Seen Online

 A Man, No Plan, Iran 

I Don't Mind The Opposition Of Those In The Media And Politics

to the American Antichrist that is peddling the latest Israeli-American war,  this one on Iran, using what is misnamed "Christian prophesy."   I wish the likes of Ali Velshi and Keith Olberman and the various online journalists who are saying that knew a little more about what they're talking about because it's not "Christian" it's a particular and minority species of white evangelical heresy that was invented in the 19th century and was promoted for financial and ideological reasons by late 19th and early 20th century millionaires and, inexplicably, the Oxford University Press.  

What all the bullshit coming out of Kegbreath and LadyBug Graham and Huckabee, etc. and is vaguely mouthed by the first American Antichrist president,  Trump, is a flaky heretical line of bullshit known as "dispensationalist theology" WHICH THE LARGE MAJORITY OF CHRISTIANS HERE AND AROUND THE WORLD REJECT.   

It was popularized by a petty Trump style con-man, adulterer and, after he noticed the business opportunity, hallaluliah peddler named Cyrus I. Schofield.   Schofield produced a kind of study bible that promoted the bullshit dispensationlist . . . I really can't consider it theology but that's what they call it . . . well, bullshit that has become massively popular especially around those churches denominated "evangelical" whether Calvinist or Pentecostalist or Baptist or other which has fallen for that crap.    I would recommend even those who find anything to do with Christianity offensive or tedious or boring to look into Schofield and his bullshit and the bullshit peddlers, especially the mega-church, night-club-church types who get the big bucks with the big backing of billionaires and millionaires - I would bet you that there are even a number of the "trad-catholics" and would be Orthodox,  especially the recent supposedly ex-evangelical converts, who fall for it even though it is considered heretical by both of those catholic traditions. 

One of the most interesting things about Schofield style dispensationalism is the end-times Protestant Zionist bullshit comes from that, especially their literalist reading of the Book of Revelation.   A lot of People suspect that explains the entirely inexplicable fact that the Schofield Bible, the work of an uncredentialed, uneducated American con-artist, was published by the foremost English language academic publisher, Oxford University, whose requirements of academic standing in theor authors was quite rigid.   And considering the size of the Schofield Bible and it having no track record that would lead to the publisher expecting sales to make up the cost of printing the thing,  just who put up the money for that first printing and promotion of it is a topic of great speculation.   Everyone from American robber barrons who thought the line of bilge that Schofield and his ilk were peddling would prove profitable for them to the Rothschild family who were already going big for Zionism are suspected of being the money behind it as well as the pressure for Oxford to publish it.   I'm putting my money on the early support coming from the American millionaire robber barons who mostly professed to believe in some species of Protestantism, though it wouldn't surprise me if a member of the Rothschild family was also involved along with Brits with similar financial interests.   Never underestimate the desire of such to get Jews out of their countries and into the ultimate ghetto. 

And, considering what dispensationalist theology teaches about that,  "ultimate" really means "last" as the Nazis intended the one at Warsaw to be. 

I am again calling for a serious and rigorously fought brawl among Christians for the meaning of the word "Christianity" because the political-religio-fascists here and elsewhere are discrediting those who take the teachings of Jesus, Paul, Moses and the Prophets seriously just when that vitally important theology of justice, love and mercy are most needed.   Schofield dispensationalist bullshit and "christian" Zionism are two of the most dangerous heresies current among those who mistake themselves as Christians - especially those in the Republican-facist party and those under the sway of the billionaire-oligarchs.   I certainly call on Catholics to attack those heresies because, as we can see in America and Israel's Iran crimes, the crimes of the previous American and other governments where dispesationalist superstition is politically potent, it is getting hundreds of thousands and millions killed.  It is a moral obligation to attack it and those sources of it. 

I wish that Velshi, Olbermann and others online and elsewhere would take the time to really understand that this stuff is not even real majority Christianity,  it can be attacked and made less powerful and it needs to be.   I don't think the media figures figure this is a distinction worth making but it would be a way to diminish its strength, which means learning what it's all about is worth the effort. 

In Case You Don't Know That Trump-Israel's Catastrophic War On Iran Is Going To Destroy Us

THERE IS THE "AI" BULLSHIT bubble that is going to burst very soon. 

Sam Altman: Everything You Didn't Know About His Sh*tty Past

Never, ever underestimate how stupid greed makes the ultra-rich as well as them loving to pretend to understand things that they don't begin to understand.   Billionaires are no way to run an economy,  they're such suckers who then blackmail the politicians into bailing them out. 

Trump Is The Death Of Liberal Democracy

THE "FREE PRESS" being the stupid, superficial whore that it is,  if anything of the most disgusting display by an American president in the history of the country last night takes, it will be his wearing his obscene campaign ball cap to the Dignified Transfer ceremony instead of doing what any other president, even the worst in our history would have understood,  you make at least a show of respect to the dead YOU GOT KILLED by taking your goddamned hat off.   

But the American free press being the whore of Trumpian fascist oligarchy,  even that most visual of lapses in mere respect for the military who Trump got killed will probably be gone by Sunday noon as his whores go out to do damage control during the most lie filled hours of the news week,  those talk shows on the morning of what used to be considered the Lord's day.  

I wonder if anyone else will notice what I did,  that the lumpish asshole of a president we have,  who couldn't be bothered to take his campaign cap off to make a show of honoring the fallen didn't have it on when the reporters were questioning him and his Secretary of Warcrimes,  Kegsbreath.   No doubt the vestiges of his mind were on his image at that point and the makeup person who,  I'm sure, travels with him at our expense, had done his fake hair had made sure it looked as fake as it usually does. 

But it was the obscene, fascist, war criminal evidence that spewed forth from him on Airforce One that is both the most significant thing about that entire atrocity of a media event.  He literally confessed to some of the greatest war crimes, crimes against humanity, NAZI LEVEL CRIMES, and pooh-poohed their significance, even enthusing about doing more of it.  And him and Kegsbreat going to watch the flag draped coffins for the cameras was the media event, not the Transfer.  It would have been more dignified if they had stayed home.   NOTHNG BUT IT BEING A MEDIA EVENT WOULD HAVE GOTTEN HIM AND HIS ALCOHOLIC OBERKOMMADO DER WEHRMACHT THERE.   

Trump and Hegseth's open disregard for even the Americans who have and will die in their war, Trump's open disdain now and in the past might get a mention now and again.  THE IRANIAN AND OTHERS WHO THEY MURDER IN THE THOUSANDS, WHOSE DEATHS THEY BRING ABOUT BY THEIR NAZI STYLE UNLIMITED WAR ON CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE WILL NOT EVER BE CONSIDERED IN ANY CONSEQUENTIAL WAY BY THE AMERICAN MEDIA, AMERICAN LAW, AMERICAN POLITICS.

If I made a movie about this,  I might subtitle it "or How I Learned To Hate The Free Press," though that leson started about five decades ago. 

This is the third time and decisive test and failure of America's democractic order just during my lifetime,  four if you count Korea.   Vietnam-Southeast Asia, Iraq-and that region, and now Iran and the even wider war that has brought AND THE GODDAMNED UNITED STATES HAS LEARNED ABSOLUTELYI NOTHING THAT HAS KEPT US FROM DOING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN,  THE AMERICAN POLITICAL AND LEGAL SYSTEM WHICH IS NOTHING BUT THE PEOPLE WHO COMPRISE THOSE AT ANY GIVEN TIME, HAVE LEARNED NOTHING TO KEEP THIS FROM HAPPENING AND FROM STOPPING IT AS IT HAPPENS.   

It was during the Biden administration,  one of the rare instances when a Democrat has a chance and makes some progress on repairing the tatters of our liberal democratic system, listening to the promises of the civil liberties and public interest lawyers promising that the law, the norms and rules of our law, of our Constitution would save us, as those were openly failing to do that and as the legal system let off Donald Trump AS HE HAS GOTTEN OFF WITH HIS CRIMES HIS ENTIRE LIFE . . . It was during the Biden years that the remnant faith I had in the possibility of the American Constitution and its purported democracy died and rotted.   

