The woman who would be king..er, president beaming the fake “excited to see you” professional pol look.
The Anti-Empire Report BY WILLIAM BLUM | Dateline: July 9, 2007
www.killinghope.org
Neocons, theocons, Demcons, excons, and future cons
Who do you think said this on June 20? a) Rudy Giuliani; b) Hillary Clinton; c) George Bush; d) Mitt Romney;
or e) Barack Obama?
“The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities to make the hard political decisions necessary to give the people of Iraq a better future. So the American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions which are important for their own people.”[1]
Right, it was the woman who wants to be president because … because she wants to be president … because she thinks it would be nice to be president … no other reason, no burning cause, no heartfelt desire for basic change in American society or to make a better world … she just thinks it would be nice, even great, to be president. And keep the American Empire in business, its routine generating of horror and misery being no problem; she wouldn’t want to be known as the president that hastened the decline of the empire. Continue reading ‘Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life’
BY SHAYNE NELSON
DISPATCH FROM PARIS ///•\ Dateline: 28 June 2007
Very few people today connect the brilliant strategies of Charles de Gaulle with today’s situation in France, but unless I’m mistaken, there’s a direct link. Not only does the major Paris airport bear the General’s name, but the political climate still suffers, I believe, from one of his major coups.
Back in the early Sixties, (I believe it was ‘61) the powers that be approached de Gaulle asking him to take the reins of the sovereign nation of France. The general hedged, and hesitated, and played hard to get, then finally said he’d only do so on three conditions. Continue reading ‘When is the Left Not the Left?’
BY JONATHAN STEELE | Dateline: The Guardian (U.K.) June 22, 2007
The Hamas emblem. Hamas, or Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya or "Islamic Resistance Movement,"[1]) is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist organization. It was elected in January 2006 as the government of the Palestinian people.[2] Since the Battle for Gaza in June 2007, when it took by force sole control of the Gaza Strip, its members were ousted from its positions in the Palestinian National Authority government in the West Bank and were replaced by rival Fatah members.
Washington’s fingerprints are all over the chaos that has hit Palestinians. The last thing they now need is an envoy called Blair
Did they jump or were they pushed? Was Hamas’s seizure of Fatah security offices in Gaza unprovoked, or a pre-emptive strike to forestall a coup by Fatah? After last week’s turmoil, it becomes increasingly important to uncover its origins. The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas’s victory in last year’s Palestinian elections. Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid. Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale. The aim was to turn voters against Hamas - a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender. Continue reading ‘Hamas acted on a very real fear of a US-sponsored coup’
THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC PARTY IMPLOSION AS A RESULT OF GROSS BETRAYAL
BY PHIL ROCKSTROH | Dateline: 6/21/07
Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public? Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It’s the world’s way of delivering the life lesson that it’s time to shed the vanity of one’s innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here’s lesson number one for political innocents: Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It’s that simple.
Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they’re entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they’re better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means. Continue reading ‘The Democratic Party and the Infantile Omnipotence of The Ruling Class.’
BY MATT TAIBBI | Dateline May 10, 2007
There is a growing number of people out there who believe the Reid-Pelosi Iraq war supplemental is a gigantic crock of shit, and who think the Democratic Party leadership should now officially be labeled conspirators in the war effort. I’ve even seen it suggested that Reid and Pelosi should now be sent official “certificates of war ownership,” to formally put them in a club with Bush, Cheney, Richard Perle and the rest of the actual war authors.
The growing tension between the real antiwar movement and the Democratic Party was reflected in a long article over the weekend in the New York Times. “Antiwar Groups Use New Clout to Influence Democrats.” The piece that described how an umbrella group of antiwar activists called Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq was ready to drop the public relations hammer on the Dems, should they cave too easily in their negotiations with the president. Continue reading ‘Tension Mounts as Antiwar Movement Challenges Dems’ Commitment to Stop the War’
BY MATT TAIBBI
RollingStone.com
Posted on September 26, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/42181/
Why the “9/11 Truth” movement makes the Left Behind series read like Shakespeare.
A few weeks ago I wrote a column on the anniversary of 9/11 that offhandedly dismissed 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “clinically insane.” I expected a little bit of heat in response, but nothing could have prepared me for the deluge of fuck-you mail that I actually got. Apparently every third person in the United States thinks George Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks.
” You’re just another MSM-whore left gatekeeper paid off by corporate America,” said one writer. “What you do isn’t journalism at all, you dick,” said another. “You’re the one who’s clinically insane,” barked a third, before educating me on the supposed anomalies of physics involved with the collapse of WTC-7. Continue reading ‘The Idiocy Behind the ‘9/11 Truth’ Movement’
The remains of an Iraq War victim (make that of an unnecessary Iraq War).
