post.  In his Foreign Policy blog he succinctly summarizes the whole post-9/11 and Iraq debacle in one paragraph:

I've long thought that this country was knocked off balance by 9/11, and that instead of steadying us, as leaders should, President Bush and Vice President Cheney led the panic, and so intensified and lengthened the period of disequilibrium. The Iraq war was one result -- and also a cause -- of the length of this period, because the hundreds of billions of unnecessary spending led to a huge borrowing splurge by the federal government. Essentially China paid for the war, and our children and grandchildren are on the hook to pay it back.

Maybe the sheeple will remember that it was was their own intellectual laziness and dismal understanding of world affairs and economics that led to the election of a president who previously had never left the country, and permitted that same president to pursue two Middle eastern wars while cutting taxes; the latter a first in the history of the republic.  This morasses is as much the fault of the belligerents and corporate toadies in the White House and US congress, as it is the idiotic and feeble minded dolts who consistently failed to ask the right questions and hold those in power in check.  These red-baiting dunces, who decades ago were shrieking of the terror of global communism, have handed the butchers of Tiananmen Square and the communist hierarchy in Beijing the financial and political leverage that forty years of cold-war posturing could not accomplish.

Quote of the Day: Sullivan on Obama

Andrew Sullivan is one of the few persons who has constantly and unequivocally condemned Republicans and Democrats, under the Bush junta and the Obama administration, of condoning and actively participating in the torture and murder of war on terrorism detainees.  In a blog entry that addresses the Machiavellian undercurrent to American politics, he condemns Mr. Obama for his recent cowardliness in preventing those who have been wrongly "extraordinary renditioned" and tortured by American forces to seek redress in court.

Aggressively trying to prevent torture victims from having their day in court merely using unclassified evidence is active complicity in the war crimes of the past. And such complicity is itself a war crime. Either we live under the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions, or we don't. And when Obama says we don't - as he unmistakably is - the precedent he is setting all but ensures that torture will come again, that there will never be consequences for it, and that the national security state can cloak itself in such a way that the citizenry has no way of penetrating its power. Bush and Cheney remain the real culprits here; but watching Obama essentially surrendering to their trap is a betrayal of a core rationale for his candidacy.

Nader Interviews Judge Andrew Napolitano

I encourage everyone to watch and understand the vast scope of criticisms leveled by conservative legal authority Judge Andrew Napolitano.  Despite his affiliation with Fox News and the less than lucid histrionics of his comrades at Fox, the above interview with Ralph Nader -conducted for CSPAN- consolidated the fact that there are issues that are beyond the false media symmetries of right and left or conservative and liberal.

The interview outlines a vast scope of criminality, violations of the constitution, and historically unprecedented actions committed by the Bush White House against American citizens and in many cases perpetuated by the Obama White House.

Napolitano declares that:

1. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be indicted and prosecuted for torture, domestic spying, and the illegal arrest and confinement of both American citizens and non-American citizens.
2. Questions the legality and morality of the Obama Administration's use of extra-judicial killing of American citizens while outside American territory.
3. Discusses the failure of persons within the Bush WH, such as Jay Bybee, to provide sound legal advice relating to the use of torture.
4. Asks where is this generation's Thurgood Marshall, the venerated Supreme Court Justice who attacked Jim Crow laws as a civil rights litigator.  Despite there being more lawyers than ever in the history of the USA, there remains very few entities (outside the ACLU, CCR, and human rights organizations) or persons willing to challenge the egregious criminality of the American president.

That Strange Concept Called Accountability!

Something remarkable happened last month that the press seems to have thoroughly overlooked here in the Americas.  The newly formed Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in Britain told the country that they were going to reform civil liberties that had been badly diminished under Labour and equally, hold the previous government accountable their years of participating in the kidnapping, rendition, and torture of persons across the globe.

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime-Minister, made a speech declaring that the coming changes would be the biggest shake-up in UK democracy since 1832.  He railed against a litany of previous Labour government policies that formed the basis of Britain's surveillance state:

• ID Card schemes
• national identity registers
• biometric passports
• the storing of Internet and email records
• DNA databases
• proliferating security cameras
• repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights

Mr. Clegg's party before the election didn't mince words.  The Liberal-Democrats stated in their party platform that, "The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties."  He further inveighed against the current criminal justice system which imprisons too many citizens without improving public safety, and "pledged radical reform to empower citizens" over entrenched and wealthy interests.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, announced that an independent judge will investigate whether the British government was complicit in the torture of terror suspects.  The Guardian summarizes:

The judicial inquiry announced by the foreign secretary into Britain's role in torture and rendition since September 2001 is poised to shed extraordinary light on one of the darkest episodes in the country's recent history.

It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11, but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities. . . . Those who have been most bitterly resisting an inquiry -- including a number of senior figures in the last government -- may have been dismayed to see the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed, as this maximised the chances of a judicial inquiry being established.