I will point out that as Johnson's great love, the Great Society was dealt a fatal blow by him getting entangled in Vietnam, Biden getting entangled in Israel's genocide in Gaza contributed greatly to the destruction of his clear intentions to revive the lot of the American People.   Bush II suffered no such consequences for his Iraq crimes and Trump-Vance will suffer none for an even greater criminal campaign in Iran.  Such is life under the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment. 

The lie you have heard and will hear from the liberalish lawyers on MS-Now and online is that what Trump has done and is doing in both his first and second terms is "unconstitutional" is proven to be a lie by simply facing the terrible truth that WHAT IS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN, WHAT IS NOT STOPPED AS WE LIVE UNDER THE CONSTITUTION, IS WHAT IS, IN FACT CONSTITUTIONAL.   The crimes of Trump which are not stopped by the courts,  by the Congress, are what is constituitonal under the United States Constitution as the crimes of all previous presidents not stopped, except, arguably, some of those by Nixon* are what is constitutional under the United States Constitution.  That is the Real Constitution of the United States,  not that high school civics class, university and law school bull shit, flag waving Hollywood-Broadway propaganda Constitution which has never existed.   Certainly it was not the real Costitution before the 1860s as both slavery, the extension of slavery to the free states BY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT IN THE DRED SCOTT DECISION.   The last best hope of making the Constitution something better than what the slave-holders and corrupt lawyer-financiers from the North gave us in 1787,  the Civil War Amendments were soon diminished and gutted by the Supreme Court and by the assenting Congress in which emancipation had increased the power of the slavers from 3/5ths stolen representation to 5/5ths and by the Electoral College staffed presidency.    

The second salvage attempt in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act and  Great Society legislation under Lyndon Johnson was, as well, gutted by Courts and the Congress and, in that suprme act of irony, the freeing of the American Free Press from consequences of the most extravagant lying,  the ultimately stupid First Amendment regime of the Warren Court, it, as well, being exploited by the future fascists on the Court to give us the republic of lies that directly brought us to Trump. 

Those who made "freedom" and, even more so, "liberty" the highest disideratum of republican and allegedly democratic government proved to be either lying or wrong, those on their own don't produce something better.  What they've produced include  the obscene fiction that there that there is what the civil liberties lawyers call a "right to lie" support what has brought us to the rule of the biggest liars in our history,  Donald Trump being the all-time champion liar AND THE MAN WHO HAS PROFITED FROM THE FREEDOM TO LIE IN THE MASS MEDIA.  

That is the horrific and real truth of what the United States has become under the Constitution as, I have every suspicion that the slave-holders and financier-lawyers who framed the Constitution wanted to a limited degree,  they being stupid enough to believe once they'd rigged the thing that future generations of crooks, degenerates, and evil doers wouldn't enhance and amplify and learn to exploit and expand the corruptions they built into the thing FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT.  

I have said that equality is the only guarantee of legitimate government, government which has the consent of an informed majority, one which administers government and justice on the basis of total equality to everyone.  But that's not the whole of it,  legitimate govenace also must adhere to a number of moral absolutes,  that the truth is better than lies is just one of those non-negotiable truths.   That love is better than hate,  THAT WE ARE MORALLY BOUND TO DO TO OTHERS AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE TO US, THAT WHAT WE DO TO THE LEAST AMONG US WE DO TO GOD.  

I would certainly not call such a democracy a "Christian democracy" because the American and many of the European governments and cultures have made political "Christianity" an engine of evil in itself.  Such "Christian democracy" has been unChristian though much of it was quite compatible with a translation of American liberal democracy.   Though, as you can see, I think any government that is legitimate will have to include those explicitly Scriptural truths those are contained in other religious traditions,  many of the most important of them shared with Judaism and Islam and other religions.   Another lesson I take from the horrible truth of American history in my lifetime is that secularism, taken as a metaphysical requirement instead of a merely administrative policy in a pluralistic OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY has contibuted mightily to the ever greater failure of even America's liberal democratic system.   Whatever in the way of common received disdain for something as declasse as Scriptural equality and economic justice - the kind of thing that regards love and equality as unfashionably icky - unless government AND LAW are administered under the radical equality and truth-requirng Scriptures,  it will devolve as Americas liberal democracy has devolved into our indigenous fascist tradition held by he framers and founders,  white supremaicst oligarchy. 

I will confess that I have not spent much time studying the stated intentions of George Soros' "Open Society" effort to see how it deals with the issues above.  As I read it is explicitly as "secular" effort, trying to sidestep what I am now convinced is an absolutely religious requirement to achieve even a legitimate government in line with how I defined it above.  As I've pointed out before,  Marylynne Robinson brilliantly posed the problem of what a secular expression of Jeffersons' assertion of rights in the Declaration of Independence would read like.   I've issued that as a challenge to the secularists and materialists and atheists and agnostics.  How do you claim on the basis of scientific method what Jefferson claimed on the basis of it being "self-evident": 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, . . . . 

I don't see how that can be done on the basis of secularism or constitutions, or laws, or just setting aside the basis of it.  

Getting back to the failure of Soros' "open society" which has embraced such luminaries as Viktor Orban and Scott Bessent, I take that as just another aspect of the failure of secular, 18th century style liberal democracy even as imagined by as idealistic of a secularist billionaire as Soros. 

You know I could go on and on and on with examples, but time is short. 

Don't mourn liberal democracy,  it got us here.   Work for moral, egalitarian democracy.   That's the only chance we've got. 

* I will point out again that most relevant and topical of truths, that when the House Committee was voting on adoption of the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon,  the article proposed by Congressman Fr. Robert Drinan, concerning his most signifcant crimes in making war in Southeast Asia were voted down by the committee.   THE MOST SIGNFICANT AND GREATEST CRIMES OF NIXON WERE NOT THOSE HE WAS TO BE TRIED ON BY THE SENATE DUE TO THAT FAILURE OF THE HOUSE TO ADOPT THAT ARTICLE.   That is something that the history of the Real Constitution has to face as part of the terrible truth of what it is. 

