Tag: fascism

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Sick Fux.

BECK: Last week, I head you say that – you were on with Dennis Miller. … You two were talking about an insurrection coming.

O’REILLY: Tax revolt.

BECK: He used the word insurrection. And not in a comedic way.

O’REILLY: Yeah, tax revolt. I think people, when they figure out how badly they’re going to get hurt in the next few years, there’s going to be a tea party on taxes and its gonna get nasty. Nancy Pelosi’s going to be bobbing up and down in the Boston Harbor.

    This statement appeared to be too much for Beck even, who replied, “Uh, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

ThinkProgress.org

    More below the fold.

As the total vacuum of any principled leadership from President Obama has now produced the inevitable directionless, anti-consumer, Insurance Monopoly boondoggle fraud, now masquerading in Congress as “reform“, it is time to reflect upon just who Obama’s friends really are and have been all along, and what his uninspiring charade of a Presidency is really all about.

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I’m sorry, but if this doesn’t leave you feeling completely sick to your stomach, you just haven’t been paying attention.

This is one of those times where the transparency is cranked up to 11, the veil falls away, and no pretense is made as to a political figure’s true position.   This is right up there with GWB’s “I call you my base” speech, one of those sickening moments that you will probably only see in a Michael Moore film, a moment that will leave you wondering “how come nobody noticed this when it happened?”

I’ll just get right to it, even though I’m tempted to go on about how disgusting it truly is:

In a glowing tribute to a Republican predecessor, President Obama on Friday praised President George H.W. Bush as an example of someone who eschewed “a life of comfort and privilege” and instead devoted himself to public service – inside government and out.

During an evening speech to honor the public service institute that Bush founded two decades ago, Obama called for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats. The former president, he said, proved that “the R or D next to your name is irrelevant” in challenging times.

“You might not always know it from watching the cable news shows or listening to folks on the radio,” Obama said, but “I think we’re standing in one of those moments.”

They were joined onstage Friday in the Texas A&M University auditorium by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who also served in the previous administration and was CIA director under the elder Bush.

Okay, I don’t even know where to begin here ….

For one thing, here’s the statement that is so ridiculously true, it’s like they are mocking us on purpose:

“the R or D next to your name is irrelevant”

That really does say it all.   There is no difference between the R’s and the D’s, especially when the D’s are honoring one of the great criminals of the 20th century, George Herbert Walker Bush.   The Bush family is nothing more than a criminal enterprise, literally a crime family, who are responsible for literally countless deaths, destruction, coups, wars, trickery, assassinations, corporate/government malfeasance, conspiracies, and worse.  

Yet here he is being “honored” by the member of the supposed “opposition” party who was swept into power by one of the greatest con jobs of all time, that of convincing the desperate American public that he was an agent of “hope” and “change”.

Wow.  

Next is the “you must think we’re really stupid” bullshit of this whole “public service” thing.   Public Service?   Are you fucking kidding me?   PUBLIC SERVICE from the BUSH FAMILY?   Is THAT what you’re CALLING IT these days?

Gangsterism, pure and simple, is now being called “Public Service”?

Sure, it’s a public service to start wars, destroy governments, conspire to assassinate folks who don’t play ball with you, to give your sons entire states to play with, to manipulate presidential elections, to con, to steal, to bankrupt …… You call that Public Service?

Okay.   In a world turned completely upside down and gone completely fucking MAD, we’ll call that Public Service from now on.

And it is utterly appropriate that they these two assholes, these two criminal fucks, were joined onstage by another monster criminal fuck, one Robert Gates, who Obama had the sheer audacity to keep on as head of the Pentagon, knowing that we wouldn’t give him one iota of shit for this.   The Obama-Con was so complete that Obama could literally wipe his ass with the Constitution on live television and everybody would swoon and cheer, and this is basically what he is doing at this point — he has done nothing but go out of his way to continue the policies of George Bush, one of the three criminal sons of the master criminal he is honoring here, knowing that nobody would say a peep and what’s more important, nobody could stop him even if they wanted to.

