HOUSE OF PAINE blog

The US government now confronts every minor inconvenience with brutality and force. With lies. With tricks. With deceit. With unrivaled hypocrisy. It speaks a scripted and rehearsed dialog of illogic and insults. It changes the meanings of words and uses those words as weapons to crush, to silence and oppress, to steal what it wants. This government no longer shows respect for anyone but itself and feels no compulsion to listen or cooperate, to show respect for others, or to care at all about right and wrong, truth or lies, justice or injustice.

It seems that this government can’t take a single step without stepping on others, without breaking the very laws it exists to uphold, without negating every principle we stand for.

At what point will this criminality cease?

It is no surprise that we are seeing our own citizens being brutalized and arrested for imaginary political crimes before any crimes are committed; and when there is no possibility that they will be committed. For this government there is no longer any concept of innocence until guilt is proven in a court of law. A court of law un-tampered with, a court uncontrolled by compromised loyalists, a court left free to honor its commitment to see justice done. There is no longer any concept of requiring proof of any crime at all.

For this government there is no need for any crime to actually be committed before it engages in illegal, unjustifiable surveillance, the planting of its spies in the affairs of private citizens, the laying of blatantly unsupported charges, all with the obvious aim of depriving innocent people of their freedom and their rights with unlawful, disingenuous arrests.

Every power this government begged us for, insisting with feigned hysterics that such unprecedented powers over others were necessary to protect the public has been fully and thoroughly misused and abused, used against the very people it claimed the desire to protect. There is no respect for the rule of law instead of the rule of men. There is only the obvious problem this government has with the millions of its own citizens that disagree with its vision of death to all who would stop them from their brutal, murderous desire to take control of the world.

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Do you remember the scene from the movie “the Godfather” where Al Pacino was attending a church ceremonial, while at the same time many of his enemies were getting assassinated by his henchmen.

The recent events in the pseudo-republic of Georgia took me back to this scene, when I saw George W. Bush attending the Olympics ceremonials, while a covert war was being waged against the tiny province of S. Ossetia, in order to involve Russia into a murky geostrategic conflict.

Meanwhile in the United States, John Edwards’ affair took center stage in the corporate media, after the story was conveniently leaked during the inception of the Georgian war in order to adumbrate the event, knowing well that the American public would be more interested in gossip and sexual affairs than a war in a country they don’t even know it exists.

Shortly before the Edwards’ news, another huge event was conveniently revealed by the media regarding the alleged lone Anthrax assassin and sorority fiend Bruce Ivins, who supposedly committed suicide with an overdose of prescription Tylenol with codeine prior to his indictment and arrest.

Ivins joined the rank of the lone assassins or patsies like James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lee Harvey Oswald. That can only mean that the truth regarding the anthrax case will never be discovered.

As a standard operating procedure in political practice, you give a dog a bad name before you kill him as in the case of Saddam Hussein. However, in Ivins’s case the opposite was true. The bad name was given to him in his casket, even though all of the evidence against him was circumstantial, like his possession of the book by Albert Camus “the Plague.” Law enforcement has actually used the play as an evidence to prove or to frame Ivins as the lone anthrax assassin. Any student of existentialism would easily debunk this evidence, because the plague was a metaphor for Nazi occupation. The book also edified that true evils in life are often faceless, and that people deserve the wars they get.

It is an ominous and fascist signal when your government begins to use what you read against you. It is also a clear indication that the collected evidence was simply gathered to manipulate public opinion, as well as to frame another innocent man, hunt him down, harass him, target his family, threaten his children, and psychologically destroy him.

Interestingly, the corporate media has blacked out the story about Lt. Col. Dr. Philip M. Zack who was caught entering the lab where the Anthrax used in the letters was kept, after he had been fired for a racially motivated attack on a co-worker, whom he intentionally humiliated, harassed, and attempted to frame as a terrorist, because that co-worker happened to be of an Egyptian descent.

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In actuality, how many of us really want our kids to be different?