The Firebombing - James Dickey

“Deke daran, dass nach den grossen Zerstörungen Jedermann beweisen wird, dass er unschuldig war.” 
[Consider this: after the huge destruction,  everyone will swear that he was innocent.] 
—Günter Eich
​
“Or hast thou an arm like God?”
—The Book of Job
​
Home-owners unite.
​
All families lie together, though some are burned alive.
The others try to feel
For them. Some can, it is often said.
​
Starve and take off
​
Twenty years in the suburbs, and the palm trees willingly leap
Into the flashlights,
And there is beneath them also
A booted crackling of snailshells and coral-sticks.
There are cowl-flaps and the tilt’ cross of propellers,
The shovel-marked clouds’ far sides against the moon,
The enemy filling up the hills
With ceremonial graves. At my somewhere among these,
​
Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit
​
And some technical-minded stranger with my hands
Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light,
Having potential fire under the undeodorized arms
Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles,
The “tear-drop-shaped” 300-gallon drop-tanks
Filled with napalm and gasoline.
​
Thinking forward ten minutes
From that, there is also the burst straight out
Of the overcast into the moon; there is now
The moon-metal-shine of propellers, the quarter-
moonstone, aimed at the waves,
Stopped on the cumulus.
​
There is then this re-entry
Into cloud, for the engines to ponder their sound.
In white dark the aircraft shrinks; Japan
​
Dilates around it like a thought.
Coming out, the one who is here is over
Land, passing over the all-night grainfields,
In dark paint over
The woods with one silver side,
Rice-water calm at all levels
Of the terraced hill.
​
Enemy rivers and trees
Sliding off me like snakeskin,
Strips of vapor spooled from the wingtips
​
Going    invisible    passing    over    on
Over    bridges    roads for night-walkers
Sunday night in the enemy’s country    absolute
Calm    the moon’s face    coming    slowly
About
the inland sea
Slants    is woven with wire thread
Levels out    holds together like a quilt
Of the starboard wing    cloud flickers
At my glassed-off forehead    the moon’s now and again
Uninterrupted face going forward
Over the waves in a glide-path
Lost into land.
​
Going: going with it
​
Combat booze by my side in a cratered canteen,
Bourbon frighteningly mixed
With GI pineapple juice,
Dogs trembling under me for hundreds of miles, on many
Islands, sleep-smelling that ungodly mixture
Of napalm and high-octane fuel,
Good bourbon and GI juice.
​
Rivers circling behind me around
Come to the fore, and bring
A town with everyone darkened.
Five thousand people are sleeping off
An all-day American drone.
Twenty years in the suburbs have not shown me
Which ones were hit and which not.
​
Haul on the wheel    racking slowly
The aircraft blackly around
In a dark dream    that    that is
That is like flying inside someone’s head
​
Think of this    think of this
I did not think of my house
​
But think of my house now
Where the lawn-mower rests on its laurels
Where the diet exists
For my own good    where I try to drop
Twenty years, eating figs in the pantry
Blinded by each and all
Of the eye-catching cans that gladly have caught my wife’s eye
Until I cannot say
Where the screwdriver is    where the children
Get off the bus    where the new
Scoutmaster lives    where the fly
Hones his front legs    where the hammock folds
Its erotic daydreams    where the Sunday
School text for the day has been put
where the fire
Wood is    where the payments
For everything under the sun
Pile peacefully up,
​
But in this half-paid-for pantry
Among the red lids that screw off
With an easy half-twist to the left
And the long drawers crammed with dim spoons,
I still have charge—secret charge—
Of the fire developed to cling
To everything: to golf carts and fingernail
Scissors as yet unborn    tennis shoes
Grocery baskets    toy fire engines
New Buicks stalled by the half-moon
​
Shining at midnight on crossroads    green paint
Of jolly garden tools    red Christmas ribbons:
​
Not atoms, these, but glue inspired
By love of country to burn,
The apotheosis of gelatin.
​
Behind me having risen the Southern Cross
Set up by chaplains in the Ryukyus—
Orion, Scorpio, the immortal silver
Like the myths of king-
insects at swarming-time—
One mosquito, dead drunk
On altitude, drones on, far under the engines,
And bites between
The oxygen mask and the eye.
The enemy-colored skin of families
Determines to hold its color
In sleep, as my hand turns whiter
Than ever, clutching the toggle—
The ship shakes    bucks
Fire hangs    not yet fire
In the air above Beppu
For I am fulfilling
An “anti-morale” raid upon it.
All leashes of dogs
Break under the first bomb, around those
In bed, or late in the public baths: around those
Who inch forward on their hands
Into medicinal waters.
Their heads come up with a roar
Of Chicago fire:
Come up with the carp pond showing
The bath-house upside down,
Standing stiller to show it more
As I sail artistically over
The resort town followed by farms,
Singing and twisting
All the handles in heaven    kicking
The small cattle off their feet
In a red costly blast
Flinging jelly over the walls
As in a chemical war-
fare field demonstration.
With fire of mine like a cat
​
Holding onto another man’s walls,
My hat should crawl on my head
In streetcars, thinking of it,
The fat on my body should pale.
​
Gun down
The engine, the eight blades sighing
For the moment when the roofs will connect
Their flames, and make a town burning with all
American fire.
Reflections of houses catch;
Fire shuttles from pond to pond
In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.
With this in the dark of the mind,
Death will not be what it should:
Will not, even now, even when
My exhaled face in the mirror
Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.
The death of children is ponds
Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs
The terraces of hills
Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust
At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out
That is what should have got in
To my eye
​
And shown the insides of houses, the low tables
Catch fire from the floor mats,
Blaze up in gas around their heads
Like a dream of suddenly growing
Too intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms
Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
Seeing the ponds catch fire
And cast it through ring after ring
Of land: O death in the middle
Of acres of inch-deep water!    Useless
​
Firing    small arms
Speckles    from the river
Bank    one ninety millimeter
Misses    far down    wrong petals    gone
​
It is this detachment,
The honored aesthetic evil,
The greatest sense of power in one’s life,
That must be shed in bars, or by whatever
Means, by starvation
Visions in well-stocked pantries:
The moment when the moon sails in between
The tail-booms    the rudders nod    I swing
Over    directly over the heart
​
The heart of the fire. A mosquito burns out on my cheek
With the cold of my face
there are the eyes
In blue light    bar-light
All masked but them    the moon
Crossing from left to right    in the streams below
Oriental fish form quickly
In the chemical shine,
In their eyes one tiny seed
Of deranged, Old Testament light.
​
Letting go    letting go
The plane rises gently    dark forms
Glide off me    long water    pales
In safe zones    a new cry enters
The voice-box of chained family dogs
​
We buck    leap over something
Not there    settle back
Leave it    leave it clinging and crying
It consumes them in a hot
Body-flash, old age or menopause
Of children, clings and burns
eating through
And when a reed mat catches fire
From me, it explodes through field after field
Bearing its sleeper    another
​
Bomb finds a home
And clings to it like a child. And so
​
Goodbye to the grassy mountains
To cloud streaming from the night engines
Flags    pennons    curved silks
Of air    myself streaming also
​
My body covered
With flags, the air of flags
Between the engines.
Forever I do sleep in that position,
Forever in a turn
For home that breaks out streaming banners
From my wingtips,
Wholly in position to admire.
​
O then I knock it off
And turn for home over the black complex thread worked
through
The silver night-sea,
Following the huge, moon-washed stepping-stones
Of the Ryukyus south,
The nightgrass of mountains billowing softly
In my rising heat.
Turn and tread down
The yellow stones of the islands
To where Okinawa burns,
Pure gold, on the radar screen,
Beholding beneath me the actual island form
In the vast water-silver poured just above solid ground,
An inch of water extending for thousands of miles
Above flat ploughland. Say “down,” and it is done.
​
All this, and I am still hungry,
Still twenty years overweight, still unable
To get down there or see
What really happened.
But it may be that I could not,
If I tried, say to any
Who lived there, deep in my flames:    say, in cold
Grinning sweat, as to another
​
Of these home-owners who are always curving
Near me down the different-grassed street:    say
As though to the neighbor
I borrowed the hedge-clippers from
On the darker-grassed side of the two,
Come in, my house is yours, come in
If you can, if you
Can pass this unfured door. It is that I can imagine
At the threshold nothing
With its ears crackling off
Like powdery leaves,
Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not
Amiable, gentle, well-meaning,
A little nervous for no
Reason    a little worried    a little too loud
Or too easy-going    nothing I haven’t lived with
For twenty years, still nothing not as
American as I am, and proud of it.
​
Absolution? Sentence? No matter;
The thing itself is in that.

I don't know if he'd have made a good Pope

or one as essential as the American-Peruvian Leo has turned out to be as a counter to Trumpian fascism and world criminality but I had kind of liked the idea of  Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle from the Phillipines becoming Pope.   

This article about a tell-all book about the conclave that elected Leo - who is turning out to be an excellent Pope in many ways, though one who I have some major disagreemtnts with - has this titbit of gossip in what may have sunk Tagle's cause. 

O'Connell also cites sources as later saying that the backlash over a video of Tagle singing karaoke to John Lennon's "Imagine" that had circulated online ahead of the conclave "caused many of his would‑be supporters to reconsider and abandon him." 

I'm assuming it wasn't because the Cardinal electors know a really lousy song when they hear one.  And I'm assuming it wasn't the smart mop-head's insincere imagining of "no possessions" but the rote, Brit, anti-religious content that got them.   Though I'd have marked him down for the music too.

Damned song, who knows what might have been if Tagle had sung "You Light Up My Life" or  some crappy show tune instead.  Though if it was Andrew Lloyd Webber,  I'd disqualify him too. 

Update:  Simps wants me to get into it with him about the mop-heads and his god John Lennon again.  I am tempted to kick his ass around once again over something really stupid and unimportant but considering the gravity of the times,  I'm not going to do so unless at least four of you ask me to.

Update 2:  Apparently no one here cares enough to see me answer Simps so I will honor that non-choice. 

I Need A Short Break From The Wars,

the one on Iran in which Israel and the US are trying to do to Tehran what they did to Gaza, the one on us, the ones on eveyone else that the Trumpzi regime is bringing.

So here's a section of an old interview by the great and too little read Susan Faludi and the great, late Molly Ivins during a fundraiser for Mother Jones Magazine.