I don’t even know where to begin with Gates.  He’s a criminal from the GHWBush school, a crony, a former CIA guy along with “Poppy” Bush, and his rap sheet is a mile long.  Here’s just a tiny sample:

One of my daily hits on the internet is Cryptogon.   The site is run by a fellow who was lucky enough to be able to leave the country and set up a self-sustaining farm out in the middle of nowhere in New  Zealand.  Now did he pull this off?   Well, he married a woman from New Zealand.   That’s step one that not everyone can do of course.  🙂  

He has a knack for finding the out-of-the-way story, and has a unique perspective on the world.

Usually he posts articles and information with just a few comments, sometimes none, but today he has a post which is pure commentary.   And I just have to share it because it’s brilliant.

A few people seem surprised that the U.S. is a police state.

Oh the cops. Oh the poor students. Oh boo hoo, we just want to wave our signs.

The don’t taze me bro generation is obviously going to have to figure this one out the hard way.

My position has always been that people who wave signs at fascists are clinically nuts; holy roller, speaking in tongues, batshit crazy nuts.

Sign waving is not resistance. Sign waving is part of the problem in the same way that voting is part of the problem. How’s that Change working out for the Obama supporters? (Some of those bozos are already talking about how they’re going to get it right in 2012…)

In the few video clips of the G20 protests that I watched, I saw a bunch of zombies with iPhones, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, as the Legion of Doom tested out its new sonic weapons and tear gas lobbing skills.

WTF is the matter with these people? Where does someone get the idea that the way to deal with Darth Vader is to wave a sign at him? Maybe a few, “Fuck the police” tweets will do the trick? Send out invites to join revolutionary sign waving groups on Facebook?!

The Twitbook aspect of this is, frankly, bizarre. Maybe I’ve been out here in the bush too long, but it looks like powerlessness is manifesting itself into a sort of flaccid, me-too technophelia, crossbred with a hamster wheel. This is more embarrassing than anything else.

The U.S. is no longer a country. It’s a company town. If waving signs at the company’s goon squad just makes people look stupid, what does twitbooking about it amount to?

Here are some other ideas:

Eliminate your debt. Take your money off the table. Stop buying stuff that you don’t need. Live well on very little. Grow your own food. Participate in alternative and/or outlawed food economies for what you don’t produce yourself. Barter, or use cash. Support people who do good work. Finally, draw a line in the sand. Don’t tell anyone where that line is, or what the consequences will be if it’s crossed. Don’t wave a sign about it. Don’t twitbook about it. Let the fascists figure it out the hard way.

The U.S. is no longer a country. It’s a company town.    That’s just stating the obvious so perfectly that I wish I’d thought of it.  

Just had to share.    

So I want to share three stories with the people here, but I honestly can’t decide which one to post tonight.  So I’m doing all three.   Why not?  

First, the bad news.

Apparently, a “Thursday Night Massacre” in Afghanistan, where we blew up a tanker truck and killed at least 90 people and wounded more, almost all of whom were civilians, happened at 2:30 a.m. on the biggest party night of the week.

In short, it happened while everybody was blind stinking drunk.

Afghan alcohol ban after Nato staff were ‘too hungover’ to give explanation for airstrike that killed 70 civilians

There are seven bars on half-square mile Isaf compound. One insider told the Times: ‘Thursday nights are the big party nights, because Friday’s a ‘low-ops’ day. They even open a bar in the garden at headquarters.

‘There’s a ‘two can’ rule but people ignore it and hit it pretty hard.’

The airstrike occurred at 2.30am on Friday morning.

Although McChrystal is publicly saying that alcohol was not a factor in the strike itself (yeah right), check out the evidence to the contrary:

General Stanley McChrystal has banned alcohol at the International Forces in Afghanistan headquarters

Alcohol has been banned from Nato’s headquarters in Afghanistan in the wake of an airstrike that killed up to 70 civilians.

US General Stanley McChrystal, head of the International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), decided to bar boozing after launching an investigation into the bombing in northern Afghanistan.