Make no mistake. Conformity is a control mechanism that keeps the United Corporations of America sputtering along, unhealthy of course, but productive enough to keep the shareholders comfy. We may not he headed in the right direction, but our lemming-esque locomotion is a marvel of multi-media-induced coordination, social engineering and perpetual, material-assuaged surrender.

We pay lots of lip service to daring to be different and not caring what other people think, but when it comes right down to it, we‘re despicable hypocrites. If we don’t look the right way and say the right things, the wretchedly superficial social circles we covet entry into are inevitably closed to us. If we don’t go along to get along, vocational success eludes our grasp. If we don’t parrot the proper patriotic slogans and dimly accept all those maliciously crafted and incessantly repeated talking points, we’re deemed suspicious or subversive and dismissed by the hapless majority who believe they’re in the know. Heck, if we didn’t vote for Bush a few years back, we were practically traitors.

This is the world we live in. “Jumping off a bridge” used to be considered aberrant behavior, but now it’s the norm. Metaphorically speaking, we jump off bridges every day, because it’s exactly what everyone else is doing, it’s what’s expected of us and we don’t have the courage to deviate from the norm.

If you don’t want your kids jumping off bridges like everyone else, lead by example. Stop agreeing when you disagree. Stop acquiescing when you’re right and they’re wrong. Stop cowering before corrupt or illegitimate powers. Stop trusting news sources that bank on you being an ignorant, manipulable cretin. Stop giving credence to dissenting “authorities” propped up by gainful factions with ulterior motives. Stop simply believing what you want to believe and spend some time discerning what’s believable. Stop preferring short-term gratification to long-term health and sustenance. And stop letting yourself off easy.

We achieved the current catalogue of impending dooms as a reckless species, a careless people and as irresponsible individuals. To thwart our societal plunge, the buck has to stop with you, every one you know and every one you ever knew. Everyone everywhere.

Conformity is the currency of dilapidation. It compromises every aspect of our politics, our lifestyles, our worship and our wellbeing. If, as Einstein put it, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” then conformity is at least a little psychotic if not outright insane.

Isn’t it time we acknowledged our psychosis and dealt with it?

Untuck your shirt. Defy instead of defer. Speak truth to panderers.

Until we stop jumping off bridges, our advice to our children is just effective reverse psychology. And the last thing we should be able to stomach is them ending up like us.

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Though few Americans realize it, Cheney and Rumsfeld worked through the 1980s and 1990s on emergency nuclear-response plans which allegedly suspended the American constitution and also Congress. (Through these decades Rumsfeld was CEO of a major pharmaceutical firm, and in the later 1990s Cheney was CEO of Halliburton; but their private status did not deter them from continuing to exercise a supra-constitutional planning power conferred on them by Ronald Reagan.)

Even fewer Americans know that these rules, originally dealing with a nuclear attack on America, were extended by Reagan Executive Order 12656 to cover “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” And few Americans realize that at least some of these rules, known technically as Continuity of Government or COG rules, were invoked before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001.

As he did in 2007, President Bush has again, on August 28, 2008, continued for another year the national emergency first officially proclaimed on September 14, 2001, along with “the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency:”

Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines flight 93, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2008. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

GEORGE W. BUSH
THE WHITE HOUSE,
August 28, 2008.

Once again appropriate personnel in Congress should learn and review what those “powers and authorities” are, since almost certainly they include COG (Continuity of Government) rules. In 2007 National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51), issued by the White House, also extended for one year the emergency proclaimed in 2001; and it empowered the President to personally ensure “continuity of government.”

NSPD 51 also contained “classified Continuity Annexes” to “be protected from unauthorized disclosure.” Congressman DeFazio twice requested to see these Annexes, the second time in a letter cosigned by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Carney. The White House denied these requests, claiming that the congressmen lacked the requisite clearances.

Oliver North, who worked on COG planning with Rumsfeld and Cheney in the 1980s, was asked in the Iran-Contra Hearings about his work on an emergency plan “that would suspend the American constitution.” Democratic Senator Inouye, who was presiding, pounded his gavel and interjected that this was a “highly sensitive and classified matter,” not to be dealt with in an open hearing. Congress has never discussed COG plans publicly since that time.