I have most of Molly Ivins books, maybe it will be a project for the rest of the year to read Susan Faludi's.   Backlash is one of the books that has made the strongest impression of me of any I've read. 

"waring parties, they lie as part of the war"

I DON'T FOLLOW THE OLYMPICS,  so I don't know if the miracle that happens every four years has happened yet,  the one in which an audience whose expertise consists of ignoring competitive figure skating for four years suddenly become experts in the sport based on their disapproval of those the judges choose to give the the gold medals to.   Aside from not caring about it as sport and finding figure skating pretty vulgar as art,  I figure that anyone who chooses to waste their youth on the sport have agreed to its invented and chosen rules of how the spectacle is judged and, so have consented to be judged by those judges.   You play the game, you agree to the rules, no matter how crooked those are. 

Something similar happens whenever the US opens up a major war in a place in the world that the notably geography and history ignorant US population,  including the elites apart from a very few specialists, many of them having everything like an interested and partisan view of it, suddenly figure that they've got it all figured out.   Including some members of Congress, the kind who couldn't tell you the difference between "A-rabs" and "I-ranians."   Many of them and their constituients not aware that there is any difference.   That's part of what the Bush II regime weaponized to sell the Iraq and Afghanistan forever wars that they opened up,  the kind that until last week Trump claimed he wouldn't engage in.

I don't think that it's just because the damned Olympics is going on now that I've been reminded not to get too far over my skis in commenting on the war except what I know, that various Arab, Sunni governments - some of them imposed on Shite majorities in some of the countries, and the Israeli government bought this war from Trump and that it is going to be a catastrophe, likely one that will make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars look like the mere prelude to what could become WWIII.   The talk this monring that Turkey is claiming an Iranian drone attacked its territory and they were going to invoke the NATO agreement chilled my blood like this old-fashioned Maine winter hasn't managed to yet. 

I'll give you this discussion with Trita Parsi and Owen Jones (he gets some of the best interviews there are, these days).  I've edited part of the machine translation of it, not going over it in the way I normally would like to because,  in the enormously even-handed and vastly informed responses of Mr.Parsi, you are presented with just some of the enormously complex issues that, as far as I can see, the Trump regime and its supporters in the media (virtually all of the American so-called free press, that is) and the Republicans in Congress, have no to little clue of and which it would seem they're saying exactly what it will take to make an even more clueless bloodbath of a mess they've created,  the liklihood of it being an even worse catastrophe than the Bush II war in Iraq, looking ever higher.  

Trita Parsi:  I don't know if the  Iranians are now suddenly shifting their strategy to something else. But I would be very careful from either side, either side making any of these declarations that they're really winning the war.

That is part of the conduct of war to spread that type of propaganda. 

The a key political figure in Iran, Ali Larani just tweeted earlier this morning that the Iranis have killed more than 500 American soldiers. I don't find that credible. I think there's a likelihood that they've killed quite a bit more than the six that the administration hasn admitted. And I think that the Trump administration will try to pace the announcement of any of these deaths in order not to shock the country, a country that already is overwhelmingly opposed to this war. 

But I find it extremely unlikely that the Iranians have managed to kill that many  American soldiers and that the Pentagon has managed to keep that more or less a secret. I find that very unlikely. 

And I also find some of the speculation of how the US has already managed to take out x amount of what the Iranians are doing unlikely or at least not credible until they have been verified by other sources because waring parties, they lie as part of the war.

Owen Jones:  In terms of the regime, I mean do you see any signs of cracks or do you think it's actually rallied and and in terms of the support base people often estimate 20 to 30% of the country still supports the regime in some form or other. they have managed to mobilize big crowds which they weren't doing before the war began. Do you think there is a kind of rallying of their of their base and that strengthened the regime from   where it was?

Trita Parsi:  I've spoken to people in Iran including this morning who said that a lot of people have now left Tehran because the indiscriminate bombing by  the Israelis.  

[Note:  I've read elsewhere that the Israelis are doing the same kind of indiscriminate bombing that they did in Gaza.   Whether or not that's true, I don't know.  Warring parties lie, media lie as much.  What I do know is that the claim that they did has to be taken as credible after seeing what they've done to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and to Lebanon.  Israel is a genocide state, now.]

They're out in other cities. Those cities tend to be calm and every night there's like parades or some sort of a demonstrations in favor of the country as well as the regime at least in some of those instances. And he said that he's not seeing any signs of counterprotest or anything like that. 

I don't think we've seen a clear rallying around the flag sentiment. In fact, we saw it much more clearly in June than what we see today. 

But I think more importantly perhaps from the standpoint of the US, we're not seeing the cracks. We're not seeing people pouring out in the streets thinking that this is the moment to do a revolution. I think the calculation or the plan was that after a week or two of taking and I'm talking about the plan of some of the folks on the opposition side [that?] exiled the monarchies for instance. They believe that a couple of weeks of war would have led to enough of the IRGC and the basie [?] and the police being weakened so that people could take to the streets and overthrow the government. 

That may have been their calculation, but that's a calculation that also means that in the meantime, the country is more or less blown up to uh into pieces. 

It also means that  this war would go on much longer than the Trump administration wanted and perhaps can afford. So there seems to be a lot of conflicting  calculations when it comes to this, but so far we're not seeing the uprising in the manner that I think the opposition or the administration wanted. 

Nor are we seeing dramatic signs of nationalism at the level at least that we saw when the Israelis surprised Iran with an attack in June. 

One factor that may change all of this to the detriment of the Trump administration is the announcement that they are now going to go in or they're going to be supporting Kurdish separatist groups in the western part of the country. And I think frankly based on the comments that came out of many members of Congress yesterday after they were briefed by the administration. To me it sounded very clearly that the classified briefing said that the US is going to go in with ground troops asm well.

And if you now have ground troops from the United States in support of separatists, that is a factor that I think will definitely play much more into the line of rallying around the flag fueling nationalism because this really justifies validates a narrative that is very strong in Iran that ultimately the objective of the United States and Western powers is not democracy. I mean, very few people in Iran would believe it is, but that it actually is the separation of Iran, the disintegration of Iran, turning Iran into six smaller countries. This is a very strong narrative in the Iranian mind because there's plenty of evidence of this. Infact, this is one of the things that Tariq Ali Aziz, the foreign minister of Saddam Hussein, said  a couple of months into the [Iraq-Iran]war, that it would be preferable for Iraq at the time to have six small Irans as a neighbor rather than one big Iran.

This is something that Bernard Lewis had been writing about and talking about ever since the 1970s. So, this is not taken out of thin air. And when the US is now suddenly because of frankly in my view scrambling for a plan B talks about supporting Kurdish separatist groups and revealing that the CIA has already been arming and training them for some time. That is definitely going to  go more in the direction of fueling nationalism and rallying around the flag because it's striking . . .  I mean the exiled crown prince Resa Palvi who's been abandoned by Donald Trump, I mean he denounces those separatists doesn't he?

So it's kind of amongst you know the kind of pro- US opposition they they oppose that because theyunderstand that that's anathema to the population of Iran. 

I will guarantee to you that Iranians, seeing that Trump is destroying democracy here have no reason at all to believe claims that that is their goal anywhere.   It's a point I made when Bush II claimed that was its goal in Iraq,  that is the Bush II regime that lost the election and was installed by collusion between the Jeb Bush machine in Florida and five Republican-fascists on the Rehnquist Court.  

I will also guarantee you that no one in the Trump regime, which is staffed with idiots, the lowest that cabloid TV put in front of the real life TEEVEE Mike who rules us, has any notion of most of what this Iran expert has pointed out.   For myself,  given how the American government from Bush I to Trump has betrayed those who they encouraged and even armed to fight against the former Iraqi, Syrian and the present Iranian regime after they decided they didn't need them,  I would doubt many Kurds would trust the biggest crook and liar of them all,  Trump to help them.   I'll remind you that a few months ago,  Trump assired the Iranian opposition that he had their back,  that wasn't worth the lying words that he tried to con them with.  It wasn't worth the spaces between the words. 

And I can assure you, the American People have been kept so ignorant of history and geography that a dangerous number of them will fall for the stream of lying slogans they're going to get fed.   

