General Smedley D. Butler
Nowhere is the terminal decline of the American Empire, at least the terminal moral decline more evident than in the ongoing worship of all things military. As Ike warned of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell speech the chickens have come home to roost in 2010 with our national state of permanent war. By now it should be evident to all but the most blinded lemmings and willfully ignorant fake left Democratic party tools that Barack Obama is a fake, a fraud and a phony. As I called it shortly after the grand inauguration of the latest American Emperor, the Pope of Hope is nothing more than a teflon-coated bullshit salesman. Nothing that Obama has done (or more appropriately NOT done) has done anything to reign in the militarism run amok than the American Reichstag Fire that was 9/11 provided endless justification for. Nothing Obama has done has reigned in the war machine and the costly wars of conquest are never given any mention in our national propagandist media.
I get a sardonic chuckle how all of the so-called deficit obsessed charlatans in Congress who have the audacity to pass themselves off as conservatives will shovel trillions into the Wall Street casinos, cut off the unemployment benefits of the poor schmucks who have become a part of our star-spangled economic diaspora but never withhold one thin dime from the bloated and bloodthirsty Pentagon. The fake liberals are no different, one of the things that turned me off on the pathetic and dysfunctional 'left' was their immediate embracing of military power when the cruise missiles served their political agendas. Take for example the much hyped Iranian Green Revolution; watching self-proclaimed progressives prostrate themselves to the neocon propaganda, mobilize on Twitter, adorn themselves in green and weep for poor doomed Neda was enough to make one want to vomit. As Mike Ruppert pegs the American Left dead on as "..the most delusional, ineffective, and compromised political worm ball I have ever experienced, past and present", they are nothing more than defenders of the status quo, guardians of the temples of the oligarchs and worshippers in the pews of the church of the blessed little green Army men. Rome fell when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and America fell when the Constitution was discarded in the aftermath of the false flag 'terrorist' attacks of September 11, 2001 provided Bush and Cheney and their fascist ilk all the justification that they needed to strip Americans of our rights and jobs at home and to crusade for global hegemony abroad.
Today, in the aftermath of Memorial Day, a holiday which should be observed somberly for all of those who were fed into the imperial meatgrinder by lying weasel politicians yet instead turns into the institutionalized worship of death it is time to expose the lies. Lies are all that we have, our history is built on a foundation of prevarications, American exceptionalism and revisionism that continue to be perpetuated in order to wage wars - or more appropriately to drop bombs on women and children and blow up wedding parties with predator drones directed from air-conditioned rooms filled with gutless geeks weaned on violent video games. The worship of the cult of miltarism permeates every element of our society, there can never be an NFL football game without the requisite pre-game flyovers, our children are exposed to tens of thousands of simulated murders on television, become judge, jury and executioner in increasingly violent and sophisticated video games, the Christian church has veered into anti-Muslim bloodlust and as a society we are deily indoctrinated to accept any military action no matter how costly or bloody. This is a long and complex rant to get into now so I'll save it for another time. What I do want to offer up here is a story that strikes at the very heart of the war machine, it's propagandists and the mouthpiece for the Military Industrial Complex that is Senator John McCain, the LOSER of the 2008 presidential election although you would never know it thanks to a corporatist propaganda apparatus that Herr Goebbels would be proud of. So influential is McCain, largely the result of the enduring power of the official myth of the returned POW who endured years of hell in the Hanoi Hilton and rise through the political cesspool that has sucked down American democracy that he arguably holds more power than the man who trounced him.
The story that I refer to is not a new story, it has been suppressed as anything remotely resembling the truth is always flushed down the memory hole by our media Mockingbirds. The American Conservative magazine has given new life to a piece by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sydney Schanberg on the instumental role that McCain has played in covering up the ugliness of the POWs who were abandoned in Nam who didn't happen to be privileged children of the fleet Admiral like he. John McCain and the POW Cover-Up is a devastating indictment of a charlatan who was able to survive his role in the Keating Five scandal, having his balls torn off by a vicious Karl Rove black operation during the 2000 GOP primary in South Carolina and learning to kiss the whip by being instrumentl in the codifying of torture in the post-9/11 Homeland. That a man whose myth has so completely been constructed on his being tortured by Charlie in Nam this piece is the sort of real investigative journalism that has gone AWOL in America. Of course this story, if it ever emerges to see the light of day will be savagely attacked by public relations flacks, government operatives and their multi-millionaire media demagogues like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the swine and tagged with that most dreaded of all American pejoratives "Conspiracy Theory". That is what the government calls any evidence that happens to conflict with their official conspiracy theory, like the one that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed Kennedy, or the one about the CIA not aiding and abetting the international narcotics trade to finance covert operations, or George W. Bush, his brother and the SCOTUS rigging the 2000 elections or the biggest lie of them all: that 19 amateurs with boxcutters and a few guys in a cave over in Afghanistan could circumvent the entire American air defense command, outwit every intelligence agency and successfully hijack and fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon to hit the reset button on over two centuries of American history.
Given how the Vietnam debacle set the stage for the newest imperialist wars it is imperative that the big lies persist. That the hippies, the damned libruls [sic] and the media stabbed our fine baby-killing troops in the collective back and refused to let them win the fucking war. The stab in the back is fascist propaganda of the finest vintage and was instumental in allowing an embittered Germany emerge from the devastation of the Versailles Treaty to goosestep their eventual way to a rendevous with historical infamy. It was used by the cancerous Republican party to catapult Reagan into the White House (see this great Harper's piece by Kevin Baker entitled Stabbed in the Back! The Past and Future of a Right-Wing Myth) in order to restore our national glory and lay out the foundation for the neocon Project For the New American Century. The first Gulf War was built on lies, one of the most dastardly being the Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by Saddam's goons but allowed America to wash the taste of Vietnam out. Of course there were the ass-kickings given to military powerhouse Grenada by the Gipper and the deposing of former partner in drug-dealing and murder Manuel Noriega in Panama by Poppy to build on but with the first war as a televised extravaganza America was back. The potency of the Vietnam legacy is still as fresh as Napalm laced black tar heroin as is evident by this Kelly B. Vlahos's piece Reflections on Rolling Thunder, that describes the war worship on Memorial Day 2010. Like the proverbial Bouncing Betty going off on the national psyche the old mythology of the spitting on soldiers, the betrayal of Hanoi Jane and the stabbing in the back are as fresh as the rotting corpses in Saigon once were, and fed off by the same parasites, scum like John McCain all too eager to continue to gloss over his singing songs for Charlie for favorable treatment in the Hanoi Hilton while his fellow prisoners were being beaten and eaten alive by rats. You can always count on the American right-wing as exemplified by the teabaggers and the Palinazis to continue to rip off the scabs from the festering wound of Nam for political expedience. This is why Schanberg's piece is so important.
As former Reagan-Bush CIA director and Wall Street mover and shaker William Casey once put it: “We will know that we have succeeded when everything the public believes is false.”
Just take a look around.
Brojess
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