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Sarah Palin, the surprise vice presidential pick by Republican candidate John McCain, has said the war in Iraq was ‘a task from God’.

Like US President George W. Bush, Governor Palin attempted to justify her policies by claiming they were divinely-ordered during a speech at the Wasilla Assembly of God church in June.

“Pray for our military. Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right for this country - that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” the Alaska governor said in her address posted on the website of the Wasilla Assembly of God.

Earlier in 2005, President Bush claimed he was on a mission from God when he started the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” The US president told a Palestinian delegation in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Palin, prior to her ‘there is a plan and that it is God’s plan’ comment on the Iraq war, asked the audience to pray for a $30 billion national gas pipeline project because it was ‘God’s will to get that gas line built’ as well.

Earlier in March 2007, Palin had said, “I’ve been so focused on state government, I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.”

The report comes as one of the first on Palin’s positions on foreign policy issues, as the Republican camp has not yet allowed her to hold a press conference.

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“Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators, and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.”

~ Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State

The concept of the State is the greatest criminal conspiracy ever perpetuated upon humanity. As Nock details in his book above, all States originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, continue to exercise this monopoly of crime over their subject peoples through war, taxation, conscription, and indoctrination.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943), who wrote a little book called The State, put the case brilliantly.

In essence, he said, there are only two ways for men to acquire wealth. The first method is by producing a good or a service and voluntarily exchanging that good for the product of somebody else. This is the method of exchange, the method of the free market; it’s creative and expands production; it is not a zero-sum game because production expands and both parties to the exchange benefit. Oppenheimer called this method the “economic means” for the acquisition of wealth.

The second method is seizing another person’s property without his consent, i.e., by robbery, exploitation, looting. When you seize someone’s prop­erty without his consent, then you are benefiting at his expense, at the expense of the producer; here is truly a zero-sum “game”–not much of a “game,” by the way, from the point of view of the victim. Instead of expanding production, this method of robbery clearly hobbles and restricts production. So in addition to being immoral while peaceful exchange is moral, the method of robbery hobbles production because it is parasitic upon the effort of the producers.

With brilliant astuteness, Oppenheimer called this method of obtaining wealth “the political means.” And then he went on to define the state, or government, as “the organization of the political means,” i.e., the regularization, legiti­mation, and permanent establishment of the political means for the acquisition of wealth.

In other words, the state is organized theft, organized robbery, organized exploitation. And this essential nature of the state is high­lighted by the fact that the state ever rests upon the crucial instrument of taxation.

This has been the case in every State throughout recorded history. From the primitive city-states of ancient Sumer located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Southern Mesopotamia, to the most sophisticated and powerful State-apparatus yet organized – that of the United States of America – presently engaged in an act of criminal conquest, occupation, and savage exploitation of those very lands and peoples in what is presently labeled Iraq.

When it comes to the State, there is truly nothing new under the Sun.

To persons studying ancient history these documented facts are obvious and unchallenged. There is an unquestioned acceptance of the brutal and exploitative nature of imperial kingdoms of the past. These were regimes of criminal bands of warriors, slave traders, pirates and plunderers, who over the course of time, grew into dynastic ruling families and elite oligarchies, sanctified by ritual trappings and tradition.

But when we come to regard modern or contemporary affairs, there is a great disconnect or discontinuity among most persons. Why is this so?

The answer lies with the pivotal role of “court intellectuals” in justifying and rationalizing the actions of the State. Whether by Homeric bards spinning poetic mythology of noble deeds; the Divine Right theology of a Jean Bodin, Richard Hooker, or Sir Robert Filmer; or spurious “Social Contract” theorizing ala Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or John Rawls; the result has had the same bamboozling effect.

These tall tales are then funneled into the State’s indoctrination centers, the public schools and universities, which teach the ideological passive acceptance of this criminal process. The State is further bolstered by their willing servitors in the complaisant and compliant mainstream new media.