Update:  Bernard Lewis was an example of those thoroughly biased and partisan - and racist - elite experts of the kind you'd hear asked to be interviewed and whose advice, when it turned out to produce one of the biggest disasters in US history,  the Bush II Iraq invasion,  he lied claiming he opposed it. 

Lewis's influence continues to this day. US Secretary of State and former CIA boss Mike Pompeo declared on 20 May: "I owe a great deal of my understanding of the Middle East to his work." Regime change in Iran was one of Bernard Lewis’s political projects and, inspired by his intellectual hero, Pompeo may be about to have a go at achieving it.

We have been here before. Lewis was the moral leader of the small group of intellectuals who argued for the Iraq invasion of 2003. Within days of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, he was agitating for the downfall of Saddam Hussein, expressing opinions which delighted the neoconservatives pressing for military action in the Middle East.

Lewis's mistake over Iraq was just one manifestation of a hideous world view which included a nakedly racist approach to the Middle East

He later deceitfully claimed that he had been against the Iraq invasion. This is rubbish. He was directly involved. Even before 9/11 he'd pressed for regime change in Iraq, and after the attack he seized his chance. Lewis was there when the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board held its notorious meeting to consider military action against Iraq at the end of September 2001.

Lewis told the board that the United States should support so-called democratic reformers in the Middle East, "such as my friend here, Ahmed Chalabi". As one of the world's leading experts on Islam, Bernard Lewis had no excuse for falling for Chalabi, the charlatan who led the Iraqi National Congress.  

Note:  Chalabi was almost certainly acting as an Iranian agent both in the United States and in Iraq after the US invasion that he played such a big role in peddling to the US public.   That such an expert as Lewis could buy what he was peddling shows how much his expertise was worth.

Yet he did - hook line and sinker -  with terrible consequences that the Middle East lives with to this day.

Lewis's mistake over Iraq was just one manifestation of a hideous world view that included a nakedly racist approach to the Middle East. He told Vice President Dick Cheney: "I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power."

Question And Answer

Q:  Why do you hate Merrick Garland so much?

A:  I don't hate him,  I absolutely disdain him for his lawyerly cowardice and double standard,  holding "little people" to a standard of justice that he was too cowardly to try with the rich, the powerful, the Republican-fascist.    Like other elite lawyers who were held up as heroes such as Robert Mueller, like the large majority of the judiciary, EVEN THOSE IN WHOSE COURTROOMS TRUMP WAS FOUND LIABLE AND GUILTY OF FELONIES,  they are cowards or worse,  ministers of injustice who rarely hold the rich, the white, the male, the powerful to the same standards of justice that the poor, the Brown and Black, Women, those whithout power,  Merrick Garland has no credibility if the subject is real justice.   He was the most non-feasant of Democratic Attorneys General when the time of his term was the one that required courage and holding the most dangerous man in the United States, probably in its history,  Donald Trump to the letter of the law.  As I said he wasn't the only one who did that, lawyers from the bottom of the profession up through the elites,  lawyers in the Congress, lawyers in the Department of "Justice,"  lawyers who became judges and "justices" all did what Roy Cohn taught Trump his colleagues and the judges would do,  let him get away with everything, now even murder. 

I'm Enjoying Watching Hillary Clinton's

testimony in front of the Comer Clown College.    

We were deprived of a great president, WHO WON THE 2016 ELECTION, by the goddamned Electoral College.   She is brilliant.   Hearing her telling the wackjob Nancy Mace,  why she knew Howard Lutnick because of 9-11 and the more than 600 or his employees who died were her constituents is bizarre.   LUTNICK IS PART OF TRUMP'S CABINITE,  MACE LYING OVER AND OVER AGAIN AS SHE WOULDN'T LET HER ANSWER THE QUESTION WAS CLASSIC.    And then there's the picture snapper,  Boebert asking her about Pizzagate is about as discrediting a thing as I've ever heard in a Congressional hearing.  

I havent heard as much of Bill Clinton's testimony yet but I am sure I'll find much to enjoy in it, too.  Bill Clinton who is certainly feeling the effects of age and who had to remind them that he's old now,  certainly using that to comment on the president they are covering up for, is still sharper than Trump was any day of his life.  

Marco Rubio Falls Back On One Of The Most Antisemetic Tropes To Cover Trump's Ass. What Will The Consequences Of That Be?

YOU DON'T HAVE TO go outside of the Trumpzi movement going back to the white-supremacist-Nazi rally in his first year as president,  you'll remember their chant in Charlottesville, Virginia, "Jews will not replace us."  The old trope that Jews had sinister aims to covertly rule the world, taking power to thwart gentile governments and institutions.    It is certainly what led the Czarist establishment to forge the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used by Hitler and the Nazis in their propaganda, the actual establishment of Israel certainly contributed to Stalin's post-WWII paranoid pogrom against Jewish writers, doctors and others, etc.  That is what the only Jewish member of the British government at the time of the adoption of the Balfour Declaraion warned about as he opposed it,  that it would lead to beliefs that Jews had loyalty to a foreign government.   

Don't for a second believe that Americans aren't as able to fall for that as anyone, especially as the Israeli government claims that they represent all Jews everywhere, including in the United States.  And that is official Israeli policy and, under its Supreme Court, the legal claim of Israel's government. 

I will note that among America's indigenous fascist, white supremacists, especially those of a white-evangelical kind and fascist tending,  the same accusation was made against Catholics and the Vatican, Al Smith faced it,  John Kennedy did,  I even saw it used against Joe Biden though generally it was just atheists who said it, then. 

Yesterday, when Marco Rubio said in response to a question of why Trump began the war on Iran right now, what was the urgent issue that led to that choice, Rubio said, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.  . . We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

So, the Trump regime, instead of threatening the Netanyahu regime with consequences for endangering Americans in that way,  was taking their war orders, in effect, from the Israeli government.  That the Netanyahu government was the one which - and this is beyond doubt true - which knew it could force the American government into what has the all too real potental to be the biggest catastrophe in the history of the American military and government, worse than the Bush II wars combined, made that decision. for the corrupt Trump regime.   But in the case or Trump,  they didn't have to use much force, they'd already bought this war along with their Arab partners in Saudi Arabia and those in the Gulf States. 

Do I believe the souless and degenerate Marco Rubio?   My first tendency is not to, that this is just an example of how far they will go to cover up for their own criminality.   I do know that the many, many Republican-fascist-Trumpzi followers who have been open antisemites - something that featured in the Republian campaign against Kamala Harris whose husband is Jewish - will interpert this in line with their colleagues who marched with torches through Charlottesville, VA in 2017,  the ones who, no doubt, Trump meant when he said some of them were "good People."  

But, as I said,  I don't for a second believe that the Netanyahu government was not one of those in the region who bought this war from Trump.   Rachel Maddow's initial and almost instantaneous insight that when we ask why now that they should follow the money was true.  As I recall, without looking it up, she mentioned the white-elephant of a luxury jet that the Qutar government gave Trump and the billions that the Saudi government put in Jared Kuschner's accounts, I believe she mentioned the crypto currency deals that the Trump family got.  and there are many other such examples.   The prospects of the Trump family building a pleasure dome on the bones of the Palestinians murdered in the Israeli genocide there would be all that Trump would need to do everything up to and including dropping nuclear weapons on Iran.   

And, by the way, I think that's very much on the table with the Trumpzi regime.  And if he does it in Iran,  Putin will do it in Ukraine.  

One point someone made over the weekend, is that Khamani was the one in the Iranian government that was acting as a religious roadblock to the development of nuclear weapons in Iran.   By the way,  their nuclear capacity was a product of American and British policy way, way back when they wanted Iran to export their oil to the West for the profit of American and Brit oil companies, so they encouraged the Shah to buy nuclear reactors for Iran. 

Getting back on topic, I'll repeat myself again,  do I believe Marco Rubio is telling the truth, or even half of the truth?