By KURT NIMMO | Dateline: January 21, 2005
REPOSTED AS AN ENTRY IN CLASSIC ESSAYS
On January 15th, at Kane Hall, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, former L.A. cop and self-described 9/11 investigator Mike Ruppert told a standing-room only crowd the obvious:
“[Ruppert] believes that no sanctions, indictments or criminal prosecution [against the Bush warmongers] will ever be handed down. Rubicon [Ruppert’s book], he says, remains a base map of the decades before and the years since 9/11. But now he says we must look at the herd of elephants charging at us, instead of the one elephant that just ran us over,” Ken Levine summarizes on Ruppert’s From the Wilderness website. Continue reading ‘Gold-Plated Activism? The Problem w. Mike Ruppert’
Richard Perle, Israeli agent by any standard, deeply embedded in the US foreign policy/media/political establishment, and bald-faced pusher for imperialist designs across the map, principally the Middle East. A Nuremberg-class war criminal to keep in mind.
BY BRYN LLOYD-BOLLARD
In an age in which the democratic mask is essential to legitimate plutocratic power with the benighted masses of the Anglo-American empire, the manner in which imperial designs are carried out today may be less obvious than in ancient times, but the results are practically the same.
It is common to hear talk of the Roman Empire, the British Empire, or the Soviet Empire, yet comparatively little is said about an American Empire. The reason is that it is often taken for granted that the era of imperialism ended with the collapse of communism, and that the near-universal extension of economic and political liberalism precludes any chance that Empire will again rear its ugly head. Empire is considered an outdated concept of little use for explaining the dynamics of a world increasingly integrated and globalized. Thus, Francis Fukuyama argues that we are witnessing the “end of history,” “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (Fukuyama, 39). The age of ideology is over, capitalism’s victory is absolute. Implicit in his view is the assumption that the free market is antithetical to Empire, and that imperialism cannot exist when liberal values are widely acknowledged as sacrosanct. Considerably less attention is therefore paid to the ways in which contemporary American power, as exercised on a global level, mirrors that of history’s greatest imperialist states. Continue reading ‘Imperial America?’
Jose Maria Aznar, the smiling fascist. All the cosmeticization of such “elegant reactionaries” by the media whores cannot hide their despicable impact on modern politics.
BY VICENTE NAVARRO || Dateline: August 21, 2003
Can you imagine the response of the U.S. media if the president of the governing party of Poland were to say that Stalin was the former Soviet Union’s greatest leader? Or if the president of the German government had never condemned the Hitler regime, or if a founder of the governing party in Germany was a person who had written a prologue to a book denying the existence of the Holocaust? Surely the media would hit the ceiling immediately and call for these person’s resignations.
Well, the U.S. government and the U.S. media have been welcoming a man who has done something similar, a man they have referred to as “a great friend of the U.S.” and “a representative of the New Europe” (in Rumsfeld’s narrative), and a man that leading Democrats (not to be perceived as less welcoming) have referred to in equally laudatory terms. Even the Democratic-controlled California Assembly gave him a standing ovation. His man’s is Mr. Jose Maria Aznar; he is the president of the Spanish government and leader of the governing party, the Popular Party (PP). More critical media would have made some inquiries about the PP and about Mr. Aznar. Let’s start with the Party. Continue reading ‘The US Media’s Double Standard: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush’
Spanish caudillo Francisco Franco. Before there was a Pinochet, there was this brutal creep to set the reactionary standard for treason and bloodthirstyness.
DEMOCRACY NOW! WITH AMY GOODMAN | an wbai special radio show
Grandson of Man Killed by Franco Finds Remains in Mass Grave |
Dateline: Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004
We look at the legacy of Francisco Franco - the dictator who in 1936 launched a bloody civil war and then ruled Spain for 40 years - and one man’s quest to find his grandfather who was killed by Franco’s troops decades ago. [includes rush transcript]
When I ask people here about the legacy of Francisco Franco, the dictator who in 1936 launched a bloody civil war and then ruled Spain for 40 years, many of them say this: he was the man who divided Spain forever into two sides.
Over one million Spaniards were killed in the war and in the brutal repression that followed. Many victims were summarily shot and buried in mass graves. Entire villages were wiped out. Many people were imprisoned and tortured. But unlike other countries that have tried to bring justice to victims through truth commissions, Spain never closed this traumatic chapter. No-one was ever tried or jailed for these crimes after Franco died and Spain transitioned into a democracy. In fact, Franco’s longtime Minister of the Interior, Manuel Fraga, still holds a powerful political post as the head of the Autonomous Region of Galicia. Continue reading ‘Recovering Historic Memory in Spain’