This article will attempt to challenge this seeming discontinuity by providing an analytic framework and key reference sources that document for the engaged reader the hidden history where organized crime and government meet.

The subject to be explored is the intersection between the “underworld” of organized crime and the “upperworld” of the power elite, with the connecting link being the intelligence community and covert action operations. The global narcotics trade (and related money-laundering) is the superglue which binds this relationship together.

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“If I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist. I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.”

- Senator Joseph Biden

The selection of Senator Joseph Biden as the vice-presidential candidate of the Democratic Party underscores the fraudulent character of the Democratic primary campaign and the undemocratic character of the entire two-party electoral system. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the supposed protagonist of “change,” has picked as his running-mate a fixture of the Washington establishment, a six-term US senator who is a proven defender of American imperialism and the interests of big business.

The rollout of the Biden selection over three days of escalating media attention, culminating in the text-message announcement early Saturday and a kickoff rally in Springfield, Illinois, is a metaphor for the entire Obama campaign. His presidential candidacy represents not an insurgency from below, but an effort to manipulate mass sentiments, using Internet technology and slick marketing techniques, aided by a compliant media, to produce a political result that is utterly conventional and in keeping with the requirements of the US ruling elite.

For all of Obama’s campaign promises of “change,” his choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate sends a clear signal to Israel’s lobby in Washington and its right-wing government in Jerusalem that for the next four years there will be no change in the United States’ unconditional support or its annual $6 billion in direct and indirect aid.

Predictably, neither will there be a change in the hopelessness and the impotent rage of the Arabs suffering under a U.S.-supported Zionist ideology in Palestine.

Senator Biden is the ardently pro-Israel chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is a 36-year veteran politician whose specialty is foreign policy. When he told a reporter from the Jewish cable network, Shalom TV, that he is a Zionist, he knew the implications of that admission for the Palestinians, the entirety of the Arab world, and America’s global “war on terror.”

Matt Dorf, the Jewish outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee, said that “Israel would have no better friend in the vice president’s office than Joe Biden.” Dorf might just as easily—and as honestly—have said, “Palestinians would have no greater foe in the vice president’s office than Joe Biden.”

Commenting on the unrest in Palestine in 2007, Biden planted his flag deep in Israel’s camp: “The responsibility rests on those who will not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, will not play fair, will not deal, will not renounce terror.”

Obama’s running mate has chosen his side. He cannot be a neutral American statesman brokering a Middle East peace or he cannot be a Zionist.

One cannot be a Zionist and place the suffering of Palestinians on the same moral plane as that of Israeli Jews.

One cannot be a Zionist and demand that Israel dismantle its illegal settlements that co-opt nearly half the land in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank.

One cannot be a Zionist and place the blame for sixty years of violence and the deaths of innocent thousands—both Palestinian and Israeli—on the cold-blooded determination with which the Zionist cadre executed the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians from the land they had inhabited for untold generations.

One cannot be a Zionist and contemplate the return of Palestinians to their homes that are now occupied by Israeli Jews or the rebuilding of the 500 Palestinian villages destroyed during the great Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.

One cannot be a Zionist and abandon the dream of Eretz Israel in order to live as equals with an Arab neighbor in a truly democratic Palestine-Israel.

One cannot be a Zionist and demand that Israel’s apartheid wall be torn down.

One can be a Jew. One can be an Israeli. But one cannot be a Zionist.

Joseph Biden is neither a Jew nor an Israeli. He is the Democratic vice presidential candidate who unabashedly declared, “The Democrats’ support for Israel comes from our gut . . . and ends up in our heads.” Sound familiar? Haven’t we already had eight years of a president who “thinks” with his gut and expects the rest of us to behave like dung beetle larvae? Speaking strictly for myself, I’m tired of their balls of poo.

Could it be there is no difference, no possibility of change as Obama promises, between the Democratic and Republican parties’ subservience to Israel’s shadow government on K Street or their tacit support of Israel’s internationally condemned policies toward the Palestinians?