Staff at the Kabul headquarters were ‘either drunk or too hungover’ to answer his questions.

Yeah it sounds like alcohol played no part whatsoever in the strike.   Sure, Stanley, we believe you.  

I just have to pass this along, from the Asia Times:

Bush’s third term? You’re living it

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?

There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed”, and maintaining a prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for all US troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still “the decider” he’d be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You’d have somebody like John (“May I torture this one some more, please?”) Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along – with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been re-appointed to run the Fed. And Bush’s third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush’s third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.

President Obama is now deploying American Troops to Colombia to start new unprovoked Military hostilities against (neighboring) Venezuela, using the same advanced Predator Drone Airstrike technology that has been murdering thousands of innocent civilians throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

From The RawStory.com Obama Sends Soldiers And Drones To Venezeula’s Neighbor

American troops will soon find themselves stationed at military bases scattered across the South American nation of Colombia with a mission to use advanced Predator drone technology to “aid in fighting the drug trade” and to “combat terrorism”.

President Hugo Chavez warned, “the winds of war are beginning to blow.” Chavez has already accused Colombian troops of making an incursion over the border and regional tensions are running high.

Honduran de-facto President Rafael Correa also took exception, saying the United States would target Colombia’s neighbors. “It has also sparked concern from moderate Colombian allies, such as Chile and Brazil, who want assurances that U.S. forces won’t be operating outside Colombia’s territory,” The Wall Street Journal adds.

To start, let’s put Apocalyptic Christianity into a historical perspective.

Native American Holocaust – Sex, Race and Holy War. Excerpts from the book: American Holocaust by David Stannard Oxford University Press, 1992

From the moment of its birth Christianity had envisioned the end of the world. Saints and theologians differed on many details about the end, but few disagreements were as intense as those concerned with the nature and timing of the events involved. There were those who believed that as the end drew near conditions on earth would grow progressively dire, evil would increase, love would diminish, the final tribulations would be unleashed-and then suddenly the Son of Man would appear: he would overcome Satan, judge mankind, and bring an end to history. Others had what is generally thought to be a more optimistic view: before reaching the final grand conclusion, they claimed, there would be a long reign of peace, justice, abundance, and bliss; the Jews would be converted, while the heathens would be either converted or annihilated; and, in certain versions of the prophecy, this Messianic Age of Gold would be ushered in by a Last World Emperor-a human saviour-who would prepare the way for the final cataclysmic but glorious struggle between Good and Evil, whereupon history would end with the triumphant Second Coming.

Trail Of Tears: Moving Beyond The Myth Of America

This is so worth reading:

http://www.alternet.org/health…

Why? Because the author used to be one of them:

Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls

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They are using my old shock troops — given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

snip

“How do I know this is the norm? … I know this script. I helped write it.”

He tells it exactly how it is.

There is no daylight between the Republican Party, the health-care insurance industry, far right leaders like Dick Armey, the legion of insurance lobbyists, and now, a small army of  thugs. All we’re missing is actual uniforms, otherwise we now have a full blown American version of the Nazi Brown Shirts.

No, I don’t believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American.

snip

Here’s the emerging American version of the fascist’s formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists’ money with embittered  troublemakers  who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing — Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies’ big bucks. That’s how it works — American Brown Shirts at the ready.  

What’s the results of the fascist formula for the rest of us? Well, think how this “method” worked against Dr. Tiller’s abortion clinic and how that story ended. In this case a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save our economy from going bankrupt because of spiraling health care costs may be lost, not because of a better argument, but because of lies backed up by anti-democratic embittered thuggery. The motive? Revenge on America by the Old White Guys of the far right, and greed by the insurance industry.  

snip

It’s time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.

Why? Because Obama won:

They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.

Could someone do a diary on Daily Kos on this?  I did one today.  It needs ot be out there.

Chris Hedges is a war correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize winner.   He is also one of the “truthiest” people out there, and is one of the few who actually has a handle on things.    Sad thing is, the truth is damn scary.  

http://www.theglobeandmail.com…