Glenn Greenwald describes the mindset of Barack Obama, who claimed during the 2008 election that it was his desire to hold the Bush junta to account for their crimes.  To date the Obama administration has held none of the fiends who lied and took America to war on bogus premises, engaged in wholesale torture across the globe, and violated the Geneva conventions.  George W. Bush has already admitted that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA's use of torture.  Earlier this month, he further admitted that "Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded by the US, and said he would do it again 'to save lives'." This is consistent with Dick Cheney's bold statement to the world, back in February,where he announced that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding."

Andrew Sullivan and Scott Horton have both said that president Obama and his AG are now obligated to prosecute both Messrs Bush and Cheney.

[T]he attorney general of the United States is legally obliged to prosecute someone who has openly admitted such a war crime or be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture. For Eric Holder to ignore this duty subjects him too to prosecution. If the US government fails to enforce the provision against torture, the UN or a foreign court can initiate an investigation and prosecution.... Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.

How far down the rabbit hole have we all gone, where the Conservatives of Britain are willing to hold their people to account, while the Obama administration gives the worst government in the history of the American republic another "get-out of jail" card and the press doesn't bother talking about any of it?

Why do you make them so stupid, God?

Every time I review a poll done assessing the average American's grasp of economics, public policy, or science I cringe. The latest is a doozy!

According to the a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey no less than 44% of Americans polled wish that Dubya was still in the White House managing affairs. As a quick recap, lets look at Mr. Bush's greatest accomplishments and legacy:

• Failed to prevent terrorists from attacking America on 11-Sept. 2001
• Invaded Afghanistan, but failed to capture and prosecute Bin Laden
• Assisted members of the Bin Laden family and assorted Saudi nationals to leave America eight days after 9-11
• Illegally invaded Iraq to the opposition of nearly the entire planet
• Mismanaged the entire Iraq War and let terrorism exponentially grow across the world
• Allowed nuclear weapons proliferation to rogue nations like North Korea and Iran
• Ignored New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck and let the city nearly be destroyed by his administration's incompetence and neglect
• Tried to scuttle and then block corporate crime prevention legislation, after the first wave of corporate criminality (i.e. Enron, WorldCom,...etc.)
• Produced virtually no jobs during his eight years in office, that is capped by two recessions
• Caused the greatest economic meltdown in the history of the world (in terms of absolute size) through his deregulatory and laissez-faire policies
• Increased the US National Debt by 86% (i.e. $4.9 Trillion)
• Eliminated the 800 year rule of habeas corpus in common law
• Instituted torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite imprisonment as common tools against enemies of the state and created concentration camps and CIA controlled "black-sites" for torturing/executing prisioners overseas
• Conducted a series of wide reaching and illegal searches of Americans personal email, phone calls, physical mail, purchasing habits, library and book borrowing habits, and monitored public speech
• Criminalized public protest of Republicans during his election convention in 2004
• Stole or rigged three elections (2000, 2002, and 2004) through well documented forms of fraud, voter intimidation, destruction of ballots, and suppression of Democratic voters
• Attempted to create a unitary Presidency in violation of the US Constitution
• Politicized every office and branch of the US government to serve his dogmatic Christianist and pro-business agendas.
• Denied man-made Climate Change was occurring for years, then when he said that it did exist, stated that there was nothing anyone could do about it.... etc.

What type of world are these people living in that they think George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld, Condollezza Rice, and rest of the criminal junta that ran America off the cliff and made it the most loathed nation in the world, should be allowed back into the White House?

Well, it is most likely the same world inhabited by Americans, who in another Pew survey, think that the world's leading economic power is China. An incomprehensible 44% of Americans polled thought that China, a country with an economy one-sixth as large as the US and where the majority of people have no indoor plumbing and are agrarian farmers, has the world's largest economy. They are also equally likely to be amongst the, "19% of the public [that] says the use of torture is often justified to gain important information from terrorist suspects... [or the] 35% [that] say the use of torture in these circumstances is at least sometimes justified."

There you have it! A large percentage of Americans believe that Bush should have remained as president, that torture is an excellent and ethically sound policy, and that China is economically more significant than America. FUCKING RETARDS!

The Torturer’s Apprentice: Liz Cheney

Dick Cheney has long been described as being the most powerful vice-president in the history of the American republic. Over the period of eight years, it was impossible to distinguish where his authority and influence on the office of the president began and ended. It can be assumed however, that America’s long descent into unlimited war, domestic spying, wholesale torture, the escalation of Halliburton as an adjunct limb of the US military, and the myriad crony-capitalist dealings that came to typify this administration would have been different under the management of less Machiavellian operators.

It was written that Richard Nixon, another tricky Dicky, was the darkness reaching out from the darkness. Nixon, at his worst, was a paranoid and vulgar man that was obsessed with amassing power. In both Nixon’s and Cheney’s worldview, “if the President does it then it is legal!” Like Nixon, Cheney’s contempt for the constitution was legendary. His persistent attacks against the inherent constraints that limited the president’s power were exemplified in his attempts to create a unitary wartime president. Like Nixon, he was willing to fabricate evidence to support his warmongering ambitions. Like Nixon, if it meant undermining portions of the state, as when he leaked the identity of CIA intelligence officer Valarie Plame and undermined an entire clandestine network whose objective it was to actually prevent WMD dissemination, merely to prop up his overt lies, then so be it. To Dick Cheney, violations of the Geneva conventions, establishment of concentration camps, and torture to illicit false statements that would provide justifications for his previous deceit were not unethical, but the new normal and he would make no apology for his imperial excesses.