I do believe that in the calculation of Trump and whoever is running his quickly dying brain these days that deflection from the Epstein files and the revelations of those is a big part of anything they do these days.   Trump would certainly drop the bomb to end that,  he would foment a 9-11 style attack on the United States having seen what that did for the Bush II regime as it was floundering.   I won't go into the clear nonfeasance of Bush and, especially Condoleeza Rice in the run up to that as they repeatedly got warnings that something was going on.  Not now, at least. 

What if it's partly true?   

It was one of the slams that the American president of the past fifty-seven years who I think did the best job,  Joe Biden that his foreign policy in the middle-east was entirely too influenced by his own announced Zionism.  His support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza is the greatest stain on his career and life.   The kind of stain that Vietnam was for the greatest president of my lifetime,  Lyndon Johnson.   I don't doubt that his and his administration did, in fact, make too many of its decisions based on what the corrupt Israeli government did.   And if I didn't hold that to be true,  I could certainly find numerous American,  British, Canadian, etc. Jews who slammed him for that and rightly so.  For example, Lily Greenberg Call, who said,  "He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong."  I think his Secretary of State,  Anthony Blinken has committed crimes against humanity of the kind that should prevent him from traveling to any country which recognizes the Court of International Justice.   As the former American diplomat Hala Rharrit said,  “When I became a diplomat, I swore an oath to defend the Constitution. They are circumventing the process to continue the flow of arms, knowing how catastrophic that is. For me, it’s really unforgivable, and it is criminal.”

Whatever you can say about what Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken did that got them that criticism, they were doing something that you couldn't accuse Lyndon Johnson of in Vietnam, they were supporting the decisions of the Netanyhu government, not determining it,  the Israeli government that had the support of the large majority of Israeli voters.  What Trump did, according to Rubio, went entirely farther on decision of the Israeli government than any previous American president ever did.  

This is a one of those watersheds that you're always hearing about but this is a real one.  This will,  I fear and guarantee you, mean that antisemitism of the kind that rose up with the promotion of Zionism in the late 19th century is going to flourish as the terrible consequences and costs of this war in Iran come home to the Amerian People AND MOST OF ALL THE AMERICAN RIGHT WHO DID NOT WANT YET ANOTHER DISASTEROUS,  NETANYAHU DESIRED AMERICAN WAR ON TOP OF THE ONE THE BUSH II REGIME GAVE US IN IRAQ.  

And antisemitism being what it is,  this is going to fall on all American Jews as I'm already reading EVEN THOUGH SO MUCH OF THE REJECTION OF ZIONISM AND THE ISRAELI APARTHEID REGIME AND THIS MONUMENTALLY CRIMINAL WAR IS COMING FROM JEWS, HERE AND ELSEWHERE, EVEN WITHIN ISRAEL.  

It was one of the things I had to overlook in my support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,  their support for the Israeli government, the apartheid Israeli government, the Netanyahu, electoral-fascist government.   I don't think I will be able to continue to overlook the advocacy of Zionist policies in American politicians ever again,  not after the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran.   Up till now the American "Israel-right-or-wrong" politicians have had some level of political if not legal restraint on what they would do to support that diasterously failed experiment in 20th century European colonialism.   I supported both Biden and Harris knowing that the alternative was worse, as it has, indeed, turned out to be.   

But if they're going to lose elections with those Zionist policies that very likely did play a large role in Harris losing at least a few vitally important states,  Democrats will have to take that into account or they will lose.   That's along with having to take into account the clear fact that Democrats must accept the widespread misogyny and racism of a critical minority of American voters into account as a given - NOT TO DETERMINE POLICIES OF A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT BUT AS IN WHO TO NOMINATE TO GIVE THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION.   

I won't support any Democrat who announces that they are a Zionist,  not anymore.   As far as I'm concerned,  No more after Netanyahu.   As the reaction against the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran develops, I would bet that it becomes harder for a Republican who has announced the same thing to get elected, though Republican-fascists want oligarchic fascism here more than anything,  their base won't care how many People elsewhere get killed,  Trump certainly doesn't, no one in his regime is doing what so many who worked under Biden did,  quitting over the war crimes and atrocities.   And if it is politically a burden for them,  they'll go as antisemitic as those who are the bulk of their base have traditionally been.  It has always been one of the features of America's indigeous fascists, the white supremacists, especially in the South and the mid-west.   Though never nearly as much so as their hatred of Black People and other People of Color. 

It is one of the handicaps that Democrats have that a critical number of Democrats do care about such things,  that is a handicap that Republicans who don't care about anything except themselves and their money don't have.   Genuine democracy, egalitarian democracy is a harder sell than liberal democracy which is quite compatible with apartheid democracy in which those deluded suckers who belive they're one scheme away from easy-street will buy even their own harm.   Even when, as Trump I did, he robs and cheats and kills lots of them.   I don't know anything anyone said which showed more wisdom about the history of American politics UNDER THE CONSTITUTION than the currently circulated quote by Lyndon Johnson:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

It's far from just the lowest who'll do that, racism and antisemitism have been features of our oligarchy, as well.  They're just more genteel about it, sometimes.  It works with other aspects of identity, too.   

Reese Waters Shows How MAGAts Have No Integrity

 

As always, he and his team who he gives full credit to at the end of the video,  get it exactly right.   

 #SendBarron

"This early basking of triumph doesn't always last," - The Corporate Media Is Going To Peddle Another Disasterous Republican-fascist Middle-Eastern War To The Suckers

I HAVEN'T SAID anything about the Israeli-American war on Iran yet because so little that is in any way reliable is known about it.   I have learned, in a long life of hearing and reading the American free press when it comes to American military actions and so-called intelligence actions that we can't rely on them at all in the near term and very little in the long term - they will lie and cover for the American president and the American military and intelligence networks and spin the biggest disasters into political opportunity for the corporate party,  the Republican-fascists.   That experience starts in the early 1960s and has spun an unbroken string of such spin that goes on right now. 

And so it was when I looked online and on searches of Google, Youtube, other search engines, immediately in the early hours of this that the media here and in Britain were spinning the attack on Iran as some kind of preemptory strike, spinning it in a way that made the gullible think that it was in some way a retaliation or preventative strike.   I looked at even the English language services from France and Germany and though they were far less inclined to lie like the English media of the English speaking Peoples they reserved judgment as to the clear illegitimacy of the attack,  that is if law meant anything.  

As I'm finding so often,  Zeteo had some of the best commentary on it, here's what its founder, Mehdi Hassan said,  my editing of the machine transcript:

I wasn't sure what it was, right, Prem? Because a lot of the reporting, including from Swin, who's going to give us his take in a moment, was is this going to be a smaller strike first and then they do a big strike later. Is this Trump's way of bringing the quote unquote regime to the table? Even though they were in the middle of negotiations, even though hours before these strikes, the Omani foreign minister, the Omanis, for those of you who don't know, don't tend to talk very much in public. 

The foreign minister of Oman went on American TV and said, "You know what? The Iranians have pretty much agreed to everything the Americans want. They've gone beyond what Barack Obama got from the Iran deal." And yet, they still attacked, which everyone should keep in mind when they hear American officials saying this was about the nuclear program.   A complete load of Um, this is a huge attack.   Trump called it a massive wave of attacks last night.  

And Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton, the very hawkish Republican chair of the intel committee has said today, "This is an attack that won't end in days. It's going to last weeks." 
So, we are looking at a major attack. I've always worried that a war with Iran would make the war with Iran look like a walk in the park. I hope I'm proven wrong. 

Something you said, Prem, stuck out to me, which is, you know, history's being written, but we don't know how it's going to be written. The problem we have, and I would urge all Zeteo subscribers to keep this in mind who are watching right now, is the media are going to tell you all sorts of things about who's up, who's down, who's won, who's lost. It's meaningless. 

This is the first few hours of a major, major war. Remember what happened after Iraq? Remember George Bush standing on a ship saying, "Mission accomplished." Remember the people who mocked some of us saying, "See, it all worked out amazingly. We took over the country. We got Saddam. Um, and Iraq was the disaster it was." Same with Afghanistan. Same with Libya. 

This early basking of triumph doesn't always last. And let's see what happens with American soldiers. Trump has talked about American soldiers uh losing their lives possibly . . . 

This early basking of triumph doesn't always last,  not that that has ever really cost a Republican-fascist anything, nor even a war hawk Democrat.  