Could it be that the two parties’ overt support for Israel’s regional aggression exacerbates the “war on terror” and makes the people their candidates swear to God to protect and defend less safe?

Could it be that the “ball of dung” being fed to the American people by both parties conceals the obvious truth that there is no strategic value in our irrational alliance with Israel?

Commenting on the unrest in Palestine in 1921, Winston Churchill, one of the architects of the modern Middle East, told the House of Commons: “The cause of unrest in Palestine, and the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement, and from our promises and pledges in regard to it.”

Joseph Biden’s self-professed Zionism plays well on Shalom TV, but it is a liability for the United States in the global “war on terror” and a death warrant for Palestinian and Israeli innocents.

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Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 – pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality – namely, that Russia’s control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

Not only did Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the “near abroad” when the Soviet Union broke apart.

Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

Scheunemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9/11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … a free people ought to be constantly awake,” Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. Yet none dare call it treason.

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The success of the Bush Regime’s propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

It certainly worked with Americans.

The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.

Iraq is in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed by American bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships.

We do not know the death toll in Afghanistan, but even the American puppet regime protests the repeated killings of women and children by US and NATO troops.

We don’t know what the death toll would be in Iran if Bush, Cheney and the neocons succeed in their plot with Israel to bomb Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.

That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity.

America will never recover from the shame and dishonor heaped upon her by the neoconned Bush Regime.

The success of the neocon propaganda has been so great that the opposition party has not lifted a finger to rein in the Bush Regime’s criminal actions. Even Obama, who promises “change” is too intimidated by the neocon’s success in brainwashing the American population to do what his supporters hoped he would do and lead us out of the shame in which the neoconned Bush Regime has imprisoned us.

This about sums up the pessimistic state in which I existed prior to the go-ahead given by the Bush Regime to its puppet in Georgia to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russians in order to defuse the separatist movement. The American media, aka, the Ministry of Lies and Deceit, again accommodated the criminal Bush Regime and proclaimed “Russian invasion” to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Russians in South Ossetia by the Georgian military assault.

Only this time, the rest of the world didn’t buy it. The many years of lies–9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, “the United States doesn’t torture,” the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated “terrorist plots,” the determined assault on civil liberties–have taken their toll on American credibility. No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government.

The rest of the world reported the facts–an assault on Russian civilians by American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian troops.

The Bush Regime, overcome by hubris, expected Russia to accept this act of American hegemony. But the Russians did not, and the Georgian military was sent fleeing for its life.

The neoconned Republican response to the Russian failure to follow the script and to be intimidated by the “unipower” was so imbecilic that it shattered the brainwashing to which Americans had succumbed.

McCain declared: “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” Imagine the laughs Jon Stewart will get out of this on the Daily Show. In the early years of the 21st century the United States has already invaded two countries and has been beating the drums for attacking a third. President Bush, the chief invader of the 21st century, echoed McCain’s claim that nations don’t invade other nations.

This dissonant claim shocked even brainwashed Americans, as readers’ emails reveal. If in the 21st century countries don’t invade other countries, what is Bush doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what are the naval armadas and propaganda arrayed against Iran about?

Have two of the worst warmongers of modern times–Bush and McCain–called off the US/Israeli attack on Iran? If McCain is elected president, is he going to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as “nations don’t invade other nations,” or is President Bush going to beat him to it?

We all know the answer.

Suddenly the Western Europeans have realized that being allied with the United States is like holding a tiger by the tail. No European country wants to be hurled into war with Russia. Germany, France, and Italy must be thanking God they blocked Georgia’s membership in NATO.

The Ukraine, where a sick nationalism has taken hold funded by the neocon National Endowment for Democracy, will be the next conflict between American pretensions and Russia. Russia is being taught by the neocons that freeing the constituent parts of its empire has not resulted in their independence but in their absorption into the American Empire.

Unless enough Americans can overcome their brainwashed state and the rigged Diebold voting machines, turn out the imbecilic Republicans and hold the neoconservatives accountable for their crimes against humanity, a crazed neocon US government will provoke nuclear war with Russia.

The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.

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