Within weeks of leaving office, Cheney went full-tilt on right-wing television to justify his actions as VP and impugn the Democrats, including Obama, as being weak on terrorism. He continued with his classic formula by levelling false accusations and once more playing the fear card by claiming that there was a “high probability” that terrorists would attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years and succeed. His maniacal aspersions continued throughout the first half of 2009. However, having earned a miserable approval rating of less than 20% upon departing the White House, Republican strategists realized that he was only reminding the public at large why they scorned him and had voted for Obama.

Liz Cheney, a chip off the old neoconservative freak show, was brought in to do what her father could not do: put a shiny lip-sticked smile on the face of evil. She is paraded out on a daily basis, as Michelle Cottle of the New Republic describes, to do “her usual song and dance about what a caring, devoted patriot her daddy is.” Of course the primary reason she and not Papa Doc Cheney is waltzed out into TV-land is because,

Everyone involved in political combat is well aware of the different rules that still apply to most female combatants--much less baby-faced blonde ones fighting for an aging, ailing daddy's honor. Men in particular must take care not to come across as bullying their fairer opponents.

This is the Republican version of affirmative action. Liz Cheney repeatedly has said, like her father, president Obama is sympathetic to terrorists, is holding hands with extremists, and is failing to protect America. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, 1 September 2009, she became apoplectic when Sam Donaldson and Stephanopoulos challenged her on the definition of torture, which she claims does not entail waterboarding prisoners; a act that strangely used to be internationally recognized as illegal when the Japanese used it on prisoners during WWII, when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, and when Latin American military dictatorships used it against their own populace.

Liz’s most recent act of naked propaganda, was saying that she thinks that Mr. Obama should, “Accept the [Nobel] prize on behalf of the U.S. military and frankly to send the message to remind the Nobel committee that each one of them sleeps soundly at night because the U.S. military is the greatest peacekeeping force in the world today.” The totality of this statement when weighed against the historical antecedent is so absurd and obscene that only the most facile minded and ignorant cheerleader of American hegemony and militarism would accept her statements as even being credible.

The fact that Dick Cheney now has to hide behind his own daughter’s skirt and that there are no elected Republicans willing to defend the history of the Bush-Cheney years, should be sufficient proof that the party has exhausted itself of any crediblity.

Fear and Loathing in Washington DC

“He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte

“Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy..."
- Abraham Lincoln

In response to a drumhead to exact revenge of the killing of the four Blackwater mercenaries by the citizens of Fallujah, a political decision was made ordering US Marines to commence Operation Vigilant Resolve in April. The city of Fallujah was purged of its 70,000 citizens and American forces in the ensuing month long battle engaged in some of the heaviest urban combat of the war. It was reported that the rules of engagement were changed to allow US snipers to fire on unarmed civilians, including children, as well as firing on clearly marked ambulances in an attempt to inflict maximum damage on the recalcitrant and indigenous population. American casualties in April reached their highest peak with a total of 136 Americans dead, plus another 1214 declared wounded. The commander-in-chief had entered a battle his military officers had warned him not to pursue and it ended with him reversing orders, equally to the objections of his military chiefs of staff when the bodies started pilling up.

Domestically, the US economy was still faltering and deep concerns were emerging throughout the nation about the competency and re-electability of George W. Bush.

To ‘manufacture consent’ for their man in the White House, operatives within the federal government in the eighteen months preceding the 2004 presidential election, engaged in a remarkable campaign to instil both fear and terror into the American people. Tom Ridge, then Homeland Security Secretary, stated that he,

[was] never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

In a review of the 2004 election, Joshua Marshall in Time magazine (2006) reported that the terror warnings became synchronous with major societal and political events.

Warnings of terror attacks over the Christmas 2003 holidays, warnings over summer terror attacks at the 2004 political conventions, then a whole slew of warnings of terror attacks to disrupt the election itself. Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge's terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention.

The severity of this now confirmed internal policy only adds to the growing writ of crimes instituted by the Bush junta to manipulate and inject public fear for political advantages (the definition of terrorism). Apparently when swarthy unshaven foreigners engage in this behaviour a two trillion dollar war without end can be justified, but when public officials sworn to uphold the American constitution do otherwise, it’s a non-story.

When then Democratic Party presidential candidate Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT) questioned the timing of these terror alerts, not only was he attacked by Dick Cheney and Tom Ridge, but he was lambasted by his own party in the likes of that ‘ultimate loser’ John Kerry and the spineless glitterati of the punditry class, such as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon, says this of the Atlantic magazine’s Marc Ambinder,

[He] acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends,... but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns.

The corruption amongst the mainstream news media and both Democrats and Republicans is respectively beyond the scale of even Pravda and that of Latin Americian banana republics. Democracy in America (or the pretense of it) simply ceased to exist in any meaningful manner at this historic juncture.