No one knows where this is going to go, I doubt it's gone the way that Netanyahu or the various Arab states who bought themselves this American war greasing the path for it with emoluments that used to be considered illegal in the US (that is until the Roberts Court made corruption legal here) has gotten what they expected, so far.   You can't predict the outcome of somthing like this which just one of the lesser moral reasons of why it should never have been started.  

You can listen to the entire discussion here, thougheven before my posting it,  other than the misgivings, it will be out of date.  

I Feel Irresistably Compelled By My Hatred Of Little Bobby To Explain That 20 Year Old Citation

I WAS WELL OVER THE KENNEDY CULT by the 1990s, though I would admit that the then Senator Edward Kennedy,  "Ted" was the best of the Kennedy men who had gone into politics.  I was never, despite being an Irish Catholic from New England young enough to catch it,  all that gone on the Kennedys.    Not that JFK had been the worst president of my lifetime, nor his brother who he had made his Attorney General in such an open, plain and bald act of nepotism the worst democratic AG.  By then Bobby Kennedy sr.'s sandbagging of Lyndon Johnson happened, which played a big part in getting Nixon elected and Ted Kennedy doing the same with Carter,  losing to Reagan a dozen years later had opened my eyes to the irresponsibility and sense of entitlement that seemed to be a family trait.   There have been other examples since then,  Patrick Kennedy trying to do the same to Ed Markey in the Senate and, of course, Little Bobby doing the same to the only Democrat of my lifetime who could rival LBJ's political effectiveness,   Joe Biden.   See what I mean about that being a family trait.  I do not find the sense of entitlement that pervades the Kennedy men anything but irresponsibly discrediting. 

Of all the Kennedys,  there are none who I despise more than RFK jr.  Little Bobby.   Though I cited that article he wrote with Greg Palast in 2006, I never really trusted him and not only because he was a Kennedy.  Hardly because of that.   In his highly touted role as an environmental lawyer, I always had the feeling he was a bit too much of an ambulance chaser,  someone who always seemed to me to want to use issues to promote HIMSELF.   I can't remember if it was with a feeling of unease that I cited Kennedy along with Palast but I can say I think it's the only thing from him I ever cited,  I never relied on what he said.   I have always been allergic to celebrity lawyers and those who trade on their family name. 

Those on the left, those who were caught up in the post 50s (McCarthyite) Bobby Kennedy or the post JFK assassination make-over into some kind of anti-war, lefty and those who bought his son's image as a crusading environmental lawyer, especially thosein the media who worked with him asked what happened to him in the past five or so years.  A lot of them attributed his present corruption to his claims of having a brain worm,  and that might have something to do with it.  

One of the best who worked with him,  Greg Palast in the most complete account of observing his transformation closely leans on that in the end.   I'm going to give you a lot of this piece he wrote about that in 2024 because it goes a lot farther into what makes Little Bobby tick than any other thing I've read about him AND BECAUSE RFK JR. IS A CONTINUING DANGER TO THE LIVES AND HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF LITERALLY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HERE AND AROUND THE WORLD.  

It was truly scary.  In 2012, Bobby had arranged a press conference about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Eleven oil rig workers were incinerated in the blow-out of a British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Palast investigations team discovered that, 17 months before that oil rig blew out in the Gulf, British Petroleum suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.  The oil company—with the connivance of then-Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice—covered it up.

[Note:  Condoleeza Rice is someone whose vileness has never been taken as seriously as it should be.  She was one of the worst of the worst in the Bush II regime.  She should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. ] 

It was a hell of a story, which I broadcast on prime time in Britain and Europe.  I wrote a book about it, Vultures’ Picnic.

Here’s where Bobby comes in—and it gets weird.  On the second anniversary of the blow-out, Bobby, a professor of environmental law, arranged for a major press conference to expose this story of BP’s blood-encrusted perfidy.

But then, Bobby cancelled the press conference, saying he heard the story had been told previously.  Well, yes it had.  You told it.  Bobby, I was on the radio with you for an hour discussing the blow-out and its cover-up.  Bobby had a national radio/TV show, Ring of Fire.  He reviewed my book about the story.  And strangest of all, Bobby was on my Democracy Now! Report about the blow-out.    That Bobby had forgotten all these things was frightening—as if Leonardo DiCaprio had forgotten he was in a film about the Titanic.

Our investigator Leni Badpenny was listening in and she began making frantic cut-off gestures, to end a call with him. End it now!  “Something’s wrong with him, or he’s just a jerk.  I don’t know.  But something’s really wrong and you don’t want your reputation destroyed by standing next to him when it goes wrong in public.  Promise me we will never work with him, never see him again.  I think he’s dangerous.  I really do.”

This was difficult for her to say as she never got over being a bit star-struck in his presence.  “Look,” she said, “I’m just a little kid from the Swiss Alps and I got to tell my dad I just had dinner with a Kennedy!”

But she insisted, “Stay away from him. He’s become untrustworthy and he’s getting crazier and crazier.”

This was not the first incident.   Bobby was a strong guy in his late fifties talking like a 92-year-old in a nursing home trying to remember his first date.

Since then, we’ve found out that Bobby had a worm in his brain—a real, live physical critter that somehow got inside his skull.  I’m not sure about the connection because I’m not a brain surgeon and I don’t speak worm.

That's useful information but I think the rest of the article gives even greater insights into how he was already well on his way to being a dangerous lunatic well before then.   And I will say from a lifetime of observation of the American left that what I think may be the key to understanding him,  a willingness to believe unevidenced and sensational accusations, is one of the worst things many on the left have in common with those on the lunatic right.  

THAT may well give a clue into how his father could go from an acolyte of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s (he wanted the job McCarthy gave to Roy Cohn) to the would-be (I believe) opportunistic lefty of 1967.   There has been an old and very well trodden road going the other way,  from would be "far left" to fascist and even Nazi right.  Little Bobby has just been one more traveler on that road. 

And, note.  THAT WHAT HE WANTED TO PEDDLE AS FACT on the basis of conspiracy theory, without evidence to support it,  exactly melds with Trump's election conspiracy theories which he sold to his gullible fascists. 

Palast continued:  

What I liked about Bobby—and Bobby about me—was that we were always skeptical of “official” stories. After all, his own dad famously admitted to making up cockamamie lies about Vietnam to waltz us into that war. We bonded over rejecting bullshit from the government and its servile punditocracy.

[RFK sr. and JFK were both way gone cold warriors,  I doubt that he would have ended America's involvement in Vietnam, after the issue had served to get him elected.  I've seen too much of that kind of thing to believe his last minute conversion was real.  I do think that Eugene McCarthy (who I also didn't much like and whose much braver anti-war campaign RFK hijacked) may have made good on that, though I doubt he would have won the election.] 

But there was a big difference between us. He thought every official story was bullshit. But I needed to see the bull. I was, and remain, a big-time believer in show-me-the-facts. But facts didn’t seem to get in the way of Bobby’s attraction to plain whacko conspiracy theories.

Example: We co-authored articles for Rolling Stone about racial vote suppression. [The one I believe I referenced in 2006.  Though I hadn't learned how to do links that early in my blogging so I'm not sure.]  In my book Armed Madhouse, my chapter “Kerry Won” described the physical evidence of ballots disqualified—enough rejections of Black voters’ ballots in Ohio to re-elect George W. Bush. This is hard evidence.

But Bobby jumped into an evidence-free crazy-world in a cringeworthy article for Rolling Stone speculating about voting machines that magically switched Kerry votes to Bush. I checked these stories to a fare-thee-well. Nothing to them. Bobby mistook the “potential” to cheat with actual evidence. I bit my tongue and said nothing.

Later, his knee-jerk reaction against Covid vaccines was the result of the attack on his reasoned questions raised in the film Vaxxed about MMR vaccines laced with mercury. The film successfully got Big Pharma to remove the mercury. But Bobby, having been savaged by the industry, now became Mr. Anti-Vax, opposing anything injected by a needle (except, it appears, steroids to build muscles). Sorry, I’m no fan of Big Pharma—but I need proof before I tell people not to wear a mask during a pandemic. I need the proof—and his only proof was to accuse Big Pharma and the FDA of being liars. They are. Still, that’s not proof.

I think that point about Little Bobby's anti-vaxxer lawyer career may have an enormous motive of self-enrichment in it, as well.  I think that's his motive in wanting to get control of entities like the CDC, to create bogus scientific and policy documents that he and his ambulance chasing law firm can spin into profits for themselves.  

A couple of weeks back I went into the use of lies by celebrity lawyers, especially the Epstein-Trump-porn-wife killer's liar-lawyer Dershowitz, concentrating on both his documented use of some truly putrid lies and how he knows he lies as he lies them.   I noted Norman Finkelstein's theory that such lawyers can lie knowing their lies are lies and believing their lies as they lie them.   

Thinking about that more,  I don't buy Finkelstein's theory that they really believe their lies are true,  I think they're just so used to lying and getting away with it EVEN IN WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE A RIGOROUS METHOD FOR SORTING OUT LIES, BEFORE A JUDGE IN A COURT  that they lie out of habit knowing they will suffer no consequences for it.   Greg Palast isn't a lawyer, he has, as he noted, a requirement to see sufficient evidence before he claims something is true.   I think RFK's life of growing up among the trained lawyers that just about all the men in his father's generation were, imbibing the same training in an elite law school - and his Harvard years among the rich boys wouldn't have done much to get him out of that habit of lying - AND HIS HISTORY AS A DRUG ADDICT would if anything reinforce that.   I've known addicts, to drugs, to alchol, to other things and there is one thing all of them have in common,  they lie to themselves and to others as easily as a celebrity "civil liberties" lawyer does.   AS MUCH AS A TRUMP DOES.    

And here we come to a connection between RFK jr and Trump that goes back almost to the beginning.   I mentiond that RFK sr. wanted the job that Roy Cohn got,  well, that world champion class lawyer-liar is where Trump developed not only his continuing education in lying BUT IN HOW TO GET AWAY WITH BLATANT LYING AND CHEATING AND AMORLIAITY.   He learned how to manipulate courts, judges, the law and the lazy-work-shy habits of all of them to get away with everything that he's gotten away with from Cohn.    While there are entirely more moral lawyers than Cohn or RFK jr.  that permisson to lie with impunity - so long as you are rich and white - is endemic to the profession.  When you get an entitled, rich, white, straight, male who is also an Ivy leaguer lawyer, one who has a history of a drug addict and, as his cousin,  JFK's daughter pointed out, a destructive manipulator of others, the big surprise would be if he hadn't turned out to be the psychopathic criminal he is.  

I strongly urge you to read all of Greg Palast's post on this, especially the hatred of RFK jr. for Palestinians and the ease with which he supports the Israeli genocide of them.   I may go into that but will just recommend what he says about it. 

We might get a crook in an honest election, we are certain to get one from a crooked election.

IT WASN'T UNTIL I went back and looked at this post that I wrote almost twenty years ago about the urgent need to secure our elections FROM REPUBLICAN-FASCISM that I was reminded just how corrupt Little Bobby Kennedy is.   But being the kind of person who, if I have time,  I like to look into the topic I'm writing about and, in this case, mentioned as the inspiration of a post I wrote twenty years ago,  I  looked into that.  I'll post on that later.  

This has become far more urgent than it was even in 2006, I agree with Keith Edwards that it's clear trump and the Republican-fascists are actively trying to take over the mid-term election this year in order to prevent Democrats, especially those in targeted groups from voting or having their vote counted. 

Note that since 2006 and having expeienced both voting by mail and, especially, rank-choice voting - THAT IS VOTING TO GET YOUR SECOND CHOICE INSTEAD OF YOUR LAST CHOICE - I think both are absolutely essential to securing American democracy and improving that into an egalitarian democracy.   Of course, part of that is taking control of the postal service again, as is mandated in the Constitution, and making sure that a corrupt appointee and a corrupted board can't ratfuck the mail to the Republican-fascists advantage and to the advantage of the private corporations the likes of the putrid and blatatnly corrupt Louis DeJoy.   The half-century of Nixonian privitization of the postal service has been a corrupt failure, one that should never have been allowed. 

As for what I said then,  I warned you.  

Friday, June 02, 2006

OUR VOTE OUR BLOOD

Let me be clear, I am not being coy or ironic or clever. This is it folks, this is real, as real as we are going to see it in our lifetimes.

The Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy jr. and the headline article by Greg Pallast posted today on Buzzflash.com lay out the evidence that Ohio was stolen by the Republicans. Anymore reading them who says they don't believe the 2004 presidential race was stolen would have to have some conclusive evidence or they are lying. If they do, they must lay it out in its entirety for the world to see now or be forever judged as liars. But if that evidence was there they would have shown it already. They haven't so it isn't there.

We can't ignore this any longer. It's not exciting, it's not trendy, it's not sexy, it's entirely clear how it could be fixed so no one is going to gain a reputation for brilliance and become the toast of the scribbling class over it. It's only a question of whether the United States is a nation of laws and not of men, a democracy of a despotic oligarchy.

[Note 2026:  You will probably know by now that I've entirely lost any confidence that any kind of democracy except an egalitarian democracy will endure as any kind of a democracy.  American liberal democracy has not only proved to be incapable of fighting off the fascism which has been building and gathering strength since the 2000 election theft of Bush v Gore,  its holdings and character have contributed to that fascist takeover.  That is due in no small part to liberal democrats being entirely unwilling to address the problem and take the urgently needed steps to fight the fascists, especially the lawyers among them.]  

- We need one national ballot form for the national constitutional offices, President, Vice-President, Senator, Congressman. These are the only four offices that have a direct impact on us all. The citizens of the entire country have a right to these four offices being filled in a completely honest way. Everyone has a right to know that every congressman was chosen honestly, even in the district farthest from where they live. There is an overriding interest in the citizens of the entire country having an honestly chosen government strong enough to overcome constitutional objections. This is THE question of national integrity, not a detail of petty federalism.

- We need one form of ballot for those offices, no butterflies, no esthetic tampering. One form that a child learns in fourth grade and that doesn't change for as long as our form of government doesn't change. President, Vice-President, Congressman, Senator. One ballot for each office if there are that many candidates in a district but one form that is as familiar to a voter as a Lincoln penny. [Save the Lincoln penny and make it worth something, again.] 

- We need those ballots to be on paper, marked clearly by hand with an X or a check mark, either a valid mark. One ballot form, one thing for the voter to do. Both have worked for decades and there is no reason to fool with it.

- We need them to be counted by hand with observers from all parties. Those ballots are to be counted honestly, everywhere, every time. If local officials can't run a clean election it will be run by a higher level of government. If you don't like that, look at those clean, honest, simple and quick elections they've got in Canada run by Elections Canada. You can go to their web site and see how those practical people have managed simple methods for dealing with problems of disabled voters. Look now before the Conservative government starts trying to copy cat the United States to steal elections for themselves.

No electronic voting for the federal constitutional offices is to be tolerated. We have seen that electronic voting and vote tabulation is certain to give an inaccurate count and that's even when it isn't rigged to steal the election.

The results of two stolen presidential elections in a row are all the proof anyone needs that a crooked election gives us a crooked government. We might get a crook in an honest election, we are certain to get one from a crooked election. The elections of 2000 and 2004 have given us the disaster of Iraq and will produce at least one more disaster, probably in Iran. The Republicans who stole these elections are costing us in blood, in honor and in money. We cannot afford to nickel and dime democracy, the cost is staggeringly high if we continue to cheat ourselves out of honest elections.

Computers and modern research have allowed the Republican Party to destroy the last and best hope for a free people to govern themselves. We aren't living in an age where genteel comity and a bit of indulgence of petty theft can be smiled at. If the DC-NY scribblers and the law professors had the blood of their children and themselves at risk they might see it more clearly. There is nothing ironically amusing about it.

Update 2026:  I will have more to say about a lot of this, especially around the collapse of faith I once had in honest lawyers.   You can't have anyone who is relialble, even an honest lawyer who has conformed to an essentially crooked profession.   Or:  Why Greg Palast Didn't Go Bad While Little Bobby Did.